Senate debates as Republicans attempt to derail $1.9tn Covid relief bill – live | US news

Time-check: the Senate vote on Bernie Sanders’ minimum wage proposal has now been open for more than five hours.

The vote has stood at 42 to 58 for hours now, meaning the measure will almost certainly be rejected.

But Senate Democrats are keeping the vote open as they work to convince Joe Manchin to support Tom Carper’s proposal on the expanded unemployment benefits in the coronavirus relief bill.

Manchin had previously been considering supporting a proposal from Republican Senator Rob Portman, which would lower the federal unemployment benefit from $400 a week to $300 a week.

Walking by reporters on Capitol Hill moments ago, Portman said he was on the phone with Manchin to get a sense of whether the moderate Democrat was still planning to support his proposal.

Joe Biden is now holding a roundtable discussion on his $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill at the White House.

The White House said of the event: “The president will participate in a roundtable with individuals who will benefit from receiving relief checks thanks to the American Rescue Plan. They will discuss how these relief checks will help relieve some of the hardship they have experienced due to Covid.”

The roundtable is being moderated by the senior White House adviser and former Democratic congressman Cedric Richmond.

Progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar criticized Senate Democrats for limiting the eligibility for the direct payments in the coronavirus relief bill.

In the version of the relief bill passed by the House, the checks completely phase out for individuals making $100,000 a year, but the Senate bill lowers that income threshold to $80,000 a year.

Omar, a Democrat of Minnesota, noted that the change meant about 17 million fewer Americans would receive checks from this relief package, in comparison to the two rounds of payments that Donald Trump approved.

“We obviously are now ultimately sending money to less people than the Trump administration and the Senate-majority Republicans were willing to,” Omar said.

“This is not the promise that we made,” the congresswoman added. “So ultimately it is a failure when we compromise ourselves out of delivering on behalf of the American people and keeping our promises.”

Here’s where things stand in the Senate: the vote-a-rama has now been stalled for more than three hours.

It appears Senate Democrats are keeping the vote on the $15 minimum wage open to give themselves more time to negotiate a compromise over the expanded unemployment benefits in the relief bill.

Senator Tom Carper had proposed lowering the federal unemployment benefit from $400 a week to $300 a week, in exchange for extending the benefits until the end of September (rather than August) and making $10,200 of unemployment benefits tax exempt.

But according to multiple reports, Senator Joe Manchin has signaled he may support a Republican proposal to lower the benefits to $300 a week without either of the other parts of Carper’s measure.

Negotiations over the issue continue, so stay tuned.

The White House briefing has now concluded. Here’s where the day stands so far:

• The US economy added 379,000 jobs last month, according to the latest report from the labor department. The unemployment rate dropped slightly to 6.2%.
• The Senate has started its “vote-a-rama” on the coronavirus relief bill. Senator Bernie Sanders has already introduced a proposal to add a $15 federal minimum wage to the relief package, but that measure appears to have failed.
• Chuck Schumer pledged the Senate would stay in session until the coronavirus relief bill passes. “The Senate is going to take a lot of votes. But we are going to power through and finish this bill, however long it takes,” the Democratic majority leader said this morning. “The American people are counting on us and our nation depends on it.”

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, rejected the notion that Joe Biden was “snubbing” lawmakers by delaying his first address to a joint session of Congress.

“It’s not a snubbing happening here,” Psaki said. “We are in the middle of a global pandemic.”

Psaki added that Biden intended to address Congress soon, and he is in close consultation with congressional leaders to determine a date for that speech.

The White House has previously indicated that Biden wants to wait to address Congress until after he signs the coronavirus relief bill.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about whether Joe Biden would soon speak to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Psaki said the two leaders would speak “at some point,” but she did not give a clear sense of when that might happen.

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said Joe Biden is “not engaged in conversations or negotiations about lowering the threshold for the minimum wage”.

Psaki reiterated that Biden strongly supports Bernie Sanders’ proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, but she said the president is currently focused on passing the coronavirus relief bill.

Psaki’s comments come as the Senate appears to have rejected Sanders’ amendment to add a minimum wage provision to the relief package.

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, was asked about whether Joe Biden was concerned that it seems like his coronavirus relief bill will not attract bipartisan support in Congress.

“Bipartisanship is not determined by a single zip code in Washington DC,” Psaki replied.

The press secretary noted that polls have shown a large majority of the American people support the relief package, and she argued those polls were a better reflection of the bipartisan support for the bill.

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, was asked about the Detroit mayor’s rejection of a shipment of the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine because of its lower efficacy rate compared to the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

“Our team has been in touch with the mayor. There’s been a bit of a misunderstanding,” Psaki said.

Echoing public health experts, the press secretary once again encouraged Americans to receive whichever of the three approved coronavirus vaccines that is made available to them.

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said a group of senior officials will soon travel to the US-Mexican border to provide Joe Biden with a briefing on the influx of unaccompanied migrant children at the border.

Citing security concerns, Psaki would not provide details on which officials were going or where specifically along the border they would be traveling to.

When a reporter noted that Donald Trump has criticized Biden’s immigration agenda, Psaki replied: “We don’t take our advice or counsel from former president Trump on immigration policy.”

Tthe White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, was once again asked about Joe Biden’s views on the Senate filibuster.

“His view and his position haven’t changed,” Psaki said.

Biden has previously voiced opposition to the idea of scrapping the filibuster, although he has left himself some wiggle room if Republicans attempt to obstruct all of his agenda, which progressives have said is a virtual certainty.

As of now, Democrats don’t have the votes to eliminate the filibuster because at least two moderate Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, has said they are against the idea.

Jen Psaki said Joe Biden will hold his first full press conference as president “before the end of the month”.

Biden has received some criticism for not yet holding a solo press conference, as many reporters have noted that Barack Obama and Donald Trump had already held press conferences by this point in their presidencies.

Psaki defended the timing of the press conference, saying Biden has been focused on responding to the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic fallout.

The press secretary also noted Biden frequently takes questions from reporters after his events, but the president usually just answers one or two questions before departing.

Joe Biden will travel to Baltimore on Wednesday to meet with the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson and Merck, press secretary Jen Psaki just announced.

The trip comes days after the president announced Merck would start producing Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine.

Biden said he would invoke the Defense Production Act to help Merck facilities get the needed resources to start producing the vaccine.

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, is now holding her daily briefing, and she started the event by commenting on the latest jobs report.

“While it shows some progress, it also shows the long road ahead,” Psaki said.

The press secretary noted that the US economy still has about 9.5m fewer jobs than it did in February 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic started.

The jobs report will be discussed when Joe Biden receives an economic briefing from the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, later today, Psaki said.

Richard Luscombe reports for the Guardian:

A former aide to Andrew Cuomo who has accused the New York governor of sexual harassment has said she believes he is a “textbook abuser” who knew she was a survivor of sexual violence and nevertheless made inappropriate advances.

Charlotte Bennett, 25, Cuomo’s former executive assistant and health policy adviser, told CBS Evening News on Thursday that Cuomo was trying to proposition her for sex during an “uncomfortable” encounter in his office last spring, and that she felt she “had to get out of this room as soon as possible”.

She said it was one of multiple incidents in which the 63-year-old governor, who is also facing similar allegations from two other women, acted inappropriately.

“He is a textbook abuser,” Bennett said, when asked how she would describe Cuomo. “He lets his temper and his anger rule the office, but he was very sweet to me for a year in the hope that maybe one day when he came on to me I would think we were friends or that it was appropriate or that it was OK.”