Tom's Newsmaker guest today is Maryland's senior US senator, Ben Cardin.

Back in March, President Joe Biden had a big victory when Congress passed his enormous $2 trillion dollar American Rescue Plan. Since then, Democrats have suffered setbacks with legislation around voting rights and police reform.

But Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has expressed confidence that an infrastructure bill can make it through, perhaps as early as this week. The White House and a bipartisan group of Senators spent months negotiating an infrastructure blueprint. The Senate was in session over the weekend, and an infrastructure bill, totaling about $550 billion dollars in new spending, was delivered to the floor last night.

Schumer has now undertaken the complicated task of shepherding both the bi-partisan infrastructure package and another package which does not have any Republican support through the closely divided Congress. The second bill, a Democratic-only led effort, would fund massive increases for education, child care and climate programs.

Sen. Ben Cardin will be with us for the hour on Zoom. We’ll take your calls and comments a little later in the broadcast.

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