· NATION
This Is What an Opposition Party Is Supposed
to Sound Like
Bernie Sanders’s moral outrage and
devastating sarcasm struck back against a GOP assault on poor and low-income
workers.
MARCH
27, 2020
Senator Bernie
Sanders speaks on the Senate floor. (Senate Television via AP)
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Republicans
are using the coronavirus outbreak as an excuse to do the same thing they did
during the financial meltdown of 2008: wage class war against working Americans.
This time, Bernie Sanders is refusing to let them get away with it.
Employing a combination of moral outrage and devastating sarcasm, the Vermont senator shamed Republicans in
a Wednesday Senate floor speech that ripped into them for prioritizing
corporate bailouts while objecting to providing a measure of security for
low-wage workers who have lost their jobs as much of the American economy has
ground to a near halt.
“How absurd and wrong is that? What kind of
value system is that?” demanded Sanders, as he railed against a Republican
amendment that would have constrained benefits at a time when the unemployment
rate is skyrocketing. Even in the midst of the crisis, the senator thundered,
“Some of my Republican friends have still not given up on the need to punish
the poor and working people.”
In a matter of minutes, during a debate
that focused on just one portion of a huge measure, Sanders illustrated how an
opposition party is supposed to operate, and what it’s supposed to sound like.
Refusing to let Republicans peddle the nonsense that invariably serves as a
cover for the awful combination of bailouts for the wealthy and austerity for
the working class, Sanders pushed back.
It was a fight Sanders expected to win, but
it was the way he fought it that mattered: He hit as hard as the Republicans.
And he claimed the moral high ground—inspiring the hashtag #ThankYouBernie to trend on social media as the Rev.
Dr. William J. Barber II wrote, “#ThankYouBernie for pointing out the
immorality of Republicans funding big business & trying to strip out the
few things in the bill to help poor & low income workers.”
Former senator Heidi Heitkamp, a moderate
Democrat from North Dakota, circulated a video of the speech with the message, “I may not always agree
with @BernieSanders but this is @BernieSanders at his very best. You go, my friend!”
Whether Sanders continues his bid for the
Democratic presidential nomination as he trails former vice president Joe Biden
or whether he folds at some point, his speech this week signaled that the
senator will remain a transformative figure in the politics of the Democratic
Party and the United States.
The fight that Sanders joined goes to the
heart of concerns about the federal response to economic dislocation caused by
the coronavirus pandemic. There is broad bipartisan agreement that Congress
must move decisively to fund an urgent response. But there is a good deal of
disagreement about how to respond to the economic fallout as states lock down
in order to slow the spread of the deadly virus. There is a good deal of concern
that the legislative process will be gamed by Republicans—and perhaps some
Democrats—who are as inclined to bail out Wall Street in 2020 as they were in
2008. The wrangling over the Senate bill highlighted those concerns.
The $2 trillion relief package that the
Senate approved Wednesday night does everything imaginable, and a few
things that are unimaginable, for big business. The 880-page measure allocates
$425 billion to create a fund controlled by the Federal Reserve, which permits
massive loans to corporations. In addition, it makes $75 billion available for
loans targeted to aid the airline and hotel industries.
The legislation is so friendly to big
business that, even after it was reported on Thursday morning that a record
3.28 million people had filed for unemployment benefits, the Dow Jones surged because, as one analyst told CNBC, “the focus by the market now is on the
fact we’re likely to get a historically large fiscal stimulus.” The wolves of
Wall Street are excited by what economist Dean
Baker correctly
identifies as “the $500 billion slush fund that McConnell has made a
centerpiece of the Senate bill.”
The measure would have been dramatically
worse had Republicans not been faced with the reality of a divided Congress and
the interventions of Senate minority leader Charles Schumer and his caucus,
which fought for more than $100 billion for hospitals, $150 billion dollars for state and local government, $30
billion in emergency education funding, $25 billion in emergency transit
funding, vital initiatives for small businesses, and anti-corruption
initiatives that Schumer said were toughened with the aid of Massachusetts
Senator Elizabeth Warren. The Democrats celebrated a plan providing direct
payments averaging $1,200 for individuals and $2,400 for couples, as well as
what Schumer dubbed “unemployment insurance on steroids.”
The package, as it was agreed to by Senate
negotiators, featured a section—which Sanders and other progressives had
championed—that supercharged unemployment benefits by promising out-of-work
Americans up to four months of weekly unemployment checks from the states where
they live and an additional $600 a week in benefits. It also established a new Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program to provide benefits to gig workers
and the self-employed.
This level of care for vulnerable workers
disturbed Republican Senators Tim Scott, Lindsey Graham, and Ben Sasse. Their objection? “Unless this bill is fixed, there is
a strong incentive for employees to be laid off instead of going to work. This
isn’t an abstract, philosophical point—it’s an immediate, real-world
problem,” the senators claimed in a press statement, continuing:
If the federal government accidentally
incentivizes layoffs, we risk life-threatening shortages in sectors where
doctors, nurses, and pharmacists are trying to care for the sick, and where
growers and grocers, truckers and cooks are trying to get food to families’
tables. This isn’t who we are as Americans; this isn’t what we do in a crisis.
We must sadly oppose the fast-tracking of this bill until this text is
addressed, or the Department of Labor issues regulatory guidance that no
American would earn more by not working than by working.
Sanders responded immediately:
Unless these Republican Senators drop their
objections, I am prepared to put a hold on this bill until stronger conditions
are imposed on the $500 billion corporate welfare fund to make sure that any
corporation receiving financial assistance under this legislation does not lay
off workers, cut wages or benefits, ship jobs overseas, or pay workers poverty
wages.
When the Republican amendment was debated
Wednesday, Sanders held nothing back.
“So now I find that some of my Republican
colleagues are very distressed. They’re very upset that somebody who is making
$10, $12 an hour might end up with a paycheck for four months [amounting to]
more than they received last week,” raged the senator. Aiming sarcastic fury at
the Republicans, he shouted:
Oh, my God, the universe is collapsing.
Imagine that! Somebody is making 12 bucks an hour, now, like the rest of us,
faces an unprecedented economic crisis with the 600 bucks on top of their
normal, regular unemployment check might be making a few bucks more for four
months. Oh, my word, will the universe survive?
Noting that “these very same folks had no
problem a couple years ago voting for a trillion dollars in tax breaks for
billionaires and large profitable corporations,” Sanders added, “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.”
The Senate did not strip it out. The
Republican amendment failed, and the objecting senators folded—joining
the full Senate in voting for the overall bill.
What was striking, and what will be
remembered, is that in this chaotic moment Bernie Sanders framed an urgent
debate around the fundamental premise that “one thing we must not do is punish
low-income workers.”
John
Nichols is The Nation’s national-affairs
correspondent and host of Next
Left, The Nation’s podcast where politics gets personal with
rising progressive politicians. He is the author of Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide
to the Most Dangerous People in America, from Nation Books, and co-author, with
Robert W. McChesney, of People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless
Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607;
Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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