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Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for Oct. 7, 2020

End to Stimulus Talks Is a Full-Spectrum, Foreseeable Disaster

How Mitch McConnell gave up on 2020, and how Democrats failed to
recognize what was happening in March

 

Mitch McConnell at the Capitol last week. (Tom Williams/AP Photo)

First Response

**** Since the inauguration of Unsanitized, this
space has been insistent that Democrats were likely to only get one bite
at the stimulus apple. This basic truth, informed by being alive during
the financial crisis and early Obama administration, was my animating
principle for everything that came afterward. If you believed there was
only one shot, that first bill had to be negotiated like it was the
last.

Of course, we know have confirmation that there was only one shot. I
take no pleasure in being correct. Because there are millions of people
who will be forced into economic ruin, with little or no help from their
government, during a pandemic. This isn't a time for gloating, it's
a tragedy. And it also provides some lessons.

What are we to make of Trump, for example, tweeting an end
to the
relief talks being held by Nancy Pelosi and Steve Mnuchin, only to
apparently restart them
last night?
Being on a powerful steroid that makes you stay up all night is probably
the culprit. But the biggest reason is that he's not in control of the
situation. Mitch McConnell is, and he rather brilliantly got Trump to
take the fall for it.

Jeff Stein reported out
the fact
that the end of the talks came right after McConnell held a phone call
with Trump, and "suggested... that Speaker Pelosi was stringing him
along and no deal she cut with Mnuchin could pass the Senate." People
are wondering why Trump would commit political suicide by denying
economic help weeks before an election, when it was McConnell who ended
things all along.

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**** Because Trump is so easily manipulable, he
took McConnell's statement that Pelosi was playing him at face value,
and took ownership of walking away from the bargaining table, like The
Art of the Deal tells him to do. Only later did he realize that, when
you do that in public, you become the man who denied relief to the
nation, and subsequently he frantically tried to backpedal, offering to
sign standalone bills
for a $25
billion airline bailout, a resumption of the PPP program for small
businesses, and another $1,200 stimulus check
.

That's maybe fun to comment on (the $135 billion in PPP funding he
offered was what was leftover in the program when it expired, they
couldn't give free money away last time, I don't know why resuming
it two or three months later to small businesses with no cash reserves
would be any different), but it's also useless. The important thing to
understand is that this was McConnell's plug to pull. He's in charge
now.

Some blame Nancy Pelosi for not taking a $1.6 trillion offer from the
White House. But pay attention to McConnell's statement above. "No
deal she cut with Mnuchin could pass the Senate." That includes the
$1.6 trillion. McConnell barely got a caucus majority for a $300 billion
package. Large numbers of his caucus are thinking about 2024 and
adopting a Tea Party-style fiscal responsibility posture. So at one
level, McConnell is just expressing reality. He can't pass a bill with
mostly Republicans, and he's never been interested in passing one with
mostly Democrats. (If there's one thing that would hurt his
re-election chances, it's that.)

But there's an even better explanation for why McConnell would destroy
his party's standing before the election. The answer is: Because he
already thinks the election is over. McConnell doesn't feel like any
stimulus would help Trump, or even his endangered frontline members.
They're already done for, as the coronavirus is the most important
issue in the election, and there's a raging outbreak at the White
House. There was a poll yesterday showing Joe Biden up 16 points
,
and another one showing a lead in the sample after Trump's positive
test of 22. Every Republican you think is not going to win, is not going
to win.

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McConnell, as pure a political animal as we have in America, is playing
not for 2020 but 2022, and well beyond. His most important directive now
is to get Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court and lock in that strong
conservative majority for decades. His second most-important directive
is to deny Biden a half-decent economy propped up by stimulus, to make
the beginning of his tenure difficult. Ordinary people, and not even his
fellow Republican colleagues, don't factor into the decision.

What looks like a political downside
,
in other words, is just McConnell banking on a future political upside.
He's plotting his comeback, using the same script as 2009-2010. "We
thought-correctly, I think-that the only way the American people
would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not
bipartisan," McConnell said about that time. "When you hang the
'bipartisan' tag on something, the perception is that differences
have been worked out, and there's a broad agreement that that's the
way forward."

McConnell wanted and needed a corporate bailout and really nothing else.
He waited for months to see what the political situation was going to
be, not the economic one.  Now that he understands it, he will not
cooperate with Democrats on things like assistance for the American
people. We're in a plutonomy now, so everyone McConnell cares about
has already been helped. He will offer that great debate between now and
the 2022 election. He will hope to win back his majority in the
midterms. And even if he does not, he will have the Supreme Court for a
generation. In fact that's part of the plan: if they obstruct forward
movement in Biden's first two years, McConnell can blame him for lack
of action.

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All of this was foreseeable: this disaster for the economy, for public
health (one of the funding measures in the stimulus was billions for the
safe distribution of a coronavirus vaccine
).
There's a theory that, in a month, after Democrats win resoundingly,
they can announce several stimulus measures

they will adopt, and this will stabilize things. But a lot of scarring
can happen in the 78 days between the election and the inauguration. The
risk of undershooting the recovery, as Fed chair Jay Powell said
yesterday, far outstrips the risk of overshooting it.

If I could recognize this in March, without a giant staff and access to
every economist on the planet, then the Democratic leadership could have
known it too. Instead they arrogantly believed they could come back for
more. People inside the Democratic caucus who warned of this are
seething. "It's emblematic of the total lack of urgency from the
top, even now. What a tragic disaster," said one House Democratic
aide.

"Just calm down
,"
Pelosi said to Jake Tapper in April when asked if not getting state and
local government relief might have been a mistake. I haven't been calm
since then. This was political malpractice of the highest order. Anyone
could see that the CARES Act was not going to be enough. Just adding the
words "for the duration of the national emergency" to every measure
in that bill would have made a huge difference. Instead, here we are.

They say that victory has a hundred fathers but failure is an orphan.
Not true in this case. A lot of people share the blame for this mess. It
was what some of us mean by bipartisanship.

Days Without a Bailout Oversight Chair

195
.

We Can't Do This Without You

Today I Learned

* We'll have VP debate coverage tonight, follow along at prospect.org.

* Dozens of people stricken in the White House hot zone
.
(Roll Call)

* The White House apparently relied on rapid tests

that were too inaccurate to shoulder that burden. (New York Times)

* Almost all of the senior Pentagon leadership is self-quarantining
.
What a disaster. (CNN)

* Confirmed that the Barrett nomination announcement was a
super-spreader event
.
(Bloomberg)

* Get out your schadenfreude; Stephen Miller has it
.
(HuffPost)

* Biden will rightly opt out of the next debate

if Trump is still sick. (Los Angeles Times)

* Hydroxychloroquine activists (they exist) are mad that Trump hasn't
included their wonder drug

in his cocktail. (Talking Points Memo)

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