For most of 2020, President Trump downplayed the COVID-19 pandemic. He called it a hoax designed to attack his presidency, then it was the common cold so there was no need to shut down businesses — all while arguing his case against mask-wearing (until contracting the virus himself). Today, Donald Trump has strangely found himself on the same side of the stimulus issue as Senator Bernie Sanders, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the Democrats. He is demanding that the $600 per person stimulus package be increased to $2,000.
The U.S. House of Representatives (almost unanimously) passed the amendment despite knowing Mitch McConnell would block it. His action is a giant smack in the face to every struggling American. Due to this pandemic, people are at risk of losing their homes, families cannot feed their children, and electricity has been turned off because people don’t have the money to pay the bill. McConnell is telling every struggling American that he doesn’t care about their problems. So what does he care about? Adding two other items to the package that benefit Trump and the Republicans.
McConnell wants to make sure that Section 230 and the voter fraud investigation are packaged in with the $2,000 stimulus. Section 230 throws away liability for social media companies, like Facebook, for the content posted on their platform. For Republicans, this means they can post false information to these platforms without the consequence of that post being labeled false or fact-checked. And in another attempt to try to overturn the election, McConnell wants an investigation into fraud in the 2020 presidential election written in as well.
Once again, McConnell has placed the wants of the Republican Party over the needs of the American people. Mitch McConnell’s addition of these poison pills proves that he has no intention of allowing another vote on a clean bill that would help put struggling Americans out of their misery. I for one will be glued to the Georgia Senate runoff next week and hope to see McConnell become minority leader. We deserve better!
Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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