Democratic strategists are hopeful that Kamala Harris can avoid being held responsible for the inflation surge that has soured public discontent with President Biden, but that will be difficult given her key role in passing the bill that led to the worst price increases in four decades.
The Biden-Harris administration’s massive $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed a deeply divided Senate in March 2021 after Harris voted in favor of a pandemic spending bill that even leading Democratic economists warned would overheat the economy.
Republicans voted unanimously against the bill, criticizing it as unnecessary, underfunded, and dangerously inflationary. Even prominent economists with ties to liberal politics and the Democratic Party, such as Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard, warned that the ARP could cause significant inflation. Summers called the plan the “most irresponsible” economic policy of the past 40 years, arguing that it would drive demand beyond the economy’s capacity and lead to sustained inflation. Similarly, Blanchard expressed concern that the scale of spending could create significant inflationary pressures that could undermine economic stability in the long run.
Those warnings proved prescient: Shortly after Harris voted to pass the Senate’s largest deficit-increasing bill in a generation, long-simmering inflation erupted across the U.S. economy, pushing it to levels not seen in decades. By the following summer, inflation peaked at 9%, the fastest rate of price growth since 1981.
The inflation measure, passed by the House and signed into law by Biden shortly thereafter, was the first major legislative action of the Biden-Harris administration. With the economy already growing rapidly and workers returning to work as lockdowns were lifted, the Biden-Harris administration sought to put its own stamp on the economic recovery in hopes of negating the credit given to former President Trump’s pandemic aid package.
For Biden and Harris, passing the bill was seen as a political, if not economic, necessity. In the first Democratic presidential debate in 2019, Harris, then a senator from California, blasted the Trump economy, which she said was “not working for workers,” but that assertion was undermined by decades of low unemployment, low interest rates, low inflation and the highest wage growth in a generation.
During the campaigns, both Harris and Biden frequently claimed without evidence that Trump’s inadequate response to the pandemic damaged the economy, which grew in the second half of 2020 at its fastest pace in decades after a very deep recession that lasted several weeks in the spring.
The Biden-Harris spending bill pumped huge amounts of public money into the economy, including so-called “stimulus” checks providing $1,400 to hundreds of millions of Americans and a $300-a-week super unemployment benefit that will last through the summer. It doled out money to states, schools, local governments and small businesses in the name of pandemic relief. These funds spurred a surge in demand at a time when the supply side of the economy was still struggling, sparking an inflationary explosion that overwhelmed the U.S. economy.
Republicans had argued that the economy didn’t need the size of the Biden-Harris bill, especially since Congress had already passed a series of five massive spending bills with bipartisan support. They proposed significant changes to the plan, including scaling back the overall size to a more manageable but still large $650 billion and making the aid contingent on schools reopening and states lifting lockdown restrictions.
By passing the Biden-Harris pandemic spending package, which received no Republican support and was made possible only by Harris’ runoff vote in the Senate, Democrats are betraying the promises of national unity and cooperation that Biden and Harris made to voters throughout the 2020 election. Just a few weeks ago, Biden had made a call for unity the centerpiece of his inaugural address.
At the time, Harris and Biden appeared to enjoy exercising partisan power. Senator Susan Collins said at the time that “Democratic leadership was not interested in negotiating a targeted, bipartisan relief package that would address the challenges before us.” Instead, the Biden-Harris administration and Democratic leaders in Congress appeared to want a so-called “relief” package for which they could claim credit alone — a decision they would later regret when the economic effects of inflation became politically costly.
Harris’ vote wasn’t the first partisan-breaking vote in favor of an inflation bill, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last: About six weeks ago, she cast the first breaking vote to approve the pandemic spending bill blueprint and procedural steps that would have allowed the Senate to avoid a filibuster and pass the bill without Republican support.
“The vote is 50-50,” Harris said. “The Senate is tied, the vice president votes yes, and the resolution, as amended, will be adopted.”
of The New York Times Depicted the scene:
Those words carried weight, no doubt — they advanced hugely impactful legislation, of course — but they also signaled that the most influential voice in the country for the next two years may be that of Ms. Harris, declaring, in the stiff third person language of Senate procedure, which way the vice president will vote.
When she declared the resolution passed and slid her chair back from the desk, a smile was evident in her eyes, behind both masks.
Over the next year and a half, Harris continued to break centuries-old records of voting in favor of partisan legislation.
Her masked smile at the bill’s passage now seems ironic because it put the burden of inflation around Biden’s neck, jeopardizing his reelection chances even before his disastrously weak debate performance, and now threatening her credibility as a leader who can address what many Americans say is the biggest issue facing the country heading into the November election.
