Following the House’s passage yesterday of a bill to increase the COVID relief checks from $600 to $2,000, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer asked for an up-or-down vote in the Senate. However, Republican leader Mitch McConnell personally blocked the request. After that happened, Senator Bernie Sanders responded by blocking McConnell’s request for unanimous consent to override President Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act.
As a result of these two actions, neither bill was voted on today. This sets up a showdown over the two bills, with a number of political maneuvers in play.
McConnell has said he will allow the larger-checks bill to be considered, but only if it also contains a section removing protections for social media companies (the “section 230” clause). And, it must also include actions to start “an investigation into voter fraud.” These two additions are both things that President Trump wants.
So, in other words, McConnell is setting up a vote on the bill, but adding poison pills to it to make it difficult to impossible for Democrats to support it. This in spite of the fact that a number of Republicans have said they support the $2,000 amount. Nevertheless, McConnell wants to be able to say “we tried, but Democrats wouldn’t support it.”
The other maneuver in play here is Bernie Sanders saying that he will use parliamentary procedures to prevent the Senate from voting on the NDAA until there has been a vote on the bill that came out of the House. As long as he is able to prevent a vote on the bill, the Senate must stay in Washington instead of going home for the holiday. And, the two senators from Georgia in the middle of run-off elections cannot go home to campaign.
As noted by Joan McCarter on Daily Kos, “there’s a rarely used floor procedure Democrats could try to stop him nicknamed the ‘clay pigeon’ maneuver. A single senator can call for an amendment that has multiple proposals to be broken into individual components, requiring separate debate and separate votes. The last time it was used was in 2010, when then-Sen. Tom Coburn hijacked a debt limit increase bill, bringing an amendment with 17 spending cuts that had to be considered separately. Prior to that, in 2007, then-Senate Majority Harry Reid used it on a comprehensive immigration bill in an effort to ward off poison pills from Republicans. Democrats could try it with McConnell’s surely poisoned survival check bill.”
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