The Obama administration has strongly advocated for a national infrastructure bank as part of a plan to bring the nation's lagging infrastructure up to standard and to create jobs in a stagnating economy. In a rare moment of solidarity, labor unions and business leaders stood in support of the President's $10 billion national infrastructure bank proposal that facilitates public and private partnerships to rebuild roads, rail, transit and highways.

Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee John Mica (R., FL) has called a committee hearing to consider the proposal on Wednesday, October 12. However, Mica has already announced his cynicism toward the proposal; last week he released a statement that derided the bank as another agency that does little more than pick infrastructure project winners and losers: "The last thing Congress needs to do is create another federal bureaucracy where state and local officials are required to parade before Washington bureaucrats on bended knee to receive their favor."

Obama, on the other hand, is meeting resistance from the House of Representatives by focusing his rhetoric on the more concrete imagery of deteriorating roads and bridges rather than the abstract notion of infrastructure. In a recent speech, he stated, "Some of you were with me when we visited a bridge between Ohio and Kentucky that's been classified as 'functionally obsolete.' That's a fancy way of saying it's old and breaking down. We've heard about bridges in both states that are falling apart, and that's true all across the country." Implicit in this statement and the visit to the Ohio-Kentucky border is the fact that both states are represented by Republicans in the House of Representatives (Boehner, R., OH) and Senate (McConnell, R., Kentucky), demonstrating another attempt by Obama to appeal to Republicans and generate bipartisan support for the infrastructure bank.