A look inside the $1.9t COVID-19 relief bill

‘American Rescue Plan’ advances in Congress along strict party lines, with funding disputes

The pretense of bipartisanship in Washington gave way to party politics during the passage of the latest coronavirus relief funding package.

No Republicans have voted for the new bill in either the House or Senate, whch brings total virus relief spending to more than $5 trilion.

“After Stimulus Victory in Senate, Reality Sinks in: Bipartisanship Is Dead,” exclaimed a headline in The New York Times after the vote.

The $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” passed the US Senate early Saturday and now goes back to the House of Representatives after Senate amendments. The House is expected to vote again on the measure this week before sending it to President Joe Biden for his signature.

Most Democrats praised the bill, while Republicans said it contained too much pork, or special interest funding.

“The American Rescue Plan will go down as one of the most sweeping federal recovery efforts in history,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said before the vote.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called the bill “a parade of left-wing pet projects that they are ramming through during a pandemic”.

Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican, said, “It is really unfortunate that at a time when a president who came into office suggesting that he wanted to work with Republicans and create solutions in a bipartisan way and try to bring the country together and unify, the first thing out of the gate is a piece of legislation that simply is done with one-party rule.”

“Looking at the behavior of the Republican Party here in Washington, it’s fair to conclude that it is going to be very difficult, particularly the way leadership has positioned itself, to get meaningful cooperation from that side of the aisle on things that matter,” said Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland.

The bill’s highlights include $1,400 stimulus checks for individuals making $75,000 a year or less. There will be a reduced, scaled payment for those with adjusted gross income up to a maximum of $80,000. For heads of households, the income level is $112,500 or below, and for married couples filing jointly, $150,000 or below.

In order to win support from moderate Democrats in a Senate that is split 50-50, Democrats removed a provision that would have mandated a national $15 minimum hourly wage and agreed to reduce monthly enhanced unemployment benefits from $400 to $300, through Sept 6. The $300 would be on top of what filers receive through their state unemployment insurance programs.

The changes angered the Democratic Party’s progressive faction, particularly on the minimum-wage measure, so it will be up to both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the president to help usher through the bill before March 14, when federal unemployment benefits are scheduled to expire.

“Any person who thinks that a $15 minimum wage is a crazy socialist agenda is living in a dystopian capitalist nightmare,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said Sunday on MSNBC.

“I think it’s important to recognize that in the states Republicans have won, a $15 minimum wage has also passed,” she said. “It’s extremely important to understand this isn’t a partisan issue.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki praised the bill Monday at her daily press briefing.

“Senator (Joe) Manchin and Senator (Bernie) Sanders and a range of Democrats in between just voted to support a $1.9 trillion package that is the most progressive piece of legislation in history,” Psaki said.

Funding for a rail project near Pelosi’s congressional district in California was removed. The Senate parliamentarian ruled that the $140 million appropriation wasn’t allowed under a rule that monitors unrelated items in budget reconciliation bills.

The legislation also would provide $350 billion to state and local governments and nearly $130 billion for schools, among other earmarks.

Some of the money allocated to the state and local governments has been criticized by Republicans as “blue state (Democratic-controlled) bailouts”.

California would get about $40 billion in aid while it recently ran a $10 billion budget surplus.

McConnell argued that only 9 percent of the latest spending measure is dedicated to coronavirus treatment and 1 percent to the vaccine.

He said before the final vote Saturday that the Senate “has never spent $2 trillion in a more haphazard way or a less democratic process”.

The bill provides $46 billion to expand federal, state and local testing for COVID-19 and to enhance contract-tracing capabilities with new investments to expand laboratory capacity and set up mobile testing units. It also contains about $14 billion to speed up the distribution and administration of COVID-19 vaccines across the country.

Also in the bill is $86 billion to bail out more than 180 underfunded union pensions. The legislation would not require that the funds be paid back to the government.

Without the taxpayer funds, “more than a million retired truck drivers, retail clerks, builders and others could be forced to forgo retirement income”, the Times reported.

“Just to show you how bad this bill is, there’s more money in this to bail out union pension funds than all the money combined for vaccine distribution and testing,” Senator Bill Hagerty, a Tennessee Republican, told the Times.

According to forbes.com, $470 million in the bill also would double the budgets of The Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment of the Arts and the Humanities.

The bill provides about $30 billion to help low-income households and the unemployed afford rent and utilities, and to assist the homeless with vouchers and other support. States and tribes would receive an additional $10 billion for homeowners struggling with mortgage payments because of the pandemic.

A slew of amendments proposed by GOP senators were mostly defeated by Democrats.

One by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, would have blocked stimulus checks from going to undocumented immigrants.

Democrats defeated other amendments to block payments from going to those who are incarcerated or who were convicted of a felony in the past 15 years.

Another rejected amendment would have banned COVID-19 relief funds from going to schools that allow transgender women to compete on women’s sports teams.

Also in the bill is about $130 billion in additional help to schools for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. The money would be used to reduce class sizes and modify classrooms to enhance social distancing, install ventilation systems and purchase personal protective equipment.

Spending for colleges and universities would be boosted by about $40 billion, with the money used to defray an institution’s pandemic-related expenses and to provide emergency aid to students to cover expenses such as food and housing and computer equipment.

Any person who thinks that a $15 minimum wage is a crazy socialist agenda is living in a dystopian capitalist nightmare.”

US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York