WASHINGTON – Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wants a lower overall price tag.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, doesn’t want a minimum wage increase included.
Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer still wants a “bold and robust” bill.
Competing interests, a thin House majority, and a Senate composition that gives an enormous amount of power to individual members mean President Joe Biden faces an uphill climb to pass his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package.
More aid for Americans could be on the chopping block, including a one-year expansion of the child tax credit, $1,400 stimulus checks and a proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. The pending impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump and Republican resistance to the overall price tag also loom large.
The argument is centered on a key question: Are all of the bill’s provisions related to the pandemic?
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Rep. Tom Reed, R-N.Y., the co-chair of the moderate House Problem Solvers Caucus, told reporters Wednesday the inclusion of the minimum wage increase could make the package seem like it was “contaminated” by partisans who wanted to use it as a vehicle to “legislate on things that are not related directly to the crisis.”
And Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, a key moderate, said the minimum wage increase was important to Democrats but “really has nothing to do with COVID relief,” pointing instead to provisions like the last package’s $300 boost to unemployment benefits as a higher-priority agenda item.
Biden says he’s open to some negotiation, but not all
Biden’s proposal includes a broad variety of policy priorities, including $20 billion for national vaccination program, expanding unemployment insurance supplemental payments to $400 per week, expanding to 14 weeks paid sick and family and medical leave, and allocating $25 billion in rental assistance and an additional $5 billion to cover home energy and water costs.
