"She needs to stand down on the notion that we're going to go along with taking advantage of the crisis to do things that are unrelated to the crisis." If that has echoes of "nevertheless, she persisted" for you, it should. It's Sen. Mitch McConnell talking about another powerful woman he thinks is getting uppity—this time it’s not Sen. Elizabeth Warren but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That's what he told The Washington Post in an interview on Wednesday, saying Pelosi's call for a fourth round of virus-related legislation "premature." His focus is going to be, as always, judges. "They will continue apace," he told the Post. "The Senate is going to be able to do its business."
That business, Pelosi retorted, should be people. Right now. "The victims of the coronavirus pandemic cannot wait," she said. "It is moving faster than the leader may have suspected, and even he has said that some things should wait for the next bill." She added, "I hope that we can work in a four corners manner for the common good." The "four corners" refers to bipartisan leadership in the House and Senate.
Mitch McConnell's Senate is an immediate danger to the people. Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats end their majority.
But McConnell pulled out that favorite old Republican response to doing anything to help the 99%—we can't afford it. That's after pushing $500 billion in corporate bailouts through the Senate in one week. “We do have to be mindful of how to pay for it," he said. "There has been a lot of fantasizing on both sides about massive packages," McConnell said. You could do it through, oh, I don't know: repealing the huge tax cuts to corporations and the extremely wealthy you pushed through under Bush and Trump?
As for the idea of infrastructure, which both Trump and Pelosi have been pushing—maybe. Once "we get to a point of recovery" from the pandemic. There's not going to be recovery from the pandemic without more help for more people who need it, including the direct demands of the epidemic: protecting health care workers, getting a nationwide testing regimen established, covering the treatment costs for everyone who requires it, and making sure that people have food and housing and income for the duration. That's not going to happen without at least one more round of stimulus, because a one-time $1,200 check is not going to make all that happen.