Pelosi sets Tuesday deadline for deal on stimulus

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Sunday that an economic stimulus deal must be struck within 48 hours in order for Congress to pass legislation before Election Day, but she noted that significant differences still divide her and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

“Well, that depends on the [Trump] administration,” Pelosi said on ABC’s This Week when asked if it was still possible to get relief to Americans ahead of the election barely two weeks from now.

Pelosi’s on-again-off-again talks with Mnuchin over a deal costing between $1.8 trillion and $2.2 trillion have been dragging on for months without producing results. The window for action is narrowing fast. For the first time, Pelosi put a deadline on them, indicating that if no agreement can be struck by Tuesday, it will not be possible to produce a new relief deal by the election. Pelosi and Mnuchin spoke for 75 minutes on Saturday and agreed to speak again on Monday.

“The 48 [hours] only relates to if we want to get it done before the election — which we do,” Pelosi said. “But we’re saying to them we have to freeze the design on some of these things — are we going with it or not, and what is the language?”

Tuesday’s deadline is two weeks before the Nov. 3 elections.

The White House and Pelosi appeared to be at odds more over the substance of the package and not the dollar amount. In an interview broadcast Saturday with a Milwaukee television station, Trump said he would approve a spending package that was larger than even the $2.2 trillion that Democrats had sought.

“Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want to approve anything because she wants to bail out poorly run Democrat states,” Trump said in the interview. “And we don’t want to do that.”

Pelosi has called for more money for states and cities, and Republican local leaders are among those who have asked for more aid, not just Democrats.

Pelosi has not spoken with President Donald Trump in over a year, but reiterated Sunday that she’s negotiating through his emissaries and there’s little point in talking directly with the president because he’s not truthful.

“You want to meet with him, you meet with him,” she told host George Stephanopoulos. “As far as I’m concerned, the speaker of the House must be respected in terms of what the purpose of the meeting is, what the preparation is for and what the likelihood of success would be.”

Millions remain out of work and in desperate straits. The economic recovery has slowed.

A number of House Democrats have pressed Pelosi urgently to make a deal, but Pelosi has made clear she believes she has the leverage in the talks, and she showed no sign Sunday of backing down.

Mnuchin said Thursday he was prepared to accept Pelosi’s demands for a national strategic testing plan, subject to minor edits. But Pelosi said Sunday those edits turned out to be significant, including changing “shall” to “may,” “requirements” to “recommendations” and “a plan” to “a strategy, not a strategic plan.”

She said these word changes would give the White House too much flexibility to back out of commitments once the law is passed.

“When you say ‘may,’ you’re giving the president a slush fund. He may do this, he may grant, he may withhold,” Pelosi said. “When you say ‘shall,’ according to … what the science tells must happen … We can open our schools, we can open our businesses.”