On Monday, President Joe Biden met with ten Senate Republicans who are proposing a scaled-down version of his $1.9 trillion Covid Relief bill. Scaled down would be an understatement. At $600 billion, it's less than a third of what the Administration is proposing and it doesn't have any relief for state and local governments. Put succinctly, the proposal spearheaded by these Republicans is totally inadequate to deal with the pandemic and the economic carnage it has caused and it should not be taken seriously.
This is a pivotal moment for this president and his administration. Twelve years ago, then President Barack Obama was facing an economic crisis not unlike the one Biden is currently dealing with. Economists like Paul Krugman were begging him to go big. Larry Summers, then the Director of the National Economic Council, said that "the risk of doing too little is greater than doing too much."
As we all know, the $787 billion stimulus bill that the administration eventually settled on was not nearly enough to jumpstart the economy. As a result, it took years longer for the economy to fully recover, and the GOP blamed Obama both for the slow growth and for adding to the national debt. In other words, Obama got all the grief while getting none of the accolades.
That's why it is critical that Biden not repeat Obama's mistake. What is required here is boldness, not timidity. Biden must stick to his guns, even if it means passing his Covid-relief bill through budget reconciliation. What good is having the majority in both houses if you're not going to use it?
Think about it: no matter what he ends up doing, Biden is going to be held accountable. A year from now, if the economy is still in the dumps, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney aren't going to give him any props for reaching across the aisle. They're not going to say, "That's ok, Joe, we know you did the right thing by going with our plan." Indeed, if history is any indication, Republicans won't even remember their meeting with him in the White House. "Meeting? What meeting? That wasn't us. You must be thinking of someone else." The number one rule in politics is, if you're going to catch hell, you might as well catch hell for doing something.
And doing something, i.e., accomplishing things, is the best way to ensure that Democrats and not Republicans will control the narrative going into the midterms. While the GOP continues to implode over Trump, Biden can show the country what it means to actually govern and get results, even if those results are obtained strictly along party-line votes.
It's disingenuous to say the least for Republicans to cry about a lack of bi-partisanship. Where was that bi-partisanship in 2017 when they jammed through their $2 trillion tax scheme? They didn't even have the decency to go through their own committees. All they cared about was rewarding their cronies with hundreds of billions of tax-payer dollars that could've been better spent repairing the roads and bridges of this country. Now all of a sudden they give a shit about process? Screw 'em, I say.
There is one thing Biden can and must do if he hopes to get his agenda passed: don't take Joe Manchin for granted. The interview Kamala Harris did on a West Virginia TV station was amateur hour, to put it mildly. You don't show up a senator as important as Manchin in his home state. Period. It's political suicide. Someone as experienced as Biden should've known that, and it is vital that all steps be taken to ensure such a mistake never happens again.
But barring any more unforced errors, this is Biden's chance to make history. He may have run as a centrist Democrat, but fate has presented him with the opportunity of a lifetime. I'm not suggesting that he go all in on Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. The votes just aren't there and he knows it. But there's a lot he can do. Infrastructure, renewable energy, tax reform, who knows? He could be the most successful Democratic president since LBJ.
Joe Biden has waited more than forty years for this moment. It is his to seize.
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