By
It was tough to blame President Joe Biden for celebrating the latest numbers on job growth. The Democrat said in a statement on Friday:
“Today is a good day for the American economy and American workers. We learned this morning that the economy created 339,000 jobs last month. We have now created over 13 million jobs since I took office. That is more jobs in 28 months than any president has created in an entire 4-year term.”
Consider some of the details we learned on Friday morning:
- Over 1.5 million jobs have been created in the United States so far this year — and that’s after just five months.
- The unemployment rate has now been under 4% for 16 consecutive months, a stretch unseen since the 1960s.
- The number of jobs created since January 2021 is more than double the combined total from Donald Trump’s first three years in the White House.
And what, pray tell, do Republican leaders have to say about all of this? Not much.
In keeping with the recent trend, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell responded to the job numbers by saying literally nothing about the good news. No press releases, no tweets, and no public comments. They literally found themselves speechless.
This was hardly new: The GOP leadership in both chambers has spent nearly all of the Biden era pretending not to notice extraordinarily good job growth.
For its part, the Republican National Committee issued a statement ostensibly about the latest jobs report, though it failed to make any references to jobs or unemployment.
There’s no great mystery here. McCarthy, McConnell, and their teams almost certainly believe that if they were to comment on the good news, more Americans might hear about it — and that’s the last thing Republicans want. There’s political utility in simply looking the other way.
But the GOP’s silence doesn’t change the fact that by most measures, Americans simply have not seen a job market like this one in the last half-century.
This post revises our related earlier coverage.