Tim Scott’s weak rebuttal shows a GOP badly on the defensive
Washington Post
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) delivers the Republican response to President Biden's speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday (AP)
It would be wonderful if the Republican Party that Sen. Tim Scott conjured up in his rebuttal speech on Wednesday night actually existed.
In his response to President Biden’s address to Congress, the South Carolina Republican portrayed a party profoundly devoted to racial progress, grounding public health responses in science, spending generously to help Americans through hard times, and making it easier to vote for people of all races.
In so doing, Scott revealed a party badly on the defensive in some of our biggest arguments. Rebuttal speeches are often useless, but this one is instructive: It hints at how the GOP hopes to recapture power despite their defensive posture, with a waiting game.
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Biden laid out an expansive vision for transformative government. He renewed his pitch for trillions of dollars in new spending, on everything from infrastructure to a widened social safety net to a dramatically expanded caregiving infrastructure shoring up the human potential of children and families.
This would be partly paid for by tax hikes on corporations, top earners and ultrarich investors, as well as by the recapture of revenue shielded by the accounting trickery of the wealthy and multinational corporations.
In short, Biden is offering a vision of a rebalanced political economy. It would tax back some of the rents that have resulted from badly skewed market rules that have distributed income and wealth upward for decades and channel it into a big boost to the life prospects of those relegated to the bottom and those struggling in the middle.
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Scott’s rebuttal is notable for having nothing to say as an answer to this vision of a rebalanced political economy, let alone its underlying assessment of what’s gone wrong.
Scott’s two-step
Instead, Scott employed a two-step. He portrayed the GOP as favoring government spending amid crisis by citing spending Republicans supported under President Donald Trump, while falling back on bromides about big government to dismiss spending proposed by Biden.
Scott hailed the packages of 2020, including the $2 trillion bill last spring and the $900 billion bill in December. But then he pivoted. The $ 2 trillion covid-19 relief bill that Biden signed was nothing but a “partisan” exercise. Biden’s current proposals are a “liberal wish list” funded by the “biggest tax hikes in a generation.”
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This hints at how badly on the defensive Republicans are. Scott needs to portray the GOP as committed to using government to help people, at a time when large majorities favor Biden’s plans.
But this GOP simply doesn’t exist. GOP support for big packages under Trump was just the usual opportunistic Keynesianism, in which Republicans favor stimulus and deficits under GOP presidents and rail at them under Democratic ones.
Under Biden, not a single congressional Republican voted for his first relief bill. Republicans now claim to want negotiations on infrastructure, but their offer is an absurdly tiny fraction of Biden’s plans, not an effort to start a negotiation.
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Republicans won’t entertain any tax hikes at all to pay for their minuscule infrastructure ideas, except for regressive ones on user fees. And they won’t support any of Biden’s plans on caregiving, which Scott dismisses with old slogans about “Washington” controlling your life.
Nothing to say
Even more tellingly, Scott hailed the wonders of the pre-coronavirus economy. But what about the current economy? The big story of the moment is that the covid-19 crisis has stripped bare stark economic inequities and injustices. We rely heavily on essential workers, yet it can no longer be denied how woefully underpaid and deeply vulnerable many are.
We’ve learned about huge gaps in our caregiving economy and the deep human toll that’s taking. Indeed, as Jordan Weissmann writes, what Biden is really doing now is taking the opportunity created by these revelations to turn the United States into “a normal country for mothers and fathers by providing benefits that much of the developed world already takes for granted.”
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But what do Republicans have to say about these newly exposed realities?
Scott’s fallback on decades-old big government bromides suggests Republicans don’t think they need any response to them at all. The GOP portrayed by Scott — one that favors an expansive government role amid crisis — doesn’t really exist. But at a time when Republicans have failed to rally a tea party-type backlash to Biden’s policies, it’s telling he needs to claim it does.
Similarly, Scott says Republicans favor inclusive democracy. But he dissembles badly to cover up how the new Georgia law actually does make it harder to vote in ways obviously aimed at African Americans.
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Scott cites various things Republicans support on racial injustice. But then he offers the silly formulation that America is “not a racist country” and trots out the usual vague warnings about responding to racism with reverse racism, an effort to close down discussion of lingering systemic racial inequities.
And Scott hypes the GOP’s great respect for science, but largely while arguing that schools should reopen faster, airbrushing away the party’s support for Trump as he gave the middle finger to science for a year, producing catastrophe.
The speech reads like it was written by strategists who know the GOP is perceived as the party of white grievance, hostility to inclusive democracy, continuing thralldom to the Trumpist refusal to take covid-19 seriously, and absolute opposition to acting amid widespread economic pain, and sought to paper over it all.
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What’s the GOP’s answer? To wait. Republicans are betting on the public eventually turning on this spending, helped along by extreme gerrymanders and other anti-majoritarian tactics (dressed up as respect for democracy) as the route back to power.
It could work, of course. But don’t mistake that for a sign of GOP confidence.
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