WASHINGTON (AP) – – Top congressional lawmakers reach a nightly agreement on the latest major hurdle for a $ 1 trillion COVID-19 financial aid package, paving the way for voting as early as Sunday .
A Democratic aide said in an email that an agreement had been reached by the end of Saturday and that a language of compromise was being finalized to seal an agreement that would be presented Sunday.
The breakthrough consisted of a fight over the Federal Reserve’s emergency powers that was shut down by a strange couple: the Senate’s top Democrat and a Conservative Republican.
“We’re very close, very close,” minority leader Chuck Schumer, DN.Y., said Saturday before, as he spent much of the day going back and forth with Republican Party Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Toomey had been pushing for a provision to close Fed credit facilities that Democrats and the White House said had too broad a wording and would have tied the hands of the incoming Biden administration.
COVID-19 legislation has been maintained after months of dysfunction, stance and bad faith, but talks turned serious in December as lawmakers on both sides finally faced the deadline to act before leaving Washington. for Christmas.
The bill, lawmakers and aides say, would establish additional temporary benefits of $ 300 a week for unemployment and $ 600 for direct incentives to most Americans, along with a new round of grants for affected businesses and funding. for schools, health care providers and tenants in the face of eviction.
Schumer said he expected the House and Senate to vote on the measure on Sunday. This would require more cooperation than the Senate can normally muster, but the government closing deadline was prevented at midnight on Sunday and all parties were eager to leave for Christmas.
Toomey defended his controversial disposition in a speech on the floor, saying emergency powers were designed to stabilize capital markets at the height of the COVID panic this spring and that they would expire by the end of the month. The language you were looking for would block Biden administration from restarting them.
Toomey has a stubborn streak and Democrats have also stood firm, but both sides saw the need for a commitment to pave the way for the more than $ 900 billion COVID-19 relief measure, which is it added to a $ 1.4 trillion spending bill across the government and a host of other bills that collected much of the remaining legislative production of Trump-era Capitol Hill.
These were the Fed’s emergency programs, launched amid the pandemic this spring, that provided loans to small and medium-sized businesses and bought state and local government bonds. These bond purchases facilitated the loans of these governments, at a time when their finances were under pressure from job losses and health costs stemming from the pandemic.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said last month that those programs, along with two that bought corporate bonds, would close by the end of the year, prompting a first objection from the Fed. Under the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act passed after the Great Recession, the Fed can only establish emergency programs with the support of the Treasury Secretary.
Democrats in Congress also said Toomey was trying to limit the Fed’s ability to boost the economy, just as Biden was about to take office.
“These are the existing authorities that the Fed has had for a long time to be able to use them in an emergency,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren of D-Mass. “It’s a credit authority to help small businesses, the state government.” , local government in crisis “.
Toomey discussed the charge, saying his proposal “is not emphatically a comprehensive review of the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending authority.”
The huge package would wrap much of Capitol Hill’s outstanding 2020 business in an acceptance measure that promised to be a foot or more thick. House lawmakers would probably only have a few hours to study it before voting Sunday night.
A vote in the Senate would follow, possibly Monday. A more short-term funding bill would be needed to avoid the planned deadline, or a partial closure of non-essential agencies would begin on Monday.
The $ 900 billion package was coming to an end as the pandemic produced its most fearsome increase to date, killing more than 3,000 victims a day and straining the health care system. Even though the vaccines were on their way, most people wouldn’t get them for months. Unemployment claims were on the rise.
The emerging deal would deliver more than $ 300 billion in aid to businesses, as well as the extra $ 300 a week for unemployment and renewal of state benefits that would otherwise expire just after Christmas. It included direct payments of $ 600 to individuals; vaccine distribution funds; and money for tenants, schools, postal service and people in need of food aid.
It would be the first significant legislative response to the pandemic since the CARES Act was passed virtually unanimously in March, offering $ 1.8 trillion in aid, more generous weekly unemployment benefit benefits and $ 1,200 direct to people.
The government-wide credit bill would fund the agencies until next September. This measure is likely to provide a final $ 1.4 billion quota for President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall, as a condition of winning his signature.