- Senator Bernie Sanders said on Sunday that Democrats can’t wait to approve a COVID-19 aid package.
- On CNN, Sanders said Democrats will use reconciliation “as soon as possible” to approve relief.
- Reconciliation would prohibit the use of obstruction, which to override requires a vote of 60.
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Senator Bernie Sanders said on Sunday that Democrats must act quickly when approving a relief package for COVID-19, now that President Joe Biden has taken office and Democrats have tight control over the House and the Senate.
“Well, I don’t know what the word commitment means,” Sanders, a Vermont independent, told CNN’s Dana Bash during an appearance in the “State of the Union” when asked how to find common ground with Republicans on relief. “I know that working families are living in more economic desperation today since the great depression. If Republicans are willing to work with us to tackle this crisis: Welcome – let’s do it.”
But Sanders said Democrats should not wait for Republican support to approve relief, telling Bash that Democrats should use a process called reconciliation to get relief more quickly in the hands of Americans. As Bash and Sanders pointed out, the process requires only a simple majority vote to pass the legislation, as it does not allow the use of obstruction that requires 60 votes to overturn. Reconciliation was first used in 1980 and is normally reserved for budget and spending legislation, as noted by the Politico.
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Without reconciliation, Republicans could use the obstruction to prevent Democrats from passing laws, despite their majority in the House, Senate and White House occupation. Democrats and Republicans have a uniform division in the Senate, but Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, serves as president of the Senate and will vote in the event of a tie, giving Democrats limited control of the chamber.
—State of the Union (@CNNSotu) January 24, 2021
“But what we can’t do is wait weeks and weeks and months and months to move forward,” said Sanders on Sunday. “We need to act now. This is what the American people want.”
The tactic was used by Republicans during the Trump administration, when the Republican Party tried unsuccessfully to overturn parts of the Affordable Care Act. It was also used by the Republican Party to pass tax bills, as Sanders noted. Although Bash noted that Sanders criticized his Republican colleagues for using the tactic, he defended his previous criticism in Sunday’s interview, saying that “the devil is in the details”.
“We are going to use reconciliation … to pass legislation that is desperately needed by working families in this country now,” he said.
Sanders added that he was proposing two reconciliation bills, the first of which would prioritize direct relief to Americans and efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic. The second, he said, would contain efforts to rebuild the struggling economy.
Sanders told Bash on Sunday that Senate Democrats could simultaneously focus on former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial and tackle the pandemic.
“We have to do everything,” he said. “You don’t have time to sit for weeks on impeachment and not have vaccines in people’s arms. You don’t have time to worry about vaccines or the fact that children in the United States are starving.
“We need to break with this old approach that it takes years and years for the Senate to do anything,” he added. “We are in a crisis right now. We can chew gum and walk at the same time.”