Hoyer Discusses Ongoing COVID-19 Relief Negotiations and Government Funding on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”

“We need to get to an agreement. I'm hopeful, and I talked to the Speaker this morning. She thinks we're making real progress. I hope in the very few hours that remain, before we're going to shut the government down, if we don't act on Friday at midnight, that we will get a deal, that we will have an agreement between the parties and between the Members, between the leadership and between the Appropriations Committee, and bring legislation forward that will help those millions and millions of people. [There are] 12 million unemployed. Millions of people who can't put food on their table. Millions of small businesses who are worried about going out of business permanently. Those are all efforts that we have to respond to and respond to quickly. We should have done it a long time ago. Very frankly, we passed four bills relatively quickly at the beginning of this crisis when the pandemic was raging then and subsided and is now raging again. We passed four major pieces of legislation in a bipartisan fashion. One, the CARES Act, which was the largest, over $2 trillion, was passed in the House on a voice vote. Since then we passed a Heroes bill [on] May 15. [On] October 1, [we passed] a slimmed down version of that, which responded to all the crises you've talked about, I’ve talked about, and we know are so prevalent in our country we need to respond to, and we haven't acted. It's long past the time we need to act. Hopefully, we'll get to an agreement today, put it on the Floor, pass it, and give some relief in this crisis that our families, our businesses, our individuals are facing. So let's hope we can get there.”

“We passed a bill on May 15, Heroes 1 we called it, which was a $3.4 trillion bill, which Chairman Powell of the Federal Reserve said it was an appropriate amount, and we could have done more because of the hemorrhaging of the economy and the necessity to save jobs, to save businesses, to save lives… The Senate didn't take it up. We urged them to take it up…. People have been in crisis. I've been urging, [Speaker] Nancy [Pelosi] has been urging, others have been urging that we act. We wanted to give state and local governments assistance because many of them are having an extraordinarily difficult time because it's falling revenue. Some are doing all right, but let me tell you who is really at risk: that is the small towns, the municipalities, and the cities who are having the crisis at their front door. And they are trying to respond. They're trying to deliver help through their hospitals, through other organs of their government to help people at this time of crisis… It is a moral imperative that we act.”