House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday said she will not hold a vote on additional COVID-19 relief to extend expanded unemployment insurance payments that expired at the end of July, saying it would imperil negotiations with the White House on a broader pandemic deal.
The House is slated to vote on funding the U.S. Postal Service and preventing the federal government from implementing changes to the agency.
“That’s a very positive initiative. I have encouraged that, I have welcomed that suggestion,” Pelosi told “PBS NewsHour” on Thursday.
“I don’t think strategically it’s where we should go right now, because the Republicans would like to pass something like that and say forget about it,” Pelosi continued. “Forget about state and local [government funding], forget about our investments in stopping the virus, forget about other initiatives that feed the food insecure children in our country, vote by mail initiatives and the rest.”
In a letter to Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the Democrats said the extra benefits should be continued until the end of the pandemic.
“We owe it to people waiting to get back to work across the country not only to extend unemployment benefits to help them pay their bills, but to tie these benefits to economic conditions so workers are not held hostage by another cliff like this one,” the representatives wrote to their leadership. The measure was led by Democratic Reps. Scott Peters of California, Don Beyer of Virginia, and Derek Kilmer of Washington state.
But in rejecting their initiative, Pelosi told PBS that if the House were to pass a standalone unemployment bill, Senate Republicans could amend it.
In response, Republicans in the Senate unveiled the $1 trillion HEALS Act. But after two weeks of negotiations, talks stalled earlier in August between top Democrats and White House officials.
Pelosi later said that Democrats are willing to cut their bill in half to come to a deal with Republicans.