The House of Representatives approved the final version of Joe Biden’s Covid relief legislation, sending the $ 1.9 trillion package to the president’s desk.
When Biden signs the bill on Friday, many of its provisions will go into effect immediately:
The government said it plans that millions of direct payments of $ 1,400 from the account – or stimulus checks – will reach people’s bank accounts by the end of March. The package runs through early summer, a Covid-era federal unemployment program that gives laid-off Americans $ 300 a week, in addition to their state unemployment benefits. The federal government will share hundreds of billions of dollars in spending on legislation for state and local governments at the forefront of responding to the pandemic. An expanded child tax credit for families will be included in the tax code.
The legislation passed a majority party vote in the House on Wednesday after no Senate Republicans voted in favor last week.
“How do you say no to lift 50 percent of America’s poor children out of poverty?” Spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi said in a plenary speech on Wednesday, just before the House vote, foreshadowing the ensuing political battle between Democrats and Republicans over the bill.
At a price of $ 1.9 trillion, historic legislation is estimated to be the second most expensive in US history after the initial coronavirus response package last March, known as the CARES Act, which was worth about $ 2 , 2 trillion.
Biden’s so-called American Rescue Plan Act is twice as expensive as the stimulus package approved by the Obama administration in 2009 to boost the United States economy as it recovered from the Great Recession and the housing and financial crises.
The White House praised Covid’s relief legislation as “the most progressive piece of legislation in history”, pointing to economic predictions that it will increase to one-third of Americans who currently live below the poverty line.
Democrats come together
Progressive agitators, like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, criticized Senate Democrats for reducing legislation – restricting eligibility for stimulus checks and increasing federal weekly unemployment checks from $ 400 to $ 300, per example. But when it was time for the House to vote, the majority fell in line, uniting a wide range of Democrats from across the ideological spectrum.
The approval of the Covid bill is a great time for Democrats at the start of Biden’s presidency, showing that they can come together to deliver aid to Americans, despite the deep gaps in the political and governmental approach that have spread through the party in recent years.
“I’m so excited, I just can’t hide it!” a visible and audible animation, said Pelosi, as he took the podium at his news conference earlier this week.
“It is a remarkable, historic and transformative piece of legislation,” said the speaker.
Although the bill is now in the hands of the executive branch to administer to the American people, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress know that the battle for the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) is just beginning.
Republicans attacked the bill as, in the words of minority leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, “a list of priorities on the left that predates the pandemic and does not meet the needs of American families.”
In a speech on Wednesday, the Republican Party leader condemned the $ 600 million disbursement of the bill to San Francisco, Pelosi’s hometown, part of the Republicans’ effort to reshape the package as a Democratic reward for their cronies. and allies across the country.
But San Francisco is not getting any special treatment, the Democrats responded: that $ 600 million is less than 0.2% of the $ 350 billion of total legislation spending to boost state and local governments.
Public relations war looming
Still, Democrats know that they face the frightening public relations war against Republicans for the hearts and minds of Americans who were desperate for help in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic that affected their economic well-being as well as their social life.
The GOP is preparing to retake majorities in the House and Senate in the mid-term exams of 2022
From Biden and Pelosi to the most humble supporters of Congress, Democrats agreed on how they plan to win Covid’s public relations war: ARPA’s shameless self-promotion.
“In the coming weeks and months, we should take every opportunity we have to explain exactly how the American Rescue Plan will work for the American people,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer wrote to his colleagues on Tuesday.
Schumer urged his fellow Democrats to join him in an advertising campaign for historic pandemic relief legislation, urging them to take every opportunity to publicize the project’s many “people-oriented provisions”: US stimulus checks. $ 1,400 for more than eight out of 10 American households, an extension to the Covid-era federal unemployment benefits summer program, the expanded child tax credit and several other first-rate measures.
“We cannot be ashamed to tell the American people how this historic legislation directly helps them,” wrote the Democratic leader in the Senate.
Mr. Biden agrees with that strategy.
In a conference call with House Democrats last week, the president explained how the Obama administration paid a political price for being too humble after sanctioning the $ 815 billion stimulus package in 2009 to try to get out of the Great Recession.
“We did not adequately explain what we had done. Barack was so modest, ”lamented Biden on the call. “I always said, ‘Tell people what we did’. He said, ‘We don’t have time. I will not take a victory lap. ‘And we pay a price for that, ironically, for that humility. “
President, First Lady Jill Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris will take an advertising trip next week to sell the project to any American who might be skeptical of its layout and outlines, the White House press secretary announced. , Jen Psaki, on Wednesday.
Mr. Biden will also appoint an employee to implement and enforce the law.
An initial advantage?
Despite the scruples of progressives with the new Covid package, as well as the total rejection of Republicans, the project was widely supported in public polls across the ideological spectrum.
A Monmouth University survey last Wednesday found that more than six out of ten Americans supported Biden’s stimulus plan.
This should facilitate the work of Democrats when it comes to publicizing legislation to defend their majorities in Congress in the 2022 elections.
Congressional Democratic Campaign Committee (DCCC) chairman Sean Patrick Maloney has already suggested that Covid’s relief bill will be “a big piece of the puzzle” in his party’s plans to maintain control of the House.
“Whenever you are making a delivery to the American people, you are strengthening your position politically. So it will strengthen us because it is a good policy, ”he told NBC News in an interview on Tuesday.
“We must shout from the top that we are passing historic legislation that will restart the economy and end the pandemic.”