Joking aside, what should they have done instead? Nothing? Because that’s the alternative. Is your position that these families would be better off if they got nothing instead of anything? The Democrats are making a bet here that they can campaign on expanding the child tax credit. Would reasonable, humane Americans prefer they’d gotten more? Of course, but the divided government isn’t a hypothetical: it’s reality. We have fascists in government because our moron neighbors put them there, so now we have to deal with them. I don’t like it either, but the response can’t be to throw up our hands, whine, and then lose when the citizens rightly decide the Democrats can’t govern. This isn’t a choice between sweeping progressive legislation and watered down half-measures. It’s a choice between any legislation and nothing.
The fascists aren’t an accident. They’re on the Hill because Americans put them there, and even if the Democrats sweep the elections in November, there is no scenario in which they do so overwhelmingly well that all the MAGA lunatics are no longer in government. These pricks are here to stay. And worse, they care a lot more about winning than governing, and this bill is a pretty clear demonstration that that fact is absolutely not true of both parties, and it’s not even true of the rest of the GOP, corrupt and compromised though it may be.
Most Americans–myself included–would rather have any improvement to the child tax credit than for the Democrats to engage in the same my-way-or-the-highway bullshit posturing of the QOP. We’ve seen where the moral highroading and stand-on-principle-until-the-axe-falls bullshit has gotten us. How about some actual government for a change?