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If Democrats agreed to the proposal, they would be able to pass bipartisan relief via the normal voting process.

A group of 10 Republican senators sent a letter to President Joe Biden on Sunday proposing a smaller coronavirus relief package than his $1.9 trillion plan, and asking him to negotiate with them to find compromise on the issue of new Covid-19 stimulus efforts.

The number of signatories is significant, because any bill taken up under normal Senate rules would need at least 10 GOP backers in order to be successful. This renders the letter, in effect, an offer to work with Democrats to pass new stimulus measures — with certain conditions.

In the letter, the Republican lawmakers — a group that includes Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, as well as other relative moderates — argued their proposal, which they promised to release in full on Monday, would be able to receive bipartisan support, given that it mirrors Biden’s call for $160 billion for coronavirus testing, tracing, treatment, and protective supplies.

The lawmakers also said their bill will include funding for direct payments to “families who need assistance the most,” a reference to some lawmakers’ desire to needs-test direct payments; assistance for small businesses and child care; and $4 billion for mental health and substance use.

They did not provide specifics, but the Washington Post reports the GOP proposal would cut the cost of new stimulus by $1.3 trillion, to around $600 billion, and that it would do so by making major cuts to a number of Democratic priorities.

For instance, Democrats have pushed for another round of direct payments of $1,400 to single people making $75,000 or less per year, and to couples making $150,000 or less. As Sen. Bernie Sanders pointed out on ABC’s This Week Sunday, Democrats promised there would be another round of direct payments of at least $1,400 if they won both Senate seats in January’s Georgia runoff races — and they did.

“You can’t campaign on a series of issues, and then, after the election, when you get power, say, ‘Oh, well, you know what, we’re changing our mind,’” Sanders said.

Accepting the new Republican proposal would force Democrats to do just that, however — it would reduce the direct payments to $1,000 per person, the Post reports.

And those payments would likely be sent out to a much smaller group of people under the new Republican plan. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, one of the letter’s signatories, said on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday that direct payments should be capped at individuals earning $50,000, or families earning $100,000. “Let’s focus on those who are struggling,” Portman said.

A group of GOP senators, including Sen. Rob Portman, sent a letter to President Biden proposing their own Covid-19 relief package framework and asking to work together.
“We need to be sure this is targeted,” Portman says. https://t.co/iFpCBrgsrH #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/4wycNDmQO8

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) January 31, 2021

Portman also said that the Democratic proposal to extend federal unemployment insurance — currently valued at $300 per week — through September was premature, and that that program should also be better targeted.

Democrats have proposed not just extending that program, but expanding it, by bumping up weekly payments to $400. The Post reports that the GOP plan envisions keeping the weekly allowance at $300, and extending the program, currently set to expire in March, until June.

The GOP plan also reportedly gets rid of the Democratic proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, and would likely reduce the amount of aid available to state and local governments.

The GOP signatories argue in their letter — and in television appearances Sunday — that their proposal will give Biden a chance to make good on his promise for “unity,” a theme of his inaugural address.

“In the spirit of bipartisanship and unity, we have developed a COVID-19 relief framework that builds on prior COVID assistance laws, all of which passed with bipartisan support,” the letter reads. “We request the opportunity to meet with you to discuss our proposal in greater detail and how we can work together to meet the needs of the American people during this persistent pandemic.”

And they claim that Democrats’ current plans to push their preferred proposal through Congress through a process known as reconciliation, which allows for legislation related to budgetary matters to be passed in the Senate with a simple majority vote (a majority Democrats now have due to their victories in Georgia), would — in Portman’s words — “poison the well” for any future attempts at bipartisan legislating.

State of the Union host Dana Bash asked Portman why he had supported Republicans using reconciliation to advance controversial legislation in the past, noting it had been used both in the Republican effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act and to pass Trump’s tax cuts into law. Portman replied that “reconciliation is not meant for the purposes that they are trying to use it for,” and argued Democrats should not use reconciliation as their first resort.

Democrats, however, have long been stymied in their efforts to pass a sweeping stimulus package, agreeing to a compromise bill in late 2020 after months of Republican refusals to consider a $3 trillion bill that passed the House in May 2020.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he is willing “to work with our Republican colleagues to advance” coronavirus relief, but that Democrats are “keeping all our options open, on the table, including budget reconciliation.”

What reception the new GOP proposal will receive from Biden remains to be seen. Appearing on State of the Union on Sunday, the director of the National Economic Council, Brian Deese, told Bash, “We welcome input to say where we may have not gotten everything right,” but argued, “The cost of doing too little right now far outweighs the cost of doing too much.”

