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Biden wants $1.9 trillion. Republicans want a lot less. POLITICOs Victoria Guida breaks down what would really save the Covid economy and why we shouldnt care too much about the price tag for now.

In the spirit of bipartisanship and unity, we have developed a COVID-19 relief framework that builds on prior COVID assistance laws, all of which passed with bipartisan support, the senators wrote to Biden. We request the opportunity to meet with you to discuss our proposal in greater detail and how we can work together to meet the needs of the American people during this persistent pandemic.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a member of the group, estimated the legislation would cost roughly $600 billion. Senate Republicans contend there are hundreds of billions of dollars left over from previous bills, undercutting the need for the amount proposed by Biden.

"If you want unity, you want bipartisanship, you ought to start with the group that's willing to work together," Cassidy said on "Fox News Sunday." "They did not."

The letter is a clear attempt to head off Democratic efforts to pursue budget reconciliation as the pathway to the next round of coronavirus aid. This week, Democrats in both chambers are planning to pass budget resolutions allowing the party to approve Bidens $1.9 trillion coronavirus plan without GOP votes. That tactic, called budget reconciliation, would allow Democrats and Biden to move more quickly than trying to cut a deal with Republicans that can get 60 votes.

Noting the failings of the government response to the last economic crisis in 2009 and the GOP reluctance to spend money, White House officials and Democratic senators contend that the biggest risk at the moment is not going big enough.

Biden "is absolutely willing to negotiate," said Jared Bernstein, a top Biden economic adviser, on "Fox News Sunday." But, he added: "The cost of inaction is extremely high."

Still, that path has little room for error: All 50 Senate Democrats would need to be on board, and House leaders could afford few defections. And Republicans in a bipartisan negotiating group have urged Biden to squash the effort to move forward without them, though Democrats are skeptical they will ever come on board with the large spending plan they say is needed to revive the economy.

Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, spoke to the Senate Democratic Caucus last week and has been engaged directly with members of both parties. He said on NBC's "Meet the Press" he would continue doing that and that the president's open to compromise: "What he's uncompromising about is the need to move with speed on a comprehensive approach here."

The Republican senators will release more details of their plan Monday, according to a Republican aide. Sundays letter indicated the proposal will also extend unemployment benefits that expire in March, match Bidens request for nutrition assistance and send a new round of payments to those families who need assistance the most, including their dependent children and adults. It will also address child care, small business aid and school funding.

Republicans and some Democrats have complained that high-earning people would be eligible for the next round of $1,400 payments under Biden's plan. And no Republicans have indicated even tepid support for Bidens $1.9 trillion top-line spending number. Thats led Pelosi and Schumer to say they will move forward if Republicans are an obstacle to their plan.

In addition to Collins and Cassidy, the letter was signed by GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Rob Portman of Ohio, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Todd Young of Indiana, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Mike Rounds of South Dakota. They say that if Biden is willing to hear them out, Congress doesnt have to pass a partisan coronavirus bill.

In 2020, members of the House and Senate and the previous administration came together on a bipartisan basis five times, they wrote on Sunday. With your support, we believe Congress can once again craft a relief package that will provide meaningful, effective assistance to the American people and set us on a path to recovery.

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Biden agrees to meeting with GOP senators on Covid relief - POLITICO

Doug Livingston|Akron Beacon Journal

Republican Mike Rasor is looking again to get back into public office with an announcement Wednesday that hell run for clerk of courts in Stow.

The Stow Municipal Clerk of Courts race is unique in that the political parties hold primaries in May for candidates who run without party labels on the general election ballot in November. Tom Bevan, chair of the Summit County Democratic Party, said hes unaware of any fellow Democrats challenging incumbent Amber Zibritosky in the May 4 primary.

Zibritosky was appointed to the position in 2019. She held the seat by defeating three opponents that fall, including Republican Jeff Iula.

After reaching the term limiton Stow City Council, Rasor narrowly lost a 2018 statehouse race against Democrat Casey Weinstein and gathered 44% of the vote in his 2020 loss toSandra Kurt, who held her seat as Summit County Clerk of Courts.

