McConnell to Force Vote on ‘Skinny’ Coronavirus Relief Bill

By Yuval Rosenberg

McConnell to Force Vote on 'Skinny'
Coronavirus Relief Bill

The Senate is back in session and lawmakers returning from the
August recess are finally ready to jump into action and cement a
long-delayed deal on the next coronavirus relief package.

No, of course not. Congress is picking up right where it left
off, which is to say Republicans and Democrats are still smack in
the middle of their month-long standoff on a coronavirus bill,
maneuvering to score political points and cast blame with little
prospect for an agreement anytime soon.

What’s new: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

announced Tuesday that he plans to hold a vote this week
on a
slimmed-down relief bill that would cost upwards
of $500 billion, well shy of the $1 trillion plan McConnell
released in July.

The package would provide $300 a week in supplemental
unemployment benefits through the end of the year, $258 billion in
funding for small businesses, $105 billion for education, $47
billion for vaccines and testing, $10 billion for child care and
$10 billion for the U.S. Postal Service. It would also provide
liability protection for businesses and health care providers and
reportedly includes divisive "school choice" language. It does not
include another round of $1,200 stimulus checks to individuals or
aid to state and local governments.

"It does not contain every idea our party likes," McConnell said
in a statement. "I am confident Democrats will feel the same. Yet
Republicans believe the many serious differences between our two
parties should not stand in the way of agreeing where we can agree
and making law that helps our nation."

The package also includes at least $350 billion in offsets,
according to a summary cited by
Roll Call in order to draw more support from
fiscal conservatives.

Still going nowhere: "The legislation is not expected to
advance, since that would require support from Democrats, who’ve
held out for a larger package," The Washington Post
reports. "McConnell has struggled even to unite
Republicans behind the bill, and is likely to suffer some GOP
defections."

Politico
reports that Senate Republican leaders are trying
to find a path to get 51 votes, but it’s not yet clear they’ll be
able to reach even that threshold. "The inability to get 51 GOP
votes would be a big defeat for the White House and Senate GOP
leadership," Politico’s Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer write.

What it means: The move is an attempt to ratchet up
pressure on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority
Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). "Senate Republicans and administration
officials believe Pelosi will come under growing pressure from
moderate members of her own caucus who face tough reelections and
have been uneasy about the failure to act on additional economic
stimulus," the Post reports. "McConnell’s new legislation is partly
an attempt to attract the attention of such lawmakers."

Pelosi and Schumer quickly dismissed the GOP plan. "Senate
Republicans appear dead-set on another bill which doesn’t come
close to addressing the problems and is headed nowhere," they said
in a joint
statement, adding, "this emaciated bill is only intended
to help vulnerable Republican Senators by giving them a ‘check the
box’ vote to maintain the appearance that they’re not held hostage
by their extreme right-wing that doesn’t want to spend a nickel to
help people."

A bit of good news: One possible bright spot in the
bipartisan stalemate is that Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven
Mnuchin have tentatively agreed to a "continuing resolution" to
fund the government and avoid a shutdown at the beginning of next
month.

The bottom line: With only a few weeks to go before
lawmakers leave town again for the final stretch of campaigning, a
deal still appears unlikely.

Vice President Mike Pence told CNBC on Friday that nobody wants
another round of direct payments more than Trump, and Politico

reports that the White House is set to take "baby
steps" toward an agreement this week by embracing a $1.5 trillion
price tag. But the overall price of a bill and the issue of state
and local aid remain significant obstacles. Any GOP urgency to
reach a bipartisan deal has also been diminished by last week’s
employment report showing the economy added 1.37 million jobs in
August and the unemployment rate fell to 8.4% — still high but down
enough for the White House to continue to tout what it says is a
strong recovery.

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Friday told
Bloomberg TV that, while a targeted relief package would be
helpful, the country would be fine without an additional
coronavirus relief bill. "We can absolutely live with it," he
said.

Democrats Debating Their 2021 Agenda if They Win Congress and
the White House

The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports that Democrats are already
haggling over their agenda for next year if they win complete
control of Congress and Joe Biden defeats President Trump:

"The top priority of Democrats is to pour federal resources
into combating the coronavirus and the economic devastation it has
caused, lawmakers say.
"Private discussions are also taking place over whether to
eliminate or reform the legislative filibuster, which sets up a
60-vote threshold to pass most major legislation through the
Senate. …
"Beyond that, there’s little agreement over whether to move
next to immigration reform, gun control, legislation to address
climate change or health care reform. Other Democratic priorities
on the table include tax reform, housing reform, voting rights
legislation and campaign finance reform."

