Biden plays hardball to achieve his full agenda
Jules Witcover
WASHINGTON — President Biden has said he wants to work with Republicans to restore normalcy to the American economy. But he also says he will rely if necessary on his razor-slim Democratic majority in Congress to get his way. Thus he will have to engage in hard-core politics if he is to prevail.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has left Biden with no other choice by bluntly declaring he will oppose the president “every step of the way.”
Biden through his 36 years of service in the Senate has championed bipartisanship. He has prided himself in his ability to persuade or cajole Republicans to side with him by compromising at the edges. But McConnell’s flat rejection of the notion augurs likely disappointment for Biden.
In response to McConnell’s posturing, Biden has cited public opinion polls showing solid approval by voters in both parties for the American Rescue Plan Act, which made $1,400 payments to most Americans, strengthened the frayed social safety net, shored up small businesses and state and local governments hit hard by the pandemic, and provided crucial health care aid, among other things.
Whether such distinctions will persuade many Republicans to break ranks with McConnell on his attempt to stonewall the pending infrastructure bill seems a stretch of imagination right now. The $2.25 trillion bill would seem to fly in the face of the traditional Republican Party’s pretended opposition to deficit financing as well and its penchant for cutting taxes for the rich.
In a speech in Pittsburgh last week, Biden said his administration would pay for the programs with an increase in the corporate tax rate opposed by big business interests and anathema to longtime conservative ideology. It would be spent over eight years and be paid for over 15 years, far beyond two terms of his presidency.
Biden advocates argue that much of the money will go to “human infrastructure” in the rebuilding of the skills working men and women. The whole scheme is in keeping with Biden’s declared intention to follow the examples of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which lifted the county out of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s.
It also echoes President Barack Obama’s much more limited efforts to cope with the Great Recession, overseen at the time by then-Vice President Biden.
In all, the new Biden recovery package is a wide-eyed assessment of the nation’s economic challenges growing out of the pandemic. It also reflects the new president’s determination to make the most of an uncommon situation wherein voters are asked to buy into his bold and politically risky gamble.
In a sense, Biden is calling on Americans to embrace his frank and difficult appraisal of where the country stands after the four years of Donald Trump’s lies and gross mismanagement. By and large, the nation is with him, recognizing the imperative of a major course correction.
How far Biden’s program of national reconstruction can advance, however, may depend on cracks in the unified front of the recalcitrant minority party, which has yet to face up to its responsibility for the colossal national disaster wrought by the Trump presidency.
Failing GOP defections, the Democrats will once again have to use the budget reconciliation process to steamroll the opposition in order to get anything more done this year.
Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcovercomcast.net.