Thread by @AGHamilton29

Ok I guess I will have to go over the history here since people are trying to rewrite it. There are 2 separate topics: The omnibus spending + the relief bill. Let's start with the relief bill.

Congress has been fighting over how to do a secondary relief bill since May...

At one point Trump (to his credit) used FEMA funds to add UI benefits. When October came around it became obvious that Pelosi had an intentional strategy of not passing anything until after the election, McConnell wanted to pass a compromise based on what everyone agreed to.

However, Trump was desperate to get a deal bc he thought it would help him for the election so he kept upping the offer w/o Republican buy-in (up to 1.8 trillion at one point). Pelosi had no interest bc she saw it as a way to help Dems during election (I went after her for it).

Trump got so frustrated that he suddenly (and foolishly) declared a pause to negotiations until after the election. He got a lot of backlash from it (inc from me) because suddenly he took responsibility for something Pelosi was doing.

The next day after the backlash, he tweeted a bunch of random (& bad) proposals such as to just send him a bill with the $1200 checks (which are the worst aspect of the relief). That is the tweet a lot of Trump defenders are pointing to. No one took those seriously.

After the election, Pelosi changed her tune and was suddenly willing to pass a compromise bill (~900B). Negotiators, including from the WH, got back at it and secured an agreement based only on items everyone agreed to (R's & D's dropped certain demands from the bill).

That was right on time because a lot of Americans were losing all their unemployment benefits (this week), the eviction moratorium was ending, small businesses needed $ to maintain payrolls. Pelosi caused the crunch, but it was real now.

Now separately from that, Congress has to authorize all the spending that the federal government does each year. The executive department submit their requests, Trump's team puts them in their budget, and then Congress mostly adopts them or try to negotiate some of them.

That funding was needed right after the election or the government would shutdown since we've mostly been running via CRs. No one really focused on that since no one was objecting to the contents for the most part. Mostly the fight is over how long to authorize the budget for.

The problem is that was also under a time crunch as soon as the election was over. Time had run out. Especially in the Senate it takes awhile to bring a bill to the floor and pass it and now they had 2 major topics that required immediate attention.

They didn't see it as an issue since WH negotiators were involved, no one was objecting to anything in either bill, and time was short. So in the House they voted on them separately, in Senate they passed them together w/ promise from WH negotiators Trump would sign.

& everyone knows Trump would have signed, but for one thing: he was mad at McConnell and other Senate R's for not backing his election shenanigans. He saw this as an opportunity to leverage the omnibus/relief bill to get support on that. So he's holding relief hostage.

It has nothing to do with the foreign aid or pork (which were in his own budget and he never objected to) or the amount in payments (which his own negotiators agreed-to & he can ask for more after). Those are just pretexts. So here we are now.

The last point is there are only 2 outcomes here now: 1) Trump signs the bill 2) Trump doesn't, no relief for Americans for 2 months, and then Biden and new Congress pass the same funding + a relief bill that will likely be much worse (inc state bailouts etc).

And now we’ve gone with option 1. Crisis is over. Americans get relief for the immediate future, which is what matters. Everything else is spin.