Dying of COVID-19 after hosting too many family and friends is not the only thing Americans have to fear this holiday season. Nearly half of all unemployed workers’ receiving unemployment benefits under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program passed in March could see their aid run out on Dec. 26. Additional help is stalled in Congress. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, wants us to know why we will have a Republican red instead of a Democratic blue Christmas.
McConnell insists any new COVID-19 relief package contain a five-year “liability shield” or the bill goes nowhere. Roll Call reminds readers, “Immunity from civil liability for negligence does not prevent harm or injury. It simply shifts the burden and costs to the person or group who has been injured — and all too often, to the taxpayer.” For Republicans, placing on taxpayers the costs of keeping businesses open during a pandemic is acceptable. Doing so to keep unemployed workers safe at home is not.
Once again we see Republicans holding Americans — out-of-work Americans — hostage to ensuring they cannot sue their employers over unsafe working conditions. Even as, like Proud Boys, Republican lawmakers “stand back and stand by” for Donald Trump as he files frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit in the wake of his election loss.
Another reason COVID relief is tied up in Congress is that Republicans and the lame duck Trump administration are already salting the earth ahead of the incoming Biden-Harris administration. Why wait for the inauguration to begin? But it is not as if they have to work that hard at it after the last four years.
“The president-elect is inheriting an economic mess from his Republican predecessor,” Medhi Hasan observes. “Kind of like the last Democratic administration.”
Why this lesson is not taught in textbooks by now is another mystery of modern economic theory.
Hasan invited Anand Giridharadas to share his views of where the Biden presidency might go.
Giridharadas noted how Biden ran in the primary as a centrist, restoration candidate, but rather than tacking to the middle as nominee he “evolved left.” Responding to nationwide protests in the streets, he began speaking about systemic racism. His environmental stance moved in a Sunrise Movement direction. The campaign began talking about FDR. Giridharadas thinks Biden is more likely to behave like LBJ.
“Whatever we may think of someone before they come into office,” he begins, “history provides some grounds for humility about what they’re going to actually be like when they’re in there.”
Obama appeared to be an outsider, not only because of his race but also his community organizer background. One might not have predicted the “relative conservatism of his tenure.” With FDR’s wealthy upbringing, his denouncing rich people is not something we might have expected either. Nor would LBJ’s history telegraph he would be the kind of president to pass the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts.
“So I right now feel like the nation is on a first date with President-elect Joe Biden,” Giridharadas says. “It is too early for cynicism. It’s too late to be naive. No one thinks that he is in his bones a progressive firebrand, but I still have hope that recognizing this moment, recognizing a country awash in pain, he will choose to be Scranton Joe who feels for people more than Delaware Joe, kind of connected and tied to the big company.”
Someone senior in the Biden orbit texted Giridharadas that that could only happen if the new activists do not sink back into their couches with Trump gone. Biden needs to be pressured. It was not something Giridharadas expected to hear.
He wrote at The.Ink on Tuesday:
The erosion of our democratic institutions demands #resistance. Money in politics demands #resistance. The assault on voting demands #resistance. The stacking of our courts demands #resistance. A Senate whose antiquated rules mean it can no longer really do the people’s business demands #resistance.
But in the times that loom, these worthy endeavors will lack for the galvanizing and clarifying antagonist that was Trump. To #resist Trump was one thing. To #resist what made him possible requires the resistance of diffuse systems, of blobs, of hyphenated complexes. It is one thing to challenge and protest people who are manifestly cruel and sadistic and indifferent to human life. The armies of the #resistance will now have to train their focus and scrutiny on people who seem decent and humane — but who are, nonetheless, entwined with the broken and corrupting systems that have defined this era, and who need to be pressured and held accountable if they are to change things.
Barack Obama also asked his activist base to pressure him to make change. But then he dismantled the organization he’d built to get himself elected. The #resistance that exists today is not built on any candidate’s massive, closely held email list, but on sweat and tears. With more of both we may yet see blue Christmases in the future.
UPDATE: Dropped ambiguous footnote.