House, Senate put relief plan on fast track
Democrats pave way to pass stimulus without GOP votes
WASHINGTON — The House voted largely along party lines to approve a budget plan Friday that will pave the way for Congress to quickly pass President Joe Biden’s stimulus plan without votes from congressional Republicans.
The House voted 219-209 to approve the budget plan, which the Senate had passed early Friday, beginning the process of turning Biden’s stimulus proposal into legislation. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Friday that she aims to pass the stimulus plan within two weeks.
The rapid movement by congressional Democrats occurred as Biden voiced his strongest criticism to date of the Republican approach to the stimulus package, suggesting further negotiations with the GOP probably would represent an unacceptable delay to critical relief.
“Are we going to say to millions of Americans who are out of work — many out of work for six months or longer, who have been scared by this economic and public health crisis — ‘Don’t worry, hang on, things are going to get better?’” Biden said Friday in remarks at the White House. “That’s the Republican answer right now. I can’t in good conscience do that. Too many people in the nation already have suffered for too long.”
Biden’s declaration that he will not wait for Republicans represents a pivotal moment in his presidency, given his pledges to restore bipartisanship to Washington. Biden spent 40 years shaping a political identity as a figure who reaches across the aisle — often attracting mockery or derision for it — and he based his presidential campaign on pulling the country together.
The president invited Republicans to the White House for negotiations over the stimulus, and White House officials said they still would try to incorporate GOP ideas into the final package. But on Friday, Biden sounded ready to push ahead with only the Democrats’ tiny majorities reliably behind him.
“I see enormous pain in this country. A lot of folks out of work. A lot of folks going hungry, staring at the ceiling at night wondering, ‘What am I going to do tomorrow?’” Biden said. “So I’m going to act, and I’m going to act fast.”
The budget plan passed by the House will direct committees to start working on the details underlying Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package.
The package would include checks up to $1,400 for low- and moderate-income families, extended jobless benefits, and $160 billion to strengthen the public health response to the pandemic, improving the vaccine distribution and increased testing.
EARLY SENATE VOTE
After a 15-hour voting session that stretched overnight, Vice President Kamala Harris arrived early to the Senate dais, where she cast her first tiebreaking vote. The Senate adopted the budget measure by a vote of 51-50 at 5:30 a.m.
In the marathon session — known as a vote-a-rama, and for which more than 800 amendments were drafted — Senate Democrats maneuvered through a series of politically tricky amendments that Republicans sought to attach to their budget plan.
They also endorsed a number of ideas that could drive negotiations on Biden’s stimulus measure, embracing a proposal to exclude high earners from direct payments of up to $1,400 — an idea that the president and leading Democrats have already said they are open to — and the creation of a new form of child allowance for low- and middle-income families.
Despite the amendments, the process left Biden’s plan largely intact as Democrats moved forward.
“We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the majority leader. “We cannot do too little.”
Still, the proposal did not pass the Senate without some setbacks for Democrats. In a potential sign of trouble ahead for a major plank of Biden’s plan, the Senate agreed to a Republican proposal by Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, to prohibit any minimum-wage increase during the pandemic.
The measure passed by a voice vote, signaling that Democrats were not attempting to defeat it. Biden’s stimulus package would increase the wage to $15 per hour by 2025, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has been leading the push for the wage increase in the Senate, said he would not contest Ernst’s effort because he had never sought to raise it during the pandemic.
But the vote was a signal that the wage increase could be difficult to pass in an evenly split Senate, where at least one Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, is on record opposing it.
“A $15 federal minimum wage would be devastating for our hardest-hit small businesses at a time they can least afford it,” Ernst said on the Senate floor. “We should not have a one-size-fits-all policy set by Washington politicians.”
Proponents of raising the wage believe it can still be included in the final plan, forcing a tough vote for Democrats opposed to the increase but who won’t want to vote against the entire stimulus package.
“We need to end the crisis of starvation wages in Iowa and around the United States,” Sanders said.
