Some kinds of political hypocrisy are so common they can more or less be taken for granted. The most obvious example is anything to do with the deficit: long a favored bogeyman among politicians who insist that the cupboard is bare whenever a new social program is debated but have never seen a Pentagon budget they thought too large or met a tax cut they didn’t like. The same thing can be said about universal programs and poverty relief, two policy areas that inevitably prompt every billionaire-funded think tank or congressperson with a corporate CV to reinvent themselves as an adversary of the wealthy and a champion of the downtrodden.

Crying foul in such cases, though certainly warranted, can only take you so far — the hypocrisy being so blatant that identifying it is often of limited use. Dig a bit deeper, in fact, and you tend to discover that a kind of twisted ideological consistency is actually at play, i.e., that our hypothetical lawmaker is perfectly fine with public money being shoveled into the coffers of Lockheed Martin but is deeply offended by the idea of a welfare check going out to some prole who doesn’t deserve it. There’s no overriding animus, in other words, against taxation or spending to be called out and exposed. The hypocrisy may be there, but its function is to serve as window dressing for something worse; it is more artifice than incoherence.

Which brings us to the current phony war around the COVID-19 relief checks that prominent Democrats absolutely assured everyone would be out the door in record time once they took control of the Senate. Political rhetoric having already been stretched to the breaking point when it comes to the actual size of the payments, a coalition of conservative Democrats and wonks is now determined to compromise the policy further: reducing the income eligibility ceiling from the originally proposed $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 for married couples to $50,000 and $100,000, respectively.