McConnell Warns Trump Against Pre-Election Stimulus Deal

By Yuval Rosenberg

McConnell Warns Trump Against Pre-Election Stimulus Deal:
Report

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Tuesday that lawmakers
are moving ahead with a draft of a new coronavirus stimulus bill,
despite a lack of agreement on some key provisions.

Yet even as Pelosi insisted she and the Trump administration are
“on a path” to a deal and that talks could continue beyond her
self-imposed Tuesday deadline, Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell (R-KY) reportedly told fellow Republicans that he had
warned the White House against agreeing to a deal before the
election for fear of dividing his caucus and delaying the Supreme
Court confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

Inching ahead: After speaking with Treasury Secretary
Stephen Mnuchin by telephone Tuesday afternoon, Pelosi said the two
sides had continued to make progress, and she downplayed the
Tuesday evening deadline for reaching a deal she herself had set
last weekend.

“It isn’t that this day was a day that we would have a deal, it
was a day that we would have our terms on the table to be able to
go to the next step,” Pelosi said.

She told reporters that she hoped a deal could be reached by the
end of the week.

Big issues remain: Pelosi said that while the White House
team had “come a long way” toward accepting Democrats’ demands for
more robust Covid-19 testing and tracing efforts in the
legislation, two major issues continued to vex negotiators:
liability protections for businesses that Republicans want and
significant aid for state and local governments that Democrats
want.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said the White House had
upped its offer to $1.88 trillion, moving closer to the $2.2
trillion Democrats are seeking, though he also made it clear that
there were still major hurdles to cross. “I want to stress: We’re
not just down to a difference of language and a few dollars. We
still have a ways to go,” Meadows said.

Trump lobbies again: In a morning interview with
Fox News, President Trump reiterated his call for a
substantial coronavirus relief bill. “It’s very simple. I want to
do it even bigger than the Democrats," Trump said. “Now, not every
Republican agrees with me, but they will. But I want to do it even
bigger than the Democrats, because this is money going to people
that did not deserve what happened to them coming out of
China.”

Senate could stand in the way: Although House Democrats
and the White House continue to push for a deal, all of their
efforts could be for naught if the Republican-controlled Senate
fails to support whatever agreement is reached.

McConnell said Tuesday that he would allow any deal to come up
for a vote “at some point” — perhaps after the election — and only
if Trump says he’ll sign it. “What I’m telling you is that if such
a deal were to clear the House, obviously with the presidential
signature promised, we would put it on the floor of the Senate and
let the Senate consider it," McConnell told reporters, according to

Politico.

But resistance among Republicans means it’s not clear a deal
would pass the Senate.

  • Senate Whip John Thune of South Dakota said that
    Republican’s “natural instinct, depending on how big it is, and
    what’s in it, is probably going to be to be against it.” He added,
    “I think we’re going to have a hard time finding 13 votes for
    anything,” referring to the number of Republicans that would be
    needed to vote with Democrats to pass a sizable relief bill. (Told
    about the senator’s comments, Trump said, “Well, we’ll have to talk
    to Sen. Thune.”)
  • Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah: “I think it's very
    unlikely that a number of that level would make it through the
    Senate, and I don't support something of that level. Something far
    more targeted ... I'd like to see done and I'd like to see done as
    quick as possible.”
  • Asked if Republican senators would support a $1.8 trillion
    relief bill, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said, “If it
    includes blue state bailout money then I'd say that's probably a
    hard no. That's probably a red line for this caucus including for
    me.”

The negative outlook on the viability of a deal isn’t universal,
however. Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) said that while he would oppose it,
there’s a chance a $2 trillion bill could actually get through the
Senate.

“You’ll lose a lot of Republicans on whatever that is,” Braun
said. “If they bring it up for a vote, I’m guessing there will be
enough to get it across the finish line.”

The bottom line: A pre-election relief package still
appears unlikely, especially given McConnell’s opposition and the
limited time left. “McConnell’s stance could kill any chances for
passing a new relief deal in the two weeks left before the
election,” The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein and Erica Werner

report.

Two New Polls Find Trouble for Trump on Economy

As the Trump administration and Pelosi scramble to see if they
can reach a roughly $2 trillion stimulus deal — while Senate
Republicans look to vote on a smaller, $500 billion plan — voters
clearly back a bigger package.

In a new poll from The New York Times and Sienna College, 72% of
likely voters said they support a $2 trillion plan that would
extend enhanced unemployment insurance, send stimulus checks to
most households and provide more aid to state and local
governments.

“In a sign of how broad the support is for additional relief,
and the risk congressional Republicans may be taking if they block
further spending, even 56 percent of Republicans said they backed
another $2 trillion package,” the Times’s Alexander Burns and
Jonathan Martin
write.

The Times poll and one released Tuesday by the Financial Times
and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation both find other trouble for
President Trump.

Joe Biden holds a nine-point lead over Trump in the Times
poll, 50%-41%. The likely voters surveyed said they prefer the
former vice president’s position to the president’s on a broad
range of issues — including the economy, long a strength for
Trump.

The New York Times poll finds that voters are now split,
48%-47%, on whether Trump or Biden would do a better job on the
economy.

The Financial Times-Peterson poll finds that 46% of
Americans believe the president policies have hurt the economy,
greater than the 44% who say Trump’s policies have helped. That’s a
sharp swing from March, when Trump enjoyed an 11-point net positive
rating on the question. (The Fiscal Times is an editorially
independent organization funded by the late Peter G.
Peterson and his family.)

Less than a third of those surveyed by the FT said they expect
the economy to fully recover from the pandemic within a year, the
lowest level since the newspaper first asked the question in
April.

“Part of the shift away from Mr. Trump on the economy may stem
from voters’ urgent hunger for new relief spending from the federal
government — which Mr. Trump has nominally endorsed but which he
has not sought actively to extract from congressional Republicans,”
Burns and Martin write in The New York Times.

A majority of voters also supports Biden’s call for a public
health insurance option, his $2 trillion climate change plan and a
national mandate requiring face coverings. On the coronavirus
pandemic, the Times poll finds that a narrow majority of voters
(51%) believe the worst is yet to come while 37% say the worst is
behind us. On who they trust to handle the pandemic, voters favor
Biden by 12 points.

The New York Times poll of 987 likely voters was conducted from
October 15 to 18 and has a margin of error of 3.4 percentage
points. The FT-Peterson Poll of 1,000 likely voters was conducted
between October 8 and 11. It has a margin of error of 3 percentage
points.

Read more at
The New York Times, the
Financial Times or the
Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

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