I didn’t realize it until Lawrence O’Donnell led with it tonight in his changeover with Rachel, but President Joe Biden is in good company. Biden is now the third consecutive Democratic President to have a massive economic stimulus package as his first legislative agenda after taking the oath of office.
In 1992, Bill Clinton was sworn into office looking at a deep recession brought on in the aftermath of the original Gulf war. Clinton proposed a major economic stimulus package to get the economy moving again, but, shock and awe, the GOP opposed it, and it never even got to final floor votes in either chamber.
In 2009, President Barack Obama took office, inheriting the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of 1029. Obama proposed a massive stimulus package just to stabilize the economy, to keep the global economy from falling off of the cliff. And again, the GOP obstructed, obfuscated, and stalled, tying the bill up in committee, and stripping it of enough of the real benefits to make it a shell of its former self. But it finally passed.
And now President Biden inherits a near total economic collapse left by Trump’s criminal bungling of the national Covid-19 response. And like Clinton and Obama before him, Biden’s first legislative action is a massive, $1.9 trillion relief and stimulus package to keep the country from turning turtle. And once again, the Republicans are pitching a royal pissy fit.
Unfortunately for the GOP, Biden appears to have brushed up on history, or at least Democratic Presidential history. Nobody has been more bipartisan than Biden, he built not only his election campaign on it, but his entire career on it. But it was Clinton’s and Obama’s attempts to get Republican buy in that scuttled their efforts.
Biden has endlessly preached bipartisanship, but the thing that too many people are missing is the fact that bipartisanship means different things to different people. And in this case, Biden isn’t referring to bipartisanship with congressional Republicans, but with everyday Republicans.
Biden went big with his Covid-19 relief package, and he went bold. He filled it with things that would be popular with the overwhelming majority of Americans, whatever their political stripe, and then he sold it to the American people themselves. He used video conferences and town halls to show GOP Mayors and Governors of how this bill would benefit their states and cities, and then happily accepted the accolades from them all.
The Covid bill is steaming through the House at what, for the US House, is warp speed. The bill has gone through the mark up process in 9 different House committees. And while the GOP is pissing and whining like a race horse, they have yet to remove one single big ticket item from the bill. And it is going to go on to the Senate almost intact.
Where the same thing will happen. In fact, the only big ticket item that may fall will be the $15 an hour minimum wage, not due to GOP opposition, but thanks to two turncoat Democrats, Manchin and Sinema, who oppose it. But the simple fact of the matter is that Biden is going to get almost everything he wants, simply because he knows that the GOP can vote against things that are popular with their base, and get away with it because the Democrats have the votes to pass it themselves, and save them from their own masses.
But we should make no mistake about it. President Biden is writing the template for future Democratic Presidents with how to pass must pass emergency legislation without GOP support when you have the advantage. Fill the bill with things that are wildly popular with the vast majority of the American public, market it directly to local GOP officials, and then sit back and dare the congressional GOP to defy their own voters. Go big, go bold, and when you have the advantage, ram it home at warp speed, and dare the GOP to fight you on it.
It won’t work on every bill, or every policy, nor should it, but for must pass, emergency legislation, it is a potent tool. As both Clinton and Obama learned, trying to get GOP support for common sense measures is a sure fire loser. Instead, they delay and denigrate, and use their minority power to gut the ultimate benefits of the legislation. If you have the majority advantage to pass legislation, even through parliamentary practices like reconciliation, do it, and challenge the GOP to resist on legislation that is popular with their own voters. If they can delay and obfuscate, then they win. If y0u ram forward, full speed ahead, and fore them to vote against their own voters primary interests, then it’s a whole ‘nother ball game.
Follow me on Twitter at @RealMurfster35
Biden has learned his lesson from the previous rethug obfuscation and obstruction and he knows how to deal with it.
This bodes well.
The GOP criticism is retry ridonkulous, but they’ve unified under the WSJ talking points across the internet. “This is socialism and pork, who do community health centers have to do with pandemic relief!”
I read that editorial and the subsequent parroting of it, and I don’t even understand the premise of their argument. What do you mean, community health centers and volunteer groups have nothing to do with pandemic relief? So absurd.
It’s hilarious listening to Rob Portman whine and cry about how Biden PROMISED them “bipartisanship” to give them a chance to undermine and ruin the bill and take away the help people need and then blame Democrats when things don’t rebound fast enough. He’s such a handwringer and he’s getting totally ratio’d on Twitter.
Give people what they need on every level. Then force them to take away stuff people need & like. Game. Set. Match.
Why did it take 30 years for the Democrats to figure this out?
What makes me angry is the fussing about the amount of this bill. There wasn’t any of that when they passed the 1.9 trillion dollar tax relief to the wealthy. Still makes me mad.
This seems to be a recurring theme. Republicans get power, tank the economy and balloon the deficit.
Then the Democrats try to clean up the mess and Republicans obstruct and scream austerity!
Hopefully the masses, especially those who’d vote for a dog turd if it had an (R) next to it, will wise up.
It’s called the Two Santa Clauses scheme. In the 70s the Dems were seen as Santa Clause because they gave the people things they liked – Social Security, Medicare etc. and the GOP would cut out things the people liked so they could keep government small. So they decided to decided to switch to “supply side economy” and give big tax cuts to the rich and spend big and run up the deficit. Then when the Dems would get control again they would scream about the deficit and the need to cut back on everything to lower it.
This also serves the purpose of making it clear that Democrats GET THINGS DONE. When elections roll around again, D’s can run on the fact that they accomplished more than tax cuts for the rich. Give voters a nice long list of meaningful legislation that is moving the country forward and helping all people, and except for the “vote R or die” segment, you will win over a lot of people.
I know this is obvious to everyone here, but I wish people would recognize the pattern of Republican president (Bush 1) leaves Democratic president (Clinton) with a crap economy. Clinton leaves Bush II a booming economy (almost paid off the national debt) Bush II leaves a cratered economy to Obama and of course we all know that Obama turned over a booming economy to trump and then here we are again, trump leaves a cratered economy to a Democratic president (Biden). I don’t know if we collectively will ever learn that Democratic policies are better for the economy than republican policies.
I believe you will find that windmills caused the economic problems of 1992 and 2008, and they also wrote and directed the film Heaven’s Gate. I’m pretty sure they invented disco as well.