Pelosi Doubles Down on $2.2 Trillion Demand

By Yuval Rosenberg

Pelosi Doubles Down on Demand for $2.2
Trillion in Coronavirus Relief

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi indicated Thursday that
Democrats will keep pressing for a coronavirus relief package of at
least $2.2 trillion.

“It's hard to see how we can go any lower when you only
have greater needs," she told reporters.

Pelosi’s comments come after President Trump on Wednesday
urged Republicans to go for “much higher numbers” in a stimulus
deal, including another round of direct payments to individual
Americans. Trump also expressed some support for a $1.5 trillion
package proposed this week by a bipartisan group of centrist House
members called the Problem Solvers Caucus.  

“I’d like to see the larger number,” Trump said at a White
House news conference Wednesday evening. “Yeah, I would like to see
it. There are some things I disagree with, but I’m sure they can be
negotiated.”

The Problem Solvers proposal was largely rejected on
Capitol Hill, with Republicans saying it cost too much and
Democratic leaders saying it didn’t go far enough. Still, after
weeks of deadlock in negotiations, increasing pressure from
rank-and-file Democrats combined with the new Problem Solvers plan
and Trump’s comments had sparked some renewed optimism that a deal
might still be possible before lawmakers depart for the November
elections.

Pelosi said Democrats have shown they are open to
compromise, dropping their demands by more than $1 trillion from a
$3.4 trillion package passed by the House in May. "We asked them to
go up $1 trillion, instead they went down, not recognizing the
need," she said, adding, “Why can't we spend what it takes to shore
up the middle class in our country?"

But White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said Pelosi’s
position is “an ultimatum,” not a negotiation. "Based on
conversations with some Democrat House members yesterday, I'm not
optimistic Speaker Pelosi is going to see this as an opportunity to
actually have meaningful conversations,” Meadows told reporters
Thursday, according to Roll Call.

The bottom line: Nothing much has
really changed here. The two sides are still about $1 trillion
apart.

Congress Still Doesn’t Have a Deal on Spending Bill

Congress has just two major items on its agenda before the
November elections: That stalled coronavirus relief deal and a
must-pass stopgap spending bill to avoid a government shutdown
after September. If the first was going nowhere, lawmakers at least
seemed certain to take care of the second.  

That’s still probably true, as neither party wants a
shutdown just before voters cast their ballots. Pelosi and Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin said earlier this month that they had
agreed to hash out a short-term funding bill. But the plan to pass
a “clean” continuing resolution — one that simply extends funding
at current levels, without too many additional provisions — is
starting to get a bit messy.

Roll Call’s Jennifer Shutt
reports:

“Despite the best efforts of top Capitol Hill and White
House officials, drama is creeping back into negotiations over the
stopgap spending bill needed to avert a partial government shutdown
Oct. 1.
“There's no agreement on how long the continuing
resolution will extend current funding levels, for starters, while
tricky policy issues like upcoming redistricting-related census
deadlines remain unresolved.
“What's more, there's even some talk among rank-and-file
House Democrats about withholding their votes on the CR unless
coronavirus relief provisions are attached, despite a White
House-leadership deal to keep the two issues
separate.”

Republicans reportedly want to temthe porary spending bill
to last until mid-December, while Democrats want to push the next
deadline to early next year. The negotiators have reportedly given
themselves until Friday to reach a deal. "We hope we can reach a
bipartisan, bicameral deal by tomorrow’s noon deadline," Evan
Hollander, spokesman for House Appropriations Chairwoman Nita Lowey
(D-NY) told Roll Call.

The House is expected to take up the spending bill next
week.

Trump Admin Spending Millions on PR to ‘Inspire Hope’ on
Covid: CDC Director

CDC Director Robert Redfield’s testimony before a Senate
panel on Wednesday made headlines for his comments that face masks
probably offer more protection against the coronavirus than a
vaccine and that a vaccine won’t be widely available until the
middle of next year — comments that President Trump later disputed
in
just the latest instance of the president
rejecting the recommendations and basic facts provided by public
health officials and publicly pressuring them on the proper
pandemic response.

Redfield, we should note, later clarified his comment on
Twitter: “I 100% believe in the importance of vaccines and the
importance in particular of a #COVID19 vaccine. A COVID-19 vaccine
is the thing that will get Americans back to normal everyday life,”
he wrote.
“The best defense we currently have against this virus are the
important mitigation efforts of wearing a mask, washing your hands,
social distancing and being careful about crowds.”

But there was significantly more to Redfield’s testimony
than his urging people to wear masks. As Roll Call’s Andrew Siddons

reports, Redfield told the Senate panel that the
CDC needs about $6 billion more to help states and cities build out
their plans to distribute COVID-19 vaccines once they’re ready.
“The time is now for us to be able to get those resources out to
the states, and we currently don’t have those resources,” he
said.

Redfield also said that the Trump administration had
directed his agency to transfer $300 million to the Department of
Health and Human Services’ public affairs office.

Siddons details where the money is going:

“Of that amount, $250 million is reportedly being used
for a public relations campaign ‘to defeat despair and inspire
hope’ in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed
nearly 200,000 Americans. Lawmakers view the ads as an attempt to
cast the Trump

administration’s response to COVID-19 in a positive
light. Redfield said that since the transfer was made, the CDC
hasn’t been involved in the campaign and hasn’t been asked to weigh
in with scientific expertise.

“The campaign prompted questions from subcommittee
members about whether the administration is spending money in
accordance with laws enacted by Congress — particularly if the
money would have otherwise been spent more directly on the health
response.”


Read more at Roll Call.

Jobless Claims at Historic Highs for 26th Week in a
Row

About 860,000 people filed initial jobless claims last week, the
Labor Department
said Thursday, and another 659,000 people filed
for benefits through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program,
which aids self-employed and gig workers.

The state results were slightly better than expected and the
federal program total showed considerable improvement compared to
last week, dropping by more than 200,000, but the numbers remain
extraordinarily high by historic standards, even as they slowly
improve. As former White House economist Aaron Sojourner wrote in a

tweet: “This makes 26 consecutive weeks (a half year!)
with every week's number of new state UI [unemployment insurance]
claims higher than any of the prior 2,776 weeks on record back to
1967.”

Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at the consulting firm RSM,

explained why the claims data continue to be so
troubling: “The pace of firings in the U.S. economy remains well
above anything observed during the Great Financial Crisis,” he

wrote in a commentary, adding that the numbers are
“a reflection of the deep scarring in the domestic labor market and
economy.” (See his chart below.)

Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC Financial Services, said the
economy could take a long time to recover completely. “The labor
market continues to heal from the viral recession, but unemployment
remains extremely elevated and will remain a problem for at least a
couple of years,” he
said. “Initial claims have been roughly flat since
early August, suggesting that the pace of improvement in layoffs is
slowing.”

The stalemate in Washington over a new coronavirus stimulus
package doesn’t bode well for the labor market in the coming
months, according to Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at
Barclays. “[I]f we’re not getting any additional benefits for
households and replacement of lost wage and salary income, it does
look like the pace of improvement is certainly going to slow,”
Gapen
told Bloomberg.

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