Partisanship prevails as Biden pushes agenda with little GOP support

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USA Today column on COVID victims and Mar-a-Lago 'offensive' on so many levels: Kurtz

A USA Today column suggests burying America's 500,000 COVID-19 victims at Mar-a-Lago; Fox News media analyst Howard Kurtz sounds off.

"The country is looking for action."

That’s the internal message from one of President Biden’s top advisers.

But is the country looking for the particular actions he’s pushing?

The Republicans have made it increasingly clear they will oppose his Covid relief package as too unfocused and expensive, and that the Democrats will push it through on a party-line vote. While even some liberal economists see the $1.9-trillion price tag as too high, the package is polling well, and a new president usually gets his first big initiative. So this is, to use the technical term, a no-brainer.

But could it be tough slogging for Biden after that?

The memo from White House senior adviser Mike Donilon, first reported by Axios, seems to move beyond Biden’s campaign talk of unity. The idea is to stick it to the GOP.

"There seems to be a growing conventional wisdom that it is either politically smart – or, at worst, cost-free – for the GOP to adopt an obstructionist, partisan, base-politics posture," Donilon writes. "However, there is lots of evidence that the opposite is true: that it isn’t politically smart for the GOP to be going down this road. And rather than being cost-free, this approach has been quite damaging to them."

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That remains to be seen. I do think Republicans may pay a price for opposing bigger stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, small business subsidies and school reopening assistance. If the vaccination program (which now looks to include Johnson & Johnson) succeeds and the economy booms, no one will remember what legislative maneuvers the administration had to use.

But legislative opposition does work, if only because it’s so easy to stop something on the Hill. Mitch McConnell may be backing Merrick Garland for attorney general, but he’s largely responsible for Garland not being on the Supreme Court and Amy Comey Barrett being a new justice.

"The animating spirit behind the administration’s approach is impatience — born of the pandemic, the looming midterms and Mr. Biden’s own bitter experiences with Republicans during President Barack Obama’s administration," says the New York Times. That, you may recall, is when McConnell vowed to make Obama a one-term president. (That didn’t work out so well.)

But one-party governance is hard. The Biden team may not get much cooperation on immigration, to be sure, but also on such issues as infrastructure without a greater willingness to compromise with the other side.

And the Democrats don’t have the strongest hand with a 50-50 Senate. The upper chamber has always been a place where every member has a nuclear weapon, and that’s even more true now that moderate Joe Manchin can single-handedly stop Neera Tanden’s nomination to OMB as long as Republicans hold ranks. (Whether the GOP has the standing to yell about her mean tweets, after four years of Donald Trump’s Twitter attacks, is another question, but Tanden did dig herself a deep hole.)

Two other nominees, Xavier Becerra and Deb Haaland, are also drawing flak.

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Biden has resisted caving to the left wing of his party. The former candidate who refused to back Medicare for All has also rejected liberal demands that the government forgive up to $50,000 in student loan debt. He has also signaled that the $15 minimum wage, part of the Covid aid bill, will probably have to be removed, and that he is open to a slower wage hike.

But the Democrats, after all, opposed most of what Trump wanted to do. Every time the White House or Congress changes hands, it seems to be payback time. For all of Biden’s longtime relationships with Republican lawmakers, he may find that Beltway gridlock is the one beast he cannot slay.