Expanded unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to the millions of Americans who lost their jobs in the coronavirus crisis expired at the end of last week. This week the moratorium on evictions in federally financed housing units expires. Coronavirus is raging through the South and West and Republican senators and the White House wasted another weekend squabbling among themselves to figure out some kind of plan, knowing full well what they're going to put on offer will be rejected by House Democrats. Mitch McConnell was supposed to have released his big plan last Thursday, then postponed it to Friday. Now they're saying end of the work day Monday.
The White House is attempting to carve out a quicker UI fix to pass this week, but Democrats are adamant that they will not accept a piecemeal approach and have kept the HEROES Act, which passed in the House nearly two-and-a-half months ago as their negotiating stating point. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows also said they want to include liability protection that businesses have been demanding, which Democrats oppose. The Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are fighting among themselves. South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham blurted out the truth on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures: “Half the Republicans are going to vote no to any Phase 4 package,” he said. “That’s just a fact.” Which means McConnell has to have Democrats on board to get anything passed.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released a statement Monday showing just how far McConnell is from achieving that. “We had expected to be working throughout this weekend to find common ground on the next COVID response package. It is simply unacceptable that Republicans have had this entire time to reach consensus among themselves and continue to flail.” They're flailing so badly, as a matter of fact, McConnell said Friday that "Hopefully in the next two to three weeks we’ll be able to come together and pass something that we can send over to the House and down to the President for signature." Hopefully they can have it done by mid-August.
What Mnuchin wants to do immediately, the narrow fix, is replace the $600 weekly UI payments with a new formula that would pay 70% of a worker's lost wages. Democrats are opposed, for good reason. One, many of the workers on unemployment are hourly with variable wages and no baseline wage to figure that out from. Two, the states have to figure that out and would have to retool their already-overburdened and overstretched systems to do it. Some states just got caught up this month with the first claims from March and April. The Labor Department even recognized that, and nixed the original idea from Democrats back in March to match 100% of a worker's income. The DOL said would have been too complicated for antiquated state unemployment systems to carry out.
There are other outstanding issues as well, beyond this immediate need to keep UI flowing. The White House and Democrats want another round of direct payment stimulus checks. Democrats are demanding aid to state and local governments that have lost billions in revenue. McConnell is refusing that, only allowing aid to schools and insisting that at least half of the funding be earmarked for K-12 schools that are bringing students back into the classroom. There's the possible inclusion of the so-called TRUST Act that is nothing more than a backdoor attempt, again, to cut Social Security.
McConnell can't even figure out all of that within his own conference, half of which by Graham's count aren't going to vote for it anyway, and still hasn't sat down with Pelosi and Schumer to tackle this for real. It's as if he doesn't realize that this is a five-alarm emergency with actual lives (not to mention the nation's economy) on the line.