They reached this agreement through an increasingly rare fashion in Congress: a pair of senators with implicit across-the-aisle trust; one high-profile Republican’s political evolution; and planning that began in earnest last month.
Negotiations on the overall package, worth at least $1.3 trillion, will continue throughout the weekend, but by Saturday the bipartisan talks trying to save small businesses had advanced further than any other piece of the legislative jigsaw puzzle.
“We believe that we have a small-business proposal that every member of the Senate should be able to support,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, told reporters late Saturday. Budget officials still needed to hash out some details, but he said this emerging legislation could provide at least six weeks of pay for employees of small businesses.
The plan, with Rubio and Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) as lead negotiators, would transform the Small Business Administration’s main loan program designed for companies with fewer than 500 employees.
Eligible companies would be able to get SBA-backed loans from banks, essentially a free grant program if the small businesses used money to keep paying salaries and for rent or mortgage payments. President Trump has boasted about it.
These talks advanced so quickly because these lawmakers saw the potential crisis a month ago. Rubio’s staff has been working closely with aides to Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the House Small Business Committee.
Except they had no idea of the size and scale of what their emerging proposal would become.
Ten days ago the bipartisan talks centered around a $50 billion plan, which seemed massive. By Thursday, when Senate Republicans unveiled their first offering, the small-business portion hit $300 billion, the second-largest chunk of the plan.
As she returned to negotiations Saturday afternoon, Collins confirmed that it had grown to $350 billion and could go higher, depending on how much they loosened the SBA’s definition of “small” to include businesses with more than 500 workers.
To put that surge in perspective, the SBA issued $21.2 billion in new loan guarantees for all of 2019.
The somewhat improbable Rubio-Cardin relationship played a key role in spurring these talks along.
Rubio, 48, has been a conservative star since his first Senate bid in 2010, a hard-charging, anti-big-government prodigy of the tea party movement. A man in a hurry, his every move was analyzed for presidential ambition.
Cardin, 76, took his first oath of elective office, for a seat in Maryland’s state House, 4½ years before Rubio was born. It took another 40 years for Cardin to win his first Senate race.
Their bond grew on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where for the past two years they ran the subcommittee focused on the Americas.
In November they won passage of a law supporting democracy protesters in Hong Kong, which came two months after they led the Senate in passing a condemnation of China’s mass imprisonment of Muslims.
“We really became soulmates on a lot of human rights issues,” Cardin said in a telephone interview Saturday night during a break in negotiations. “It’s a trust relationship.”
A reshuffling of GOP committee chairmen ended with Rubio holding the gavel at Small Business, where Cardin has served for several years as the top Democrat.
Their talk about doing big things prompted chuckles behind their backs, because for decades this has been considered one of the least-high-profile assignments.
But now this duo is on the cusp of the most significant piece of legislation ever produced by the committee, marking a dramatic transformation of Rubio 2010 to Rubio 2020.
In 2016 he ran for president maintaining traditional GOP approaches to free trade and business-first economics, belittled by Trump as “Little Marco” and ending the campaign with plans to retire after one relatively inconsequential term in the Senate.
Friends encouraged him to jump back into the Senate race and, after a comfortable win, he emerged as a bit more populist, abandoning the work he did as a Gang of Eight member on a far-reaching immigration bill with a path to citizenship for the millions here illegally. Cynics viewed those steps as just positioning for the next presidential bid, trying to get more in line with Trump’s more nativist base.
But allies say Rubio, on the 2016 trail, came across too many people unable to make it in the 21st-century economy having only a 20th-century skill set.
In 2017, in a tax-cut bill that favored the rich, Rubio fought to include a $1,000 child tax credit for the middle class — but, since it left out some working poor, critics wondered if Rubio was still just positioning himself, especially after he brought on board several top advisers who previously worked at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.
But by Wednesday, he stood next to Collins at a news conference detailing the proposal to simply give small businesses grants to pay workers who aren’t working.
His plan has won support across the ideological spectrum of the GOP caucus, and Rubio and Cardin won plaudits from Velázquez for keeping her involved in every step of the negotiations, as other GOP chairmen faced criticism for leaving Democrats out of their talks.
“I have been in close contact with my Senate counterparts, Chairman Rubio and Ranking Member Cardin, and have expressed the need to consider all options as we seek quick infusions of capital and other innovative opportunities to help our small businesses recover,” she said in a statement.
Each negotiator has a family legacy with small businesses that could have gone under in today’s circumstances.
Velázquez grew up in Puerto Rico, her father working sugar cane fields before becoming a political leader. Collins grew up in a family-run lumber company in tiny Caribou, Maine. Cardin’s father ran a grocery store that eventually turned into a food distribution company.
And Rubio’s parents, after emigrating from Cuba to Florida, ended up working as a bartender and housekeeper in Las Vegas — the types of jobs that have simply vanished across large parts of America in the past week.
Rubio, in all likelihood, will spend just one term chairing this committee, as another reshuffle is going to open a more plum gavel for the taking. Cardin is poised to move up at another higher-priority committee also.
But they are on the verge of a very big achievement, one that might have to grow even bigger if the coronavirus crisis continues well into the summer.
“That’s the question that nobody has the answer to, right? How long are we going to be operating under these circumstances? We’ve never faced anything like this,” Rubio said.
