The LuLac Edition #4,484, March 17th, 2021

WRITE ON WEDNESDAY

Our “Write On Wednesday” logo.

This week we reprise a column written by Martin Schram who specifically tells Trump voters that Je Biden will keep his promises….to THEM.

BIDEN KEEPS A PROMISE: RESCUING TRUMP VOTERS

Today, while we welcome all readers, we are especially talking to just 74,222,959 of you.

You’re the folks who voted to reelect Donald Trump last November. And frankly, we’ve understood each other ever since the summer of 2015, when I was impressed enough by the power of your presence at his first political rallies that I wrote that on Election Day 2016 no one should be shocked if those mad-as-hell rally-goers elected our next president. (And many of you remain convinced by his continued insistence that you did it again in November — and he really won in a landslide.)

But today we’re going to talk about something that I know just shocked you. For this week, President Joe Biden demonstrated that he has just kept a huge promise he made to you on Inauguration Day, one I know you didn’t really believe when he said it.

Biden promised he would be the president of all the people, even those who voted for Trump. But we have all just survived a year in which the impossible and unfathomable happened. In the year since this pandemic exploded across the nation, you have seen the jobs die, and then the people too. Many of you lost confidence that you could ever again regain the means to be your family’s proud provider. Shaken and shattered, you felt the only luck you had was bad.

But this week, the president you tried to keep out of the Oval Office just kept his promise — by rescuing you, your family and millions of other Trump-believers and backers — big-time!

President Biden rescued you by signing into law the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Act that will immediately begin giving you money to buy your family’s food or maybe make an overdue payment on your family home. Yet not a single Republican in the Senate or House dared or cared enough to join them in voting for the bill that is now rushing dollars you need into your bank accounts.

Those Democrats you used to rail against and ridicule will be giving your family and all Americans of modest means (who earn less than $75,000 annually):

• $1,400 plus another $1,400 for each dependent they claim on their taxes;

• $300 in increased unemployment benefits payments that will be extended until Labor Day;

• child tax credits will be increased to $3,600 for those under age 6, and $3,000 for those ages 6 to 17.

The massive bill includes funding for pandemic-related urgent needs in vaccinations, testing and tracing; plus substantial aid programs for rent and mortgage payments, day care, schools, small-business loans, restaurants and local transit systems.

But I’m guessing that what you really find painful is the realization that all members of your Republican Party in Congress were so blindly willing to turn their backs on your urgent needs in your time of desperation. It didn’t even make political sense. While 75% of Americans told pollsters they supported the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan Act, a whopping 60% of Republicans also favored the huge rescue plan.

This was not breaking news. In Florida, while Trump won the election with 51% of the vote last November, those same voters in that conservative state approved an increase of the state’s minimum wage to $15 by a whopping 60.8% of the vote.

In this era when cable news channels rely more on talking heads telling us what they think about and how they feel, CNN provided an informative insight by returning to the days of shoe-leather journalism. CNN’s excellent correspondent Gary Tuchman went into the heart of West Virginia’s coal mining country and found overwhelming support for Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act in Mingo County, which voted 85% for Trump in 2020.

In the county seat, Williamson, West Virginia, coal miner Kevin Johnson, a Republican Trump voter who lost his job in the past pandemic year, welcomed the rescue bill and said he would use the money to “pay off the rent and pay some bills because we’re behind, you know?”

After others sounded the same refrain, Tuchman asked Sherran Ray Justice how he felt about the fact that no Republican in Congress voted for this rescue measure that was so positively viewed in Mingo County. “Yeah, that’s some bull — hogwash bull,” Justice said, disapproving of the Republicans’ rigid inflexibility back in Washington. “… They should loosen up a bit, y’know what I mean?”

Meanwhile, back in the nation’s capital, at least one conservative Republican was eager to show some flexibility — in a way that is far from admirable. Shortly after voting against Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., performed a feat of considerable flexibility as he rushed to take credit for the bill’s provision that will significantly aid restaurants back home.

Wicker tweeted: “Independent restaurant operators have won $28.6 billion worth of targeted relief. This funding will ensure small businesses can survive the pandemic by helping to adapt their operations and keep their employees on the payroll.”

Down home in Wicker’s Tupelo, worshippers at the First Baptist Church, where the senator is a deacon, may well admire his demonstration of political flexibility as a feat of fine Ole Miss chutzpah.