Pelosi Passes Virus Response Bill, Filling Vacuum Left by Trump
Pelosi Passes Virus Response Bill, Filling Vacuum Left by Trump
(Bloomberg) -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Donald Trump haven’t spoken in months, but the California Democrat seized the initiative to strike a deal with the White House on a broad measure aimed at helping Americans cope with the spiraling effects of the coronavirus outbreak.
After Trump didn’t deliver on a promised announcement of a “major” economic stimulus package, Pelosi and House Democrats on Wednesday put out their own plan to ease some of the economic impact on workers and families. That began a series of negotiations between Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin over the course of three days and more than two dozen phone calls.
The end result was a rare bit of bipartisanship. The House, with the president’s support, passed a bill early Saturday morning on a 363-40 vote to provide paid sick leave, money for food stamps, bolstered unemployment insurance and significant new funding for Medicaid. Those are all are long-held Democratic priorities, though in this version they are scaled back and temporary.
For Pelosi, it was a chance to step into a leadership vacuum and to demonstrate Americans in an election year how a Democratic-led government would function.
“We could have passed our bill yesterday,” Pelosi said Friday night. “But we thought it was important to show the American people, that for the American people, that we are willing and able to work together to get a job done for them.”
Trump, who recently lashed out at “Nervous Nancy Wacko Pelosi,” reluctantly embraced the deal after criticizing it earlier in the day. Pelosi’s deal represented a political lifeline for Trump -- offering the kind of sweeping policy response to the virus that his administration had yet to provide.
Up until late this week, the president had been more focused on trying to keep the virus out of the U.S., ordering travel restrictions and some targeted screening procedures.
With markets plunging, he had called for an economic stimulus, but offered little beyond suggesting temporarily cutting payroll taxes, which drew mostly skepticism from Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.
After days of claiming the virus had been contained, he finally yielded to bipartisan pressure and declared an national emergency Friday, pledging to make coronavirus tests more available, waive student-loan interest, purchase large quantities of oil and confer new authority on his health secretary to bypass hospital regulations.
“It could get worse. The next eight weeks are critical,” Trump told reporters in the Rose Garden. “We can learn, and we will turn a corner on this virus. Some of the doctors say it will wash through. It will flow through. Interesting terms, and very accurate. I think you’re going to find a number of weeks it’s going to be a very active term.”
But it was House Democrats who delivered a measure packed with funding for lower- and middle-income Americans. The demand for some kind of help was so strong that lawmakers rushed the bill through the House without even waiting for a formal estimate of how many billions of dollars it would cost.
On Friday night, Pelosi took a victory lap with some of her freshmen members who will face tough campaigns this year. Until recently, many were were worried about the political fallout from impeaching Trump and the prospect of Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, at the top of the Democratic ticket in November. Re-electing those members, people like Virginia Representative Abigail Spanberger and California Representative Gil Cisneros, will decide if Democrats hold on to the House majority.
In the final hours before Trump tweeted his support, House Republicans said Pelosi jumped the gun by announcing that she had a deal with the administration. Less than two hours later, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was gushing about how Republicans and Democrats can work together in moments of national crisis.
Pelosi and Mnuchin were on the phone negotiating even as Trump told reporters at the White House Friday afternoon that he didn’t think Democrats were “giving enough” in the negotiation, a declaration that appeared to dash hopes of a bipartisan compromise.
In the end, the measure passed overwhelmingly.
“When you’re doing these things you want to say at a certain place, no more moving of the goalposts,” Pelosi said, “But then it happens.”
--With assistance from Laura Litvan and Steven T. Dennis.
To contact the reporter on this story: Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, Anna Edgerton, Joe Sobczyk
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