In the first big test of the Biden presidency on Feb. 27, just two House Democrats voted against the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill that’s expected to clear the Senate and become law by mid-March. One of them was Jared Golden, the second term representative of Maine’s increasingly tricky 2nd District.
The northern and eastern part of the state has long been more conservative than the south, though not necessarily less Democratic. The slow shift away from labor voters among Democrats produced the current partisan split which, for the first time, saw the two congressional districts dividing their electoral vote in 2016, and again in 2020.
Golden knows that he won re-election even as Donald Trump carried his district, and that a certain amount of independence from his party is necessary to future viability. Yet taking the largely symbolic step of voting against Nancy Pelosi as House speaker is very different from opposing a new Democratic president’s top legislative priority.
In a press event shortly after the vote, Golden called it a “principled” decision, though the reasons he provided don’t follow a consistent theme.
Rather, he said more federal spending, after the $4 trillion allocated through four bills in 2020, was too much, too soon, and that it would be better to wait a few months, and see what comes of the infrastructure bill Biden has promised will come next.
There are several flaws in this reasoning. One is that the relief bill is overwhelmingly popular with voters, and is supported by the Federal Reserve chair appointed by Trump, Jerome Powell, and Biden’s nominee, Janet Yellen.
In essence, Golden is saying he has a better reading of an exceptionally volatile economy than a president of his own party, and the past and present leaders who determine national monetary policy.
The other problem is that, while an infrastructure bill is highly desirable – it was a major promise from Trump, never achieved – by definition its spending will unfold gradually over the next decade. It does nothing for Americans currently unemployed and struggling to pay their bills.
What Golden suggests is that more negotiations with Republicans would have produced a better result. In particular, he seems to see the $600 billion offer from a group of GOP senators led by Maine’s Susan Collins as a good starting point.
It’s hard to see this approach producing anything. After all, this is not the bipartisan moment when Democrat George Mitchell and Republican Bob Dole led the Senate and produced sheafs of important bills together while George H.W. Bush was president from 1989-93.
Since 1994, the GOP has featured the scorched-earth tactics of Newt Gingrich, and the unbending obstructionism of Mitch McConnell – who notoriously denied a Supreme Court nominee a hearing for nearly a year, just because he could.
It’s almost as if Golden were back in Collins’s office, where he was a staff member of the Homeland Security Committee, learning the political trade, before being elected to the Legislature in 2014. Sure, it would be a good thing if bipartisan negotiations again flourished, but that isn’t the political world that now exists.
Golden makes plausible points about the legislation. Yes, the checks could be further targeted to those most in need, as the Senate is now considering.
Yet claiming that states and cities, unlike private businesses, don’t need federal help after laying off an estimated 1.3 million employees is quite a stretch. This is far from the “blue state bailout” some Republicans claim: The three states with the biggest revenue declines are Texas, Florida and Alaska.
And there are larger forces at work that Golden chooses to overlook. After the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, ten House Republicans voted to impeach Trump, and seven GOP senators, including Collins, voted to convict.
To this day, though, the vast majority of House Republicans continue to support the belief that Biden’s presidency is illegitimate, and that Trump was unfairly denied a second term, even though these are false and dangerous claims that imperil democracy itself.
As soon as impeachment was done, Republicans returned to the McConnell playbook. Not a single House Republican voted for the relief bill, and it appears all 50 Republican senators, including Collins, will oppose it.
This isn’t a situation where one can straddle the partisan divide, as Golden is attempting to do. By contrast, Collins has never wavered from her side, on Barack Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act and even such massively unpopular measures as Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cut.
Golden is betting he can be both for and against the Biden presidential agenda. We’ll know in two years whether that bet pays off.
Douglas Rooks, a Maine editor, reporter, opinion writer and author for 36 years, has published books about George Mitchell, and the Maine Democratic Party. He welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net
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