Romney ‘totally confident’ Biden will sign infrastructure after attempted walk back

By Devan Cole, CNN

Sen. Mitt Romney, a key Republican negotiator in infrastructure talks, said Sunday that he’s “totally confident” President Joe Biden will sign a bipartisan bill a day after the President attempted to clean up comments that threatened the deal.

“I am totally confident the President will sign it if it comes to his desk,” the Utah Republican told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

“I certainly can understand why not only myself but a lot of my colleagues were very concerned about what the President was saying … but I think the waters have been calmed by what he said on Saturday,” Romney, who was one of several Republicans who helped broker the infrastructure deal, told Tapper. The senator added that he thinks there will be enough support in the Senate to pass the proposal.

Biden on Saturday walked back comments he had made Thursday, in which he said he wouldn’t approve the bipartisan measure unless it came paired with a reconciliation proposal for “human infrastructure.” The President said in a statement that his comments “created the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to, which was certainly not my intent.”

The walk back amounted to one of the most significant course corrections of Biden’s highly disciplined presidency so far.

This story is breaking and will be updated.

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CNN’s Kevin Liptak, Arlette Saenz and Donald Judd contributed to this report.