Eric Levitz, New York Magazine:
Biden’s COVID-Relief Bill Is a Big F**king DealI found the first few paragraphs obnoxious, but this is a good summary of what's in the bill (links and formatting stripped by copy-paste; you're probably better off clicking the link):
The Democratic Party’s approach to legislative strategy has fundamentally changed.
To appreciate the concrete significance of the ARP for ordinary Americans — and, by extension, the significance of having 50 Democratic votes in the Senate versus 49 — here are a few of the ways life in the U.S. is about to change as a result of a unified Democratic government coming to power:
• The average household in the bottom quintile of America’s economic ladder will see its annual income rise by more than 20 percent.
• A family of four with one working parent and one unemployed one will have $12,460 more in government benefits to help them make ends meet.
• The poorest single mothers in America will receive at least $3,000 more per child in government support, along with $1,400 for themselves and additional funds for nutritional assistance and rental aid.
• Child poverty in the U.S. will drop by half.
• More than 1 million unionized workers who were poised to lose their pensions will now receive 100 percent of their promised retirement benefits for at least the next 30 years.
• America’s Indigenous communities will receive $31.2 billion in aid, the largest investment the federal government has ever made in the country’s Native people.
• Black farmers will receive $5 billion in recompense for a century of discrimination and dispossession, a miniature reparation that will have huge consequences for individual African-American agriculturalists, many of whom will escape from debt and retain their land as a direct result of the legislation.
• The large majority of Americans who earn less than $75,000 as individuals or less than $150,000 as couples will receive a $1,400 stimulus check for themselves and another for each child or adult dependent in their care.
• America’s child-care centers will not go into bankruptcy en masse, thanks to a $39 billion investment in the nation’s care infrastructure.
• Virtually all states and municipalities in America will exit the pandemic in better fiscal health than pre-COVID, which is to say a great many layoffs of public employees and cutbacks in public services will be averted.
• No one in the United States will have to devote more than 8.5 percent of their income to paying for health insurance for at least the next two years, while ACA plans will become premium-free for a large number of low-income workers.
• America’s unemployed will not see their federal benefits lapse this weekend and will have an extra $300 to spend every week through the first week in September.
This is a small sampling of the COVID-relief bill’s consequences (more comprehensive accounts of its provisions can be found here and here). But it is sufficient to establish that something has dramatically changed in the Democrats’ approach to wielding power.
When pundits suggested progressives had little hope of getting major reform through a 50-vote Democratic majority, their speculation was well founded. After all, when Democrats had 60 votes in 2009, they struggled for more than a year to pass a watered-down version of progressives’ health-care-reform agenda, then left the bulk of their party’s constituencies with unfulfilled IOUs.
And yet: Twelve years later, with just 50 Senate votes — including one from a state Republicans won by 40 points in November — Democrats managed to pass one of the largest fiscal programs in U.S. history within weeks of Biden’s inauguration. Obama spent the better part of his first year in office seeking bipartisan buy-in for the Affordable Care Act. Biden just slapped most of his own health-care agenda on top of a $1.9 trillion relief bill and then rammed it through Congress before his administration’s two-month anniversary.
This is how progressives have been begging their party to govern for more than a decade: Ignore the Beltway’s fetish for bipartisanship and deliver big, clear gains to the American people. The Democratic leadership has now affirmed that counsel in both word and deed. As Schumer told the Washington Post this week, “What happened in 2009 and ’10 is we tried to work with the Republicans, the package ended up being much too small, and the recession lasted for five years. People got sour; we lost the election.”
That last bit seems pretty significant. If the leadership has finally gotten it through their heads that trying to work with Republicans is a waste of time, then that seems like a big step.
OTOH, Manchin continues to be the most important vote in the Senate, and he's still talking up the importance of bringing Republicans to the table. Of course, he's also suggested that if they don't want to come to the table, he's willing to consider bringing back the standing filibuster. Nobody really knows
what the hell Manchin will end up doing, and that's the way he likes it.
I think a messaging problem the Democrats haven't been able to figure out these past 12 years is, the
idea of bipartisanship is popular and consistently polls well; people say they want Congress to work together and be above petty partisan squabbling. And Democrats haven't been able to wrap their head around how you can appeal to people who want to see bipartisan cooperation when the other party refuses to cooperate.
Democrats have, for a long time, been under the misapprehension that the answer to this dilemma is "just keep trying harder to get the other party onboard." It seems like they're finally realizing that the
actual answer is, "pass legislation that's popular with people from both parties, and point out that the other party is refusing to support it."
I mean, that's
really, really obvious, and it really shouldn't have taken them that long to suss it out. But the bar's so low that I feel like this is major progress.
Another thing I've seen: multiple Democratic politicians (Tim Ryan, Ted Lieu, Hakeem Jeffries) have recently made remarks to the effect of "We're passing legislation that helps Americans, and Republicans just want to whine about Dr. Seuss." I've seen that refrain often enough that I think it's a coordinated talking point. And I think it's a good one. Another thing that's consistently frustrated me about the Democrats is that they don't have the Republicans' skill at simple, direct messages that stick in people's minds. Some of them have tried; Alan Grayson's criticism of the Republican approach to healthcare as "Don't get sick, and if you do, die quickly" was excellent, but instead of backing him like they should have, the rest of the party tripped all over themselves shooshing him. (Jon Stewart even put that clip alongside a bunch of Fox News hyperbole in a montage for his Rally to Restore Sanity; it was a bit of bothsiderist false equivalence that still rankles today, though I still count myself as a Stewart fan.)
"Democrats are trying to get shit done, Republicans are wasting everybody's time with inconsequential bullshit that they're pretending is important" is a good message and one I'd like to see them keep hammering on.
It's still going to be a tough couple of years. Even if things break right, even if filibuster reform and voting rights pass, I still think that PR/DC statehood are a longshot. (And there are still some reasonable progressive
criticisms of whether statehood is even the right call for PR.) Even if there *is* a minimum wage increase, I bet it's going to be some kind of compromise position that's not the full $15 and preserves existing loopholes allowing sub-minimum wage jobs. And I think Democrats are going to have an uphill battle keeping Congress in '22 no matter what they do, because that's just the way things usually go in midterms. But passing the voting rights bill is essential, and a new state or two would help.
