Is the stimulus bill really dead this time?

Follow Us Get the newsletter Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. The stimulus bill seems to be more dead than ever — I'll get into exactly how dead in a bit — but the real question is why it's dead. And the answer seems to be: because many Republicans didn't want a deal, and the rest weren't willing to endorse a compromise that would've split the party. A quick recap: House Democrats started work on this bill as soon as the previous pandemic stimulus had been enacted in March. They wound up passing a $3 trillion relief measure in May. Senate Republicans responded with … nothing. They waited until mid-July to even begin talks, then never did much in the way of real negotiating. Eventually, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, sometimes joined by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, entered into on-again, off-again talks with House Democrats. But these seemed less like a serious effort to find a compromise than a show to ensure Republicans couldn't be blamed for a failure to reach an agreement. And that takes us to Tuesday, when President Donald Trump tweeted out instructions to end negotiations until after the election. Which was where things stood for a few hours, until Trump sent out another tweet seeming to agree with Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell's view that stimulus is urgently needed, the more the better, and then later demanded that Congress pass some of the stuff that he wanted in any event. What's really going on? As the Washington Post's Erica Werner and Jeff Stein report, the White House economic team, some outside advisers and a large number of Republicans in Congress simply oppose spending money to stimulate the economy. They also report that Republican leaders in both chambers are cool to making a deal. My assumption? Most mainstream conservatives, even those who think (along with virtually all economists) that government spending would boost the economy and therefore help Trump and his party in November, are more worried about being dismissed as sell-out RINOs by accepting a deal with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That is, even with a general election a month away, they're more concerned about their own primary elections in 2022 than with what might happen to Trump and their Senate majority in November. And congressional leadership rarely strays far from what the rank-and-file wants. The theory, advanced by many partisan Democrats, that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is deliberately attempting to destroy the economy because he's given up on the election and wants to undermine a Joe Biden presidency, strikes me as entirely wrong. McConnell could've had a deal for a massive stimulus bill back in April; surely he hadn't given up on the presidency or his Senate majority at that point. It makes a lot more sense that the opposition to government spending in this case was sincere.  I've also seen some speculation that had the White House struck a deal, Republican lawmakers would've been afraid to oppose it and surely wouldn't have filibustered the president's bill. I think that gets it wrong too. One reason there's no deal is because congressional Republicans didn't want to be put in that spot, and let the White House know it. Another reason is that they don't trust Trump to pick a position and stick with it. Remember when he criticized the House health-care bill that he had previously supported? You can bet every Republican on Capitol Hill does. And the president hasn't done anything recently, on this bill or anything else, to build trust in his word.  So: Before the last round of negotiations began, I thought that a deal was mostly dead — which, as Miracle Max will tell you, is slightly alive, but requires a miracle. When Pelosi and Mnuchin started meeting again, I was tempted to upgrade it to nearly dead (like all those characters in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" who claim to be feeling much better) but eventually didn't even think it was as dead as Bernie Lomax in the sadly underappreciated "Weekend at Bernie's II," who is dead but re-animates when he hears music. After Trump's afternoon tweet it sure looked as though the deal was dead-parrot dead, at least through the election, and you can't get any deader than that. But now it seems that it's more like Bernie in the original "Weekend at Bernie's" — thoroughly dead, but propped up and made to look alive for increasingly improbable reasons, even though the ineptitude of the whole thing makes you suspect that no one really buys it. 1. Must-read from Hakeem Jefferson and Alan Yan on Black voters. 2. Stephanie Ternullo at the Monkey Cage on how voters learn about the pandemic. 3. Dan Drezner on Trump's worsening behavior. 4. Anthony Marcum and James Wallner argue for an eight-justice Supreme Court. 5. And Jonathan Chait on Trump and the stimulus. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. 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