Eric Gay/AP Photo
People wearing protective masks pass coronavirus-related murals painted on closed businesses in Austin, Texas, April 17, 2020.
Mitch McConnell has made clear that he wants no blue-state bailouts in the next round of CARES legislation, but that’s just Republican posturing. Since the government can’t withhold funds from Democratic states without also withholding funds from Republican states, which will be just as close to going under as their Democratic counterparts, there will surely be money for the states—if not an adequate amount—in the next package.
But if you can’t draw a bead only on the Democrats when dealing with the states, you actually can when dealing with cities. Urban America is overwhelmingly Democratic in its demographics, its voting, its policies, and its governments. Minorities and millennials are clustered in cities. Almost every one of the nation’s 30 largest cities has a Democratic mayor and city council. To be sure, Democratic-run states will be compelled to share some of their funds with cities should cities not receive federal funding, but as for the Democratic cities in Republican-run states—cities like Atlanta, Miami, Nashville, Phoenix, Austin, Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas—funding may not come.
As Republicans do have a base in small-town America, they could even devise a formula that directs funding to smaller cities and counties and denies it to larger municipalities. That could be a formula that Trump and his legions might gleefully embrace.
In which case, the Democratic House would have to respond with the hardest of hardball, harder by far than anything they’ve done up to now. They could deny all funding unless urban areas got their fair share, or perhaps even flip the Republicans’ criteria so that funding only went to larger cities and counties.
Standing Clausewitz on his head, politics would then become a version of civil war by other means.
