#Senior Writer-More content below More content below Yahoo News White House gambling Republican resistance to COVID relief package will prove costly for GOP

A new memo emphasizes that President Biden's White House believes his $ 1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan is good policy, as well as good policy, potentially harming its Republican rivals while helping Americans who suffer. the coronavirus pandemic.

"There seems to be a growing conventional wisdom that it is politically smart, or at worst gratuitous, for the Republican Party to take an obstructionist, partisan and grassroots stance," said Mike Donilon, one of the president's top advisers. . , he wrote to senior White House staff Tuesday in a memo published by Axios. However, there is much evidence that the opposite is true: that it is not politically smart for the Republican Party to go this way. And instead of being free, this approach has been quite detrimental to them. "

Republicans seem willing to repeat the tactics they employed the last time a Democrat occupied the White House, hampering Biden's agenda whenever possible. This proved to be an effective strategy in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014, when Republicans won the vote to take control of Congress, governors' mansions, and state legislatures. But Donilon has proposed that stubborn resistance is hurting the Republican Party, citing a New York Times story that cited a drop in registered Republicans and the favorability ratings of Republican leaders in Congress well below those of the president. Democrats have also cited last month's special Senate election in Georgia, where they won two Republican seats. 

"People need relief, and they need it now," Rebecca Katz, a Democratic strategist, told Yahoo News. “Republicans are going through a little identity crisis, and while trying to figure out who they should listen to, Democrats are fighting for real relief. It's really easy to explain. "

"The Georgia Democrats put out a very simple message about the results that Georgians could feel in their pockets," Katz added. “It was the first time in the entire 2020 election that Democrats showed a clear message and it worked. They need to learn from that. "

Biden has been steadfast in his message since he took office: he would prefer bipartisan support in the stimulus package, but with the moral argument of going big in the short term to help those who suffer most, and the economic argument of going Big time in the long-term to avoid a prolonged recession, you are not willing to significantly reduce the size of the bill or delay it longer than necessary to achieve it. The president has cited the lessons of 2009, when then-President Barack Obama's drive to garner 60 votes in the Senate and fulfill his campaign promise to unify America resulted in weaker stimulus and, Democrats now argue, in consequences. prolonged economic

"In my view, the biggest risk is not going too big, is if we make it too small," Biden said in a speech at the White House on February 5.

"We've been here before. When this nation hit the Great Recession that Barack and I inherited in 2009, I was asked to lead the effort on economic recovery law to pass it. It was a huge recovery package, roughly $ 800 billion. I did everything I could to get it passed, including getting three Republicans to change their votes and vote for it. But it wasn't enough. It wasn't big enough. It stopped the crisis, but the recovery could have been faster or even greater. Today we need an answer that faces the challenge of this crisis, not one that falls short ”.

Democrats are willing to use the budget reconciliation process to pass the bill with just 50 votes in the Senate and Vice President Kamala Harris as a tiebreaker. It's the same process used by Republicans to pass a massive tax reform in 2017 that disproportionately benefited the wealthy. This has undermined the GOP messages against the Biden relief bill both in the method Democrats are taking to pass it and the potential impact on the budget deficit and national debt.