There’s urgency to pass a new relief package as federal coronavirus programs face expiration

Given that many federal coronavirus programs are set to expire in the coming months, there is a need for urgency in work on the next round of stimulus. As Vox’s Emily Stewart has reported, delays in passing the last round meant coverage gaps for many of the unemployed.

Friday, Biden stressed the importance of getting a coronavirus stimulus bill passed, saying, “I support passing Covid relief with support from Republicans if we can get it, but the Covid relief has to pass. There are no if, ands, or buts.”

Biden on if he supports passing Covid relief through budget reconciliation: "I support passing Covid relief with support from Republicans if we can get it, but the Covid relief has to pass. There are no if, ands, or buts." pic.twitter.com/rm4etycvKb

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 29, 2021

Given the House’s Democratic majority, and the fact that legislation can pass in that chamber by a simple majority vote, the Senate is where any difficulty in quickly passing aid will arise. There, Democrats have been faced with either finding 10 Republicans to support their proposal, compromising with moderate Republicans on a plan like that advanced by the 10 GOP senators on Sunday, or passing legislation through reconciliation.

For any of these routes to work in the Senate, Democrats would need to be a united front. As it stands, they hold the narrowest possible majority in the evenly-split Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as a tie-breaker.

And a united front is not a given, because there are some right-leaning Democrats in the Senate who have not fully embraced all the proposals in Biden’s plan, something that ABC’s Martha Raddatz asked Sanders about on Sunday.

Specifically, she asked Sanders about West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, who has said that bipartisan lawmaking is important to him and who has not offered full-throated support of a $15 minimum wage. He has also not said whether he would go along with Democrats if they choose to pursue reconciliation. Sanders expressed faith that “all Democrats understand the need to go forward” with coronavirus relief.

“I believe that we do,” Sen. Bernie Sanders tells @MarthaRaddatz when asked if Democrats have enough votes to pass the COVID-19 relief bill.

Despite “differences and concerns” about the bill, the American people need relief, he adds. https://t.co/0tIupXQlob pic.twitter.com/aGbtmRQ7b1

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 31, 2021

“The question is not bipartisanship, the question is how to address these crises right now,” said Sanders. “If Republicans want to work with us, they have better ideas on how to address those crises, that’s great. But to be honest with you, I have not yet heard that.”

Sanders added that there would be other opportunities for bipartisanship in the future, especially around issues like prescription drug reform and infrastructure. “But right now, this country faces an unprecedented set of crises,” he said.

One of the GOP letter’s signatories, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, suggested Sunday that Republicans hadn’t been given enough of a chance to work on a bipartisan agreement.

“If you want unity, you want bipartisanship, you ought to start with the group that’s willing to work together,” Cassidy said on Fox News Sunday.

As Republicans have pointed out, Biden has stated a desire to work with Republicans on legislation. But as Vox’s Ella Nilsen has written, Biden’s ambitions to work across the aisle and to pass his relief package may be at odds with one another — particularly given the more limited scale of relief the 10 GOP senators now propose.

And Democrats seem to believe that if they can only fulfill one of the president’s ambitions, the priority is on getting the package done. As Nilsen writes:

While Republicans in the bipartisan group are the ones advocating for cutting back on Biden’s Covid-19 bill, Democratic senators in the centrist group haven’t been as eager to scale back. Democrats remember that Senate Republicans used the budget reconciliation mechanism to pass their massive tax cut bill in 2017, and some in the Democratic caucus think they should give their priorities the same treatment now that they hold the majority.

Sanders, the Senate Budget Committee chair, and House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth have each told reporters their committees are working on drafting budget reconciliation resolutions for the Covid-19 relief bill, which could pass in a matter of days if Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi give them the green light.

Those reconciliation resolutions are now expected as early as this week. Republicans can also sign onto them if they so desire.

The head of Trump’s impeachment defense team has left; his exit was followed by several others.

With just over a week until his Senate impeachment trial, former President Donald Trump’s defense team is disintegrating, with at least five lawyers departing or declining to join it, including a South Carolina attorney selected just last week to lead the defense effort.

That attorney, Karl “Butch” Bowers Jr., will no longer represent Trump when the former president faces the Senate on February 9 over his alleged role in inciting the violent insurrection at the US Capitol. Politico reports that Bowers and another South Carolina-based attorney, Deborah Barbier, were confirmed on Saturday to have departed from the team.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins then reported on Saturday night that lawyer Josh Howard, a recent addition to the defense effort, also would not be part of the team.

