Fox News host Sean Hannity said a controversial aspect of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief package making its way through Congress “angers” his audience.
Before the Senate passed the bill late Wednesday evening, Hannity told Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that his viewers object to its expansion of unemployment benefits that critics argue will incentivize taking people out of the workforce.
“This idea that you’re going to make more money unemployed, that angers my audience. That angers me too,” said Hannity, a Trump whisperer whose show attracts millions of viewers a night. “Why couldn’t somebody just have to show a pay stub, and that’s the money you’re going to get?”
Mnuchin, who negotiated the terms of the legislation with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, said, “It angers me too,” but he reasoned that there was no time to come up with a better system because people need the financial boost sooner rather than later.
“The simplest way was, and the fairest way was, $600 per person in certain states — that may be a little bit too much money. In other states, it’s less money. It’s not a perfect system,” Mnuchin said. “But the president’s objective was to make sure we get money in people’s hands. And as I said, you know, waiting four months to reprogram systems, that doesn’t do us any good.”
Other provisions in the massive spending deal, allocating funds for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, Hannity described as a bunch of “garbage” that Democrats leveraged “in a time of an emergency and a crisis and a pandemic.”
Earlier in the program, Sen. Lindsey Graham blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for language in the bill that conservatives argued would provide some workers more money to remain on unemployment insurance than if they stayed on the job, which would disincentivize work.
“It’s Pelosi that screwed this up,” the South Carolina Republican said. “She came back from California. We had a pretty damn good deal. And she’s insisted on the mob agenda, liberal agenda. And she’s tried to hold the whole country hostage.”
An amendment he supported to change the expanded unemployment insurance language in the bill won a vote, but it failed and earned criticism from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who said the federal minimum wage has not been raised in a decade.
Mnuchin said Graham is “perfectly right” to be upset.
“I know he’s talking about, you know, in the ideal world, we’d correct this. You know, it’s — our focus was delivering money quickly to the American public,” Mnuchin said.
The Senate unanimously passed the $2 trillion coronavirus emergency relief package late Wednesday, sending the measure to the House, where leaders are trying to figure out whether they can clear it for the president’s signature without summoning back all lawmakers for a roll-call vote.
