Part 2
1. The following are excerpts from renowned Trump critic Jack Holmes' July 31, 2020 article headlined "This Is a Moral Disaster for the Country. It's a Political Disaster for Republicans." with the subheading "The Senate has allowed boosted unemployment benefits to expire as the pandemic rages and jobless claims are on the rise."
(Begin excerpts)
....how many hours a week are members of Congress working to earn their $174,000 a year?
Millions of people have a rent bill coming down the pike that they cannot pay, just as eviction moratoriums are expiring across the country. Millions are already choosing between groceries and electricity and keeping a roof over their heads. There seems to be a baseline inability among members of Congress to truly grasp how desperate this situation may become. The people tearing their hair out about a socialist revolution are hopelessly blind to their role in creating the conditions for one....Just wait until you throw people on the street during a pandemic. It's not just moral barbarism, it's incredibly dumb if you're interested in maintaining the current order of things for a little longer.
....If any gravitational forces remain in American politics, voters will punish the party whose figurehead occupies the White House, which the Trump folks well know. His chief of staff, Mark Meadows, emerged on Friday to desperately suggest that they'd been open to an emergency extension of the benefits and it's Democrats who've obstructed progress. (Again, the House passed a bill in May. The Senate and the White House simply did not engage with it for months.) It's amazing they've allowed it to get this far before they broke with McConnell and went along with anything that would keep the money in people's pockets, even temporarily. Like Congress, the president's team can't even keep their eyes on the ball long enough to look out for themselves.... (End excerpts)
Source: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a33481550/senate-republicans-unemployment-benefits-expire-coronavirus/
2. America's moral barbarism and Republican political disaster rank as the stain of the century.
