Democratic leadership projects an unwavering confidence in its hardball COVID-19 relief strategy, and several Biden allies told Politico outright that it will even become their midterm elections strategy.
“It’s going to be very difficult for Republican lawmakers to look their constituents in the eyes and try to explain why they voted against giving them $1,400 checks, why they voted against reopening schools, and why they voted against speeding up vaccinations,” a White House official told the publication.
If Democrats pass COVID-19 relief on their own, that will likely be proven true in some places. But all Republicans need is a good alibi, and Democrats are creating one for them.
Less than 24 hours after his meeting with Senate Republicans last Monday, Senate Democrats put the notion of building bipartisanship to bed when they passed a resolution to kick off budget reconciliation, which allows them to pass President Biden’s package without a single Republican vote. If they don’t need Republican votes, then Democrats aren’t going to consult them meaningfully any further. Republicans can hardly be expected to vote “aye” on a bill of this magnitude on which they weren’t consulted.
As Democrats plug their ears to Republican cries, they are shutting out others, even from among their own, who suggest that the substance of their plan is flawed. In a column last week, Larry Summers, a Harvard professor and former economic adviser to President Barack Obama, praised the Biden relief package as ambitious but critiqued it as risky for its size relative to its lack of public investment.
Summers’s column got enough attention in the press (much of it negative, based on the liberal columnists whom I’ve read), and reportedly from within the White House, that he has written a follow-up. But after the original was published, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted that “we did not talk about Larry Summers” after a meeting with Biden. Perhaps it was for the cameras, but one doesn’t get the sense that Democrats are open to any effort to knead out the relief package. That would only be a barrier to swift passage, which they insist is so necessary that it requires blocking any efforts to improve or target it. Improvements might require them to give something up, and that’s just too much to ask of a newly enfranchised party, no matter what Biden has promised about working with Republicans.
It won’t be difficult for Republicans to make the case that some of the Democrats’ premises are just wrong. If the Biden package passes with the proposed $130 billion meant to, as the plan’s fact sheet says, “help schools to safely reopen,” Republicans who vote against it will not have “voted against reopening schools,” as the unnamed White House official said. They will have rejected the notion that schools cannot reopen safely without a massive cash infusion.
Three Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists observed in a recent paper that “the preponderance of available evidence from the fall school semester has been reassuring insofar as the type of rapid spread that was frequently observed in congregate living facilities or high-density worksites has not been reported in education settings in schools.” The data on which that assessment was based could only be gleaned because schools opened and made accommodations to reduce spread and, to the point, they did it without a $130 billion appropriation.
The start of budget reconciliation functionally ended relief negotiations after one meeting, after many words from Biden and his team about working across the aisle. The Democrats project a near-total rejection of the idea that their bill could be improved, and their points of focus for some major provisions in the package are just misdirected.
As they construct their “battering ram” of a relief package, which they hope they can wield against Republicans in 2022, Democrats are creating strong midterm elections arguments against their own governance that are adjacent to the spending issue but go beyond it and are not as easily dismissed as what Alex Shephard of the New Republic refers to derisively as the old Republican “song-and-dance routine about the deficit.”
