(JustPatriots.com)- President Donald Trump and the Democrats have been pushing for negotiations on a coronavirus relief package for weeks now, but the Democrats are still refusing to work on a bipartisan basis to get the deal done. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi still refuses to back down on a serious of far-left policies that have nothing to do with the virus, which recently forced President Trump to sign an executive order giving Americans a further $400 per week in unemployment benefits until the end of September.
Now, the Democrats are pushing back against extremist House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, urging her to start negotiating. Without those negotiations, the Democrats will rightly be blamed by the American voters for holding up important aid during the worst financial crisis in a hundred years.
A group of House Democrats this week published an open letter to Speaker Pelosi, urging her and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer to return to the negotiating table with the Republicans. CNBC reports that the group of congressional Democrats is particularly concerned about federal unemployment benefits increases, which are not as high as the Democrats would like and are, as it stands, not going to be available for very much longer.
In the letter, the lawmakers urged Hoyer and Pelosi to push for legislation that would once again increase the supplementary unemployment benefits to $600 per week, and for it to be slowly phased out as unemployment rates begin to fall.
“We owe it to people waiting to get back to work across the country not only to extend unemployment benefits to help them pay their bills but to tie these benefits to economic conditions so workers are not held hostage by another cliff like this one,” one of the authors of the letter told the press.
It’s an interesting proposal, and one the Republicans might consider, but it’s not without problems. The Republicans have advocated for decreasing the amount of money made available from the federal unemployment supplementary benefits to encourage people to get back to work. If unemployment benefits stay high, it serves as an incentive for people to stay at home and not look for new work opportunities. Unemployment may, therefore, not get any better for quite some time if people aren’t actively trying to get back to work.
Republicans are calling for a $1 trillion relief bill, which was initially proposed by President Trump and was much bigger than the initial amount proposed by his party. The Democrats, not wanting to be outdone, want $3 trillion in relief. At some point, though, the Democrats are going to have to realize that their goals would further damage the United States economy and give millions of Americans the opportunity to stay at home until the end of the year, or beyond, without going back to work.
Sooner or later, Pelosi will have to cave and start negotiating.
