Politico's Playbook brings us the grievances of Republican Senate staffers upset that President Joe Biden is not being bipartisan in their general direction and, I gotta tell you, it’s a maudlin little affair. For example:
"Everything they support is defined as either Covid relief or infrastructure, and everything they oppose is like … Jim Crow voter suppression and evil," and "You constantly just feel like you’re in this gaslighting chamber of insanity. But it’s working."
To clarify, this quote is from an unnamed aide to one of the self-described "G-10" Republican senators—like Susan Collins, Jerry Moran, Mitt Romney, and Thom Tillis— who have been super insistent that they would certainly be willing to do a bipartisan with Democrats but, unfortunately, everything from COVID-19 relief efforts to infrastructure programs to tax changes to Democratic presidents being able to pick their own Supreme Court justices is all “socialist madness” that the party willing to defend Donald Trump from the consequences of propaganda-premised insurrection could not possibly come to compromise on.
Yes, the party of "Fuck Your Feelings" T-shirts, Senate-enabled international extortion, and the promotion of false and fascist propaganda that led to an invasion of the U.S. Capitol is reeling from the "gaslighting" and "insanity" of Joe Biden not agreeing to cut pandemic emergency funding by two-thirds or come to a reasonable halfway point on the issue of Too Many Americans Are Voting These Days.
Stand back, everyone: They may faint dead away from the insanity of it all. Why can't it be like the old days, when a president put crackpot doctors and toxin-promoting pillow magnates in charge of national crises, and party-loyal pundits explained to America that if the economy requires Grandma and Grandpa to die horrible deaths, then, well, maybe Grandma and Grandpa need to hurry up and get to it? The old days, when presidents drew their own bogus weather maps to convince Americans they had not misspoken, they just were more knowledgable about hurricane paths than the rest of you? No prescriptions for injectable sunlight? No midnight declarations that American journalists are “enemies of the people” for reporting information that incriminates them in crooked-sounding acts?
Yes, certainly. A new president invites you to negotiate policy but doesn't wait for you to string an emergency-premised relief package along for another six months while demonizing that president to the press and pretending that each newly added demand will for sure be the one that attracts your fellow "moderate" Republican senators—insanity. Gaslighting. However will America survive these dizzying and tumultuous times?
Wait, hang on, there's more: "Biden is a horrible villain for us," says a Republican aide, because Republicans haven’t been able to find a path to properly demonize him. (Translation: Biden is white and male.) Biden is "constantly rubbing dirt in the face of Republicans" over the party's unwillingness to compromise. (Translation: Biden has repeatedly noted an inarguably true thing.)
Oh, and the aides complained to Politico about the unfairness of the media portraying Biden as reasonable and moderate when, you know, Republicans would rather they not. Mainly, though, the complaints are that the 10 senators involved here have been putting themselves up as Republican power brokers who Biden will have to work with in order to pass even the most overwhelmingly popular policies, and the White House is ignoring them to pass the policies anyway.
This is about the inability of Republican senators who have long portrayed themselves as "moderate" but who could never be mustered to vote against even kleptocratic fascism—except in performative but otherwise impotent twos and threes—to shove their way back into power broker status now that their party has stolen the silverware and ransacked the government. Tillis has done a fat lot of nothing to convince anyone that he is willing to be on the noncrackpot side of history, but Tillis still wants you to know that if Joe Biden isn't willing to put the brakes on everything to listen to Tillis, the country has gone mad.
Mind you, the solution here remains obvious. As Politico itself notes in the piece, Biden's success so far has been due to his emphasis on pursuing wildly popular policies, from substantive pandemic emergency funds to infrastructure investments that the whole country believes to be needed but have been blocked for years. The "moderate" Republican position might be to do the things their own voters want done rather than continuing the game of willfully sabotaging national priorities so as to block nonconservative presidents from claiming the credit. The "moderate" Republican position might be to buck the party in consequential ways rather than impotent ones, somewhere between "Republican presidents are allowed to do things far, far worse the stuff Nixon was forced to resign over" and "Republican presidents are allowed to foment insurrection after an election loss."
The way for Republican moderates to prove themselves willing to engage in moderate bipartisanship is to—just throwing this out there—fucking do it once or twice rather than feigning it before turning tail at each consequential vote. It's perfectly reasonable for the man whose administration your party tried to circumvent via propaganda and insurrection to not trust you any farther than he could throw you. You don't get to say “Let's all be friends now” and “Well I'm glad the murder part is behind us” and demand you be given your old seat at the negotiation table. Jeebus, how self-entitled can you possibly be? Endeavor to be as “bipartisan” in putting forward policy solutions as Sen. Josh Hawley is in his persistence at declaring that every last major Biden nominee is for some reason terribly unfit and/or a near-communist. Or even half as much. Or a quarter.
There will come a time when the Biden White House has exhausted the list of outrageously popular policies and indeed will need moderate Republican support for things further down the priority list. It will be soon, and each of the current Republican narcissists currently crying their eyes out over Biden's unwillingness to crown them Most Important Senator will find themselves back in positions where they can indeed make demands and help steer policies. They will each get to be on all the television shows, preening and saber-rattling about how they saved America from "socialism" this time around by insisting on new corporate jet chandelier deductions.
But they'll only be in that position if Biden's White House team believes they are gettable votes in the first place, and from last Election Day to this very moment not one of them has a record suggesting they would be actually willing to buck party-devoted obstructionism in exchange for that seat at the table. Of course Biden and Democratic senators weren't willing to delay pandemic relief action while Republicans who went along with six months of previous Republican sabotage of pandemic relief mouthed assurances that oh, for sure they might be willing to be something other than a malevolent hindrance this time around. Of course Biden and Democratic senators don't take current demands for "bipartisanship" seriously when "bipartisanship" is paired with maniacal Republican rants over how dare anyone consider water pipes infrastructure.
The Republican Party is a collection of crackpots, professional propagandists, white nationalists, conspiracy peddlers, and intentional saboteurs of public health propped up by the same supposed moderate voices demanding Biden’s assistance now. On the contrary, Democrats should be cutting them out of as much as possible. It needs to be made clear that there is no "moderation" involved in giving continued support to a party willing to act against our democracy and our public health both rather than abide nonconservative governance. A moderate would have left at this point. A true moderate could not stomach what this party has become.
