It’s been a generation since the right-wing activist Grover Norquist said his movement’s goal wasn’t to eliminate government, but merely to “shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.” Since then, the failure of a downsized and disinterested government to respond to crises like Hurricane Katrina seemed to have proved the empty fallacy of those words. And today, you’d think the federal government’s botched response to the coronavirus would be the exclamation point. Instead, we find Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, his clothes soaking wet, and his thumbprints buried deeply around the neck of the nearly departed.
The political nihilism of McConnell’s refusal to even take up the case of the nation’s economically drowning states and localities ought to be shocking.
In a series of interviews late last week, the most powerful Republican on Capitol Hill said that he supports letting states go bankrupt instead of approving the hundreds of millions of dollars in relief they’re requesting — and claimed that the source of their woes is “the pension problem.” The Kentuckian claimed, “We’re not interested in rescuing them from bad decisions they’ve made in the past.” He’s even called a state and local relief package “a blue state bailout,” which sounded like a cheap ploy to make the GOP’s heartland base angry at New York and California, even though most fiscal experts say the current crisis will hit red states — even McConnell’s Kentucky — as badly, or worse.
Let’s be clear: If McConnell is serious about this, and if he holds his Senate majority together (spoiler alert: He usually does), it won’t be the likes of Govs. Andrew Cuomo or Gavin Newsom who’ll be hurt. No, the victims of these Republican tactics would be the folks that we’re now calling “essential workers.” With states now facing a shortfall estimated to hit $500 billion by mid-2022, and big cities in the same boat, the status quo would require massive layoffs of cops, firefighters, sanitation workers, teachers and more.
My core thinking on McConnell’s scheme can be boiled down to one word: Why?
The nation’s unemployment rate right now seems somewhere in the 15%-20% — i.e., Great Depression II — level, so laying off middle-class government workers in the fall of a presidential election year seems pretty self-destructive. The apparent lack of any real game plan here even caused me last week to ask my Twitter followers what they thought is going on here. Some ideas:
Short-term politics. The “best-case” scenario is that McConnell is playing within the bounds of normalized political cynicism, that at some point he’ll at least hear the pleas of suffering red state governors and grant some federal relief, even if it’s less than the $700 million sought by Democrats, and it will be used as leverage to squeeze even more dollars out for McConnell’s true patrons, the millionaires and corporations that have done so well in the first four bills.
Blind ideological belief. The Republicans’ war on what they claim are overly jealous pensions for government retirees goes back more than a decade. The New Republic in the 2010s called retired teachers or firefighters getting a large enough pension to live on “the new welfare queens.” To be clear, many governments have been forced to already make adjustments to pension deals (made by both Republican and Democratic politicians) from the boom years of the 1990s that have failed to add up.
The most zealous “thought leaders” in the conservative movement believe that breaking pensions will help them break government-employee unions, which they see as a key bastion of remaining support for Democrats. But here’s a reality check: Over the last 40 years, the GOP has been hugely successful in breaking unions and eliminating pensions in the private sector, driving the gross inequality we see playing out in the COVID-19 crisis.
The survival of public employee unions and pensions is an embarrassment to the conservative movement by showing voters an alternative universe where “essential” middle-class workers are rewarded for their toil — instead of all of the benefits flowing to CEOs and shareholders.
With the economy, there’s been a lot of magical thinking all around, which goes: Sure, things are horrendous now, but you’ll see much of the economy “pop” back once we can sound the “all clear” on COVID-19. The reality is very different. When restaurants or movie theaters do reopen, some lost customers will already be too broke to go back, and others will continue to isolate over health worries. For state governments, that lingering recession will come after two to three months of almost incalculable fiscal harm. And without aid, that pain will be passed on to their workers.
If Senate Republicans truly won’t relent between now and their increasingly likely loss of power next January, there is one thing states and cities can do when they lay off our teachers and shut down our neighborhood firehouses. They can name the enabling legislation Mitch’s Law.
Will Bunch is the national opinion columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer.
