The
disturbing values driving the GOP’s handling of covid relief
Opinion by
Columnist
Dec. 15, 2020 at 11:47 a.m. CST
When the history of
the pandemic is written, President Trump’s catastrophic failure will be at its
center. But ample space should be reserved for his party’s repugnant actions:
contemptuous of public health, indifferent to widespread suffering, and right
to the end, fiercely determined not to help those with whom they disagree
politically.
As of this writing,
there is good news and bad news. First, Congress may be moving toward passage of a relief
bill to address the ongoing crisis. As usual, it has involved Democrats wanting
to do whatever is necessary to get the country through the pandemic and the
associated economic devastation, while Republicans offer as little help as
possible.
The bad news is that
the price Republicans have exacted is that there be no aid offered to state and
local governments. Or more precisely, that aid has been cordoned off in a
separate bill, along with a liability shield for businesses Republicans were
seeking. GOP lawmakers can’t stomach state and local aid, and Democrats object
to liability protections, so removing both enables passage of the rest of the
bill, which includes unemployment benefits and help for small businesses.
The bill containing
just the state and local aid and liability protection is likely to fail. But I
want to focus on it at the moment because it reveals so much.
As tempting as it
might be to draw an equivalence between the two parts of the cast-off bill,
they’re nothing alike. Democrats want to address an actual need: to help every
state in the country deal with the public health and economic effects of the
pandemic.
Republicans, on the
other hand, want to “solve” a problem that doesn’t exist and create more
problems in the process.
The challenge states
and localities face is simple: The pandemic has increased the demands on their
services at the same time that the economic downturn reduced their revenues.
Since in most cases they’re required by law to balance their budgets, they have
no choice but to impose draconian cuts — often in the form of layoffs — at the
worst possible time.
At some point,
Republicans decided that this is only a problem faced by places where lots of
Democrats live, and they’d be damned if they’d help those places. They came up
with the term “blue state bailout” to describe what they
couldn’t possibly agree to.
Of course, the crisis
has affected state and local budgets in Republican and Democratic areas alike,
and the funding would be allocated according to factors including population
and the depth of the recession in different states. The HEROES Act, which
Democrats passed through the House in May, would have provided $206 billion in
funding to states won by Trump in 2016 and $208 billion to states won by
Hillary Clinton.
But the fact that
they’re simply lying about who benefits isn’t the worst thing they’re doing.
What’s far more repugnant is the principle that underlies their position, even
if they were telling the truth: If Americans need help, we should first
determine what party most of them belong to, then provide or withhold that help
accordingly.
Whatever else you
might disagree with Democrats about, this is simply not something they do. They
don’t say “We should extend Medicaid to poor Americans only in blue states,” or
“Alabama has some of the lowest-performing students, but since the
state votes Republican they shouldn’t get education aid.” Republicans are the
only ones who think this way.
Now let’s look at the
liability shield Republicans have been demanding.
We’ve seen horror
stories like the Tyson meatpacking plant in Iowa where
supervisors “took bets on how many workers would get infected with Covid-19,
even as they took measures to protect themselves and denied knowledge of the
spread of the illness at work." Despite such stories, Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has proposed that workers and customers be
forbidden from suing businesses for allowing them to contract covid-19 unless
they can prove “gross negligence."
That standard is so
high that almost no one would be able to reach it; you’d practically have to
prove that your employer gave you covid on purpose. This is necessary,
McConnell and the Republicans say, because without it there will be a wave of
frivolous lawsuits that will unjustly victimize businesses and hamstring the
economy.
But if they were
right when they contend that without a liability shield then workers and
customers will begin suing businesses willy-nilly, it already would
have happened. After all, there’s no liability shield in place now. So
where’s the wave of frivolous lawsuits?
It doesn’t exist.
According to a tracker maintained by the law firm
Hunton Andrews Kurth that monitors suits related to the pandemic, there have
been 23 commercial personal injury complaints, 118 employment claims for things
like failure to provide PPE, and 108 wrongful death claims. While I can’t vouch
for how complete their data are, given that over 16 million Americans have
contracted covid and 300,000 have died, if that’s the magnitude of the lawsuits
we’re seeing, it’s almost nothing.
In fact, lawsuits
filed by people angry at public health measures — which of course wouldn’t be
affected by the Republicans’ bill — seem far more numerous. But heaven forbid the
family of a dead meat-packer might be able to sue his employer and get their
case heard in court.
Perhaps we should be
thankful that Republicans may allow any aid at all to go to struggling Americans
— the unemployed, the business owners on the verge of bankruptcy, the schools
trying to open safely, the families desperate for food assistance, the millions
in danger of being evicted, and more. But in the worst national crisis of our
lifetimes, once again, Republicans have shown us who they are.
