Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Push for $2K checks all but dead
McConnell sets hurdle deemed insurmountable
Sen. McConnell doomed the bill by adding poison pills, including a commission to investigate the election.
WASHINGTON—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell all but shut the door Wednesday on President Donald Trump’s push for $2,000 COVID-19 relief checks, declaring Congress has provided enough pandemic aid as he blocked another attempt by Democrats to force a vote.
The GOP leader made clear he is unwilling to budge, despite political pressure from Trump and even some fellow Republican senators demanding action. Trump wants the recently approved $600 in aid increased threefold. But McConnell dismissed the idea of bigger “survival checks,” saying the money would go to plenty of American households that just don’t need it.
McConnell’s refusal to act means the additional relief Trump wanted is all but dead.
“We just approved almost a trillion dollars in aid a few days ago,” the Kentucky Republican said, referring to the year-end package Trump signed into law.
McConnell added, “if specific, struggling households still need more help,” the Senate will consider “smart targeted aid. Not another firehose of borrowed money.”
The showdown between the outgoing president and his own Republican Party over the $2,000 checks has thrown Congress into a chaotic year-end session just days before new lawmakers are set to be sworn into office.
It’s one last standoff, together with the override of Trump’s veto of a sweeping defense bill, that will punctuate the president’s final days and deepen the GOP’s divide between its new wing of Trump-styled populists and what had been mainstay conservative views against government spending.
Trump has been berating the GOP leaders, and tweeted, “$2000 ASAP!”
For a second day in a row, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York tried to force a vote on the bill approved by the House meeting Trump’s demand for the $2,000 checks.
“What we’re seeing right now is Leader McConnell trying to kill the checks — the $2,000 checks desperately needed by so many American families,” Schumer said at the Capitol.
The roadblock set by Senate Republicans appears insurmountable. Most GOP senators seemed to accept the inaction even as a growing number of Republicans, including two senators in runoff elections on Jan. 5 in Georgia, agree with Trump’s demand, some wary of bucking him.
Congress had settled on smaller $600 payments in a compromise over the big, year-end COVID relief and government funding bill that Trump reluctantly signed into law. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said those checks will begin to go out Wednesday.
With the Georgia Senate runoff elections days away, leading Republicans warned that the GOP’s refusal to provide more aid as the virus worsens could jeopardize the outcome of those races.
Georgia’s GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are in the fights of their political lives against Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in runoff elections that will determine which party has the Senate majority. The two Republicans announced support for Trump’s plan on checks.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said, “These Republicans in the Senate seem to have an endless tolerance for other people’s sadness.”
Saying little, McConnell has tried to shield his divided Republicans from a difficult vote. On Wednesday he provided his most fulsome views yet, suggesting he had kept his word to start a “process” to address Trump’s demands, even if it means no votes will actually be taken.
“It’s no secret Republicans have a diversity of views,” he said.
Earlier, McConnell had unveiled a new bill loaded up with Trump’s other priorities as a possible off-ramp for the stalemate. It included the $2,000 checks as well as a complicated repeal of protections for tech companies like Facebook or Twitter under Section 230 of a communications law that the president complained is unfair to conservatives. It also tacked on the establishment of a bipartisan commission to review the 2020 presidential election Trump lost to President-elect Joe Biden.
Democrats opposed that approach and it does not have enough support in Congress to pass.
No votes on additional COVID aid are scheduled. For McConnell, the procedural moves allowed him to check the box over the commitments he made when Trump was defiantly refusing to sign off on the big year-end package last weekend.
“To ensure the President was comfortable signing the bill into law, the Senate committed to beginning one process that would combine three of the President’s priorities,” McConnell said. “That was a commitment, and that’s what happened.”
Liberal senators led by Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who support the relief aid are blocking action on the defense bill until a vote can be taken on Trump’s demand for $2,000 for most Americans.
Sanders said McConnell should call his own constituents in the GOP leader’s home state “and find out how they feel about the need for immediate help in terms of a $2,000 check.”