Republica Press

Your Business & Political News Source

REPUBLICA PRESS
Your Business & Political News Source

Republican Party

Defying Critics, Biden and Federal Reserve Insist Economic Recovery Remains on Track

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“We should be on track for a fantastic American comeback summer, full steam ahead,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said this month on the chamber floor. “From vaccinations to job growth, the new Biden administration inherited favorable trends in every direction.”

“But in several important ways, the decisions of elected Democrats have contributed to slowing the return to normalcy,” he added.

Critics have also questioned the wisdom of the Fed’s commitment to keeping interest rates low and buying bonds even as prices begin to rise. Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, said last month that while the Fed “maintains that this bout of inflation will be mild and temporary,” it “may be time for the central bank to consider the alternative.”

Mr. Biden’s aides say they continue to monitor the threat that consumer prices could spiral upward, forcing a rapid policy response that could slam the brakes on economic growth. They say that those risks remain low, and that they see no reason to change course on the president’s agenda, including proposed infrastructure and social programs that the president asserts will bolster the economy for years to come. That agenda could prove a more difficult sell, even among congressional Democrats, if job growth continues to disappoint and inflation soars higher than expected.

Fed officials also remain undaunted. They show no sign of raising interest rates soon and are continuing to buy $120 billion in government-backed bonds each month. Officials have given only the earliest hints that they might begin to tiptoe away from that emergency policy setting. They argue that their job is to manage risks, and the risk of withdrawing help early is bigger than the risk that the economy will overheat.

“I don’t think it would be good for the industries we want to see thriving as the recovery continues for us to close off that recovery prematurely,” Randal K. Quarles, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, said at a House committee hearing this week as lawmakers pressed him on the threat of inflation. The Fed is independent of the White House, but responsible for keeping prices in check.

Voters give Mr. Biden high marks for his economic stewardship thus far. A solid majority of Americans — including many Republicans — approve of the president’s plans to raise taxes on high earners and corporations to fund new spending on water pipes, electric vehicles, education, child care assistance, paid leave and other programs, according to polling for The New York Times conducted by the online research firm Survey Monkey from May 3 to 9.

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Republicans Reject Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal

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WASHINGTON — The Biden administration sent Senate Republicans an offer on Friday for a bipartisan infrastructure agreement that sliced more than $500 billion off the president’s initial proposal, a move that White House officials hoped would jump-start the talks but that Republicans swiftly rejected.

The lack of progress emboldened liberals in Congress to call anew for Mr. Biden to abandon his hopes of forging a compromise with a Republican conference that has denounced his $4 trillion economic agenda as too expensive and insufficiently targeted. They urged the president instead to begin an attempt to move his plans on a party-line vote through the same process that produced his economic stimulus legislation this year.

Mr. Biden has said repeatedly that he wants to move his infrastructure plans with bipartisan support, which key centrist Democrats in the Senate have also demanded. But the president has insisted that Republicans spend far more than they have indicated they are willing to.

He also says that the bill must contain a wide-ranging definition of “infrastructure” that includes investments in fighting climate change and providing home health care, which Republicans have called overly expansive.

countered with a $568 billion plan, though many Democrats consider that offer even smaller because it includes extensions of some federal infrastructure spending at expected levels. In a memo on Friday to Republicans, obtained by The New York Times, Biden administration officials assessed the Republican offer as no more than $225 billion “above current levels Congress has traditionally funded.”

The president’s new offer makes no effort to resolve the even thornier problem dividing the parties: how to pay for that spending. Mr. Biden wants to raise taxes on corporations, which Republicans oppose. Republicans want to repurpose money from Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic aid package, signed in March, and to raise user fees like the gas tax, which the president opposes.

Mr. Biden “fundamentally disagrees with the approach of increasing the burden on working people through increased gas taxes and user fees,” administration officials wrote in their memo to Republican negotiators. “As you know, he made a commitment to the American people not to raise taxes on those making less than $400,000 per year, and he intends to honor that commitment.”

