Americans can’t wait for elected Republicans to begin cleaning up the multiple national crises they allowed their incompetent president to create. Fortunately, President Joe Biden, Democrats in Congress and the handful of Republicans who are really willing to help are smart enough to know that. Biden has made it clear he welcomes bipartisan support to begin the long overdue national action to get the deadly coronavirus pandemic under control as the first step in restoring the shattered American economy, but he doesn’t intend to wait around for hostile Republicans to get on board. “I support passing covid relief with support from Republicans — if we can get it,” Biden said. “But the covid relief has to pass. There’s no ifs, ands or buts.”
On Sunday, a small group of Republicans offered a drastically reduced $600 billion alternative to Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief and economic stimulus plan that would cut the $1,400 stimulus checks to Americans to $1,000, throw out any increase in the minimum wage and reduce enhanced unemployment payments when nearly a million workers a week are losing their jobs.
Biden has seen this movie before. In 2008, he was elected vice president to President Barack Obama when they succeeded President George W. Bush, another Republican whose policies had destroyed the national economy. Obama also hoped to govern with bipartisan support to help Americans survive the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. But Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell had other ideas.
Cruel Calculations
McConnell unpatriotically declared the first political priority of Republicans was to make sure the nation’s first African American president was a one-term president. McConnell’s cruel calculation was if Republicans blocked Obama’s economic recovery program, Americans would be so miserable under a failed Democratic presidency, Republicans could return to power.
Instead, Obama and Biden presided over a growing economy for seven years until they were succeeded by Trump, who outdid McConnell’s racism with a constant stream of inflammatory lies feeding racial and religious bigotry to divide the nation. Trump’s unAmerican presidency reached its logical conclusion when he incited a violent mob of his supporters to attack democracy itself with a destructive rampage through the U.S. Capitol. They threatened the lives of both Democrats and Republicans to try to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s election to illegally keep Trump in office.
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The deadly attack killed one police officer, four rioters and injured 140 other police, many seriously with brain injuries, shattered ribs and one lost an eye. Senators and House members hid behind piles of furniture against locked doors to protect themselves from the rioters. Despite that, when Congress reconvened after the riot eight Republican Senators and two-thirds of House Republicans including Wisconsin Congressmen Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Tiffany voted to throw out millions of legally cast votes in Pennsylvania and Arizona to try to reverse Trump’s election loss.
If Biden and Democrats remain united, they can narrowly control both the House and Senate without Republican votes. They don’t have to settle for a fraction of the funds needed to control the pandemic and begin restoring our devastated national economy. An overwhelming majority of economic experts say the greatest danger to the nation right now is spending too little to control the pandemic and restore the economy, not spending too much.
Bizarre Q Cult
Trump’s gone now, but Republicans are still far from becoming credible negotiating partners. The overwhelming majority of elected Republicans are still afraid of losing votes and possibly even their lives from the dangerous, violent extremists Trump attracted to their party. The Republican Party now includes not only Klansmen and Nazis from out of the past, but also deranged members of a bizarre new cult called QAnon. There are now actual Republican members of Congress who believe prominent Democrats cannibalize children and drink their blood. A Republican congresswoman from Georgia has expressed support online for ending Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s political career with “a bullet to the head.”
These aren’t the kind of Republicans who are interested in working with Democrats in a bipartisan way to solve the nation’s problems. All but the most totally ignorant elected Republicans have to recognize the dangerous forces Trump unleashed in their midst. Former Vice President Mike Pence certainly does. After embarrassing himself by proclaiming Trump the greatest American president in history for four years, Pence and his family narrowly escaped being murdered at the hands of Trump’s raging mob because he refused to violate the Constitution and support Trump’s preposterous lie he defeated Biden by a landslide in a presidential election in which just the opposite happened.
Responsible Republicans cannot begin restoring integrity to their party until they take concrete action to rid it of the terrifying, pro-Trump extremists we all watched attacking American democracy on January 6. There’s nothing conservative about violent insurrection. Democrats will have to repair Trump’s destruction of our democracy without them.