The Stow Municipal Court serves 330,000 residents from 16 northern Summit County communities including: Boston Heights, Boston Township, Cuyahoga Falls, Hudson, Macedonia, Munroe Falls, Northfield, Northfield Center Township, Peninsula, Reminderville, Sagamore Hills, Silver Lake, Stow, Tallmadge, Twinsburg, and Twinsburg Township.

In announcing his candidacy hours before the 4 p.m.Feb. 3 filing deadline, Rasor touted his record as a fiscal conservative, saying he served as president of Stow City Council during a time when debt fell, funding for roads and police increased,and no new taxes were passed.

For 10 years, I had the humbling opportunity to serve my community on Stow City Council, Rasor said in his emailed statement. We made the government competent, fiscally conservative, and accountable to residents. I will take these same goals to the Clerks office.

Stow municipal clerks serve six-year terms.

Nonpartisans who plan to run against Zibritosky or Rasor must turn in petition signatures by May 3, the day before the partisan primaries.

Summit County Republican Party Chair Bryan Williams has said he is hoping to see fewer candidates in the general election, blaming the crowded field in 2019 for syphoning votes away from Iula, a Republican on Cuyahoga Falls City Council.

Williams is trying to strike a deal to give Rasor a better chance in thegeneral election by settling an old feud between the party andJudge Kim Hoover, an independent who wields influence at theStow Municipal Court. In the past, Hoover has supported candidates who've run against Republicans for the clerk of courts race.

Williams is lobbying the governor to appointHoover's daughter, family law attorney Corinne Hoover Six,as the next Summit County Domestic Relations judge. Gov. Mike DeWine has yet to announce his pick for the one seat in the domestic relations court, where the judgeships are now controlledby theRepublican Party.

Reach reporter Doug Livingston at dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3792.

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Mike Rasor runs in second clerk of courts race in as many years - Akron Beacon Journal

Last week, for his first public appearance since his supporters laid a deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol, President Donald Trump chose a rather predictable refuge: Texas.

Texas, after all, is the biggest and reddest border state in the country, and the border has been inseparable from Trumps political identity since the start of his White House ambitions.

On this trip, though, the president stepped off Air Force One at Valley International Airport without the usual mix of state Republican officials eagerly awaiting his arrival so they could grip and grin on the tarmac.

Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick were in Austin for the first day of the legislative session, though almost exactly two years earlier, the sessions start did not keep Patrick from traveling to Washington, D.C., to help Trump craft a nationally televised address on border security. When Trump visited the Permian Basin in July to give a speech on the oil and gas industry, congressional candidates drove hundreds of miles for the tarmac photo opp.

But the low-key reception belies Trumps otherwise overwhelming presence in Texas politics as he prepares to leave office Wednesday. Texas Republicans by and large embraced and enabled him for the past four years. In the aftermath of the deadly Capitol riot that he was impeached for inciting an unprecedented second impeachment for a president they now face a profound reckoning.

The Republican Party is at a crossroads like its never been before, and its gonna have to decide who it is, said Corbin Casteel, a Texas GOP operative who was Trumps Texas state director during the 2016 primary.

No one seems to be under the illusion that Trump will fade quietly. Since losing the election to Joe Biden in November, Trump has launched baseless attacks on the integrity of the election as most prominent Texans in his party let his claims go unchallenged. Some of Trumps most loyal allies in Texas expect hell be a force here for years.

The party is really built around Donald Trump the brand, the image, but most importantly, his policies and what he accomplished, Patrick said during a Fox News interview Thursday. Whoever runs in 2024, if they walk away from Trump and his policies, I dont think they can get through a primary.

To Texas Democrats, Trump has been a highly galvanizing force who created new political opportunities for them, particularly in the suburbs. He carried the state by 9 percentage points in 2016 the smallest margin for a GOP nominee in Texas in two decades and then an even smaller margin last year. But his 6-point win here in November came after Democrats spent months getting their hopes up that Trump would lose the state altogether, and they also came up woefully short down-ballot, concluding the Trump era with decisively mixed feelings about his electoral impact at the state level.

More broadly, some Texas Democrats believe Trump is leaving a legacy as a symptom of the states current Republican politics, not a cause of it.

