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WASHINGTON Top Republicans are evoking concerns about the rising national debt to pump the brakes on coronavirus relief, and Democrats are crying foul.

House Democrats are eyeing a vote as early as Friday on a $3 trillion package that includes aid to state and local governments, assistance for essential workers, an extension of unemployment benefits beyond July and another round of direct payments for families.

"We're taking a look at what we've already done we've added about $3 trillion to the national debt and assessing the effectiveness of that before deciding to go forward," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters Tuesday. "If we reach a decision along with the administration to move to another phase, that'll be the time to interact with the Democrats."

He said the House bill "is not something designed to deal with reality but designed to deal with aspirations this is not a time for aspirational legislation."

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The budget deficit is projected to rise to a record $3.7 trillion in fiscal year 2020, according to the Congressional Budget Office, although the U.S. continues to borrow at record low interest rates.

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Democrats say Republicans are using the issue now as a pretext to reject additional relief, arguing that they weren't concerned about the debt when they passed the $1.9 trillion tax law or other coronavirus aid measures that helped businesses.

"Well, it's interesting to see what they're saying, becoming now, renewing their fiscal hawk positions that they can barely remember. I have confidence in going big with what we do," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Monday on MSNBC's "All In with Chris Hayes."

"When I saw them give a $2 trillion addition to the national debt in order to give 83 percent of the benefits to the top 1 percent, that was so irresponsible in terms of it did nothing for the economy except heap mountains of debt on our children," she said.

The budget deficit fell sharply during Barack Obama's presidency amid demands from congressional Republicans. But it rose by hundreds of billions of dollars after the GOP took control in 2017 and passed tax cuts and struck deals to increase spending.

The Democrats' new legislation, which is backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., includes nearly $1 trillion in aid to state and local governments to cover expenses related to the coronavirus and to pay health care workers and teachers. McConnell and other Republicans have used the growing debt to pour cold water on the push.

On the Senate floor Wednesday, Rick Scott, R-Fla., sounded the alarm about the fiscal situation as he railed against "bailing out" states facing budget woes during the pandemic.

"Our national debt and deficits already at unsustainable levels have skyrocketed as Congress has spent almost $3 trillion to address this crisis," Scott said. "At some point, we need to start thinking about the impact this spending will have on our country's financial future and the future of our children and grandchildren."

The battle is less partisan among governors.

"As Congress reconvenes, delivering urgent state fiscal relief must be a top priority. Each day that Congress fails to act, states are being forced to make cuts that will devastate the essential services the American people rely on and destroy the economic recovery before it even gets off the ground," Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a joint statement Wednesday. "This is not a red state or blue state crisis. This is a red white and blue pandemic. The coronavirus is apolitical."

Republicans are digging in their heels less than six months before an election that will shape the U.S. recovery from the coronavirus, foreshadowing political roadblocks that the apparent Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, would have to deal with if he is elected president. The outcome will affect whether the country pursues fiscal restraint or major stimulus efforts to recover from the coronavirus calamity.

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A task force announced Wednesday by Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., includes some figures who have downplayed the deficit in pursuit of national goals: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Stephanie Kelton, an economics and public policy professor at Stony Brook University in New York. The task force features progressives and moderates who will recommend policy to the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Ocasio-Cortez said Democrats should ignore GOP debt warnings.

"It's absolutely a bad-faith argument," she said in an interview. "They were not concerned about the deficit when they wanted half a trillion dollars that would be leveraged into $4 trillion for Wall Street and their donor buddies. And honestly, you know what? If they are that concerned about the deficit, I'm happy to meet them halfway and roll back the $2 trillion tax cut that they passed just two years ago.

"Aside from that, they don't get to just start whining about the deficit the moment we actually get on the cusp of helping working people," she said.

Sahil Kapur is a national political reporter for NBC News.

Read more:
Democrats accuse Republicans of 'bad faith' as they invoke national debt to pause pandemic aid - NBCNews.com

WASHINGTON The congressional Democrats' latest proposal for rescuing the nation from the coronavirus economic crash looks like a series of dreams come true for New York State and the Buffalo area.

The state would get $34.4 billion over two years, and more than $1 billion would flow into Buffalo's coffers. Congress would send $517 million to Erie County, and property owners across the state would get back the cherished SALT deduction that Congress trimmed three years ago.

"This is exactly what a disaster relief bill should look like," Rep. Brian Higgins, a Buffalo Democrat, said of the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act, or Heroes Act.

But to Republicans, the Democrats' $3 trillion proposal is a disaster in itself.

