Partisan battle over coronavirus aid centers on unemployment benefits

The unemployment payment proposal, if signed into law, represents about a $400 weekly reduction from the current $600 per week in expanded benefits, which is set to expire this month.

Democrats want to keep delivering the $600, while Republicans have broadly rejected the $600 expansion because in many cases, it has paid workers more to stay home than to return to their jobs.

Republicans have declared that returning people to work and reopening the economy are among the pillars of their $1 trillion coronavirus aid package they plan to unveil on Monday.

The GOP measure is meant to serve as an opening offer in what will likely become difficult negotiations with Democrats, who are seeking at least $3.4 trillion in new coronavirus aid after passing their own $3 trillion bill in May.

The unemployment benefits provision is perhaps the biggest sticking point.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, is not budging on the $600 figure, arguing that is the amount unemployed individuals need to pay for food and housing and making the case that two years ago, they passed legislation to slash corporate taxes.

“It’s essential to the well-being of America,” the California Democrat told reporters Friday. “What do the Republicans and the White House have against working families in our country that they would begrudge them $600 in necessary sustenance.”

The Democratic position is likely to produce a partisan standoff as the two parties begin hammering out a deal that can pass both the Democratic-led House and the GOP-led Senate and also win Trump’s signature by early August, when Congress is set to adjourn for the summer.

Republicans and Trump have been largely unified in opposing the $600-per-week federal payment.

Republican negotiators have developed a proposal tying the next round of expanded unemployment benefits to individual state unemployment benefit systems.

The proposal would allocate benefits based on a worker’s current wages, which would result in workers receiving a benefit worth about 70% of their current pay, White House officials and lawmakers said.

Republicans said in order to reopen the economy, businesses must have not only the tools to do so safely but also an incentive for workers to return to their jobs.

“You are not going to get small businesses to open if people get paid more money not to come to work,” Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican and the state’s former governor, said. “You can’t do that.”

Scott and the rest of the GOP support a provision providing lawsuit liability protection for businesses, schools, and health care facilities, which Scott said, “would get businesses back to work faster, move the economy back, and move people back to work faster,” than unemployment benefits. Democrats have expressed opposition to lawsuit limitations.

The benefits and liability protection provision are among dozens of spending items that will require compromise between the two parties.

The Senate GOP bill provides $200 billion for a new round of forgivable loans for certain small businesses and a new batch of $1,200 stimulus checks targeted to individuals earning less than $40,000.

The Democratic wish list includes funding to bail out the U.S. Post Office and state pension plans as well as “hazard pay” for some workers and a half-trillion dollars to help states and local governments cope with revenue loss that has followed coronavirus lockdowns. Democrats would provide stimulus checks to those earning up to $75,000.

The partisan differences extend to education as well. Republicans propose $105 billion for schools, universities, and colleges to reopen safely, topping the Democrats’ initial demand in May for $100 billion.

Pelosi told reporters on Friday that neither the House nor the Senate proposal is nearly enough anymore for the schools to operate, and she’ll ask for much more.

“We probably need at least double that much for education,” Pelosi said.