Marcy Wheeler’s tweet reminded me to go back and read the piece I brushed off earlier to focus on infrastructure.
Here is how it starts:
If President Biden gets his way, the national minimum wage will be $15 an hour, immigrants without legal status will receive an eight-year path to citizenship, firearms will be harder to purchase, votes will be easier to cast and Americans will head back to work in 10 million new clean-energy jobs.
And that’s just the beginning.
That is supposed to evoke among conservatives the kind of existential dread found in one of Ground Zero’s tracts on nuclear war:
The good news is you will be killed instantly.
The bad news is you might survive.
See, passing a wildly popular agenda that defeats the pandemic, puts Americans back to work, and puts money in their pockets might, you know, create a backlash at the polls in 2022 from people who really, really hate all that.
“Some Democrats” are raising alarms.
Some Republicans might even “portray the president as a left-leaning radical.”
Some “Republicans are hopeful they can exact a political price.”
“It’s classic Democratic overreach,” says a flack for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Then again, other Republicans could not even give away anti-Biden merchandise at CPAC.
Immigration policy could indeed hurt Biden, Wheeler tweets. And it did hurt Trump in 2018. “But immigration is one thing, and giving people money is another thing. The latter is, by all measures, wildly popular. So is taxing the super rich!”
But forget all that. Forget that the “legislation is broadly popular with the majority of the country.” Forget that the rescue package:
… not only provides $1,400 checks to many struggling Americans and money to help ensure that the nation can be fully vaccinated by the end of the year, but it also extends unemployment insurance, helps bail out roughly 185 union pension plans on the verge of collapse, provides aid and debt relief to disadvantaged Black farmers and seeks to cut U.S. childhood poverty in half through expanded tax credits.
O death, where is thy sting?
Giving Americans what they want could all backfire badly somehow?
There is some amount of irony that Biden, who was among the most moderate Democrats in a sprawling field of some two dozen presidential contenders, has emerged as a liberal champion. And the next phase of Biden’s presidency will also test his ability to use a more understated demeanor to sell policies that restructure broad swaths of the U.S. economy and social policy. One of his former opponents, Andrew Yang, said last year that “the magic of Joe Biden is that everything he does becomes the new reasonable.”
Years of Trump mean tweets helped inure Democrats to the reflexive wailing of Republicans still fighting the Cold War they declared Reagan won 30 years ago. Crying socialism as Republicans will just isn’t as flinch-inducing as it once was. Take it from Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders:
“Like Roosevelt understood during the Great Depression, Joe Biden understands this country today faces a series of unprecedented crises,” Sanders, who ran against Biden in the 2020 primary, said in an interview.
“What Joe Biden concluded is that if his administration is going to mean anything, it has got to think big, not small, and it has got to address these unprecedented crises in an unprecedented way. In that regard, he is off to a very, very good start.”
Let the GOP worry about its do-nothing and seditionist wings.