After spending more than a week blocking a bill that would have smoothly and quickly replenished the Paycheck Protection Program meant to help small businesses weather the rough waters of the coronavirus storm, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had the unmitigated gall on Wednesday to turn around and blame Republicans for preventing the bill’s passage. This is the kind of absurd politicking that you can only get away with when you have the entire mainstream media in your pocket. Of course, no one is more aware of that advantage than Pelosi.
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“We’re very pleased that the Senate finally accepted the fact that we needed more money for testing, for hospitals, for lower, smaller businesses to participate in the Paycheck Protection Program,” Pelosi told reporters. “It took them, that took them a couple of weeks, but they finally did.
“Mitch McConnell likes to say we delayed the bill. No, he delayed the bill,” Pelosi continued, her nose growing longer by the second. “So we were very pleased that he finally came around to the fact that we had to go forward with this. So he was the one wasting time. I say that because I keep hearing him say we delayed. No, he delayed.”
To find the lie in this statement, one need only go back and listen to Pelosi herself. Last week, she was profusely praising her Democratic colleagues in the Senate for refusing to go along with McConnell’s call for unanimous consent.
“So, last week when they came with, they asked for a quarter of a trillion dollars in 48 hours and I said, well I don’t think so, let’s see how we can open this up to many more people,” Pelosi said last week. “So, Chuck Schumer and I and – this all happened on the Senate side and I congratulate the Senate Democrats, they went to the floor when Mitch McConnell went in for his 250 and they said they objected.”
Now, you may argue that it takes two to tango. One party cannot unilaterally “block” a bill unless the other side utterly refuses to negotiate under any circumstances. This was not the case here, granted. But the thing is, McConnell wanted to address the actual issue, which is that the PPP ran out of money. To fix this, he asked the Senate to vote by unanimous consent on adding another $250 billion to the fund. He wasn’t asking for the $250 billion, plus a ban on abortion. He wasn’t asking for the money along with, say, another $10 billion for the border wall. This bill was clean as a whistle.
It was Democrats who demanded that the new bill be stuffed with all kinds of special provisions that had nothing to do with the original purpose of the Paycheck Protection Program. They demanded money for state governments, money for hospitals, and special protections for minority-owned businesses. Whether or not these were important provisions is up for debate, but the fact is that a lot of this had already been covered by the $2.2 trillion stimulus package. And a lot of the rest could have been hashed out in a subsequent bill.
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Pelosi held workers’ paychecks hostage because she wanted to flex her ideological muscles on Capitol Hill, plain and simple. And now she wants McConnell to pay the political price for her delay. Those are the facts, regardless of how the media might choose to spin them.
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