Is Joe Biden shifting the goalposts on $2000 pandemic-relief checks?
Joe Biden has shown us his package:
President-elect Joe Biden has unveiled a $1.9tn (£1.4tn) stimulus plan for the coronavirus-sapped US economy before he takes office next week.
If passed by Congress, it would include $1tn for households, with direct payments of $1,400 to all Americans.
If you’ve paid attention to Democratic politicians this year, you might be confused by that “$1,400” number, because Democrats promised direct payments of $2000, not $1400. Now, the BBC article I quote does explain how Biden justified offering $1400 instead of $2000:
The direct payments of $1,400 would come on top of $600 payments provided in a relief bill enacted last month.
Unfortunately, that would still be a walking-back of the $2000 promise, because Democrats promised a new $2000 check, not just $1400 on top of last year’s $600. Some Democrats have held to the promise, among them Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez —
— Pramila Jayapal —
— and newly minted Congresswoman Cori Bush:
In short, Congresspeople in Joe Biden’s own party want him to stop moving the goalposts on the $2000 that the party promised in pandemic relief. I can end this blog post here, right?
Biden’s defenders maintain that he’s not moving the goalposts
Unfortunately, as one can see from the replies to each of those tweets (especially Bush’s for some reason), there are a lot of people running cover for Biden’s $1400 switcheroo. Even The American Prospect’s David Dayen (who is normally very good!) rationalized the $1400-as-$2000 bait and switch by pointing out that AOC had proposed $2000 last year, before last month’s round of $600 checks, and so (in his mind) the $1400 was just the second installment of the promised $2000.
A lot of seemingly normal people (inasmuch as volunteer PR flacks for Joe Biden can be considered normal) on Twitter used a similar defense, writing off the dispute as Cori Bush and others failing to understand basic arithmetic.
Other Biden-defenders were more aggressive, outright calling the people demanding $2000 instead of $1400 “stupid”, ignorant of mathematics, “disingenuous”, destructive, or guilty of “gaslighting”.
Democrats really did move the goalposts
Far from being stupid or disingenuous, AOC, Jayapal, and Bush are simply in the right; Biden and his acolytes are simply in the wrong. Here’s why.
Biden and his amateur PR team are hiding behind the grain of truth that Democrats, once upon a time, did demand a $2000 check in lieu of a $600 check. However, that was in December. On 21 December Congress passed a bill legislating for a $600 check, and in the remaining week and a half of 2020, House Democrats (and Donald Trump!) called for that $600 check to be blown up to a $2000 check, until Trump signed the $600-check bill into law on the 27th and Mitch McConnell halted the push for $2000 checks at the end of 2020.
Had high-profile Democrats not made any more “$2000” promises since then, Biden’s defenders would arguably be correct.
But high-profile Democrats in fact continued to promise $2000 checks in January 2021, motivated by the chance to eke out a Senate majority in Georgia’s two US Senate elections on the 5th of January. None other than president-elect Joe Biden promised that “if you send Jon and the Reverend [the two Senate elections’ Democratic candidates] to Washington, those 2000-dollar checks will go out the door”.
Biden’s promise was seconded by his VP(-elect) Kamala Harris, by Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and by the Democratic candidates in Georgia themselves, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who scored narrow victories (Ossoff by about 1.2%, Warnock by about 2.1%) on the back of the promise.
Ossoff had tweeted on 2 January, and again on the 4th, that the Democrats could pass “$2000 relief checks” only if they won the Georgia elections.
Then, on the last day of voting, he’d told reporters in person that “[w]hen we win both of these Senate races, we will pass $2,000 stimulus checks immediately”.
Warnock was still more direct, tweeting on the first day of 2021 that his Republican opponent Kelly Loeffler “[wa]sn’t in DC fighting for a $2,000 relief check”, along with a snazzy graphic depicting a single $2000 Treasury check accompanied by the text “WANT A $2,000 CHECK? #VOTEWARNOCK”.