Still, the new proposal shows some movement from the White House. It cuts out a major provision of Mr. Biden’s “American Jobs Plan”: hundreds of billions of dollars for advanced manufacturing and research and development efforts meant to position the United States to compete with China for dominance in emerging industries like advanced batteries. Lawmakers have included some, but not all, of the administration’s proposals in those areas in a bipartisan bill currently working its way through the Senate.

Mr. Biden’s counteroffer would also reduce the amount of money he wants to spend on broadband internet and on highways and other road projects. He would essentially accept the Republicans’ offer of $65 billion for broadband, down from $100 billion, and reduce his highway spending plans by $40 billion to meet them partway. And it would create a so-called infrastructure bank, which seeks to use public seed capital to leverage private infrastructure investment — and which Republicans have pushed for.

Republican senators who were presented the offer in a conference call with administration officials on Friday expressed disappointment in it, even as they vowed to continue talks.

“During today’s call, the White House came back with a counteroffer that is well above the range of what can pass Congress with bipartisan support,” said Kelley Moore, a spokeswoman for Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who is leading the Republican negotiating group.

“There continue to be vast differences between the White House and Senate Republicans when it comes to the definition of infrastructure, the magnitude of proposed spending, and how to pay for it,” Ms. Moore said. “Based on today’s meeting, the groups seem further apart after two meetings with White House staff than they were after one meeting with President Biden.”

The updated White House offer drew immediate pushback from progressives as well, illustrating the extent to which the forces pushing against a deal are bipartisan. Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, urged his party not to “waste time” haggling over details with Republicans who do not share their vision for what the country needs.

“A smaller infrastructure package means fewer jobs, less justice, less climate action, and less investment in America’s future,” Mr. Markey said in a news release.

Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill have watched the talks skeptically, wary that Republicans will eat up valuable time on the legislative calendar and ultimately refuse to agree to a deal large enough to satisfy liberals. While they have given the White House and Republican senators latitude to pursue an alternative, party leaders are under increasing pressure from progressives to move a bill unilaterally through the budget reconciliation process in the Senate.

They have quietly taken steps to make that possible in case the talks collapse. Aides to Senators Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, and Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and the chairman of the Budget Committee, met on Thursday with the Senate parliamentarian to discuss options of proceeding without Republicans under the rules.

Biden administration officials were frustrated that Republicans did not move more toward the president in a new offer they presented this week in negotiations on Capitol Hill. They made clear to Republicans on Friday that they expected to see significant movement in the next counteroffer, and that the timeline for negotiations was growing short, a person familiar with the discussions said.

The administration may soon find itself negotiating with multiple groups of senators. A different, bipartisan group plans to meet on Monday night to discuss spending levels and proposals to pay for them. Members of the group — which includes Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Rob Portman of Ohio, all Republicans, as well as Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, both Democrats — helped draft a bipartisan coronavirus relief bill in December.

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Electric Pickups Could Make or Break Biden’s Infrastructure Plans

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“The F-150 is generally driven by guys who have a certain image of driving around in a truck — and that image includes noise, gasoline, a muscle engine. We don’t know anything about consumer uptake of eclectic trucks. We don’t know if they’ll want to drive this.”

A study published this year found that about 20 percent of people who purchased electric passenger vehicles were dissatisfied with them — in part because they worried about the lack of electric vehicle charging stations — and returned to driving traditional vehicles.

But White House officials say the pickup Mr. Biden drove on Tuesday could help tip that calculation. The F-150 “has really been a high-performing work vehicle and leisure vehicle, and now you can get it without the expense of all of that gasoline,” Gina McCarthy, the White House national climate adviser, said in an interview.

So far, only Tesla has sold electric models in high volume, but Ford typically sells about 900,000 F-Series vehicles a year. Earlier this year, Ford began selling the Mustang Mach E, a battery-powered sport-utility vehicle styled to resemble the company’s famous sports car.

