WASHINGTON — With the U.S. House expected to pass a $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package on Friday, opposition to the plan is hardening among Republican senators, setting up a strictly partisan vote on President Joe Biden’s first, and arguably most consequential, legislative initiative.
As chances of a broad-based compromise dwindle, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been able to keep his 50-member caucus united around a simple argument: Democrats are trying to spend too much money on items not directly related to pandemic relief.
“Even mainstream liberal economists agree that our country does not need another massive firehose of borrowed money,” McConnell said on the Senate floor this week. “This isn’t April 2020. This is a different chapter.”
GOP senators who are generally perceived as more persuadable to negotiation, like Mitt Romney of Utah and the retiring Rob Portman of Ohio, are squarely in line with McConnell, echoing his complaints about the bill’s hundreds of billions of dollars in “wasteful spending.”
But Democrats have resigned themselves to pursuing partisan passage of the plan largely because they don’t believe Republicans would ultimately get on board even if they offered a compromise.
Rep. John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat and the House Budget Committee chairman, said his party is heeding the lessons from its 2009 experience on the Affordable Care Act, when he believes the GOP used the compromise card as a delay tactic.
“We kept saying to Republicans, ‘What do you want? What changes do you want?’ And they’d suggest a change and we’d either make it or say, ‘If we make it are you going to vote for the bill?' and they’d say ‘No.’”
“This is dangerous turf,” Yarmuth added. “We could’ve spent months trying to figure out how to compromise and get a few Republican votes, but we have some very significant deadlines coming up.”
Democrats have stated they will aim to send the legislation to Biden’s desk by March 14 before unemployment payments expire. In pursuing a special procedure called budget reconciliation, they are anticipating to win only a simple majority in the Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris potentially casting the tie-breaking vote.
The existing package includes hundreds of billions to help vaccine distribution and bolster state and local government budget shortfalls, as well as $1,400 checks to individuals.
But the rescue plan also includes some projects that Republicans are targeting as unnecessary, including $1.5 million for a bridge in upstate New York and $135 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.
A drop in bridge toll collections and the shuttering of live entertainment can be directly attributed to COVID-19 lockdowns, but Republicans see them as symbols of Democratic excess when it comes to spending. While the costs for these projects are relatively small in a $1.9 trillion package, Republicans are already plotting to showcase them, in an attempt to puncture the overwhelming political popularity of the package.
“When people hear this a COVID relief bill, that’s a good idea, but that doesn’t mean they’ll see it that way when they know the details,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster. “By Labor Day 2022, the $1,400 will be gone but the ads talking about the wasteful spending won’t be.”
It’s impossible to measure the popularity of the American Rescue Plan in more than a year from now, but the operating consensus in both parties is that it is more likely to win no Republican votes than even a few.
In that sense, it could end up as a more partisan legislative act than former President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus act, meant to jolt an economy out of recession at a price tag of $787 billion. No House Republicans supported that stimulus either. Of the three Republican senators who crossed over with their votes, only one remains in the upper chamber today: Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.
Republicans went on to romp in the 2010 midterm elections, with voters largely rewarding them for their opposition to the Obama agenda.
Democrats believe McConnell is likely making a similar calculation now.
“The idea that ten Republicans are going to give Democrats their votes for just about anything is laughable. They’re not giving them votes for COVID aid and I don’t think they’ll give them their votes for anything else,” said Adam Jentleson, a former aide to Harry Reid on Ezra Klein’s podcast recently. “It took sharp insight on McConnell’s part and the willingness to take the punishment from the punditocracy to carry out the strategy and deny Obama cooperation in every way. And what he did is he proved that blame for gridlock ends up being directed towards the party in power.”
But Yarmuth is convinced that McConnell and the GOP are misreading the pain, frustration and anxiety Americans are feeling after losing nearly a year of their lives to a pandemic.
“You don’t think when 80-plus percent of the people in their district get $1,400 that they’re not going to be happy with that? They’re going to worry about other money coming into the district that helps pay their teachers, that helps pay their first responders? … The polling on it is off the charts,” Yarmuth said. “Congressional Republicans are out on a limb and they see it being sawed off in front of them and they’re just looking for anything to grasp onto.”
