Congressional lawmakers plan to address two key issues in one bill while rolling the less controversial parts of their package into a separate one worth $748 billion.
Photo: Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images
WASHINGTON—Lawmakers settled in for the final stretch of negotiations over a coronavirus relief package, as a bipartisan group prepared to release its proposal for the two most controversial portions Monday afternoon.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers crafting a $908 billion Covid-19 aid package said Monday they would unveil their compromise around the two thorniest issues: a set of liability protections for entities operating during the pandemic, and a formula for distributing funds to state and local governments.
Lawmakers said Sunday that those two pieces would be split off into one bill, while the less controversial provisions of their agreement would be addressed in a separate $748 billion bill, including adding $300 a week to fund state unemployment benefits for four months, $300 billion in aid to small businesses and $35 billion for health-care providers, among other measures.
Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) was expected to confer again with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Monday as a parallel set of negotiations continued between congressional leaders and the White House over both a coronavirus relief package and a full-year spending bill lawmakers expect will be finished Tuesday. Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Mnuchin spoke on Sunday.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have sought to pass another relief bill after months of gridlock and as the pandemic’s resurgence has strained hospitals and generated new business restrictions. The first U.S. shots of the vaccine were administered Monday just as the nation’s death toll from the virus neared 300,000 since the start of the pandemic.
“We are at the beginning of the end of this pandemic with nearly 300,000 Americans dead,” Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), who has been involved in the bipartisan proposal, said Sunday on NBC. “We should not leave for the holidays until we have adopted that $908 billion framework to give a next round of relief to the millions of Americans who are facing eviction, hunger, unemployment, disease.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) signaled last week that Senate Republicans wouldn’t accept any proposal on liability protections or state and local funding to emerge from the bipartisan group. He urged lawmakers to instead proceed with a narrower agreement on the other issues and return to those two others next year.
It isn’t clear whether Mr. McConnell might be more receptive to the bipartisan group’s liability proposal once its details emerge. Their package is expected to call for requiring plaintiffs in coronavirus-related lawsuits to prove that a defendant acted with gross negligence to expose people to the virus, according to a person familiar with the proposal. Mr. McConnell’s original proposal on liability protections would have created a gross negligence standard, a step that Democrats hesitated to embrace earlier in the talks.
The State of the Pandemic
Republicans have said robust liability protections are needed so that businesses, schools and nonprofits can operate without the threat of litigation and jump-start economic growth. Democrats argued that businesses shouldn’t be given permission to relax safety precautions and that relatively few coronavirus-related lawsuits have been filed.
More than 6,500 such complaints have been filed across the country, according to a litigation database maintained by law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, but thousands of those cases have nothing to do with tort liability for exposure. Of those, 23 deal with consumers allegedly exposed to the virus, 158 emerge from health-care settings and 116 respond to employment conditions, according to the database. The bulk of the lawsuits are contract and lease disputes, prisoner litigation and civil-rights challenges to state travel and business restrictions.
Some Democratic leaders were still pressing over the weekend to include funding for state and local governments, but their stance could shift this week as 11th-hour negotiations will likely compel further compromises.
Nationwide, the U.S. state budget shortfall from 2020 through 2022 could amount to about $434 billion, according to data from Moody’s Analytics. State workers are being laid off and others are taking pay cuts, and the retirement benefits for police, firefighters, teachers and other government workers are under growing pressure.
Separately, some lawmakers are also pushing to include a second round of direct stimulus checks in the coronavirus relief package. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) said they would force the Senate to vote this week on legislation adding another round of $1,200 checks to the aid package, since the checks weren’t included in the bipartisan $908 billion proposal.
Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R., S.D.) said last week that adding a second round of smaller checks was a possibility.
On Fox News, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany declined to say whether President Trump would get more involved in the talks, reiterating that he backs direct checks and liability shields for businesses.
Write to Kristina Peterson at [email protected] and Andrew Duehren at [email protected]
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
