In a Friday Oval Office signing of the new relief package, President Trump cheered the next stage of the almost $500 billion program as being “great for small businesses” and “great for the workers.” He also said it would “extend relief to thousands of African-American and Hispanic-American business owners.”
This is another crippling loss for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats both in the legislative sense and in political perception.
The measure spends $310 billion to shore up the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which aids firms with fewer than 500 employees with loans that cover eight weeks of their payroll, benefits and other costs. $30 billion of that is reserved for community-based lenders, small banks, and credit unions.
The bill also spends another $50 billion for the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) emergency disaster lending and $10 billion in SBA disaster grants.
Democrats lost their short-sighted campaign to spend more cash on state and local governments that are trying to use virus funds to cover the costs of non-virus related budget shortfalls. The legislation also secured $75 billion for health care firms to support coronavirus expenses and lost revenue due to the canceling of elective surgery procedures. The package also includes $25 billion to develop more mass testing, with $11 billion of that spent for testing in states and localities.
The Democrats delayed and fought the package until they ran out of political options and could feel public pressure building against them. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led Democrat Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York around by the nose and decreed he oppose the measure, though sources say in private he was willing to honestly negotiate from the beginning of the process.
Pelosi now suffers another blistering defeat, while still recovering from the public relations fallout from her hilariously inept and visibly toasted video tour of her personal ice cream depository.
This piece was written by David Kamioner on April 24, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.
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