The Grim Reaper is grimly reaping,
and enjoying every moment
Salon writes in an article entitled Mitch McConnell's dark pivot: Wreck the economy — and sabotage Biden's presidency:
Mitch McConnell, however, appears to be moving on to his next mission: kneecapping Joe Biden.
The Senate majority leader is doing what everyone who actually learns from history predicted he would, and deliberately sabotaging the American economy, in a belief that voters will blame the incoming Democratic president for the disaster and not the Republican senators who are actually responsible.On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of congressional leaders proposed a compromise coronavirus relief bill, worth about $900 billion. The bill is meant to rescue the economy from what is likely to be a disastrous winter, as lockdowns tighten and people stay home in the face of rising cases of COVID-19. It falls far short of the $3 trillion relief package that the Democratic-controlled House passed in May — a bill that was ignored by the Senate — but is substantially better than anything McConnell has proposed. It's also better than nothing, which is what McConnell's actions so far have amounted to.
Unsurprisingly, however, McConnell's reaction to this carefully drafted and dramatically announced bill was to blow a big, fat raspberry, refusing to even look at it."We just don't have time to waste time," McConnell told reporters, even though he has been wasting time since May, pretending he intends to pass a real relief bill while actually focusing the Senate's precious time on cramming as many Trump appointees onto the federal bench as he can.
McConnell is as shameless a liar as Trump, even if he's less theatrical about it. He is clearly in no hurry to pass a stimulus bill and, frankly, is behaving like a man who hopes no bill gets passed at all.
This is what the radical right planned and did to Obama from the moment he won election.[1] The GOP hated his guts and they still hate his guts. The radical right GOP has no interest in compromise. Not one shred of interest. Biden is going to get exactly the same treatment, no compromise, no cooperation and no bipartisan help. None at all.
Footnote:
1. Jane Mayer wrote this in 2017 about what Obama faced from the authoritarian radical right GOP:
"The highlight of the Koch summit in 2009 was an uninhibited debate about what conservatives should do next in the face of electoral defeat. As the donors and other guests dined [...] they watched a passionate argument unfold that encapsulated the stark choice ahead. . . . . Cornyn was rated the second most conservative republican in the Senate . . . . But he was also, as one former aide put it "very much a constitutionalist" who believed it was occasionally necessary to compromise in politics.
Poised on the other side of the moderator was the South Caroline Senator Jim DeMint, a conservative provocateur who defined the outermost antiestablishment frings of the republican party . . . . Before his election to congress, DeMint had run as advertising agency in South Carolina. He understood how to sell, and what he was pitching that night was an approach to politics that according to historian Sean Wilenz would have been recognizable to DeMint's forebears from the Palmetto state as akin to the radical nullification of federal power advocated in the 1820s by the slavery defender John C. Calhoun.
. . . . Cornyn spoke in favor of the Republican Party fighting its way back to victory by broadening its appeal to a broader swath of voters, including moderates. . . . . the former aide explained . . . . "He believes in making the party a big tent. You can't win unless you get more votes."
In contrast, DeMint portrayed compromise as surrender. He had little patience for the slow-moving process of constitutional government. He regarded many of his Senate colleagues as timid and self-serving. The federal government posed such a dire threat to the dynamism of the American economy, in his view, that anything less than all-out war on regulations and spending was a cop-out. . . . . Rather than compromising on their principles and working with the new administration, DeMint argued, Republicans needed to take a firm stand against Obama, waging a campaign of massive resistance and obstruction, regardless of the 2008 election outcome.
As the participants continued to cheer him on, in his folksy southern way, DeMint tore into Cornyn over one issue in particular. He accused Cornyn of turning his back on conservative free-market principles and capitulating to the worst kind of big government spending, with his vote earlier that fall in favor of the Treasury Department's massive bailout of failing banks. . . . . In hopes of staving off economic disaster, Bush's Treasury Department begged Congress to approve the massive $700 billion emergency bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
Advisers to Obama later acknowledged that he had no idea of what he was up against. He had campaigned as a post-partisan politician who had idealistically taken issue with those who he said "like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states." He insisted, "We are one people," the United States of America. His vision, like his own blended racial and geographic heredity, was one of reconciliation, not division." (emphasis added)
