March 23, 2020

Mitch McConnell’s Slush Fund Will Never Pass

From the Washington Post:

Did Mitch McConnell seriously think he could pass a bill that contains a blank-check $500 billion corporate bailout? Both parties objected when a Republican Treasury Secretary tried to ram through a $700 billion blank-check bank bailout in 2008, and both parties ought to be objecting now. To their shame, though, Republicans no longer care about this, even though giving Donald Trump a blank check is far more dangerous than giving George W. Bush a blank check ever was. Without tighter direction, there’s simply no reason to believe that Trump won’t use his authority over this bailout fund as leverage to help his friends and punish his enemies. This is the way Trump works, and everyone knows it. It would be insane to pretend otherwise.

I don’t know precisely how the bailout fund should be structured, but it should be kept very far away from Trump’s mercurial disposition. McConnell can’t possibly believe that Democrats will ever vote for it otherwise.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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