President Trump continues to war with congressional Republicans as 2020 comes to an end. On Tuesday, he responded to the House’s Monday override of his annual defense spending bill veto by calling GOP leaders “weak” and “tired.” He accused them of committing a “disgraceful act of cowardice.”
However, thanks to Bernie Sanders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was not able to hold his own veto override on Tuesday, but will have to keep the Senate in session through the New Year’s celebrations in order to overcome the Vermont senator’s procedural objections.
Sanders’ gambit is pretty simple. He wants the Senate to vote on increasing the $600 individual checks in the COVID-19 relief bill to a more meaningful $2,000. The House voted to do this on Monday (with 44 Republican votes), and it has the support of both Trump and president-elect Joe Biden. Unless McConnell brings this to the floor, Sanders will object to any effort to bring the defense veto override to a vote.
In itself, Sanders’ move is little more than a dilatory inconvenience for McConnell, as he can file for cloture. But McConnell can’t avoid the politics. Seventy-eight percent of Americans support the larger $2,000 checks, and this combined with Trump’s advocacy has put so much pressure on Georgia senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who are facing January 5 runoff elections, that both are now supportive.
When the Senate gaveled in at noon on Tuesday, McConnell was noncommittal about allowing a vote on the stimulus checks, but he blocked efforts by Sanders and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to force the issue. If he relents at all, he’s likely to attach poison pills to the measure.
McConnell on Trump demands for $2K checks, Section 230 reform & election investigations:
“This week the senate will begin a process to bring these three priorities into focus.”
It’s possible McConnell links these together to poison the well on dem votes for the $2K checks
— Garrett Haake (@GarrettHaake) December 29, 2020
This would force the Democrats to object to a vote on the checks and remove some of the pressure. It would also allow Perdue and Loeffler to say they support $2,000 checks without ever having to actually vote for them. For these reasons, McConnell will probably opt to go with the poison pill maneuver rather than approve the checks. This will anger Trump, but increasingly McConnell doesn’t care what Trump thinks.
On the other hand, it’s not likely that Perdue and Loeffler will benefit. With Trump railing against gutless Republicans in Congress, it’s unclear why this will make Trump-supporting Georgians eager to vote for Republican senators.
The politics are pretty bad for McConnell. He’s trying to have it both ways but the people are not going to be fooled. The ads write themselves, and the early vote number suggest Ds should be slightly favored for both races. I may be wrong but I think Bonnie and Clyde are going down and we get our senate majority. It will be the biggest self own in politics in a century, maybe more.
It sounds like McConnell has a pretty good plan to poison pill the whole thing, so the right wing noise machine can blame democrats for killing it. Really I don’t know why we bother talking about the “politics” since reds and blues live in different informational universes. Everyone is going to vote for their side, so the only thing that matters is GOTV before an election and raw power afterwards.
This. Ignore the polls. Ignore the campaigns. Ignore the posturing.
It’s all GOTV and turnout.
Hmm, that may or may not be true in some contexts, but the most recent election doesn’t seem to bear it out. The electorate was in fact very Republican. 48% R, 47% D, and 5% independent in fact. For Biden to have won in an environment whereby the electorate was more Republican than Democratic, he had to have persuaded a significant number of Republicans. According to AP VoteCast, Biden won 8% of Republicans and Trump won 4% of Democrats.
Granted, this is a very marginal number of people and the country is extremely split. This means “landslides” are off the table — until they aren’t. I don’t know when that will be, but it won’t be until the disjunctive period is over. I thought COVID accelerated the process after seeing some polls confirm what should have happened, but I was a fool to have believed it.
Anyway, point is: persuasion still matters.
Seabe, I agree with you with regards to the 2020 presidential. But that seems to be a special case, where there was a significant group of republicans who couldn’t countenance Trump. It seems much less likely that there is a similar group of people for a senatorial election.
Anyway, I don’t actually have strong opinions about persuasion vs. GOTV. My point really is that persuasion is unlikely to work on the basis of policy, because the different informational systems will work overdrive to convince R-leaners that the policy is shit [e.g. Obamacare]…or, failing that, that the R party is really the one that supports the policy and the Ds are against it [e.g. Medicare]. In this case, McConnell will poison pill the whole thing, and Loeffer and Perdue will say that it’s Schumer & Pelosi’s fault that they didn’t get $2K.
If we allow this to prevail – the grinch approach to everything and poison pills – we know what will happen. In 2010 we lost the majority in the house and congress was shit from then until 2016. The democrats have to stand up and that includes Joe in West Va, or we should invite him to leave.