Congress passes bill to avert government shutdown, buy time for COVID-19 relief talks
Congress swiftly passed a two-day stopgap spending bill Friday night to avert a partial government shutdown, trying to buy time for frustratingly slow endgame negotiations on an almost $1 trillion COVID-19 economic relief package.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said early in the day he was “even more optimistic now than I was last night,” but Democrats launched a concerted campaign to block an effort by Republicans to rein in emergency Federal Reserve lending powers. They said the GOP proposal would deprive President-elect Joe Biden of crucial tools to manage the economy.
Believing a deal could be reached Friday “would be a triumph of hope over experience,” said a downbeat No. 2 Senate Republican, John Thune of South Dakota.
In other developments:
- The U.S. stood on the verge of adding a second COVID-19 vaccine to its arsenal Friday as the outbreak passes through its most lethal phase yet, with the nation regularly recording over 3,000 deaths per day.
- Vice President Mike Pence became the highest-ranking U.S. official to receive the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on Friday in a live-television event aimed at reassuring Americans the shot is safe. He celebrated the milestone as “a medical miracle” that could eventually contain the pandemic.
- President-elect Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, will be getting their first dose of the coronavirus vaccine on Monday. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will receive their doses the week after next.
- The legislative branch of government is rapidly moving to receive the coronavirus vaccine, with both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell getting the shot on Friday and the top Capitol doctor urging all members of Congress to join them.
- The Trump administration abruptly closed the Washington Monument over exposure concerns from a recent visit by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who tested positive this week for the coronavirus.
- A second federal inmate scheduled to be put to death next month in a series of executions by the Trump administration has tested positive for COVID-19, his lawyers said Friday.
- One in every five state and federal prisoners in the United States has tested positive for the coronavirus, a rate more than four times as high as the general population. In some states, more than half of prisoners have been infected, according to data collected by The Associated Press and The Marshall Project.
- The head of the Food and Drug Administration said late Thursday that his agency will move to quickly authorize the second COVID-19 vaccine to fight the pandemic. The comments came hours after the shot won the key endorsement of a government advisory panel.
- U.S. health officials are seeing an astonishing lack of demand for COVID-19 medicines that may help keep infected people out of the hospital, drugs they rushed out to states over the past few weeks as deaths set new records.
