Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Thursday, July 1st, the failed Justice Breyer Countdown Edition.

David and John are not here. I don't really know where they are. And who cares? Because instead, we have Jamel Bowie, New York Times

opinion columnist, and Ruth Marcus, Washington Post opinion columnist. Welcome, Jamel and Ruth.

Hello. Hello. We are going to have three topics today. We will talk about Biden's

infrastructure deal. Is it going to blow up? How are the planets

aligning for or against it in Congress and what are the threats to this partial $1.2 trillion

dollar infrastructure agreement that Biden thinks he has bipartisan support for?

Second topic, Bill Cosby released from jail this week.

Not because he did not rape anyone, but because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said that

Cosby testified in a civil suit to his own detriment because he relied on a promise by

the former district attorney that he would not be prosecuted.

This is such a tricky, interesting case, and I can't wait to talk about it more.

Third topic, the Supreme Court term ended this week with decisions on a law limiting voting rights in Arizona

and on another law from California that requires the disclosure of major donors to nonprofit groups. Also, we will talk

about whether or not Justice Breyer retired, which we don't know the answer to yet because we're

taping before the court actually begins its session. We'll come back later and finish. So we can

answer that question, maybe. Plus, we will have cocktail chatter. Okay, so first topic about infrastructure. President Biden announced last week that he and a group of 10 bipartisan senators had hashed out a $1.2 trillion deal on infrastructure. This would pay for roads and bridges and tunnels and broadband, the kind of traditional, more narrow definition of

infrastructure, not all the other stuff that progressive Democrats wanted to put in here about

child care and home care and community college and climate change. According to Catherine

Rampel in the Washington Post, almost right away there have been clues that the White House is anxious about how this compromise is going to play with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

One of the things going on here is this $1.2 trillion number includes hundreds of billions of dollars that were already expected to be spent on infrastructure,

whereas the original $2.25 trillion did not include the already scheduled spending. So the

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