Ten NJ Members of Congress on a COVID-19 Crisis Phone Call
When 10 members of Congress get together, something is bound to happen.
Maybe New Jersey’s 10 Democratic members of the House joined in a tele-conference today to talk about the next steps the feds can take in fighting the coronavirus pandemic.
The state’s two Republicans in Congress, Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew, were not included.
Frank Pallone, the dean of the state’s delegation and the host for the session, said the idea was to talk about what Democrats, who control the House, can do.
There wasn’t a lot of new ground, which is not to say the concerns and issues raised were not important; they were.
But a lot of the goals enunciated were familiar.
For instance, individual House members, all of whom spoke for about five minutes each, supported reopening the ACA, or Obamacare enrollment period, more federal money for hospitals, infrastructure
improvements and NJ-Transit and restoring the full deduction for state and local taxes.
And it was acknowledged that even if some – or all – of these items make it into subsequent stimulus bills, they still need to get through the GOP Senate.
Two other comments are worth mentioning.
Bonnie Watson Coleman said New Jersey’s allotment of money under the recent CARES Act is disproportionate. She said states with fewer COVID-19 cases wound up getting much more federal money per capita than New Jersey.
“We are looking for equity and equality,” she said.
This is certainly not a new problem, but the power of the state to change things is doubtful.
And then there was Andy Kim. who talked about problems with the federal program to aid small businesses.
Reflecting on the urgency of small business owners in his district (the third) to get help, Kim said ominously that some “only have a few days left.”
“Congress has a responsibility to protect taxpayers and once again, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman has failed in her responsibility, ” said McCormick. “Now, it is clear that small businesses have been disappointed and cheated because Bonnie Watson Coleman is not doing her job.”
Congress has not been living up to the standards many Americans imagine it should uphold but incumbents like Bonnie Watson Coleman have the advantage of raising vast sums of money from special interests and corporate PACs in a system McCormick describes as ‘legal bribery.”
“The Congress enacted this massive appropriation without safeguards or oversight to insure that taxpayers would be protected, and now the money is gone and only predators seem satisfied while 22 million Americans are filing for unemployment,” said McCormick. “In addition to the $2.2 trillion included in the bill is another $4 trillion that the Federal Reserve will distribute as part of Trump’s slush fund.”
McCormick said that donations from companies receiving bailout money will flood the Trump re-election campaign coffers, giving Republicans a significant advantage over Democrats whose campaign efforts have been largely derailed by the coronavirus.