President Joe Biden's decision to plow ahead on passing his $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package without the help of Washington Republicans has plenty of GOP officials outside the Beltway cheering. Alongside the wildly high support among the American public, many Republican mayors and governors are desperately hoping Biden pulls through on providing the very federal aid their D.C. counterparts have insisted on excluding.
Biden's plan is expected to include $350 billion in assistance for states and cities—funding that congressional Republicans have repeatedly dismissed as wasteful. But someone like first-term Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer in California is pulling for Biden and congressional Democrats to help shore up the city's $31 million budget shortfall that could result in hundreds of layoffs.
“It’s not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue,” Dyer, a Republican and former police chief for the city, told the Washington Post. “It’s a public health issue. It’s an economic issue. And it’s a public safety issue.”
The federal aid, say many GOP mayors and governors, will help keep local police and firefighters employed, prevent the closures of struggling local businesses, and provide resources for swelling numbers of hungry and homeless residents.
Last Friday, Biden hosted a bipartisan group of local and state officials at the White House to discuss their most urgent concerns. “You folks are all on the front lines and dealing with the crisis since day one,” he told the group, which included the GOP governors of Maryland and Arkansas along with the Republican mayors of Miami and Oklahoma City. According to the Post, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez later told reporters that he’d had more communication with the Biden White House in the first several weeks of his administration than with Trump’s administration “in the entirety.”
The pain has not been spread evenly among states and locales, with those that rely more on tourism and fossil fuels typically taking a harder economic hit during the pandemic. But everyone’s budget has been impacted, according to Oklahoma City's Republican Mayor David Holt. “I don’t know of any city that hasn’t been affected negatively,” Holt said. “Some may be worse off than others. But we have all had to make cuts.”
What the bipartisan group demonstrated more than anything is just how far out in the wilderness GOP lawmakers in Washington are in their criticism of the bill. Biden not only has the support of a number of cities and states run by Republicans, but an impressively broad spectrum of the American public.
It seems the only people carping about the so-called "blue state bailouts" is Washington Republicans, who used their power in 2017 to pass a costly $2 trillion tax giveaway to the rich. Today, most everyone else outside of congressional Republicans is both desperate and eager for the federal aid. Yet another instance where a manufactured GOP talking point turns out to be wildly off the mark in the real world.