Pence promises big bill to fortify infrastructure

Confirmation hearings held on interior, education picks

Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Education Department, arrives for a Senate hearing Tuesday with Sen. Tim Scott (left), R-S.C., and former Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. DeVos vowed to be “a strong advocate for great public schools” while supporting access to “a high-quality alternative.”
Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Education Department, arrives for a Senate hearing Tuesday with Sen. Tim Scott (left), R-S.C., and former Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. DeVos vowed to be “a strong advocate for great public schools” while supporting access to “a high-quality alternative.”

NEW YORK -- Vice President-elect Mike Pence pledged to a group of mayors Tuesday that Donald Trump's administration will make a serious investment in infrastructure.

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In a Senate hearing Tuesday on his nomination as Interior Department secretary, Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., disputed President-elect Donald Trump’s claim that climate change is a hoax, citing the changes he’s seen at Glacier National Park in his home state.

Also Tuesday, the Senate continued confirmation hearings in Washington for the president-elect's Cabinet picks, with Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana and business leader Betsy DeVos presenting their visions for the Interior and Education departments, respectively.

Pence, speaking Tuesday in Washington at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said Trump told him to pass on that "we're going to do an infrastructure bill, and it's going to be big."

Trump, who often lamented on the campaign trail the state of the country's bridges, roads and airports, has promised to invest $1 trillion in transportation and infrastructure spending, although he has provided few details.

[TRUMP: Timeline of president-elect’s career + list of appointments so far]

Pence also said the new administration will work with cities as partners. He looked ahead to Friday's inauguration, saying it will mark "the dawn of a new era for our country, it's an era of growth and opportunity and renewed greatness for America."

On Tuesday, Trump made his first trip in weeks to Washington, as his inauguration festivities approach.

He flew in for a black-tie dinner honoring Tom Barrack, his longtime friend and head of the Inauguration Committee. The Chairman's Global Dinner drew nearly 150 diplomats and ambassadors, donors, soon-to-be White House staff members and Cabinet picks.

"We have great respect for your countries. We have great respect for our world," Trump told the group after he was introduced by Pence, who assured that the future president was willing to engage with the world, despite his "America First" mantra.

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"I'm not sure that the national media here in America completely understands the president-elect. I can assure you that the world will," Pence said, adding that Trump "will be a president who puts America first, but we will work every day with nations around the world to advance the peace and prosperity of our allies and our friends across the world."

In New York on Tuesday, Trump met with Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg. Trump has criticized the cost of Boeing's Air Force One program.

"We made some great progress to refine requirements for Air Force One, to streamline the process, to streamline certain features, all of that will lead to a better airplane at a lower cost," Muilenberg said after the meeting. He said Trump "is doing a good job as an agent of business" and added that more conversations are forthcoming. He did not set a timeline on settling on a final price tag for the plane.

In another development Tuesday, Trump put GOP lawmakers on the defensive regarding their tax plan, after he called it "too complicated" during an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

At issue is a proposal called "border adjustment" that would tax imports to the U.S. while exempting exports. It's part of a planned rewrite of the U.S. tax code aimed at lowering overall tax rates on corporations from 35 percent to 20 percent.

"Anytime I hear border adjustment, I don't love it," Trump said.

Over the weekend, Trump also appeared to outline a different health care goal from what many Republicans favor. During interviews with The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, Trump said that after the repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, he'll offer "insurance for everybody." Congressional Republicans have taken care to say that they want to provide "universal access."

Lewis, Trump exchange

Also Tuesday, the president-elect continued his criticism of U.S. Rep. John Lewis, whom he berated Saturday for challenging his legitimacy to be the next president. Trump said the veteran black congressman from Georgia had wrongly claimed that it would be the first inauguration he's missed since 1987.

During a taping Tuesday for a segment on Fox News's Fox & Friends, Trump again criticized Lewis.

"He conveniently doesn't remember. How do you forget if you go to an inauguration?" Trump said during the interview, which is to air in full this morning. "You don't forget something like that. So, he got caught, and it's pretty bad, and it's making him look bad, frankly. ... I think he just grandstanded, John Lewis, and then he got caught in a very bad lie."

The president-elect's comments echoed posts on Twitter earlier in the day: "Wrong (or lie!) He boycotted Bush 43 also because he 'thought it would be hypocritical to attend Bush's swearing-in....he doesn't believe Bush is the true elected president.' Sound familiar!"

Lewis' office confirmed Tuesday that the civil-rights leader had missed George W. Bush's 2001 swearing-in.

"His absence at that time was also a form of dissent," said spokesman Brenda Jones. "He did not believe [that] the outcome of that election, including the controversies around the results in Florida and the unprecedented intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court, reflected a free, fair and open democratic process."

