Category: Congress

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) passed her $3 trillion phase-four coronavirus bill in the House. All it contains is a “policy wishlist” for Democrats and progressives. The Heroes Act is a 1,815-page bill that the House passed but will never pass as written in the Senate. While House and Senate leaders continue their bickering over what to keep, what to throw out, and what they can sell to the American people, several million unemployed Americans lost that $600 weekly stipend they received in the previous bill. And those Americans are hurting.

“We have passed our bill, the appropriate thing for the Senate to do is to pass a bill, and then we can negotiate with them, but they can’t even get a bill passed on their side, even if it just took 51 votes, they’re in disarray,” Pelosi said.

But what Pelosi and House Democrats did was launch into the new  Pelosi “Take our bill and pass it as-is or NOTHING” legislative process. After all, Pelosi knows what’s best for the American people!

The legislation was not negotiated with congressional Republicans or the Trump administration. If it ever is taken up in the Senate, it will likely languish and die. Though Pelosi has met several times with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, nothing meaningful has been accomplished. What Pelosi and Company are demanding is just too big a pill to swallow. Politico reported even before the House bill passed that it serves as more of a wishlist for the House Democrat conference’s most progressive lawmakers than a piece of meaningful legislation to help Middle-Class Americans weather the COVID-19 pandemic’s slaughter of the nation’s economy.

Privately, several House Democrats concede the Heroes Act they passed feels like little more than an effort to appease the most liberal members of the caucus. Many of them were chafed that their most important priorities were minimized or ignored entirely in previous coronavirus negotiations.

The Heroes Act  contains mostly leftist provisions, including:

• $755 million for the government for Washington, DC. The bill would also allow the D.C. government to participate in the Federal Reserve’s Municipal Liquidity (MLF) to support additional lending to the city.
• $1 million for the National Science Foundation to study the spread of coronavirus-related “disinformation.”
• $10 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as well as $10 million fo the National Endowment for the Humanities.
• Eliminates limitations on the federal deduction for the state and local taxes (SALT). Republicans limited this deduction through the Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The SALT deduction primarily benefits wealthy, largely Democrat states.
• Grants additional aid for State and local government bailouts. The bill contains $500 billion in funding for state government relief and $375 billion in aid to local governments. Senate Republicans such as Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) have contended this will particularly aid fiscally irresponsible blue states such as California, New York, and Illinois to the detriment of more fiscally responsible states such as Texas and Florida.
• $25 million for migrant and seasonal farmworkers, including emergency support services through the Department of Labor.
• $1.7 billion for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority Serving Institutions, $20 million for Howard University, $11 million for Gallaudet University, $11 million for the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.
• $15 million to maintain operations, rental assistance supportive services, and other actions to mitigate the impact on low-income people with HIV/AIDS through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
• Create a two month special enrollment period for Obamacare. The bill also extends full premium subsidies to allow workers to maintain their health insurance coverage through COBRA.
• Allows Attorney General William Barr to make grants to states to create state-run hate crime reporting hotlines.
• Relief for up to $10,000 of up-front debt relief for all Department of Education loan borrowers.
• Authorizes up to $50 million in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “environmental justice” grants to investigate or address the disproportionate impact of coronavirus in environmental communities.
• $75 billion for housing assistance.
• Mandatory early voting for every state and mandatory mail-in ballots for every state. Nate Madden, a press secretary for the House Oversight Committee Republicans, said it would be a “nightmare scenario for voter fraud.”
• Allows wealthy people who make money from dividends and royalties to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is designed for lower-income Americans.
• Extends assistance designed for nonprofits to political action groups and chamber of commerce-style associations. Open Markets Institute fellow Matt Stoller called it a “corporate lobbyist bailout.”

Pelosi’s Heroes Act represents a staggering amount of spending.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) noted that the bill has “70 appropriations over a billion dollars each.”

Norman asked rhetorically, “When you walk out of secret negotiations with an 1800 page, $3 trillion bill that has no chance of becoming law, why is that portrayed as an accomplishment?”

What’s Next?

