Democrats take step to advance relief proposal
They push budget maneuver but still seek GOP support
WASHINGTON — Democrats on Tuesday took the first step to push through President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic rescue plan, using a budgetary maneuver that can allow such a measure to become law without Republican support.
The move advanced the two-track strategy that Biden and Democratic leaders are employing to speed the aid package through Congress: show Republicans that there are enough votes to pass an ambitious spending bill with only Democratic backing, but offer to negotiate some details in hopes of gaining Republican support.
“We are not going to dilute, dither or delay,” Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor. “There’s nothing about the process itself that prevents bipartisanship.”
The party-line vote of 5049 set the stage for Democrats to advance Biden’s plan through budget reconciliation, which would allow it to gain approval with a simple majority vote, bypassing the need for Republican support. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., was absent and did not vote.
The vote came the day after 10 Republican sena
tors met at the White House with Biden to seek a smaller, $618 billion package they said could win bipartisan backing.
Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met virtually with Senate Democrats at their lunch Tuesday afternoon.
On the call, Biden “spoke about the need for Congress to respond boldly and quickly,” Schumer said afterward. “He was very strong in emphasizing the need for a big, bold package. He said he told Senate Republicans that the $600 billion that they propose was way too small.”
While Biden said he told Republicans that he was willing to make some modifications to his proposal, he and Yellen asserted that if the Senate embraced the Republican plan, “we’d be mired in the covid crisis for years,” according to Schumer.
The president cautioned against demands for overly “targeting” the aid in the package, as Republicans and some Democrats have suggested, giving an example of “nurses and pipe fitters” who are in the middle class but still might be in need of assistance.
Biden also spoke of the need to learn the lessons of previous recessions, when Congress didn’t approve enough relief.
As vice president under President Barack Obama more than a decade ago, Biden was involved in crafting a $787 billion relief bill to help the country climb out of a recession. In retrospect, many Democrats and economists say the country would have recovered faster had they passed a larger relief package. But at the time, Republicans balked at a bigger figure.
Biden also spoke during the call about the many people still hurting in the nation, particularly women. He acknowledged Democrats’ majority is small but said they will succeed together, according to the people familiar with the call.
“The president’s commitment is to urgently deliver relief to the American people, and that’s what he’s conveyed in every meeting he’s had or engagement he’s had with Democrats and Republicans,” said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary.
Psaki emphasized, as did congressional Democrats, that proceeding along the “budget reconciliation” route did not preclude Republican support.
Multiple Republicans, however, argued that proceeding via reconciliation would undercut Biden’s campaign claims that he would govern as a bipartisan unifier.
“It’s not a good signal that [Schumer] is adopting a takeit-or-leave-it approach right after his president delivers an inaugural address based on unity,” said Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., who was among the group of Republicans who met with Biden at the White House on Monday evening.
Senate Democrats could approve the budget resolution as soon as Friday.
On Tuesday, a key Democratic senator announced he would support it. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who is a crucial swing vote, said he would agree to move forward with the budget process “because we must address the urgency of the covid-19 crisis.”
“But let me be clear — and these are words I shared with President Biden — our focus must be targeted on the covid-19 crisis and Americans who have been most impacted by this pandemic,” Manchin said in a statement, signaling he might still vote against aspects of Biden’s plan that he opposes. “I will only support proposals that will get us through and end the pain of this pandemic.”
Manchin also reiterated his opposition to Biden’s proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, which could force Democrats to drop it from their legislative package.
The budget resolution would instruct congressional committees to draft legislation that could include Biden’s stimulus proposal, which features $1,400 direct payments for many Americans and funding for vaccine distribution, reopening schools and other measures. The committees would work on finishing the plan at the same time as the Senate is scheduled to hold an impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump on a charge of inciting the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
The resolution’s introduction met with resistance from Republicans who discussed the $1.9 trillion proposal with Biden on Monday evening at the White House and warned against pursuing it through reconciliation. Many of those senators voted for the 2017 tax-cut legislation that Republican leaders passed via reconciliation without a single Democratic vote.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who employed reconciliation for both tax cuts and a failed attempt to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act under Trump, said the group of 10 Republicans who met with the president left the White House believing Biden was more interested in compromise than his staff or Schumer was.
“They’ve chosen a totally partisan path,” McConnell said of Democrats in the Senate.
Lawmakers have begun pushing for changes to the Biden plan, including Democrats who on Tuesday pushed for its cost to be offset in part by repealing a business tax break that Congress approved last year.
More than 100 lawmakers, led by Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, say the move — and a related change that would effectively raise taxes on some businesses in the years to come — could reduce federal borrowing for the aid package by as much as $250 billion.
Biden on Tuesday also faced pressure from an influential business group that had welcomed his initial proposal but is now urging him to trim his spending plans and compromise with Republicans.
In a four-page letter to Biden and congressional leaders, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said lawmakers should prioritize money for vaccine distribution, school reopening and child care facilities in their economic aid package. It asked them to tie additional months of assistance for the long-term unemployed to economic conditions in states, cutting off aid when the economy improves, and to provide less aid to unemployed workers than Biden has proposed.
The chamber also pushed Biden to reduce the number of Americans eligible to receive direct payments, citing statistics showing a majority of households earning more than $50,000 a year have not lost income in the pandemic.
Psaki told reporters Tuesday that Biden wished to send payments to a large group of families, including some with six-figure incomes. She cited a hypothetical couple in Scranton, Pa., earning $120,000 a year, and said Biden believed “they should get a check.”