We Can Finally See the Real Source of Washington Gridlock
Deep into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Republican leaders had one question for President Barack Obama, as his administration sought nearly $1 trillion in funds from Congress: How are you going to pay for this?
The unemployment rate was greater than 7 percent in January 2009, and would rise above 8 percent by February. Mitch McConnell, then the Senate minority leader, insisted, “The question is not doing nothing versus doing something,” but “the appropriateness of an almost $1 trillion spending bill to address the problem.”
Others in his caucus made similar points. “If you believe this is a good process to spend $800 billion, we’re on different planets,” Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, declared. Chuck Grassley of Iowa complained that “the package's massive government spending and long-term entitlement commitments … will leave the next generation with trillion dollar deficits.” Lamar Alexander of Tennessee demanded, “Should we ask every American family to increase their $531,000 debt in order to spend money for a stimulus package to try to restart the economy?”
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As for McConnell, his opposition to the Obama administration was identifiable as partisan rather than ideological even at the time. As one Republican aide later told Grunwald, “If this thing works and the economy is booming and everybody is happy, your vote against the stimulus won’t be held against you. In good times, people get reelected.” On the flip side, Grunwald noted, “if the economy wasn’t booming by 2010, Republicans could return from the wilderness.” Republicans went home and bragged to their constituencies about the projects funded by the stimulus they had voted against.
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McConnell and the Republican leadership saw prolonging the Great Recession as a political opportunity to be exploited. The longer and more grueling the economic recovery, the easier it would be to evict Obama from the White House and Democrats from Congress, even if their own constituents suffered as a result. Democrats, by contrast, did not attempt to block help for Americans navigating the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus. On the contrary, they sought more generous provisions, despite the knowledge that the president they had recently impeached for trying to coerce a foreign country into framing his prospective Democratic challenger would take the credit and use the aid as an argument for his own reelection. At the signing ceremony for the CARES Act, Trump was flanked exclusively by Republican leaders; Democrats were not invited.
https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/609244/
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The very best sanitation.
Time to stir the compost
