ICYMI: Congressman Keller joins C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Prime Time to discuss COVID-19 response efforts
Discusses need to re-open Pennsylvania’s economy, the Paycheck Protection Program, and getting Congress back to work
In case you missed it, Congressman Fred Keller (R-PA) was on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Prime Time Tuesday evening discussing the need to re-open Pennsylvania’s economy, the replenishment of the Paycheck Protection Program, and getting Congress back to work, among other topics.
(Click to watch interview)
Here are some key excerpts from the interview:
On re-opening Pennsylvania’s economy:
The Governor put out a stay at home order, but early on when he started it there was a lot of uncertainty over who could work and who could not work. My point with that is we want to make sure everybody is safe, but we also want to make sure we don’t add a lot of anxiety on top of an already serious situation with the virus. I think there’s a lot of people in Pennsylvania that can get back to work safely, want to get back to work safely, and I think we can start moving toward that goal soon.
On replenishing the Paycheck Protection Program:
It should have been done a lot sooner than it was now. The Democrats in Congress knew this was going to be running out of money over a week ago as far as the Paycheck Protection Program, and that’s America’s families. That’s America’s small businesses. When you look at how this program was rolled out and administered, it was a huge success. When you look at almost 75 percent of the loans to businesses were less than $150,000, that’s small businesses when you are talking about payroll and so forth for a couple of months.
When you look at the popularity of the program, we should’ve gotten this done more than a week ago. Unfortunately, some people interjected politics into this and the people that suffered are the ones that get the job done every day. So, I think there was finally enough pressure on Leader Schumer and Speaker Pelosi to come to the table and get it done.
On the possibility of a Phase 4 COVID-19 response:
I think the first thing we need to do, we have programs like the Paycheck Protection that drives money out to families, out to small businesses. Before we start talking about a big, massive program, I think we need to start to see how these programs work and the effect they have. Just like some of the other things you mentioned the money to the hospitals, which is great, but once we get that out there let’s see how that happens, how that gets put into the economy once things get rolling again.
On getting Congress back to work:
I think we should be down in D.C. working…[T]here’s a lot of people still going to work each day doing the new normal. I want to get back, as far as our economy is concerned, to the old normal. That’s the normal of the economy that was unleased on January 20, 2017, and we need to get back to that normal.
You can watch the interview in full HERE.
