Why
Mitch McConnell wants to raise your hopes and then dash them
Opinion by
Columnist
Dec. 30, 2020 at 9:46 a.m. CST
Mitch McConnell
(R-Ky.) is happy to be the bad guy. If you were counting on Congress raising
the amount of the stimulus checks people will be getting from the latest
pandemic relief package from $600 to $2,000, the Senate majority leader has no
problem being the one to crush your hopes. And he’s doing it in a multiphase
strategy that involves raising expectations and then dashing them. If done with
the proper timing, Republicans can win political benefits on both ends.
The fact that those
checks almost certainly won’t materialize is a testament to McConnell’s power
and his willingness to use it ruthlessly. If you just looked at the broadest
political calculation, you’d think those checks would be on their way to people
within days. The idea is incredibly popular with the public — who doesn’t like
free money? The president wants them. The House passed a bill to provide them by an
overwhelming majority. A majority of the Senate wants them, too, including
probably all the Democrats and a rising number of Republicans:
New proponents of the
$2,000 checks include Georgia’s two embattled Republican senators — David
Perdue and Kelly Loeffler — who find themselves in tough reelection battles
that will decide the fate of the chamber next week. Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.)
also lent support Tuesday, declaring that “people are hurting and we need to
get them more aid.” They joined Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Sen. Marco Rubio
(R-Fla.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who have also supported the idea
of $2,000 stimulus checks.
McConnell is done
providing help to the U.S. economy, however, now that President-elect Joe Biden
will be taking office in just three weeks.
But it’s a little too
early to kill the idea just yet, so McConnell has put together a bill raising
the stimulus to $2,000 per person but joining it to two of President Trump’s
priorities — a commission to investigate voter fraud and a repeal of Section 230, the latter an obvious poison pill
that would ensure his bill’s defeat.
In case you haven’t
followed that particular debate, some conservatives, including the president,
have seized on Section 230 in their displeasure at the fact that Twitter
sometimes puts a stern label on Trump’s most egregious lies. The problem is
that a sudden repeal of the law could drive every social media company out of
business, because it would make it possible for people to hold Facebook or
Twitter legally liable for anything anyone said on their platforms.
There are certainly
reforms Congress could pass to address the sewer of misinformation, conspiracy
theories and incitement that those platforms have become (particularly
Facebook). But tossing a repeal of Section 230 into a stimulus bill without any
kind of planning or deliberation is not the way to do it, which McConnell knows
perfectly well.
Instead, the point
for him is to just run out the clock. The 116th Congress comes to an end on
Jan. 3. The Georgia runoff elections happen two days later.
McConnell has two
competing needs at the moment. First, he has to do what he can to help Loeffler
and Perdue in order to maintain the Republican hold on the Senate (if they both
lose, Democrats take control). The stimulus had already become a major issue in
the Georgia campaign, and after being hammered by their Democratic opponents
over it, Perdue and Loeffler arrived at the position that just about
whatever stimulus anyone suggests is great with them, whether it’s $600 or
$2,000. They’re now posing as the guarantors of government succor, who in their
boundless beneficence will rain money down on every Georgian.
But at the same time,
McConnell doesn’t actually want the $2,000 stimulus checks to become a reality.
It’s not because he cares about increasing the deficit (he doesn’t). Nor is it
because he thinks the aid is poorly targeted — even though you can make a good
case that it is, and we would do better to send money to the people who need it
most right now rather than to everyone.
No, the reason
McConnell opposes the $2,000 is that any further stimulus would accelerate the
economic recovery. How much it would do so is hard to predict with precision,
but it would certainly have some effect, and anything that helps the economy is
bad for the Republican project of constraining, undermining and sabotaging
Biden’s presidency.
So all McConnell
needs is to drag this out for a few more days. If he can give Loeffler and
Perdue the time to loudly proclaim their support for the $2,000 checks, it
might not matter for their race whether the bill dies in the end. The best
possible outcome is for them to win in part because they promised to bring more
stimulus, but then for no more stimulus to arrive.
That’s because over
the next two years, Republicans would very much like Americans to think that
government has failed them. The more dissatisfaction and displeasure there is,
the more likely it becomes that McConnell and his party can sweep the 2022 midterms,
make Biden’s life hell and set the GOP up to retake total control of government
in 2024 — even if it was largely their fault.
Back in 2010,
McConnell famously said, “The single most important
thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” He
also desperately wanted Republicans to take control of Congress, which
eventually they did. Today, he has the same goals. And his work has already
begun.
