With fewer than two months until the election, the odds for a massive stimulus compromise intended to help bolster small businesses, provide additional unemployment benefits and give more money to schools as they adapt amid the coronavirus pandemic have fallen practically to zero.

"Well, looking to the House and for that matter our colleagues across the aisle -- it's a sort of a dead end street, and very unfortunate, but it is what it is," Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican from Kansas, told reporters.

This week not a single Democrat voted for the Republicans' scaled-back stimulus plan and no leadership-level negotiations between Republicans and Democrats ensued. Instead, Congress is turning its focus now to simply passing a short-term spending bill by the end of the month aimed at keeping the government funded and then heading home for the election.

Asked if the stimulus negotiations were officially dead, Sen. Dick Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, told reporters, "It looks that way."

"You never know around here. Sometimes things look bleak and they're revived, and so forth. We thought the scaled-down version was a good bill, a good timing and everything else. The Democrats obviously thought otherwise. That's all we can do, is tee it up and go with it," Shelby said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put it this way: "I wish I could tell you we were going to get another package but it doesn't look that good right now."


https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...on/ar-BB18XtiL