After Republicans lost control of the Senate this week, President-elect Joe Biden renewed his request for $ 2,000 stimulus checks on Friday. However, at least one Democrat is opposed to the idea.
Democrats secured control of the upper house by winning the two runoff elections for the Georgia Senate, paving the way for the party to make the $ 2,000 in direct payments its leaders promised in recent weeks. With control of both chambers of Congress, Biden on Friday demanded that the bigger checks be included in the next coronavirus stimulus measure.
“We need more direct help flowing to families and small businesses, including finishing work and raising $ 2,000 for people,” he said in Delaware. “Six hundred dollars is simply not enough when you have to choose between paying the rent or putting food on the table and keeping the lights on.”
With newly elected Georgia senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, Democrats will have 50 seats in the upper house, and vice president-elect Kamala Harris now has the tiebreaker vote.
To ensure that the heaviest checks pass, Senate Democrats may need to work around Republican obstruction by ensuring a simple 51-vote majority. But at least one Democratic senator has expressed strong opposition to the $ 2,000 stimulus checks.
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In a Friday interview with O Washington Post, Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, said “absolutely no” for direct payments of $ 2,000 and emphasized that “vaccinating people is the number one job”.
“How will the money we invest now help us in the best way to get jobs back and get people employed? And I can’t say that sending another check will do that to a person who already has a check,” he said.
In a later tweet, Manchin said the next round of stimulus checks “should be targeted at those in need”.
If Manchin is opposed to the $ 2,000 checks, the new Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, will need to find at least one Republican senator for the measure to pass. Several Republicans, including Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have already strongly supported the increase in recently approved $ 600 checks to $ 2,000.
Newsweek contacted Biden’s transition team for comment.
President Donald Trump pushed to fatten the second check for $ 2,000 before signing the last coronavirus relief bill late last year. A measure to increase payments was passed by the House, but Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell blocked an independent vote.
Soon, Schumer will be the legislator who will decide the bills that reach the Senate floor. After the second round of elections in Georgia, the main Democrat said that allowing a vote on checks would be “one of the first things I want to do”.
Biden made a last-minute appeal to Georgians on the eve of the second round, promising to deliver checks for $ 2,000 if Democrats controlled all three branches of government.
“Georgia, there is no one in America with more power to make this happen than you, the citizens of Atlanta, the citizens of Georgia and this is not an exaggeration. This is literally true,” he said. “If you send Jon and the reverend to Washington, those checks for $ 2,000 will go away, restoring the hope, decency and honor of so many people who are fighting now.”
Warnock and Ossoff also campaigned with the promise to deliver $ 2,000 stimulus checks to Americans.