Leaders in both parties say the package will likely be wrapped up by the end of Tuesday. As the negotiators settle the final issues, Republican senators are doing some last-minute sniping about how supposedly unreasonable Democrats were in not accepting the Republicans’ version of the rescue package.

But there’s one critical thing to understand about how this all played out: In almost every case and on every question, Democrats wanted to spend more and do more than Republicans did.

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There were a couple of small exceptions; for instance, Republicans wanted to give slightly more money to the Pentagon to deal with the effects of the virus than Democrats proposed. But overall, there is simply no question about which party wants to move more aggressively to confront these twin crises.

Yet if you listened to the Republicans, you’d think that Democrats didn’t want to address the problem at all, but were just playing “political games” while the country suffered. So let’s remind ourselves of some of the things that separated the two parties:

Democrats wanted $150 billion for hospitals and health centers to deal with the virus; Republicans wanted $75 billion.

Democrats wanted to give families checks for at least $1,500 per person; Republicans wanted $1,200.

Democrats wanted $500 billion in aid to small businesses; Republicans wanted $350 billion.

Democrats wanted a requirement that large companies given assistance keep their workers on the payroll; Republicans would have left open a loophole companies could have used to take the money and lay off workers anyway.

Democrats wanted to require companies that got aid to pay a $15 minimum wage and agree to strict requirements limiting executive compensation and stock buybacks.

Democrats wanted more money for states to help them deal with sudden costs and avoid a budget spiral that would lead to severe cutbacks in state services.

Democrats wanted four months of extended unemployment benefits; Republicans wanted three months.

Democrats wanted help for people to pay their utility bills and would bar utilities from cutting off people’s service during the crisis.

Democrats demanded oversight of the “slush fund” that in the Republican plan would have let the Treasury Secretary distribute half a trillion dollars to corporations at his own discretion, with no oversight. When asked about it on Monday, President Trump said , “I’ll be the oversight.”

On that last point, as on many others, the Republicans eventually gave in. There will be an inspector general monitoring the process, along with some kind of oversight board, likely with representatives of both parties. We don’t yet know all the details, but in nearly every case where the parties met in the middle, it meant Republicans relented and gave the U.S. economy more than they had originally wanted it to get.

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Yet much of the Republican complaints have centered on a few small provisions in the Democratic proposal that may not be directly germane to the immediate crisis, like providing $1 billion to develop more sustainable fuels that could help planes operate without generating so many carbon emissions, now that we’ll be giving the hugely profitable airlines tens of billions of dollars in support.

But not only are those provisions tiny in the scope of the entire bill ($1 billion is one-twenty-fifth of one percent of the total cost of the House bill), one suspects they were inserted so Democrats could give them away in negotiations to make Republicans feel they got something.

Republicans have duly complained that Democrats included these provisions instead of helping struggling American families and businesses, and decried the delay of a day or two in passing the rescue package. But what was the alternative? To just assent to whatever the White House dictated and wind up with a package that did less for those struggling Americans while providing a windfall for corporations — especially those that win Trump’s favor?

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Here’s the rather odd political situation at play here: The only thing that will make it possible for Trump to win reelection is if the federal government takes the most aggressive steps possible to contain the virus and mitigate the recession, yet it’s Democrats who want to do more and spend more.

Unfortunately, much of the news coverage of these negotiations frames it as “partisan bickering” and “Washington dysfunction,” which is a way of putting blame on all sides equally while you obscure the substantive issues at work.

But this is the reality: There will be a rescue package, and it will be unprecedented in size. Republicans wanted it to be smaller and do less to address both the public health crisis and the economic crisis we’re now experiencing. We can disagree over the details, but that’s the heart of it.

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