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Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for Oct. 16, 2020

McConnell's "Skinny" Relief Bill Might Not Even Be a Bill

The procedural games behind a show vote on coronavirus aid

 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) voting in his home state
on Thursday. (Timothy D. Easley/AP Photo)

First Response

**** People are very invested in the concept
of calling Mitch McConnell's bluff. I don't know if every political
observer's brains have been wiped clean of all evidence since 2008 or
what, but there's this thinking that you can't really pin the
failure of any second round of economic relief on McConnell until Nancy
Pelosi joins hands with Donald Trump and dares him to reject it.

Well, he's already rejected it. Explicitly
.
As in "McConnell says he will not put $1.8 trillion stimulus bill on
Senate floor," as a headline. That anvil is already fully tied to the
legs of Senate Republicans. This idea that it's hard for McConnell to
reject things is at odds with all past experience. There are hundreds of
pieces of legislation lying fallow, one more won't really change
anything.

And as for it being impossible to assign political blame unless Pelosi
acquiesces, well, no, you have the Senate Majority Leader saying he
won't agree to the legislation, and if you can't make hay with that
you shouldn't be in politics. In fact Senate Democratic challengers
are doing just that, and that's why they're advancing, in places
like Kansas and Alaska and North Carolina (despite a sexting scandal).
Here's Steve Bullock going after Steve Daines

over stimulus in Montana, and Theresa Greenfield going after Joni Ernst

in Iowa. The anger at Pelosi for denying Democrats a political win is
coming mostly from D.C. pundits; if they'd look past the federal
district, they'd understand that the political win is already in hand.

Meanwhile McConnell is going to put a "targeted
"
relief on the Senate floor on Monday. We don't know a heck of a lot
about it, frankly. It appears that it will look approximately like the
bill that failed, with the support of all Senate Republicans but one,
last month. That included another round of the Paycheck Protection
Program, minor amounts of money for unemployment and schools and
hospitals, and McConnell's cherished liability relief proposal to
immunize companies whose workers and customers get infected with
COVID-19. According to McConnell
,
some checks "for those who have been hit the hardest" have also been
included. It clocks in at around $500 billion, far less than the $1.8
trillion White House offer.

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**** The bill on Monday serves two goals: it
gets McConnell to say the Senate acted on relief first, before the
Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, which will be taken up on
Friday
.
And it gives vulnerable Republicans in tight races a chance to say they
did something to mitigate the economic damage.

My initial thought here was, why wouldn't Chuck Schumer call the
bluff? If Democrats just don't filibuster and this bill passes, the
House could ask to go to conference with it and the $3 trillion-plus
Heroes Act. When McConnell declines, then you'd reinforce the source
of the delay on Capitol Hill. Indeed, this is under consideration, as
Democrats haven't committed

to blocking the skinny relief bill.

But McConnell has some procedural options that would deny even that.
Back in September, Schumer managed by a fantastical circumstance to get
the floor, and he set up a vote on healthcare, really a message bill to
force Republicans to choose a side. McConnell reacted with an unusual
vote

that gave Republicans the opportunity to claim they supported
pre-existing condition protections. The nature of that vote is what's
interesting. It wasn't a vote to advance the bill; it was a motion to
table

an amendment to existing legislation. Though Republicans brought it up,
they were all the No votes, voting to allow further debate. Democrats
voted to table.

That motion failed on a 47-47 party-line vote, but nothing further was
done with it. In other words, Republicans "won" the vote but
didn't proceed. That's what kind of bill McConnell could make the
relief package. It would be an amendment to a shell bill, and the motion
would be to table it. If Democrats lost that vote, the amendment
wouldn't go anywhere; it's purely messaging. And they certainly
wouldn't be able to go to conference.

In other words, the bill McConnell's bringing on Monday is likely to
be a fake bill. Nothing about his process is sincere, because he
doesn't want to provide an ounce of help to a future Joe Biden
presidency, and is indeed seeding the ground for a snap return to
austerity and fiscal probity. You don't need Nancy Pelosi doing
whatever Nancy Pelosi does to tell that story.

And just to be clear: Pelosi and the Democrats set the stage for this in
March by passing inadequate relief that ended before the national
emergency, and giving up their leverage. I get why people are angry that
nothing can be done now, but... nothing can be done now.

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Today I Learned

* Inside the fall of the CDC
.
(ProPublica)

* Claudia Sahm

on the Federal Reserve's failure to help ordinary people amid
Washington dysfunction. (New York Times)

* One of the brightest notes for the future: the IMF says austerity is
not required
to
offset pandemic-related fiscal spending. (Financial Times)

* The European second wave

is here. (Axios)

* OSHA isn't requiring data

from employers on COVID-related hospitalizations. (HuffPost)

* Remdesivir, it turns out, doesn't do much

to reduce deaths in patients, according to a large international study,
though the implementation in different countries could be part of the
problem. (New York Times)

* Actors are booking ads by getting their family members
,
the only people they can be in the same room with, to appear with them.
(Wall Street Journal)

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