© Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/TNSThe U.S. Capitol Building, on Saturday, Jan. 16, 2021, in Washington, D.C..
President's Joe Biden's signature Friday on the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan is going to be the only place on the urgently needed COVID-19 relief package with his name. Unlike his predecessor, who slapped "President Donald J. Trump" on millions of paper checks (and also put his jagged John Hancock on 90 million letters sent to mailboxes), Biden is forgoing the self-promotion.
That's an insignificant change from the earlier rounds of economic help from a united Washington to a nation suffering from COVID-inflicted massive unemployment, flat broke state and local governments, closed businesses and depleted household savings. But a huge difference between now and then is the total lack of Republican support this time. There wasn't a single GOP member of the House or Senate who voted for the bill. Not one out of 211 in the House or 50 senators.
Their arguments against growing the debt, against government handouts, against jobless compensation as a disincentive to work, against checks going to the fully employed, against fueling inflation all could have been made during round one or two or three or four of the COVID-19 bailouts of 2020. But those were under a Republican president and a Republican Senate, and the GOP voted in unison with the Democrats on passage again and again.
The CARES Act from last March spent the most, $2.2 trillion, including $1,200 direct payments that Trump decorated with his name, and it still cleared the Senate 96 to zero. It passed the House by near acclamation on a voice vote. The final package under Trump, in the waning days of December, with $600 checks, was overwhelmingly approved by a Congress ready to override if the sore loser vetoed it.
Had, God forbid, Trump been reelected, there would have been another assistance package that would have had big Republican majorities. What changed wasn't the dire need, but the politics.
Maybe if Biden had promised to put Don's name on the $1,400 checks, Trump's loyal followers would have voted for it.