Sen. Joe Manchin rebuffed claims that a proposed $908 billion stimulus package was “dead,” saying negotiations for a coronavirus stimulus bill are “alive and well” and that legislation will be ready for Congress to take action on Monday.
“Here’s the thing: It hasn’t fallen apart,” the West Virginia Democrat told Fox’s Chris Wallace on Sunday. “We’ve been meeting day and night for the last month. We were on a call all day yesterday. We’ll get on a call again this afternoon to finish things up. We’ll have a bill produced for the American people tomorrow — $908 billion.”
Congress hasn’t passed a coronavirus-related stimulus bill since March. A number of bills of various sizes, one as large as $2.2 trillion, have been proposed and passed in the House or Senate, but none of the bills have earned total support from the House, the Senate, and the president.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers announced the $908 billion compromise bill on Dec. 1. The bill included support for small businesses and temporary liability shields against coronavirus-related lawsuits, both important measures for Republicans, and a new round of supplemental federal unemployment and support for state and local governments — two must-haves for many Democrats.
“We are trying to get through the toughest first quarter of our country that we’ve ever faced, and we’ve got people without nutrition, we have people without shelter, we have people without paychecks, they’re unemployed. We have — hospitals are being overburdened. We have healthcare workers. We have schools that need to be attended to,” Manchin said. “This covers all of that, and we give all the small businesses a chance to survive until the first quarter. By then, we should start to come out with a vaccine that should be helping us, and Joe Biden will be our president and make a determination what more’s needed. This is strictly an emergency measure.”
Absent from the bill is a second round of coronavirus stimulus checks — which liberal Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and conservative Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley have been outspoken advocates for, according to the New York Times.
“There’s a lot of parts to this bill and in the spirit of compromise, you have to work through all of that. But at the end, you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Manchin said.
