>
President Biden signed his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill into law yesterday, a move that will send $1,400 stimulus checks to many Americans, strengthen a wide range of social programs and step up investment in vaccine distribution. A few hours later, he went on national television to trumpet the achievement. And this afternoon, he celebrated it in a Rose Garden ceremony, joined by Democratic leaders in Congress.
“It changes the paradigm,” Biden said today, talking about the plan’s provisions to support low- and middle-class workers. “For the first time in a long time, this bill puts working people in this nation first.”
The bill passed without any Republican votes, depriving the Biden administration of the ability to frame it as a bipartisan effort — but also denying the G.O.P. the chance to reap its rewards in the realm of public opinion, if the legislation remains as popular it is right now, according to polls.
Biden is planning to travel the country in the coming days to drive home the message to Americans that the legislation doesn’t just provide needed relief to families and businesses — but also that Democrats have delivered on a key campaign promise. Will it resonate? Come the 2022 midterm elections, will voters remember a law that was passed a year and a half earlier?
To understand how the policy interacts with the politics, I caught up with Jonathan Martin, a national political correspondent, to talk about how Democrats plan to marshal this legislative victory to their advantage at the ballot box next year.
Republican lawmakers in Washington were unified in their opposition to the relief package. But some, like Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, are already praising some of the programs that the bill has funded. Are any of those G.O.P. lawmakers regretting their opposition?
The popularity of the package isn’t lost on congressional Republicans. Some in the party believe it will become less appealing once voters realize how little of the funding is for direct Covid relief, but most G.O.P. lawmakers seem eager to change the subject to the growing number of migrants on the southern border.
It’s no accident that the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, is headed there on Monday (and not planning to hold events in opposition to the stimulus).
Biden has talked about learning lessons from 2009, when then-President Barack Obama signed a nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill but resisted taking a “victory lap.” Democrats ended up suffering big losses in the 2010 midterms. How is Biden seeking to avoid a similar fate?
With a lot of events! I’m only half-kidding.
The White House is determined to flood the zone, as the saying goes, and dispatch all manner of figures, from the first and second families to cabinet secretaries, to promote the bill.
But the administration also hopes that the direct impact — namely checks in the mail — will make this measure a lot more tangible and therefore politically popular than the 2009 bill.
If Democrats were able to retain their razor-thin majorities in Congress, it would fly in the face of history — which tells us that a new president’s party hardly ever comes out on top in the midterm elections. Looking at the map in 2022, how good do Democrats think their chances are of defying that history?
Right now, they are optimistic because they’re united — certainly by Democratic standards! — and Republicans have obvious challenges with former President Donald Trump, who’s still liked by their primary base but is deeply unpopular with the broader electorate.
But Democratic leaders know how often there’s a backlash to the party in power, and they also know how tight their margins are in both chambers of Congress. Even the slightest pro-Republican breeze next year will lift them to the majority.
In his speech last night, Biden said the vaccine rollout was “truly a national effort, just like we saw during World War II.” After a presidential campaign centered on calls for unity and reconciliation, does Biden see this bill — which is supported by about seven in 10 Americans, according to polls — as an opportunity to actually hark back to an era of American history before political polarization took hold so deeply?
That’s certainly how he campaigned, and in the first days of his administration he seemed to be interested in pursuing bipartisanship. But when Senate Republicans came to him with a counteroffer on the stimulus that was about a third of the $1.9 trillion he had in mind, he chose speed and scale over bipartisanship.
The big question, now that Congress seems to be moving to infrastructure, historically an issue that transcends party lines, is whether Biden will make a real turn toward true bipartisanship and push congressional Democrats to put together a package that includes Republicans.
New York Times Podcasts
The Ezra Klein Show: How America’s Covid-19 nightmare ends
On today’s episode, Ezra spoke with Dr. Ashish Jha, a physician, leading health policy researcher and dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
Dr. Jha helps guide us through these next months of the pandemic, to help us see what he’s seeing. Don’t get him wrong: This isn’t over. But in America, things are going to feel very, very different in 45 days, for reasons he explains. Then comes another question: How do we make sure the global end to this crisis comes soon after? You can listen here.
