The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, projected confidence Friday about the state of negotiations over coronavirus relief, with just hours to go until government funding expires.
“I’m even more optimistic now than I was last night that a bipartisan, bicameral framework for a major rescue package is very close at hand,” he said in a floor speech.
McConnell said he and Democratic congressional leaders were “working around the clock” to reach an agreement on coronavirus relief and government funding.
If Congress does not pass a spending bill today, the US government will shut down at midnight. “The Senate will be right here until an agreement is passed, whenever that may be,” McConnell said.
House leaders from both parties indicated they would support a stopgap to prevent a shutdown. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, said on Friday that he’s “not for a shutdown in any shape or form”. Meanwhile, Steny Hoyer, the House’s majority leader, said: “We’re going to keep the government open.”
Lawmakers appear to be stuck on restrictions for the Federal Reserve and funding for state and local governments, though Democrats and Republicans seem to be set on most of the bill’s major components.
The bill is slated to be about $900bn and will include a new round of stimulus checks, reportedly to be about $600 maximum for households that meet a certain income threshold, and a $300 bolster to unemployment insurance. Funding for small businesses, vaccine distributions and schools are also included.
Many of the key elements of the last coronavirus aid bill have since expired even while millions of Americans continue to be unemployed and the virus rages across the country, having killed over 309,000 people in the US.
It was unclear if a breakthrough would come Friday or if it would stretch into the weekend.
John Thune, the Senate majority whip, told reporters yesterday that a brief shutdown might be possible as a deadline extension might not get enough votes. “I know people are gonna object to that, that want to keep pressure on the process until we get a deal,” he said.
Speaking on the Senate floor yesterday Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said of negotiations that “many if not all difficult topics are behind us, [though] a few final issues must be hammered out”.
In recent days, Republicans have been gunning for the bill to include restrictions on the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending program for businesses and municipalities. Republicans say funding for the program was meant to be temporary, but Democrats are arguing that cuts to the program would hamper the Biden administration’s ability to provide aid to institutions, particularly cash-strapped state and local governments.
Meanwhile, Democrats have been negotiating for money for state and local governments as Republicans show hesitancy to provide direct relief. The compromise appears to be $90bn in funds administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, though lawmakers are still working out exactly how an aid program would be structured.
Other issues include how long the additional unemployment insurance should last and eligibility for stimulus checks.
Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia, told the New York Times that “these 11th-hour issues are pretty big. They were issues that neither side, in a month plus of negotiations, ever brought up beforehand”.
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