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If you drove over some nails and popped a tire, you probably wouldn’t roll into a service garage and shell out thousands of dollars on unrelated, unnecessary repairs. Certainly not if you were already up to your eyeballs in debt.

This is a pretty good analogy of where we are right now with additional COVID relief. I am very disappointed that Congress is at an impasse, but there are some important things you should know.

Yes, good progress is being made on vaccines and therapies. Yes, hospitalization and death rates have generally been declining, according to the CDC. Yes, our economy is already showing promising signs of recovery. However, there are many Americans, through no fault of their own, who are still struggling mightily because of this pandemic.

There are some very obvious and easy things Congress could be doing to help these Americans. For example, the widely popular Paycheck Protection Program (“PPP”) still has $130 billion in unspent funds. Why not extend the loan window so more small businesses can participate and keep workers employed? Why not allow certain companies to apply for a second loan? It seems logical since there’s money left over, right?

There’s actually a Republican bill (H.R. 8265) that would do just that, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will not allow it to advance. I even signed what’s known as a “discharge petition” to bypass Mrs. Pelosi and force a vote on this important legislation. Virtually all of the 197 Republicans in the House joined me, but we needed a simple majority of 218 to make that happen, and Democrats have been unwilling to move this bill forward. We’ll get to why in a minute.

What else? Well, we’ve come to learn that the PPP’s loan forgiveness process has been incredibly expensive for small businesses who are already struggling financially. So I co-sponsored a bill (H.R. 7777) to help streamline the reporting requirements. This too has been held up by Democrat leadership in the House.

So what’s the deal? Why not allow some of these “no brainers” to get through the House?

The answer is because these common-sense efforts are being used as leverage for trillions of dollars in additional spending on things that aren’t directly related to COVID relief, like bailouts for poorly run Democrat cities that have been fiscally mismanaged for decades.

In total, the price tag of what Nancy Pelosi and House Democrat leadership are holding out for is at least $2.2 trillion. This is far beyond the focused, targeted relief we should be talking about. Using our analogy above, it’s like going into the service garage for a blown tire and choosing to instead purchase another car.

Ultimately the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democrat-controlled House must both agree on legislation. So the question is whether Republicans should concede trillions in additional, irresponsible, unnecessary spending? Or should Democrats set aside their liberal wish list to pass what would really matter to most Americans?