Anat Shenker-Osorio

1. The Senate Republicans are no longer dithering. Along with the White House, they have decided to split the difference.

2. They aren’t demanding a payroll tax cut, as the president preferred, but neither are they demanding a continuation of $600-a-week in unemployment benefits, as Mitch McConnell preferred. Instead, they are going to push for reducing that benefit to about $200 a week.

3. This is bad policy and bad politics, as my friend Marty Longman (@BooMan23) wrote last week. Two hundred bucks weekly is better than a payroll tax cut. No one would see that (especially if they’re unemployed).

4. But people would see less money coming in amid a pandemic, recession and housing crisis just getting started. (Evictions are set to soar next month.) In the Washington Monthly, Marty said the “compromise” is an “example of the way ideology twists the Republican Party in knots.

6. Conservative ideology does indeed turn the GOP into knots, but I suspect there’s more going on.

7. At one time in our past, it would have made perfect sense to say, as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin did last week: “We’re not going to use taxpayer money to pay people more to stay home.” While that rhetoric may still persuade some, it by no means persuades most.