GOP senator whose vote is needed to fund $5,000 checks says he won't fund them

…(cont) I wrote something last week about a word, "dividend," and I'll leave that be this time. What I want to get to is Wednesday's item, because it's new and it's short and I keep rereading the short ones.

Fox News, Wednesday the 21st. Senator Paul — "fiscal hawk," that's Fox's word for him in the headline, not mine, I don't hand out titles, I just read what's printed — does not support the five-thousand-dollar plan. That's the sentence. Doesn't support it. And in the same piece he's quoted, on the record, saying something else about spending: "both parties have failed us." That's his sentence. I'm not putting words next to it that aren't his.

Here's what I keep doing with it, standing at the toll plaza, the exact-change lane, the one with the basket you throw the quarters into. You don't get through on ninety-nine cents. The basket doesn't care how sincerely you meant the dollar. It counts what lands, and if it's short, the arm doesn't go up, and the fellow behind you leans on his horn.

Five thousand dollars, if it ever gets sent, needs Republicans to hold both chambers, and then it needs Congress to actually vote the money — that's two separate baskets, not one. And a member of the party that has to hold that chamber has already told a wire service, this week, that he isn't putting his quarter in. That's not a prediction. That's a basket coming up short before the car's even pulled up to the plaza.

And Treasury — I wrote this down from the Hill piece, it's around here somewhere — Treasury is the outfit that would actually have to write the checks, and as of the 12th nobody there would say on the record they could do it without Congress agreeing first. So now you've got the White House throwing its promise in the basket, and Congress supposed to throw in the yes, and one of the men whose job is to throw in that yes has already said, on the record, that he won't.

I keep going back to the number, "100 percent," because that's the number the man used, and I keep going back to the senator's sentence, "both parties have failed us," because that's the number he used, and I don't know how to make those two numbers sit in the same basket. Maybe you do. I'm just an old man at a toll plaza with a dispute about four dollars and eighty cents.

Oh — before you go. That charge on my E-ZPass. They never did say whether it's coming back. Neither, far as I can find anywhere in this pile, has anybody said that about the five thousand.