The Washington Post’s Annie Linksey reports that "bitter
internal battles" could lay ahead, thanks in large part to Biden’s
"strategic flexibility" in staking out policy positions.

"This reluctance to be pinned down on policy details is central
to Biden’s campaign, which has focused on a pledge to ‘restore the
soul of the nation’ rather than any particular legislative holy
grail," Linksey writes. "While Biden has issued a raft of
proposals, he’s often taken an all-things-to-all-people approach,
sometimes making strong public declarations while relying on aides
to soothe critics behind the scenes."

One example: Biden’s campaign, as part of a "unity task force"
with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) issued recommendations to expand
access to financial services by allowing banking at the U.S. Postal
Service and bank accounts at the Federal Reserve.

"But in private calls with Wall Street leaders, the Biden
campaign made it clear those proposals would not be central to
Biden’s agenda," Linksey reports. The Biden camp told the Post that
the task force recommendations were never intended to be official
policy.

Read more at
The Hill and
The Washington Post.

Pharma CEOs Pledge to Abide by Science, Not Politics, for
Coronavirus Vaccine

The chief executive officers of nine pharmaceutical companies —
AstraZeneca, BioNTech, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna,
Novavax, Pfizer, Merck and Sanofi — have pledged to uphold
scientific standards as their firms work to develop coronavirus
vaccines.

In a
letter released Tuesday, the CEOs said they "want
to make clear our on-going commitment to developing and testing
potential vaccines for COVID-19 in accordance with high ethical
standards and sound scientific principles."

The unusual public statement comes amid growing concerns that
President Trump may attempt to rush vaccines or treatments for the
coronavirus in order to strengthen his hand in the fall election.
The Trump administration has rolled out "Operation Warp Speed" to
accelerate the development and manufacture of vaccines, and the
president said over the weekend that a vaccine could be ready by
October — a claim that has been
questioned by federal health officials.

"It’s unprecedented in my experience that industry would do
something like this," Ira Loss of Washington Analysis, which
monitors drug regulations and legislation for investors, told

Stat. "But we’ve experienced unprecedented events
since the beginning of Covid-19, starting with the FDA, where the
commissioner has proven to be malleable, to be kind, at the foot of
the president."

Loss added that drugmakers are concerned about the public
losing faith in their products. "The companies are aware that, on a
good day, they have trouble selling vaccines to 25% of the country
that is suspicious about safety," he said. "So the last thing they
need is to have Trump pull a stunt and push through a vaccine ahead
of its time. In many ways, the industry is doing a defensive move
to ensure they’re not going to have to defend any approval because
the president is doing a dance."

Number of the Day: $12.2 Billion

Last month’s huge motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South
Dakota, was a "superspreader event" that led to more than 250,000
reported cases of Covid-19 and an estimated public health cost of
$12.2 billion, according to a recent report published
by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany. Read more

here or
here.

Charts of the Day

SALT Cap Isn’t Scaring Away Millionaires: The $10,000 cap
on state and local tax deductions imposed as part of the 2017
Republican tax law is not causing high-income taxpayers to flee
high-tax blue states, according to Carl Davis, research director at
the progressive Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

In a
blog post last week, Davis said that new IRS data
show that states including California and New York added a
significant number of millionaires to their tax rolls from 2017 to
2018. "California and New York saw more growth in millionaire tax
returns than any other state in 2018," Davis wrote. "Taken as a
group, California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and
Illinois saw 40 percent of the nation’s growth in millionaire tax
returns occur within their borders, despite the fact that these
states are home to just 27 percent of the nation’s population."

But Politico’s Weekly Tax
notes that "it’s also undeniable that traffic is
more going away from high-tax states and toward low-tax ones" and
analysts on the other side of the political divide argue that taxes
play a sizable part of such decisions.

Majority of Young Adults Now Living With Their
Parents: The coronavirus pandemic is pushing millions of young
Americans back into their family homes, according to a
new report from the Pew Research Center.

In July, nearly 26.6 million people between the ages of 18 and
29 — or 52% of all young adults — were living with one or both
parents. That marks the first time the majority of people in that
age group have done so, surpassing levels seen during the Great
Depression. (Researchers note that data is sparse for the ‘30s, and
levels may have been higher at some point between the 1930 and 1940
Census counts.)

"Essentially we saw about a little over 3 million more
people moving home ... with their parents or grandparents, from a
year ago," Cheryl Young, a senior economist at Zillow,
told CNN. "A big share of that population that
moved home are young people, Gen Z, 18- 25-year-olds, and even some
millennials as well."

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