Mitch McConnell has released the working draft of his plan to give a laundry list of liability protections—for as long as five years—to allow any school, college, charity, church, government agency, or business to reopen as carelessly as they want as long as they "make reasonable efforts to follow applicable public-health guidelines." The weasel words there are "reasonable" and "applicable."
In remarks this week, he showed how weaselly that is. "Unless you were grossly negligent or intentionally engaging in harmful conduct, you should be protected from liability during this process." If you're just casually or incompetently negligent and engaged in harmful conduct because local regulations let you be, you'd be off that hook.
The proposal includes coronavirus care by "licensed healthcare facilities and healthcare workers," such as nursing homes. The nursing homes that the Trump administration relaxed rules for when the pandemic hit, allowing people who had received just eight hours of online study to become nurse's aides. That was at the behest of the industry. Now, also undoubtedly at the behest of the industry, nursing homes that took on those unqualified nurse's aides will be held legally blameless for the deaths that have followed and will continue to follow. Needless to say, Democrats had nothing to do with this proposal. In fact, McConnell has completely shut them out.
"We have not heard a peep from McConnell or the Republicans or the administration on any proposal, even though we've been asking for weeks and weeks and weeks," Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said on a conference call with public workers and advocates on Friday. "McConnell knows from the previous bills that passed in the Senate he's got to work across the aisle," Schumer said, pointing to previous efforts by McConnell to shut Democrats—"it fails," he said. On the liability proposal, Schumer said "I think it's interesting that the first piece of the first proposal the Republicans are offering is something they negotiated with lobbyists that protects big corporations."
Schumer also made some news in saying the bottom line for Democrats will be the HEROES Act the House passed more than two months ago, which McConnell has been ignoring. "The bottom line is we're going to fight for the whole HEROES bill period," Schumer said. He also told Senate Democrats that there would be no negotiating with Republicans on anything without House Democrats in the room, apparently a warning to some of the more Republican-friendly members of the conference that they shouldn't be out there freelancing to water down Democrats' demands.