from the lie-about-everything,-constantly dept
Back in 2021, Congress passed both the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the infrastructure bill. While getting the latter right has taken a lot of time (causing no limit of whining by election-season Republicans and some segments of the “abundance” set), ARPA has already funded a lot of amazing stuff, from local community centers and affordable housing to super cheap, locally-owned fiber broadband networks.
The bills were good and popular, generally. And by and large, Republicans voted against both of them. Yet Republicans will repeatedly take credit for the impact of both bills when talking to their constituents. I’ve lost track of the Republican reps, senators, and governors who have taken credit for ARPA improvements in local communities (especially broadband).
And this appears to show no sign of slowing down.
Representative Nancy Mace, for example, last June shamelessly took credit for South Carolina infrastructure bill transit improvements made possible by the infrastructure bill, despite not only having voted against the bill, but having called it a “socialist wish list” and a “fiasco.”
Having faced no accountability for lying about that, Mace last week again proceeded to take credit for all of the improvements made by a bill she voted against:
“Mace, a right-wing lawmaker who is now running for governor in South Carolina, told the conservative network NewsMax2 on Wednesday that she “helped secure the largest infrastructure grant in state history, in South Carolina history.”
One major reason Republicans get away with this kind of lying is we’ve let policymakers and corporations eviscerate local news at the hands of mindless consolidation and the extraction class. Neither the hedge-fund hollowed husk of your local paper or right-wing fake broadcast news machines like Sinclair broadcasting are going to clearly tell the South Carolina public that Mace is lying.
“They can just go online to get the truth,” I hear someone say, ignoring that 54 percent of U.S. adults operate at or below a 6th grade reading level, and the internet has been actively been filled with badly automated bullshit and propaganda at a scale never before seen in human history.
The national media generally finds infrastructure boring because it doesn’t get clicks. And when they do press lawmakers like Mace on these kinds of lies, like CNN tried to do, politicians like Mace will just lie some more without any press follow up.
For example, at a recent South Carolina town hall, Mace again not only lied and insisted she was directly responsible for getting the $195 million infrastructure bill money needed for traffic improvements, the media was somehow covering up her involvement:
“One of the things the press will not tell you: I am one of the leading members of Congress who’s gotten resources for our state,” Mace said. “In fact, our office assisted in getting the largest infrastructure grant in South Carolina history, at $195 million earlier this year. The press won’t tell you that.”
When someone from CNN tried to press Mace on that lie, she lied some more, insisting that she deserves credit because she later injected herself into the spending process:
“We fight over how we spend the money, how we appropriate it, but once the appropriations happen, I’m gonna make sure that South Carolina, that we get our fair share, because that money’s getting spent and our tax dollars in South Carolina is equal to anybody else’s in California, New York, Tennessee.”
Except when MAGA Republicans get involved in infrastructure bill spending fights, they routinely make things worse. Case in point: Republicans are effectively rewriting the part of the infrastructure bill that doles out $42.5 billion in broadband grants to not only eliminate affordability and equality requirements, but to try and slather Elon Musk with undeserved taxpayer subsidies, making the resulting broadband more expensive and shittier.
So no, voting against a bill, undermining the bill at every opportunity, then later injecting yourself into the process (in a way that, at best, probably didn’t actually help anybody) doesn’t really qualify as helping your constituents, unfortunately. With a lot of the infrastructure bill funding still slowly winding its way to the states, you’re going to see a lot more extremist MAGA lawmakers taking credit for policies they not only voted against, but repeatedly tried to undermine.
This isn’t helped by Dem lawmakers that lack the messaging competency to take loud (and annoyingly repetitive) credit for the successful policies they push. I study broadband access for a living, see first hand the direct good ARPA is doing for access, but between woeful Dem messaging and a broken press, I’m hard pressed to find voters who actually know why a local project happened and how it got funded.
That creates a vacuum for opportunistic liars like Mace to stumble into without much serious effort.
Filed Under: american rescue plan act, arpa, governor race, infrastructure bill, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, nancy mace, south carolina
