One would assume a Senator elected to represent the state of Pennsylvania would take particular care to promote and protect the interests of its biggest city and population center, Philadelphia. A Senator chosen to serve Missouri would have to view St. Louis and vicinity as a top priority, right? In Louisiana, isn’t the welfare of New Orleans critical to the state’s overall health? Just as Atlanta is to Georgia, and Miami to Florida, Milwaukee to Wisconsin? After all, if you are willing to forsake the basic interests of those comprising your state’s most significant population centers, what good are you, and whose priorities are you beholden to? Senate Republicans don’t appear too psyched to consider such dilemmas, only determined to create them. Their breathtaking intractability during the last week on a Covid relief plan has clarified who they favor, as well as who they detest. Hint: follow the tweets.
Back in March the impetus for locking America down was the specter of Coronavirus spreading unchecked throughout the nation. The carnage occurring at that moment in New York City served to scare the US into doing the right thing, otherwise what was still an isolated horror could come to your town, overwhelm your local hospital. Nine months of the worst possible federal leadership has fulfilled that awful prophecy, we are losing the Covid battle and sit on the brink of a runaway health catastrophe.
More than 400K new cases were reported last Friday, and more now are dying per day than were passing at the height of last spring’s worst surge. Too many ignored CDC guidance to stay home over Thanksgiving, and nobody expects even more dire warnings to be better heeded over Christmas. More than 5000 deaths per day by late January will shock nobody. The heartland will see more than its fair share thanks to governors and citizenries beholden to the guff of Fox/AM hucksters at the expense of minimal civic duty. The CDC’s map makes clear virtually no state will be spared.
To hear Josh Hawley of Missouri tell it, “hard working Americans” – a term he employed near a dozen times in about five minutes while on the Senate floor bellowing for a Covid relief package he could support – need relief now for no other reason than reckless closures of the economy, restrictions everyone knows were never justified. More than 5000 Missourians have died of Covid, with record daily highs now routinely established, but no matter; perhaps Hawley figures they just didn’t work hard enough to stay well.
Covid hospitalizations in the St. Louis area surged past 900 after the Thanksgiving holiday, a new high that administrators warned could overwhelm ICUs. Doctors and nurses are pleading with residents to stay home for the Christmas holiday, but such dire concerns appeared incapable of catching Hawley’s attention. Only Trump’s “remarkable” leadership, responsible for bringing a vaccine to market in record time distracted Hawley’s laser focus on his “hard working” constituents’ entitlement to compensation for enduring the needless damage meddlesome pols inflicted in the name of public health. “It’s a disgrace,” Hawley scolded, imitating his hero, who he still tacitly maintains isn’t going anywhere next month.
With the rank and file of the Senate GOP caucus now operating under the premise a Biden Administration will be in business come January 20, despite the fact most are still too cowed to say it in public, frugality and broad economic principles are suddenly top priorities once again. The same bunch who added $2 trillion to the debt at full employment, with a tax cut the 1 percenters couldn’t have been more happy to receive, now wants to pinch pennies as the poorest absorb the economic disaster calamitous federal mismanagement of the pandemic is solely responsible for. State and city budgets have been decimated since March, with safety net programs pushed to the brink; those who had little now have nothing. Homelessness beckons for thousands unless lifelines emerge soon, “hardworking” or not.
Moody’s Analytics just projected the Covid crisis will create state and local government budget deficits ranging between $330 billion and $470 billion through fiscal year 2020, with big city services and support structures hit worst of all. Democrats initially pushed for $160 billion in state and local aid; Mitch McConnell was having none of it. The Trump tweet from August that any Covid relief to states is merely a bailout their failed lib policies don’t deserve IS the Republican position. The $900 billion plus package now being finalized will contain nothing for states and cities.
Listening to the parade of Senate Trumpies bellow on the matter of their responsibilities during this crisis it was reasonable to wonder what country they were talking about. Too many are more focused on tooting out their bona fides for inheriting Trump’s wretched core than much of anything else, thus the middle finger extended to states and cities. The GOP has shamed itself in so many ways serving a nihilist bully’s rabid indecencies one has to triage for outrageousness. Yet and still, the outright disdain its bargaining position on Covid relief reflects toward any federal assistance to big cities is a grievous sin, a clearly bigoted abdication of its most basic obligations. The only thing Republicans want to be involved in when it comes to urban constituents is schemes to suppress their numbers at the polls. No vote is a good vote.
What’s emerging is a clear picture of what we can expect throughout Biden’s Presidency. This is a nullification party with no qualms about picking and choosing the constituents it will either help or hurt based on what will be Trump’s most disgusting legacy: the unabashed embrace of transactional representation, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately sensibilities, machine politics writ large. The national GOP is now a party at war with US demographics, beholden only to those inane electoral maps with all of that red denoting flyover whiteness. It’s no longer even a question of priorities, it’s now the Trumpist philosophy of all out pandering to the base at the expense of enemies… zero-sum all the way. It’s not governance, it’s a naked struggle for power. Bipartisanship is for RINOs. Not my President? Try not your Senator! BC