Coronavirus stimulus: McConnell pessimistic as President Trump pushes for deal before election
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sounded a pessimistic note on Friday morning while the White House reportedly increased its offer for comprehensive stimulus legislation to address increasing financial pain caused by the coronavirus pandemic ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
“We do need another rescue package,” McConnell said at an event in Kentucky, “but the proximity election and the differences of opinion about what is needed at this particular juncture are pretty vast.”
The president, meanwhile, is pushing for a comprehensive stimulus deal after briefly calling off negotiations earlier this week. “Covid Relief Negotiations are moving along,” Trump tweeted on Friday. “Go Big!”
The White House is primarily represented by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in negotiations with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Talks are ongoing.
“Their conversation focused on determining whether there is any prospect of an imminent agreement on a comprehensive bill,” Drew Hammill, Pelosi’s spokesperson, said in a tweet on Thursday. “The Secretary made clear the President's interest in reaching such an agreement.”
Pelosi, who sharply criticized the president’s withdrawal from the talks earlier this week, told reporters on Thursday that she is “hopeful because it has to be done.”
“We’ll see what they have to offer today," Pelosi told MSNBC on Friday morning. “Part of it is about money, and part of it is about policy."
The Democrats’ latest $2.2 trillion stimulus proposal — passed by the House last week — has a higher price tag than the White House’s reported $1.8 trillion proposal and a much higher price tag than the GOP’s previous $300 billion proposal.
McConnell noted on Friday that he’d like to see another bipartisan stimulus deal “like we did back in March and April, but I think that's unlikely in the next three weeks.” (President Trump signed the CARES Act into law on March 27, 2020, and most of the stimulus ran out at the end of July.)
In early August, McConnell said that the GOP would go along with any deal made between the White House and Democrats — but that no longer seems to be the case.
“Leader McConnell continues to try to make the best of a tough situation,” Mark Harkins, a former congressional staffer and senior fellow at Georgetown’s Government Affairs Institute, told Yahoo Money. “The president would benefit politically from an agreement but a majority of Senate Republicans simply do not support the level of spending being discussed.”
https://www.yahoo.com/money/coronavirus-stimulus-mcconnell-trumps-before-election-151635167.html