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Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for Oct. 20, 2020

Deadline Day for Pre-Election Stimulus Comes, And Will Go

Plus, more links to our special report on universal family care

 

A homeless encampment in Philadelphia, PA. Lives are at stake with the
failure to provide federal relief amid the coronavirus recession.
(Steven M. Falk/Philadelphia Inquirer via AP)

Universal Family Care

Here are today's great stories from our special issue on the need for
universal family care :

* Sara Luterman on disability care
, an
overlooked part of the family care system.

* Sarah Jaffe on the crisis of U.S. workers without paid sick leave
.

* Alex Sammon on the collapse of long-term care insurance
,
a system that is no longer sustainable to protect people from elder care
expenses.

* Moe Tkacik with an amazing long-read on the corporatization of nursing
homes
,
captured by a predatory outfit decades ago that set the stage for many
of private equity's worst tricks.

* Rhacel Salazar Parrenas on the aging of migrant domestic workers
,
and the situation of the elderly caring for the elderly.

* Brittany Gibson explains what caregiving looks like in the UK
.

You can see all of the stories throughout the week at
prospect.org/familycare . I'll be
listing the stories here too.

Click to Support The American Prospect

Deadline to Nowhere

Today is a "deadline" day for whether or not there will be an
agreement

on COVID relief before the election, and I'll save you the trouble by
pointing out there won't be any. It's inexcusable in an alleged
democracy where voters support relief by 51 points

that it's not going to happen, leading us into what's likely to be
the worst months of the pandemic with no federal support. But at the
risk of being redundant, the cake was baked on this in March, when the
first and only real pre-election bite of the stimulus apple would be
taken.

Based on who I've been talking to, the easiest part of this
deal-getting the White House (through its negotiator Steven Mnuchin)
and House Democrats together on a deal-is incredibly remote. "We
want specificity, we want language that is binding," Rep. Raul
Grijalva (D-AZ), chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, told me
yesterday. "There might be agreement on a number, but still no
agreement on values. Giving the budgetary discretion to this
administration at this time, that would be a mistake without being more
prescriptive on how that money is used."

The rough translation there is that Democrats don't trust the Trump
administration with appropriated money. These are the guys that took
military funds and used them to build a border wall. One response to
that is to look at the CARES Act, where money flowed out smoothly, but
not all the rules were followed there. A report out just this week found
that Treasury encouraged banks to lend to existing customers

on the Paycheck Protection Program, and airlines that got bailout money
laid off workers before the fact
.
So part of this reflects the crumbling trust over a four-year period.

Related to that is the fact that even "agreements
"
from the principals are not leading to actual agreements on legislative
language. This Jake Sherman thread
shows how
even simple things like money for transit and community health centers
has been deadlocked, with Republicans resistant to sign onto things
agreed to by Mnuchin.

**Read all of our Unsanitized reports here**

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Then there's the liability release for businesses whose workers or
customers contract COVID, a red line for both Republicans and Democrats.
People I've spoken with on the left say there's no way any bill with
that in there gets passed, and Republicans say no bill without it does.

These are just the divisions to get to a White House/House Democratic
agreement, before you get to the Senate. Sen. John Thune (R-SD), a
member of the Senate leadership, said that he doubted there were even 13
votes

(the minimum to break a filibuster) in his caucus for anything above a
token amount. And that assumes Mitch McConnell would put a bill
supported by all Senate Democrats and almost none of his caucus on the
floor. There are a lot of stupid semantic games around McConnell saying
he would "consider
"
a White House agreement; everyone knows that doesn't mean anything and
certainly doesn't mean a guaranteed vote. Even the most deal-friendly
Democrats, like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), understands that McConnell is and
always was the roadblock
.

What McConnell's actually done is set up votes on the exact same piece
of legislation that failed a month ago, the $500 billion "skinny"
relief bill, which includes an amendment that just restarts a PPP that
had effectively no demand when it expired. Today, actually just the PPP
restart will be voted on, as an amendment, and it won't even be a vote
to pass it, but a vote to table the amendment. (Long story, read this
.)

This is purely designed to put Democrats in an alleged bind of voting
against stimulus, except they have voted against this several times and
it's caused no discernible reaction, with vulnerable Republican
Senators still vulnerable. McConnell is not quite a "master"
strategist when it comes to anything other than bulling through judges.

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Speaking of which, yesterday Chuck Schumer offered a sample of what
Democrats could do to crank the Senate floor to a halt to slow down an
Amy Coney Barrett confirmation, though not as much as they could have.
Schumer forced a vote on a motion to adjourn (with a caveat that the
chamber would come back in the event of a stimulus package) and a
Congressional Review Act vote on a Trump administration banking
regulation. This is within the power of the minority, and it did force
votes, though they failed. Republicans had four absentees yesterday,
meaning that a quorum call

would have put the chamber into purgatory, at least until McConnell
could rustle up 51 Senators. But Schumer didn't opt for that.

While McConnell is trying to set up his votes to block any amendments to
his useless skinny relief bill, Schumer did start a process to put the
House-passed Heroes Act onto the legislative calendar. McConnell is
using a very complicated procedure to try to block any attempt from
Democrats to call this vote up. There will also be a roll call to go
back to executive session to keep the Barrett nomination on track,
making any of these votes on stimulus kind of moot. If McConnell
doesn't have all his members today, it would be a good day to test out
the quorum call option.

The inevitability of lack of relief does not make it any less tragic.
Whatever savings low-income people managed to build up with CARES Act
relief will be gone well before any other help arrives, and another
pandemic surge deeply complicates matters. Even if the country doesn't
go back into lockdown, habits will change enough to dampen spending on
any group-based activity. Many of the few still-extant relief supports
expire at the end of the year
.
I've already said enough about how this was guaranteed by political
decisions made long ago. But I'll just say that it's disgusting to
now have a man-made depression on top of the pandemic-made one.

Days Without a Bailout Oversight Chair

208
.

We Can't Do This Without You

Today I Learned

* Three billion people globally may be unable to access a COVID vaccine
,
because there are no proper storage facilities in their home countries.
(Associated Press)

* Britain moving to human challenge trials
.
That means people signing up to inject themselves with coronavirus to
see if the vaccine works. (Washington Post)

* COVID-induced lung damage may not be long-lasting
,
and let's hope so. (New York Times)

* Europe moving to lockdown
. (BBC)

* Centralized, fragile supply chains will continue to be snarled for
years

from the pandemic. (Vox)

* It's dumb to cover the pandemic, Trump says
,
apparently out loud. (Axios)

* The evictions are coming in January

if there are no policy changes. (Reuters)

* As the Google antitrust lawsuit drops
,
tech influence on markets soars in the crisis
.
(Wall Street Journal)

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