Trump has received criticism over his Lewis comments, and more than 40 House Democrats say they plan to boycott his inauguration Friday.

Asked about the inauguration boycott during a phone call with reporters, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said they would "love for every member of Congress to attend, but if they don't, we've got some great seats for others to partake in. It's a shame that these folks don't want to be part of the peaceful transfer of power."

Separately, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday said reports that Trump has been compromised by Russian intelligence are "total nonsense" and that the allegations were fabricated to "undermine the legitimacy" of Trump's presidency.

It was Putin's first direct denial of the contents of an uncorroborated dossier written by a former British intelligence agent hired to compile opposition research. The dossier claimed that Trump was compromised by Russian intelligence agents during a 2013 visit to Moscow to host the Miss Universe pageant.

"The people who are ordering this kind of false information, who are now disseminating it against the president-elect of the United States, who fabricate it and use it in a political fight, are worse than prostitutes," Putin told journalists after talks with Moldovan President Igor Dodon in Moscow. "They have no moral boundaries."

Trump is "a grown man, and secondly he's someone who has been involved with beauty contests for many years and has met the most beautiful women in the world," Putin said. "I find it hard to believe that he rushed to some hotel to meet girls of loose morals, although ours are undoubtedly the best in the world."

Zinke on U.S. lands

In the Senate on Tuesday, Trump's choice to head the Interior Department rejected claims that climate change is a hoax, saying it is indisputable that environmental changes are affecting the world's temperature and human activity is a major reason.

"I don't believe it's a hoax," Zinke told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee during his confirmation hearing. "The climate is changing; man is an influence. I think where there's debate is what that influence is and what can we do about it."

Trump has suggested in recent weeks that he's keeping an open mind on the issue and may reconsider a campaign pledge to back away from a 2015 Paris agreement that calls for global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Zinke cited Glacier National Park in Montana, his home state, as a prime example of the effects of climate change, noting that glaciers there have receded in his lifetime and even from one visit to the next.

Zinke, 55, listed a variety of purposes for the nation's vast federal lands, from hiking, hunting, fishing and camping to harvesting timber and mining for coal and other energy sources.

The Interior Department and other U.S. agencies control almost a third of land in the West and even more of the underground "mineral estate" that holds vast amounts of coal, oil and natural gas.

Zinke has said he would never sell, give away or transfer public lands -- a crucial stance in Montana and the rest of the West where access to hunting and fishing is considered sacrosanct. Zinke feels so strongly about it that he resigned as a delegate to the Republican National Convention last summer because of the GOP's position in favor of land transfers to state or private groups.

Even so, Zinke's position on public lands came under fire this month after he voted in favor of a measure from House Republicans that would allow federal land transfers to be considered cost-free and budget-neutral, making it easier for drilling and development.

On Tuesday, Zinke told senators that he flatly opposes all sales or transfers of federal lands.

DeVos on schools

Later Tuesday, DeVos -- Trump's pick to head the Education Department -- was under scrutiny from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for her support of school choice.

DeVos said she would address "the needs of all parents and students" but that a one-size-fits-all model doesn't work in education.

Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee grilled the wealthy Republican donor on a range of topics from sexual assault to child care, students with disabilities, and making public colleges and universities tuition-free.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asked DeVos if she would have gotten the nomination had it not been for her family's political contributions. "As a matter of fact I do think that there would be that possibility," she said. "I have worked very hard on behalf of parents and children for the last almost 30 years."

Asked by Sanders about her views on tuition-free public colleges and universities, DeVos said: "I think we also have to consider the fact that there is nothing in life that is truly free. Somebody is going to pay for it."

Facing criticism from teachers unions that she is working against public education, DeVos told the committee that she will be "a strong advocate for great public schools."

"But," she added, "if a school is troubled, or unsafe, or not a good fit for a child -- perhaps they have a special need that is going unmet -- we should support a parent's right to enroll their child in a high-quality alternative."

DeVos, the wife of Dick DeVos, the heir to the Amway marketing fortune, has spent more than two decades advocating for charter schools in her home state of Michigan, as well as promoting conservative religious values.

Labor unions, Democrats and civil-rights groups have opposed her appointment. She and her family have donated millions of dollars to Republican politicians and groups over the years, including making campaign contributions to several committee members.

Information for this article was contributed by Jonathan Lemire, Catherine Lucey, Julie Pace, Steve Peoples, Andrew Taylor, Jonathan Lemire, Matthew Daly and Maria Danilova of The Associated Press; by Andrew Roth, David Filipov, Brian Murphy and John Wagner of The Washington Post; and by Olga Tanas, Henry Meyer and Ilya Arkhipov of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 01/18/2017

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