"Obviously, it's a partisan exercise," said Rep. Tom Reed, a Corning Republican who criticized the measure for loosening the reins on the cannabis industry, releasing federal prisoners and aiding undocumented immigrants.

In other words, then, the Heroes Act is just the opening volley in what's likely to be a longer and more difficult tussle than Congress endured in passing its first four pieces of legislation aimed at responding to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Heroes Act would refill local government accounts that have been running low because sales tax revenues have disappeared amid the Covid-19 shutdown. In the Buffalo area alone, municipalities would get $2.2 billion over two years.

"This proposal would absolutely eliminate the city's fiscal problems," said Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown. "I think that this proposal is very forward-thinking in that municipalities won't just need federal aid for one year, but they will need it for multiple years."

Erie County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz was equally pleased.

The bill "provides the certainty we need so that we could continue providing the services as normal for a county government without having to do drastic layoffs," Poloncarz said.

The measure would also give $171.2 million to the City of Niagara Falls and $117.7 million to the Niagara County government. The largest towns in the region would each receive tens of millions of dollars, and even the smallest municipalities would get something.

Moreover, the bill would likely limit cuts in state funding to municipalities and school districts. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday that the state now faces a $61 billion funding gap. The Heroes Act would cover $22.3 billion of this year's shortfall and give the state $12.1 billion in 2021.

Cuomo was particularly pleased with the bill's proposed return of the federal deduction for state and local taxes. Capped at $10,000 annually in the Republican Congress' 2017 tax overhaul, that deduction would go uncapped for the next two years a move that would help high-tax states such as New York to retain residents.

"It's the single best piece of action for the State of New York," Cuomo said.

The trouble with the Heroes Act, though, is that its an entirely Democratic bill and any successful measure will have to pass muster with the Republican-led Senate and the Republican president.

And while President Trump remained silent on the measure, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had plenty to say.

"Even the media is describing it as a partisan wish list with no chance of becoming law," McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said in a statement. This is exactly the wrong approach."

Rather than starting work on a fourth major coronavirus funding bill, McConnell said he is putting together a bill aimed at protecting businesses from lawsuits if they reopen amid the Covid-19 crisis.

Meantime, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy took issue with provisions of the Heroes Act guaranteeing the right to vote by mail this fall, rescuing troubled pension funds and restoring the SALT deduction.

The problems with this 1815-page, multi-trillion dollar messaging bill are plain to see," said McCarthy, a California Republican. "Its central demands changing election laws, bailing out mismanaged pensions, and temporarily suspending the cap on SALT tax deductions for millionaires and billionaires were drafted behind closed doors, predate the crisis, and are not targeted to coronavirus."

Despite that partisan divide, Democrats and Republicans agreed there are areas where the two parties may eventually come to an agreement.

Reed has been working with Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, and Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, on a measure that would provide $500 billion to states and localities half of what the Heroes Act would deliver.

"A trillion dollars is not reasonable," Reed said.

There's also bipartisan interest in increasing funding for the National Institutes of Health. The Heroes Act would boost NIH funding by $4.75 billion just shy of the $5 billion that Higgins has been pushing for research into finding a vaccine or treatment for Covid-19.

"We have to deal with the problem at hand," Higgins said.

Congress may do that at a leisurely pace, though, partly because the Trump administration has said there's no need to pass another relief bill immediately.

"We just want to make sure that before we jump back in and spend another few trillion of taxpayers money that we do it carefully," Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said on Fox News this week.

But Congress is already facing pressure from the nation's governors. Cuomo, the Democratic vice chair of the National Governors Association, and Gov. Larry Hogan, the group's Republican vice chair, delivered a joint statement Wednesday calling for fast action.

"With widespread bipartisan agreement on the need for this assistance, we cannot afford a partisan process that turns this urgent relief into another political football," they said.

Excerpt from:
Localities win in Democratic bill that Republicans dismiss out of hand - Buffalo News

According to a report in the New York Times, Republican officeholders in competitive districts fear Donald Trump's unpopularity particularly in light of his coronavirus failures and the subsequent collapse of the economy willswamp their chances of holding onto their seats in November.

As GOP lawmaker put it: "I'm holding on."

"It is a tricky task for lawmakers like [Rep. Fred] Upton (R-MI) in centrist districts throughout the country, who understand that their re-election prospects and any hope their party might have of taking back the House of Representatives could rise or fall based on how they address the pandemic. Already considered a politically endangered species before the novel coronavirus began ravaging the United States, these moderates are now working to counter the risk that their electoral fates could become tied to Mr. Trump's response at a time when the independent voters whose support they need areincreasingly unhappywith his performance," the report notes before adding, "The president's combative news conferences, which his own political advisers have counseled him to curtail, have made the challenge all the steeper."

