Stimulus Talks Resuming Today? We’ll See

This is my stimulus update for Thursday, August 27.

Nancy Pelosi and Mark Meadows Speaking This Afternoon

Big news is that Nancy Pelosi and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows will be speaking this afternoon after not having spoken since stimulus negotiations broke down on August 7.

So this could, optimistically-speaking, be restart of stimulus negotiations.  Maybe Pelosi saw Meadows’ interview with Politico yesterday, how Meadows was saying that Pelosi is going to hold out until the end of September and will try to use COVID-19 to get her way with appropriations, but whatever has transpired, it looks like there will be some communication today between Nancy Pelosi and Mark Meadows regarding stimulus at 2:30 PM today Eastern time.

I don’t want to get your hopes up too much, we know that Mnuchin and Pelosi spoke a little less than a week after negotiations broke down, and that talk didn’t go well, but we’ll see what happens this afternoon, I will of course keep you updated.

Yesterday’s Poll Results

Poll results from yesterday.  I asked you all yesterday what you thought about Pelosi’s decision to bring the House to vote on a Postal Service bill this past Saturday but not doing any voting on stimulus-related measures despite many members of her own Democratic caucus calling for that as I told you last week.

The overwhelming majority of you, 70%, said that you believed that this was a bad call by Pelosi with 16% of you saying it was a good decision and 14% of you saying it was a neutral decision.

Republicans Updating “Skinny” Bill?

So we’ve talked about Democrats like Pelosi a lot, we’ve talked about Mark Meadows a lot, but today we’re gonna talk about Senate Republicans because the stimulus news of the day is based on a tweet by a Washington Post reporter, Erica Werner.

She tweeted yesterday that Republican Senator Ron Johnson, the same Ron Johnson who said he was very pleased that stimulus negotiations fell part on August 7 for the sake of future generations, that Ron Johnson told her that he’s optimistic about getting fifty-one Republican senators on board with a “targeted” stimulus bill that they could be called back to vote on before Labor Day.

Looks like CNBC has caught on to this story as well, by the way, reporting that five people in the know told them, CNBC, that this bill, which I take to be perhaps an updated draft of the “skinny” bill, could be released to members of Congress this week.

CNBC is reporting that this bill would just include areas of “bipartisan support” such as unemployment, PPP, money for schools, and money for COVID-19 testing, tracing, and vaccine.  Absent from CNBC’s list is the liability protection, so obviously this is just a news report, but maybe Republicans are leveling off that proposal which was in their “skinny” bill.

Anyway, Werner did tweet that Republicans have been working off of that “skinny” bill, the draft bill I showed you last week when I went over what is in that draft skinny bill, and as I mentioned there are no stimulus checks in there, at least not the draft that has been circulated, all it has is the liability protection, federally-funded enhanced unemployment benefits at $300 weekly through the week ending December 27, a second round of PPP targeted at businesses particularly hard hit in 2020 from 2019, a loan to the post office, $105 billion for education, $29 billion for COVID-19 vaccine, and $16 billion for testing and contact tracing, those are the major components.

But according to CNBC, it looks like they might be nixing the liability protection in an attempt to appear more bipartisan.

Like I said, no stimulus checks in the draft that we saw, no eviction and moratorium, no assistance for renters and homeowners, none of that.

But nevertheless apparently Senator Johnson doesn’t like calling it a “skinny” bill, he would prefer to refer to it as a “targeted” bill, but frankly if you ask me the draft that I’ve seen, it’s skinny, that’s a very apt description.

Some reporters are saying that they could, for example, be tweaking this “skinny” bill to bump up the proposed unemployment to $400 per week from $300 per week, for example.

But without state and local funding, without renters and homeowners assistance, Democrats just aren’t going to go for this thing, so what’s going on is, and this is just my take not having seen this new bill or perhaps updated version of the “skinny” bill, but this is basically sounding like the Senate Republicans’ version of what the House Democrats did with the HEROES Act.

What Republicans Are Doing Here

The HEROES Act was never meant to be bipartisan and to actually pass both houses of Congress, it was meant to get House Democrats behind something so they can say how dumb the Republicans are being.

Same thing with this skinny Senate Republican bill as far as I can tell.  Because remember, the HEALS Act is a bunch of different bills that haven’t been voted on, but it looks like here Republicans are trying to cobble together one bill combining what they apparently believe to be the most urgent perhaps of bipartisan stimulus-related concerns so they can vote on it and say see, it’s the Democrats who are the bad guys here!

But what’s the silver lining here?

Silver lining is that we’ve seen an absolute hawk like Ron Johnson have a bit of a change of heart with respect to another stimulus bill, a cheap, woefully miniscule one, but a stimulus bill nevertheless.

And we’ve also heard this hawk Johnson say that he thinks that possibly 51 Republican senators could support such a bill.

So maybe, just maybe this means that if there is a bipartisan second stimulus bill, some of those Republicans who months ago said no new stimulus, folks cut from the same cloth as Ron Johnson who a little less than three weeks ago said he was glad stimulus talks broke down, maybe these Republicans will begrudgingly vote yay on a truly bipartisan bill, not the HEROES Act, not the HEALS Act, not this skinny Republican bill.

Is this kind of good news?  Sure.  But I’m still not comfortable slapping “GOOD NEWS!” on my title for something like this.

Unemployment Update

It being Thursday, the jobless claims data for the preceding week came out, and the Department of Labor’s release today said that the number new jobless claims for the week ending August 22 was 1,006,000, that’s down from the revised amount of 1,104,000 for the previous week, and we still have 27,000,000 Americans on some form of unemployment assistance, and that number has been going down, it was over 30,000,000 for quite some time, but now it’s down to 27,000,000, though of course that’s obviously still so many people.

In terms of Trump’s unemployment memorandum and FEMA funding, Hurricane Laura is a bit concerning, because remember these $300 weekly benefits are coming out of FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, but anyway, Missouri has reportedly become the third state to start paying out $300 weekly benefits, following Arizona and Texas.

Ohio became the thirty-third state to be approved by FEMA for the $300 weekly funding for three weeks.

And yesterday New Jersey, North Dakota, Florida, South Carolina, and Hawaii all said they would be applying for the FEMA grant to pay the $300 weekly.

So to sum up for each state, the following thirty-three states have been approved by FEMA for funding for the extra $300 weekly, these are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Washington.

Twelve states have not been approved but have indicated that they have applied or will apply, and these states are Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

South Dakota has stated that it will not be applying, and four states — Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin — have not given any confirmed indication yet one way or the other as to whether or not they will apply.

Likewise, the District of Columbia has not given confirmation with respect to whether or not it will apply.