Answering Trump, Democrats Try and Fail to Jam
$2,000 Payments Through House
In a brief bit of political theater, the House
majority leader opened the chamber for business to ask for unanimous consent to
accede to President Trump’s request for larger checks.
By Emily
Cochrane and Luke Broadwater
Dec. 24,
2020
Updated
10:57 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON
— The fate of $900 billion in pandemic aid will remain in limbo over the
Christmas break after House Democrats tried and failed on Thursday to more than
triple the size of relief checks, then adjourned the House until Monday, when
they will try again.
President
Trump’s implicit threat on Tuesday to reject a relief compromise that
overwhelmingly passed both chambers unless lawmakers agreed to raise the bill’s
$600 direct payment checks to $2,000 has continued to roil Congress while
rattling an already teetering economic recovery.
Mr. Trump
decamped for Mar-a-Lago, his club in Palm Beach, Fla., on Wednesday without
saying another public word on the relief bill’s fate, leaving both parties to
guess whether he really intends to veto the long-delayed measure, which
includes the pandemic aid as well as funding to keep the government open past
Monday.
The result
of the dysfunction is that millions of Americans who were counting on relief in
the immediate future, or even continued unemployment checks, are not going to
get them, barring a surprise bill signing in Florida.
On
Thursday, the Government Publishing Office finished physically printing the
nearly 5,600-page package, and congressional leaders signed it before it was to
be flown to Florida by the White House for Mr. Trump’s possible signature. But
if the president does nothing, the legislation — and its relief — will die on
Jan. 3 with the statutory end of the 116th Congress. Government funding,
extended unemployment benefits and a continued eviction moratorium will have
lapsed even before then.
“The best
way out of this is for the president to sign the bill,” said Senator Roy Blunt
of Missouri, a member of the Republican leadership, “and I still hope that’s
what he decides.”
A delay in
signing the bill could be costly for unemployed workers. States cannot pay out
benefits for weeks that begin before the bill is signed, meaning that if the president
does not sign the bill by Saturday, benefits will not restart until the first
week of January. But they will still end in mid-March, effectively trimming the
extension to 10 weeks from 11.
“Donald
Trump’s temper tantrum is threatening to cost millions of jobless workers a
week’s worth of income,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. “The
ability of millions of Americans to pay rent and buy groceries hangs in the
balance, and Donald Trump spent the day golfing. It’s shameful.”
The
Democrats’ Christmas Eve gambit on the House floor was never meant to pass, but
the party’s leaders hoped to put Republicans in a bind — choosing between the
president’s wishes for far more largess and their own inclinations for modest
spending.
Republicans
rejected the request by the House majority leader, Representative Steny H.
Hoyer of Maryland, for unanimous consent to pass a measure fulfilling Mr.
Trump’s demand for $2,000 checks.
Without
support from both Republican and Democratic leadership, such requests cannot be
entertained on the House floor. Republicans then failed to put forward their
own request to revisit the foreign aid provision of the spending legislation
that Mr. Trump has also objected to, although most of the items came almost
dollar for dollar from his own budget request.
Speaker
Nancy Pelosi of California vowed in a statement on Thursday to hold a roll-call
vote on the direct payments legislation on Monday, declaring that voting
against it would “deny the financial hardship that families face and to deny
them the relief they need.”
With
government funding set to lapse at the end of the day Monday, House lawmakers
are also considering the possibility of another stopgap spending bill — which
would be the fifth such spending measure this month — to prevent a shutdown,
Mr. Hoyer said.
Meantime,
Republican leaders were left wondering aloud why Congress was still dealing
with a matter on Christmas Eve that they thought had been finally put to rest
on Monday night.
“There’s a
long list of positive things that we’d be talking about today if we weren’t
talking about this,” Mr. Blunt told reporters on Capitol Hill. “And I think
that would be to the president’s advantage if we were talking about his
accomplishments rather than questioning decisions late in the administration.”
The
pandemic relief and government spending bill, which passed both chambers this
week with overwhelming bipartisan support, contains the first significant
federal relief since April. If the president does not sign it, millions of
Americans are set to lose access to two federal unemployment programs that were
expanded under the $2.2 trillion stimulus law, which passed in March and lapses
after this week.
A series of
additional relief provisions, including an eviction moratorium, are set to
expire at the end of the month, and other temporary relief protections
shielding millions of Americans from the brunt of the pandemic’s economic toll
will lapse shortly after the new year without action.
