Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Biden, "bipartisanship" and the COVID relief bill

President-elect Joe Biden gave a pre-Christmas message and took press questions at the end. He sounded good on the cybersecurity mega-breach. And sounded serious and sympathetic on the pandemic. Biden Delivers Remarks On Wilmington NBC News 12/22/2020:


But, at just after 3:40 he says, "In this election, the American people made it clear, they want us to reach across the aisle and work together on matters of national concern to get something done." Words that translate to Republicans as, "We surrender!"

This after the Republicans' appalling, months-long obstructionism on the COVID relief bill. That kind of phrases from Biden encourage Republican intransigence, period.

But Trump took some brief timeout from frantically plotting in his desperate clown coup to call for higher individual relief payment, which lets him do a bit of "populist" posturing. After Biden was just praising the high-minded bipartisanship of the relief bill. (Kelly Hooper, rump takes aim at Covid stimulus bill, raising specter of veto Politico 12/22/2020)
While Trump did not directly threaten to veto the bill, his message raised the possibility that he might do so.

In a video tweeted by the president Tuesday evening, Trump delivered a four-minute speech listing his many grievances with the bill — which would send much-needed aid to Americans struggling amid the pandemic. Trump specifically criticized the relief package for including “wasteful spending” on issues unrelated to Covid-19, only providing $600 to individuals and families, and not giving enough emergency aid to small businesses.

“For example, among the more than 5,000 pages in this bill, which nobody in Congress has read because of its length and complexity, it’s called the Covid relief bill, but it has almost nothing to do with Covid,” Trump said.
As is often the case with Trump, his latest intervention may be more due to blundering than to any well-though-out strategy. But Trump does have a demagogue's instinct, even though he may have actually lost his mind in the last few days. And with Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer all accepting the bill and praising it as a great breakthrough, Trump's complaining about it when he did is consistent with the strategy that Republicans ran against Obama in his first year in office on economic recovery: insist on watering down his legislative proposals with deals they don't honor, and then blame him for not only the inadequate results of the programs but also for unpopular aspects of the program that look like crony capitalism.

The relief bill is the warm-up round for this strategy against the Biden-Harris Administration. In this case, Biden stepped right into the messaging trap the Republicans laid for him. Even if Trump's kinda-sorta veto threat was not something coordinated with Mitch McConnell.

In the question period of his appearance, Biden did give Bernie Sanders credit for getting direct aid back into the relief bill. But he also mentioned the bipartisanship trope even there. But good on him for recognizing publicly recognizing Bernie's role.

The Back-to-Brunch Liberals can legitimately be relieved to see a presentation from the President-elect that actually sounded Presidential. But no amount of repeating "bipartisan" will deal with the political nihilism of today's Republican Party. On the other hand, mainstream pundits loo-oove this kind of thing. Here's columnist Doyle McManus gushing about it: "the bill had one important virtue: It was a genuine compromise, a species rarely seen in Washington. Even more intriguing, it was based partly on the work of a bipartisan cabal of centrist senators who bolted from their parties’ dug-in positions and took matters into their own hands to get something done." (After COVID deal, Biden’s quest for bipartisanship looks a little less naive Los Angeles Times 12/23/2020. my emphasis)

But Biden's line about ending up "with two million people standing on our border" was nails-on-the-blackboard centrist Mugmump triangulating. He's got to fix the immigration process, beginning with getting the kids out of cages and reunited with their parents.

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