The Mercury Lounge turned 25 years old on August 4, and owner Jennifer Henigin Housh is struggling to survive to 26. The club — a down-home combination of grit and old-school attitude in Old Town Goleta — had a great January and February; they were breaking even before the pandemic shut their doors in March. But with COVID-19 widespread in Santa Barbara County, there’s little hope she’ll be able to reopen anytime soon. Her employees, Housh said, need the extra $600 in unemployment from the federal government to survive. Housh’s story is one part of an economic shot-between-the-eyes that’s ricocheting from Washington, D.C. to California.
“The house is burning, and Republicans want to focus on the fence that’s on fire,” said Salud Carbajal, Santa Barbara’s representative in the House, back in town on Tuesday but on call to return to D.C. should the Democrats’ HEROES Act — a $3 trillion stimulus bill — come up for a vote. The proposal to extend the unemployment stimulus for just one week, which Republicans voiced just before the benefit lapsed last Friday, infuriated Carbajal. “We had the HEROES Act done for three months. All of a sudden, for one week they want to cherry-pick what they want to do, instead of looking comprehensively at the challenges Americans face,” he said.
Ongoing talks are taking place behind the scenes to bridge the gap between the $3 trillion stimulus package proposed by House Democrats and the $1 trillion HEALS Act proposed by Senate Republicans, which cuts the extra federal unemployment benefit from $600 to $200 a week. With Congress normally headed for recess in August, there was little faith late last week that Republicans would return and take up the bill, as well as an expectation they’d continue to piecemeal it, Carbajal said.