Outlook Unclear For $2,000 COVID-19 Relief Payments As Action Shifts To Senate

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has blocked an attempt to have senators vote on increasing direct coronavirus relief payments.





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McConnell acknowledged that Trump was unhappy with some aspects of the bill and with the failure in Congress to negotiate a deal involving some legal protections for Big Tech. All the same, however, the majority leader said Congress must continue its decades-long record of passing the mammoth annual defense bill.

Democrats and allied senators, led by Sanders, lined up to pressure McConnell and Republicans on the coronavirus relief payments. Then Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., delivered speeches of their own enjoining McConnell to schedule a vote on increasing the payments.

Senate Republicans agreed over months of negotiations to $600 direct payments to qualified Americans in the coronavirus relief legislation. Trump, however, complained before he signed the bill that Americans should get more.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., took up the matter with a vote on Monday in which the House supported increasing the payments to $2,000.



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Some individual Republican senators have said they might be open to increasing the payments, but it wasn’t clear Tuesday afternoon how much support that idea enjoys within the majority. However, Democrats appear to feel they have the bit in their teeth and want to continue pressing forward.

Markey said on Tuesday that it would be a «moral failure if the Senate doesn’t increase the payments and that the statements by the individual Republicans confirm the question is ready to be tested in the full chamber.

«The American people have a right to know where every member of the Senate stands on this issue, he said.