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“I will speak to the speaker this afternoon, we will talk about the situation we are in with the issue of appropriations, making the government work is the first priority,” Mnuchin told reporters earlier on Tuesday. , referring to the December 11 deadline. keep the government funded.
“We want to make sure he’s on the right track, so the president wants to make sure there’s no shutdown and our first choice is not to do CR, to pass the credits,” Mnuchin said, referring to the continued resolution that could keep the government funded at current levels until a specified date while negotiations continue.
Following their conversation, Pelosi released a statement saying the two discussed the funding bill and coronavirus relief.
“Further relief from COVID is long overdue and must be embraced in this lame duck session,” Pelosi said.
Stimulus talks have halted and started multiple times since July, with both sides stuck on another package since Congress passed $ 2 trillion in emergency aid in March. News of the Pelosi-Mnuchin talk comes as grassroots members put renewed pressure on their leaders to adopt some form of stimulus as the country faces a cliff at the end of the year when several provisions will expire.
Some Republicans were hardly thrilled with the news that Mnuchin and Pelosi will be speaking. Although this is the first time the two have spoken of stimulus funding since the election, Republican aides involved in the spending and stimulus negotiations have argued that the talks could make it more difficult to reach a deal and they are not optimistic that the discussions will change much.
“We haven’t had enough over the past few months,” said a GOP aide.
Republicans have worried for months that Mnuchin isn’t as fiscal conservative as they would like in the talks. This is partly why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear after the election that he was going to step in to negotiate and why Mnuchin has not played a visible role in those talks for weeks. .
Republicans fear Mnuchin is giving too much to Democrats. Ahead of the election, Pelosi and Mnuchin were hoping for a proposal of around $ 1.8 trillion. The bipartisan plan presented to the Senate on Tuesday morning cost only $ 908 billion. In other words, Republicans think they could be much more aggressive in the negotiations if Mnuchin didn’t negotiate them.
Yet a growing number of lawmakers on both sides are struggling to find some sort of deal. On Tuesday morning, a bipartisan group of senators announced their own $ 908 billion proposal, which would fall between the roughly $ 2 trillion package Democrats requested earlier this year and above the $ 500 billion plan. dollars that GOP senators had discussed over the summer.
Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah said the group had spoken with Mnuchin about the framework, but he did not weigh in on whether the White House would support him. He said they also spoke to McConnell.
West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who was among senators working with Romney, called the $ 908 billion “framework” relief that would go through April 1 “a labor of intense effort” that came together in about 30 days.
“It is inexcusable for us to leave town and not have a deal,” Manchin said. “It will get us through the most difficult times.”
Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, also said he hoped they would get through something before Christmas.
“It won’t make everyone happy, but there has been a tremendous amount of work done,” Warner said. “It would be silly on steroids if Congress left for Christmas without doing an interim package as a bridge.”
The bipartisan framework, however, still lacks key details. The two sides did not say how they would treat liability protections, which McConnell said was a red line for him to back a package. And the group has not yet deployed a specific language for its proposal. Many senators have said they need more details before they can agree to support it.
“The energy is in the Senate,” Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said. “There seems to be a desire from people on both sides of the aisle before we get home, before Christmas, to provide much-needed relief. Liability protection must be part of the package. … If you can fix this, I think you’re gone for the races. “
CNN’s Manu Raju and Kristin Wilson contributed to this report.
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