“We’re not just electrifying fringe vehicles,” the company’s chairman, William C. Ford Jr., said. “The Mustang and the F-150 are the heart of what Ford is, so this is a signal about how serious we are about electrification.”

Autoworkers have expressed concerns over the electric transition, which American automakers are increasingly embracing, because the production of an electric vehicle requires about one-third less human labor than a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine.

But union leaders offered cautious support of the president’s cheerleading for the electric pickup.

“It is no secret that the U.S. auto industry is at a crossroads, as sales of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids are poised to become more and more common on our roads and highways in the years ahead both at home and abroad,” said Rory L. Gamble, the president of the United Auto Workers. “Taxpayer dollars should be spent in support of U.S.-built vehicles, not imports. ”

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Texas, Indiana and Oklahoma join states cutting off pandemic unemployment benefits.

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Texas, Indiana and Oklahoma this week joined the growing number of states that are withdrawing from federal pandemic-related unemployment benefits.

Supported by Republican governors and lawmakers as well as national and state chambers of commerce, the decision will eliminate the temporary $300-a-week supplement that unemployment recipients have been getting and will end benefits for freelancers, part-timers and those who have been unemployed for more than six months.

In Wisconsin, where the governor is a Democrat, Republicans in the Assembly and Senate have introduced legislation to end participation.

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming also plan to end federal unemployment benefits, beginning in June or early July.

Gov. Greg Abbott said in a news release. “According to the Texas Workforce Commission, the number of job openings in Texas is almost identical to the number of Texans who are receiving unemployment benefits.”

The moves will affect more than 3.4 million people in the 21 states, according to a calculation by Oxford Economics, a forecasting and analysis firm. Of those workers, 2.5 million currently on unemployment would lose benefits altogether, it said.

Although business owners and managers have complained that unemployment benefits are discouraging people from answering help-wanted ads, the evidence is mixed. Vaccination rates are picking up but less than half of adults are fully vaccinated. In surveys, people have cited continuing fear of infection. A lack of child care has also prevented many parents from returning to work full time.

Arizona, Montana and Oklahoma are offering newly hired workers an incentive bonus.

Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut, a Democrat, said this week that his state would offer $1,000 bonuses to 10,000 workers who have experienced long-term unemployment and obtain new jobs. His state is not dropping the federal benefits.

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Democrats, Growing More Skeptical of Israel, Pressure Biden

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WASHINGTON — President Biden’s carefully worded statement on Monday supporting a cease-fire between Israelis and Palestinians came amid growing pressure within his own party for the United States to take a more skeptical stance toward one of its closest allies.

Mr. Biden’s urging of a halt to the fighting — tucked at the end of a summary of a call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel — followed a drumbeat of calls from Democratic lawmakers across the ideological spectrum for his administration to speak out firmly against the escalation of violence. It reflected a different tone than the one members of Congress have sounded during past clashes in the region, when most Democrats have repeated their strong backing for Israel’s right to defend itself and called for peace, without openly criticizing its actions.

The push is strongest from the energized progressive wing of the party, whose representatives in the House, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, have drawn attention in recent days for accusing Israel of gross human rights violations against Palestinians and of operating an “apartheid state.” But their intensity has obscured a quieter, concerted shift among more mainstream Democrats that could ultimately be more consequential.

Though they have no intention of ending the United States’ close alliance with Israel, a growing number of Democrats in Washington say they are no longer willing to give the country a pass for its harsh treatment of the Palestinians and the spasms of violence that have defined the conflict for years.

a letter on Friday that stood by Israel but also said Palestinians “should know that the American people value their lives as we do Israeli lives,” AIPAC quietly worked behind the scenes to discourage lawmakers from signing.

