White House, Democrats Apart on Job Aid as Benefits End
Republicans are pressuring Democrats to go along with a stopgap extension of the expanded unemployment benefit.
(Bloomberg) -- A top-level meeting on Saturday between Congressional Democrats and Trump administration officials was termed productive but left central questions unanswered on striking a deal to extend unemployment insurance and provide other coronavirus pandemic relief.
“There’s still a lot of work to do” to strike a deal, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters after the three-hour meeting. An impasse continues, he said, on whether to do a short-term extension deal for enhanced unemployment benefits, or push forward to try to nail down a comprehensive deal, as Democrats want.
Extra weekly aid for as many as 30 million jobless Americans has run out, with Democrats and Republicans trying to reach common ground on extending unemployment insurance and providing other help for an economy sagging under the weight of pandemic-induced shutdowns.
Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows met at the Capitol with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The gathering was held without staff to promote a more candid conversation, but staff will take up the effort at this point.
“Our staffs will be working to -- theirs and ours -- to have some clarity in some of the issues and we’ll meet on Monday,” Pelosi said.
Schumer told reporters it was the “best discussion” so far, even though the sides aren’t close. Similarly, Meadows lauded “a good foundation” laid by Saturday’s efforts but said he doesn’t want to suggest a deal is imminent “because it’s not.”
“There’s clearly a subset of issues that we both agree on very much,” Mnuchin said, citing schools, jobs, liability insurance, the Payroll Protection Program and other elements. “We discussed both the issues we agree on and the issues we don’t agree on.”
Democrats have rebuffed proposals from the Trump administration to extend lapsing supplemental unemployment benefits temporarily and then circle back to work on a full package.
“We are light years apart,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday on WHAS radio in his home state of Kentucky. On Saturday, Meadows said liability protection for employers bringing people back to work was a “red line” for McConnell.
A White House official said there are about a dozen issues that have to be resolved for any final deal. The most pressing one in the talks now is about extra federal unemployment benefits of $600 a week that ran out as of Friday, leaving millions of out-of-work Americans without an additional safety net at a time when the jobs market is still depressed. In addition, a moratorium on evictions expired July 24.
Meadows said Trump, who spent Saturday morning at his golf course in Virginia, was checking “hourly” and that unemployment benefits and eviction protections are the president’s top priorities.
Trump tweeted “Payroll Tax Cut plus Dollars!” Saturday afternoon, suggesting he might again be backing a payroll tax holiday, an idea that’s mostly unpopular with lawmakers of both parties.
Read More: U.S. INSIGHT: Over the Cliff –- What End of Benefits Means
Both the unemployment aid and the eviction moratorium were part of the $2.2 trillion bipartisan stimulus plan passed in March, when many in Washington and elsewhere expected the impact of the coronavirus pandemic would be waning by summer and the economy on the road to recovery.
Pelosi made clear after negotiations late Thursday that Democrats would only support a very short-term extension of unemployment benefits if it were used to allow time to finish a bipartisan, broad-based deal that appeared imminent.
“The one-week extension is good if you have a bill and you’re working it out,” she said. “It’s worthless unless you are using it for a purpose.”
Meadows said Friday that he and Mnuchin “made no less than four different offers” on unemployment insurance and a moratorium on evictions, though he didn’t give details.
President Donald Trump on Friday unleashed a Twitter barrage at Pelosi and Schumer, accusing them of holding up extra unemployment aid as well as direct payments to individuals that both sides want in a broader package.
But Pelosi said that Republicans were at fault for waiting to come up with their own virus-relief proposal until the start of this week, even though the House passed the Democrats’ plan in May.
“The Republicans said they wanted to take a pause. Well, the virus didn’t,” she said. “Clearly they, and perhaps the White House, do not understand the gravity of the situation.”
Republicans want to cut the benefit in the next stimulus package to a portion of lost wages, but Democrats have proposed keeping it at the current level.
“I think they can reach a deal and they must reach a deal,” Representative Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican, said Saturday on Fox News. He voiced opposition to keeping unemployment payments at levels that “disincentivize” returning to work.
McConnell set up votes next week on Republican proposals to extend the lapsed supplemental unemployment insurance.
The GOP gambit is almost certain to fail because McConnell would need Democratic votes to pass any legislation. But it will give Senate Republicans a chance to go on the record as saying they tried to act.
The two sides have to bridge significant differences between the $1 trillion stimulus plan the GOP released Monday and the $3.5 trillion package that House Democrats passed in May.
The biggest roadblocks remained McConnell’s plan to shield employers against lawsuits stemming from Covid-19 infections, and Democrats’ drive to maintain the $600-a-week supplemental unemployment payments and provide $1 trillion in aid to state and local governments.
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.