“We have been doing three things at once,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. Now with the second Trump impeachment trial ended and the Republican Party even more fractured, Democrats led by President Joe Biden shift to filling out his cabinet and delivering badly needed relief to the country. Not all of it will take legislative action.
Biden declared Sunday “an emergency exists in the State of Texas and ordered federal assistance to supplement state and local response efforts due to the emergency conditions resulting from a severe winter storm beginning on February 11, 2021, and continuing.”
The declaration authorizes the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to coordinate disaster relief efforts in 254 Texas counties. FEMA will support mass care and shelter with 75 percent federal funding.
Biden even did so without complaining Texas did not vote for him and “without even a little insinuation that it’s really kind of their fault,” snarked Bob Schooley.
With the spotlight off the former president for a moment, the current one has chances like this to shine. His $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan is still urgently needed even as infection rates sink across the U.S.
Stephen Collinson writes at CNN:
There is no time to lose since the success of Biden’s presidency — and the nation itself — will depend on his capacity to end the pandemic and rescue the economy. And the crisis is at a pivotal point. Cases of the virus are falling fast and death tolls, which typically lag new infections, will soon do the same. But new variants of Covid-19 that appear more contagious are spreading. This makes new funds for a vaccination drive contained in the congressional package increasingly crucial. With extended unemployment benefits set to run out in March, millions of Americans are relying on Congress. The bill also includes billions of dollars in funding to safely reopen schools — an increasingly troublesome political issue for the White House and a paramount concern for desperate parents.
Biden and the Democrats may face Republican opposition in Washington, D.C., but the Washington Post reports they have support among Republicans in places like Fresno, Calif. where unemployment is over 10 percent, crime and homelessness are up, and loss of tax revenue means the city may have to lay off 250 employees:
“That,” said Jerry Dyer, mayor of the half-million-strong city in the Central Valley, “is going to be devastating.”
The looming cuts explain why Dyer’s eyes are fixed on Washington, where President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan dangles the tantalizing prospect of a reprieve. Though Dyer is a Republican, he’s rooting for the president to successfully push through federal aid that, after a nightmarish year for Fresno, will “help get us to the end.”
No partisans in foxholes
Republican in Congress can be expected to obstruct pandemic relief citing the usual complaints about Democratic policies, but outside the capitol those who actually need the help are more red-blue color blind:
Instead of the “blue-state bailout” derided by GOP lawmakers, Republican mayors and governors say they see badly needed federal aid to keep police on the beat, to prevent battered Main Street businesses from going under and to help care for the growing ranks of the homeless and the hungry.
“It’s not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue,” said Dyer, who became mayor last month following a long career as the city’s police chief. “It’s a public health issue. It’s an economic issue. And it’s a public safety issue.”
And it’s good politics. A Quinnipiac poll earlier this month found 68 percent for the coronavirus relief package. Only a minority of Republicans opposed it. A CNBC|SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey poll finds 63 percent of small business owners support the package, including 46% of Republican entrepreneurs.
Biden brought a bipartisan group of mayors and governors to the White House Friday to explain specifics in the package and to ask “what do they think they need most.”
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez (R) later told reporters from the podium in the White House briefing room that he had spoken with Biden and Vice President Harris more in the first several weeks of their administration “than I had spoken to the prior administration in the entirety.”
There are many uncertainties between here and November 2022. When the pandemic will subside. How much life will get back to “normal.” How much more political tribalism will deepen and violence spread. How the census and redistricting might tilt control of the House against Biden and the Democrats. How much of Biden’s agenda will pass. How much it will help.
What is not uncertain is that Americans of all persuasions are in pain. Almost half a million have died of COVID-19. Their families grieve. Their children go hungry. Their businesses fail and jobs are lost. The party that believes government can still help improve Americans’ lives — all their lives — has a chance to prove their case more concretely than any impeachment trial. They had best make it a good one.