Unity Among Democrats is the Only Unity We Need

Despite some manufactured drama by the media on Tuesday, all 50 Democratic senators voted to pass a budget resolution that paves the way to pass much-needed COVID relief through the budget reconciliation process. 

While Republicans are all-in on supporting their QAnon members, Democrats are united in working to help the American people. Republicans may kick and scream that that Democrats aren't including them in the process, but their paltry $600 billion offer was never going to cut it. Despite Susan Collins' upbeat review of Monday night's meeting with Joe Biden, it's apparent that Biden sees the Republican offer as a nonstarter. Combined with all 50 Democratic and independent senators voting to advance the budget resolution today and it's becoming obvious that Democrats are moving ahead with an ambitious $1.9 trillion package that will help everyday Americans with stimulus checks, will help with small business relief, will provide supplemental employment insurance and will finally provide adequate funding for the vaccine rollout. Republicans may whine like bratty children but Joe Biden is governing like a man who won his election by more than 7 million votes. 

And Joe Biden is no dummy. He spent 8 years watching Republican intransigence up close. He was there in the room with Barack Obama during his first few weeks in office in 2009. Then, much like today, the country was faced with an unprecedented challenge with a Democratic president providing his Republican counterparts an olive branch to join him as equal partners in the recovery process. As revealed in his memoir The Promised Land, Barack Obama fully expected to earn a dozen or more votes from his Republican counterparts with his landmark American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Yet when it came time for passage, not a single Republican member of the House broke party ranks and only 3 did so in the Senate. They had their marching orders from Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, who famously vowed to do everything in their power to make Barack Obama a one-term president. It would be this vote that would show, clear as day, that Republicans were more than willing to put party over country if it meant seeing a Democratic administration fail and the American people suffer.

Flash forward 12 years.

Again we have a Democratic administration cleaning up a clusterfuck created by Republicans. Only this time, Democrats know the Republican playbook. They know their feigned indignation about not being included in the budget reconciliation is all an act. They know Republicans don't actually care about COVID relief or they would have negotiated in good faith with the $2.2 trillion COVID relief bill that Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats passed back in late September. They know Republicans don't actually believe in providing $2,000 total in stimulus checks, an issue that very well may have cost them the United States Senate. And they know that Republicans couldn't care less about extending unemployment benefits, an issue that reared its head last summer when Republicans refused to extend the $600/month federal unemployment benefit. 

So while Republicans cry their crocodile tears on Fox News, Joe Biden and Democrats are united in helping the American people just as Barack Obama and Democrats did 12 years before. But this time around, Republican efforts to cry wolf can and should fall on deaf ears. They have proven time and time again that they don't actually care about helping the American people. We have 447,000 lives lost as Exhibit A in this regard and Joe Biden knows we simply cannot wait. Republicans will never come around because doing so would mean they would have to put their country above their party and as we've seen with their insurrection, Republicans simply cannot do this. They cannot act in a way that benefits anyone other than themselves. They are too far down the fascist rabbit hole now to ever again considering working in good faith with a Democratic president. Joe Biden knows what he is up against and he and his fellow Democrats are ready to go at this alone. 

And history will show that in America's hour of need, the Republican Party was nowhere to be found.