Sen. Bill Cassidy Give An Update on COVID Relief Package

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: But I want to ask you, Senator, as a professional doctor as well, you just heard from Dr. Griggs in the pediatric hospital in Boston. You must feel their pain and the pain of millions of Americans who are hanging on your every — every word right now.

SEN. BILL CASSIDY (R-LA): Absolutely. If you will, this is a kind of bifurcated economy right now. If you’re making your living on Zoom, you might be doing pretty well. But if you make your living in a service industry, as a waiter, as a chef, then maybe you’re not doing so well. And so that vulnerability among our fellow Americans is what we’re trying to address with this COVID relief package.

AMANPOUR: So, tell me about it, then, because we heard that it was kind of going along. And now we hear that it stalled. There was a deadline of Friday. I think you all are meant to be shutting down for the holiday period. What is happening? Is it going to pass, because it’s a cliff edge for a lot of people, as you pointed out.

CASSIDY: Yes, so Mitch McConnell has said, we’re not leaving town without a COVID relief package. So, now when we leave town is still up in the air. It could be Friday night. It could be Saturday morning. If they can — if they can’t iron out the differences, it might run into Sunday. I do think, by the weekend, we will have — by the end of the weekend, we will have something done. But the things I think it’s important to know that are now apparently the hangups are not critical to the COVID relief package. The things that are working group put together, the help for the small business to keep people employed, the help for the unemployed, the help for vaccine distribution and for testing, for schools, et cetera, that, I believe, has been agreed upon. It is these kind of peripheral issues that are now holding it up.

AMANPOUR: Can you give us a peripheral issue, as you put it?

CASSIDY: Yes. So, what I’m told is that — and I don’t have the kind of details of this information — but that FEMA has spent a lot of money in New York and New Jersey, and that there’s a state match, which is required, and the delegation of New Jersey and New York are trying to get that waived. Now, that’s billions of dollars, potentially. Now, that’s a peripheral issue, but obviously important to Chuck Schumer and folks like that. But I am told that’s one of the issues holding things up.