It's been 163 days since the House passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act, and 25 days since the House passed their compromise $2.2 trillion bill, both of which Mitch McConnell has refused to take up. It is eight days until the election and Republicans are planning their next Supreme Court superspreader party while COVID-19 is spreading faster and further than ever, and not just among White House staff.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Sec. Steven Mnuchin are still slogging away at negotiations for the next relief bill, with Mnuchin expected to respond to the "list of concerns" Pelosi said she gave him on Friday. "My understanding is he will be reviewing that over the weekend and we will have some answers on Monday," she told CNN Sunday. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told CNN Sunday, "We continue to make offer after offer after offer, and Nancy Pelosi keeps moving the goalposts," so a deal is not imminent. But Meadows also told CNN that the White House isn't trying to "control the pandemic," so why should they be bothered by the effects of it?
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An issue that was still outstanding, Pelosi said Sunday, was a testing and tracing plan, seemingly a relatively easy part of the negotiations that has hit some kind of snag. On Monday, Pelosi told House Democrats that even after Mnuchin said publicly 10 days ago that he was accepting that testing plan, "the administration still refuses to do so." She added: "Unless we have a national plan for testing, tracing, treatment, mask-wearing, social distancing and other science-based steps to crush the virus and combat the disparities facing communities of color, we cannot safely reopen our schools and economy." She also low-key dinged Meadows and his assertion that the administration wasn't trying to control the virus, saying: "The Republicans' continued surrender to the virus—particularly amid the recent wave of cases—is official malfeasance."
That snag over testing language could be Trump, who continues to insist that there wouldn't be any cases if there wasn't any testing. "If we did half the testing, we would have half the cases," said Trump. "If we did no testing—like many countries—we would have very few cases."
The White House has come up to nearly $2 trillion, closer to the House's $2.2 trillion mark. Pelosi has suggested that one of the key outstanding issues—the Republican insistence on lifting liability for businesses—might have a compromise "whereby companies following strong government Covid recommendations could claim compliance as a defense in civil lawsuits by employees." There could also be agreement on the other big issue—state and local aid—with a reinvestment of existing funds and some moving around of money.
The largest problem always has been and remains McConnell. His refusal to negotiate or to bring a House-passed bill to the floor for nearly six months has been the major factor in the economic and public health disaster we're now in. Pelosi said as much Sunday. "We want to do it as soon as possible. I thought the president did too. And that was part of the leverage that each side had—that we both wanted an agreement. Why would we even be talking to each other if we didn't believe that we could reach an agreement? So again, it could happen this week in the House, but that's up to Mitch as to whether it would happen in the Senate and go to the president's desk, which is our hope and prayer."
It would take a miracle for this to happen before the election. The Senate will vote on Amy Coney Barrett's nomination Monday, and then McConnell will cut them all loose so they can return to their campaigns. Campaigns many of them are losing because they prioritized getting extreme ideologues onto the courts over helping the American people.