These resignations came, Collins’s sources said, because “Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and it was stolen from him rather than focus on proposed arguments about constitutionality.”

Finally, two other South Carolina attorneys who reportedly planned to be part of Trump’s team, Johnny Gasser and Greg Harris, have exited as well, according to the New York Times.

The news comes after Trump reportedly struggled to find lawyers to represent him.

Oral arguments are due to begin on February 9, a date chosen after some negotiation among party leaders. House Democrats serving as impeachment managers have their first filing in the proceedings due on Tuesday. Trump has until the day before the arguments begin to file his briefs.

Bowers, who previously successfully defended former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford in a 2009 impeachment hearing, was considered a measured alternative to the more bombastic Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s longtime attorney who oversaw the Trump campaign’s failed attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in court.

Giuliani had suggested that he might lead Trump’s defense, after representing Trump during a special counsel investigation into his 2016 campaign. However, he later said he can’t represent Trump in this case, as his presence at the Trump rally that proceeded the insurrection makes him a “witness.”

The departure of Barbier and Bowers was described to Politico as a “mutual decision.” Trump reportedly did not feel that he had chemistry with Bowers, “a quality the former president generally prizes in his relationships,” reported the Times’s Maggie Haberman. Additionally, Bowers does not maintain a significant media presence, another quality that Trump likes in his lawyers, according to Haberman.

Bowers is a longtime friend of Sen. Lindsey Graham, who first announced the hiring during a Senate GOP meeting on January 21. At the time, Graham suggested that the defense’s legal strategy might hinge on the idea that the impeachment proceedings should be considered unconstitutional, coming, as they will, weeks after Trump left office.

However, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser has explained, a majority of legal scholars say that holding an impeachment trial for a former president would be constitutional. Nevertheless, following the dissolution of Trump’s legal team, a spokesperson for the president again made the claim that the trial is unconstitutional, while also saying that Trump’s defense is still being finalized.

“The Democrats’ efforts to impeach a president who has already left office is totally unconstitutional and so bad for our country,” Trump spokesperson Jason Miller said. “In fact, 45 senators have already voted that it is unconstitutional. We have done much work, but have not made a final decision on our legal team, which will be made shortly.”

Here, Miller was referring to a motion led by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky last Tuesday to force a vote on whether impeaching a former president would be constitutional. Paul, who has declined to admit that the November election was not stolen, was attempting to demonstrate that there will not be sufficient GOP support for conviction.

An impeachment trial conviction requires the support of two-thirds of the Senate, which means at least 17 Republicans would need to vote in favor of convicting Trump for the effort to be successful. There is little indication that many GOP senators will be willing to do so.

It is not clear who will now step up to represent Trump in the historic proceedings, which come after he was impeached in the House on January 13 for “incitement of insurrection,” after a mob of his supporters violently attacked the US Capitol building shortly after a Trump-led rally on January 6. The attack left five people, including a Capitol Police officer, dead.

Giuliani has said he cannot. And Trump’s lawyers from his first impeachment, including former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Jay Sekulow, have signaled that they will not represent him in this one.

Democrats are finalizing their impeachment trial strategy

Even as Trump works to quickly reassemble his legal team, Democrats are moving full speed ahead with their prosecution.

According to the Washington Post, House Democrats have made plans to bring evidence linking Trump to the injuries sustained by police officers during the insurrection, and are using cell phone footage taken on January 6 to “build an emotionally compelling impeachment case.”

At least 140 Capitol Police officers were injured during the day’s events, according to their union. One is in danger of losing an eye, one was stabbed with a metal fence stake, and others have suffered spinal and brain damage, Gus Papathanasiou, the chair of the Capitol Police Labor Committee, said this week.

One officer died from injuries sustained during the attack, and two other police officers who responded to the attack have died by suicide in the days since. Four of the rioters also died on January 6; one was shot by police, while three others died in separate medical emergencies, according to DC Metropolitan Police at the time.

Democrats appear poised to use video evidence of the day’s dramatic and bloody events to make the case that it was Trump who incited this level of violence, and that he did so in an undemocratic attempt to maintain his hold on the presidency.

Democrats may also attempt to leverage the fact that members of Congress and their staffs were witnesses to the storming of the Capitol, and are reportedly considering calling police officers who tried to repel the insurrectionists to testify as witnesses.

