Politics & Power Quote by Howard Coble

Coble’s sentence is Washington boilerplate with a purpose: to make spending sound like inevitability and virtue all at once. He starts by invoking “a time when we have much work to do,” a familiar civic drumbeat that frames action as overdue rather than optional. “Critical infrastructure” does double duty here: it signals national safety and economic competence, while staying vague enough to cover everything from bridges to broadband without committing to any specific tradeoffs.

The key move is the pivot from repair to employment. Calling the measure “also a jobs bill” isn’t an add-on; it’s a political shield. Infrastructure can trigger ideological reflexes about government size or deficit spending. “Jobs creator” re-routes that debate into the safer, bipartisan language of paychecks. It’s less about detailing outcomes than about pre-loading the audience with a moral equation: if you oppose the bill, you oppose work.

His phrase “as I said” hints at the real context: a floor speech or committee setting where repetition is strategy. Legislators don’t just argue; they brand. The slightly clunky redundancy (“dire need of upgrade and repair”) reads like someone trying to satisfy multiple constituencies at once - local contractors, union labor, business groups, and fiscal hawks - by piling on justification.

The subtext is transactional but not cynical: this is how Congress sells big, expensive maintenance. Not as maintenance, but as momentum. Infrastructure becomes less a line item than a story about national renewal that conveniently pays people to believe in it.