Lisa McCormick says Congress gave Trump a $6 trillion slush fund

A Democratic challenger said she is more worthy of the party’s nomination for Congress because her incumbent opponent voted to give Republican President Donald Trump a $6 trillion slush fund that will benefit his re-election more than it will help the country recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

Progressive champion Lisa McCormick is challenging incumbent Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman for the Democratic nomination for Congress in New Jersey’s 12th District, which includes parts of Mercer, Somerset, Middlesex and Union counties.

“The CARES Act is 880 pages of outrage and corruption, that gave Republican President Donald Trump a $6 trillion slush fund without adequate oversight or guidance to prevent abuses,” said Lisa McCormick. “Instead of stabilizing the economy, it enriches the rich and insults the 99 percent of Americans who follow the rules. This is worse than the TARP bailouts under Bush.”

Watson Coleman has been speaking about the new law to local groups, taking credit for its supposed benefits but McCormick says the bad news far outweighs any good from the $2.2 trillion emergency bailout measure.

McCormick said many working families are still waiting for a promised $1200 relief payment and New Jersey employers have been shut out from federal funding to keep payroll flowing, while poor oversight measures built in opportunities for Trump Republicans to allocate the money for partisan benefits.

During the the federal government’s so-called small-business rescue program, states that supported Donald Trump got enough money to cover a majority of eligible payrolls. It was a different picture in blue states like New Jersey, New York and California, which got a significantly smaller share of payroll support from the loans.

The cost of living in New Jersey is 22.2% more expensive than Georgia, but the states have comparable GDP ($645 billion vs. $616 billion) and population (9 million vs. 10.5 million).

“The 33,519 loans approved in New Jersey cover only 45.3 percent of payrolls while the 48,332 loans approved in Georgia cover 58.5 percent of payrolls,” said McCormick. “New Jersey voted Democratic while Georgia helped put Trump in the White House.”

“New Jersey reported 3,840 COVID deaths as of April 17, compared to the 650 victims on that date in Georgia, so the Garden State has a much greater need for financial assistance but Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman failed to make ‘need’ a condition for Trump’s $6 trillion slush fund,” said Democratic challenger Lisa McCormick, the progressive champion who stunned political observers in 2018 by capturing 38 percent of the primary election votes cast for U.S. Senate.

Thousands of small business owners across the U.S. have been left in the lurch as the federal government-backed loan program meant to save them and protect worker paychecks in the pandemic fallout officially ran out of money Thursday morning.

The $350 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was supposed to cover eight weeks of a business’ payroll expenses, so fewer workers would be unemployed, and the loans are forgivable provided that 75% of the total amount borrowed is used for payroll expenses. Borrowers were to be able to use the money to cover payroll and benefit costs, as well as overhead such as rent, mortgages, utilities, and interest on debt.

The Small Business Administration was unable to accept new applications for the Paycheck Protection Program because the entire appropriation was spent before many employers applied to the program, which was plagued by reports about websites crashing or mom & pop shops and minority businesses shut out by big banks loaning to favored customers.

“The Paycheck Protection Program is one of the most deceptive parts of the CARES Act, but the program might as well have been administered by the Trump campaign organization instead of the Small Business Administration,” said Lisa McCormick, who produced a chart illustrating the unfairness of loan allocations, which clearly favored states that voted for Trump in the 2016 election. “The CARES Act is a $6 trillion slush fund that will benefit Republican President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and it was approved almost unanimously by Democrats in Congress, even though it won’t help many people in Princeton or Plainfield.”

“States that got loans covering more than 65 percent of payroll costs gave Trump 124 electoral college votes and they awarded to Democrats only 20 electoral college votes,” said Lisa McCormick. “This is a clear case of President Donald Trump using taxpayer money to reward political supporters and punish Democrats but it was Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman and others in Congress who gave the Republican President a $6 trillion slush fund that will benefit his re-election campaign.”

“We need to outlaw bribery in all its forms, but the Congress should have known better than to entrust money in the hands of President Donald Trump,” said Lisa McCormick. “Just as they did when President George Bush rammed through TARP bailouts for Wall Street, Congress let 99 percent of Americans get steamrolled so the rich could collect free government money. This typifies the incompetence and cowardice that I am prepared to fight against.”

“When people needed help, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman gave Republican President Donald Trump a $6 trillion slush fund and she abandoned her responsibility to protect New Jersey taxpayers,” said Lisa McCormick. “The federal response to coronavirus has been a disaster on top of a disaster, because the people we elected are just not doing their jobs. American voters must take responsibility by firing Bonnie Watson Coleman and Donald Trump.”

McCormick said she calls the measure “Trump’s $6 trillion slush fund” because the $2.2 trillion appropriated by Congress includes funds that will allow large corporations and banks to leverage another $4 trillion in bailout money from the Federal Reserve.

A supplemental $310 billion PPP appropriation was also largely squandered by the administration, which steered the money to states that voted Republican in 2016.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has come under fire for suggesting the $1,200 coronavirus stimulus payments could last people 10 weeks, which McCormick says further illustrates how far out of touch Congress and Trump have become.

“I think the entire package provides economic relief overall for about 10 weeks,” Mnuchin told CBS’s Face the Nation. “Hopefully we will kill this virus quicker and we won’t need it, but we have liquidity to put into the American economy to support American workers and American business.”