Talks for a new stimulus are on ice, unemployed Americans are looking at smaller benefits and the threat of eviction, but Washington feels more broken than ever

If he didn’t need Congress to do these things, one wonders why he didn’t do them before now since the expanded unemployment benefits and eviction moratorium expired last month. The President is scheduled to hold another news conference at his Bedminster golf club on Saturday afternoon, where he can be expected to discuss the failed stimulus negotiations and possible executive actions.

The idea of cutting revenue and spending money without the legislature would seem to violate the Constitution.

But Trump’s not concerned about the legality of the actions he promised, which he said lawyers are “drawing up.”

“No, not at all. No. You always get sued,” he said.

The idea of a legal battle over executive actions will be cold comfort to people struggling and out of work and afraid of contracting a virus that continues to rip through the country, despite Trump’s false promise that it will just go away.

Democrats are sure to challenge these executive actions as being insufficient and, in the case of the payroll tax cut, which Trump has fixated on, unnecessary, since it will give money to people currently earning a paycheck and not help those put out of work by the pandemic.

For instance, Democrats want to give $1 trillion to states and cities gasping to maintain services despite losing much of their tax revenue due to the pandemic.

In that, Trump sees an effort to bilk taxpayers and bail out mismanaged cities.

“They’re really just interested in one thing and that is protecting people that have not done a good job in managing cities and states and nothing to do with Covid or little to do,” he said.

Influencing the election

Trump also made the wild accusation that “The Democrats are cheating on the election” by trying to pass this new stimulus bill.

“Because that’s exactly what they’re doing. If you look at what they’re doing even with these negotiations. That’s an influence, and an unfair influence, on an election,” he said.

“I was shocked by what I learned — and appalled that, by swearing Congress to secrecy, the Trump administration is keeping the truth about a grave, looming threat to democracy hidden from the American people,” the Connecticut Democrat wrote.

Democrats say the White House needs to budge

Where Trump sees conspiracies holding back the stimulus bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer see intransigence on the part of the White House.

“Meet us in the middle — for God’s sake, please — for the sake of America, meet us in the middle,” Schumer said Friday as talks stalled again.

He and Pelosi pointed the finger at White House chief of staff Mark Meadows for refusing to budge.

“We believe we have a responsibility to find common ground,” Pelosi said. “We’ll come down a trillion and you go up a trillion and we can figure out how we do that without hurting America’s working families,” she said.

On Capitol Hill, Schumer said the math of getting a bill that can pass requires the White House to add more money.

“The House doesn’t have the votes to go south of $2 trillion, the Senate Democrats can’t go south of 2 trillion, so that’s what compromise is all about,” Schumer said. “Because there are 20 Republicans who don’t want to vote anything that doesn’t mean the whole thing should shift in their direction. You have to meet in the middle.”

Nobody is meeting anywhere at the moment, since there are no more talks currently scheduled, according to Meadows.