"In an attempt to ensure their contests become referendums on their own responses to the virus, rather than the president's, vulnerable House Republicans are instead brandishing their own independent streaks, playing up their work with Democrats, doubling down on constituent service and hosting town-hall-style events avoiding mention of Mr. Trump whenever possible," the report continues with Rep John Katko (R-NY) admitting, "It does make it difficult at times."

According to former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) who battled with Trump and ended up losing his seat in the 2018 "blue wave" election it is not an easy task.

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"The president continues to be reckless in the context of the Covid-19 crisis," Curbelo explained. "You could see a similar dynamic where a lot of Republicans in competitive districts will just break with him in an effort to protect their own candidacies."

"Many of his former colleagues in competitive districts had hoped the severity of the crisis would give them a platform to highlight their own responses, Mr. Curbelo said. But as Mr. Trump's nightly briefings 'became more about the president and his personality' than about the disease, he added, 'Republicans have perceived a peril in that development, and certainly some of the recent polling validates that,'" the report continues.

"In some ways, the dilemma these centrist Republicans are facing is the same one they have had to navigate since Mr. Trump was elected, as they have repeatedly been called upon to answer for his more provocative statements and actions. But the pandemic has sharply raised the stakes as their constituents bear the brunt of its dire consequences," the Times reports. "At home in their districts, lawmakers have largely been able to avoid direct questions about the president's handling of the crisis, instead fielding anonslaught of requests from constituentsand reporters for basic information about when relief will reach them."

One Republican voter who voted for Trump in 2016 and will likely support him in 2020, said he understands the problems faced by GOP lawmakers who are trying to avoid the president.

"It's a tightrope," explained Gary Dixon, a retired salesman who supports Rep. John Katko (R-NY). "You've got to be on that wire where you're trying to stay in the middle, but I don't think his middle position will alienate the true Republicans."

You canread more here.

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Republicans in tight races are fleeing Trump in fear of a November election disaster: report - Salon

The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has four essential rules for successful punditry:

Those maxims have consistently made Krugman the most intelligent and the most useful New York Times pundit, at least since Frank Rich wrote his final must-read column 11 years ago. A new collection of Krugmans pieces, therefore, is a timely reminder that actual knowledge and ordinary common sense are two of the rarest qualities in mainstream journalism today.

Krugmans enemies are the zombie ideas of his books title, especially the belief that budget deficits are always bad and the notion that tax cuts for the rich can ever benefit anyone other than the plutocrats who never stop pleading for them.

The same tired arguments in favor of coddling the rich have been rolled out over and over again, by Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, even though there has never been a shred of serious evidence to support them.

These relentless efforts over five decades culminated in the Trump tax cut, memorably described by the political consultant Rick Wilson as a masterwork of gigantic government giveaways, unfunded spending, massive debt and deficits, and a catalogue of crony capitalist freebies.

Wilson also identified the billionaires effect on the nations capital. Washington, he wrote, has become the drug-resistant syphilis of political climates, largely impervious to treatment and highly contagious.

Krugmans columns act like a steady stream of antibiotics, aimed at restoring the importance of the economic sciences that have been so successfully displaced by brain-dead Republican ideology.

Very few political columns are worth reading 12 months after they are written the New York Times grandee James Reston accurately titled one of his collections Sketches in the Sand. But Krugmans book proves that he, a Nobel-prize winning economist, shares two rare qualities with George Orwell, the novelist who also wrote much of the best journalism of the 20th century: deep intelligence and genuine prescience.

The modern GOP doesnt want to hear from serious economists, whatever their politics. It prefers charlatans and cranks

Krugman is at his Orwellian best here: When youre confronting bad-faith arguments, the public should be informed not just these arguments are wrong, but they they are in fact being made in bad faith.

Its important to point out that the people who predicted runaway inflation from the Feds bond buying were wrong. But its also important to point out that none of them have been willing to admit that they were wrong.

Krugman also writes that even asking the right questions like what is happening to income inequality will spur quite a few conservatives to denounce you as un-American. And its worse for climate scientists, who face persecution for speaking the truth about our continued dependence on fossil fuels, or social scientists studying the causes of gun violence: From 1996 to 2017 the Centers for Disease Control were literally forbidden to fund research into firearm injuries and deaths.

