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      Biden's FDR moment? President in New Deal-like push that could cement his legacy

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      Joe Biden came to power promising a New Deal-like economic agenda that would not only combat the Covid-19 pandemic, which has now claimed more than half a million lives in the US and caused unemployment not seen since the Great Depression, but also confront the deep-rooted disparities it has exposed.After a blitz of executive orders in the opening days of his presidency, Biden is on the verge of achieving the first major piece of his multi-pronged relief and recovery plan, a $1.9tn coronavirus stimulus package expected to reach his desk by the end of next week.But the partisan tightrope Biden has walked to advance the sweeping pandemic relief bill – which enjoys broad public support – likely foreshadows even greater challenges that lie ahead as he pivots from “rescue” mode to his next and possibly biggest legislative act: a multi-trillion dollar plan to rebuild the country’s ailing infrastructure.“The American Rescue Plan is largely about relief – for the millions of people unemployed, for distributing vaccines, for opening schools safely,” said Virginia congressman Don Beyers, the Democratic vice-chairman of the joint economic committee.“This next bill can be almost completely characterized as investment in the future.”Even more so than the stimulus plan, a wide-ranging jobs and infrastructure bill would weigh the president’s desire for bipartisanship against his promise to enact progressive economic policies that could forge his legacy. With the barest of majorities in Congress, Biden has little room for error if he hopes to succeed in a policy quest that bedeviled his predecessors.In theory, infrastructure is an area where Democrats and Republicans can find common ground. Fixing bridges, roads and broadband networks has long unified Americans and elected leaders. Yet there is little bipartisan agreement over the size and scale of such a package.“He wants to move as quickly as possible,” Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat and the chairman of the House transportation and infrastructure committee, said after a bipartisan meeting with Biden on Thursday. “He wants it to be very big and he feels that this is the key to the recovery package.”Emerging from the same meeting, Missouri congressman Sam Graves, the top Republican on the transportation committee, tempered expectations of a deal.“A highway bill cannot grow into a multi-trillion dollar catch-all bill, or it will lose Republican support,” he warned in a statement. “Republicans won’t support another Green New Deal disguising itself as a transportation bill.”During his presidential campaign, Biden cast the infrastructure effort as an economic road map to create jobs and revitalize industry, saying it would be the “largest mobilization of public investment since” the second world war.As proposed, his “Build Back Better” infrastructure plan would spend trillions of dollars to make the US economy more sustainable, more equitable and more competitive, particularly with China, with ambitious investment in public transportation, sustainable housing, electric vehicles and upgrading the power grid to be carbon pollution-free by 2035. Funded by a mix of tax increases on corporations and the wealthy, his agenda promises to create millions of union jobs and direct significant resources to communities of color disproportionately affected by the consequences of climate change.As talks intensify between the White House and Congress, progressives and environmental groups are contemplating even bigger proposals, pointing to the recent crisis in Texas that left millions without water and electricity during a severe winter storm, as a reason to act urgently – and unilaterally, if necessary. Some moderate Democrats are angling for a more cautious, bipartisan approach, while Republicans and business groups are setting conditions for their cooperation, as fights brew over how to pay.The White House has said it is premature to talk about the shape of an infrastructure package, at least until Congress passes the relief bill. But this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats were already proceeding with the “recovery” part of Biden’s agenda.