Pennsylvania Sens. Casey and Toomey happy with virus rescue bill
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Pennsylvania Sens. Pat Toomey and Bob Casey didn’t see eye-to-eye in the days leading up to the U.S. Senate’s agreement on a historic $2 trillion emergency bill. But they are both glad the deal was struck shortly after midnight on Wednesday.
The Senate passed the bill late Wednesday night, following last-minute debates regarding unemployment benefits. The bill must also be approved by the U.S. House. President Trump, however, has indicated support.
The measure is a response to the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing economic crisis. It would give direct payments to most Americans, expand unemployment benefits and provide a $367 billion program for small businesses to keep making payroll while workers are forced to stay home during the spread of covid-19.
Casey, a Democrat, said that the support for small businesses was one of the few areas where there was bipartisan support.
“Maybe not as to the number but certainly as to the commitment to small businesses,” Casey said. “So, that didn’t necessarily require anywhere near the kind of negotiation and hand-to-hand combat that some of these other provisions required.”
Casey pointed out several instances where he said Democrats added funding to proposals initially written by Republicans.
One is the $150 billion for the so-called Marshall Plan for health. The money is earmarked for hospitals, nursing homes and community health centers.
“We can’t even begin to say we’re on the right track until we have the pandemic itself, if not under control, we can at least push it back,” Casey said. “And you can’t do that without a substantial investment in health care. If the Republican bill went forward, that number would have been a lot smaller.”
One of the more contentious issues concerned the $500 billion for guaranteed, subsidized loans to larger industries, including a battle over how much to give the airlines.
Toomey, a Republican, bristled at the Democrats’ assertion that this is a corporate giveaway.
“One of the biggest arguments that we had is while our Democratic colleagues were going down to the floor criticizing our bill as being a big slush fund and giveaway to corporations — despite the fact that they knew these were loans — behind closed doors they were actually insisting that we give away money to the airlines,” Toomey said. “Democrats insisted that we just write checks and we resisted that.”
But at the end of the day, both sides agreed that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.
“How do we help people who are in this terrifying circumstance of being unable to go to work? In Pennsylvania, our economy is closed,” Toomey said. “This has never happened before in American history. And so we’re responding.”
As part of the stimulus deal, lawmakers agreed that the federal government would pay jobless workers an extra $600 a week on top of their state unemployment benefits for four months.
“I don’t know that we’ve ever had this kind of an investment in unemployment insurance,” Casey said.
Those unemployment benefits became a sticking point on Wednesday afternoon,
Casey said he was disappointed that substantial student loan relief was not part of the deal. But he was pleased with the transparency that was an integral part of the package, including creating a new inspector general and an oversight board for the corporate funding.
“The oversight is substantial compared to where we were just a couple of days ago,” Casey said.
“I think we learned a good bit, not just from TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) but also from the (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) of 2009,” he said. “Oversight isn’t just making sure the money is spent efficiently. Oversight means the dollars get to the people who are supposed to benefit.”