Why in the world would House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put together a $3 trillion bill that has no chance in high heaven of being enacted? And force Democrats to vote for it anyway?
Her strategy in this episode didn’t quite fit her image in the media as a brilliant political boss. Instead, her pursuit of a legislative package to nowhere was what Republicans saw as an effort to keep her squabbling caucus united.
Pelosi has “a real problem managing her caucus,” says Karl Rove, an adviser to President George W. Bush and now a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Rove described the bill as “a laundry list of social goals and economic goals” designed to appeal to the majority liberal — or, if you prefer, “progressive” — bloc of House Democrats.
Scott Reed, campaign manager of Bob Dole’s presidential bid in 1996 and currently the top political adviser at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called the legislation “a political statement for the progressives.” And all but one of them, ultra-leftist Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, voted for it.
“At the core, our response from Congress must match the true scale of the devastating crisis,” she was quoted saying before the vote, which was won by Democrats 208-199. The bill “simply fails to do that.”
But Jayapal, her House allies, and progressive hard-liners in general don’t run the party. A striking example was their failure to keep nonradical Democrats from catapulting Joe Biden to the presidential nomination.
Capitol Hill is different. What progressives prompted Pelosi to squeeze into a single piece of legislation was extraordinary. It would reward illegal immigrants with retroactive $1,200 checks from the earlier CARES Act and with new rebates in the HEROES Act, the name for the $3 trillion bill. These immigrants will also be free from deportation as long as the pandemic lasts.
On top of $1,200 checks, those who lost their jobs would get $600 a week. The result: roughly half of the ex-job holders would make more than they had while employed.
You may think boosting the economy is more urgent than helping “cannabis businesses,” but the bill mentions marijuana outfits 63 times to 42 for jobs. The cannabis folks would get cut-rate financing too.
As for state and local governments, it would be a $915 billion bonanza. One-third of state budgets are already paid for from federal aid, but they’ve been barred from using federal funds to bail out their underfinanced pension plans. It looks like Pelosi would let them.
Since the press sugarcoats the bill by calling it an economic “stimulus,” which it isn’t, or a “coronavirus relief” program, which is less than half of it, several controversial provisions might be overlooked.
For one thing, the rules for voting on Election Day would be nationalized. IDs would no longer be required, and voting by mail would be expanded — except you wouldn’t need to buy a stamp to send your ballot in. Thanks to “ballot harvesting,” a stranger would drop by to collect your ballot and take it somewhere. This is ripe for abuse.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich believes the Pelosi document is the Democratic agenda for 2021 should Democrats win the White House and perhaps the Senate. Once Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stepped in, any chance this year was gone.
“In the two months that House Democrats spent away from their duty stations,” McConnell said, “they seemingly gave themselves just one assignment: Draft an enormous political messaging bill and brand it as coronavirus relief.” It was “the legislative equivalent of stand-up comedy … with tax hikes on small businesses [and] tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the bluest states.”
It would be foolish to rule out the possibility that Pelosi’s ploy worked. Ten of the 14 Democrats who voted against her bill belong to what Reed refers to as the “Trump 30” — that is, members of Congress whose districts voted for Trump in 2016. By dragging the party another notch to the left, Pelosi may have wooed the progressives. But she deserted the Trump 30, leaving them more vulnerable Nov. 3.
Fred Barnes is a Washington Examiner senior columnist.
