By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
President Joe Biden meets with a group of 10 Republican Senators today who have urged him to negotiate a coronavirus aid package, rather than ram his proposed $1.9 trillion bill through Congress.
Sen. Roy Blunt says if the package is focused, it will pass.
“As long as you can meet the definition of coronavirus relief, it can go somewhere,” Blunt tells St. Joseph Post. “If you use it as an opportunity to pass lots of legislation that’s part of an overall Democratic platform, it won’t go anywhere.”
Blunt points out Congress approved a $900 billion coronavirus aid measure late last year. Blunt says $5.5 billion is still unspent.
“I think there are gaps to be filled and frankly if the administration would focus on a small gap here and there and say we need another ‘x’ number of dollars to complete this particular thing, I think that money comes easily,” Blunt says.
Blunt says too much of the proposal made by Biden has nothing to do with COVID-19 or gives away money to those who haven’t been harmed during the pandemic.
“If you were in the delivery to grocery stores (business), you did really well. If you were delivering the same kind of thing to college campuses or schools, you didn’t do nearly as well,” according to Blunt. “We need to look and see who was hurt, what we need to do to stabilize them, what we need to do to keep our smaller businesses operating during this struggle, if they lost money. And we don’t need to be helping them if they made money.”
Blunt adds relief checks, such as the proposed $2,000 to most Americans, aren’t the best way to provide relief.
“Of course, that sounds good,” Blunt says. “If there are four people at your house, who wouldn’t like to have 8,000 extra dollars? But, if we do anything like that, direct checks to people, they ought to be very much based on direct checks to people who really were impacted by the virus or government decisions during the virus in a way that affected their income.”