Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decided to cut the Senate's work week early (as usual), adjourning it at 3:49 Thursday afternoon despite the fact that some kind of big stuff is happening right now. The Congress has just two weeks to pass a reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the landscape for that is in total chaos at the moment; and there's also that little issue of the global pandemic that has now arrived in the U.S.—still on a limited basis so far, but the country has its first instance of COVID-19 spreading within a local community as opposed to as a result of exposure in an area where the disease has been rampant. McConnell thus far has been more concerned with politicizing the outbreak than addressing it.
McConnell hit Democratic leadership last week for requesting as much as $8.5 billion from Congress to fund efforts against COVID-19, as opposed to the initial request from the White House of $2.5 billion, an amount that is universally agreed to be laughably insufficient—so much so that the bipartisan consensus among House leaders is that funding from $6 billion to $8 billion is necessary, and they're "rushing to draft an emergency spending package" to get it passed as soon as the middle of next week. In the House, anyway. The Senate probably won't start actual work on the floor until Tuesday afternoon.
While they're working that out, McConnell's No. 2, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, is floating the idea of complicating the issue by tacking FISA on to it. "On an issue like the coronavirus, you ought to for sure find common ground. And maybe you package stuff together given how challenging FISA and all this is," he told Politico. That's probably floated on behalf of McConnell, who wants a quick and unaltered reauthorization of the program. The House and Donald Trump, however, oppose him on that.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shot that idea down. "That's not our plan," she said Thursday, noting the immediate need to act on the coronavirus. Perhaps because he hadn't gotten the memo yet from McConnell, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy agreed. "It should be standing on its own, and it should move just like that, and it should move fast," he told reporters on Thursday. McConnell has other plans, however, with an energy bill scheduled to take up most of next week, leaving only one more week before the next recess to deal with both the coronavirus and FISA.
That's McConnell's doing: trying to jam both the House and the Senate and bend them to his will. He's tried it before on FISA and surveillance programs, and massively lost. But that was nearly five years ago, and things have changed. What hasn't changed is that there's still bipartisan opposition in both the House and the Senate to his plan for FISA. He's also got Trump against him. The coronavirus crisis is the big, big new factor here, though, and the fact that it's hit in an election year. Not one of his vulnerable senators is going want to have to explain to constituents, when they go home for spring break, why they didn't act immediately to combat it.