Coronavirus: congress foes unite to say no to Donald Trump’s tests offer

Democrat and Republican leaders reject Trump administration’s offer to conduct rapid coronavirus screening on senators.

Nancy Pelosi on Capitol Hill last week. Picture: AFP

In a rare joint message, Democratic and Republican congressional leaders have rejected the Trump administration’s offer to conduct rapid coronavirus screening of senators who will return to Washington this week, stating that the tests should be reserved for the public.

Democrat House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement on Sunday (AEST) announcing that congress was “grateful” for the offer, but that they would “respectfully decline”.

“Congress wants to keep directing resources to the frontline facilities where they can do the most good the most quickly,” they said.

The US’s 100 senators, many of whom are advanced in age, will return to Washington on Tuesday following a recess that was prolonged due to the pandemic.

President Donald Trump had tweeted that there “is tremendous CoronaVirus testing capacity in Washington for the Senators returning to Capital Hill”.

In recent weeks, congress has worked to pass measures to revive the US economy, hard-hit by the coronavirus crisis.

However, Ms Pelosi said her chamber’s 435 representatives would not return to Washington for at least another week, in step with guidelines from the Capitol’s attending physician. Mr Trump derided the move, tweeting that the house “should return but isn’t because of Crazy Nancy P”.

The Trump administration said on Saturday it would send portable devices to the Senate to quickly diagnose any coronavirus cases. Senator McConnell and Ms Pelosi said however they would follow testing protocols already in place until “these speedier technologies become more widely available”.

The US is the country hardest-hit by the pandemic with 66,224 deaths and more than 1.1 million cases of the disease as of Sunday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

AFP