Hours after blocking legislation to increase the direct payments in the coronavirus stimulus legislation to $2,000, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell introduced a bill to approve the larger checks but only if Congress acceded to two other demands of President Donald Trump.
As the price for the $2,000 checks, McConnell’s bill would establish a commission to investigate the 2020 election, which Trump continues to maintain without any evidence was fraudulent and he actually was re-elected.
The legislation also would repeal the law, known as Section 230. that protects social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook from lawsuits over content posted by their users. Trump has railed against the companies because they have flagged or deleted false postings by him and his allies.
Trump cited both of those issues as well as his demand for the higher stimulus payments when he signed the $2.3 trillion government spending and coronavirus stimulus legislation a week after it cleared Congress.
“The Senate will start the process for a vote that increases checks to $2,000, repeals Section 230, and starts an investigation into voter fraud,” Trump said Sunday. “Big Tech must not get protections of Section 230. Voter fraud must be fixed.”
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McConnell’s legislation has no chance of getting the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate, let alone clear the Democratic-controlled House, which on Monday passed what was known as the CASH Act. The measure simply increased the payments to $2,000 from $600, as Trump called for.
The Senate leader refused Tuesday to bring up the House-passed bill, even though it has the support of all 48 Democratic senators and is close to picking up enough Republicans to reach the 60-vote threshold for passage.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called McConnell’s alternative “a cynical gambit” and “a blatant attempt to deprive Americans of a $2,000 survival check.”
“Senator McConnell knows how to make $2,000 survival checks reality and he knows how to kill them,” Schumer said. “If Senator McConnell tries loading up the bipartisan House-passed CASH Act with unrelated, partisan provisions that will do absolutely nothing to help struggling families across the country, it will not pass the House and cannot become law.”
McConnell could decide to allow a vote on the House bill, his own legislation, or neither.
Dozens of judges, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have thrown out Trump campaign lawsuits, saying that they had no proof of wrongdoing. Even McConnell acknowledged Biden’s victory after the Electoral College cast its votes Dec. 14.
“You’ve got election officials all over the country and national security officials saying that it was a clean election and the effort to have an unnecessary investigation is just one to kowtow to the base and the president,” said David Vance, a spokesman for the watchdog group Common Cause.
Trump also claimed that he lost the popular vote in 2016 due to illegal votes and formed a commission in May 2017 to prove it. The panel disbanded the following January without finding any evidence of fraud.
“To block you from getting $2,000, Mitch McConnell is demanding a ‘commission’ to spew lies about the election Trump lost and attack democracy,” Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-9th Dist., said on Twitter. “This is a goddamn disgrace. The depravity of Republican leaders has no bottom.”
Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @JDSalant.
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