“Its’ an exciting time,” she said.Haunted by the slow-paced recovery that followed the financial collapse of 2008, when the Obama administration enacted a slimmed-down stimulus package amid fears of inflation and Republican objections to rising national debt, only to suffer major defeats in midterm elections, Democrats are eager to act boldly while they have unified control of Congress.“If you have an opportunity to go big, go big,” Beyer said. “You’re going to pay a political cost one way or the other, so you might as well get as much as you possibly can when you get the opportunity to do it.”Sean McElwee, co-founder and head of the progressive polling firm, Data for Progress, said it was good policy and good politics to pursue an ambitious economic agenda. Voters prioritize results over bipartisanship, he said, arguing that Democrats could defy political history in the 2022 congressional midterms if they act boldly on the economy.“Joe Biden understands that Democrats will be judged in 2022 by how he has handled the economy and the pandemic,” McElwee said, citing broad public support for the president’s relief plan and the enduring appeal of infrastructure spending. “The political benefits of going small just aren’t there any more.”Biden has held several high-profile meetings to build support for a bipartisan package, including with top officials, labor leaders and lawmakers involved in drafting infrastructure legislation.Ahead of his meeting with lawmakers on Thursday, Biden said the group, which included transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, planned to discuss “what we’re going to do to make sure we, once again, lead the world across the board on infrastructure”.After spending decades in the Senate and eight years as vice-president to Barack Obama, Biden is plainly aware of the complex matrix of political and ideological considerations that have felled previous attempts to pass a major infrastructure bill.Yet since the onset of the pandemic, and the ensuing economic crisis, Biden has embraced a far more aspirational agenda that intentionally echoes the vision of Franklin Roosevelt, whose New Deal programs helped lift the country out of the Great Depression and transformed the role of government in American life.Despite his reputation for compromise and preference for bipartisanship, Biden largely rejected appeals from Republicans to dramatically shrink his $1.9tn stimulus package, which includes $1,400 payments to tens of millions of families, extended unemployment benefits as well as tens of billions of dollars for vaccine distribution and coronavirus testing.In pitching his relief plan, Biden has insisted that now is time to “go big,” and that the greater risk is doing too little, not too much. But as he looks beyond the immediate crisis, it remains unclear how the president will choose to proceed with the rest of his agenda.Progressives, largely encouraged by the opening weeks of his presidency, are now pressuring Biden to adopt the same go-it-alone approach for the rest of his agenda. Attempting to forge a consensus with Republicans, they warn, would almost certainly result in a bill that falls short of his campaign promises to address the deep-seated, structural inequalities in the economy exacerbated by the pandemic.“I think Biden understands that there is a real opportunity here to deliver lasting, legacy-defining improvements to America that otherwise would never get done,” said Faiz Shakir, who was the campaign manager for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential run. “He wanted an FDR-modeled presidency and this would be a huge, huge investment in working people on a scale that we have not seen since FDR.”The urgency of the pandemic has helped fuse public opinion – and a factious Democratic caucus – around the need for a massive stimulus bill. But spending trillions more on infrastructure with initiatives that reach far beyond the present emergency is a different battle entirely, said Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.Biden campaigned on his plans to control the pandemic – and a promise to end hyper-partisanship in Washington. A plan that achieves neither goal could risk a “huge political backlash” beginning with the midterms next year, Galston said.“History is full of administrations who came to power, over-read their mandate and then went too far and evoked a reaction,” he said. More

