“I’ve known you for many years, but I never knew how bad a Senator you are for the state of New York, until I became president,” Trump concluded. (So much for the president’s newfound somber tone.)
Trump’s argument that New York’s current suffering could have been stopped if Schumer hadn’t cared about impeachment reflects a new line of argument from the GOP, which suggests that the government would have dealt with the coronavirus better if it hadn’t been so focused on the president’s dealings in Ukraine. (This argument, of course, conveniently ignores that the Trump administration ignored warnings and advice about a potential pandemic even before impeachment, and continued to downplay the coronavirus well after the president was acquitted by the Senate.) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that he thinks impeachment “diverted the attention of the government, because everything every day was all about impeachment.” But Trump contradicted McConnell at his press briefing Tuesday, saying, “I don’t think I would have done any better had I not been impeached,” causing the Senator to walk back his comments and say that he meant Congress specifically. “We were all kind of preoccupied, I’m talking about the Congress side,” McConnell told the Washington Post Wednesday. “The administration can speak for itself.” Pelosi, however, thinks that McConnell shouldn’t use impeachment as an excuse for his and Trump’s own failings. “I think that’s an admission that perhaps the president and the majority leader cannot handle the job,” Pelosi said on CNN about McConnell’s initial comments. “We have a life-and-death situation in our country, and they should not try to hide behind an excuse for why they did not take action.”
As McConnell points fingers at Democrats for what went wrong in the government’s slow response to COVID-19, the Senate Majority Leader is also signaling his unwillingness to give into the other side as the coronavirus relief effort moves forward. With the stimulus package’s passage behind them, Pelosi has announced that her next planned phase of coronavirus response includes legislation to address inadequate infrastructure, with a plan to invest an additional $10 billion into health care centers, along with funding for housing, education, increased broadband access, improved local water quality, and more. The planned legislation reflects inequalities that have been further exposed by the coronavirus crisis, particularly in rural and low-income areas that don’t have adequate access to health care and broadband.
While Trump himself has expressed enthusiasm for an investment in infrastructure amid the coronavirus outbreak, however, McConnell told the Post that Pelosi’s plan is a “non-starter.” The Senator said that he would engage in bipartisan talks about how to address the coronavirus fallout—but intends to move slowly and not give into Pelosi’s demands. “She needs to stand down on the notion that we’re going to go along with taking advantage of the crisis to do things that are unrelated to the crisis,” McConnell told the Post, calling the House Speaker’s planned legislation “premature.” McConnell’s argument reflects a seeming broader line of thinking among congressional Republicans that the government should hold off on future relief measures, despite the fast-spreading virus and the widespread economic devastation it’s leaving in its wake. “Let’s let [the stimulus package] work. Let’s let this work inside America,” McCarthy said last week.
Pelosi, however, plans to keep pushing forward despite McConnell’s opposition. “The victims of the coronavirus pandemic cannot wait,” Pelosi said in a statement. “It is moving faster than the leader may have suspected, and even he has said that some things should wait for the next bill. I hope that we can work in a four corners manner for the common good.”
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