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Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for Oct. 9, 2020

Republicans Must Choose Between Stimulus
or Their Supreme Court Power Grab

Plus, Wall Street landlords are back

 

Trump's bumbling has put Republicans like Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) in a
bind: prioritize Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett (left) or
assistance for the American people? (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo)

First Response

**** We've been whipsawed from the cancellation
of talks on a stimulus before the election to talks resuming within 48
hours. President Trump, high on steroids, has furiously backpedaled from
his initial announcement, and Politico's Jake Sherman touts
that the
White House "is now completely set on striking a COVID stimulus
deal."

But Sherman's throw-in line, "No guarantees it goes anywhere in
senate," kind of nullifies the whole thing, doesn't it? Even if I
believed that Trump would agree to work with Nancy Pelosi, who is
publicly floating a bill

to have the presidency stripped from him due to lack of mental
competency, why am I to believe that Mitch McConnell is involved with or
interested in this in any way?

Indeed, McConnell is out this morning calling hopes for a deal
"unlikely
."

Nothing has changed this week for McConnell, who hasn't been at the
White House

in two months and told Trump by phone days ago that he couldn't pass
any deal struck between Pelosi and Steven Mnuchin through the Senate.
His members still are wary of large fiscal spending, and if he passes a
bill with mostly Democrats, that would be the one thing to possibly get
him in trouble with his own re-election in a few weeks.

All the national election indicators still point to McConnell playing
for 2022 rather than 2020
.
Heck, Trump's erratic behavior has the party on the verge of losing
Kansas, Missouri, and Montana
,
according to internal polling, to say nothing of Arizona, Texas, and
Georgia. McConnell likely doesn't think a stimulus bill will revive
electoral fortunes, though it may give a runway to a President Biden.
And that would not please the Senate Majority Leader.

You could maybe see McConnell agreeing to certain targeted relief, as
long as it was targeted at the corporate sector. But Pelosi rejected a
standalone airline package
,
even after readying the legislation

last week. She's still pressing for a comprehensive deal. But that's
where McConnell and his caucus have consistently drawn the line for
months. Even the $1.6 trillion White House offer

from a week ago includes measures that I'd think McConnell would have
no interest in passing, including $250 billion in a "blue state
bailout" (read: vitally necessary state and local government relief).

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**** What Trump has done with his "save my
re-election" lunge is a couple things. First, it's operated as a
stock-pumping scheme. Trump was worried about the market reaction

to his calling off the talks, but just the resumption has put Wall
Street on track for its best week since August
.
If you keep talking about stimulus without actually doing it, investor
expectations grow and grow, and the market goes up. I don't know if
there's a dump to this pump and dump scheme, but this is what the pump
looks like.

But Trump has fumbled his way into handing Senate Democrats an excellent
closing argument. The question every Republican needs to answer now is
this: who should get priority from Republicans, Amy Coney Barrett, or
millions of unemployed and suffering Americans?

McConnell has two weeks left in the Senate calendar before the election,
and he wants to spend that time on the Barrett confirmation. There's a
world where a stimulus bill is ready on the 19th and dispensed with
before Barrett hits the Senate floor on the 26th, but that presumes a
very quick agreement on the top lines (it'll take a week to translate
that into legislative language) and the creation of a bill that
McConnell and Senate Republicans actually want to pass.

More likely, if the Pelosi/Mnuchin talks bear fruit, is a situation with
limited floor time and Senate Republicans with two options: plow forward
with Barrett, or pass stimulus. That's a fight that Democrats can win
big politically, even if they can't get McConnell to alter his course.
I could see Barrett herself being asked this question in confirmation
hearings: who do you think is more important, you or the 2.4 million
Americans and rising

that have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks?

Trump should be asked the question as well, as should every Republican.
Should economic stimulus come first, or confirming a Supreme Court
justice? Everyone from the local dog catcher to the president should be
forced to choose between their generational stamp on the high court and
aid for the American people. I see no evidence to alter my initial
conclusion that time and Mitch McConnell will prevent the people from
getting that aid. But there remains political value in laying bare GOP
priorities.

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Wall Street Landlord Redux

Back in the last global economic crisis, there was a particularly
galling course of events. Wall Street financiers scooped up
single-family homes at a discount, in many cases renting them back to
the very victims of foreclosure who took the hit at the hands of other
financiers who ripped them off in the housing bubble. These home rentals
were predictably fraught, with serious deficiencies, jacked-up rents,
property managers who did no repairs, quickie evictions, and so on.
There's a chapter about this in my new book Monopolized, as the main
practitioners of the Wall Street rental scheme were giant private equity
firms.

Well look who's back. Invitation Homes, then a division of private
equity leader Blackstone and now a publicly traded company, just got a
cash infusion

of $1 billion to go out and find more discount properties. They've
already been buying about $200 million worth of homes per quarter since
the pandemic began, adding to their stock of 80,000 homes nationwide.

What's interesting here is that the housing market is actually
over-performing right now, as city dwellers seek refuge in the suburbs.
That has meant low inventory, which is good for the home rental market.
There has been "record occupancy and rising rents" in single-family
rentals since the crisis began, as they offer something that families
without a down payment can afford. Stocks in these companies have beaten
the market, and unlike the financial crisis, they're not starting from
scratch. These are professionalized operations that can acquire capital
and find homes for their portfolios quickly. Some companies have moved
into building their own housing stock.

That's all bad news for renters. The stories of price-gouging and bad
conduct

are legion. The pandemic has accelerated all sorts of economic trends,
and I fear absentee slumlords is another.

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Today I Learned

* Yesterday was the largest one-day surge

of coronavirus cases in history, led by nearly 100,000 in Europe.
Complacency has set in and it's deadly. (Common Dreams)

* Coronavirus was here long before we detected it
,
and before even those vaunted travel lockdowns Trump's always on
about. (Wall Street Journal)

* The Trump administration tried to keep stimulus checks from
incarcerated people
;
a federal judge demanded they send them, as the law requires.
(Washington Post)

* Another late-stage Trump bribe attempt
:
the $200 drug cards for seniors. (Politico)

* The latest announcement of significant layoffs comes from Warner Media
.
Could be thousands of workers. (Wall Street Journal)

* The difficulties of voting in nursing homes

during a pandemic. (Los Angeles Times)

* Gyms make it impossible

to cancel memberships, despite mass pandemic exodus. (Vox)

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