Rep. Miller-Meeks keeps taking credit for funding she voted against

Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks has publicly touted the roughly $470 million in infrastructure funding that’s been promised to her district, even though she voted against the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, which is providing the funding. 

Nearly three years after she voted against President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa’s 1st Congressional District continues to take credit for the bill and the money it’s delivering to her district.

Overall, only 13 House GOP lawmakers voted for the 2021 law to fund rails, bridges, roads, and more nationwide. These lawmakers faced threats and ferocious criticism from the right, and from former president Donald Trump himself, who said they should be “ashamed of themselves.” 

Although the vast majority of Republicans claim that the bill’s price tag was the reason they voted against it, it is widely believed that many of them simply didn’t want President Joe Biden to get a win.

But now, it’s Miller-Meeks’ own district that is winning, as it’s been promised nearly $470 million in investments from the infrastructure law, despite her vote against it. 

POLITICO this week even highlighted how her district is actually receiving the most help of all from Biden’s investments among swing districts held by Republicans seen as “toss-up” races.

Miller-Meeks publicly touted that money over and over again, attending a ribbon cutting for a key highway interchange, for example, and stressing the importance of the modernization of locks and dams on the Mississippi River in her district. She called them “critically important” to Iowa’s economy and thanked the Army Corps of Engineers for their work.

“We all agree that the country is in a dire need of a clean transportation bill that addresses failing infrastructure. The bill would have had large bipartisan support had Republicans been allowed to be engaged in the process and if it was not vastly overloaded with pet projects,” Miller-Meeks said in a statement to POLITICO.

“Although I was unable to support the massive partisan legislation as a responsible steward of taxpayer dollars, I do support Community Funding Projects, which goes through regular Appropriations Committee order with bipartisan input,” Miller-Meeks added. “I will always fight to ethically bring federal dollars back to my district.”

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Mallory Payne criticized Miller-Meeks hypocrisy in a statement.

“Mariannette Miller-Meeks is doing what she does best – trying to mislead Iowans,” she said. “Her record has only hurt middle class families, so her solution is to take credit for game-changing, job-creating investments that she voted against.”

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) isn’t the only major piece of legislation Miller-Meeks has voted against.

She—along with every other Republican in Congress—also voted against passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which represented the largest-ever investment in fighting climate change, lowered health care and prescription drug costs, raised taxes on corporations, and boosted funding for the Internal Revenue Service to go after wealthy tax cheats.

Additionally, she voted against the American Rescue Plan, which helped Americans financially through the pandemic, and against the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, which is intended to lure microchip manufacturing back to the US after decades of companies offshoring the technology.