Democratic leaders have now endorsed an emerging bipartisan framework in the Senate for a $908 billion package as the starting point for new negotiations with Senate Republicans.
This is a remarkable turn of events. Earlier this fall, Democrats were calling for $2 trillion in new spending. Now they're willing to accept less than half of that -- in a proposal that includes some assistance for state governments, the unemployed and small businesses but lacks direct cash payments to individuals -- as the baseline for negotiations.
It's difficult to say whether moving so dramatically toward Republicans has any utility. The problem is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., tends to treat such movements not as something to respond to with movement of his own, but rather as something merely to exploit tactically.
So McConnell, who is still insisting on a package of around $500 billion that does not include aid to state governments, is likely to seize on this and continue to refuse to budge. He will hope to end up somewhere between $500 billion and $900 billion and then call that a "compromise."
To reiterate, this is a problem with no simple answer. But here's what I think is going on with Democrats right now.
The starting point for understanding their perspective is what Joe Biden said Monday. The president-elect commented that anything that passes during the lame duck session will likely be "at best just a start."
This means that Democrats badly want to get something done before the end of the year just to throw some money at the deepening economic crisis, on the thinking that next year will offer new opportunities.
This is also functionally a concession that McConnell's control over what gets floor votes is a problem for Democrats: He has been forcing Democrats to vote against much smaller stimulus bills, which is a position they don't want to be in forever.
But the $908 billion compromise proposal has at least the chance of shifting the dynamic somewhat, a Democratic aide told me. McConnell has been able to hold all his Republican members with him in opposition to the much bigger stimulus Democrats want, and crucially hold them with him while he refuses to negotiate at all.
But now that's changing: With several Republicans (such as Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah) endorsing the compromise plan, that suggests McConnell will not be able to hold all his members in opposition to doing something for much longer.
In endorsing the compromise but only as a starting point for talks, Democrats hope that it's becoming increasingly untenable for McConnell to refuse to enter into genuine negotiations.
"McConnell has refused to be at the negotiating table since the spring," the Democratic aide told me. "His members are clearly tired of it."
Of course, it's still plausible that McConnell will seize on the fact that Democrats have moved dramatically toward him, and he'll try to make very minimal concessions and call the result a compromise. But it's not clear that doing nothing is an option for Democrats, either. And plainly, Biden wants some sort of rescue package put into circulation before he takes over, even if it's minimal.
Biden provided a clue on his thinking in his new interview with Tom Friedman. Biden suggested that the bite of economic misery would put more pressure on Senate Republicans.
"When you have cops and firefighters and first responders across the board being laid off, when you're not getting the kind of distribution of vaccines out to rural America," he said, "it has to have some consequences."
Biden apparently believes that once he's in office, and especially if economic misery is spreading and people are clamoring for more federal action against the pandemic, he'll be able to exert a lot more pressure on Republicans.
One can envision House Democrats passing a large rescue package at that point and Biden and Democrats demanding that Senate Republicans step up and work with the new president, who will suddenly command a lot more media attention. They might vividly highlight the suffering of Americans as they do.
Yes, McConnell's strategy will be to try to inflict as much economic misery as possible to make Biden own the politics of a grueling recovery. But at least Biden appears to grasp that he will have to exert the rawest of political pressure on Republicans to have any hope of getting them to buckle. He appears to want to get through to that point.
Sargent writes for The Washington Post.