Republicans have also seen a political advantage in trying to use the most extreme statements from progressive Democrats to try to peel Jewish voters away from the party.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader and a vocal supporter of Israel, condemned Ms. Ocasio-Cortez on Monday for her description of Israel as an “apartheid state” and urged the president to “leave no doubt where America stands.”

wrote on Twitter. (Mr. Yang later released a new statement saying that his first was “overly simplistic” and “failed to acknowledge the pain and suffering on both sides.”)

That has left some of Israel’s most vocal traditional allies in the party in an awkward position.

Mindful of the crosscurrents in his party and home state, where he faces re-election next year, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, has been largely silent since the fighting broke out. Like Mr. Menendez, Mr. Schumer voted against the Iran nuclear deal, and he represents the largest Jewish population in the country, ranging from secular progressives to politically conservative Orthodox communities.

In response to a question asked by a reporter at the Capitol on Monday, Mr. Schumer said, “I want to see a cease-fire reached quickly, and mourn the loss of life.”

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Unemployment Job Search Requirements Return. Is It Too Soon?

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A tenet of the American unemployment system has been that anyone collecting benefits, in good times and bad, must look for work.

That quid pro quo changed early in the pandemic. Profound fears of contagion and the sudden need for millions of workers to become caregivers led states to lift the requirements for reasons both practical and compassionate.

But as vaccinations increase and the economy revs back to life, more than half of all states have revived their work search requirements. Arkansas and Louisiana did so months ago in an effort to push workers off their swollen unemployment rolls. Others, like Vermont and Kentucky, have followed in the last few weeks.

ordered the Labor Department to “work with the remaining states, as health and safety conditions allow,” to put such requirements in place as the pandemic abates.

Research suggests that work search requirements of some form in normal economic times can compel workers to find their next job and reduce their time on unemployment. But the pandemic has added a new layer to a debate over how to balance relief with the presumption that joblessness is only transitory. Most states cut off unemployment benefits after 26 weeks.

Business groups say bringing back work search requirements will help juice the labor market and dissuade workers from waiting to return to their old employers or holding out for remote or better-paying jobs.

Opponents contend that the mandate keeps undue numbers of Americans from continuing to receive needed benefits because it can be hard to meet the sometimes arduous requirements, including documenting the search efforts. And they say workers may be forced to apply for and accept lower-paying or less-satisfying jobs at a time when the pandemic has caused some to reassess the way they think about their work, their family needs and their prospects.

“I think the work search requirement is necessary as an economist,” said Marta Lachowska, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich., who has studied the effects of work search requirements on employment. But she added, “Perhaps given the big disruption we have observed to the labor market, people should be given some slack.”

In Washington, the issue has become part of a larger clash over jobless benefits that intensified after the disappointing April jobs report, with Republicans asserting that Mr. Biden’s policies are deterring people from looking for work and holding back the economic recovery.

A rising number of Republican governors have taken matters into their own hands, moving to end a weekly $300 unemployment supplement and other federally funded emergency assistance that otherwise isn’t due to expire until September.

Job openings rose in March to 8.1 million, the Labor Department reported on Tuesday, yet there are more than eight million fewer people working than before the pandemic. Economists ascribe some of the incongruity to a temporary mismatch between the jobs on offer and the skills or background of those looking for work. They say that in a recovering labor market like the current one, there may not be enough suitable jobs for people seeking re-employment, which can frustrate workers and drive them to apply to positions haphazardly.

That has been the case for Rie Wilson, 45, who worked in venue sales for a nonprofit in New York City before she lost her job last summer.

To fulfill New York’s work search requirement, which generally makes unemployment applicants complete at least three job search activities each week, Ms. Wilson has had to apply for positions she would not typically consider, like administrative assistant jobs, she said.

The prospect of accepting such a job makes her anxious.

“There is always a thought in my mind that, ‘Well, what if I do get pulled in this direction just because I’m being forced to apply for these jobs? What does that look like for my career?’” she said.