Frankly I dont think he changed the Republican Party in Texas, said Gilberto Hinojosa, the state Democratic Party chair, adding that Trump has instead magnified the extreme politics and tendencies that Texas Republicans have long harbored. The things that [Trump] stands for the white nationalism, the anti-LGBT [sentiment], the just flat-out racism, just the absolute meanness thats what the Republican Party has been in Texas for quite some time.

As for Texas Republicans embrace of Trump, Hinojosa added, they are the people that Trump talks about when he says he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose their support.

In polling conducted multiple times a year by the University of Texas at Austin and The Texas Tribune, Trump began his presidency with an 81% approval rating among the states Republicans. It climbed into the high 80s by mid-2018 and stayed high for the rest of his presidency, registering at 90% in the most recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll in October.

Really the only point at which Texas Republicans were unsure about Donald Trump was at the beginning of his presidency, said Joshua Blank, research director for The Texas Politics Project at UT-Austin. From that point forward, hes maintained sky-high job approval numbers with Republican voters throughout all four years and no matter what the controversy may have been.

To be sure, Trump has faced some intraparty dissent in Texas, particularly from Republicans who see a need to build a bigger and more diverse party coalition. It is a group that includes people like former state House Speaker Joe Straus, former President George W. Bush and former U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes.

The future of the Republican Party is being the folks that empower people, not the government that is focused on helping everyone moving up the economic ladder, said Hurd, who emerged as perhaps the most persistent critic in his party of Trump while he was in office. Its a party filled with leaders that inspire, not fearmonger.

One of the things that I learned during my time as an undercover officer in the CIA is you should be fighting the next war, not the last war. We should be looking to the future.

Privately, Texas Republicans have been more candid about Trump. In 2019, then-state House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, R-Angleton, was caught in a secret recording saying that Trump was killing us in urban-suburban districts.

Even if there is a Republican crackup, the party will hardly make a clean break from Trump if it wants to make one at all. Like elsewhere, Trumps biggest critics within his own party in Texas have been either former or retiring elected officials, or Republicans unlikely to face the voters including Trumps fervent base for the foreseeable future.

On the flip side, hours after the U.S. Capitol riot, most Texas Republicans in the U.S. House voted in favor of objections to certifying the presidential election results in two swing states; no Republicans in the states delegation voted in favor of impeaching the president a second time.

While the states GOP leadership has been largely supportive of Trump, the extent of individual allegiances has varied. Officials like Abbott and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn have backed the president while avoiding some of the slavish tendencies of other pro-Trump Republicans, often offering gentle disagreement or silence in response to his controversies. Patrick, who chaired both of Trumps campaigns in Texas, has been a dutiful cheerleader, as has Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who latched on to his 2016-borne reputation as Trumps man in Texas.

Other Texas GOP leaders saw their support for Trump go through notable transformations over the past four years in most cases becoming more, not less, supportive of the president. After Trump emerged as the GOP nominee in summer 2016, Land Commissioner George P. Bush became the only prominent member of his famous political family to fall in line behind Trump and then enthusiastically campaigned on Trumps endorsement in his 2018 reelection bid. After U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz bitterly battled Trump in the 2016 presidential primary, Cruz emerged as a close congressional partner who welcomed Trump to Houston for a 2018 reelection campaign rally. And Attorney General Ken Paxton had always positioned himself as a Trump ally leading a Trump-backed lawsuit to strike down Obamacare, for example but his loyalty reached a new intensity in recent weeks as he pushed, unsuccessfully, for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the presidents reelection loss.

Both Cruz and Paxton are now reckoning with their distinct roles in the lead-up to the Capitol riot; Cruz led a group of senators who planned to object to the Electoral College certification, and Paxton spoke at the rally that Trumps supporters attended beforehand.

It was not their finest hour, said Jerry Patterson, a Republican former state land commissioner who is open about his unhappiness with Trump. On the one hand, you cant blame a politician for being a politician, but frankly this is all about trying to inherit the Trump base which is smaller now than it was about two weeks ago.