As painstaking as Democrats’ preparations are, and as chaotic as Trump’s have been, for many observers it is all but a foregone conclusion that Trump will not be convicted.

While a handful of Senate Republicans have been critical of Trump in the wake of the attempted coup, most still support the former president, and have either signaled or said outright that they will not vote to convict. Many do not believe the proceedings should be allowed to go forward at all.

Both parties have suggested that they want the trial to be speedy — preferably lasting a week — as the country continues to face down a roiling pandemic and related economic calamity. However, the trial may not be the end of potential consequences for Trump’s role in attempting to overturn the election: If the Senate does not vote to convict, Democrats are also beginning to weigh a censure resolution, proposed by Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.

The skit investigated Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, GameStop, social media, Covid-19, and Tom Brady.

After a year that seemed to last a decade, the month of January has somehow also managed to pack a lifetime’s worth of major historic events into a few weeks.

That was the premise of Saturday Night Live’s cold open for its January 30 show, which featured a spoof of gentle morning talk shows, called What Still Works?

Kate McKinnon played the host, and began the segment with the question: “It’s a new year and we have a new president, so some things should work. But do they?”

A range of characters came out to answer that question by speaking on topics including politics, finance, technology, and health — each touching on the fact that in the past few weeks, a new Congress has been sworn in, there was an attempted insurrection at the US Capitol, former President Donald Trump became the first president to be impeached twice, an internet community helped drive a major stock market squeeze, and the pandemic continues to take thousands of lives per day.

Out first was QAnon adherent Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (played by Cecily Strong) to talk about the government. McKinnon prompted her to review her week, which included the surfacing of previous incorrect statements, ranging from her claim that California’s 2018 forest fires were caused by Jewish-controlled space lasers to her suggestions that school shootings aren’t real.

“And those are real things you believe and tell other people about? And you’re a US representative?” McKinnon asked, to which Strong replied, “Mmhm, yep.”

“People can Google you and it’ll say, ‘She’s a real member of the US government?’” McKinnon asked.

“That may not be the first thing that comes up, but yes,” Strong replied.

“So, government doesn’t work,” McKinnon concluded.

Next, McKinnon turned to talking about the stock market. “That usually works, right? That’s where people invest all their retirement money, so it should probably work.”

Out came Pete Davidson as Derrick Boner, introduced as the new majority shareholder of GameStop. This week, that company saw its share prices soar after an army of small investors, largely encouraged by a Reddit forum, turned that stock into a valuable meme.

When asked if the stock market still works, Davidson — attired in a GameStop shirt, an enormous gold chain, and a a gaudy wristwatch — replied, “Hell yeah.”

But McKinnon questioned whether GameStop, which currently relies on an increasingly obsolete business model at a time when many people download or stream games, will be able to maintain its sky-high share prices.

“So now it seems like — ” she prompted Davidson.

“The entire system is a joke?” he replied.

“Exactly,” she said. “So, the stock market no longer works.”

Next, McKinnon questioned Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (played by Mikey Day), and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (played by Alex Moffat), quickly concluding that social media is broken, too, after each reflected on the role the major tech platforms played in amplifying far-right voices ahead of the violent siege of the Capitol.

In focusing on the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, McKinnon brought out Kenan Thompson as O.J. Simpson, who received an inoculation this week.

“Get your shot. I got mine!!!” the 73-year-old, whose age puts him in his state’s priority group, posted on Twitter on Friday. The post drew backlash from some who felt the former football star was getting special treatment, as millions of vulnerable Americans still have not received theirs amid a bumpy and disorganized distribution scheme.

“Teachers can’t get vaccines, but you did? People with long-term lung conditions can’t get the vaccine, but you did?” McKinnon asked. “Among the first 3 percent of Americans given the vaccine was O.J. Simpson?”

“Hey, guilty as charged,” Thompson’s Simpson laughed. “About the vaccine!”

Finally, McKinnon brought out Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, played by the show’s host, John Krasinski.

“You might be the only thing in America that still works,” McKinnon said. “So I guess everyone must be rooting for you, right?”

“Almost no one,” Krasinski replied.

McKinnon said she’d root for him, because “it’s not like you’re a weird Trump guy or anything, right?”

Brady has long faced such questions over his relationship with Trump, and at that, Krasinski left.

McKinnon ended the segment by joking that she’s been “slowly losing my mind with all of you,” and with a more sober acknowledgment that amid all the news, it is okay to sometimes feel overwhelmed.

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