The process has been time-consuming, she said, “and it’s also a mental wear and tear because you’re literally pulled from all angles in a very stressful situation.”

Alexa Tapia, the unemployment insurance campaign coordinator at the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group, said work search requirements “harm more than they help,” especially during the pandemic.

In particular, she said, such requirements perpetuate systemic racism by trapping people of color, especially women, in underpaid work with fewer benefits. And she noted that people of color were more likely to be denied benefits on the basis of such requirements.

With state unemployment offices already overtaxed, she added, work search requirements are “just another barrier being put to claimants, and it can be a very demoralizing barrier.”

In states that have reinstated work search requirements, worker advocates say an especially frustrating obstacle has been a lack of guidance.

Sue Berkowitz, the director of the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, which works with low-income South Carolinians, said unemployed workers in the state largely wanted to go back to work. But the information on the state’s website about work search requirements is so confusing, she said, that she worries workers won’t understand it.

Before the state reimposed the requirements last month, Ms. Berkowitz sent a marked-up copy of the proposed language to the chief of staff at the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce urging clarifications and changes. One of her biggest concerns was that the language as it stood was at a 12th-grade reading level, while the typical reading level of adult Americans is much lower. She did not hear back. “It was crickets,” she said.

More broadly, employees in South Carolina, where the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, can be reluctant to take a job that pays less than the one they had before the pandemic, Ms. Berkowitz said.

“It’s not that they are below taking a job that makes a lot less, but their financial needs are high enough that they need to continue to make a certain salary,” she said.

Although work search requirements have become a political issue, their restoration does not fall solely along partisan lines. Florida, for instance, where the Republican governor has repeatedly flouted virus restrictions, had kept the work search waiver in place before announcing recently that it would reinstate the requirement at the end of the month.

But many other states, particularly Republican ones, have rushed to bring their work search requirements back.

That is what Crista San Martin found when they left their job out of health concerns at a dog boarding facility in Cypress, Texas, which reinstated its work search requirement in November.

Mx. San Martin, 27, who uses the pronouns they and them, said there were very few job openings near them in the pet care industry, making finding a position onerous.

“That made it really difficult for me to log any work searches, because there simply weren’t enough jobs that I would actually want to take for my career,” they said. The first job they applied to was at a Panera, “which is not in my field of interest at all.”

Above all, applying to arbitrary jobs felt risky, they said, because there was no way to assess potential employers’ Covid-19 safety protocols. Mx. San Martin has since returned to their old job.

“It’s pretty unfair,” they said. “Going out and just casting a wide net and seeing whether a random business will take you is not safe.”

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Looking for Bipartisan Accord? Just Ask About Big Business.

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But in recent years, that compact has begun to fracture. Democrats, pushed by progressive activists, have shifted further to the left on a wide range of economic policy issues. Under Mr. Trump, Republicans became more hostile to free trade and immigration. After the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, some prominent companies and business groups announced they would cut off donations to Republicans who had joined an effort to challenge in Congress the results of Mr. Trump’s November loss to Mr. Biden, prompting some Republican lawmakers to swear off corporate donations.

Many top executives feel they have little choice. They are being pressured by customers and increasingly by young, progressive employees to speak out publicly on major issues. And in the era of social media, companies can get into just as much trouble by staying silent as by weighing in.

Polling data shows the squeeze. A Gallup poll conducted in January, in the days leading up to and immediately following the Capitol riot, found that just 31 percent of Republicans were satisfied with the “size and influence of major corporations.” That was down from 57 percent a year earlier.

And in a survey conducted last month for The New York Times by the online research platform SurveyMonkey, 81 percent of Republicans who knew enough to form an opinion said it was inappropriate for business leaders to speak out against the Georgia law. And 78 percent of Republicans said large corporations had too much influence over American life in general. (The survey was conducted before two coalitions of business leaders released letters calling for expanded voting rights in Texas.)

