Trump Faces a GOP Revolt Over Stimulus

By Yuval Rosenberg

Trump Faces a GOP Revolt Over Stimulus

The faint hopes that were raised last week for another
coronavirus relief package faded very quickly, as congressional
Republicans and Democrats both rejected a $1.8 trillion White House
proposal, leading Trump administration officials to again change
their approach to the stimulus talks.

Republicans revolt over White House offer: On a Saturday
conference call with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White
House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, a number of Senate Republicans
reportedly
blasted the relief package that had been approved
by President Trump, criticizing both the overall cost and specific
components. “The voices were loud and angry,” Politico
reports. The blowback was so strong that Meadows
at one point reportedly told the group that they would “have to
come to my funeral” after he conveyed their adamant opposition to
the president.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), meanwhile, dismissed the
proposal as “grossly inadequate.” She said that the plans for
coronavirus testing, tracing and treatment in the White House offer
were “wholly insufficient” and that the proposals for unemployment
insurance, aid to state and local governments, child care and tax
credits also fell short.

“It is hard to understand who is shaping their approach, which
to date has been a miserable and deadly failure,” Pelosi wrote in a
letter
to House Democrats on Sunday. “Until these serious issues are
resolved, we remain at an impasse.”

Pelosi also faces some pushback from her members, with Rep. Ro
Khanna (D-CA) and others pressing her to take the White House
offer. “Make a deal & put the ball in McConnell court,” Khanna
tweeted.

White House pivots again: In a
letter to the House and Senate on Sunday, Mnuchin
and Meadows called for lawmakers to immediately take up a narrower
bill that would reportedly allow small businesses to apply for a
second round of forgivable loans, using the roughly $130 billion in
untapped funds from the Paycheck Protection Program.

“Now is the time for us to come together and immediately vote on
a bill to allow us to spend the unused Paycheck Protection Program
funds while we continue to work toward a comprehensive package,”
they wrote. “The all-or-nothing approach is an unacceptable
response to the American people.”

No clear path forward: “The shift in strategy from the
White House caps a week in which the president and his negotiators
adopted a dizzying number of different approaches to securing a
relief package through Congress,” The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein
and Erica Werner
reported Sunday. But this latest proposal is no
more likely to succeed, even as lawmakers in both parties support
extending the Paycheck Protection Program. Pelosi has dismissed the
idea of piecemeal legislation, arguing that a broader relief effort
is needed.

Trump himself now appears to be pressing for a larger package,
too, calling on Republicans Monday to cut short Supreme Court
confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett so they could
turn their focus to a stimulus deal.

"The Republicans are giving the Democrats a great deal of time,
which is not mandated, to make their self serving statements
relative to our great new future Supreme Court Justice," he

wrote on Twitter. “Personally, I would pull back,
approve, and go for STIMULUS for the people!!"

Democrats, criticizing what they called a rushed confirmation
process, also argued that lawmakers should be spending their time
on coronavirus relief.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), the Democratic vice presidential
nominee and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, castigated
Republicans for pushing ahead with the confirmation while not
taking up a House-passed coronavirus relief bill, leaving the aid
package in limbo.

“Senate Republicans have made it crystal clear that rushing a
Supreme Court nomination is more important than helping an
supporting the American people who are suffering from a deadly
pandemic and a devastating economic crisis,” she said.

Will Trump try to squeeze GOP senators? White House
economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Sunday that Trump may still
press for a larger relief package — and suggested that, despite
ample evidence to the contrary, Senate Republicans would go along
with the president. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany
made similar comments on Monday. “I believe Senate Republicans will
ultimately come along with what the president wants — the president
noted that yesterday,” she
told Fox News. “We believe Senate Republicans are
not what’s blocking this. It is Democrats.”

Trump undercut that message a bit in a Monday afternoon
tweet: “Republicans should be strongly focused on
completing a wonderful stimulus package for the American
People!”

The bottom line: Pelosi and Mnuchin are expected to talk
more this week, but the chances of a relief package passing before
the election were slim to begin with and they keep shrinking with
each passing day. As Politico
said Sunday: “Republicans aren’t taking issue with
a policy or two, they’re taking issue with the entire package, the
number, the scope and the policies. There doesn’t appear to be a
middle ground here.”

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told lawmakers
Monday that “no votes are expected in the House this
week.”

Tweets of the Day

As you might have guessed by now, President Trump has been
busy on Twitter today. His torrent of tweets included a couple on
health care:

It's not clear how Trump, who supports the lawsuit
seeking to invalidate Obamacare, would protect pre-existing
conditions. The president hass never released a comprehensive
health care plan.

Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy
at the Kaiser Family Foundation, provides a reality
check:

Number of the Day: 20%

From March 1 through August 1, the United States saw 1,336,561
deaths — about 20% more than would normally be expected, with
Covid-19 accounting for roughly two-thirds of the “excess,”
according to a new
study in the medical journal JAMA.

"Contrary to skeptics who claim that COVID-19 deaths are fake or
that the numbers are much smaller than we hear on the news, our
research and many other studies on the same subject show quite the
opposite," Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor at the Virginia
Commonwealth University School of Medicine,
said.

A separate
study also published Monday in JAMA found that Covid
death rates in the United States have been higher since May than
those in some other countries with high mortality rates. “The
comparison in the study shows that if the US had comparable death
rates to France beginning May 10, it would have had 96,763 fewer
deaths,” CNN
reports.

The researchers found that after May 10, the US had more deaths
per 100,000 people than other "high mortality" countries included
in the comparison, such as France and Sweden. Authors Alyssa
Bilinski, a PhD candidate at Harvard University, and Dr. Ezekiel
Emanuel, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, note that
if U.S. mortality rates were comparable to Canada’s, the country
would have had 117,622 fewer deaths.

“Compared with other countries, the US experienced high
COVID-19–associated mortality and excess all-cause mortality into
September 2020,” they write. “This may have been a result of
several factors, including weak public health infrastructure and a
decentralized, inconsistent US response to the pandemic.”

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