After months of on-again, off-again talks on an increasingly needed fiscal-stimulus package, Tuesday is shaping up as a do-or-die moment for Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to get a virus relief deal done in time for Election Day.
With Mnuchin phoning in from a Middle East trip, he and Pelosi will make one more effort to patch up differences between the White House and Democrats on a welter of issues that have prevented agreement since talks began in July.
“We’ll see what tomorrow will bring,” Pelosi said on MSNBC Monday night. “Let’s make a judgment. We may not like this, we may not like that. But let’s see on balance if we can go forward.”
Her spokesman Drew Hammill said earlier on Twitter that “the Speaker continues to hope that, by the end of the day Tuesday, we will have clarity on whether we will be able to pass a bill before the election.”
Neither Pelosi, in a call with House colleagues Monday, nor President Donald Trump, in a campaign appearance in Arizona, telegraphed that a deal is looming. Pelosi again listed a divide in principles on how to deploy stimulus money, while Trump again charged the speaker with holding back from agreement to gain an electoral advantage -- something he repeated Tuesday.
“Here’s the problem: she doesn’t want to do anything until after the election, because she thinks that helps her,” Trump said on Fox News. “I want to do it even bigger than the Democrats. Not every Republican agrees with me, but they will,” he also said, reiterating that he’s willing to go beyond the $2.2 trillion top-line number Democrats favor.
Areas of division include the scale of assistance to state and local authorities, tax credits Democrats want for lower-income families, liability protections that Republicans are pushing but Democrats oppose, and a repeal of a credit for past business-tax losses that Republicans want to keep.
One potential, unintended beneficiary of the lack of any deal could be Senate Republicans who have opposed the $1.8 trillion-or-more size proposed by the White House. Voting against a bill would showcase a split in the GOP days before Nov. 3.
Senate Republicans on Tuesday will attempt to proceed with one of two planned votes on smaller-scale stimulus efforts that both the Trump administration and the House Democratic majority oppose.
With Election Day in two weeks, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is aiming to shame Democrats for what he described as an “all or nothing” approach with their insistence on a $2.2 trillion bill.
McConnell Tuesday will try to secure a vote on legislation allowing unused funds from the March stimulus law to replenish the Paycheck Protection Program to aid small businesses. On Wednesday he plans a $500 billion stimulus, along the lines of what he tried and failed to pass last month.