Pelosi’s Congress Should Shelter At Home For The Rest Of The Year Joy Pullman
https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/01/pelosis-congress-should-shelter-at-home-for-the-rest-of-the-year/
Earlier this week, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer postponed lawmakers’ return to Washington DC, citing concerns about coronavirus transmission. Congress should stay out of Washington DC a lot longer. Even until next year.
The primary reason isn’t because they, like health-care workers or truckers or grocery store employees or pastors, might catch coronavirus doing their jobs. The primary reason is that when they “do something,” Congress usually hurts the country far worse than if they just took naps in the closet or played cards all day, like my husband’s coworkers at a union-run former workplace.
The nation should have learned this from activist responses to the Great Depression, which we now know made the depression longer and harder. It also created expectations, institutions, and ways of life that have upended our exceptional system of self-government. Yet House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is as determined as President Franklin D. Roosevelt to exploit this crisis for political gain, on the well-founded calculation that if Democrats ask Republicans to unleash a horde of locusts, they’ll agree to half the locusts. Maybe even three-quarters!
Despite failing so far to use the pandemic to get race and sex quotas for corporate boards, insane emissions requirements on airlines, more money for Democrat politicking funneled through unions, student loan bailouts, and bigger tax credits for solar panels, Democrats have already commandeered it to send pork to the Kennedy Center, bail out the U.S. Postal Service, get raises for Congress as 26 million Americans filed for unemployment, fund PBS stations, and upcharge for refugee resettlement.
And they’re just getting started. Pelosi has started talking about moving beyond blanketing the nation with deficit-funded checks into a “guaranteed income.” Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Doug Jones (D-Ala.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn) propose to “fund a portion of a company’s payroll costs, up to $90,000 per worker who has been laid off or furloughed.”
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has proposed a similar idea. “Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) has proposed a bill that would cover 100 percent of salaries for at least three months.” Shifting American workers to federal welfare akin to the make-work Civilian Conservation Corps of Roosevelt’s day (but without the bridges) could cost another trillion dollars. At least, initially. Since the small business bailout fund has been replenished twice and counting, we shouldn’t expect Congress to turn off the firehose any time soon. It’s a national emergency, you see.
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