| Let's hear it for Congress! I don't get to write all that many positive items these days, but here's one. Phase Three — the whopping $2 trillion bill to bail out the economy from the pandemic — is done. As I write this, lawmakers are finalizing the legislative language, and they still need votes in the Senate and House and the president's signature. But it appears that the deal reached by congressional leadership and the Trump administration is complete. This means that Congress will have met an unprecedented challenge by passing three bills with unusual speed. We shall see, of course, how effective any of this is. I am not an economist; I can only talk about the process, and I'll leave it to others to assess whether this is good policy — other than to say that it probably beats doing nothing. There's little question that a Phase Four and probably a Phase Five bill will still be needed. And no one thinks this will be enough to prevent a damaging recession, or to position the economy for a rapid return to health once the threat of the coronavirus diminishes enough to allow for that. Still, for a political system that's often accused of being hopelessly unable to deal with problems, the speed here and the scale of the bill are truly impressive. Yes, they were hoping to have it done over the weekend and they didn't finish until after midnight Tuesday, but this is complex stuff. The truth is that many politicians involved have serious legitimate differences over which policies will achieve the best results, and others are representing constituencies that have genuinely clashing interests. It's simply not true that if it weren't for lawmakers' partisan and personal self-interests all of this would be easy. On the contrary: Healthy representation may look chaotic, but when done correctly it can allow obscure groups and interests to have a seat at the table in national policy making. Kudos are in order. Democrats could have sat on their hands, hoping that national disaster would harm the president and help them in November. Instead, they took the lead on the previous bills, and on this one pushed for aid to hospitals, state and local government, and to workers through more robust unemployment payments, in each case securing far more than was in the Republican-written original bill. They did that knowing that Trump will be able to claim credit for all of it, and that Republicans did not act as cooperatively in 2009 during the economic crash when Barack Obama was in the White House, and that they would have to support bailouts that many of them strongly oppose for big companies. Congressional Republicans deserve credit, too. A $2 trillion government spending bill isn't what they came to Washington to do. Nor are a lot of the specifics in the bill — thus those items getting added only after Democrats insisted on them. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell didn't have an easy hand to play, given the difficulties in negotiating with this White House and the various preferences of Senate Republicans. And while I've been critical of some of his partisan rhetoric as the deal-making continued, I do give him credit for setting an early deadline and pushing to get the bill done. And, yes, it appears that the White House and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin played a mostly constructive role this time. I'd say three cheers for all concerned, but I'll hold off on that until we get the details, which are sure to contain all sorts of interesting provisions. I'm not averse to some goodies inserted to sweeten any legislation for those who have to cast tough votes, but we won't know for a while exactly how many of those there are. We also don't know yet how well the mechanisms designed to insure oversight of corporate bailouts will work, or for that matter how well any of the provisions will function. I still do think that McConnell grandstanded unnecessarily, and that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was wrong in failing to keep the House in Washington for the duration of this crisis. And of course the bill hasn't actually passed yet. For now, however, it's good to see that at least in an emergency Congress is capable of large, rapid action. 1. Julia Azari at Mishiefs of Faction on Biden, Sanders, and the effects of the pandemic on the party. 2. Rachel Bitecofer's latest forecast for the 2020 presidential election looks good for the Democrats. Very much worth a look, although my general feeling about any forecast right now based on regularities in U.S. politics is that it's extremely hard to predict the effects of an essentially unprecedented event. 3. Alexandre I.R. White and Katrina Quisumbing King at the Monkey Cage on the U.S. habit of finding scapegoats for disease. 4. Greg Sargent on Trump's continuing unpopularity in swing counties. 5. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Michael R. Strain on why a premature reboot of the economy would be counterproductive. | 
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