Welcome to the dispatch podcast.

I'm your host Sarah Isger.

And this week it'll be me and Chris Dyer Walt talking to A B Stoddard.

She is an associate editor and columnist at Real Clear Politics.

She's who I have to turn to anytime I've got real questions about the Hill, how it works.

We have so much to talk about between infrastructure, the Voting Rights Act, Bill, the filibuster.

Plus maybe we'll talk a little 2022, 2024 Republican campaign politics.

Let's dive in.

A.D., I am looking at this bipartisan infrastructure bill.

And I am confused because what it looks like to me is that the original Biden infrastructure bill is actually what's still going to happen.

It's just that they split it into two parts and Republicans are going to vote for half of it.

And then they're going to do the other half without any Republican votes.

And I'm not sure why we're calling that bipartisan.

That's a really good point.

In fact, there's a really good chance that none of it passes because their plan,

their top secret strategy is so complicated that they might have stepped on a rake.

What they wanted to do was make the transportation part by partisan.

And so that Biden can say, and the Democrats can say, the Congress functioned,

we worked in a bipartisan way across the aisle, on something that all these presidents before him wanted to do.

And that in and of itself would be a feat to have an infrastructure package and have it be bipartisan.

Obviously, it's extremely popular across the political divide.

And that would be something to campaign on.

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