From the left: Biden’s Bipartisanship Bungle
Team Biden and Democrats erred in rejecting Republicans’ offer of a $600 billion COVID relief plan in February and passing their own $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan instead, laments Bloomberg Opinion’s Matthew Yglesias. With bipartisan COVID-relief and infrastructure bills and possible bipartisan science funding, Biden “could claim to have delivered” on his vow to unite the country — and maybe even gotten Sen. Joe Manchin to back his Build Back Better plan. Instead, Dems “set aside the possibility of bipartisanship in pursuit of more far-reaching legislation,” despite their narrow majority. That now looks “like foolishness. The current slog is more reflective of the underlying political reality, and Biden and his party would almost certainly be better off today had they acknowledged this reality from the start.”
From the right: Dems Target W.Va’s Poor
“The Democrats love the poor. The Democrats hate the poor. And the poor in West Virginia? They’re at the bottom of the bucket,” scoffs National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson. Dems have targeted Sen. Joe Manchin, “the moderate Democrat from West Virginia,” because he, and the West Virginians he represents, didn’t agree with everything in their Build Back Better plan and killed it. Manchin “is about as far to the political left as today’s West Virginia is going to go,” but Democrats act like “voting Republican is just one more pathology that afflicts the toothless hillbillies of their imagination.” They can’t, or won’t, understand “that there are poor and struggling Americans who do not instinctively turn to welfare-statism as the answer to their problems.”
Libertarian: Joe’s Ignorance About . . . Delaware
“President Joe Biden knows that his home state of Delaware is also home to more corporations than just about any other place on the planet — but he doesn’t seem to know why,” quips Reason’s Eric Boehm. “I come from Delaware,” the prez boasted, while pushing his tax-heavy Build Back Better bill, “so I understand big business.” Yet Delaware “didn’t become America’s top destination for corporate headquarters by raising taxes on the businesses that operate there. The state is famous for its favorable tax laws, including no sales tax [and] no corporate income tax on revenue earned outside of Delaware.” Meanwhile, Biden’s BBB plan hikes “the corporate tax rate to 28 percent” — the opposite of his state’s approach.
Conservative: How Hubris Haunts the Left
“The left is being consumed by its own hatreds and hubris,” declares Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness. Take COVID: Joe Biden took advantage of it, from using lockdowns “to run a virtual campaign from his basement to equating Donald Trump with the” virus. Democrats believed panic “could help achieve single-payer health care, or a recalibrated capitalism, or the end of Donald Trump himself.” Yet there have been “far more deaths” under Biden than Trump, despite “ubiquitous vaccinations, new therapies and antiviral drugs.” Biden wouldn’t want someone “to do to him what he did to Trump: question the efficacy and safety of the vaccines, blame Biden for more than 400,000 deaths on his watch and claim the continuance of the pandemic was Biden’s fault alone.” But it would logically follow Dems’ own “rhetoric and actions.”
Pandemic journal: Fauci’s Latest COVID Fear
“It has been evident for some time now that while the omicron variant is more transmissible than earlier COVID variants, it also appears to cause less severe symptoms,” and now, notes the Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll, even the Biden administration admits that, with Dr. Anthony Fauci citing data confirming “less severity” in terms of hospitalizations. Yet Fauci also stressed that people shouldn’t be “complacent” given the high volume of new infections, even though there’s “no evidence that omicron is causing hospitals to be overrun with COVID patients,” which “seems to be what Fauci is afraid of.” Hopefully, as Paxlovid — a new drug that limits severity — becomes more available, “we’ll never have to hear about what Dr. Fauci is afraid of ever again.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
