The White House’s planned victory lap celebrating the passage of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus pandemic spending package comes with plenty of political risks, Republicans warn.
Republicans argue that Biden’s popular spending package is chock-full of provisions that don’t even relate to the COVID-19 public health and economic crises. They say the measure substantially adds to the country’s ballooning federal deficit, making it almost impossible for future generations to pay back the total borrowed amount — and likely putting a new tax burden on them.
And despite team Biden’s publicity tour, Republicans are betting voters will share their gripes before the 2022 midterm elections, when the party could take control of both chambers. Though some in GOP circles say former President Donald Trump, with his sometimes-lackluster virus response, has made the Republican counterargument less compelling.
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For Republican strategist Doug Heye, Biden has learned from former President Barack Obama’s mistake of not framing his own 2009 spending package, valued at roughly half of Biden’s iteration, as more of a dire need during the financial crisis he inherited from President George W. Bush.
The political fallout of Biden’s package is difficult to gauge 20 months before the 2022 election cycle. But in 2010, Democrats predicted “political doom” for Republicans who opposed Obama’s package — Republicans won 63 House seats that fall, Heye noted.
“This bill reflects Nancy Pelosi’s line of, ‘We have to pass it to find out what’s in it,'” he wrote in an email. “While the bill is popular now, as the contents of the bill become better known — big checks for unions, Cadillac-level paid leave for federal employees, for instance — Republicans may have an opportunity to campaign against those portions of the bill that have nothing to do with COVID relief.”
Former Republican Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp, who once chaired the conservative House Tea Party Caucus, also evoked the 2010 elections. He described Biden’s “big-government” package as “a self-dealing spending binge of handouts for and by Washington Democrats.” He charged Democrats with exploiting COVID-19 “to mask this $2 trillion partisan monstrosity.”
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“Just like the Obama stimulus, the Democrats will awaken a new generation of Tea Party conservatives and candidates all across America,” he wrote in a statement to the Washington Examiner. That could “provide the energy for Republicans to retake the House and the Senate,” he added.
Another former Republican congressman, Bob Beauprez of Colorado, refused to call Biden’s spending package a “legislative win” given it wasn’t a bipartisan agreement. But he did echo Heye’s point about what conservatives call irrelevant inclusions in the framework.
“I’m not sure I’d want people to talk about it much more because they might actually find out what’s in it,” he joked.
Beauprez questioned the package’s positive polling — “Free money? That does sound good.” — and the pressure it places on the country’s finances — “buying votes with borrowed money.” But those are more nuanced messages that are harder to convey to the public.
“We didn’t care enough about it,” Beauprez said specifically of Republicans and deficit spending over the last four years. “The Trump administration didn’t want to talk about it. It was essentially off the table. Entitlement reform was off the table. He wasn’t going to go there. Those are two very large frustrations that I have, and somebody’s gonna have to reconcile it.”
Democratic control of the White House and Congress, however, could boost Republicans in future electoral contests if history is any guide.
“They can shove things down America’s throat and thumb their nose at Republicans temporarily,” Beauprez said. “I think this will have consequences in 2022, and perhaps, we’ll see, [in] 2024. Chickens do come home to roost. And if Democrats overreach, I think they’ve already overreached in their first month, if they continue to overreach, it will have consequences.”
Former Republican South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis agreed about Republicans being “complicit” in deficit spending before the pandemic and during the coronavirus outbreak under Trump complicates the party’s response to the Democratic spending measure, which got zero GOP votes in either chamber.
There are two other complications, according to Inglis. For one, if the economy recovers, Republicans will receive a sliver of the credit apportioned to Biden and the Democrats, he started.
“Success has many fathers, and failure is an orphan. And orphans take up residence at the White House when it comes to policies that don’t work out,” he said.
The overriding risk for Biden is if his package “overexcites” the economy, triggering a spike in inflation and an interest rate hike that could hurt growth, Inglis continued. The risk for Republicans was then appearing to “rejoice in bad news” instead of being a party in which “the test of conservatism is that it works for everyone,” he added.
“A better strategy is to express cooperation on dealing with COVID, on dealing with climate change, on addressing the race problem. If all that works out, then you’ve got a message to take to those suburban districts,” he said.
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On his 50th day in office, Biden signaled the White House’s plan to embark on a victory lap before he signed the bill into law Thursday. During a call with House Democrats this month, he said Obama “paid a price” in 2010 because “we didn’t adequately explain what we had done” with the 2009 spending package.
Biden is so far scheduled to make stops in Pennsylvania and Georgia as part of the 2021 package’s “Help is Here” tour. First lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, and a host of Cabinet officials have also been drafted for the effort. They will all fan out across the country ahead of Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress.