To be sure, its entirely possible Republicans unite in the next year the way political parties do when theyre in the minority with an oppositional message to the opposing administration. But the GOPs longer-term challenges could prove harder to resolve. In the final years of Trump, some in the party drifted from any unifying policy vision. At the 2020 Republican National Convention, the party opted not to create a new platform, saying it would instead continue to enthusiastically support the Presidents America-first agenda.

Novembers elections in Texas did little to settle the debate over which direction the party should go. Those who want to move on note that Trump won with the narrowest margin for a GOP presidential candidate this century, and swing-seat Republican congressional contenders largely outperformed him in their districts.

Most every Republican that was successful, with the exception of a handful, outperformed Donald Trump by a significant margin, Hurd said. If youre not growing, you are dying, and if were not expanding to those voters that are disaffected and dont believe in the message that Democrats are providing, then were not going to be able to grow.

On the other hand, Trumps 6-point margin was bigger than expected, and he performed surprisingly well in Hispanic communities in South Texas. Former Texas GOP Chair James Dickey said Trumps message was particularly effective in swaths of the state that arent typically looked at as political bellwethers.

His biggest impact has been a return to populist roots and an expansion of the party in minority communities, which, again, is a return to its roots, Dickey said.

His emphasis on making sure the U.S. was energy independent, having a very positive impact for Texas on all of our energy production, not just fossil fuels, Dickey continued. Also the renegotiation of NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] and the production of the much-improved USMCA [United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement].

While Dickey worked hard to build up the party for November, he was not around to see the results as chair. Weeks before the election, he resoundingly lost his reelection bid to Allen West, the former Florida congressman, and while Trump didnt weigh in on that race, West has since taken the party in a more adamantly pro-Trump direction.

Trumps influence was most acutely felt in the states primary seasons, which were already action packed before he became president. But whereas past Texas GOP primary battles were waged over proving conservative purity, the ones in 2018 and 2020 were more about demonstrating presidential loyalty. Candidate after candidate sought to show they would be a stronger Trump ally in Congress and seized on rivals slightest past criticism of him, all while angling for Republican political gold: an endorsement from the man himself.

Even in districts that were set to be hotly contested in the general election, Republicans fervently sought and promoted Trumps backing, bargaining that it was worth whatever trouble awaited them at the hands of Democrats in November. Even Hurds GOP successor, Tony Gonzales running in a district that Trump lost by 4 points in 2016 savored a presidential endorsement, which arrived days before a primary runoff that Gonzales won by less than 100 votes.

A decade down the line, Patterson said he thinks his party will look back on this moment in history and remember that we were saved from the Trump era by Democrats. But he said theres still work to do on figuring out where the party goes without a de facto leader.

When I was a brand new second lieutenant [in the Marine Corps] and I was at initial training after being commissioned about how to lead, the question was always, What now, lieutenant? Patterson said. Were at the what now, lieutenant point in the Republican Party.

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Texas Republicans face profound reckoning as Donald Trump leaves office - The Texas Tribune

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The Club for Growth, an anti-tax group funded by billionaires, has been the primary financial backer of Andy Harris, the Republican lawmaker who sought to bring a gun to the floor of the House of Representatives.

Harris, a medical doctor who represents the eastern shore of Maryland, has received about $345,000 from individuals associated with the Club for Growth since the rightwing campaigners helped to get him elected in 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The latest revelation about the Club for Growths support for Harris comes after the Guardian revealed last week that the group, which is headed by the former Republican congressman David McIntosh, was a major financial support of 42 of the Republicans who sought to invalidate Joseph Bidens victory in the 2020 election.

It has also supported another lawmaker, Lauren Boebert, who has argued for the need for firearms to be carried inside the US Capitol. Members may only carry firearms in their own offices.

CNN reported on Friday that the US Capitol police were investigating an incident that occurred on Thursday, when Harris was stopped from bringing a concealed weapon on to the floor of the House. The Republican, who is an anaesthesiologist, had set off the newly installed metal detectors outside the chamber, prompting him to ask another lawmaker, Republican John Katko, to hold the weapon for him.

Katko refused, according to a press pool, and Harris then left and returned later, without setting off the metal detector.