To drive the message home, Warnock posted on Instagram the same image of a check made out for $2000 next to the same “WANT A $2,000 CHECK? #VOTEWARNOCK” message.
Warnock followed those posts with 3 more tweets over the next two days. On January the 2nd, he tweeted that while Kelly Loeffler was “in the Senate, Georgians will not get the $2,000 relief checks they need to survive”. On the 3rd, he tweeted about “what [h]e heard” after asking “Georgians why they needed a $2,000 relief check”, posting another tweet 4 hours later: “Vote for $2,000 relief checks” with a graphic saying “$2,000 RELIEF CHECKS NOW”.
Warnock’s January messaging was admirably clear: in exchange for voting him into the Senate, he’d fight to get you precisely one (1) check with “2000.00” literally printed on it. If he and the other Democrats had stuck to talking about “checks” in the plural, you could conceivably contrive a pedantic defense that “checks” referred to checks in general, including the $600 checks approved and disbursed from December (though that defense would still ignore the fact that such abstract “checks” were promised conditional on Ossoff and Warnock being elected into a new meeting of Congress under a Biden administration, distinct from the meeting of Congress that approved $600 checks under Trump). But Warnock’s crystal-clear references to a single $2000 check blow apart even that overly charitable defense.
Biden fans and Democratic partisans might want to retreat to a final, weakest version of that defense: even if Warnock repeatedly referred to a “$2,000 check” in the singular, Biden never did, so Biden himself didn’t lie.
But Biden himself did move the goalposts
That last line of defense still ignores the fact that Biden promised $2000 checks in January, but let that slide. The defense actually fails on its own terms, because it turns out that Biden explicitly promised Georgia voters a “$2000 stimulus check”, singular, if they elected Ossoff and Warnock.
Skip to 39 minutes into the full video of Biden, Warnock, and Ossoff holding a rally in Atlanta the day before the Georgia elections. Biden says:
The power, the power is literally in your hands, unlike any time in my career, one state, one state, can chart the course, not just for the next 4 years, but for the next generation. By electing Jon and the Reverend, you can make an immediate difference in your own lives, the lives of the people all across this country, because their election will put an end to the block in Washington — that $2000 stimulus check, that money that will go out the door immediately, to help people who’re in real trouble! Think about what it’ll mean to your lives!
Not only does Biden refer explicitly to a single $2000 check, but he promises to get it “out the door immediately”. Both facts confirm that he’s not counting the $600 December checks; promising to send already disbursed checks “out the door immediately” would be nonsensical. And I’m not the only person to register the significance of this bit of Biden’s speech. Other people spotted the same snippet and clipped it on C-SPAN’s website multiple times, labelling it “that moment when joe biden promised 2000 if georgia just voted for Democrats” and “He Said It”.
So there we have it. Raphael Warnock and, most importantly, Joe Biden explicitly promised a freestanding $2000 check if Warnock and Ossoff were elected. Having been told that, Georgia voters duly elected Warnock and Ossoff. The Democrats, foremost among them Warnock and Biden, therefore owe them a direct payment of $2000, not $1400. That includes Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff, who, genius that he is, quoted a tweet mentioning Biden’s proposal of “$1,400 checks to individuals” and rewrote it into an offer of “New $2k relief checks”. Yes, Schiff literally used the word “New”.
If the Democrats don’t approve a new direct payment of $2000, Joe Biden will have lied, with Warnock and Schiff (and Harris and Pelosi and Ossoff) having enabled the lie. If anyone has shifted the goalposts, it’s them. Not AOC or Cori Bush or Lee Carter or Susan Sarandon or Rebecca Nagle or Peter Daou or the DSA or Ryan Knight or Ashley Reese or anyone else demanding only the fulfilment of a promise.
Update, March 15: the phrase “by Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi” originally linked to Nancy Pelosi’s Wikipedia article, rather than her relevant tweet of 5 January. I now fix that link.
Thanks for The inflation.
Ra ra. Go team blue. Go team blue. We are for you! Team blue!