Opinion | Rescuing restaurants (again) ought to give Congress indigestion

The nation has never experienced as large and abrupt an intervention as the cumulative federal and state lockdowns of commercial activity imposed when covid-19 surged in 2020. The wisdom of those measures is debatable; the pain from them is undeniable. Small businesses of long-standing, and families who went into debt to launch, say, restaurants or bars or bakeries just before the pandemic, now have blighted futures — the caprice of rotten luck.

So, in March 2021, seasonal compassion reinforced a political temptation for all seasons — Congress’s temptation to make life less unfair. The American Rescue Plan created the Restaurant Revitalization Fund. By June 2021, the fund’s $28.6 billion had been disbursed to 100,000 applicants in grants averaging $283,000.

There had, however, been 278,304 applicants seeking $72 billion. Most applicants got to the trough too late, when it was empty. What to do? Do it again, but bigger. Hence the Replenishment Act. The Senate has a $48 billion bill, with more than restaurants eligible for revitalization: gyms, minor league sports teams, companies that support live entertainment events (lighting and sound technicians, etc.), buses and ferries, etc. Including $85 million for certain border region businesses, such as those in (herewith a geography lesson) the Northwest Angle, which CQ Roll Call explains is “a region of Minnesota that is separated from the rest of the state by the Lake of the Woods but shares land borders with Canada,” whose strict pandemic protocols injured Americans living in the Angle.

Among the 435 congressional districts, surely not one lacks businesses eligible for aid, especially from the Senate bill. But, then, weapons systems have been purchased because suppliers of components were spread across the country like tapenade on toast.

Nevertheless, the Replenishment bill barely passed the House 223 to 203 in April, with only six Republicans favoring it and only four Democrats opposed. Forty-three Senate Republicans, objecting to the fact that only a smidgen of the Senate bill’s cost would be offset by economies elsewhere, on May 19 prevented there being 60 votes to proceed with it.

Will an injustice be done if, with the pandemic receding and the economy reviving, nothing is done for those who missed out in the first-come-first-served scramble for the initial (and perhaps final) $28 billion? Christian Britschgi is dubious.

Writing for Reason, he noted…