Elena Adams, a survey respondent in Northern California, said she began to feel that corporate America was shifting against her a few years ago, when Nike embraced Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who drew widespread attention for kneeling during the national anthem to protest police violence.

“Basically I think we’re celebrating people who are not for the United States and pushing the agenda that we should be ashamed if we’re not people of color,” she said. “This whole narrative of the race thing, it’s reverse racism, is what’s happening.”

Ms. Adams, 66, said she had stopped flying Delta and buying Coca-Cola products. Since Major League Baseball relocated the All-Star Game from Atlanta over the Georgia voting law, she has quit following the Oakland Athletics. She has abandoned social media, believing that companies such as Facebook and Twitter are unfair to conservatives, and told the purchasing managers at the emergency response business where she is a partner to avoid buying from companies that espouse liberal positions, although she said it was too difficult to avoid companies like Amazon and Google altogether.

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Amid Economic Turmoil, Biden Stays Focused on Longer Term

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Administration officials express confidence that recent price surges in used cars, airfare and other sectors of the economy will prove temporary, and that job growth will speed up again as more working-aged Americans are vaccinated against Covid-19 and regain access to child care during work hours. They say Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic aid package, which he signed in March, will lift job growth in the coming months, noting that new claims for unemployment fell to a pandemic-era low on Thursday.

The officials also said it was appropriate for the president to look past the current crisis and push efforts to strengthen the economy long term.

The two halves of Mr. Biden’s $4 trillion agenda, the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, are premised on the economy returning to a low unemployment rate where essentially every American who wants to work is able to find a job, Cecilia Rouse, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview.

“The American Rescue Plan was rescue,” Dr. Rouse said. “It was meant as stimulus as we work through this hopefully once-in-a-century, if not longer, pandemic. The American Jobs Plan, American Families Plan are saying, look, that’s behind us, but we knew going into the pandemic that there were structural problems in our country and in our economy.”

Mr. Biden’s plans would raise taxes on high earners and corporations to fund new federal spending on physical infrastructure, care for children and older Americans, expanded access to education, an accelerated transition to low-carbon energy and more.

Those efforts “reflect the empirical evidence that a strong economy depends on a solid foundation of public investment, and that investments in workers, families and communities can pay off for decades to come,” Mr. Biden’s advisers wrote. “These plans are not emergency legislation; they address longstanding challenges.”

The five-page brief focuses on arguments about what drives productivity, wage growth, innovation and equity in the economy. The issues predate the coronavirus recession and recovery, and Democrats in particular have pledged for years to address them.

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Why Liz Cheney Matters

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The Republican Party’s big recent moves — the ouster of Liz Cheney from a leadership position and the passage of new state voting laws — do not have much immediate impact on Americans’ lives.

Cheney’s removal doesn’t change congressional Republicans’ approach to President Biden’s agenda, and the voting laws will mostly start to matter next year. With Biden in the White House, Democrats controlling Congress and many Americans still focused on Covid-19, internal Republican debates can sometimes feel like an exhausting partisan sideshow.

They are not. The last few months have the potential to be a turning point for the country because of what is happening inside the Republican Party.

I don’t say that lightly. Readers of this newsletter know that I don’t believe any political ideology has a monopoly on truth. Democrats have their own problems, including an elitist intolerance for debate about some subjects and a set of Covid fears that are at times disconnected from scientific evidence. But the issues inside the Republican Party — involving its attitude toward democracy — are of a different order of magnitude.

a defiant speech from the House floor before her ouster, Cheney said, “I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law.”

It’s worth stepping back for a minute to think about what has happened since November.

After losing an election, many Republican leaders spread the lie that their opponent had cheated. On its own, this lie resembled the historical tactics of authoritarians, who often try to delegitimize any political party but their own. The similarity became starker when multiple elected Republicans either encouraged or excused a mob that violently attacked the U.S. Capitol.

