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Why Coronavirus Relief Is Dividing the Republican Party

Why Coronavirus Relief Is Dividing the Republican Party

It’s looking increasingly unlikely that Republican senators will reach a consensus on the next coronavirus relief bill anytime soon — and that’s before they would have to hammer out a compromise with House Democrats. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a sly reference to the perennial Washington headline about “Democrats in Disarray,” said it was now the Republicans’ turn: “Their delay is their disarray.”

The pandemic has left GOP lawmakers deeply splintered, not just over tactics or strategy but on basic principles. There are roughly four factions, as of this writing, and if they don’t find a way to heal their fractures, U.S. workers and the overall economy will suffer even more.

The core issue is that the pandemic is an uncertain and evolving threat, a combination of an external attack and an internal failure. For Democrats, the answer to both of these challenges is the same: more intervention, stricter rules and greater spending. Republicans, in contrast, have traditionally supported government-led action and unrestrained spending only to battle foreign foes; with some notable exceptions, they have preferred to leave domestic issues to the private sector or the states.

True, some of these splinters predate Covid-19. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, caused some GOP lawmakers and many voters to become suspicious of government action against even external threats.

The pandemic has pushed this group over the edge. Congress has spent almost half as much fighting Covid-19 over the last four months as it spent in nearly 20 years fighting the war on terror. Yet cases are still rising and there are renewed calls for more lockdowns. Unless there is a realistic plan to cure the virus and completely reopen the economy, they are not prepared to spend another dime leading the U.S. even deeper into what appears to be a quagmire.

There is another group, while sympathetic to these objections, that sees the main issue as the reckless promiscuity of the original Cares Act, passed last March.

They argue that the law gave potentially hundreds of billions of dollars to people who didn’t need it and created an unemployment insurance system that paid people not to work. At the same time, it failed to adequately fund the testing-and-tracing programs necessary to successfully suppress the virus. Members of this group want to keep the cost of a new bill low and focus on measures that are directly related to reducing the spread of the virus.

A third faction continues to believe that Covid-19 should be treated as external threat and that the full force of the U.S. government should be enlisted against it. That means more money for public health, schools and biomedical research, as well as continuing aid for struggling workers and businesses. Failure to pass a new Cares Act would only prolong the battle against the virus and further weaken the economy.

Lastly, there are a few senators who are not enthusiastic about more spending, but could tolerate it if it were accompanied by longer-term measures to help the economy. Their thinking goes something like this: No one knows how long the virus will last or how much economic growth will return. So spending decisions should be judged on what they do now to help end the virus and what they’ll do later to help speed the recovery.

This taxonomy isn’t exhaustive by any means, and there are undoubtedly many congressional Republicans who fit into more than one group, or none at all. Bringing them all together will require what the party is most lacking right now: a clear vision of how get out of this crisis with as little death and devastation as possible. With that in place, the virus hawks might be willing to tolerate more spending, and the virus doves might be willing to trim their demands.

What that vision might consist of is anyone’s guess. Yet this much is clear: Until they can agree on a vision, even an imperfect one, the Republican Senate — and by extension the government itself — may well find itself paralyzed.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Karl W. Smith, a former assistant professor of economics at the University of North Carolina and founder of the blog Modeled Behavior, is vice president for federal policy at the Tax Foundation.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.