This wasn’t the fault of parents. Congress did it by refusing to reauthorize the payments of up to $300 per child each month under President Biden’s expanded child tax credit. The expiration of other benefits provided during the pandemic made things worse.
On the same day, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had an important announcement to make. In a more humane world, he might have addressed this dramatic turnaround in the lives of children. You’d think that a party committed to rolling back abortion rights would want to demonstrate that its dedication to life extends to children after they are born.
But McCarthy had something else on his mind: impeaching Biden. More precisely, he announced a vague impeachment inquiry without providing any evidence of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that are the Constitution’s standard for such a momentous action. He offered little about how this inquiry would move forward.
Clearly, McCarthy hoped the impeachment sop would be a magic elixir for party unity. But it could not bring him even the temporary peace he needs with the 20 or so far-right members of his caucus who are eager to shut down the government and keep threatening to throw him out of his job. A frustrated McCarthy, The Post reported, resorted to the f-word at a House Republican Conference meeting on Thursday, daring his tormentors to try to remove him. But f-words don’t get budgets passed.
There’s good reason for rage at two levels: basic governance and vision.
Washington is a mess primarily because about 5 percent of House members on the far right insist on getting what they want despite what the voters decided in 2022. With a Democrat in the White House, voters gave the GOP a very thin majority in the House and Democrats a comparably slender majority in the Senate.
This means bold moves rightward or leftward are, for now, impossible. Biden accepted this in the deal he made with McCarthy in May to prevent a debt default. In the Senate, both Democrats and Republicans accepted the need for compromise on spending bills. Only the House, held hostage by radicals, seems prepared to blow everything up.
The larger failure is rooted in the lack of vision created by ideological blinders. Ironically, the surge in child poverty brought about by the expiration of the expanded child tax credit made clear that this was a government program that achieved exactly what it promised to do. We saw what life was like with it — and without it.
The same census report brought home government’s capacity to do good with some positive news: Thanks to Obamacare and recent improvements in the program made under Biden, the share of Americans without health insurance dropped to 7.9 percent. In 2009, before Obamacare, 19.4 percent of Americans lacked health insurance for at least part of the year.
Sure, libertarians want to get government out of all sorts of activities. But most Americans, including most conservatives, are a long way from pure libertarianism. A significant portion of the spending that eased the economic impact of covid-19 was passed on a bipartisan basis.
A more benevolent and practical political system would examine how pandemic-era programs — such as the expanded child tax credit and expanded support for child care — improved life for millions of Americans. The debate the country needs would focus on the lessons of these experiments, how to build on that knowledge and, yes, how to pay for the programs we ought to bring back.
The person who needs to lead this effort is Biden. There is so much talk about his age that a key factor in his polling troubles is widely overlooked: The end of the pandemic relief is leaving a lot of Americans worse off than they were.
The Bidenomics investments that did pass are worthy, even visionary, but many of their payoffs are indirect and long term. The parts of the Biden program that fell away included measures that offered immediate help, often by extending versions of the emergency interventions. The president needs to renew the fight for them and make that battle central to his 2024 campaign.
House Republicans risk kicking away their majority with the impeachment sideshow and their signature chaos. But the disillusionment with Washington they’re leaving in their wake could haunt Biden far more than a few stumbles or garbled sentences. He needs to make clear to voters who is to blame for their frustration — and convince them that building back better is still a good idea.
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