by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
If I were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which Praise Allah I am not, I would be chortling into my Metamucil this morning while envisioning the panic that GOP members of the leadership in the House and Senate must be enduring as they try to figure out how to deal with Donald Trump's latest wild shot of self-serving bravado.
Pelosi and her lot, those godless tax-and-spend Democrats, had been struggling for months, literally, to create a second stimulus bill, one somewhere north of three trillion dollars that would be more focused on meeting the needs of actual people than the first bill, a hog wallow for corporations and rich Americans, had been.
The Senate's leader, the ever-sensible Mitch McConnell, saw the focus of a second stimulus bill as needing to set up protections (legal immunity) for businesses whose employees contracted COVID as a result of their work conditions. (Such as the thousands of Tyson's and other meat-packing employees who came down with the disease in their damp and crowded workplaces.) And Mitch, who has long believed that wealth trickles from the top down - instead of from the bottom - the wage earners - upward, really had no interest in handing out what Rand Paul has termed "free money" to the unwashed masses.
So Pelosi did most of her months of negotiating with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a direct representative of Donald Trump, the third party who would have to eventually agree to a proposed stimulus package. Nancy wasn't unreasonable and it soon became known that she could dip down into the two trillion dollar level.
Still nothing happened. Pelosi and Mnuchin could chatter till the cows came home, but no deal would be reached until Mitch McConnell came on board. Mitch had a death grip on the actual process and everyone knew it. He simply was not motivated to negotiate with anyone. Screw the deal.
But then something unexpected happened on Election Day. Yes, Donald Trump lost, but that wasn't really a surprise to most of the Washington insiders, even McConnell. But what was surprising to many was that the Democrats lost seats in the House and only had a net gain on one in the Senate. They failed to retake the Senate! Mitch McConnell could keep his death grip on the nation two more years and really mess with the incoming Biden administration in important ways.
Probably.
Biden's win meant that Kamala Harris, a Democrat, would now cast the deciding vote in the Senate in the event of a tie. That meant that to regain the majority, the Democrats, now with forty-eight incoming members, needed only two more Senate seats to be the effective majority - and thus bump Mitch back to a smaller office. And lo-and-behold, neither GOP incumbent senator in Georgia managed to win an outright majority on Election Day in November, and when that happens in Georgia the top two candidates in each election must run in a run-off election.
The Georgia runoffs will be January 5th, and Democrats have a shot at winning both seats. (Biden, after all had won Georgin in the presidential election, so two more Democratic wins are conceivable.) Mitch McConnell has a lot riding on the January 5th runoffs in Georgia, including his iron-fisted control of the Senate.
But those dirty Democratic senate candidates in Georgia began reminding Georgians that they could have another stimulus check to spend on Christmas - and basic survival - if it wasn't for Moscow Mitch and his stingy GOP senators - like the two currently representing Georgia. So Mitch got the stimulus religion quickly and began personally trying to get a new bill passed. On the one hand he wanted to appear concerned with the needs of real people - an historic first for McConnell - and on the other hand he wanted to insure that a government "handout" to the masses was not overly generous.
An odd assortment of individuals began clamoring for checks to individuals of at least the same level as last spring's - $1,200 for each adult making less than $75,000 per year - and $150,000 for married couples. Socialist-leaning Bernie Sanders of Vermont supported relief at that level, as did Missouri's adolescent GOP Senator Josh Hawley - and Hawley even famously telephoned Donald Trump and advocated for $1,200 individual payments.
The wily old McConnell, while deftly accusing Democrats of stalling the process for months (a bald-faced lie), managed to get the overall total of the bill down below one trillion dollars (900 billion), with $600 payments to individuals. Pelosi, who probably hasn't been in an actual grocery store since the 1950's, thought that was sufficient for most people, and agreed to the slimmed-down compromise. The bill, which was included with a nine-month appropriations bill to keep government running, had a host of "extras" tucked into it, and the resulting legislation was over 5,000 pages long - and had to be passed right then in order to get it to Trump in time for his signature.
Members could study the fine print later to learn what they had really passed.
So last night the massive spending bill landed on Trump's desk with a big old thud - and Trump - who seldom reads anything - balked at affixing his signature! The political huckster who is struggling to remain relevant in his waning days as President, instead went on social media to criticize the legislation. There were things included in the appropriations bill that he did not like, such as money for national museums as well as for the Kennedy Center, and he railed that more money needed to be sent directly to ordinary Americans. Trump said he believed that people should be given two thousand dollars each, and four thousand for married couples!
Pelosi, if she is as smart and assertive as her publicists would have us believe, needs to jump on that - this morning - and get the new stimulus levels amended to the original bill - and then send it on over to the Senate for Mitch to enjoy.
Well, McConnell probably won't enjoy it, but a lot of us damn sure would!
If Trump gets the bigger stimulus checks, he wins a tussle with Congress and comes off as Santa Claus to a grateful nation - and if he doesn't get them he still wins by having sided with the needs of real Americans - for a change.
And the Trump 2024 campaign will have something positive to use for campaign ads. Perhaps that was what the phone call from Senator Hawley had really been about.
But through it all, the checks still are not in the mail!
Merry Christmas, ya'll!
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