It's been 205 days since the House passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act, and 67 days since the House passed their compromise $2.2 trillion bill, both of which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to consider. By the end of the month, unemployment, sick leave, housing assistance, eviction moratoriums and a host of aid to Americans suffering through this pandemic will end, a cliff that could ruin millions financially.
There are more than two dozen stimulus programs that will expire in the last week of December. In addition to the extended unemployment and coverage for self-employed and gig workers, paid sick leave and eviction protections for individuals, there are tax credits to help business that are expiring, and state and local governments could be facing having to return millions of dollars they'd been holding back to help fund pandemic response operations as the crisis wears on. "If we let things that are going to expire [actually] expire in December, you are truly going to have widespread hardship,” warned Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "All the bad things we were worried would happen—but were successfully addressed in the first round of bills—could hit at once. […] It would be blatant neglect to allow all these things to expire." It's worse than neglect, and it is almost entirely on Mitch McConnell who is still refusing to bend at all on his primary goal: bailing out corporations which willfully endanger their employees.
Unfortunately, it seems like a handful of Senate Democrats are willing to capitulate to his demands for sweeping liability protections for businesses. The five-year liability protections he has been insisting on is excessive and dangerous, overriding state laws for worker protections, putting all cases in federal courts packed with McConnell's far-right judges. It would change the rule for civil procedure capping damages and setting impossible-to-meet burden of proof requirements. It would neuter the federal role in workplace safety, barring federal agencies from investigating workplaces and enforcing workplace safety standards. It's incredibly destructive and long-lasting—five years!—and could permanently become part of workplace law if it gets established. Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, has been attempting to negotiate another approach, but McConnell has apparently refused to budge thus far. Alarmingly, according to sources to the American Prospect, at least three Senate Democrats—Mark Warner, Joe Manchin and Jeanne Shaheen—are willing to swallow McConnell's poison pill. When McConnell desperately needs to save his Senate majority in Georgia, where COVID relief is a key issue.
Their willingness to swallow this unacceptable poison pill whole is particularly galling when they're not demanding, at the very least, resumption of the direct stimulus payments to people. Even the horrible Sen. Josh Hawley, the far-right Missouri Republican, is embarrassing them. "Working families and individuals ought to be first for Covid relief, and then we'll talk about everything else. I see some of these comments about ‘well, we just don't have any money left over,'" Hawley told Politico. "We don't have money left over for people? We can give it to state governments, to businesses, but we don't have any money for people? I just think that's crazy." He's not feeling strongly enough about it, however, to go to McConnell and argue for it. He's talking with Sen. Bernie Sanders, which is good, but has also called Trump to ask him to champion the payments and veto any bill that doesn't have them.
The group of senators working on the proposal had intended to have the details of their $908 billion package released to the public by Monday, but it's not out yet. Meanwhile, the other must-pass bit of business the Congress has is funding government. The two packages—coronavirus relief and a spending bill to take the country through to next October—are going to be combined by agreement from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and McConnell. As of now, government funding runs out in four days, at midnight Friday. Leadership has decided to pass a weeklong continuing resolution to give the Congress another week to keep kicking this all around. Because of course they did. It's December and Mitch McConnell is taking the country hostage. The response to that is always a stop-gap continuing resolution.