Last week, Senate Republicans finally unveiled their blueprint for the next coronavirus relief package: the Health, Economic Assistance, Liability Protection and Schools (HEALS) Act. Since any legislation will ultimately need the votes of Democrats, the bill is unlikely to pass in its current form. But it’s still worth examining as a formal statement of Republicans’ policy priorities. In short, the bill is a monstrosity: it would intensify austerity, cost millions of jobs, deepen poverty, exacerbate the eviction crisis, and fuel the spread of the virus itself. The result would be nothing short of mass immiseration. And they’re barely trying to hide it.

The HEALS Act is the Senate Republican response to House Democrats’ coronavirus relief package, the HEROES Act, which top GOP lawmakers derided as “the legislative equivalent of stand-up comedy.” Given the enormity of the crisis, HEROES is a reasonable set of measures. It calls for a new round of stimulus checks, mortgage relief and rental assistance, deferrals on student loans, hazard pay for essential workers, a moratorium on debt collections, and an extension of the expanded $600 a week emergency unemployment benefit for another six months.

If anything, the Democratic House bill doesn’t go far enough to protect people from the personal economic consequences of the shutdown — which, as the rise in daily death tolls after a wave of reopenings indicates, remains necessary from a public health perspective. But Senate Republicans see it differently, calling HEROES “partisan,” “unaffordable,” and “unrealistic.” In response, they have proposed a bill so tightfisted and callous it would make Ebenezer Scrooge blush.