With a massive stimulus bill passed, Biden sees light at end of the tunnel

Barely half way through his first 100 days in office, US President Joseph Biden addressed a restless nation still reeling under the pandemic, putting out hopes that perhaps light is at the end of the tunnel and that by its July 4 Independence Day the country can be back on track celebrating with barbeques, fireworks and what not.

But all this could happen only if people get themselves vaccinated and observe the health norms such as wearing masks and maintaining social distancing, the President warned. “Just as we were emerging from a dark winter into a hopeful spring and summer is not the time to not stick with the rules. This is not the time to let up,” Biden said.

Without a doubt it has been a painful year for all Americans with the virus taking a debilitating toll economically and in human terms as well, clinging on to the hope that the worst is over. The pain is also being tempered with a sense of restlessness as evidenced from a number of state Governors anxious to return back to normality even if it meant abandoning the sense of caution urged in the medical community.

Biden himself took note of all that the country had missed in the last one year by way of celebrations, graduations, and weddings. With multiple vaccine roll-out process and more than one third of the population already having received their shots, it is estimated that all adults would have had their doses by the first of May.

The Presidential address took place after Biden had the massive stimulus package of US$1.9 trillion in his pocket and some have passed this off as some kind of a major legislative victory. The truth of the matter is that in both the House of Representatives and Senate it was a strict party-line vote with no Republican lining up behind the Democratic President. This is in sharp contrast to the relief measures passed during the Trump administration that had broad bi-partisan support.

Political analysts remember the stimulus package of 2009 that President Barack Obama had rolled out in the aftermath of the financial collapse, preferring Republican lawmakers to take the lead. In ways more than one, the political environment is reflective of the legislative hurdles that are along the way for the Biden administration, especially on tougher issues like healthcare and immigration. The Biden White House cannot always depend on Vice President Kamala Harris to cast the tie-breaking vote as stimulus bill indicated of initial Democratic dissent in the Senate.

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Liberal and progressive Democrats in the House and Senate had a bitter pill to swallow when they had to come around and support the stimulus package minus the US$15 per hour minimum wage plan. That provision had to be dropped as it was not within Senate rules and the grievance was that the Biden White House did not vigorously oppose this stipulation. But Democrats came around realizing that President Biden needed party unity on this critical bill. The progressive rallied behind the White House as it generally tallied with what they had been pushing for—about US$130 billion to assist schools, direct payments of up to US$1,400 that could hit bank accounts this weekend, a substantial expansion in child tax credits; increased subsidy for health insurance, a liberal dose of assistance to state and local governments and restaurants given financial assistance.

“Finding light in the darkness is a very American thing to do. In fact, it may be the most American thing we do and that’s what we’ve done,” Biden said.

For a party that has all along opposed the stimulus package, the reaction to both the relief measure as also the President’s address was along expected lines. To members of the Grand Old Party, the stimulus package amounted to nothing more than a laundry list of left wing priorities, unnecessary expenditures on things that had nothing to do with the pandemic and measures that would only result in unnecessary bureaucratic delays.

In fact, the Grand Old Party has signalled that the stimulus package has defined the basis of the 2022 elections and hopes to get back control of Congress. Former President Trump has also set the ball rolling by saying, “If I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for five years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers.”

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But Democrats remember Trump for something else—that of a person who refused to take the virus seriously from the very beginning, mocking those who had different views, his inconsistencies on the virus like terming it as nothing more than a common flu but privately admitting to Journalist Bob Woodward that it is indeed deadly, congratulating the Chinese President for the way he had handled the virus and later on labelling it as a China virus, and above all of an administration that basically slept at the switch.

“It goes away… It’s going away. We want it to go away with very, very few deaths,” Trump said on March 11, 2020. A year later, there are close to 30 million cases and some 532,000 deaths, a staggering statistics that few can be in denial of.

(Formerly a senior journalist in Washington D.C. covering North America and the United Nations, the author is currently a Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the College of Science and Humanities, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai)

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