Let us all have a moment of sympathy – and perhaps even understanding – for Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie.
For Massie and many like him, the bill to prevent an economic catastrophe in the face of a pandemic is inherently a financial misfortune and a radical change in government philosophy. Letting go of this without a recorded vote was a profound surrender – a violation of everything he believed to be sacred.
“If this bill is so great for America, why not vote on it?” he raged on Twitter.
One reason at the time was that more debate and reflection would mean that Americans would have to wait so much longer for the huge amounts of money to geyser out of Washington soon.
Another reason was that the return of House members to vote would mean hundreds of people returning to the Capitol. Some travel around the country to be there, risking exposure to the virus or sharing it with others.
Even so, Massie had a point with his Cri de Coeur for conservatism.
The CARES law (Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security) explicitly spends money faster than any other legislation in history and scoops it out with a hint of desperation. This frightens those who routinely look at all governments with suspicion and the government in Washington with the greatest suspicion of all.
The law implicitly states that as a nation, when the chips are down, we turn to our national mother – the federal government. For a libertarian like Massie, who also claims this label as a Republican member of Congress, that must be an abomination (just like his compatriot Kentuckian, Senator Rand Paul, who didn’t vote in the Senate because he tested positive for that Corona virus).
We are currently in a crisis. But how will fiscal conservatives, who voted for $ 2 trillion, attack the cost of budget items in the coming years, which will now look like rounding errors or “decimal dust”?
Republican Senate chairman Everett Dirksen spoke about federal spending decades ago and once joked: “A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you’ll be talking about real money.”
Have we now translated that into the language of the trillions?
If you had written a 30-second TV commercial in the past that is attacking a congress with free expenses, you might have written something like this: “This is an unprecedented surge of taxpayers’ money – with no contradicting income or spending cuts – not only Balloons are the federal budget, but tripled the $ 1 trillion deficit expected this year (already among the highest in history), and with this single vote, Congress has contributed as much to government debt as it has accumulated in the first 200 years of the constitution’s existence has been. “
Some of those who voted for CARES this week can expect to hear something like this one day, whether it is a completely fair characterization or not.
However, the power of this current crisis and the force behind this bill at this hour were so great that even the leading financial conservatives, who would normally be at the forefront and at the center, were noticed by their absence. President Trump now wanted the bill on his desk. The Senate had voted 96-0. Even members of the stubborn House Freedom Caucus resigned when a large, non-partisan majority of the house played the matador and let the bull rush past.
That is what Massie decided that he couldn’t tolerate without protest. Was it a grandstand game? Was he a show boat? Perhaps, and if that’s the judgment of his colleagues and voters, he’ll pay a price for it. The rest of us have to judge for ourselves.
But the mockery came immediately. In two tweets, which represented a rare encounter of their thoughts, President Trump demanded that Massie be ousted from the Republican Party and former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry denounced the Kentuckian for exercising his constitutional right to be a body part not worth mentioning.
Trump tweeted this He never knew that Kerry had such a sense of humorand for a fleeting moment the nation finally seemed united in something.
Back on Capitol Hill, the ground leaders of both parties fought for Massie. Within a few hours they had established the debate rule for the bill so that the CARES version of the Senate could be approved without a roll call.
A frustrated massie had to rage on social media as the greatest juggernaut of all time rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue to hastily sign the White House.
And while none of the leaders of his own party joined his lonely crusade, Massie at least spoke to others across the country who could hardly believe what was happening on C-SPAN – and the lack of a significant opposition in Washington.
Matt Welch, editor-in-chief of Reason, a libertarian magazine, described the CARES Act as “a massive course in experimental economics” and compared the American public to “laboratory rats”. Even President Barack Obama’s $ trillion stimulus package, which the Republicans opposed in 2009, had not been as robust.
“In America there is no tax caution policy anymore,” added Welch, “just a competition to see who can wag with the biggest fire hose.”
Indeed, some of the Republican senators who ultimately voted for the law made serious speeches this week at the Senate floor, complaining of its need. Some appealed to the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s presidency or the America he wanted to represent and restore. (His 1980 campaign contained the slogan, “Let’s make America great again.”) Indeed, the Reagan era of the 1980s was a setback for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in many ways – albeit half a century too late.
“A sharp break with the past actually took place in March 1933,” wrote historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. about the first inauguration of the FDR in the The cycles of American history. “The essence of this break was precisely the changes in volunteering rightly as a means of orderly economy.”
In other words, the 1933 break was between dependence on the individual and dependence on the collective, between libertarian conservatism and the liberalism of the great government. These competing forces have since risen and fallen in our mutual national experience in relation to one another.
It would be too much, or at least too early to say that what happened in Congress this week was a comparable turning point in this long struggle. But for Thomas Massie and many like him, it must have felt similar.