WHEN YOUR VOTERS DON'T CARE WHETHER GOVERNMENT IMPROVES THEIR LIVES, YOU CAN DO ANYTHING YOU WANT

Poor Senate Republicans! I feel so sorry for them! The president has put them in an impossible position!

The prospect of $2,000 COVID-19 stimulus checks reaching Americans is just a Senate vote away — and the situation poses an agonizing choice for Republicans.

The House, powered by its Democratic majority, on Monday passed a bill to increase the $600 checks in the $900 billion COVID-19 stimulus bill to $2,000. President Donald Trump unexpectedly called for the larger checks last week.

Following the House vote, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, pledged in a statement to bring it to the Senate on Tuesday — putting Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who decides the order of business, in a sticky position.

Is this really "an agonizing choice for Republicans" and "a sticky position" for McConnell? He apparently doesn't think so:

The fate of President Donald Trump's call to increase pandemic aid checks to $2,000 was in doubt Tuesday as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked Democrats' initial attempt to approve increased payments.

... the GOP leader outlined three priorities the president demanded Congress examine, linking the increased payments with Trump's calls to repeal Section 230 that allows big tech companies legal immunity and an examination of election integrity after Trump's unproven claims of voter fraud after his defeat.

"Those are the three important subjects the president has linked together. This week, the Senate will begin a process to bring these three priorities into focus," McConnell said on the Senate floor.

It's so much easier to be a Republican than a Democrat. If you're a Republican, you've persuaded your voters that the purpose of government isn't to make ordinary people's lives better -- government just screws up everything it touches anyway, right?

GOP voters elect GOP candidates for one reason only: to own the libs. They want Republican officeholders to prevent the Black Lives Matter socialist Antifa Chavista LGBT gun-grabbing baby-killing elitists from destroying America, and they want Democrats insulted and humiliated on a regular basis. They also want to be able to blame every government failure on the libs.

McConnell has that teed up very nicely. All he has to do is attach national voter ID legislation to the COVID checks, or offend the tech industry (which gives more money to Democrats than Republicans) by attaching Section 230 repeal to the checks, and then it will be Democrats' fault that the checks didn't happen. And GOP voters won't say, "Why did McConnell attach these poison pills to the bill? It's his fault!" They'll see right-wing media blaming the Democrats. They'll see the mainstream media blaming "Congress" or "gridlock" or "partisan bickering" -- or blaming the Democrats. So they'll blame the Democrats.

And because they don't expect to get anything from government except validation of their hatred of liberals and the Democratic Party, they'll be fine. They won't care that the checks didn't go through. They'll still vote for Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in the Georgia Senate runoffs. They won't punish Republicans for this in any upcoming elections.

I wish this were agonizing for Republicans. But nothing ever is.