Biden spending targeted
Americans for Prosperity plans over 100 events
The fiscally conservative group Americans for Prosperity is mobilizing to try to stop more than $4 trillion in spending President Biden has planned.
WASHINGTON – Tim Phillips had some straight talk for fellow “freedom fighters” who gathered in an Iowa restaurant in April.
Their side lost the first few months of the “big, big battle” going on in Washington as Congress passed a $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package, said Phillips, head of the fiscally conservative group Americans for Prosperity. But it’s still possible to stop the more than $4 trillion in additional spending that President Joe Biden has proposed.
“In the next few months, Washington, D.C., is going to be making some decisions that could literally dramatically transform our country,” Phillips said as he urged the gathering of more than 160 people to “do more than you’ve ever done before.”
That meeting, held in the district of Rep. Cindy Axne, a moderate Democrat who is among the top targets for Republicans in the midterm elections, was the first of more than 100 events around the country that AFP has in the works for a major campaign that kicks into gear next week.
In details provided first to USA TODAY, the group’s “End Washington Waste: Stop the Spending Spree” campaign also includes several million dollars in advertising to pair with the planned rallies, town halls, phone banks and door-to-door canvassing.
“This spending spree we’re seeing out of Washington, D.C., is both unprecedented and unsustainable,” Phillips told USA TODAY.
It remains to be seen whether conservatives can generate the kind of grassroots activism that roiled lawmakers’ districts when Democrats debated how to overhaul the health care system in 2009. Democrats eventually passed the Affordable Care Act, with no support from Republicans, but lost the House in the 2010 midterm elections.
Former President Barack Obama, in his memoir, described the “Tea Party summer” of 2009 when he was greeted by angry protesters as he traveled to discuss his health care plan. He wrote that the tea party represented a genuine populist surge, even if he thought some of the anger was misdirected and that it was “carefully nurtured” by groups like Americans for Prosperity.
Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Americans for Prosperity was one of the groups that, recognizing the opportunity presented by tea party enthusiasm,
stepped in to organize that energy. “And they benefited hugely from it,” she said, “and massively expanded their reach on the ground.”
Progressive groups are also mobilizing to support Biden’s proposals and fight back against groups like Americans for Prosperity.
Building Back Together, a progressive organization run by Biden allies, began airing TV ads Wednesday in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Nevada to promote Biden’s “blue-collar blueprint to build America.”
The case Americans for Prosperity is making against Biden’s plans centers on both size and scope.
Phillips said that given the massive amount of money the government has already spent through the coronavirus rescue package, it’s difficult to envision a package “with even more money” that Americans for Prosperity could get behind.