Democrats are much closer to achieving their first big goal of the Joe Biden era. On Saturday morning, the U.S. House passed a $ 1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill in an almost online vote.
Vote 219-212 allows the U.S. Senate to formally pass legislation, which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) intends to do immediately. But the party is under gunfire: many Democrats see March 14 — the day millions of unemployment benefits ran out — as a de facto deadline to get the so-called American Rescue Plan to Biden’s table.
The legislation would supplement the relief of the unemployed by extending a weekly check of $ 400 until August. It also fulfills a number of other promises made by Democrats in 2020: $ 1,400 in direct stimulus control to supplement the $ 600 checks that came out in December, $ 1 billion to speed up the distribution of vaccines, funds for schools and help for state and local governments. The House bill passed with an increase in the federal minimum wage, but the Senate chief of staff found that the proposal did not conform to the rules of fast-track monitoring of a bill in the House. high. It effectively kills the prospects of a net pay rise as part of COVID legislation.
Previous rounds of major COVID legislation passed the House with the support of bipartisanship, but Friday’s vote confirmed Biden’s first relief effort to go a partisan path. The Republican Party, surrounded by fighting in the wake of the January 6 attack and the ouster of Donald Trump, has found reasons for unity to oppose the relief plan, which they criticized as an inflated vehicle for the articles of the liberal wish list. Democrats held out hope that at least a few Republicans would vote for the plan, but not a single Republican lawmaker backed the legislation and their chances of picking up many Republicans from the Senate seem weak.