The United States needs a “smart, strategic, and serious” approach to coronavirus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement Thursday morning, “and we stand ready to work in a bipartisan fashion in Congress and with the administration to achieve this necessary goal.”
“Lives are at stake—this is not the time for name-calling or playing politics,” they continued, not naming any names. But, not naming names, they anticipated some potential shenanigans from the Trump administration, as Congress takes the key first step of “ensur[ing] the government has the resources needed to combat this deadly virus and keep Americans safe.”
Specifically, “Any emergency funding supplemental the Congress approves must be entirely new funding—not stolen from other accounts”—something the Trump administration is already doing. And it has to include provisions preventing Donald Trump from shifting the money “to anything other than the coronavirus and fighting infectious diseases” (like, say, a wall), as well as making vaccines “affordable and available to all that need it”—in sharp contrast to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar’s refusal to promise that a vaccine would be affordable.
Pelosi and Schumer also called for interest-free loans to small businesses hurt by coronavirus and reimbursements to state and local governments “for costs incurred while assisting the federal response to the coronavirus outbreak.”
It’s striking the degree to which sensible policy proposals, made with an effort to avoid partisanship, still have to be hedged around with defenses against Trump's disastrous response to the outbreak. Not because he’s Trump but because it’s dangerous.