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      House set to approve $1.9tn Covid aid bill despite minimum wage setback

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      The US House of Representatives is aiming to pass Joe Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus aid bill on Friday in what would be his first big legislative win, although marred by the news that a favored minimum wage hike would have to be tossed out.A spirited and potentially long debate was expected, as most Republicans oppose the cost of the bill that would pay for vaccines and other medical supplies to battle a Covid-19 pandemic that has killed more than 500,000 Americans and thrown millions out of work.The measure would also send a new round of emergency financial aid to households, small businesses and state and local governments.A group of Senate Republicans had offered Biden a slimmed-down alternative, but the White House and some economists insist a big package is needed.Biden has focused his first weeks in office on tackling the greatest public health crisis in a century, which has upended most aspects of American life.Democrats control the House by a 221-211 margin, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi is counting on nearly all of her rank and file to get the bill passed before sending it to a 50-50 Senate, where the Democratic vice-president, Kamala Harris, holds the tie-breaking vote.Embedded in the House bill is a federal minimum wage increase, which would be the first since 2009 and would gradually bump it up to $15 an hour in 2025 from the current $7.25 rate.But the future of the wage hike was dealt a serious blow on Thursday, when the Senate parliamentarian ruled that it could not be allowed in the Senate version of the coronavirus bill under that chamber’s “reconciliation” rules.The special rules allow the legislation to advance in the Senate with a simple majority of the 100 senators, instead of the 60 needed for most legislation.Biden has not given up on raising the minimum wage to $15, a top White House economic adviser said on Friday.A higher wage “is the right thing to do”, White House national economic council director, Brian Deese, said in an interview on MSNBC.“We’re going to consult with our congressional allies, congressional leaders today to talk about a path forward, about how we can make progress urgently on what is an urgent issue.”Meanwhile, lawmakers must also act on the coronavirus stimulus package, Deese said.The $15 minimum wage figure had already faced opposition in the Senate from most Republicans and at least two Democrats, which would have been enough to sink the plan. An array of senators are talking about a smaller increase, in the range of $10 to $12 an hour.In a statement after the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling, Pelosi said: “House Democrats believe that the minimum wage hike is necessary.”She said it would stay in the House version of the coronavirus bill.In arguing for passage of the relief bill, Pelosi cited opinion polls indicating the support of a significant majority of Americans who have been battered by the yearlong pandemic.“It’s about putting vaccinations in the arm, money in the pocket, children in the schools, workers in their jobs,” Pelosi told reporters on Thursday. “It’s what this country needs.“Among the big-ticket items in the bill are $1,400 direct payments to individuals, a $400-per-week federal unemployment benefit through 29 August and help for those having difficulties paying their rent and home mortgages during the pandemic.An array of business interests also have weighed in behind Biden’s America Rescue Plan Act, as the bill is called.Republicans have criticized the legislation as a “liberal wishlist giveaway” that fails to dedicate enough money to reopening schools that have been partially operating with “virtual” learning during the pandemic.The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, complained it was “too costly, too corrupt”. While Republicans for months have blocked a new round of aid to state and local governments, McCarthy said he was open to his home state of California getting some of the bill’s $350bn in funding, despite a one-time $15bn budget surplus.Efforts to craft a bipartisan coronavirus aid bill fizzled early on, shortly after Biden was sworn in as president on 20 January, following a series of bipartisan bills enacted in 2020 that totaled around $4tn. More

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      'Hopefully it makes history': Fight for $15 closes in on mighty win for US workers

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      Fear was the overwhelming emotion Alvin Major felt when, on a chilly November morning in 2012, he went on strike at the Brooklyn KFC where he worked.
      “Everybody was scared,” said Major. He may have been fearful, but what Major didn’t know was that he was about to make American history – an early leader in a labor movement that some historians now see as the most successful in the US in 50 years.
      Major was paid just $7.25 an hour as a cook at KFC, but the consequences of losing his job were dire, as his family was already struggling to make the next month’s rent. “Everybody was scared about going back to work,” he said. “Nobody visualized what this movement would come to.”
      The New York strike by hundreds of majority Black and brown New York fast-food workers was, at the time, the largest in US history – but it would be dwarfed by what was to come. Two years later, strikes had spread across America, and fast-food workers in 33 countries across six continents had joined a growing global movement for better pay and stronger rights on the job.
      In eight years, what became the Fight for $15 movement has grown into an international organization that has successfully fought for a rise in minimum wage in states across the US, redefined the political agenda in the US, and acted as a springboard for other movements, including Black Lives Matter. It now stands perilously close to winning one of the biggest worker-led rights victories in decades.
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      This Tuesday, fast-food workers will walk out again, hoping to push through a change that will affect tens of millions of American workers.
      For Major, now 55, it all began in a hall in Brooklyn, where union and community activists had convened a meeting of fast-food workers to see what pressure they could bring on an industry notorious for its low wages and poor conditions, and a state that had shown those workers little interest.
      With a platform to speak, the workers talked about “how you had to be on food stamps, get rent assistance, all these kinds of things, and we’re working for these companies that are making billions”, said Major.
      At one point, a worker showed the burns on his arm he had suffered at work. In a show of solidarity, workers across the room others rolled up their sleeves to show their scars too. Even when injured on the job, workers said, they were too scared to take time off.
      This was not how Major imagined America to be when he moved to the US from Guyana in 2000. “In our family, with 14 kids, my dad’s wife never worked a day. My dad used to work, he took care of us, we had a roof over our head, we went to school, we had meals every day, he had his own transportation.”
      In America, “the greatest, most powerful and richest country in the history of the world”, he found “[that] you have to work, your wife has to work, when your kids reach an age they have to work – and still you could barely make it”.
      Industry lobbying allied to Republican and – until relatively recently – Democratic opposition has locked the US’s minimum wage at $7.25 since the last raise in 2009. Now a raise to $15 looks set to be included in Joe Biden’s $1.9tn Covid relief package – although it will still face fierce opposition.
      Even Biden, who campaigned on the raise, has expressed doubt about whether it can pass. But more progressive Democrats including longtime champion Senator Bernie Sanders are determined to push it through, and it remains in the House Covid relief bill.

