Trump pledges $5,000 checks; Republicans admit there's no bill; conservatives call it a bribe

…(cont) Four days later, the Speaker of the House — a man whose whole job is knowing what Congress can and cannot do — told a reporter the payment "requires congressional approval." I checked my notebook twice on that line, because I wanted to be fair to him. Where's the bill number? Where's the appropriation, the line item, the dollar figure with a committee stamp on it? I looked. I don't have one written down anywhere in here. Do you?

I think about the bank line at my branch on Fridays, the one that backs up past the velvet rope by two-thirty. If I walked up to that teller and told her I was owed five thousand dollars because a man said so from a stage in Dallas, what do you suppose she'd ask me for first? An account number, I'd guess. So where's the account this money is supposed to be sitting in, four days after the Speaker himself said there's no bill to move it?

Even the president's own side seems to be asking a version of my question. The Hill ran a piece this week calling the whole promise an insult to conservatism, and buried in it is a line I copied straight into the notebook because I liked how plain it read: "Sounds to me like using federal tax dollars to buy votes." The piece doesn't say whose voice that is, so I won't guess at it. But I know the outlet, and I know the date — September 16th — seven days after the promise, three days after the Speaker's own admission that there's no bill behind it. What does it tell you when a conservative paper reaches for the word "insult" before the money has so much as a form to fill out?

So here's what I keep circling back to, and then I'll let you go. The number gets announced on a Wednesday in Dallas. The bill that would fund it doesn't exist four days later, by the Speaker's own account. And by each paper I've got in this notebook, the money — if it shows up at all — shows up after the votes are counted, not before. If a company paid you that way, wouldn't you want to know what kind of company it was?

Excuse me — before you go — I want to read you that word one more time, the one I set aside back at the start. A company already has the money before it pays out that word to the people owed a share of it. Each paper in this notebook has the number, the stage, the date, even the Speaker's own words about the missing bill — so which company, exactly, is paying out this dividend?

— Lou