WASHINGTON, April 30 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday marked his 100th day in office with a trip to the southern U.S. state of Georgia, during which he talked up his administration's accomplishments in three months and launched a publicity blitz for his legislative agenda focusing on infrastructure, child care and paid family leave programs.
"It's only been 100 days," Biden said at a drive-in rally near Atlanta. "We've got a lot more to do." He highlighted the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan he had rolled out in his first address to a joint session of Congress one day earlier.
Beyond the 100th-day mark, however, the ongoing tug-of-war between the White House and Republicans is expected to continue and even intensify.
The American Jobs Plan, aimed at investing in and building climate-friendly infrastructure such as roadways and broadband, would be guided by one principle: "Buy American," Biden said in his address to Congress.
The American Families Plan will add two years of universal high-quality pre-school for every 3- and 4- year-old in America, provide up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, ensure that low- to middle-income families will pay no more than 7 percent of their income for care for children up to the age of 5, and expand the child tax credit for every child in a family.
To finance the plans, Biden proposed major tax hikes on corporations, investment income and wealthy households. The president said the proposals will help the battered U.S. economy recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and get Americans back to work, but Republican lawmakers argued that the U.S. economy would be weakened by the White House push.
"The actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart," said Senator Tim Scott, who delivered the Republican rebuttal to Biden's address.
"Usually people with big dreams are successful," Tom Waters, a soybean and corn farmer in Orrick, in the Midwest state of Missouri, told Xinhua in a recent interview, "but, I guess on the flip side of that, I have concerns of who's going to pay for all those big dreams."
Waters said he believes infrastructure is always good for the country since it allows businesses to develop and grow, but worries Democrats would put "a lot of things that are not necessarily infrastructure" into the bill.
Facing uphill battles to garner enough Republican support in the Senate for the proposals, the president implored lawmakers from the two parties to work together to prove "that our government still works -- and can deliver" for the American people.
In his first 100 days in the White House, Biden seems to have managed to keep Democrats together under their big tent, but he faced arguably fiercer partisan polarization than many of his predecessors.
"There is an understanding that if we're going to address the crises facing this country, we're all in it together," progressive Senator Bernie Sanders said in an interview with The New York Times.
However, the moment of unity with the Democratic Party could be fragile, the Times report added, noting that sharp differences remain between Biden and his left flank over issues including health care, college costs, expanding the Supreme Court and tackling income equality.
Meanwhile, no Republican lawmakers voted in March for Biden's signature 1.9-trillion-dollar coronavirus relief package, known as the American Rescue Plan, and most Republican lawmakers have expressed reservations about other aspects of Biden's policy agenda.
As a result, the two plans face a deeply uncertain fate in Congress, where Democrats hold only a slim majority in both the House and Senate. Biden has made it clear that he will not wait indefinitely before moving ahead via reconciliation again.
In his address on Wednesday, Biden also urged Congress to pass legislations on immigration reform, gun safety, the 15-U.S.-dollar minimum wage, equal pay for women, as well as expanded protections for members of the LGBTQ community.
He also called on lawmakers from both parties to "find consensus" and pass policing reform by the anniversary of African American George Floyd's death in late May. Each of these legislative efforts require the support of at least some Republican senators.
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the Democrat-led House, has stalled in the evenly split Senate amid Republican opposition. The two parties differ on how far the federal government should go to root out violence against African Americans and abuse of power in policing.
The moment of harmony in the past 100 days could be fragile.
"The (U.S.) media seem always like to give the president's first 100 days a kind of a grace period," Waters told Xinhua. "And following that first 100 days, that's when the bullets start flying, right?" Enditem
