Donald Trump's first big fight with the GOP Congress is already brewing


During her campaign, Hillary Clinton called for about $500 billion in infrastructure spending. Donald Trump promptly promised to double it, which is how the president-elect is pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan his own party does not particularly support.
Trump says his proposal will be like the New Deal or Dwight Eisenhower's development of the national highway system, and it will create millions of new jobs for Americans. Many Democrats like the idea, but conservatives, including leading advocacy groups and at least some congressional Republicans, aren't so enthused.
"Conservatives do not view infrastructure spending as an economic stimulus, and congressional Republicans rightly rejected that approach in 2009," Dan Holler of Heritage Action for America told Politico. "It would be a mistake to prioritize big-government endeavors over important issues like repealing ObamaCare, reforming our regulatory system, and expanding domestic energy production."
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The key sticking point for many on the right is where that $1 trillion would come from, and on that point Trump has so far been vague. The language in Trump's agenda for his first 100 days in office claims the American Energy & Infrastructure Act will be "revenue neutral," but only offers a two-sentence description from which it is difficult to divine exactly how that would be achieved.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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