WASHINGTON (AP) – Congress is about to approve a milestone $ 1.9 trillion COVID-19 contingency plan, putting President Joe Biden on the eve of an early triumph that promotes Democratic priorities and demonstrates the unity that his party will need to achieve future victories.
On Wednesday, the House was expected to give final congressional approval to the package, which aims to fulfill the Democrats’ campaign promises to defeat the pandemic and revive the weakened economy. The House and Senate Republicans unanimously opposed the package as bloated, full of liberal policies and ignoring signs that the dual crises are on the wane.
“It is a remarkable, historic, transformative piece of legislation that goes a very long way in crushing the virus and resolving our economic crisis,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Tuesday.
For Biden and Democrats, the bill is essentially a canvas on which to paint their core beliefs – that government programs can be a benefit, not a curse, to millions, and that spending huge sums on such efforts can be a cure, not a curse. The measure follows the Democrats’ priorities so closely that some rank it among the peak achievements of their careers, and despite their small congressional majority, there was never any real uncertainty about its fate.
They were also bolstered by three dynamics: their unfettered control over the White House and Congress, polls showing strong support for Biden’s approach, and a time when most voters cared little about government debt rising to a stratospheric $ 22. trillion. Neither side seems to be bothered much by the rising red ink, except when the other uses it to fund its priorities, be it democratic spending or GOP tax cuts.
A predominant feature of the bill is its initiatives, making it one of the largest federal efforts in years to help lower- and middle-income families. Included are extensive tax credits for the coming year for children, childcare and family leave plus expenses for tenants, nutrition programs and people’s utility bills.
The measure offers up to $ 1,400 direct payments to most Americans, comprehensive emergency unemployment benefits, and hundreds of billions for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, schools, state and local governments, and ailing industries, from airlines to concert halls. There is support for colored farmers and pension systems, and subsidies for consumers who buy health insurance and states expanding Medicaid coverage for people with lower incomes.
Its very vastness is a major point of discussion about GOP.
“It is not aimed at COVID assistance. It’s aimed at pushing more of the far-left agenda, ”said Steve Scalise, GOP leader of No. 2 House, from Louisiana.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll last week found that 70% of Americans support Biden’s response to the virus, including a hefty 44% of Republicans.
Still, the bill’s path has underscored the challenges facing the Democrats as they try to build a legislative record to convince voters to let Congress lead in next year’s elections.
Democrats control the Senate, split between 50-50, just because Vice President Kamala Harris gives them the winning vote in tied roll call. They only have an advantage of 10 votes in the House.
That’s almost no leeway for a party that ranges from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin on the Conservative side to progressives like Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Progressives had to swallow major concessions to solidify moderate support. Most painful was lowering the house-approved federal minimum wage increase to $ 15 an hour by 2025.
Moderates now fully enforced the right to qualify for the $ 1,400 incentive checks for individuals making $ 80,000 and couples making $ 160,000. The House’s first extension of the soon-expiring $ 400 weekly emergency payments, paid in addition to state benefits, was reduced to $ 300 by the Senate and will now end in early September.
Manchin was a leading remnant and was in the middle of the talks that led to all those initiatives being curbed. The Senate approved the bill on a party line 50-49 on Saturday.
Dropping the minimum wage increase was “irritating,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., President of the approximately 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus. But she called the blanket bill “incredibly risky,” adding, “It hits all of our forward-thinking priorities – putting money in people’s pockets, guns in hand, unemployment insurance, childcare, schools.”
The Independent Tax Policy Center said the bill passed by the Senate would give nearly 70% of this year’s tax breaks to households earning $ 91,000 or less. In contrast, the Trump-era GOP tax bill gave nearly half of the 2018 cuts to the top 5% of households earning about $ 308,000, said the research center, which is run by the liberally-minded Urban Institute and Brookings Institution.
Still, keeping Democrats united won’t get any easier as the party tries to push the rest of its agenda forward. There are fault lines within the party on priorities such as immigration, health care and taxation.
At some point, it seems likely that progressives will draw their own lines in the sand. They are already demanding that the party revisit the minimum wage increase, and in the midst of all these Republicans, they are already demonstrating their willingness to attack.
The American Action Network, which has ties to House GOP leaders, said it has launched digital advertising in predominantly moderate districts, calling the emergency “a freight train of frivolous spending to fund their liberal cronies.”
The bill passed the Senate under budget rules that prevented Republicans from launching filibusters, requiring 60 votes for most measures. That process won’t be available for much future legislation, but regardless, any renegade Democratic senate will make most of the bills out there non-starters.
Even with their procedural advantage, the Democrats’ path to victory in the Senate was pockmarked. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Forced clerks to spend nearly 11 hours reading the entire 628-page bill; the negotiations on unemployment benefits with Manchin took about nine hours; and the vote on three dozen amendments, almost all of which had been lost beforehand, took about 12 hours longer.