The history of the last half-century is mostly about how the unbridled greed of the top 1% has perverted American democracy so successfully, it has become almost impossible to implement rational policies that benefit a majority of Americans.

To Krugman, an interlocking network of media organizations and think tanks that serves the interests of rightwing billionaires has effectively taken over the GOP and movement conservatism is what keeps zombie ideas, like belief in the magic of tax cuts, alive.

Its not just that Trump has assembled an administration of the worst and the dimmest. The truth is that the modern GOP doesnt want to hear from serious economists, whatever their politics. It prefers charlatans and cranks, who are its kind of people.

Even now, as the incompetent kleptocrats who have filled up the White House and every federal agency confront the greatest worldwide health emergency of modern times, they have maintained their laser-like focus on the interests of the rich. As the Guardian has reported, Millionaires and billionaires are set to reap more than 80% of the benefits from a change to the tax law Republicans put in the coronavirus economic relief package the change will allow some of the nations wealthiest to avoid nearly $82bn of tax liability in 2020.

And as the great labor reporter Steven Greenhouse pointed out this week, with Trumps latest executive order to keep meatpacking plants open regardless of the consequences to their employees, the president is literally marching many meatpacking workers off to slaughter.

Never before in modern American history has the plutocracy so blatantly embraced the idea that profits matter much more than people especially when the idiotic reopening of the economy weeks before health experts say its safe will clearly kill more poor people than anyone else.

When I was 15, I acted as the translator for my uncle Jerrys family on a tour of the grand chateaux of the Loire Valley. As we traipsed through one spectacular example of conspicuous consumption after another, my deeply progressive uncle kept repeating the same question: What took them so long to start the revolution?

If our present calamity is finally enough to force the climate-change-denying, poor-people-hating Republican party from the White House and the Senate, one can only hope the popular imagination will be stirred as it was in Paris in 1793.

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Arguing with Zombies review: Paul Krugman trumps the Republicans - The Guardian

The best way to promote a liberal agenda is to build trust in good government.

Unlike the Republican response to efforts aimed at mitigating the effects of the Great Recession in 2009, Democrats arent attempting to obstruct everything Trump and Republicans propose as the country struggles to deal with a pandemic. That alone should be a stark reminder that both sides dont do it when it comes to gridlock in Washington.

But as Ezra Klein notes, the differences between the two parties are even more stark than that. While Republicans sat on their hands and simply obstructed, Democrats are actually trying to govern.

Democrats are acting as the governing party even though theyre in the minority. Theyre fighting for the baseline policies that any normal administration, Republican or Democrat, would be begging for right now.

From the very beginning, this administration made the decision that there was no legitimate role for the federal government to play in responding to this crisis, says Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT). It wasnt an accident they didnt request any money in the early days. They really believed, as they believe today, that this is a problem states and local governments should confront.

The risk Democrats take is that voters tend to credit a president with any major legislation, especially during an election year. Given the magnitude of Trumps failures during this crisis, that is less of a concern than it would be otherwise. But weve still seen him take credit for relief measures, when it was actually Democrats who did the heavy lifting during negotiations.

There are always those who think that Democrats should employ the same tactics Republicans have used to effectively obstruct any progress that could be credited to the opposition. But that ignores a fundamental difference between the two parties, as Senator Brian Schatz explained.

Its like the old saying that Republicans believe the government is incompetent and then get elected and prove it, says Schatz. They dont want the federal government to work and we do. Thats whats going on here, and I dont have a quick, facile solution to it. If we engage in a zero-sum game, well just accelerate the death spiral that is Grover Norquist and Mitch McConnell and the Koch brothers dream.

Schatz is exactly right. If you had any doubts about the fact that Democratic obstruction would play right into the hands of Norquist, McConnell, and the Koch brothers, I would remind you of what Mike Lofgrenformer Republican congressional stafferwrote back in 2011.

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congresss generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

That is precisely why a mantra of mine has been that the best way to promote a liberal agenda is to build public trust in good government.

Those differences are especially stark when, for the president and his supporters, the cruelty is the point. As Representative Pramila Jayapal told Klein about our current crisis, There is enormous suffering, and if we do not respond with the boldness and the scale that this crisis demands, then that suffering will continue.

There are probably times when promoting good government becomes a liability for Democrats who are attempting to negotiate with a party that is, as Lofgren suggested, programmatically against government. But ignoring the suffering of the American people, especially during a crisis like the one were facing now, is simply not an option.

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Why Democrats Govern and Republicans Obstruct - Washington Monthly