Bryan Shuy, Harriss chief of staff, said in a statement released to the Guardian: Because his and his familys lives have been threatened by someone who has been released awaiting trial, for security reasons, the congressman never confirms whether he nor anyone else hes with are carrying a firearm for self-defense.

Shuy added: As a matter of public record, he has a Maryland handgun permit. And the congressman always complies with the House metal detectors and wanding. The congressman has never carried a firearm on the House floor.

The Club for Growth did not respond to a request for comment.

The Club for Growth became a significant backer of Harris in 2007, when it helped to defeat a longtime and more moderate Republican congressman who had served in Marylands first district. Harris lost that race in the general election but then won in 2009 in a heavily Republican district.

In a CNN interview on Thursday, the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has said she feared for her life on the day of the Capitol insurrection, said a lot of members of the House did not yet feel safe around other members.

The moment you bring a gun on to the House floor in violation of rules, you put everyone around you in danger. It is irresponsible, it is reckless, but beyond that it is the violation of rules, she said.

She added that Harriss actions, whatever his intentions, had endangered the lives of fellow members of Congress and were a violation of House rules.

The Club for Growth has recently received the vast majority of its funding from Richard Uihlein, the anti-choice rightwing billionaire founder of Uline packaging supply company, and Jeffrey Yass, a billionaire co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, a Philadelphia-based options trading company.

Last year, the group spent millions of dollars helping to elect Lauren Boebert, a far-right pro-gun activist and QAnon conspiracy theorist, who this week was reported to have challenged Capitol police officers who sought to check her purse after she set off metal detectors.

Harris voted on 6 January to overturn the 2020 election results, hours after rioters stormed the US Capitol. In a a radio broadcast a few days later, he criticized a decision by Twitter to ban the president from using the online platform, calling it the result of collusion between socialists and big corporations.

In fact, some of the richest Republican donors have backed Harris, including the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman and other executives from Blackstone, the Wall Street firm whose executives donated more than $10,000 to Harris in the last election cycle.

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Revealed: Club for Growth is main donor to gun-toting Republican congressman - The Guardian

President-elect Joe Biden, who will assume the presidency at 12 p.m. Eastern tomorrow, has been absolutely consistent about this.

There was the time last year, early in his presidential campaign, when Joe Biden said at an event in New Hampshire that, with Donald Trump out of the White House not a joke you will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.

Just last month, Biden, in a conference call with supporters of his campaign, said, I may eat these words, but I predict to you: As Donald Trumps shadow fades away, youre going to see an awful lot change among Republicans.

And just last week, only days after President Trumps supporters had invaded the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to stop the final approval of Bidens victory by any means necessary, the former vice president gave a speech laying out his economic agenda in which he said, Unity is not a pie-in-the-sky dream, it is a practical step to getting things done.

So, is Biden crazy? Is he simply overly optimistic?

[Related: How Trump Changed America]

Recent history says so. From 2009 through 2016, the last time the nation had a Democratic president, the Republican Party intensely opposed virtually every part of then-President Obamas agenda, culminating in the GOPs refusal to even hold a hearing for Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016. Biden, of course, had a front-row seat to this GOP opposition as the vice president.

Four years later, the Republican Party appears to have drifted even further away from any interest in being, or ability to be, a loyal opposition party. Most Republicans in Congress supported efforts to disqualify legitimate election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania, continuing a two-month long campaign by Trump and many in the GOP to overturn Bidens victory in the 2020 election. And Senate Republicans, while they were less likely to contest the election results, have broken with precedent and refused to hold hearings for Bidens Cabinet nominees before he takes office.

So its worth exploring three different possibilities in terms of Bidens rhetoric about working with Republicans:

Biden aides and other Democrats arent committing to a single interpretation of the president elects bipartisanship comments. They are suggesting both that Biden truly believes some Republicans will work with him but that he is also preparing to push forward on his agenda without them.

So this is a bit of an open question as he begins his presidency. Lets look at all three possibilities:

I dont think that congressional Republicans will be more likely to work with Biden than they were with Obama simply because Biden is white. The deep antipathy towards Obama among GOP voters and GOP officials was connected in some ways to him being Black, but as we have seen in the last few weeks, there is plenty of resistance in the GOP base to a Biden presidency. (And partisan politics nowadays is deeply intertwined with race no matter the politician.) Nor do I think Bidens long tenure in the Senate (1973-2009) matters much only about a dozen members of the current GOP bloc in the Senate served with Biden.