      Rep. Pramila Jayapal
      (@RepJayapal)
      I’m thrilled to announce that after working with leadership, we’ve secured a $15 minimum wage in the House’s COVID relief bill!This provision would lift nearly 1 million people out of poverty. It’s long overdue that Congress enacts a minimum wage that is a living wage.

      February 8, 2021

      The stakes are huge. The Congressional Budget Office said this week that 27 million Americans would be affected by the increase, and that 900,000 would be lifted out of poverty at a time when low-wage workers – and especially people of color – have suffered most during the pandemic. The CBO also said the increase would lead to 1.4m job losses and increase the federal budget deficit by $54bn over the next 10 years.
      Other economists have disputed the CBO’s job-loss predictions – the Economic Policy Institute called them “wrong, and inappropriately inflated”. The long-running debate about the real cost of raising the minimum age will no doubt continue. What is certain is that Biden will face enormous political blowback if his campaign promise to raise the minimum wage falls so early in his presidency – a promise that during his campaign he argued was central to his plans to address racial inequality.
      That backlash will also cross party lines – at least outside Washington. The US may be as politically divided as it has been since the civil war, but polling shows the majority of Americans support increasing the minimum wage no matter their chosen party. In November 60% of voters approved a ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2026 even as they voted to re-elect Donald Trump.
      More people voted for that ballot initiative than voted for either presidential candidate in the state. With Florida, seven states plus the District of Columbia have now pledged to increase their minimum wage to $15 or higher, according to the National Employment Law Project (Nelp) and a record 74, cities, counties and states will raise their minimum wages in 2021.
      The movement, and this widespread support, has changed the political landscape, pushing Democratic politicians, including Biden, Hillary Clinton and the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, to back a $15 minimum wage, against their earlier qualms.
      Cuomo called a $13 minimum wage a “non-starter” in February 2015. By July, he was racing California to get it into law.
      In the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, Clinton went from supporting a raise to $12 an hour to $15 as Sanders made ground on the issue. Even Saturday Night Live parodied the pair arguing about who was most for a $15 higher wage.

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      Big companies including Amazon, Target and Disney have all moved to $15, or pledged to do so. One of Biden’s first executive orders called for federal contractors to pay employees a $15 minimum wage. The federal holdout would be the movement’s biggest win to date, but there is little arguing that they have made significant progress without it – not least for Alvin Major, who now has a union job earning over $17 an hour working at JFK airport and who says he is no longer worried about his bills.
      For Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), this is “the David and Goliath story of our time”. She puts the public support down to the “pervasiveness of underpaid, low-wage work”.
      “Every family in America knows somebody that’s trying to make ends meet through a minimum-wage job. And the pandemic has revealed that essential work in a way that many people hadn’t noticed before, and they now understand how grocery store clerks, nursing home workers, janitors, airport workers, security officers, delivery drivers [and] fast-food workers are all people trying to do the very best job they can, and provide for their families.”
      The SEIU has been a longtime funder and supporter of Fight For $15 and for Henry, the first woman to lead the SEIU, the fight for a higher minimum wage is just the beginning of a greater push for workers’ rights – not least the right to join unions, in a service sector where women and people of color make up a disproportionate number of workers.
      “Eighty per cent of our economy is driven by consumer spending. Service and care jobs are the dominant sectors in the US economy, and we have to create the ability of those workers to join together in unions in this century, just like auto, rubber and steel were the foundation in the last century,” she said.
      “If the US Congress can’t see what the American people are demanding, in terms of ‘Respect us, protect us, pay us’, then they’re going to have a political price to pay in 2022,” she added. “Our nation’s leaders need to get this done. Congress has used its rules to pass trillions of dollars in tax cuts for billionaires and massive corporations, so now it’s time for our nation’s leaders to give tens of millions of essential workers a raise.”
      Backing Henry will be a younger generation of activists who cut their teeth in the Fight for $15 movement and have used it as a springboard into a political debate that is now centered around racial and economic justice. One of those leaders is Rasheen Aldridge, one of the first to take action when the Fight for $15 spread to St Louis, who was elected to Missouri state assembly last November.
      Aldridge was working at a Jimmy John’s restaurant in 2013 when he was approached by a community organizer asking him about his pay and conditions. Aldridge had recently been humiliated by a manager who took pictures of him and a co-worker holding signs they were forced to make, saying they had made sandwiches incorrectly and had been 15 seconds late with a drive-through order. “It was so dehumanizing and just a complete embarrassment,” said Aldridge.
      The organizer talked about the strikes in New York, Chicago and elsewhere, and suggested the same could happen in conservative Missouri. More

