Joe Biden Did a Lucy and Pulled the Football From Republicans
Conventional wisdom has been that Republicans won’t negotiate in good faith with Joe Biden, that bipartisan talks were just a ploy to waste precious time, and that Mitch McConnell would sandbag any deal at the eleventh hour—like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. I’m starting to think it’s the other way around. Maybe Joe Biden is Lucy?
After a bipartisan group of senators announced the framework for a compromise $1.2 trillion COVID-19 bill, hopes were high that the fever had broken. At least, that was true until Biden made it clear that he would only sign the compromise bill if he simultaneously received what he wanted on a party-line reconciliation bill vote with the rest of his two-trillion-dollars-and-change “infrastructure” package that stretched the meaning of the word to cover a wishlist of Democratic priorities.
In other words, Biden announced a bipartisan deal with his right hand and yanked it back with his left. “If this [the bipartisan bill] is the only one that comes to me,” he said, “I’m not signing it. It’s in tandem.”