This week Joe Biden signed the CARES Act, which passed with near-unanimous support from Democrats in each house. (Maine Congressman Jared Golden was the only Democrat opposing the measure.)
And the Republicans? Although they will tout the benefits to their constituents of this popular bill, every single Republican member of both chambers voted in opposition, because they think blanket opposition is the most reliable way to make gains in the 2022 midterms. As Perry Bacon put it:
All indications are that Republicans think that the way to win back control of the House and/or Senate next year is to repeat their strategy from the Obama years: intense and total opposition to the agenda of the sitting Democratic president.
Jonathan Bernstein recognizes that the pattern of absolute Republican opposition goes even further back:
It’s … the logical consequence of their long-term strategy for dealing with new Democratic presidents: Oppose everything and regard losing as better than cutting a deal.
That was bound to be the Republican congressional reaction to Biden because it was their reaction to Presidents Bill Clinton in 1993 and Barack Obama in 2009, and in both cases they considered the strategy to have been successful.
The strategy is consistent with the “post-policy Republican Party” (in Bernstein’s assessment circa 2017) that had come to dominate the GOP by the Gingrich era. Republicans offer a “nihilist message of unfocused resentment,” rather than public policy proposals. While this tact may win elections, it is a recipe for dysfunctional governance. It will not solve any problems that Americans experience. It creates frustration and anger.
The Republican playbook, focused on the next election cycle, shrugs off the legislative defeat. From the vantagepoint of the first 50 days of the Biden presidency, the public policy loss appears to be highly significant. The bill (made possible because Democrats understood what President Obama was painfully slow to grasp about Republicans’ strategic refusal to engage constructively) is both larger and more far reaching than it would have been had the minority party been willing to meet Democrats halfway. With broadened eligibility for a generous child tax credit and expanded subsidies for Obamacare, the act in one fell swoop is poised to cut childhood poverty nearly in half (though the provisions must be made permanent at some point in the future). It also protects the pensions of about a million Americans whose multi-employer plans were threatened with insolvency.
Senator Sherrod Brown remarked gleefully on passing this legislation: "This is the best day of my career because we did so many things."
Among the "so many things" are provisions that benefit not just the poor, but the middle class. This act will touch many Americans who work for a living, among them a fraction of Trump voters who might be persuaded to vote Democratic in the future.
Jeff Greenfield suggests that the act is "the most audaciously ambitious social welfare legislation since the New Deal," and goes on to say, "From a political perspective, the potential impact of the rescue plan is hard to overstate; what it represents is the possibility that the Democratic Party has found a tool to reconnect it to a working and middle class whose loyalty has been threatened for well over half a century."
Paul Krugman pronounced, 'The era of “the era of big government is over” is over.'
Well, maybe. But Joe Biden isn't FDR yet. While significant, the CARES Act is only Act 1. Democrats are striving to show that government can have a constructive role in Americans' lives. If they succeed, the Reagan era -- and the belief that "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." -- may be coming to an end.
What is clear is that there aren't many Reagan Republicans left in Washington. The optimism is gone. The old bromides, now stale, have been replaced by grievances and conspiracy theories. And the economic solutions that Reagan offered to a 1980s America (while the country was suffering from stagflation and a loss of confidence in government following the Vietnam War and Watergate), haven't worked all that well for most working Americans. (Nor did Donald Trump's only legislative victory, the tax cuts aimed at corporations and the rich.) In 2021, a time of crisis, the Republican Party isn't even trying to provide an answer. Instead, it has set out on a different crusade.
In the words of Richard Yeselson:
The country’s political and economic order is experiencing acute and chronic crises. One of the two major parties has given up hope of winning over a majority of the country’s voters. To achieve and maintain power, the Republicans rely on voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, and anachronistic structural features of American governance—federalism, the Electoral College, the Senate, and, within the Senate, an antidemocratic requirement for a supermajority.
Joe Biden, remarkably, has hit all the right notes up till now. Democratic unity has been a thing to behold. But it's early and historical patterns represent a steep climb. It is hardly clear how this turns out.