But there are at least two reasons to think that Republicans will try to work with Biden or at least, work with him more than they did Obama. First of all, on Cabinet nominations and judgeships, Democrats already have the votes they need, since those require only a simple majority in the Senate. So I think its likely that since Republicans cant block these picks anyway there will be a group of Republicans who vote for some of Bidens would-be federal judges and Cabinet members, particularly if they are not known for being very liberal. A Republican senator who wants to present himself as reasonable would have every incentive to vote for, for example, the relatively non-controversial Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who led the opposition to Garlands Supreme Court nomination, has reportedly told Biden that he will vote for Garland to become Attorney General.

[Bidens Team And Priorities Show How The Democratic Party Changed In The Trump Era]

This is not a particularly important element of bipartisanship Republicans providing extra votes for people who would be confirmed anyway. But I would assume Biden will cite these kinds of votes as examples of him bringing unity to Washington if some Republicans do come on board for his Cabinet or judicial nominations.

Secondly, the COVID-19 pandemic, with thousands of people dying from the virus daily, is a much bigger and more serious issue than anything that happened in the Obama years. So perhaps some Republicans put party lines aside to help Biden and the country deal with the pandemic. After all, there were several bipartisan COVID-19 relief bills passed last year with Trump as president but Democrats in control of the House.

The context of the pandemic and the needs of their constituents may lead Republicans to be willing to work with Biden and the Democrats on vaccine and pandemic recovery legislation even if they oppose the levels of spending proposed by Biden, said Laurel Harbridge-Yong, a political science professor at Northwestern University who studies Congress.

Also, politics may be changing on the right in a way that pushes some Republicans toward working with Biden on COVID-19 in particular. Republicans used to talk a big game about reining in the federal budget deficit while never really doing anything about it. But in the Trump era, some prominent Republicans, including Trump himself and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, have basically dropped the pretense that they really care about keeping the deficit low. That pretense seems to already be returning with a Democrat poised to occupy the White House. But if a big part of Bidens agenda in his first year is trying to provide Americans direct financial aid to help them deal with the economic slowdown caused by COVID-19, perhaps 10 or so Republicans sign onto some of those bills, allowing them to pass without Democrats using the reconciliation process. (More on reconciliation in a bit.)

COVID relief is a great test for bipartisanship at this point. Unless youre gonna do some sort of pure infrastructure bill, is there really a big bill you can imagine thats more potentially bipartisan than this? said Matt Glassman, a congressional expert at Georgetown Universitys Government Affairs Institute.

I have no idea if the Republicans are going to bargain in good faith, he added. Like Hawley and friends should be for the $2,000 checks, but who knows if the partisan climate is such that hes just going to 180 on that stuff completely and go into total opposition mode.

Indeed, I dont think the case I just made is that strong because

This is the much safer assumption, of course: Republicans will oppose much of Bidens agenda. After all, the parties disagree fundamentally on a lot of issues, such as raising the national minimum wage to $15 per hour, which Biden is proposing in his new economic stimulus bill but Republicans oppose. Secondly, even on issues where the parties in theory could reconcile their policy differences, it might be smarter electorally for Republicans to oppose whatever Biden proposes, try to drive up his disapproval ratings and use him as foil in the midterms. Thats basically the story of the last four midterm elections 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018. The party that didnt hold the presidency won a lot of House seats after spending the previous two years constantly attacking the incumbent president and his agenda.

Republicans benefit politically from manufacturing gridlock, said Adam Jentleson, who was a top adviser to then-Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid during the Obama presidency. They only need to win one seat to take back the Senate in 2022, and all of their incentives point to making Democrats look bad so they can reclaim the majority. The narrowness of the Democrats majority increases Republicans incentive to obstruct, said Jentleson, who is the author of a new book called Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate that chronicles some of the ways that McConnell and other Republicans limited the policy goals of Obama and Biden.

