President Joe Biden scored his first legislative win because the House of Representatives handed his $1.9 trillion coronavirus aid package deal early Saturday, although Democrats confronted challenges to their hopes of utilizing the invoice to boost the minimal wage.
Democrats who management the chamber handed the sweeping measure by a principally party-line vote of 219 to 212 and despatched it on to the Senate, the place Democrats deliberate a legislative maneuver to permit them to move it with out the help of Republicans.
The American Rescue Plan would pay for vaccines and medical provides and ship a brand new spherical of emergency monetary help to households, small companies and state and native governments.
Democrats mentioned the package deal was wanted to battle a pandemic that has killed greater than 500,000 Americans and thrown thousands and thousands out of labor.
“The American people need to know that their government is there for them,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi mentioned in debate on the House ground.
Republicans, who’ve broadly backed earlier COVID-19 spending, mentioned a lot of the present package deal was not vital, highlighting parts like a subway close to Pelosi’s San Francisco district. Only 9% of the whole would go immediately towards combating the virus, they mentioned.
“It just throws out money without accountability,” House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy mentioned.
The House vote amounted to a profitable first check for Democrats, who maintain a slim 221-211 majority within the chamber. Progressives and moderates within the get together who are sometimes at odds will face harder battles forward on immigration and local weather change initiatives that Biden needs to push.
The president has centered his first weeks in workplace on tackling the best US public well being disaster in a century, which has upended most points of American life. Democrats purpose to get the invoice to him to signal into legislation earlier than mid-March, when enhanced unemployment advantages and another varieties of help are on account of expire.
The invoice’s big-ticket gadgets embody $1,400 direct funds to people, a $400-per-week federal unemployment profit by means of Aug. 29, and assist for these in issue paying rents and residential mortgages in the course of the pandemic.
The motion now strikes to the Senate, the place Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris could must solid a tie-breaking vote in a chamber the place Republicans management 50 seats and Democrats and their allies management the opposite 50.
Fate of minimal wage hike unclear
Democrats must kind out methods to deal with a proposed minimum-wage improve, which can must be stripped from the invoice because of the sophisticated guidelines that govern the Senate.
The House-passed invoice would elevate the nationwide hourly minimal wage for the primary time since 2009, to $15 from $7.25.
The improve is a prime precedence for progressive Democrats.
However, the Senate’s guidelines skilled mentioned on Thursday that the wage hike didn’t qualify for particular therapy that permits the remainder of the invoice to be handed with a easy majority, fairly than the 60 votes wanted to advance most laws within the 100-seat chamber.
Pelosi predicted the aid invoice will move Congress with or with out the rise, and mentioned Democrats wouldn’t hand over on the matter.
It isn’t clear whether or not the minimum-wage hike would have survived the Senate even when it have been to be saved within the invoice. At least two Senate Democrats oppose it, together with most Republicans.
Some senators are floating a smaller improve, to the vary of $10 to $12 per hour, whereas Democrats are contemplating a penalty for big companies that don’t voluntarily pay a $15 wage, in line with a Democratic aide.
Efforts to craft a bipartisan coronavirus help invoice fizzled early on, shortly after Biden was sworn in as president on Jan. 20, following a sequence of bipartisan payments enacted in 2020.