Pelosi said Thursday that Democrats would not give up on trying to raise the wage to $15 even outside the stimulus measure should it be ruled out by the Senate parliamentarian at a later date.
“It’s not the last bill we’ll pass,” Pelosi said. “This is the rescue package.”
FLURRY OF AMENDMENTS
Among the Republican proposals that fell were measures to reduce funding to states like New York, which is under investigation over coronavirus deaths in nursing homes; to prohibit funding for schools that do not reopen for in-person classes once teachers are vaccinated; and to block funds from so-called jurisdictions that do not cooperate with federal law enforcement on immigration matters.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., chairwoman of the education committee, called the effort to put restrictions on sending aid to schools “simply a political show.”
“If we withhold funds and schools cannot implement health safety protocols, then we are acting counter to actually getting students back in the classroom,” Murray said.
Democrats did, however, rally around some amendments from Republicans. The Senate, by unanimous vote, agreed to a motion from Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, both Republicans of Florida, to block tax increases on small businesses during the pandemic.
Lawmakers also backed a measure from Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., to establish a fund to provide grants to food and drinking establishments affected by the coronavirus crisis. And, by a vote of 58-42, they agreed to prohibit stimulus money from going to people in the country illegally — something that is not included in Biden’s economic rescue plan.
The eight Democrats who voted with Republicans on that last measure included John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Gary Peters of Michigan and Manchin.
The Senate also passed an amendment 99-1 that would prevent the $1,400 in direct checks in Biden’s proposal from going to “upper-income taxpayers.”
But the measure, led by Sens. Susan Collins and Manchin, is ultimately symbolic and nonbinding and does not specify at what level a person qualifies as upper-income.
Biden told CBS that he was “prepared to negotiate” on the upper boundary for where payments would phase out. “Middle-class folks need help,” he said. “But you don’t need to get any help to someone making 300,000 bucks or $250,000.”
DEFICIT QUESTION
The Friday votes are the latest sign of a more partisan effort underway in pursuing final passage of Biden’s relief package through a narrow majority.
Top Democrats in both chambers say they are moving with an increased sense of urgency, as the economic recovery from the pandemic continues to show signs of stalling. Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers have called for slowing down the relief effort and substantially scaling back the $1.9 trillion effort, which conservatives have derided as unnecessarily increasing the federal deficit.
Biden on Friday accused Republicans of “rediscovering” the danger of the deficit, which rose during the Trump administration with tax cuts.
A new jobs report out Friday provided the latest glimpse of the faltering economy, which added just 49,000 jobs in January, an anemic amount of growth, coming a month after the labor market shed jobs.
“We now have three disappointing months in a row. We have to admit we’ve stalled out. There’s a danger of double-dip recession,” Austan Goolsbee, who served as a senior economist in the Obama administration, said Friday on CNBC while talking about the January jobs report.
Indeed, Democrats have been rushing the stimulus package through, in part, because tens of millions of Americans are set to begin to losing federal unemployment benefits in mid-March.
Biden on Friday hosted House Democratic leaders, including Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., at the White House to make the case for swiftly passing the relief effort. He also cited increases in suicides, drug abuse and violence against women during the pandemic.
Pelosi also told House Democrats in a letter Friday that they aim to “finish our work” on the relief package before the end of February. Asked if she could guarantee the legislation would be passed before unemployment aid expires for millions of Americans in midMarch, Pelosi said: “Absolutely. Without any question. Before then.”
“Hopefully in a two-week period of time, we will send something over to the Senate,” Pelosi said, flanked by the Democratic committee chairmen. “We hope to be able to put vaccines in people’s arms; money in people’s pockets; children safely in schools; and workers in their jobs.”
Information for this article was contributed by Jeff Stein, Erica Werner and Rachel Siegel of The Washington Post; by Luke Broadwater, Hailey Fuchs and Jim Tankersley of The New York Times; and by Josh Boak, Zeke Miller and Lisa Mascaro of The Associated Press.