By: Alana Satlin
Top Democrats on Sunday criticized President Donald Trump's executive actions on coronavirus relief as "absurdly unconstitutional" and "way off base."
The measures, which Trump signed on Saturday and sidestep Congress after lawmakers failed to reach a deal on Friday, provide an additional $400 per week unemployment benefits among other relief measures such as a temporary payroll tax cut.
Trump said the federal government would fund most of the benefits with disaster relief money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He also called on states, many of which are already suffering from budget shortfalls due to the pandemic, to cover a quarter of the cost.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., lambasted the move in interviews with "Fox News Sunday" and CNN's "State Of The Union."
Pelosi called the the president's actions "unconstitutional slop."
"While he says he's going to do the payroll tax, what he's doing is undermining Social Security and Medicare, so these are illusions," she said on "Fox News Sunday." Social Security and Medicare are funded through payroll taxes, which Trump on Saturday also vowed to slash permanently if he's re-elected.
In an interview on CNN, Pelosi called the measures "absurdly unconstitutional" but she would not say whether Democrats would mount a legal challenge as they previously indicated.
"Something's wrong," she said. "Either the president doesn't know what he's talking about ... or something's very wrong here about meeting the needs of the American people at this time."
In an interview on "This Week" on ABC, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., declined to discuss whether he thought Trump's move was illegal, saying instead that "it doesn't do the job."
"The president's executive orders, described in one word, could be paltry, in three words, unworkable, weak, and far too narrow," Schumer said, adding that they are "a big show, but it doesn't do anything."
Schumer also said the payroll tax cut was "way off base."
"Employers are just going to continue to withhold the money — I've talked to some — because they don't want their employees to be stuck with a huge bill in December," Schumer said. "So it's not going to pump money into the economy."
MU2's Take: Well looky here, the do-nothing left is pissed that the POTUS is taking action in the face of their inaction. This really demonstrates the goal of the left, which in my opinion is to kill small business and make it look like it's Trump's fault. This has zero to do with "meeting the needs of the American people" as Pelosi stated. Not directly anyway. Trump is throwing a lifeline at the American worker that won't be there when the virus is gone if they do not get the additional support. Yet again the left tries to give our POTUS a black eye and ends up punching their own junk.
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