COVID-19’s spending legislation policy is complicated.
President Biden and former President Donald Trump, who do not agree much, pushed for direct payments of $ 2,000 for most Americans this winter, and the Republican governor of West Virginia is supporting the COVID-19 aid package of $ 1.9 trillion from Biden while his state is a Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, prefers a smaller package. The White House is meeting privately with a group of Senate Republicans who have proposed an alternative $ 618 billion package, The Associated Press reports, even when Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, reject that amount as insufficient and urge Democrats to grow quickly.
Biden and his advisers “publicly praise the virtues of bipartisan collaboration”, but “they are not polyanaish about it,” reports Sam Stein in Political. “They know that there is no recent history to suggest that such collaboration is coming.”, But “within the White House there is still it is no surprise that Republicans today are no longer interested in working with them to relieve COVID. Not because they believe Republicans philosophically support the bill, but because there are clear political incentives for them to do so.
Biden and his aides have repeatedly noted that just because the budget reconciliation process would allow Democrats to approve much of the $ 1.9 trillion package without Republican support, Republicans can still vote for the package.
If Democrats follow the route of budgetary reconciliation, the ten Senate Republicans can “oppose the measure without being able to interrupt it or work to shape it, promise to vote and get credit for the benefits it brings”, he reports. Stein. “Put another way: Republicans can vote for a bill that includes billions of dollars of aid for states, large amounts of money for vaccine distribution and a $ 1,400 stimulus check for most Americans. Or they they can object to it on the grounds that the price is too steep, or the minimum wage increase is too high, or the process is too hasty. “And if they do, a senior government official told Stein,” they won’t get credit “for those $ 1,400 checks.
Democrats only have the option of party line because they unexpectedly won both seats in the Senate in a runoff election in Georgia, Stein notes, and a “political lesson from this episode is bluntly: it is better to be on the side of giving money to women. people”. Trump understood that. Time will tell what the Senate Republicans will decide.
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Originally published