There’s a curious narrative emerging about the passage of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act. I’ve seen it echoed by quite a few folks, but I’ll pick on the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman as an example:

To me, this is a strange talking point for a reporter, if not a Democratic operative, to turn to. Not a single Republican in either chamber of Congress voted for the American Rescue Plan, and the idea that the party has been muted in its criticisms of it is absurd.

-Senator Susan Collins came out against it on January 21, Biden’s first full day in office, saying, “We just passed $900 billion worth of assistance; why we would have a package that big now? Maybe a couple of months from now the needs will be evident and we will need to do something significant. But I’m not seeing it right now.” When it passed the Senate this past weekend, she wrote that “under the guise of providing COVID-19 relief, the Democratic leaders proposed a bloated $1.9 trillion package stuffed full of provisions that have nothing to do with fighting the coronavirus, from either a public health or economic perspective.”

-Senator Mitt Romney penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed deeming it a “clunker . . . filled with bad policies and sloppy math.”

-Senator Ben Sasse issued a statement that could hardly be described as meek: “This weekend’s spending is bigger than the entire annual economy of Canada, yet only one percent of it is vaccine-related. Here’s how midnight spending bills go down: Senators hide a bunch of crap behind titles like ‘The Cuddly Puppies Act,’ and then say anybody voting against it hates puppies. This $1.9 trillion ‘emergency’ bill is overwhelmingly non-emergency — we should’ve just bought Canada too.”

-Senator Josh Hawley joined Fox & Friends to characterize the bill’s priorities as “funding abortion providers, funding environmental justice, [and] shoveling money to blue states whose revenues are actually up.”

-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell asserted that “instead of working together to fight COVID-19, Democrats decided to exploit the crisis by jamming through unrelated liberal policies they couldn’t pass honestly.”

-Senator Ron Johnson forced Senate clerks to read the bill in its entirety, a task that took over eleven hours.

From leadership to the back benches, Republican moderates and archconservatives alike have proclaimed their opposition to the American Rescue Plan Act. They have done so on television, in print, and with the help of parliamentary procedure. The bill passed anyway because Democrats hold majorities in the House and Senate, not because some GOP figures have commented on the Dr. Seuss controversy — even if some of those comments induce an involuntary eye-roll.

Moreover, they have done so in spite of the bill’s overwhelming popularity because of principled objections to spending $2 trillion during a time of economic expansion. Especially when that money is being spent frivolously on extravagant benefits for federal workers, bailouts for pension funds both public and private, and, nominally, efforts to reopen school even while billions of dollars in education spending from the last round of relief remains unspent.

As for the supremely popular tax-credit elements of the stimulus, the GOP has been largely supportive of those. Remember, it was the 2017 tax-reform bill — opposed by every Democrat in both chambers — that doubled the child tax credit. There’s little to suggest that these elements could not have been included in the compromise bill suggested by Collins and Romney, among other Republican lawmakers, but Democrats opted for a behemoth aimed less at addressing the crisis at hand and more at pleasing its patrons in the teachers’ unions and federal bureaucracy.

Yet because the more agreeable parts of the bill yield more obvious dividends than its extraneous provisions do immediate visible harm, the public largely supports the bill as a whole. It is to its credit that the GOP opposes it anyway. If figures such as Haberman spent a little more time reporting on the contents of the American Rescue Plan Act and a little less time tweeting about others’ fixation with Dr. Seuss, it might be polling differently.