As of 5:30 PM, Monday talks stalled once again. The Senate put together a bill they’re calling the “HEALS Bill.” House and Senate leaders met on Monday once more with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to try and reconcile differences between the HEROES Act and the HEALS Bill. It seems to Americans it would be prudent to find consensus and get something put in place quickly.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful in all of this screaming at each other in closed meetings if negotiations would be publicized — at least in part — so that 330 million Americans would have some firsthand knowledge of where these serious and important negotiations stand? Better yet, wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone would put all of what is in both bills in the public’s hands so WE could peruse what both parties are demanding? Is that too much to expect? After all, they each work for us!

As usual, TruthNewsNetwork has done the deep dive for our partners. The HEALS Bill has not been put forward in legal format to the Senate. It is still in “production.” But here’s what we are doing today: the following link is a .pdf of the House-approved HEROES Act. Feel free to read or download to examine yourself. Please know, however, it is more than 1,800 pages long! And it’s full of pork that in no way has anything at all to do with COVID-19. There are billions of dollars of unnecessary spending that each is little more than Democrat payback to whomever they need to payback.

Somehow that’s not surprising.

Below the link to the HEROES Act file to download, please see a bullet point summary of where negotiations ended Monday afternoon. Please know these are just summary points:

https://truthnewsnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Heroes-Act-of-2020.pdf

Now, as promised, here are the fundamental differences between the two as of Monday:

Bullet Point Differences between HEROES Act and HEALS Act

• Total Cost of each: HEROES — $3 trillion; HEALS — $1 trillion
• Stimulus payment to Americans: HEROES — identical to that in the previous CARES Act
• Additional stimulus payment to dependents: HEROES — $1200 for dependents, maximum of three; HEALS — $500 for dependents, no age limit
• enhanced unemployment: HEROES — $600 per week; HEROES — $200/week, then up to $500/week to match 70% of lost wages when added to state benefits
• unemployment benefits paid: HEROES — January 2021 for most; HEALS — $100/week through Sept. Then 70% matching of lost wages until 12/31/2020
• Paycheck Protection Program: HEROES — Expands eligibility, eliminates 75% payroll requirement, and extends application period to 12/31/2020; HEALS —  Injects another $190 billion into the PPP fund, expands eligibility and allows businesses to request a second loan. Eliminates 75% payroll requirement and expands approved uses of funds for loan forgiveness
• Employee tax credit: HEROES — Increases tax credit to 80% of up to $15,000 in wages; HEALS — Increases tax credit to 65% of up to $30,000
• Bonus for employees who start new jobs or are rehired: HEROES — not included; HEALS —  There could be a return-to-work bonus of up to $450 per week for unemployed workers who secure a new job or are rehired
• Eviction protections and a moratorium: HEROES —  Expands to cover nearly all rental properties in the US, extends eviction moratorium an additional 12 months, allocates $200 billion for housing programs and another $100 billion for rental assistance; HEALS — not included
• School reopening: HEROES — $58 billion for grades K-12, $42 billion for higher education; HEALS —  $70 billion to K-12 that open for in-person classes, $29 billion for higher education, $1 billion to Bureau of Indian Education, $5 billion state discretion
• Liability protection from coronavirus illness: HEROES — not mentioned; HEALS — 5-year liability shield to prevent schools, businesses, hospitals, from being sued over coronavirus-related issues
• Coronavirus testing: HEROES — not included; HEALS — $16 billion

Summary

There’s only ONE thing we know is certain: what you see above, which is exactly where Leadership found themselves Monday afternoon will most certainly NOT be where this will end. It’s nothing more than typical partisan poker where all the players watch and listen intently to see which blinks first.

Am I the only American who is nauseated at the games these politicians play at every level, and with every part of our lives and seem to care little what THEIR diddling costs our nation? My temptation is to delve on that. But then I recall that this IS politics. Congress constitutionally is supposed to craft and implement legislation for their bosses: the American people. They are certainly NOT authorized to play any game in which the fate of 330 million Americans lies on who blinks first.

If you decide to go to a dictionary to find a definition of “Congressional Negotiations,” there you’ll undoubtedly see as part of the definition in Webster’s the word “Insanity.”

