Biden warms up to accelerate stimulus after liberal pressure increases

Photographer: Stefani Reynolds / Bloomberg

President Joe Biden and White House officials are on the side of liberal Democrats, hurt by previous efforts to reach a deal with Republicans and refusing to heed the Republican Party’s calls to reduce the $ 1.9 trillion US stimulus. government.

Biden entered into negotiations last week with a group of Republican senators who proposed a bill just one-third the size of his pandemic aid package. They were the first lawmakers he invited to the White House as president, raising concerns on the left that he could take his counter-proposal seriously.

But on Monday, after a lobbying effort by Democratic lawmakers and activists who sought to keep Biden committed to his own plan, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the stimulus is likely to advance under a procedure that requires only simple majority support in the Senate.

“I don’t think the American people are particularly concerned with how direct aid” gets to her hands, she told reporters. “The most likely route at this point is through a reconciliation process.”

Biden’s conversations with 10 Senate Republicans reminded some liberal allies of his role in negotiating the 2009 recovery project as vice president. That effort was kept below $ 1 trillion to appease a handful of Republican supporters – a concession now considered on the left as a mistake.

“We cannot allow the same thing to happen again,” said more than 200 former Obama administration officials, including Valerie Jarrett and John Podesta, in an open letter to Congress published on Friday.

“Obama extended his hand a lot, and he got a fist instead of an open hand very often,” South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn, the third Democrat in the House, said in an interview last week. “He arrived in the Senate, Obama decided to try to be bipartisan and was reduced by more than US $ 200 billion. Everyone now knows that losing that number has given us an insignificant recovery. “

Biden indicated that he also regards the 2009 negotiations as a wake-up call.

The $ 787 billion stimulus he helped negotiate 12 years ago “was not enough,” he said Friday at the White House. “It stopped the crisis, but the recovery could have been faster and even bigger.”

He said he warned his new negotiating partners that “if I have to choose between getting help now for Americans who are suffering so much and getting stuck in a long negotiation or compromising a bill that is – that’s up until the crisis, this is an easy choice. I will help the American people who are suffering now. “

Democrats laid the groundwork last week for a bill to be passed in reconciliation by passing budget resolutions in both chambers. According to the lawsuit, much of Biden’s stimulus could pass the Senate with just 51 votes, instead of the 60 normally required to end an obstruction – presumably all 50 Democrats plus Vice President Kamala Harris. House committees began to release the legislative text on Monday.

Republican Complaints

Republicans used reconciliation under former President Donald Trump to pass the 2017 tax review and repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act. But Biden’s Republican Party negotiating partners say they are dismayed that he can abandon a bipartisan approach to stimulus.

“We approved five Covid bipartisan packages. It is not a good sign that he is taking a take-or-leave approach right after the president delivers an inaugural speech based on unity, ”said Todd Young, an Indiana Republican who is among the 10 senators involved in the negotiations. Last week.

Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican also in the group, said on Monday: “It was a mistake for the Democratic leader to go immediately to reconciliation, less than 24 hours after we had a constructive and cordial meeting of 10 Republican senators at the House White. “

Some on the left have noticed that ex-President Barack Obama’s stimulus grant in 2009 had political costs. The former president was chased by Republican criticism that the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis was not robust enough. Trump even tried to use the complaint against Biden in last year’s campaign.

‘Great goal’

“It was a coup de grace in Obama’s years in this case – you say ‘we don’t want a big stimulus, we don’t want a big stimulus’, so two years later, you accused” the government of not bringing the economy back, Marc said Morial, president of the National Urban League and former mayor of New Orleans. “It’s called snooker.”

Clyburn, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and other Democratic congressmen met with Biden and Harris at the White House on February 5 to discuss the stimulus. Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Pelosi and Clyburn said they were confident that a bill could pass in mid-March, when the increase in unemployment insurance is due to expire.

So far, Biden’s liberal allies say they are encouraged by the president’s stance and believe he is not inclined to give too much ground to Republicans.

“The key question underlying the whole struggle is: have Democrats learned the proper lesson from the Obama years?” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “Being bold is always popular and bold, slow ideas are always a bad idea.”

– With the help of Daniel Flatley