What House divided?

Battered by years of declining public trust, polarized by brutal partisan warfare and poisoned by nasty rhetoric emanating from the Trump White House, America’s democratic institutions entered the coronavirus crisis surrounded by justified doubts about their basic capacity to respond. So there is cause for genuine optimism, if not outright celebration, in the fact that the House of Representatives has passed a significant economic relief and public health package on a bipartisan basis, with support from the administration and only about 40 of 197 Republicans voting no.

Obviously, it’s easier to compromise when a national emergency removes any budget constraint; the bill’s cost, likely many billions, has not yet been estimated precisely, and may not be possible to estimate, given how little we know about the epidemic’s ultimate course. In our view, though, the greater risk remains fiscal under-reaction rather than over-reaction.

This is a moral and practical imperative, to prevent avoidable suffering both to individuals and avoidable damage to what was, before the pandemic, a basically sound economy. While Mr. Trump’s proposal for a payroll tax holiday may point in the right direction, it is not optimally targeted to the most needy. Congress will be better off providing cash in the form of a tax rebate that arrives immediately and in larger amounts for those lower on the income scale.

For now, though, it bears repetition that our bitterly divided parties and politicians have done the right thing. Quite possibly, they were spurred by the fact that the pandemic occurred in an election year, when the public will render judgment on politicians who stand in the way of reasonable solutions. At least that’s the way democracy is supposed to work—and at least sometimes, it seems, still does.