Minnesota Senator and former presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar has introduced a bill called the Save Our Stages Act to help struggling performing arts venues, which she says have been particularly hard-hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
"One of the things that we have seen is that some of the first businesses to close and some of the last to reopen are going to be music venues and theaters," Klobuchar told Cheddar.
The bill would direct Small Business Administration grants to eligible venues, permit recipients to use the money for a broad array of costs such as rent, utilities, taxes, and maintenance, and appropriate an extra $10 billion for the program.
The Democratic senator stressed that the extra support is needed for venues, especially those located outside major cities that have a deeper bench of entertainment options.
"It's not just Austin, as cool as their music scene. It's not just Nashville. It is also some of these mid-sized cities who have one music venue or one theater that people go to all the time," she said. "We do not want to let the music die during this pandemic. Enough people have died without letting the music die."
So far, the legislation has bipartisan support with nine Republican senators signing on.
But whether the bill gets rolled into a more comprehensive relief package remains to be seen.
"I never give up hope," Klobuchar said. "Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi and Senator [Chuck] Schumer in the last real negotiation said, 'We'll meet you halfway,' and then [Republicans] still balked and walked away."
She said Congress should anticipate at least another six to eight months of dealing with this outbreak, which means businesses, such as music venues, have a long haul ahead of them before they can reopen.
"You can't go stand in a mosh pit in the middle of a pandemic," she said.
President Donald Trump has fired one of two Democratic members of the U.S. Surface Transportation Board to break a 2-2 tie ahead of the board considering the largest railroad merger ever proposed.
The Rev. Al Sharpton is set to lead a protest march on Wall Street to urge corporate America to resist the Trump administration’s campaign to roll back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The New York civil rights leader will join clergy, labor and community leaders Thursday in a demonstration through Manhattan’s Financial District that’s timed with the anniversary of the Civil Rights-era March on Washington in 1963. Sharpton called DEI the “civil rights fight of our generation." He and other Black leaders have called for boycotting American retailers that scaled backed policies and programs aimed at bolstering diversity and reducing discrimination in their ranks.
President Donald Trump's administration last month awarded a $1.2 billion contract to build and operate what's expected to become the nation’s largest immigration detention complex to a tiny Virginia firm with no experience running correction facilities.
Cracker Barrel said late Tuesday it’s returning to its old logo after critics — including President Donald Trump — protested the company’s plan to modernize.
Donald Trump has a message for critics who think turning the U.S. government into a major stockholder of Intel is a “socialist” move: More is coming.
Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook's lawyer says she'll sue President Donald Trump's administration to try to prevent him from firing her. Longtime Washington attorney Abbe Lowell said Tuesday that Trump “has no authority to remove” Cook. If Trump succeeds in removing Cook from the Fed's board of governors, it could erode the Fed’s political independence, which is considered critical to its ability to fight inflation because it enables the Fed to take unpopular steps like raising interest rates. The Republican president said Monday he was removing Cook because of allegations she committed mortgage fraud. Cook was appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden in 2022 and says she won't step down.
