Rim Country Gazette: Biden and Democrats try to lead while McConnell holds a hungry, sick, dying nation hostage

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Biden and Democrats try to lead while McConnell holds a hungry, sick, dying nation hostage

It's Nancy, Chuck and Joe with an empty seat at the table for Moscow Mitch.

It's been 191 days since the House passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act, and 55 days since the House passed their compromise $2.2 trillion bill, both of which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to take up. And in just 37 days, the fraying remnant of the safety net created by the CARES Act back in March will expire.

With the impeached loser squatter in the Oval Office having pretty much entirely checked out from reality as he spins fantasies for his adoring followers about fraud and stolen elections and the Supreme Court riding to the rescue, President-elect Joe Biden is stepping into the breach to try to get some kind of coronavirus bill done before the end of the year to tide the nation over until he's in office two months from now. Biden had his first meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer last week to start talks on legislative priorities.

That includes, sources from The New York Times say, asking Pelosi and Schumer to strike a quick deal with Senate Republicans even if that means compromising further. Pelosi has already trimmed her HEROES bill by nearly $1 trillion. In response, McConnell actually cut what he had on offer, what he brought to the Senate floor as a show of partisan kibuki, by half a trillion. He's now at $500 billion, and presumably stuck there. As of now, Pelosi and Schumer are not backing down from their $2+ trillion demand, arguing that "despite the consensus from economists and experts that the country requires a much larger injection of aid," McConnell has been slashing his bottom line.

"There needs to be emergency assistance and aid during the lame-duck session to help families, to help small business," Jen Psaki, a Biden transition aide, said Friday before the Biden meeting with the leaders. "There's no more room for delay, and we need to move forward as quickly as possible." The transition team issued a statement after the meeting saying that the leaders "agreed that Congress needed to pass a bipartisan emergency aid package in the lame-duck session" but didn't specify the size of that package. Thus far, McConnell remains the brick wall. "We want to reach agreement on all the areas where compromise is well within reach, send hundreds of billions of dollars to urgent and uncontroversial programs, and let Washington argue over the rest later," he said the Senate floor last week, trolling the Democrats. "By playing all-or-nothing hardball with a proposal this radical, our colleagues have thus far guaranteed that American workers and families get nothing at all." Which is, of course, bullshit.

The situation is absolutely dire, with a group of bipartisan economists convened by the Aspen Institute and inducing former Treasury secretaries to publicly urge lawmakers to get something out there to families, small businesses, and state and local governments, saying the economy "cannot wait until 2021" for relief. McConnell has been adamant in opposing aid to state and local governments, and just as adamant that he will only agree to a proposal if it lets businesses off the liability hook. For example, the Tyson meatpacking plant in the news last week for the grotesque abuses it inflicted on workers, where individuals in management actually placed bets on how many workers would get sick with COVID-19. If McConnell had his way, those abuses would never have come to light since they were revealed in a lawsuit by the family of the late Isidro Fernandez, who was infected at the plant. As of now, McConnell hasn't lifted that demand.

Meanwhile, the crisis continues. "What I'm really worried about is the millions of people who are going to be without food or without a home during the winter," said Melissa S. Kearney, who directs the Aspen Institute strategy group. "That level of individual suffering, really, to me, should be everyone's priority and move them past their political differences." She clearly hasn't met Mitch McConnell.