 | | Photo illustration by Antonio de Luca; Photo by Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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President Biden signed his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill into law yesterday, a move that will send $1,400 stimulus checks to many Americans, strengthen a wide range of social programs and step up investment in vaccine distribution. A few hours later, he went on national television to trumpet the achievement. And this afternoon, he celebrated it in a Rose Garden ceremony, joined by Democratic leaders in Congress. |
"It changes the paradigm," Biden said today, talking about the plan's provisions to support low- and middle-class workers. "For the first time in a long time, this bill puts working people in this nation first." |
The bill passed without any Republican votes, depriving the Biden administration of the ability to frame it as a bipartisan effort — but also denying the G.O.P. the chance to reap its rewards in the realm of public opinion, if the legislation remains as popular it is right now, according to polls. |
Biden is planning to travel the country in the coming days to drive home the message to Americans that the legislation doesn't just provide needed relief to families and businesses — but also that Democrats have delivered on a key campaign promise. Will it resonate? Come the 2022 midterm elections, will voters remember a law that was passed a year and a half earlier? |
To understand how the policy interacts with the politics, I caught up with Jonathan Martin, a national political correspondent, to talk about how Democrats plan to marshal this legislative victory to their advantage at the ballot box next year. |
Republican lawmakers in Washington were unified in their opposition to the relief package. But some, like Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, are already praising some of the programs that the bill has funded. Are any of those G.O.P. lawmakers regretting their opposition? |
The popularity of the package isn't lost on congressional Republicans. Some in the party believe it will become less appealing once voters realize how little of the funding is for direct Covid relief, but most G.O.P. lawmakers seem eager to change the subject to the growing number of migrants on the southern border. |
It's no accident that the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, is headed there on Monday (and not planning to hold events in opposition to the stimulus). |
Biden has talked about learning lessons from 2009, when then-President Barack Obama signed a nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill but resisted taking a "victory lap." Democrats ended up suffering big losses in the 2010 midterms. How is Biden seeking to avoid a similar fate? |
With a lot of events! I'm only half-kidding. |
The White House is determined to flood the zone, as the saying goes, and dispatch all manner of figures, from the first and second families to cabinet secretaries, to promote the bill. |
But the administration also hopes that the direct impact — namely checks in the mail — will make this measure a lot more tangible and therefore politically popular than the 2009 bill. |
If Democrats were able to retain their razor-thin majorities in Congress, it would fly in the face of history — which tells us that a new president's party hardly ever comes out on top in the midterm elections. Looking at the map in 2022, how good do Democrats think their chances are of defying that history? |
Right now, they are optimistic because they're united — certainly by Democratic standards! — and Republicans have obvious challenges with former President Donald Trump, who's still liked by their primary base but is deeply unpopular with the broader electorate. |
But Democratic leaders know how often there's a backlash to the party in power, and they also know how tight their margins are in both chambers of Congress. Even the slightest pro-Republican breeze next year will lift them to the majority. |
In his speech last night, Biden said the vaccine rollout was "truly a national effort, just like we saw during World War II." After a presidential campaign centered on calls for unity and reconciliation, does Biden see this bill — which is supported by about seven in 10 Americans, according to polls — as an opportunity to actually hark back to an era of American history before political polarization took hold so deeply? |
That's certainly how he campaigned, and in the first days of his administration he seemed to be interested in pursuing bipartisanship. But when Senate Republicans came to him with a counteroffer on the stimulus that was about a third of the $1.9 trillion he had in mind, he chose speed and scale over bipartisanship. |
The big question, now that Congress seems to be moving to infrastructure, historically an issue that transcends party lines, is whether Biden will make a real turn toward true bipartisanship and push congressional Democrats to put together a package that includes Republicans. |
Cuomo says he won't bow to 'cancel culture' and rejects growing calls to resign. |
By Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Jesse McKinley |
Facing a deluge of calls to resign from New York's U.S. senators and the majority of its House Democrats, Gov. Andrew Cuomo made clear on Friday he had no intention of quitting, deriding the mounting pressure from his own party as "cancel culture" and insisting he would not bow to it. |
The calls first came in a coordinated barrage of statements released in the morning from more than a dozen House members — most of the state's Democratic delegation — including Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The sentiment was clear: Mr. Cuomo had lost the capacity to govern and must leave office. |
By the end of the day, Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand had also called on Mr. Cuomo to step down. |
"Due to the multiple, credible sexual harassment and misconduct allegations, it is clear that Governor Cuomo has lost the confidence of his governing partners and the people of New York," the senators said in a joint statement late this afternoon. "Governor Cuomo should resign." |
The governor responded with defiance — a surprise in a traditional political sense, given that other elected officials have resigned in the face of far less unanimous sentiment. But it also signified a return to form for the pugilistic governor, who last week had struck a more conciliatory, apologetic tone in addressing the harassment accusations. |
In a hastily arranged news conference after the House members issued their calls, Mr. Cuomo quickly rejected the demands for him to step down, and denied harassing or abusing anyone. He lashed out at the lawmakers for jumping to conclusions, calling them "reckless and dangerous." |
"I did not do what has been alleged, period," he said. |
The sudden mass defection of members of Mr. Cuomo's own party was one of the most stinging rebukes of a sitting governor in the state's history, prompting new questions about his ability to weather the most severe political crisis of his decade-long tenure. |
Several women, some of them current or former state employees, have accused the governor of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior, including an unidentified aide who this week said Mr. Cuomo groped her in the Executive Mansion. Last month, Lindsey Boylan, a former administration official, said the governor gave her an unsolicited kiss on the lips, and Charlotte Bennett, a former aide who is 25, said the governor had asked her invasive questions, such as whether she had sex with older men. |
As members of his own party and former allies turned against him, Mr. Cuomo — a 40-year-veteran of New York politics and the son of a former governor — also sought to make his isolation into a virtue, suggesting that he was being punished because he was "not part of the political club." |
"And you know what?" he said. "I'm proud of it." |
Mr. Cuomo said he was determined to continue "doing my job," but that seemed imperiled by both political opposition in Albany and elsewhere. |
The Ezra Klein Show: How America's Covid-19 nightmare ends |
On today's episode, Ezra spoke with Dr. Ashish Jha, a physician, leading health policy researcher and dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. |
Dr. Jha helps guide us through these next months of the pandemic, to help us see what he's seeing. Don't get him wrong: This isn't over. But in America, things are going to feel very, very different in 45 days, for reasons he explains. Then comes another question: How do we make sure the global end to this crisis comes soon after? You can listen here. |
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