PERDUE, LOEFFLER BACK LARGER STIMULUS PAYMENTS
As runoffs loom, GOP senators align with Democrats
President Donald Trump’s call to more than triple pandemic cash relief for individual Americans has scrambled political calculations made by Georgia’s two Republican senators in the closing week of their highstakes runoff campaign.
Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeff ler declared their support on Tuesday for onetime payments of $2,000 that Trump and Democrats endorse but most congressional Republicans oppose.
The move came after the two Georgians sidestepped the matter for days while celebrating the passage of a longsought aid package that included smaller $600 payments.
Now, to maintain their alliance with the mercurial president, the senators also find themselves aligned with the very Democratic congressional forces they caricature as socialists who’d taxand-spend the nation into bankruptcy if the Georgia contests go against the Republicans.
Democrats must sweep the Jan. 5 runoffs to force a 50-50 chamber with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking vote for control. Republicans need just one of the Georgia seats to maintain a majority.
Perdue told “Fox & Friends” in a Tuesday morning interview he’d be “delighted” to back a $1,400 increase in individual payments. He called it “appropriate” and “the right thing to do.” Loeffler said in a separate Fox News interview that she’d support the increase, as well: “Absolutely, we need to get relief to Americans now.”
Those statements came less than a day after House Democrats adopted the $2,000 relief stipend, openly crediting Trump’s request. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., followed Tuesday by blocking the measure from being considered in his chamber, though he’s scheduled a vote for today. That could allow Loeffler and Perdue to cast a “yes” vote on the record, giving them partial political cover even if the measure doesn’t pass.
Trump amplified the matter again Tuesday via Twitter. “Give the people $2000, not $600,” the president wrote. “They have suffered enough!”
Perdue’s and Loeff ler’s campaign aides did not respond to Associated Press inquiries asking whether they asked McConnell to allow an up-or-down vote.
It’s not the first conundrum Trump has foisted upon his Georgia allies. Tacitly echoing Trump’s debunked assertions of widespread voter fraud in the November election, neither senator has explicitly recognized that President-elect Joe Biden won nationally or in Georgia. Loeff ler has left open the possibility of protesting the Electoral College count during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, even after McConnell urged Republican senators to accept the results.
That refusal to deviate from Trump underscores the president’s hold on the Republican base, which both senators will need to turn out in order to win.
“I stood by the president 100 percent of the time. I’m proud to do that,” Loeff ler said Tuesday on Fox.
Perdue’s and Loeff ler’s respective opponents, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, sought to capitalize on the potential vulnerability.
Speaking at a downtown Atlanta campaign stop, Ossoff said Perdue “needs to step up” and “join” Trump to help people who “have credit cards maxed out, rent past due, gas bills piling up, prescription drug costs, child care costs.”
Warnock addressed a drive-in rally of union members later Tuesday and, without acknowledging the senators’ statements earlier in the day, criticized the pair as complicit in a pandemic economy that designates “essential workers” but “won’t give them essential pay.”