KC lawmakers weigh ideas to aid communities ‘economically bludgeoned’ by coronavirus
Lawmakers are preparing to pass a $1 trillion bill to help businesses and workers cope with the financial strain of the coronavirus crisis. But how much money, who gets it and how it is distributed all remain unresolved issues.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Missouri, said lawmakers shouldn’t impose a means test on assistance or restrict payments to one subset of citizens when many Americans are already losing their jobs.
“Everybody is going to get hurt,” said Cleaver, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, which drafted one of several bills intended to address the crisis.
“Everybody will be economically bludgeoned in this process and I would much rather be criticized for making too much money available,” Cleaver said, noting that requiring a means test could delay distribution of aid.
A bill offered by Senate Republican leadership would provide tax filers with a one-time $1,200 rebate if they make $75,000 or less. Married couples who file jointly would receive double the amount if they’re combined income is under $75,000. Families would receive additional payments of $500 for each child.
Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Missouri, a member of Senate leadership, told The Star on Tuesday that “a check that would equal a couple of weeks’ pay going out to most Americans would be quicker and more impactful than having a little more money in every paycheck.”
Cleaver said that with rent and mortgage payments due every month, Congress should be prepared to send multiple checks until COVID-19 is contained.
“A thousand dollars is better than nothing, but a thousand dollars is just a little bit better than nothing in the face of the crisis,” Cleaver said. “There’s no reason for us to believe that we will have everything contained in a couple of months.”
‘Relief shouldn’t be regressive’
The bill from the House Financial Services Committee, on the other hand, would provide individuals with $2,000 for each month the crisis lasts with an additional $1,000 per month for each child.
Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, is the bill’s lead sponsor, but it was drafted with input by the whole committee, Cleaver said. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, hasn’t yet taken a position on the proposal.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, is racing to pass the Republican plan, which follows approval of two previous coronavirus measures to provide testing and other resources. McConnell has set a goal of passing the bill by Monday.
The Senate leadership bill would send $600 to those who do not make enough to pay federal income taxes. The provision to pay these people less than others was panned by Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who has offered his own plan.
“Relief to families in this emergency shouldn’t be regressive. Lower-income families shouldn’t be penalized,” Hawley said on Twitter, after the text of the leadership-backed bill became available on Thursday.
Hawley introduced a bill earlier in the week that would have provided aid to families — tying the amount to their income and number of children— but the bill would have excluded childless adults.
“A working single mom with three kids needs more support than an unmarried computer programmer living in his parents’ basement. Help families,” Hawley said on Twitter Wednesday.
However, Hawley offered new legislation on Friday that would aid both families with children and childless adults. The measure followed an inquiry by The Star about why laid off workers without children and many seniors were excluded from his original bill. His office did not directly respond to The Star’s questions.
His new legislation — offered as an amendment to the larger Senate package— would provide $1,200 to individual tax filers with an additional $500 for each child. It omits language in the leadership bill reducing the payment for people without a federal tax liability
An emotional floor speech
Rep. Sharice Davids, a Kansas Democrat who has quarantined herself for possible exposure to COVID-19, said she was spending the day studying the various plans circulating Congress.
She said she would like the relief package to focus on small business owners , laid off workers and parents struggling to pay for their kids’ meals.
“Those are the folks that congress needs to prioritize,” Davids said in a phone call, contending that Congress should learn from lessons of bank bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis.
Cleaver, who was serving in the House at the time, said Congress made a mistake by being too corporate-focused in its response during the 2008 crisis. This time, he wants the focus on individuals.
Waters’ bill includes provisions to suspend consumer credit payments, prohibit debt collection and ban evictions during the crisis, measures that Cleaver said ensures people can afford to stay in their homes during the pandemic.
Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, has offered legislation to loosen regulations on community banks to help them meet their financial needs during the crisis without tightening their lending practices. Moran is trying to get the legislation included in the larger relief package.
The Kansas Republican gave an emotional speech on the Senate floor Wednesday about the financial impact to his home state during the crisis.
“I think about my hometown and the loss of a business. There aren’t many businesses in rural communities in Kansas and many businesses don’t really earn much of a living or a profit. It could be a family circumstance. It could be this is what they did. This is what their parents did. This could be a service to the community,” said Moran, who grew up in Plainville, a western Kansas town of about 1,900 people.
“But this kind of challenge is such that if that business closes, the chances are that it doesn’t reopen. The financial circumstances of small town American are such that there’s little chance of recovery and reopening.”
Moran has also offered an amendment to the larger bill that would expand access to allergy tests for Medicare and Medicaid recipients, a measure to help doctors diagnose for causes of symptoms other than coronavirus as the nation struggles to distribute enough test kits to states.
Neither of Moran’s proposals had been included yet in the broader package as of Friday afternoon.
Nurses sewing their own masks
But a piece of legislation aimed at tackling gaps in the medical supply chain, which was co-sponsored by Blunt, has made it into the bill.
The legislation would instruct the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine to make recommendations for increasing domestic production of essential medical equipment, a problem that has been highlighted by the shortage of protective medical masks, which are primarily manufactured in China and other Asian countries.
“The situation we’re in now is a direct reminder that many of the medical supplies that we use and need in this kind of pandemic are not made in this country,” Blunt said.
Former Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, said on Twitter that her daughter-in-law, a nurse in Colorado, works at a hospital that has set up a sewing machine to produce masks and gowns in the face of the shortage.
President Donald Trump has sent mixed signals on whether he plans to use the Defense Production Act, a Cold War era law that enables the president to compel the private sector to produce essential supplies, to produce the needed masks.
Davids said there’s a company in Johnson County, Kansas with the capacity to produce the masks, but she said the federal government needs to provide resources through the Defense Production Act for it to start up production. She declined to name the company in a Friday morning interview.
