Libertarian Republican Rep. Thomas Massie may have been the face of lonely opposition to the more than $2 trillion coronavirus economic rescue package recently enacted by Congress, at least on procedural grounds, but socialist Democrats didn’t like it much better.
Obviously, progressives didn’t object to the federal government spending vast sums of money to prevent an economic downturn. Even many conservatives and libertarians were willing to help workers and businesses who were hurt by a pandemic through no fault of their own, often because the government itself required employers to close for an indefinite period of time in order to halt the spread of a deadly, highly contagious illness. Unlike banks behaving badly, there is no moral hazard here.
But populists of the Left, no less than on the Right, objected to the composition of the bill, arguing that too much of the spending was targeted at the well-off rather than working families. “There should be shame,” said socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in an animated House floor speech, about “what the Senate majority supported.” The legislation offered mere “crumbs for our families,” she added.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist from Vermont who is still running for the Democratic presidential nomination, was in the upper chamber ripping “these very same folks [who] had no problem a couple years ago voting for a trillion dollars in tax breaks for billionaires and large profitable corporations. Not a problem.”
“But when it comes to low-income workers, in the midst of a terrible crisis, maybe some of them earning or having more money than they previously made — oh my word, we gotta strip that out,” Sanders added. “You see because poor people are down here, they don’t deserve, they don’t eat, they don’t pay rent, they don’t go to the doctor, they’re somehow inferior because they’re poor, gonna give them less. Some of my Republican friends still have not given up on the need to punish the poor and working people.” He went on Late Night with Seth Meyers to call the GOP’s handiwork “so ugly, so grotesque, so immoral.”
Sanders decried the bill as corporate welfare and a bailout — and then proceeded to vote for it, helping it pass the Senate 96-0 and sending it on a fast track through the House and eventually to President Trump’s desk.
Bernie repeated the same mistake John McCain made in 2008 with the Wall Street bailout. Both men were running floundering presidential campaigns, at an age where they were unlikely to ever seek the White House again, and had the opportunity to burnish their populist bona fides, distinguishing themselves from their general election opponents. Instead, they both sided with the bipartisan Washington establishment and an unpopular sitting Republican president. Sanders, unlike McCain, is actually hoping against all odds to run against that incumbent president.
At a time when each man needed a Hail Mary, they instead took a knee.
In Sanders’ case, it was somewhat understandable. It is hard for a socialist to resist an increase in federal spending and many Americans were genuinely in dire need of economic assistance. As his ally and endorser Ocasio-Cortez put it, “The option that we have is to either let them suffer with nothing, or to allow this greed and billions of dollars, which will be leveraged into trillions of dollars, to contribute the largest income inequality gap in our future.”
Yet as we see from the roll-call tally, the package was certain to pass without Sanders’ vote. He could have made a statement louder than his Senate speeches and television interviews. Given how far behind likely Democratic nominee Joe Biden he is in the delegate count, Sanders had little to lose.
For all his revolutionary bluster, Sanders has always flinched from going on the offensive. He has generally treated Biden with kid gloves in the Democratic debates. He similarly let Hillary Clinton off the hook for her “damn emails” and seldom criticized her Iraq War vote during the 2016 nomination contest, even as her allies put their thumbs on the scales at the expense of his loyal voters.
We all remember the result of McCain playing it safe on the bailout — his second and final presidential campaign ended in failure. As his 2020 campaign winds down, Bernie Sanders will meet the same fate.
W. James Antle III is the Washington Examiner’s politics editor.
