Congress Willing to Sacrifice for Stimulus?

This is my stimulus update for Tuesday July 14th.

Local Stimulus Updates

I will be including links in the description to various local stimulus programs that I’ve caught wind of.

I don’t want to cover each and every local stimulus program here in my daily stimulus updates because I know that local stimulus programs don’t apply to everybody.

So you may be very interested in the Los Angeles Rent Assistance Program that’s going on right now that you have to apply for, but not all of you in Los Angeles, right?

So I’m just going to start including those in links in the description that I will update on a daily basis. I can’t promise that I’m going to cover every single local stimulus program out there, but I’m going to try to cover the big ones.

Status of Congress

Now on to today’s stimulus update. So Congress is back in town next Monday, July 20th.

Game plan is Republicans are going to come up with their own stimulus bill, internally amongst themselves, and then they’re basically going to pitch it to the Democrats.

So we’re going to see what the Republicans come out with, it’s kind of similar to what the Democrats did with the HEROES Act.

They kind of came out with their own thing and put it out there. Now Republicans are going to come out with their own thing, put it out there, and then those inter-party negotiations will get underway.

I hope they wrap something up by the end of the month. That’s probably a bit optimistic. We know that the House goes on recess the entire month of August, the Senate starts its recess on August 8th.

Pelosi on the House’s August Recess

However, Nancy Pelosi was on CNN this morning and was asked, “Hey, would you be willing to cancel or shorten that August recess in the House if necessary to get another bill through?” Here’s what she said.

She’s saying, “Yeah, of course. Of course we would do that if we had to”. These congressional recesses, they’re not set in stone, they’re not law, you don’t have to do them.

Senate canceled a recess back in March to push the CARES Act through. I’m hoping that if something doesn’t get done by August, that both Houses of Congress will be willing to shorten or cancel their recesses in order to get something done for the American people.

But we’re going to have to see what happens.

Pelosi reiterates the major points of the HEROES Act that has already passed the House in May, the unemployment, the direct payments, i.e., stimulus checks, assistance for rent, mortgage foreclosure, forbearance state and local assistance, testing, tracing, trading and all that.

So Pelosi’s reiterating the same talking points with the HEROES Act, but this is kind of new. She is very supportive of the idea of canceling the House’s break in August if that’s what it takes to push the next stimulus relief bill through.

We haven’t heard as much from Mitch McConnell, but then again, he hasn’t been asked as directly on this issue as Pelosi has with respect to the House.

Another Republican Senator on More Stimulus Checks

We have another Republican senator being asked about stimulus checks. This one is John Cornyn, Senior Senator from Texas. Here’s the clip.

John Cornyn: Originally, we sent a lot of checks out to people who were still working and didn’t need the extra income, and that seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I think if we do that, we may try to narrow it a little bit more by income and people who literally haven’t been able to get a pay so haven’t been able to provide for their family. But in another way, we’ve been trying to help it through increased unemployment insurance benefits, and so that’s the goal.

So Cornyn is, of course, reiterating the more targeted notion with respect to another round of stimulus checks that seems to be gaining steam with some Republicans.

McConnell kind of broke that $40,000 figure last Monday.

We’ve heard Kudlow allude to the fact that the next round of stimulus checks may be more targeted, we talked about that yesterday.

Now we have John Cornyn talking about more targeted narrowly directed stimulus checks. So is that the mainstream Republican agenda at this point with respect to another round of stimulus checks?

I don’t know, we’ll see. And, of course, you’re going to have to get House Democrats on board with whatever idea they have.