Leah Greenberg, co-director of a progressive activist group called the Indivisible Project, pointed to another huge barrier to congressional Republicans working with Biden: They are worried about being defeated in GOP primaries. For the first year of Bidens term, Republican senators will be looking over their shoulders for primary challengers just as much as theyre worrying about the general election, Greenberg said.

[Related: Even Though Biden Won, Republicans Enjoyed The Largest Electoral College Edge In 70 Years. Will That Last?]

Shouldnt Biden already know that Republican cooperation is a long shot? I would not be so sure. The political instincts of Biden and his team have been rightly praised over the last two years as the former vice president won the Democratic primary in part by resisting the leftward lurch of the party and then pulled off the somewhat rare feat of defeating an incumbent president. But we also have plenty of reasons to doubt Bidens political acumen: his first two terrible presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2008; his vote for the Iraq War; his dismal finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire during the 2020 primaries despite being the frontrunner and former vice president; and the fact that he stopped the day before Novembers general election in Ohio, where he ended up losing by 8 percentage points.

Back in 2012, Biden (and Obama) were confidently suggesting that the oppositional fever among Republicans would break if Obama and Biden were elected for a second term. They were both totally wrong, of course. Democrats who are more progressive than Biden are deeply concerned that the new president will spend a lot of time fruitlessly trying to get congressional Republicans to sign onto his proposals, as opposed to pushing his agenda in ways that only require the support of Democratic lawmakers.

I tend to think this third possibility is closest to the truth: Biden is being more optimistic about the prospects of bipartisanship in his public statements than he truly believes and is fully prepared to govern facing basically unified GOP opposition.

What makes me think this? Well, first of all, even if Biden was (and likely still is) somewhat overly confident about both his ability to cut deals and the GOPs desire to work with him, he is also taking actions that would line up with a one-party governing strategy. He campaigned hard for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, whose wins in Georgia gave Democrats control of the Senate. Even before he takes office, Biden has rolled out a stimulus proposal that seems more aimed at trying to boost the economy, help people who are struggling economically and fund Democratic Party priorities than appeasing Republicans, who unsurprisingly balked at the $1.9 trillion price tag of the proposal. Congressional Democrats are already talking about passing this bill through the so-called reconciliation process, by which they would need only a simple majority in the Senate and thus no GOP votes.

[The Final Two Months of Trumps Presidency Were The Most Important Ones]

So why all the talk about unity and bipartisanship? For two reasons. First, its a fairly normal thing for a president to do. American politics has been deeply polarized by party for at least the last four presidencies (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and Trump.) But Trump was the only one of those four presidents who regularly spoke of blue states and red states himself and generally seemed fairly uninterested in trying to rise above that polarization. In other words, of course Biden isnt starting his term by announcing that basically half of the members of Congress will never support anything he does!

Secondly, polls suggest that voters, particularly independents, want Biden and other politicians to seek agreements across party lines. For example, in a Pew Research Center poll conducted earlier this month, 74 percent of Americans said that Biden should try as best he can to work with the congressional GOP leaders to accomplish things, even if it means disappointing some of his own voters, compared to just 24 percent who said Biden should, stand up to GOP leaders on issues important to his voters, even if its harder to address critical problems facing the country. (Its not surprising that a lot of Americans dont want a president to be more partisan and therefore not address critical issues, so the phrasing of this question is not ideal.)

So it makes sense that Biden, as the electoral and political leader of the Democratic Party, is using rhetoric that sells with voters.

Heres the thing: Its not totally clear that Biden truly believing that he can work with Republicans versus faking that belief matters that much in terms of governing. Lets say Biden is slightly overly confident about his ability to work with Republicans but also correctly assesses that there is some political value in talking about bipartisanship. Lets also say that he is also conscious that Republicans might not go along with his agenda and therefore planning an alternative course. He might, say, roll out a big stimulus plan, publicly talk about getting some Republicans behind it and privately pursue their votes but, at the same time be ready to move forward with a Democrats-only strategy for passing it. That is exactly what he is doing.

In other words, expect to see Biden continue to talk about the value of bipartisanship even if he doesnt manage to get much of it.

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Does Biden Really Think Republicans Will Work With Him? And Could He Be Right? - FiveThirtyEight