That, after all this, House Republicans feel abandoned and betrayed by Trump — well, it couldn’t be happening to a bunch of nicer sycophants, enablers and betrayers of our democracy.
Republicans
raging at Trump are getting exactly what they deserve
Opinion by
Columnist
Dec. 24, 2020 at 9:06 a.m. CST
House Republicans are
in a fury with President
Trump, now that he is threatening to blow up the
carefully negotiated settlement that led to passage of the $900 billion
economic rescue package. They are raging that he
abandoned them after the White House asked them to support the deal.
Oh, dear. Given what
a cartoonish farce this has all become, let’s let Mr. Krabs of SpongeBob
SquarePants do the honors:
“Boo, hoo. Let me
play a sad song for you on the world’s smallest violin.”
Specifically, let it
not be forgotten that more than 125 of the very same House Republicans now
raging at Trump for betrayal just got through betraying our country on his
behalf, by joining a lawsuit designed to
further his aim of subverting millions of votes in four states to keep him in
power illegitimately.
Trump’s demand for $2,000
stimulus checks, rather than the $600 ones in the current deal, is imperiling
the prospects for getting help to Americans in time, even as new signs are emerging that economic
misery is worsening.
It’s not clear
whether Trump will veto the bill, but the delay could kick it into the next
Congress and makes a government shutdown more likely. This is spreading panic among
Republicans and has put them on the
defensive in
the Georgia runoffs, where Senate control will be decided.
“Frustration” with
Trump “boiled over” on a conference call among House Republicans, the New York Times reports. On the call,
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy acknowledged that the deal is now “tainted.” And
Republicans vented about the problem this is creating for them:
“I don’t know if we
recover from this,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, according
to three officials on the call. “We will have a hell of a time getting this out
of people’s head.”
Representative Don
Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, said Mr. Trump had thrown House Republicans
under the bus, according to a person on the call.
Meanwhile, The
Post reports that both
McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were “blindsided” by
Trump’s condemnation. And there’s this:
White House aides
were receiving an avalanche of angry messages from GOP lawmakers and
consultants, who said they felt abandoned by Trump after administration
officials said he supported the bill and asked them to vote for it.
Reps. Foxx and
McCarthy both joined the brief filed by House
Republicans in support of the Texas lawsuit. That sought to invalidate the
voting in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia, based on a pernicious legal theory that amounted to a call for
the Trump minority’s will to be imposed on the popular majority that elected
Joe Biden.
Many of the other
House Republicans on that brief came from those four states. To keep Trump in
power, they were willing to undermine the right of countless voters in
their own states and districts to choose who governs them, an
appalling betrayal of the public trust.
The House vote on
$2,000 checks
Trump is now
rewarding House Republicans by forcing them into a very uncomfortable public position.
House Democrats just held a vote by unanimous consent on a bill that would increase the stimulus
payments to $2,000, as Trump wants, with just about all Democrats in support.
House Republicans
just procedurally thwarted this effort.
Now, a Democratic
aide tells me, the House will hold a formal vote on that bill on Monday. It
seems clear House Republicans will oppose that too, in order to keep the
economic rescue bill on track on their own preferred terms.
This will neatly
illustrate the Democratic message of the moment: Democrats support more robust aid
to the American people, and have done so for months, while Republicans
want to do far less or even as little as they can politically get away with.
None of this is to
say that Trump’s position is admirable. While a larger stimulus check is
definitely desirable, all signs are that Trump only arrived at this position
out of pique.
After Trump was
largely MIA during this process for many months, his allies reportedly believe this is mostly
a way for him to punish Republicans for failing to help realize his quest to
overturn the election.
It is amazing that
Trump is such a madman that, after all Republicans have already done to help
him subvert the voting, he is still raging at them for betrayal on this front.
But there’s an element of poetic justice here.
The corrupt bargain
unravels
The corrupt GOP
bargain with Trump has long been as follows. Republicans would politely ignore
his corruption (among many other hideous degradations) or even actively shield
him from accountability wherever possible. In exchange, they would get
conservative judges and Trump’s active support as they pursued tax cuts for the
rich and other deeply regressive obsessions like the failed rollback of the
Affordable Care Act.
Republicans scored
heavily on all these fronts, and in return they delivered beyond what should have
been Trump’s wildest dreams. And this went well beyond their backing for
Trump’s effort to overturn the election. During impeachment, House Republicans
went to extraordinary, farcical lengths to function
as dutiful propagandists and literal bodyguards against
accountability for
Trump. They worked to thwart transparency into Trump’s
finances, helping to shield his self-dealing from the public they purport to
serve.
But not only was all
this still not good enough for Trump, he’s now also further
punishing them in a way that exposes a politically damaging core truth about
that very bargain. Congressional Republicans, motivated by orthodox
conservative opposition to spending, are the real obstacle to robust assistance
to the American people, amid two of the biggest crises our nation has faced in
decades.
That, after
all this, House Republicans feel abandoned and betrayed by Trump — well, it
couldn’t be happening to a bunch of nicer sycophants, enablers and betrayers of
our democracy.