A bit of history, then.

The first week in May of 1803, 216 years ago this week, was the greatest Infrastructure Week in the history of the country. Over in Paris, a couple of Americans, James Monroe and Robert Livingston, representing President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison, had a meeting with Francois Barbe-Marbois, the French minister of the treasury representing the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and they agreed that France would sell to the United States the territory of Louisiana—828,000 square miles and, basically, the middle third of what is now the continental United States—for $15 million, or about four cents and acre. (Napoleon thought this such a grand bargain that he paid Barbe-Francois a 150,000-franc performance bonus.) This, of course, gave the white settlers in North America a whole bunch of new Native Americans to slaughter, and it also kicked off the free state/slave state conflict that ultimately would prove to be unsolvable without a sanguinary war. But give it this: it wasn't a project from men who thought small.

I mention this because, the other day, Senator Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leaders in both houses of the Congress, met with the president*, and they announced their intention to pass a $2 trillion infrastructure plan, and god knows this broken-down country needs one. This announcement landed in Congress with a resounding thud. From Politico:

“The likelihood of that happening at $2 trillion— just on the face of what I saw — is pie in the sky,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.). “But I’d love to have a big infrastructure bill.”...“I don’t see where the pay-fors will come from,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), one of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill...“It’s a tremendous amount,” said Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), the ranking member on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Another reason for skepticism: Some Democrats say Trump must consider rolling back some of the 2017 GOP tax cuts — his signature legislative accomplishment — to pay for new infrastructure investments. That “made me chuckle,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). “It’s not serious.”

Some day, a historian is going to write a long and earnest volume on the slow death of this country's vaulting ambition, which often was the most charming thing about it, when it wasn't being exercised on subject populations here and abroad who caught the sharp edge of it.

Jefferson had no doubt about the Purchase. GraphicaArtis Getty Images

The debate in the Senate over the deal acquiring Louisiana took only two days. Federalists argued that the current residents of Louisiana, most of whom were at that point actually foreigners, were somehow unfit to be citizens of the new republic having grown up as subjects of kings and despots. Jefferson's allies had serious—and well-founded—constitutional objections that were so serious that Jefferson didn't even mention the purchase in his Annual Message (the original State of the Union address) that fall.

"The less we say about the constitutional difficulties respecting Louisiana the better," Jefferson told Madison. "What is necessary for surmounting them must be done sub silentio." But what was necessary was done, and that vaulting ambition took the shape of an entirely new continental arrangement, and an extended republic that would eventually extend to the Pacific. For good or ill, and there has been plenty of both, this country never was so miserly with its ambitions. Infrastructure Week wasn't always a punchline.

(h/t to Jon Kukla's A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America for details on the big land deal.)

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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