Never mind making sure people can afford to live and eat and have shelter. Never mind making sure people do live by providing enough money for testing and contact tracing and treatment for coronavirus. Never mind making sure state, local, and tribal governments can stay afloat. No, the new priority for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is sacrificing the nation's schoolchildren, teachers, and school staff to the altar of Donald Trump. His new make-or-break deal for funding anything else is going to be tied to forcing schools to reopen, by "attaching incentives or conditions to tens of billions of dollars in new aid as part of the next coronavirus relief bill," according to The Washington Post's sources.
McConnell himself told reporters Wednesday, "There's going to be a heavy emphasis in the bill I'm going to unfold next week on education. I know it will be costly. […] We need to find a way to safely get back to work, and we feel, I feel, like the federal government will have to play a financial role in helping to make that possible." Oh, okay. He "feels like" the government should play a financial role in making people work. But he doesn't feel government should play a role in fighting this goddamned virus! What McConnell is doing here is helping Trump pretend like the virus isn't raging all over the country, that it won't still be raging six weeks from now because nobody has done a thing to stop it, and that it will be fine to reopen schools and send millions of children and teachers to their potential COVID-related deaths.
He must be stopped. Please give $3 to our nominee fund to help Democrats and end McConnell's career as majority leader.
The Post reports that they're looking at "somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion for elementary and secondary schools, with one person familiar with the talks saying the target was about $70 billion." They might throw in another $20 to $30 billion for higher education, Republican officials told the Post. The American Federation of Teachers, the people who actually work in schools, estimate that K-12 schools will need an average of $1.2 million each in order to reopen safely. That's $116.5 billion in total. Which is a lot more than $70 billion.
McConnell, asked about what he'd say to parents and teachers who fear reopening schools in this pandemic, quipped, "I think they fear, more, children being stuck at home this fall." Fucking ghoul. He also said, "We can't have a normal country unless kids are in school. And of course, that has an impact on jobs because kids and school and jobs are interconnected in every single way. Because it affects both parents to get back to work if the kids are home."
What we really can't have is a normal country—as long as Mitch McConnell is in charge of the Senate.