Why the relief bill is a threat to everything Republicans believe in

Why the relief bill is a threat to everything Republicans believe in

Opinion by Paul Waldman

March 12, 2021 at 2:40 a.m. GMT+9

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy during a news conference at the Capitol on Sept. 15. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

Part of the opposition’s job is to warn that whatever the party in power is doing will result in utter destruction. The majority passed a health-care bill? It will ruin the health-care system. A new education initiative? Before long, your kids will have to take off their shoes to count to 11. An economic plan? Get ready for a catastrophic recession.

But that’s not what Republicans are saying now that President Biden is about to sign the $1.9 trillion relief bill that just passed Congress. Just the opposite: They’re saying the good times are on their way. They just want voters to know that Biden shouldn’t get any of the credit.

“We’re about to have a boom,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday. “It will have absolutely nothing to do with this $1.9 trillion.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made the same argument, predicting “an American comeback,” but adding: “It won’t be because of this liberal bill.”

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They’re only partially wrong — while the American Rescue Plan will provide a significant boost to the economy and give tremendous help to millions of families, we would likely have seen strong growth without it, as covid vaccinations allowed people to return to work and businesses to reopen.

But as a political message, it’s not exactly emphatic. Which shows why Democrats now have an opportunity to shape the political legacy of the pandemic.

Given the bill’s current and likely future popularity, and the growing consensus that a boom is indeed coming, Republicans’ reluctance to predict economic collapse is understandable. Some even want to grab a slice of the credit themselves.

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Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) took a victory lap over an amendment he co-sponsored targeting help to restaurants, even though he voted against the bill along with every other Republican. That got him plenty of mockery, but it shows the difficult position Republicans are in: When the boom comes, and Democrats repeat over and over that it’s because of the ARP, just saying “Nuh uh!” won’t get them very far.

But it also shows how the politics of this moment are working against Republicans in a more fundamental way. Wicker, a fairly mainstream Republican, is making what is essentially a Democratic argument: A terrible crisis happened; government (i.e. me and my amendment) stepped in with help; now things are better.

Republicans know they won’t be able to deny the first or third parts of that story, so they’ll have to deny the second part by saying government didn’t do anything worthwhile (except the things they take credit for, like Wicker).

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The stakes are extremely high. Because if the public were to accept that story as the model for how things ought to work more generally, it would put Republicans at a substantive and political disadvantage not just in the 2022 midterms but for the foreseeable future.

That’s just the situation Biden and Democrats are trying to create. The ARP is a revolutionary piece of legislation — but we don’t know yet whether it will be a momentary exception to the paradigm that has existed since Ronald Reagan was president, or a death blow to it.

The essence of that paradigm is that our default presumption should be that government is inefficient, wasteful and incompetent, and while there are a few things we need it to do, in general we shouldn’t expect it to solve our problems. If it does offer help — particularly to people who are struggling — it should be as stingy as possible and should be accompanied by bureaucratic red tape and petty humiliations such as drug testing so recipients feel as bad as possible about getting it.

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The ARP, in contrast, not only pours huge amounts of money into the economy and into people’s bank accounts, it does some revolutionary things, none of which are more ideologically significant than the expansion of the child tax credit.

The bill expands the credit from $2,000 to as much as $3,600 for each child and makes it available to poor families without tax liability who previously didn’t receive it. And — most symbolically important — it distributes the credit on a monthly basis, giving people regular infusions of money to help support their families. No onerous paperwork requirements to document the hours you work and thereby prove you’re morally worthy of the help, just the government giving you a hand.

Republicans don’t like this provision for multiple reasons. They don’t think government should provide that kind of income support. They worry that it will be popular and help Democrats in 2022. And they worry that if it’s made permanent (as of now it will expire after a year), it will change people’s expectations of government.

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They’ve seen it happen before. Conservatives fought the creation of Medicare for all the same reasons, and today they have to pretend they’d never lift a finger to harm a program their older constituents adore. They don’t want to see a repeat of that.

If Democrats are going to pass big programs, Republicans would rather they resemble the Affordable Care Act: complicated, difficult to understand and providing its benefits in roundabout and sometimes invisible ways.

But Democrats learned the lessons of the ACA (and the 2009 recovery bill) too. Which is why they’re sending money right to people’s pockets — and will launch a PR blitz to remind voters of what they got. If they can convince the public that’s exactly what they ought to expect from Washington, it could shift the political debate for years or decades to come.

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