A peaceful transfer of power involves both the peaceful part and a willing transfer. It depends on the ability to acknowledge defeat. Never before have so many elected members of Congress from one party tried to disrupt a clear victory by the other party.

At first, that Jan. 6 attack seemed as if it might cause party leaders, like Senator Mitch McConnell, to reassert the importance of democratic principles. Instead, Republicans who called out Donald Trump’s falsehoods found themselves marginalized. The central message of Cheney’s ouster is that Republicans must lie, or quietly endorse Trump’s “big lie,” to remain Republicans in good standing.

The same thing is happening in state Republican parties. In Virginia this week, Glenn Youngkin won the Republican nomination for governor. By résumé, he is a country-club Republican, having served as co-C.E.O. at the Carlyle Group, a well-connected investment firm. To win the nomination, though, Youngkin evidently decided that he needed to promote false conspiracy theories. So he did.

defensible on other grounds and others may have less impact than Democrats claim. But the intent of the laws is clear, and they will surely have some effect.

Provisions that target heavily Democratic areas — like Georgia’s limits on drop boxes — are particularly blatant. “The typical response by a losing party in a functioning democracy is that they alter their platform to make it more appealing,” Kenneth Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, has told The Times. “Here the response is to try to keep people from voting. It’s dangerously antidemocratic.”

A few states have also given state legislators more power over election administrators, potentially making it easier for politicians to reject an election’s result. These provisions may be even more dangerous than the hurdles to voting, especially since they are an explicit response to Trump’s big lie, as Joshua Douglas of the University of Kentucky has written.

Could all of these moves come to little, much as Trump’s postelection flailing did? Yes, that’s one possible outcome. But it is not the only one. In a way that would have been unfathomable a few years ago, one of the country’s two major parties is taking steps that would allow it to overturn the outcome of a future election.

Anne Applebaum, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the most successful strategy for beating back a political party’s authoritarian shift has depended on defections among people who otherwise agree with that party. That’s why Cheney, Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney and other Republicans criticizing Trump’s big lie are significant.

Jonathan Chait has written in New York magazine. “That fate of American democracy is the biggest issue in American politics.”

For more:

a Times column called Social Q’s, and he frequently gets a version of the question: How can I deal with the tensions around the resumption of social life? Many people are ready to return to prepandemic activities, while others are not.

Philip’s main advice: “Be nice to yourself, take care of the people you love and be as compassionate as you can.” That includes being honest about disagreements — and doing so in person or by phone rather than text.

And it’s OK to take it easy. As the author Celeste Headlee told NPR, “We have been under such a cognitive load over the past year or so that there just may not be the space for two things in one day.” — Claire Moses, a Morning writer

Related: “The lifting of pandemic restrictions represents a good opportunity to re-evaluate and make changes,” our colleague Tara Parker-Pope says. The Times has created a 10-Day Fresh Start Challenge, based on the science of beginnings.

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Biden and Republicans Spar Over Unemployment as Job Gains Disappoint

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WASHINGTON — The disappointing jobs report released Friday by the Labor Department is posing the greatest test yet of President Biden’s strategy to revive the economy, with business groups and Republicans warning that the president’s policies are causing a labor shortage and that his broader agenda risks stoking runaway inflation.

But the Biden administration showed no signs on Friday of changing course, with the president defending the more generous jobless benefits included in the $1.9 trillion bill he signed into law in March and saying the $4 trillion in spending he proposed for infrastructure, child care, education and other measures would help create more and better-paying jobs after the pandemic.

Speaking at the White House, Mr. Biden urged “perspective” on the report, which showed only 266,000 new jobs added in April. He said it would take time for his aid bill to fully reinvigorate the economy and hailed the more than 1.5 million jobs added since he took office. And he rejected what he called “loose talk that Americans just don’t want to work.”

“The data shows that more workers are looking for jobs,” he said, “and many can’t find them.”

