House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats "continue to hold up" additional funding for the nation's small businesses that have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, even while lawmakers on Capitol Hill could be near a deal to add more money to a loan fund to help them, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Monday.
"This business program has worked very well," the California Republican said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "More than 1.6 million businesses requested the money to pay their employees, to pay their rent. "Unfortunately Nancy Pelosi has held that up to the last 2 weeks."
Pelosi has done nothing "productive" in the pandemic situation, did fight back against President Donald Trump's call to ban travel from China, and "held up" when lawmakers were pulling together the $2.2 trillion CARES Act," said McCarthy.
"(There are) 700,000 small business applications in right now, trying to keep their doors open," said McCarthy, adding that last week, more than 5 million more people applied nationwide for unemployments.
"How many millions of Pelosi's layoffs will we have to endure before she will put people before politics," said McCarthy. "Even at this moment to get this agreement, we could have been done yesterday, but the Democrats continue to hold (it) up, even though we have agreed to all the numbers."
The loan program actually works as grants for businesses that use it to pay their rent and utilities, said McCarthy.
Pelosi on Sunday slammed Trump as a "weak leader" who does not take responsibility and who would get an "F" on coronavirus testing, but McCarthy said Pelosi has disagreed with Trump on everything.
"All she has ever done is criticize," he said. "We need to work together as one. Look, the virus is here, we did not invite it, we did not want it, but we will defeat it together. In no other time in history when we've had a challenge like this you've watched the speaker work with the president and you watch now the speaker criticize the president."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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