It's been 156 days since the House passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act, and 18 days since the House passed their compromise $2.2 trillion bill, both of which Sen. Mitch McConnell has refused to take up. It is 15 days until the election. McConnell is blinking, a little, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has set a tight deadline for negotiations with Treasury Sec. Steven Mnuchin: Tuesday.
“Can that be done?” she was asked on ABC's "This Week" Sunday morning. "Well that depends on the [Trump] administration." Pelosi said that if a deal hadn't been struck by Tuesday, it would not be possible to get a relief bill done before the election. She had a 75-minute phone call with Mnuchin Saturday, and the two will speak again Monday. Trump has been pushing Congress to "go big," bigger than even his administration has been offering, but also insisting that going big cannot include money to "bail out poorly run Democrat states." That's not the only contentious issue in the bill. Pelosi wants more money for a strategic testing plan, which Mnuchin said was acceptable with just a few edits. Pelosi said Sunday that the changes he was demanding were far from minor: "changing 'shall' to 'may,' 'requirements' to 'recommendations' and 'a plan' to 'a strategy, not a strategic plan.'"
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"When you say 'may,' you're giving the president a slush fund. He may do this, he may grant, he may withhold," Pelosi said Sunday. Eight months into this pandemic and Trump is still resisting having a national strategy for testing and tracing, still approaching this with the attitude that if you don't test, you don't have cases. In a letter to House Democrats Sunday, Pelosi detailed those so-called minor edits: "The White House has removed 55 percent of the Heroes Act’s language for testing, tracing, and treatment. Especially disappointing was the elimination of measures to address the virus’s disproportionate and deadly impact on communities of color. … It is important to note the impact in terms of the disparity facing communities of color: a Latino child is eight times more likely to have to go to the hospital because of COVID-19 than a white child, and a Black child is five times more likely."
McConnell remains opposed to an adequate relief bill after his abhorrent appearance in last week's debate with Amy McGrath, when he giggled and chuckled and guffawed his way through the discussion of his refusal to act since March on the crisis. He announced Saturday that the Senate will vote again on a narrow $500 billion bill, basically the same messaging bill that failed last week. It includes some money for schools and health care, more small business loan capacity, and $300/week expanded unemployment benefits—half of what was provided in the CARES Act. It includes no direct payments that the House and Trump have agreed to. It also includes the liability shield he's been insisting on for months, allowing employers to expose workers to the virus without fear of accountability.
McConnell is dismissing Trump's demands. "He's talking about a much larger amount than I can sell to my members," McConnell said last week. But he also said out loud that this isn't really about trying to get something done on the pandemic. It's about giving vulnerable Senate Republicans a vote they can point to so they can say they haven't completely abandoned their constituents. "It was important to indicate to the American people before the election—not after—that we were not in favor of a stalemate, that we were not in favor of doing nothing." Which of course is precisely what he wants to happen: nothing.
On Monday, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said that McConnell committed to him that he would allow a vote on any deal Pelosi and Mnuchin reached on the floor in spite of Republican opposition. "McConnell has agreed he's wiling to put forth the bill. […] He'll bring it to the floor and actually have a vote." But Meadows is also undermining Mnuchin and the negotiations while Mnuchin is conducting them long-distance from the from a trade mission in the Middle East. That leaves Meadows here poisoning things by saying Pelosi "continues to be very rigged in her negotiation."
Note that McConnell himself hasn't said he'd put the bill on the floor. He said on Saturday: "If Speaker Pelosi ever lets the House reach a bipartisan agreement with the administration, the Senate would of course consider it," which is as far as he's gone. McConnell seems far more committed to a new project: setting up a deepened economic disaster for what is very likely to be the new Joe Biden/Kamala Harris administration. That and packing the Supreme Court with extremist ideologues. That's what he wants to put his energy into in the next two weeks: Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation.