My reporting is Dems long assumed they'd have to do Covid as a reconciliation measure — GOP sincerely, albeit wrongly, simply does not want to spend huge sums of money on relief — but we took a brief detour because of McConnell filibustering the organizing resolution.

McConnell's move raised the prospect that Dems might go nuclear.

But you can't do something like that without engaging in a good-faith bipartisan discussion and that elevated the relevance of bipartisan relief talks.

Then the crisis was defused & we're back where we started.

I think the Republican attitude toward this is unfortunate.

Joe Biden has some very large asks on Covid relief.

An appropriate GOP response would be to counter with some substantial asks of their own. Instead, Republicans are all in the camp of "just do less."

But surely there are some right-of-center ideas for fighting the pandemic and improving the economy that are not in Biden's proposal.

In a sane world, Republicans would articulate some of their ideas and agree to do most of Biden's ideas if he'll adopt some of theirs.