Walking And Chewing Gum
Recall late last year, when the government faced another shutdown and House Democrats seemed focused only on impeachment. When the Speaker was asked about it, she brushed such criticism aside, noting that “we can walk and chew gum at the same time”.
Now comes the Senate Majority Leader, privately telling the White House that to pursue COVID stimulus legislation with less than two weeks before the election might subvert plans to approve a new U.S. Supreme Court justice in that same time.
At first, you might think Senators cannot walk and chew gum at the same time…but it’s more than that.
From a procedural standpoint, the Senate would need 60 votes to move forward on legislation to avoid a filibuster, and that’s not a certainty. And a filibuster on stimulus would indeed jam the calendar to make it hard to approve a justice, which as we all know is no longer subject to that 60-vote procedural rule.
But it’s more than that. For the President, having a big score of a stimulus bill, bigger than even Democrats want dollar-wise, helps his re-election effort. But for Republican senators facing their own re-election efforts, being tabbed as fiscally irresponsible could send them looking for packing boxes.
That may seem inconsistent, but not really. The president governs by broad strokes, while legislators are held accountable for each vote they make. And for Senate Republicans to cave on a COVID stimulus at least four times what they’ve consistently said they wanted…well, in some states those senators may as well cast a ballot for their opponent in the November election, that’s the depth of the impact.
For the GOP to come away with nothing…no new justice, no stimulus…will be a huge failure, indeed. That’s why the leader told the White House what he did. And someone there leaked it. So…pretty normal for the past four years.
