It does not appear that the 116th Congress will end up passing another COVID-19 relief bill unless leadership starts making some serious concessions. Republicans don’t want to spend $3.4 trillion, as called for in the House’s HEROES Act, and Democratic leadership has balked at more fiscally conscious Republican proposals as woefully insufficient.
Amid the monthslong gridlock, another attempt at a deal was extinguished on Tuesday when eight House chairmen rejected a bipartisan proposal put together by the House Problem Solvers Caucus, a group with both Democratic and Republican legislators.
Their proposal is strong for a few reasons. First, it treats various partisan concerns with seriousness, allocating billions of dollars to testing and tracing efforts, rent and food assistance, a federal unemployment program, and new funding for the Postal Service and notably would spend hundreds of billions to support state and local governments, all of which have been priorities of Democrats.
It also speaks Republicans’ language by providing for the employee retention tax credit, and it addresses Republicans’ fiscal concerns by repurposing money that has already been appropriated for COVID-19 relief. More than that, it creates a mechanism by which hundreds of billions of dollars might actually never be spent if conditions improve next year and the funding is deemed unwarranted. It would also make some $400 billion in spending for unemployment and stimulus checks contingent on national conditions. The exact metrics for determining to spend the spending “boosters” and “reducers” are unclear in the proposal’s framework.
Encouragingly, the proposal is an expression of functioning government, and it actually reveals the pathology of repeated failures in coronavirus relief negotiations. Few in the caucus are incredibly well-known legislators, so the reward for gamesmanship is much lower than it might be for party leadership. It goes to show that leadership has more of a political incentive to stonewall than the average legislator, especially in an intensely partisan presidential election year.
Still, Senate Republicans do not want to spend a whole lot of money, and this proposal raises the same old concerns for them as past efforts. In any case, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who has helped lead the negotiation effort with Democrats, recently said that now is not a good time to be worried about budget deficits. He may be able to coax enough Republicans into spending more than they otherwise would.
President Trump is also pushing Republicans to be willing to spend more on coronavirus relief. There is certainly a deal to be had, but something’s got to give.
