If Barack Obama were president right now, and Senate Republicans in the chamber’s minority voted unanimously to block action on a COVID-19 spending bill at a moment of generational crisis — businesses laying off employees in droves, hospitals struggling to accommodate a barrage of patients, hundreds of thousands of Americans unable to leave their homes — what would the headline be on the front page of the New York Times?


It certainly would not read “Partisan Divide Threatens Deal on Rescue Bill.”

What would Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo say on CNN if days before the vote, the House Republican whip told his fellow GOP representatives that the crisis represented “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision“?

They would — correctly — call congressional Republicans and their leaders cynics for playing roulette with the lives of millions of Americans, which is precisely what congressional Democrats are doing by trying to shoehorn their pet ideological projects into the coronavirus relief package.

But, for now, it’s just a “partisan divide.”