The adage “Never let a crisis go to waste” certainly rings true today. Tax-and-spend Democrats have ramped up their cries for more money — MUCH more money. It’s in the form of a new stimulus bill that could be on its way through Congress by the end of the week, as House Democrats on Tuesday announced plans for $3 trillion in new spending to combat the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new $3 trillion Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act (HEROES Act) would nearly double the $3.6 trillion in stimulus spending already approved by Congress since mid-March—and that’s after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–CA) stripped out about $1 trillion in additional spending requested by various lawmakers, according to Politico. The new bill includes another round of stimulus checks for all Americans, funds further coronavirus testing, and spends billions to bail out states and government agencies straining under pension debt and the collapse of tax revenue due to the coronavirus.

As it looks today, it would blow-by the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Recovery Act (CARES Act), passed in late March, as the largest stimulus spending bill in U.S. history. The Treasury has already borrowed more than $3 trillion in just three months, and the new proposal will undoubtedly add to that total.

The draft of the bill released Tuesday includes a $25 billion bailout for the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service, which could lose as much as $13 billion this year and is on a fiscally unsustainable path.

The HEROES Act also contains $540 billion in aid for states and $375 billion for local governments. That’s in addition to the $150 billion relief fund for states established by an earlier stimulus bill.

The bill also includes another round of stimulus checks for all Americans, with payments capped at $1,200 for individuals and another $1,200 per dependent, with a maximum of three dependents allowed. Those payments will be means-tested in a similar way as were earlier payments authorized by the CARES Act. The HEROES Act also incorporates a Democratic proposal to provide $100 billion in new funding to a Housing and Urban Development program offering assistance to renters.

The 1,800-page bill would also extend the federal unemployment payments authorized by the CARES act through January 2021. Those extra $600 in weekly unemployment payments are meant to soften the blow for laid-off workers at a time when the unemployment rate has spiked to 14 percent and is likely to go higher. But the added unemployment payments are also expected to make reopening the economy more difficult, as workers may be hesitant to return to their jobs as long as the boosted benefits remain available.

The HEROES Act also includes some provisions that seem unrelated to the public health and economic crises unleashed by the pandemic, like a provision that would temporarily reinstate the state and local income tax deduction — known as the SALT deduction. That deduction, which primarily benefits wealthy people who live in states and localities with high taxes, was capped by the 2017 federal tax reform law. Restoring the reduction has been on Democratic to-do lists ever since.

The omnibus bill also includes a provision giving marijuana-based businesses greater access to banking. To some, that’s a worthwhile (and long-awaited) measure, but another thing that seems disconnected from the stated purpose of the HEROES Act.

In some ways, however, the HEROES Act is already looking like a return to some sense of normalcy in Congress — though “normal” is nothing too great when it comes to congressional spending. The bill has already drawn more opposition than the first three rounds of coronavirus stimulus, which passed quickly and with only token resistance, and is likely to be subject to significant negotiation and rewriting before it is passed.

The Postal Service bailout is one point of controversy, for sure, with the White House and Republican lawmakers opposing a similar plan in earlier rounds of coronavirus stimulus. The timing of the new bill has also been questioned by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–KY), who on Monday said Congress needed to give the previous stimulus spending more time to have an impact.

McConnell has also expressed worry over the mounting levels of debt. “We now have a debt the size of our economy,” McConnell said Monday. “We have to take a pause here and take a look at what we’ve done.”

Republicans have mostly abandoned fiscal conservatism since President Donald Trump took office, but the prospect of borrowing another $3 trillion right now might get those anti-deficit spenders fired up again.

When asked about McConnell’s comments, Pelosi told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Monday night that waiting was not an option.

“We have to put money in the pockets of the American people, recognizing the pain, the agony that they are feeling,” she said. “To those who would suggest a pause, I’ll say the hunger doesn’t take a pause. The rent doesn’t take a pause.”

The passage of another significant spending bill to respond to the economic crisis created by the pandemic seems almost inevitable. If not by the end of this week, then it will probably happen sometime shortly. The failure of lawmakers to use the economic boom of the past decade to fix America’s fiscal problems — the national debt, the Post Office, state pension systems, and so on — has never seemed more foolish. And foolish is putting it nicely.

Let’s look at this new spending plan in the context of what is happening today. Indeed, Democrats are using the Coronavirus Pandemic as the basis to tag to the nation’s $20 Trillion+ debt with another two to three trillion dollars. And if you think they plan to spend it wisely specifically (and only) to soften the bite Coronavirus has taken out America, you are sadly mistaken.

