House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pointed blame at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for a delay in the passage of a new coronavirus economic relief bill by Congress after he repeatedly accused Democrats of holding the bill hostage.
“Mitch McConnell likes to say we delayed the bill. No, he delayed the bill,” Pelosi said Wednesday on MSNBC. “Two weeks ago, he came to the floor and said, “This is all we’re doing. Just the 250.” And Democrats were reunited, House and Senate. The Senate Democrats went to the floor and said, ‘No, no. … We have a better idea about hospitals and testing and more funds for all of the businesses, the lower — shall we say the unbankable small businesses.'”
Pelosi said she and her Democratic caucuses were relieved when McConnell “finally came around to the fact that we had to go forward with this.”
The Senate passed a nearly $500 billion aid package Tuesday that will replenish funds for small businesses affected by the pandemic and appropriate additional money to hospitals on the front lines of the fight against the virus.
One of the largest chunks of money in the new bill, around $321 billion, will go toward the national Paycheck Protection Program, which grants eight weeks of cash flow to qualifying small businesses so they can pay employees and avoid layoffs.
Democrats argued for and received measures ensuring that more money gets in the hands of people in rural areas and minority-led businesses than they received in the first wave of the Paycheck Protection Program.
Republicans accused Democrats of attempting to attach politically motivated provisions to the bill.
“I want everybody to fully understand: If we aren’t able to act tomorrow, it will because of our colleagues on the other side continuing to dither when the country expects us to come together and address this problem,” McConnell said on March 22.
The majority leader this week said the bill that passed Tuesday “contains essentially nothing that Republicans ever opposed.”
“I am just sorry that it took my colleagues in Democratic leadership 12 days to accept the inevitable and that they shut down emergency support for Main Street in a search for partisan ‘leverage’ that never materialized,” McConnell said.
House Republicans, meanwhile, have slammed Pelosi and Senate Democrats for “destroying the livelihoods” of small businesses that say they needed help weeks ago.
“What kind of person would literally threaten [their] livelihood in the worst crisis to try to exhort some kind of hostage leverage as a lifeline?” asked Rep. Steve Scalise this week.
Pelosi shot back that Republican leadership ought to bear the brunt of the criticism for a slow-moving process leading up to the bill’s passage this week.
“So he was the one wasting time. I say that because I keep hearing him say we delayed — no, he delayed,” she said. “But here we are, and we’re ready to go on to the next bill and help our heroes, our healthcare workers, our firefighters, our first responders, EMS, our folks who are doing all the wonderful work to save lives as they risk their lives, and now they may lose their jobs.”
Now that it passed in the Senate, the new relief bill will be considered in the House later this week, where it is expected to pass before heading to the president’s desk for his signature.
