Take that, damned constituents!

In case you haven’t noticed it, there are three “wings” of the GOP now, each with its own leader. One wing is really more of a feather: It consists of the few Senators and Representatives who aren’t inclined to parrot every falsehood that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth, even if that means there might be some – horrors! – negative impact on the GOP’s chances in 2022 from doing so. This group is small enough that they could easily hold their meetings in the men’s room, were it not for the fact that their current “leader” is Liz Cheney.

The first of the two real wings is of course the Donald Trump Wing. This is the group that either a) believes the nonsense that Trump spews (i.e. the about 30% of the electorate that continues to have a high opinion of Trump, although that percentage continues to fall. I read that Trump’s new blog – his only official social media platform now – gets around 2,000 hits a day, which isn’t much more than twice what my cybersecurity blog gets. And I’m neither an ex-president nor planning on running in 2024), or b) that doesn’t believe Trump’s fairy tales, but does believe they’ll be defeated in their next primary if they don’t repeat those tales religiously. This latter group consists, of course, of most GOP Senators and Congressmen, as well as a large proportion of state and local GOP elected officials – certainly fewer than 2,000 people in all.

And then there’s the Mitch McConnell Wing (although Lindsay Graham is its co-leader). This wing not only doesn’t believe Trump’s lies, but says so out loud. Yet in the next breath, they always say “But we can’t hold the Senate unless we’re with that guy.” So they focus intently on what they think is necessary to hold the Senate in 2022: not directly oppose Trump, but try to make sure that no legislation passes that will be seen as reflecting in any way positively on Biden and the Democrats, no matter how popular that legislation might be with their own constituents. They’ve made the calculation – probably correct – that those constituents will be so riled up by right-wing media in their crusades against Cancel Culture and Woke Corporations that they’ll overlook the fact that Rich Mitch is doing everything he can to make their lives harder. This wing consists of 40-45 GOP Senators.

McConnell hasn’t been very successful in stopping Biden’s legislation, but he has been quite successful in making his constituents’ lives harder. The best example of this is how so many Republican governors – egged on by Mitch – have cancelled the $300/week supplemental unemployment benefits that were included in Biden’s emergency pandemic relief bill in February. Given that the feds are paying 100% of those benefits, why do they feel it’s so important to “cancel” them, especially when so many of their most fervent constituents are benefiting from them?

And here it gets interesting: The only good way to justify what they’re doing is to say that people who receive those benefits need to be forced to go back to work, even though a) they may be staying home because they can’t find affordable childcare, or b) they have done a simple calculation based on the following considerations:

1.      The federal minimum wage is about $7.50 an hour. That works out to $300 a week.

2.      $300 per week is the amount of most “normal” unemployment benefits (or it might even be higher than those benefits, in some states) – i.e. the benefits that the state pays to the unemployed, regardless of any federal supplement. This means that the unemployed person who receives the supplemental benefits is receiving twice as much as they would receive if they had to take a minimum-wage job. So McConnell and his friends (Rich Mitch and his wife are worth about $30 million by the way, largely because of his wife’s family’s Taiwan-based shipping company - which of course she did her best to promote when she was Trump’s Secretary of Transportation) naturally think this is a terrible situation. How dare these people do what’s in their economic interest?

3.      Of course, if the GOP would agree to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, then people would have a lot more incentive to go back to work (especially if there are benefits. In fact, in the worst of the pandemic last year, people who had been laid off readily came back to their old jobs, even if what they were making at work wasn’t any more in dollar terms than what they were receiving in unemployment benefits. This was when there was a $600/month supplemental benefit). But that’s socialism, dontcha know?

So the GOP is in the uncomfortable position (at least it should be uncomfortable. For some reason, Mitch and the governors don’t see it that way at all) of forcing their own constituents to go back to work by cancelling the supplemental benefit – which again, is costing the states exactly $0/week. How can they possibly justify this?

They can’t. I heard Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas on NPR recently, saying something like “The people of Arkansas believe in working hard for what they earn. They don’t want to sit at home and simply be paid not to work.” If so, then why does he have to take away the supplemental benefit? These hard-working Arkansans should be flocking to the minimum wage jobs, because the last thing they want to be is a lazy shirker. But for some reason they’re not, and now Asa and his ilk have to beat them over the head with a stick to get them to come to work – as opposed to, say, using a carrot and raising the minimum wage.

Somehow, this doesn’t seem to me to be a great strategy for winning in 2022.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.