Uncle Joe can twist the knife when he needs to. He did it on Friday, while touting his economic rescue plan to speedily alleviate “the enormous pain” of the pandemic:
“I believe the American people are looking right now to their government for help, to do our job, to not to let them down. So I’m going to act, and I’m going to act fast…
“I’ve told both Republicans and Democrats my preference (is) to work together. But if I have to choose between getting help right now to Americans who are hurting so badly, and getting bogged down in a lengthy negotiation or compromising on a bill that’s up to the crisis, that’s an easy choice. I’m going to help the American people who are hurting now…
“What Republicans have proposed is either to do nothing or not enough. All of a sudden, many of them have rediscovered fiscal restraint and the concern for the deficits. But don’t kid yourself – (their) approach will come with a cost: more pain for more people, for longer than it has to be.”
Oh, you betcha. All of a sudden, Republicans have rediscovered their love of fiscal conservatism. It’s not a mystery. It happened at the split second that Biden said “so help me God” at the close of his oath on Inauguration Day.
One of the GOP’s most tiresome traditions works like this: When a Republican is in the White House, it’s fine to drown the budget in red ink. When a Democrat is in the White House, it’s time to furrow the brow about red ink.
When Ronald Reagan was president, the national debt tripled – thanks, in particular, to the huge tax cuts that were skewed to top of the income ladder. By the time George H. W. Bush was defeated in 1992, the national debt had risen another 54 percent. By the time his son Dubya left office in 2009, the national debt was twice what it was in 2001. (As veep Dick Cheney decreed at the time, “Deficits don’t matter.”) And Donald Trump, in his disastrous single term, presided over one of the largest red-ink explosions in history.
Most congressional Republicans were cool with all that. But it’s a different story when the White House is blue; as Mark Walker, a prominent House right-winger, remarked a few years ago, fiscal conservatism “is a great talking point when you have an administration that’s Democrat-led.” (It’s great when people like that commit candor.)
For instance: When Barack Obama became president in 2009, Republicans fussed about the budget deficit so relentlessly that they made it impossible for the new brooms to deliver sufficient economic relief to Americans suffering from the Great Recession that George W. had bequeathed to his successor.
Joe Biden remembers that episode well; he was the veep in 2009. Republicans kept whittling away at the price tag, and the Obama team indulged them in the hopes that the final package would pass with bipartisan support; the result was an insufficient package that passed with zero House Republican votes and only three in the Senate. As Biden said Friday, the ’09 relief law “wasn’t enough. It wasn’t quite big enough. It stemmed the crisis, but the recovery could have been faster and and even bigger. Today, we need an answer that meets the challenge of this crisis, not one that falls short. And that’s the issue facing the country right now.”
Translation: We’re not going to let the GOP pull its hypocrisy act and screw things up a second time.
Let the Republicans whine about the price tag of Covid relief. The polls show that a landslide majority of Americans applaud Biden’s handling of the pandemic, and a plurality wants him to go big on economic relief; there’s less political upside to going small. The Democratic House and Senate are now poised to get the necessary money to suffering Americans via the “budget reconciliation” process that skirts a Republican filibuster and requires simple majorities to put the relief package on Biden’s desk.
Elections have consequences – an obvious lesson most recently learned in the two Georgia Senate races that made Kamala Harris the tie-breaking voter in the upper chamber. The choice for the remaining Republicans, as we finally get back to real governance, is to get on board with helping to rebuild this wounded nation – or to get the hell out of the way and watch it happen.