Republicans cast the report as a sign of failure for Mr. Biden’s policies, even though job creation has accelerated since Mr. Biden replaced President Donald J. Trump in the White House. They called on his administration to end the $300 weekly unemployment supplement, while several Republican governors — including those in Arkansas, Montana and South Carolina — moved to end the benefit for unemployed people in their states, citing worker shortages.

relief money to subsidize tax cuts, which could further slow the rollout.

Mr. Biden said at the White House that the administration would begin releasing the first batch of money to state and local governments this month. He said the money would not restore all of the lost jobs in one month, “but you’re going to start seeing those jobs in state and local workers coming back.”

The administration also took steps on Friday to get money out the door more quickly, saying the Treasury Department would release $21.6 billion of rental assistance that was included in the pandemic relief legislation to provide additional support to millions of people who could be facing eviction in the coming months.

Officials said they expected increased vaccination rates to ease some lingering fears about returning to jobs in the pandemic. The number of Americans 18 to 64 who are fully vaccinated grew by 22 million from mid-April, when the survey for the jobs report was conducted, to Friday. That was an acceleration from the previous month. Some White House officials said the administration’s push to further increase the ranks of the vaccinated could be the most important policy variable for the economy this summer.

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, speaking at the White House, said that a lack of child care related to irregular school schedules was making it a challenge to get the labor market back to full strength. She also said that health concerns about the pandemic were holding back some workers who might return to the market.

“I don’t think that the addition to unemployment compensation is really the factor that’s making the difference,” Ms. Yellen said.

She said that she believed the labor market was healthier than the figures released on Friday suggested, but she allowed that the economic recovery would take time.

“We’ve had a very unusual hit to our economy,” Ms. Yellen said, “and the road back is going to be somewhat bumpy.”

Ms. Boushey and Mr. Bernstein said that it appeared the economy was working through a variety of rapid changes related to the pandemic, including supply chain disruptions that have hurt automobile manufacturing by reducing the availability of semiconductor chips and businesses beginning to rehire after a year of depressed activity because of the virus.

“It’s our view that these misalignments and bottlenecks are transitory,” Mr. Bernstein said, “and they’re what you expect from an economy going from shutdown to reopening.”

Other key economic officials treated the report as a sign that the labor recovery ahead is likely to prove wildly unpredictable. Robert S. Kaplan, the president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said in an interview that his economics team had warned him that the April report might show a significant slowdown as shortages of materials — including lumber and computer chips — and labor bit into employment growth.

He said he was hoping to see those supply bottlenecks cleared up, but he was watching carefully in case they did not resolve quickly.

“It shows me that getting the unemployment rate down and moving forward to improved employment to population is going to have fits and starts,” Mr. Kaplan said. He noted that sectors that were struggling to acquire materials, like manufacturing, shed jobs, and he said leisure and hospitality companies would have added more positions if not for challenges in finding labor.

“It’s just one jobs report,” cautioned Tom Barkin, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, in Virginia. But he said labor supply issues could be at play: Some people may have retired, others may have health concerns, and unemployment insurance could be encouraging low-paid workers to stay at home or allowing them to come back on their own terms.

“I get the feeling that people are being choosy,” Mr. Barkin said. “The first question I have in my mind is — is it temporary or is it more structural?”

He said that the supply constraints playing out were likely to fade over time, and that while businesses complain about rising input costs and might have to raise entry-level wages somewhat, he struggled to see that leading to much higher inflation — the kind that would worry the Fed.

The Fed is trying to achieve maximum employment and stable inflation around 2 percent on average. It has pledged to keep its cheap-money policies, which make borrowing inexpensive, in place until it sees realized progress toward those goals.

Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said the payrolls disappointment vindicated the Fed’s slow-moving stance.

“I feel very good about our policy approach, which is outcome-based,” Mr. Kashkari said, speaking on a Bloomberg television interview shortly after the report came out. “Let’s actually allow the labor market to recover, let’s not just forecast that it’s going to recover.”

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