The GOP Is Fighting to Block Red-State Bailouts

Despite the GOP's lies and efforts to harm the economic interests of much of its base, many white working class voters continue to fall for appeals to racism, religious extremism, and hatred of others and vote for Republican candidates.  Among the lies is the effort to depict most welfare recipients as non-white when in fact the majority of recipients are white, many in red states. Another one now being circulated by "Moscow Mitch" McConnell and much of the right wing "news" outlets is that pandemic relief proposed for state and local governments would be a bailout of blue states which are depicted as "poorly run" and plagued by liberals.  As the New York Times reports the reality is that six of the seven states that are expected to suffer the biggest revenue declines over the next two years are red states - states led by Republican governors and won by President Trump this year, according to a report from Moody’s Analytics.  Without federal funding, many states and localities will have to slash education spending and lay off first responders and cut public services that citizens rely upon. Along with minorities countless working class, Republican voting whites will be harmed. New York Magazine looks at the lie and the willingness of the GOP to harm its own base.  Here are highlights:

For eight months now, Mitch McConnell has been preventing the federal government from providing fiscal aid to America’s state and municipal governments. The Senate Majority Leader and his far-right colleagues have obstructed such aid even though: The Chamber of Commerce and National Governors Association (NGA) have both lobbied Congress in favor of fiscal relief, while Republican senators from Louisiana and Mississippi sponsored a bill that would have delivered $500 billion worth of it.

Since fiscal aid to states is a top Democratic priority, opposing the policy meant killing any prospect for a second stimulus package, which meant allowing many of the CARES Act’s relief measures to expire before Election Day, which very well might have cost Donald Trump reelection.

McConnell articulated the right’s rationale for opposing fiscal aid in mid-April, when he suggested cash-strapped states should file for bankruptcy, and then circulated a memo of anti-fiscal-relief talking points titled, “Stopping Blue State Bailouts.” That phrase, and the idea it conveyed — that delivering fiscal aid to states really meant bailing out corrupt Democratic machines — came to dominate right-wing media coverage of the issue, thereby reinforcing the Senate GOP’s intransigence.

This week, a bipartisan group of senators reached agreement around a framework for a $908 billion COVID relief package. The Democratic Party’s congressional leaders have endorsed the outline. It includes $160 billion in aid to states, a small fraction of what some congressional Republicans and governors have called for. And yet, as of this writing, McConnell has refused to endorse the framework . . . . .

Florida senator Rick Scott suggested he might oppose such legislation, as it would “spend hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to bail out wasteful states.”

It’s not often that one hears a senator disparage the state they represent. Yet that is, apparently, what Scott did Thursday. After all, few “wasteful states” need federal aid more desperately than his own. As the Orlando Sentinel reports: Facing a $2.7 billion budget shortfall, legislative leaders are searching for ways to raise new revenue, although not through tax hikes, along with cuts to education and health care to fill the gap when they return to the Capitol in March.  

The shortfall for the budget year that begins in July was caused by a series of falling dominoes, starting when the coronavirus pandemic shut down the tourism industry in the spring and early summer.

Six of the seven states projected to suffer the largest revenue declines over the next two years voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and are run by Republican governors, according to a report from Moody’s Analytics. Florida is among America’s most cash-strapped states, facing a revenue decline of more than 10 percent.

The “blue-state bailout” lie isn’t solely intended to justify the GOP’s stance to any swing voters who might be paying attention to stimulus talks; it’s also designed to hide the party’s true priorities from its own constituents.

The conservative movement has been trying to shrink the fiscal capacity of state governments for decades. But when they’ve actually tried to implement this agenda forthrightly — as they did in Sam Brownback’s Kansas — many GOP voters discovered that they did not actually support “small government,” if that phrase was defined as “defunding public education to make it easier for wealthy business owners to renovate their McMansions.”

But the pandemic provides conservatives with a means of forcing austerity on nearly every state in the union, while making their work look like an act of God. To the lay observer, the Republican Party didn’t force Florida to cut education funding, the pandemic did.

Notably, it isn’t just school funding that Republicans are indirectly forcing states to cut. One maddening irony of contemporary American politics is that the “Defund the Police” protest movement was seen as a liability for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, even though the actual policy of the Democratic Party is to provide states and cities with roughly $1 trillion in federal aid — more than enough to avert deficit-induced cuts to police budgets — while the actual policy of the Republican Party is, in effect, to cut the number of working police officers in the United States.

In a well-functioning republic, it would not be politically viable for the Republican Party to force unwanted austerity on its own voters through incessant lying. Fortunately for the GOP, the United States is no such polity — and the conservative movement is doing its utmost to ensure that we never will be.