Lawmakers
agreed to a plan to issue stimulus payments of $600 and distribute a federal
unemployment benefit of $300 for 11 weeks. You can find more about the bill and
what’s in it for you here.
Will I
receive another stimulus payment? Individual adults with adjusted gross income
on their 2019 tax returns of up to $75,000 a year would receive a $600 payment,
and heads of households making up to $112,500 and a couple (or someone whose
spouse died in 2020) earning up to $150,000 a year would get twice that amount.
If they have dependent children, they would also get $600 for each child.
People with incomes just above these levels would receive a partial payment
that declines by $5 for every $100 in income.
When might
my payment arrive? Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told CNBC that he expected
the first payments to go out before the end of the year. But it will be a while
before all eligible people receive their money.
Does the
agreement affect unemployment insurance? Lawmakers agreed to extend the amount
of time that people can collect unemployment benefits and restart an extra
federal benefit that is provided on top of the usual state benefit. But instead
of $600 a week, it would be $300. That would last through March 14.
I am behind
on my rent or expect to be soon. Will I receive any relief? The agreement would
provide $25 billion to be distributed through state and local governments to
help renters who have fallen behind. To receive assistance, households would
have to meet several conditions: Household income (for 2020) cannot exceed more
than 80 percent of the area median income; at least one household member must
be at risk of homelessness or housing instability; and individuals must qualify
for unemployment benefits or have experienced financial hardship — directly or
indirectly — because of the pandemic. The agreement said assistance would be
prioritized for families with lower incomes and that have been unemployed for
three months or more.
Ahead of
two runoff Senate elections in Georgia, Mr. Trump has also forced a tense
situation for his party, setting up another loyalty test for his most devoted
supporters that hinges on rejecting a $2.3 trillion package negotiated in part
by top White House officials.
The
president “doesn’t give a damn about people,” said Representative Debbie
Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, who grew emotional as she recounted calls from
constituents pleading for federal support during the holiday season. “He sowed
more fear. He threw kerosene on a fire.”
Rank-and-file
Republicans are expressing frustration, as well. On Wednesday evening,
Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio argued that House Republicans had stood
by Mr. Trump for four years.
“If he
thinks going on Twitter and trashing the bill his team negotiated and we
supported on his behalf is going to bring more people to his side in this
election fiasco, I hope he’s wrong, though I guess we’ll see,” Mr. Gonzalez
wrote on Twitter.
On behalf
of Republicans, Representative Rob Wittman of Virginia tried and failed on
Thursday to gain consideration of a separate request to revisit the annual
spending for foreign policy matters, given that Mr. Trump had also objected to
how those funds were being spent. (That legislation had also secured the
support of 128 Republicans when it passed the House on Monday.)
“House
Democrats appear to be suffering from selective hearing,” Representative Kevin
McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, wrote in a letter to
colleagues after Mr. Trump’s videotaped objection to the bill. “They have
conveniently ignored the concerns of the president and shared by our
constituents, that we ought to re-examine how our tax dollars are spent
overseas.”
But other
Republican leaders were not particularly eager to renegotiate the spending
portion of the bill either. Mr. Blunt said he believed Mr. Trump was confused
about the separation between the pandemic relief part of the bill and the
foreign aid proposed by his own administration in the government spending
portion.
“Certainly,
the negotiated foreign aid provisions would not benefit by opening that part of
the bill up, and frankly, if you start opening part of the bill up, it’s hard
to defend not opening the whole bill up,” Mr. Blunt told reporters at the
Capitol on Thursday. “It took us a long time to get to where we are. I think
reopening that bill would be a mistake.”
At a news
conference after the unsuccessful motions, Mr. Hoyer said House Democrats only
agreed to the $600 checks in the stimulus compromise because Republicans
negotiating the deal, including the president’s representative, Steven Mnuchin,
the Treasury secretary, insisted on that number.
“Mr.
Mnuchin suggested a lower figure might have been appropriate,” Mr. Hoyer told
reporters. Asked if it had been a mistake to tie the relief package and the
spending omnibus together given the conflation of various spending provisions,
Mr. Hoyer noted that “perhaps the only mistake was believing the president and
Secretary Mnuchin when we were told that the bill to be passed would be signed
by the President of the United States.”
Ben
Casselman contributed reporting from New York.
Emily
Cochrane is a reporter in the Washington bureau, covering Congress. She was
raised in Miami and graduated from the University of Florida. @ESCochrane
Luke Broadwater
covers Congress. He was the lead reporter on a series of investigative articles
at the Baltimore Sun that won a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award in 2020.
@lukebroadwater
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