If you remember correctly, we at TruthNewsNetwork were the first to do the deep dive into the minute details of the CARES ACT. We brought to you proof and details of the billions of dollars Pelosi demanded in her first draft, some of which was removed by the Senate. Not nearly enough was removed. Who will ever forget and forgive the “poster-child” example of pork Pelosi forced on us to pay as part of that bill that was supposed to be for Coronavirus assistance: $25 billion for the Kennedy Center. And to make it worse, the next day, the Kennedy Center notified their musicians the next Friday would be their last paychecks. And then they laid-off 400 employees! Pelosi states that this bill will be “exclusively” for assistance to all those who have been negatively impacted by this pandemic.”

What’s In the “Heroes Act?”

That’s a simple one. Just take a look for yourself. Here’s the link so you can download and look at it during your coffee break today. It’s only 1800 pages long!

https://truthnewsnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/New-Stimulus-Bill.pdf

By tomorrow’s story, we’ll have dived into the middle of this package and ferreted out the “good” and the “bad” for you. Though there no doubt will have features specifically targeted for the American people, businesses, and states who have all struggled because of the economic shutdown (the UNNECESSARY economic shutdown), you can rest assured it if full of pork. And, it includes the authorization for vote-by-mail. Don’t be shocked: Pelosi said: “any House bill offered this year will demand vote-by-mail to be approved.”

First Glance Problems

• If passed and signed into law as-is, this will be the largest stimulus bill in U.S. history. When you tag its price tag to that of the already $3 Trillion CARES Act and other smaller relief packages, the U.S. will, in less than eight months, added $7 Trillion to the nation’s debt.
• The bill will pass the House without using the bill-passage normal process. What’s the problem with this? Americans expect lawmakers to fully investigate every piece of legislation through committees and even subcommittees. Each takes plenty of time to find out what is in and behind every piece of legislation before it goes to the full house or Senate for deliberation there. In a bill this size, there would be multiple amendments proposed first in committees and subcommittees. Each of those committees would, once their changes are finalized, vote to move it forward or to table it. If it started in a subcommittee, it would then go to the full committee, which would then conduct the SAME process as the subcommittee did. Only after that committee passes it forward would it go to the floor of the House for consideration. There it would go through the same process! Then and only then would it go on for a vote. Whew! That’s tough. But what it does is assure Americans our legislators considered every little item to make sure it is necessary and appropriate as finalized to serve Americans as best as possible.
• Pelosi will demand this process be suspended for “the emergency status in which we find ourselves. We cannot make the American people wait while Republicans fight to keep money from all those Americans who are fighting for rent and food for their families!” That’s the way she operates. Remember when Obamacare was before the House, and she was asked what was in the bill? She famously responded, “We must pass the bill so we can find out what’s in the bill.” That without question is the craziest statement I’ve ever heard a member of the American government utter. And, by the way, both the House and Senate passed the ACA with unanimous votes of their party members without a single member having read the bill! And if she can, she’ll do the same thing with this bill. Americans’ only hope is that the Senate will turn away any such bill.

Summary

It’s a war, folks! If you listened to our show yesterday, Dr. Judy Mikovich, in an hour-and-a-half, gave us piece by piece exactly what is going on with this pandemic. To boil down her extensive and detailed and learned analysis of it all, it’s a hoax! She never said people are not dying and that the infection is in any way a fraud, she made it clear that the way its presence is being manipulated to control Americans, our economy, and our healthcare system is fraudulent. In my book, that makes it a war.

So what can we do? This is the time where each of us needs to make a concerted commitment to learning the complete details of this Heroes Act headed to Congress. We MUST become so familiar with its basic terms that we can and will reach out to our elected officials to make sure they know our support or lack of support for all or any of the provisions of this bill. Folks, if we don’t let them know, many of those 535 members of Congress will assume we just don’t care. And that certainly is not factual.

We will once again do the deep dive into these 1800 pages of the Heroes Act and will come back shortly with them in bullet point format for you. However, I suggest you already contact your members of Congress and let them know your displeasure with the massive spending they are doing while forcing our nation through economic blackmail to put 33 million out of work supposedly because of Coronavirus.

It’s war, folks…all-out war. And we’re all IN the fight whether we want to be or not.

This is the time when we discover who are patriots and who are committed to the lawful operation of our government, specifically for United States citizens. That’s what they are supposed to do: period.