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      The Guardian view on Covid relief: ideologies matter in democracies | Editorial

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      When Covid struck, it was governments that decided people could not go to work and governments that took people’s money away. It is now down to governments to decide whether or not to return that money and when to open up the economy. In the US, Democrats want to give generously. While $1.9tn dollars is a lot of money – about the size of Canada’s GDP – it probably is not enough.As Randall Wray of the Levy Institute has pointed out, the US government is engaged in relief, not stimulus, spending. It is offering much-needed assistance to the devastated balance sheets of households, school districts and local governments. Rescuing public services, making sure people don’t starve and building Covid-testing systems is not an economic stimulus but a necessary antidepressant. Reducing the size of the relief package would prolong the recession, which, given the virus’s capacity to surprise, may last longer than the experts predict. President Joe Biden was right to rebuff criticism that Democrats risked overheating the economy, saying the problem was spending too little, not too much. There is slack in the US economy: 400,000 Americans left the labour market in January.Mr Biden aims to control the virus and then create jobs with infrastructure investments to reinvent the post-crisis economy for a zero-carbon world. Call it a spend-then-tax policy. If he succeeds, Mr Biden will go some way to repudiate the conventional economic wisdom that argues that if governments keep borrowing too much, they risk defaulting, will end up printing money and be forced in a panic to put up interest rates. The pandemic revealed this to be bunk. Central banks can keep interest rates low by buying government bonds with money created from thin air. Last year, they bought 75% of all public debt.Within days of assuming power, Mr Biden had a plan, and new thinking, to rebuild a Covid-scarred country. Boris Johnson has little to show after months. His government intends to cut universal credit, raise council tax bills and freeze public-sector pay, weakening household finances. Given this mindset, which has dominated policy since 2010, it is hardly surprising that the £900bn of Bank of England “quantitative easing” money sitting with banks can’t find profits in the real economy. The Bank has “knowledge gaps” about QE. Yet there is truth in the quote attributed to Keynes that “you can’t push on a string” – when demand is weak, monetary policy can do little about it.With interest rates low, no recovery to invest in and no new regulations, UK banks will turn inwards, not outwards. Instead of the City contributing to the productive economy and a just green transition, expect speculation and Ponzi-like balance sheets. It is lobbying to expand lucrative but socially useless activities. In January, Tory peers with City interests argued for a new finance regulator with a “competitiveness” objective – a Trojan horse for deregulation.Central banks are creatures of their legislatures, but have been permitted, for ideological reasons, to work without a social contract. In her recent paper, Revolution Without Revolutionaries, the economist Daniela Gabor warned that unelected technocrats must not be allowed to hand politicians reasons to adopt external constraints that can be blamed for unpopular policies. It is timely advice. The UK will have record peacetime levels of debt. Rishi Sunak says such borrowing is “unsustainable”. Yet UK gilts are a risk-free financial asset, which is why banks crave them.The inequality, financial instability and ecological crises have multiple causes, but their existence is built on radical, free-market economics. It is not the case that the government’s ability to spend is temporary while interest rates remain low, as Mr Sunak claimed. Bond-purchasing programmes can control yields. A system that benefits private finance but subordinates the state and threatens to expose it, post-pandemic, to austerity and elevated levels of unemployment must be resisted. Only those unable or unwilling to believe the evidence of their own eyes would say otherwise. More

