The $600 billion fascist calls its GOP COVID relief proposal a sincere attempt at bipartisanship. That is a cynical partisan lie. Their rationale is based on the tried and true radical right complaintb that we cannot afford Biden's $1.9 trillion proposal. When it comes to the fascist GOP doing mass deficit spending, e.g., the monster 2017 tax cut for rich people law, there are no complaints from republicans in leadership roles. But when democrats want domestic spending, the GOP hypocrites howl in sanctimonious outrage about the debt and that tactic has been in place at least since the 1980s. At least, that was my take on this matter.
Salon published a more comprehensive look at just how purely partisan the faux bipartisan claim really is. There's more to it. Salon writes:
Ten Senate Republican have proposed a COVID relief bill of about $600 billion. That's less than a third of Biden's plan. They promise "bipartisan support" if he agrees.
Their proposal isn't a compromise. It would be a total surrender. It trims direct payments and unemployment aid that Americans desperately need. Biden should reject it out of hand.
Republicans say America can't afford Biden's plan. "We just passed a program with over $900 billion in it," groused Senator Mitt Romney.
Rubbish. We can't afford not to. Millions of people are hurting.
Beyond COVID relief, Biden has other proposals waiting in the wings, such as repairing aging infrastructure and building a new energy-efficient one. These would make the economy grow even faster over the long term – further reducing the debt's share.
There's no chance that public spending will "crowd out" private investment. If you hadn't noticed, borrowing is especially cheap right now. Money is sloshing around the world in search of borrowers.
It's hard to take Republican concerns about debt seriously when just four years ago they had zero qualms about enacting one of the largest tax cuts in history, largely for big corporations and the super-wealthy.
If they really don't want to add to the debt, they have another alternative: A tax on super-wealthy Americans.
The total wealth of America's 660 billionaires has grown by a staggering $1.1 trillion since the start of the pandemic, a 40 percent increase. They alone could finance almost all of Biden's COVID relief package and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic. So why not a temporary emergency COVID wealth tax?
Let's be honest. The real reason Republicans don't want Biden's plan is they fear it will work.
This would be the Republican's worst nightmare: All the anti-government claptrap they've been selling since Ronald Reagan will be revealed as nonsense.
Government isn't the problem and never was. Bad government is the problem, and Americans have just had four years of it. Biden's success would put into sharp relief Trump and Republicans' utter failures on COVID and jobs.
Trumpian Republicans in Congress have an even more diabolical motive for blocking Biden. They figure if Americans remain in perpetual crises and ever-deepening fear, they'll lose faith in democracy itself.
This would open the way for another strongman demagogue in 2024 – if not Trump, a Trump-impersonator like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, or Trump Junior.
If Biden is successful, though, Americans' faith in democracy might begin to rebound – marking the end of the nation's flirtation with fascism. If he helps build a new economy of green jobs with good wages, even Trump's angry white working-class base might come around.
My worry is Biden may want so much to demonstrate bipartisanship that his plans get diluted to the point where Republicans get what they want: Failure.
Forget bipartisanship. Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans didn't give a hoot about bipartisanship when they and Trump were in power.
The multiple crises engulfing America are huge. The window of opportunity for addressing them is small. If ever there was a time for boldness, it is now. (emphasis added)
That presents a more complete picture of the fascist's false claim of motivation by bipartisanship. I find that reasoning and in view of the underlying facts to be persuasive. The fascist GOP really does want government to fail. They want faith in democracy and the rule of law to fade so some form of a corrupt, incompetent, white Christian autocracy-theocracy can take its place.
Another aspect of the false bipartisanship claim that has come up recently relates to the bailout after the 2008 financial disaster. The GOP reduce the size of it in the name of fiscal conservatism and they promised cooperation with Obama. Experts now think the bailout was too small and that significantly slowed the recovery. On top of that, Obama never got much or any bipartisanship after that. In retrospect, probably the only reason the republicans allowed a relief bill under Obama was because all the spending went to rich people and corporations, not to regular Americans.
We've seen this radical right Trojan House before and let it in. Doing that again would be a huge, maybe fatal, mistake.
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