Pelosi’s relief bill criticized from the left
The House is scheduled to vote Friday on a $3 trillion coronavirus relief package that Republicans mock as a wish list meant to curry favor with Democrats’ liberal base during campaign season.
But some Democrats are also unhappy with it — and they’re to the left of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, coauthor of the bill known as the Heroes Act.
One is Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, cochair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Pelosi’s proposal did not include Jayapal’s Paycheck Guarantee Act, under which the government would cover all the salaries of workers at financially troubled companies, up to $100,000 a year, to keep them off unemployment.
“With more than 33 million people filing for unemployment in seven weeks, workers are looking for certainty about how we end mass unemployment and how they’ll get their next paycheck,” Jayapal tweeted Wednesday. The Heroes Act, she said, “doesn't end mass unemployment and it doesn’t get paychecks back into their pockets.”
Another progressive skeptic is Shahid Buttar, the San Francisco attorney and fellow Democrat who is Pelosi’s opponent in the November election. He says Pelosi’s proposal and previous relief packages she has negotiat
ed don’t do enough to help working people and are “skewed to serve corporate interests.”
“It's more accurate to describe these as opportunistic, redistributive attempts to take advantage of the pandemic as a pretext to redistribute wealth to the 1% and corporations,” Buttar said Wednesday on The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast.
Unlike previous relief packages, Pelosi did not negotiate this one with Republicans or the White House. Instead, she said she was inspired by a conversation with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whose advice was that because “interest rates are low, think big.”
So Pelosi went big, roughly $1 trillion bigger than the last relief package that Congress passed. The Heroes Act contains $1 trillion for state and local governments, $200 billion for hazard pay to essential workers, $175 billion for housing assistance and up to $6,000 in direct payments to individual families. Cities in the Bay Area and the state government could reap more than $50 billion from the measure.
The bill even contains a provision that would help legal cannabis businesses use traditional banking operations. But Pelosi didn’t find room in it for Jayapal’s Paycheck Guarantee Act, which the Seattle Democrat rolled out more than a month ago.
Jayapal said her proposal is intended to prevent further layoffs — 20 million people have lost their jobs during the pandemic — and give businesses incentive to rehire employees who have already been let go.
It would also pay for employerprovided benefits, including health care. A new study by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation — which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente — said that roughly one in five people likely to lose their employersupplied health care won’t be eligible to get some form of subsidized replacement. The Heroes Act would subsidize the continuation of employerprovided insurance through the federal Cobra program.
The foundation’s study said 5.7 million people who could lose their health insurance are not eligible for help under the Affordable Care Act and would “have to pay the full cost of their coverage . ... Many of them will likely remain uninsured.”
Jayapal told the “It’s All Political” podcast that her proposal is “a pragmatic solution . ... It’s probusiness, it’s proworker and proeconomy.”
Jayapal said she thinks her idea could even win support from Republicans. Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley has introduced a similar proposal, though it wouldn’t cover as much of employees’ pay, and the two lawmakers’ staffs have been working on a possible compromise.
So why didn’t Jayapal’s idea make the cut in Pelosi’s legislation? A Democratic aide familiar with both proposals said Jayapal hadn’t worked up legislative text that could be evaluated for the idea’s possible cost. Pelosi’s bill does include a tax credit for employers who retain workers, which leadership thinks might preserve more jobs.
Jayapal hasn’t said she will oppose the Heroes Act, but she wrote a letter to Pelosi asking her to delay Friday’s vote. That’s unlikely, as the speaker is anxious to lay down Democratic talking points in what are likely to be difficult negotiations with Senate Republicans and the White House, who are already labeling the bill as “an unserious proposal to appease her base.”
Pelosi told MSNBC, “I don’t call it a wish list, a liberal wish list. I call it an American wish list so that we can defeat, defeat this virus and help people in the meantime and, again, honor our heroes.”
She conceded that, “Yeah, it’s all a negotiation but, again, states, governors and mayors across the country, Republican and Democrat, desperately need this help.”
Meanwhile, Jayapal will try to pass her legislation by itself.
“This is a crisis,” Jayapal said on the podcast. “The more we wait and allow unemployment to rack up, the harder it is for us to get out of that downward spiral, and the more our economy tanks and the more it eventually costs us.”