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      US economy adds 49,000 jobs as Biden aims for further Covid relief

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      The US economy added back 49,000 jobs last month as coronavirus restrictions eased and fiscal stimulus from Washington goosed up the economy, the labor department announced on Friday.The unemployment rate dropped to 6.3%, down significantly from its pandemic high of 14.7% in April. While January’s figure marked a return to growth after job losses in December, the number was weak and big problems remain.On Thursday, the labor department said 779,000 people filed new unemployment claims last week, down from the week before but still close to four times pre-pandemic levels. The latest figures showed some 17.8 million Americans are still claiming unemployment benefits.In December the US lost 140,000 jobs as the latest wave of Covid-19 infections led to more shutdowns across the country and a slowdown in economic activity. That figure was revised to a loss of 227,000 jobs on Friday.Professional and business services (up 97,000 jobs) and local government (up 49,000) saw the largest gains over the month. The US is still losing huge numbers of jobs in leisure and hospitality (down 61,000) and retail (down 38,000) and the stark gap in racial unemployment rates remains.The unemployment rate for white Americans was 6% while for Black Americans it was 9.2% and for Latinos it was 8.6%.The jobs figure come as the Biden administration is trying to push through a $1.9tn stimulus package which would send $1,400 cheques to many Americans and provide fresh aid for struggling businesses. It would also increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 – the first increase since 2009.The plan has widespread support from voters, with a Quinnipiac survey showing more than two-thirds of respondents in favor of the plan. But it has met with opposition from Republicans in Congress, who have balked at the size of the stimulus and proposed a far smaller package. Biden’s plan was approved in the Senate early Friday by a 51 to 50 vote, with the vice-president casting the tie-breaking vote, but still faces hurdles and is not expected to become law before mid March.The recovery in the jobs market may embolden opponents but some economists warned that the economic toll of the virus is far from over.Jason Reed, assistant chair of finance at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, said: “We shouldn’t forget that the economy is still down about 10m jobs since the start of the pandemic. We aren’t anywhere close to where we were this time last year.“The rollout of the vaccine will surely help Americans get back to work, but we shouldn’t expect a return to normal until late 2021 or early 2022.” More

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      Kamala Harris uses casting vote to pass Covid relief budget resolution

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      The US Senate has passed a budget resolution that allows for the passage of Joe Biden’s $1.9tn (£1.4tn) Covid-19 relief package in the coming weeks without Republican support.
      The vice-president, Kamala Harris, broke a 50/50 tie by casting a vote in favour of the Democratic measure, which sends it to the House of Representatives for final approval. It marked the first time Harris, in her role as president of the Senate, cast a tie-breaking vote after being sworn in as the first female vice-president on 20 January.
      The House passed its own budget measure on Wednesday. Congress can now work to write a bill that can be passed by a simple majority in both houses, which are controlled by Democrats. Mid-March has been suggested as a likely date by which the measure could be passed, a point at which enhanced unemployment benefits will expire if Congress does not act.
      The vote came at 5.30am on Friday at the end of a marathon Senate debate session, known among senators as a “vote-a-rama”, a procedure whereby they can theoretically offer unlimited amendments.
      US cases
      Biden is scheduled to meet with Democratic House leaders and committee chairs early on Friday morning to discuss the Covid economic stimulus, and is expected to make public remarks on the progress at an 11.45am EST (1645 GMT) briefing.
      There was dissent from Republicans in the Senate overnight, particularly over plans for a $15 federal minimum wage. Iowa’s Republican senator, Joni Ernst, raised an amendment to “prohibit the increase of the federal minimum wage during a global pandemic”, which was carried by a voice vote.
      The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders said he still intended to support bringing the measure through: “We need to end the crisis of starvation wages in Iowa and around the United States.”
      He outlined plans to get a wage increase, phased in over five years, included in a budget reconciliation bill. The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour, and has not been raised since 2009.
      In a tweet after the vote, Sanders said: “Today, with the passage of this budget resolution to provide relief to our working families, we have the opportunity not only to address the pandemic and the economic collapse – we have the opportunity to give hope to the American people and restore faith in our government.”
      During the debate Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said “This is not the time for trillions more dollars to make perpetual lockdowns and economic decline a little more palatable. Notwithstanding the actual needs, notwithstanding all the talk about bipartisan unity, Democrats in Congress are plowing ahead. They’re using this phony budget to set the table to ram through their $1.9 trillion rough draft.”
      The $1.9 trillion relief package proposed would be used to speed Covid-19 vaccines throughout the nation. Other funds would extend special unemployment benefits that will expire at the end of March and make direct payments to people to help them pay bills and stimulate the economy. Democrats also want to send money to state and local governments dealing with the worst health crisis in decades. More

