McConnell Trying To Kill The Sick Leave Bill (And Millions of Americans)

It looks like the Trump administration only agreed to terms on the Coronavirus bill on Friday to get some good headlines.  Now that the media has reported that it passed, the administration is walking back the agreement.  The hope is that voters will hear about Trump praising the bill, and that it passed the house, without realizing that it never became law.  From Politico:

Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin were still working on the details Monday.

House sources said Monday that "major differences" remained between the White House and House Democrats over what was adopted and needed to be changed. This is slowing down the time table for House completion of the bill and sending it onto the Senate.

Pelosi and administration officials still remain hopeful they can achieve a workable compromise, but were tight lipped about the state of play on Monday.

The House passed its emergency package early Saturday morning but needs to make some technical corrections.

. . .

Some Republicans are already expressing doubt that the Senate will approve the House package without changes. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) predicted Monday on "Fox & Friends" that the House coronavirus bill as written will not pass the Senate, raising questions about its paid sick leave provisions.

"It doesn't go far enough and it doesn't go fast enough," Cotton said. "Most of the measures in this bill are something that the senators will support, I believe. ... But we worry that the bill setting up a new and complicated system relying on businesses giving paid sick leave and then getting a refundable tax credit that won't move quickly enough and could put pressure on those businesses to lay workers off."

Let me make this clear the number of COVID-19 infections in the United States is doubling every two to seven days.  On March 12 there were 987 known cases in the United States.  On March 14 there were 1,698.  This isn’t a testing artifact.  We’ve had the same, poor, testing for several days.

It would be one thing if those numbers were accurate, but we are fairly sure that there are many more cased on COVID-19 that are going untested.  Every day that this bill languishes makes it more likely that VERY LARGE NUMBERS of Americans will die.

And just as an aside, you realize that Pelosi — a person in the age demographic most likely to die from this things — is staying at the capital, working long hours with little sleep (a good way to get sick) in an environment with lots of people not practicing effective social distancing after sending members home and basically ordering her caucus to have at least half of their staff work from home.  Maybe somebody ought to remind Republican Senators that many of them are also in the demographic with a 20% fatality rate from this thing.