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Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for Jan. 14, 2021

The Democratic Policy-Smorgasbord Mistake

Democrats are talking themselves into trying to pass their entire agenda
at once. There's a far easier path.

 

The inclusion of Sherrod Brown's child allowance in the next COVID
relief package signals that it will be a free for all. (Michael
Brochstein/Sipa USA via AP Images)

First Response

In U.S. politics at the moment, I'd rather be the Democrats. The
Republican president has just been impeached for a second time for
inciting insurrection, some far-right allies appear to have aided and
abetted the effort
,
and the party lost the House, Senate, and presidency in one term for the
first time since Herbert Hoover. The dual-impeached president is
simultaneously hated by the public and beloved by the Republican base
,
making it difficult to regroup. Incoming House GOP freshman took all of
a week

to draw battle lines against one another. Corporate America is
pretending to turn on the party
.

Meanwhile, Democrats just unlocked the key to campaign victory in a
red-ish state in the deep South with a dual strategy: multi-racial
organizing and a simple, populist message based on tangible benefits.
Nothing will bring in infrequent voters more than a promise they can
easily understand. Now Democrats have the White House, the House, and
the Senate, albeit by thin margins. Building on that success, while
their opponents flail, could upend the typical logic of midterm losses
for the party in power.

And they appear to be just completely ignoring these lessons, right out
of the gate.

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Today Joe Biden will release his COVID relief plan
,
and it looks like it'll be the third major bill of this crisis, with a
price tag in the trillions of dollars. I imagine I'm going to agree
with almost every policy in it. But the fear is that the bill will be
convoluted, the process not conducive to quick success, and the very
real possibility for collapse or at least messiness inherent, when
there's a far more coherent and popular path that could further cause
headaches for Republicans and notch an early win.

Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who will I believe get sworn into the
Senate next week, ran on an extremely simple policy: extending the $600
emergency checks that have already been approved to $2,000. This showed
actual learning

on the part of the Democrats, tightening up an amorphous economic
message and offering something everyone can understand.

The easiest way to capitalize on this is by just passing the $2,000
checks, which have close to 80 percent support in the country, Larry
Summers' opposition notwithstanding. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) pledged
his support

for a standalone checks bill to "unite" the country; I don't know
about all that, but getting a popular policy passed with broad
bipartisan support sounds like exactly what Biden would want at the
outset.

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The bill he's going to announce will not be a standalone checks bill.
It's going to extend unemployment insurance beyond mid-March. It's
going to find money for state and local governments to cover revenue
shortfalls. It's going to have more funds for vaccine distribution.
It'll include public school funding, with a goal of reopening them.

It's apparently also going to include a child allowance

long sought by Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH),
which would deliver $3,600 to every household with a child under 6 and
$3,000 for households with kids between the ages of 6 and 17. This is
seen as a major anti-poverty measure, even though it has a
"trapezoid" shape where the poorest families get the least benefit,
inexplicably.

Once you open up the bill to existing policy planks that Senators have
been carrying for a long time, you're just asking for everyone to get
their favorite piece in there. And with only 50 Democratic votes, every
one of them has leverage. So you see Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) talking
up paid family and medical leave
.
You see Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) promoting full funding of the Defense
Production Act and building public manufacturing capacity

for essential medications, part of a 15-page memo. You see Bernie
Sanders (I-VT), who will run the Budget Committee where this package
could go through, seeking an emergency universal health care program
.

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All of these things are important, even critical. But it will be
impossible to get a quick-strike victory with all of those moving parts.
And it will result in another 5,000-page bill with all kinds of goodies
dumped in to placate Senators. Moreover, there's no way you get any
Republican votes for something that expansive, leading you to the budget
reconciliation

route, which only requires the bare minimum of 50 votes.

Though everyone in the world knows this, Biden will start out seeking
bipartisan support

through regular order. Bipartisan support surely exists for the $2,000
checks, and maybe for vaccine funding. But a Christmas tree,
Democratic-agenda-in-miniature bill is going to require reconciliation.
That's just reality. So Biden's approach will guarantee a waste
of-weeks? months?-in a futile attempt to find 10 Senate Republicans
to agree to everything on the Democratic wish list. Didn't we play
this game already with the Affordable Care Act, with President Obama
spending nearly a year chasing Republicans for nothing?

Once you inevitably get to reconciliation, you're now going to use one
of the only three slots available. There's definitely an argument that
a child allowance and paid family leave, building up family care and
family safety net programs, is worth spending one of those three chips.
But you'll have to select what goes in and what goes out, in a
haggling session with every Democratic Senator, all of whom think their
one idea is the most important in the universe. Does universal pre-K get
in? Climate investments? Student debt forgiveness? A public health
insurance option? Federalizing Medicaid
? Free
community college? Guaranteed housing vouchers?

What's more, Sanders at least is talking about offsetting

some of the cost of this package through progressive taxation. That will
cause yet another brawl on the Democratic side, because everyone has an
idea about the perfect tax code. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who will chair the
Senate Finance Committee, has a metric ton of ideas.

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In some sense this is inevitable: you have a big-tent caucus where every
vote is needed, and there's going to be some horse-trading. The need
exists for a big bill: look at unemployment claims pushing back up
,
on top of job loss last month. But smuggling in the entire Democratic
agenda, immediately, in the context of a "relief" bill, seems like a
recipe for disaster.

It also confuses the public. Most of these ideas are popular and
Republicans should be put in the position of making a judgment on each
one of them, one at a time. That begins with the checks legislation,
which was a direct campaign promise. People need the help now, the
Georgia senators won on it, and my belief and the belief of numerous
members of the Senate is that 60 votes exist for it. So why not pass
that? Why not next week (if the impeachment trial process can be managed
to allow for other business)? Why not build trust among the public? If
Republicans want to commit political suicide and block it, you can
always go to reconciliation. But building some mega-bill gives
Republicans an easy out for their opposition.

It's not that I disagree with a single one of these policies. But the
process is shaping up as a very typical Democratic mess. You won't be
able to tell anyone what's in the bill because everything's in it.
You won't get an early victory because there's too much to deal
with. Every day that goes by will ramp up the part of the left that eats
itself, claiming nothing's getting done because Democrats don't want
to get anything done. It seems like a slow-walk into political disaster.

And sitting out there is an alternative strategy, where Republicans have
to walk the plank every other day with some popular idea, where a couple
of them get through and are tangible and explainable, and where trust is
built. Sadly that doesn't look like the strategy we'll be taking.

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Number of Vaccines Given

10.8 million
,
up from 9.94 million on Wednesday. Up to 37 percent of supply being
administered.

Today I Learned

* The lowest-paid workers have an unemployment rate above 20 percent
,
according to Fed governor Lael Brainard. (CNBC)

* Positive news on the Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine
,
but we don't have Phase 3 Trial data yet. (CNN)

* Dollar General will pay staff

to get the COVID vaccine. (Wall Street Journal)

* Supreme Court forces women

to obtain an abortion pill in person during a pandemic. (HuffPost)

* The Capitol super-spreader event came too soon for vaccine immune
response to kick in for some members of Congress, but it may have given
some protection

to those who got it weeks ago. (Washington Post)

* GrubHub has to deliver Girl Scout cookies

because it's too dangerous for the kids. (New York Times)

* Working from home has lessened the stigma of whistleblowing on your
fraudulent colleagues
.
(Bloomberg)

* The pandemic has been a lifeline for... Dungeons & Dragons
.
(Los Angeles Times)

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