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      Biden and Yellen urge Democrats to go big and bold on Covid relief package

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      Joe Biden and his new treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, are encouraging Democrats in Congress to go big and bold on the Covid-19 relief package and have effectively panned a Republican alternative that is less than a third the size of the president’s $1.9tn rescue plan.Senate Democrats took steps on Tuesday to push ahead with the huge bill, with or without Republican support, despite the ostensibly amicable bipartisan talks at the White House the day before.Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, warned that the coronavirus crisis could drag on for several years unless maximum effort for large-scale relief is made on Capitol Hill.Democrats voted to launch a process that could approve the sweeping rescue package on their own if necessary.On Tuesday, Biden and Yellen joined the Democratic senators for a private virtual meeting and both declared the Republicans’ $618bn relief offer too small.They urged ambitious and fast action to stem the coronavirus pandemic crisis and its economic fallout.Biden on Wednesday was meeting with congressional Democrats. In a call-in to the weekly meeting of Democratic representatives he said he was willing to consider tighter limits on who gets $1,400 direct payments under his Covid-19 relief plan but not the size of the checks, CNN reported.The president invited incoming Democratic chairs of some key Senate committees to the Oval Office.“This is their new home for a while anyway,” Biden said. “And with a little bit of luck, the grace of God and the goodwill of the neighbors, and the crick not rising, it’s going to be longer than just four years.”Asked whether he believed any Republican lawmakers would support his relief proposal, Biden replied: “I think we’ll get some Republicans.”“I think we’ll get some Republicans,” Biden told us in Oval, referring to GOP votes on latest coronavirus stimulus spending plan. pic.twitter.com/VrZXudKJQh— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) February 3, 2021
      Earlier, Senators Chris Coons and Tom Carper of Delaware emerged from an hour-long meeting with Biden at the White House.Carper said the trio discussed the need to confirm Biden’s cabinet nominees, as well as president’s coronavirus relief proposal.Coons pushed for financing global vaccine relief. He noted to reporters after that it is in Biden’s coronavirus relief proposal but not in the counter proposal from 10 Republicans, and is how US can restore its global leadership.As the White House reaches for a bipartisan bill, Democrats marshaled their slim Senate majority, voting 50-49, to start a lengthy process for approving Biden’s bill with a simple majority.The goal is to have Covid-19 relief approved by March, when extra unemployment assistance and other pandemic aid expires.“President Biden spoke about the need for Congress to respond boldly and quickly,” Schumer said after the lunch meeting, and, referring to the GOP counter offer, he added: “If we did a package that small, we’d be mired in the Covid crisis for years.”Biden framed his views during the virtual lunch meeting with Democrats by talking about the need not to forget working- and middle-class families – even those like nurses and pipe-fitters making $150,000 for a family of four – who are straining during the crisis, according to a person granted anonymity to discuss the private call.The night before, Biden met with 10 Republican senators pitching their $618bn alternative, and let them know it was insufficient to meet the country’s needs. The president made it clear that he will not delay aid in hopes of winning GOP support.While no compromise was reached during the late Monday session, White House talks with Republicans are privately under way.The outcome will test the new president striving to unify the country but confronting a rising Covid-19 death toll and stubbornly high jobless numbers, with political risks for all sides.Vaccine distributions, direct $1,400 payments to households, school reopenings and business aid are all on the line.The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, criticized the Democrats for pressing ahead on their own. He said he had spoken to Biden ahead of his meeting with the 10 GOP senators.“They’ve chosen a totally partisan path,” McConnell said. “That’s unfortunate.”White House officials have previously cited the US Chamber of Commerce as evidence of broad support for their plan, but the nation’s most prominent business group issued a letter on Tuesday that urged a bipartisan compromise.“There ought to be common ground for a bipartisan proposal that can become law,” Neil Bradley, executive vice-president and chief policy officer, said in an interview.The cornerstone of the GOP plan is $160bn for the healthcare response and vaccine distribution, a “massive expansion” of testing, protective gear and funds for rural hospitals, similar to what Biden has proposed.But from there, the two plans drastically diverge. The vote on Tuesday opens 50 hours of debate on a budget resolution, with amendment votes expected later this week. More

