Republicans are beginning to coalesce around a message for confronting President Biden’s new administration, with one GOP missive stating: “There’s bipartisan agreement. … Joe Biden’s a partisan.”
The GOP is hammering Biden’s executive orders, his use of a budgetary maneuver to pass a COVID-19 relief package without Senate Republicans (despite their offers to compromise), and even occasional clashes with the dwindling number of centrist and red-state Democrats on Capitol Hill to undercut the new president’s talk of “unity.”
“Biden is starting his presidency as one of the most partisan in history, exposing his campaign pledge to reach across the aisle as another empty promise,” said Republican National Committee Rapid Response Director Tommy Pigott. “In the early hours of the morning, in a vote strictly on party lines, the Senate adopted Bernie Sanders’s budget resolution necessary to force through a partisan bill using the Biden-supported reconciliation process.”
Biden, opting against directing Democratic congressional leaders to drop plans to use the fast-track tactic, which always angers the other side, no matter which party deploys it, is acting as a sort of adhesive agent for Capitol Hill Republicans who spent time this week bickering among themselves.
“If Democrats were serious about passing a budget, they should follow regular order and move it through the committees of jurisdiction so that the American people’s representatives, on both sides of the aisle, can have input,” said Rep. Fred Keller, a Pennsylvania Republican, in a statement. “Instead, Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer are proving once again that President Biden’s calls for unity do not match Democrats’ actions to advance their radical liberal agenda.”
“We can absolutely work across party lines on budget reform, additional pandemic relief, and speed COVID-19 vaccination distribution,” concurred Rep. Rob Wittman, a Virginia Republican. “But that can’t happen when Republicans are entirely cut out of the process.”
But as was the case during the 2020 presidential campaign, the Republican message is having a difficult time being heard over continued discussion of former President Donald Trump and their own infighting. The headlines over the past week were dominated by an unsuccessful attempt to boot House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney from her leadership position because she voted to impeach Trump and the House stripping Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments for conspiracy theorizing and incendiary comments. Soon attention will turn to Trump’s Senate trial, his second in as many years.
That hasn’t stopped some Democrats from questioning whether their party leadership is trying to squeeze too much legislative output out of their razor-thin majorities without Republican cooperation.
“Biden’s advisers have led him wrong to start out in a strictly partisan direction,” Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, told a reporter. “We should have found something that we could have voted on bipartisan first and then gone down this lane when we hit a roadblock, and they didn’t do that.”
Republican operatives see a target-rich environment ahead of a midterm election in which they need only a net gain of one seat in the Senate and seven in the House to recapture the majorities.
“President Biden’s ‘return to normalcy’ has been an unmitigated disaster, and while congressional Democrats may not yet realize it, or choose to ignore the harsh realities outside of D.C., as the corporate media does,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “We were assured that Biden had a ready-to-go vaccine distribution plan, but America quickly found out he didn’t. Most voters want their kids back in school yesterday, but Biden is petrified of the teachers unions.”
“America was told that Biden would govern from the middle and would work to seek bipartisan consensus,” he added. “Instead, Biden is issuing radical executive orders on just about every issue from open borders to canceling the Keystone XL pipeline to nonsensical climate edicts like they were parking tickets accrued after a late night in Foggy Bottom. Fifty percent of America simply did not vote for this hard-left turn.”
Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, joined Manchin in voting for an amendment supporting the Keystone XL pipeline. It passed 52-48.
After being haunted by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s comment that his top priority was to make Barack Obama a one-term president, 10 GOP senators trekked to the White House to seek a compromise in COVID-19 negotiations with Biden. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki hailed the talks as “productive,” and the president himself assured reporters he would get some Republican support, even as he supported using reconciliation, a process that would make the bill immune to the 60-vote threshold for ending a filibuster, to make it unnecessary.
Polls show the public backs aggressive government action on the economy and the pandemic, so Democrats are confident they can prevail — even if bipartisanship takes a hit. They are also counting on Republicans being unable to get out of their own way.
Republicans are cognizant of the challenge.
“Yes, Biden’s early approval ratings remain high, but it is only a matter of time before America wakes up to the harsh realities of what Biden and company means for their families,” O’Connell said. “And for those who doubt what I am saying, there is a reason why the top political story in the U.S. for the last week has been about the past utterances of a backbench congresswoman from Georgia who, until recently, 99% of America had never heard of.”
“The reason is simple: If corporate media can’t fraudulently paint the Republican Party as ‘extremists’ before the American public feels the pain of one-party rule,” he added, “then the Biden administration will be neutered at the ballot box in 2022.”
