In January 5, as results came in from the Senate runoff election in Georgia, the texts between President-elect Joe Biden’s senior staff went late into the night and into the next morning. With the Senate majority on the line, and full control of Washington in their grasp, the outcome of the two Georgia races would determine the fate of what they all agreed was their top priority for the new administration — passing a massive Covid relief package in the opening weeks.
They’d been working on it for nearly two months, identifying needs and, at Biden’s direction, crafting the plan around them, regardless of cost. But if the Democrats won in Georgia, the plan would suddenly go from an aspiration they would have to bargain with Republicans over, to a reality as long as they kept their party unified.
With no war room to report to that night, no headquarters or even a transition office to gather in, the Biden staffers were all glued to the TVs in their homes around Washington, or, in the case of incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain, in Delaware with Biden, firing off texts to one another as each Georgia county reported results.
“Everybody understood for weeks what the impact of winning the two Georgia races might be,” Steve Ricchetti, the long-time Biden adviser who would become counselor to the president, told CNN in an interview. “We invested a lot of time and effort in it in the weeks leading up to it because we obviously understood what it could mean for our agenda.”
By late morning the next day, it was clear that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock had done the improbable, sweeping both races in Georgia and delivering the Senate back to the Democrats less than a month before Biden took office.
The twin victories marked a political earthquake for the incoming president and opened the door to one of the largest public health and economic relief proposals in US history.
For all of Biden’s talk of bipartisanship, Democrats now had the power to move their top priority without a single Republican vote. It was the same situation as 2009, when the Obama administration rushed to pass a relief package during his first month in office. Back then Democrats lowered the size of the plan to garner some Republican support, a decision many of them came to regret during the slow recovery that followed.
This time would be different. From the outset, the common goal among Biden’s team was to go big — even if that meant going it alone.
At $1.9 trillion, the American Rescue Plan is second only in size to last year’s $2.2 trillion CARES Act. When it was first unveiled to the public on January 14, the assumption among Republicans and even some Democrats was that Biden’s nearly $2 trillion moonshot was an opening offer, a place to start negotiations that would inevitably lead to a smaller price tag.
But there would be no negotiating from Biden’s team. That was the number, and while there was room to bargain over marginal side items, the topline wasn’t moving.
This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen officials from the White House, Capitol Hill and outside interest groups who worked directly with the campaign and transition on Biden’s cornerstone legislative proposal. CNN also spoke to Republican lawmakers and aides who remain agog at the size of the package and the speed with which Biden has pushed it along.
-CNN