Within hours of blocking legislation to increase direct payments on coronavirus stimulus legislation to $ 2,000, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell introduced a bill to approve larger checks, but only if Congress agreed with two other demands from President Donald Trump.
Like the check price of $ 2,000, McConnell’s project would establish a commission to investigate the 2020 election, which Trump continues to maintain without any evidence of fraud and he was actually re-elected.
The legislation would also repeal the law, known as Section 230, which protects social media companies, such as Twitter and Facebook, from lawsuits for content posted by their users. Trump protested the companies because they flagged or deleted false posts made by him and his allies.
Trump cited both issues, as well as his demand for higher stimulus payments when he signed the $ 2.3 trillion government spending and coronavirus stimulus legislation a week after it passed Congress.
“The Senate will start the voting process that increases checks to $ 2,000, repeals Section 230 and initiates an investigation into electoral fraud,” Trump said on Sunday. “Big Tech must not obtain Section 230 protections. Voter fraud must be corrected.”
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McConnell’s legislation has no chance of getting the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate, let alone clean up the Democratic-controlled House, which passed on Monday what became known as the Cash Act. The move simply increased payments from $ 600 to $ 2,000, as Trump asked.
The Senate leader on Tuesday refused to present the bill approved by the House, although he has the support of all 48 Democratic senators and is close to getting enough Republicans to reach the 60 vote limit for approval.
Democratic Senate 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 a reality and knows how to kill them,” said Schumer. “If Senator McConnell tries to overburden the CASH Act passed by the bipartisan House with unrelated party provisions that will do absolutely nothing to help struggling families across the country, it will not be passed by the House and it cannot become law.”
McConnell may decide to allow a vote on the House bill, its own legislation or neither.
Dozens of judges, including the United States Supreme Court, rejected the Trump campaign’s actions, saying they had no evidence of wrongdoing. Even McConnell acknowledged Biden’s victory after the Electoral College cast its votes on December 14.
“There are election officials across the country and national security officials saying it was a clean election and that the effort to do an unnecessary investigation is just to prostrate before the base and the president,” said David Vance, spokesman for the o surveillance group Common cause.
Trump also said 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, finding no evidence of fraud.
“To prevent you from receiving $ 2,000, Mitch McConnell is demanding a ‘commission’ to spew lies about the lost Trump election and attack democracy,” said Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., D-9th Dist., On Twitter. “This is a damn disgrace. The depravity of Republican leaders is bottomless ”.
Jonathan D. Salant can be contacted at [email protected] or on Twitter @JDSalant.
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