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      Biden more likely to bypass Republicans on Covid stimulus aid after lowball offer

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      Republicans senators made a lowball offer on Sunday to cooperate with the Biden administration on a new coronavirus relief package, increasing the likelihood that the White House will seek to bypass Republicans to fund its proposal.A group of 10 Republican senators led by Susan Collins of Maine pitched Joe Biden a sketch of a relief plan with a reported $600bn total price tag – less than a third of the $1.9tn stimulus package the Biden team has laid out over the last days.The yawning gap between the two numbers caused some observers to question whether Republicans were really trying to reach a deal – or instead were laying the groundwork for future accusations that Biden had not seriously pursued his promises to try to work with Republicans.Asked about the new Republican offer on the NBC News program Meet the Press, national economic council director Brian Deese said Biden is “open to ideas” but would not be stalled.“What he’s uncompromising about is the need to move with speed on a comprehensive approach here,” Deese said.“We have a virus crisis; we have an economic crisis. We have to get shots in people’s arms. We have to get the schools reopened so that parents can go back to work. And we need to provide direct relief to families and businesses across the country who are really struggling here.”One signatory of the Republican offer, senator Rob Portman of Ohio, who has announced his upcoming retirement, told CNN that the $1.9tn price tag was too high “at a time of unprecedented deficits and debts”.But moderate Democratic senator Jon Tester of Montana said the twin crises of the pandemic and record unemployment demanded decisive action. “I don’t think $1.9tn, even though it is a boatload of money, is too much money,” Tester told CNN. “I think now is not the time to starve the economy.”The US has just surpassed 26m confirmed Covid cases and 440,000 deaths. Unemployment insurance claims topped 1m last week and 30 million Americans reported suffering from food scarcity.Hoping for a break with the lockstep partisanship of the Donald Trump years, Biden has made working with Republicans a stated priority of his early presidency.But his advisers have also signaled that speed is important and that they will use a parliamentary measure known as budget reconciliation to fund their Covid relief bill if no Republicans come onboard.With a 50-member majority in the US Senate clinched by the vote of vice-president Kamala Harris, Democrats could advance the relief package alone – if they are able to craft a deal that does not lose centrists such as West Virginia senator Joe Manchin.“This is a unique crisis,” Deese told CNN. “It’s a unique health crisis, a unique economic crisis, and it’s one that calls on all of us to work together with the speed that we need to put a comprehensive response in place.”The Biden plan calls for $1,400 payments to individuals, enhanced unemployment benefits, a $15 minimum wage, support for schools to help them reopen safely, and money for vaccine distribution and administration.Republicans pointed out that Congress has already appropriated $4tn for coronavirus relief in the last year and that some of the $900bn allocated last month has not been spent.Portman said the proposal for $1,400 payouts to individuals in the Biden plan should be restricted based on income. Manchin has echoed that proposal, saying that families earning from $250,000-$300,000 should not necessarily qualify.The importance of keeping Manchin onboard was underscored when the senator reacted negatively to a surprise appearance by Harris on a local West Virginia television station calling for support for more Covid relief legislation. The move was received as an awkward effort to pressure Manchin.“I saw it, I couldn’t believe it,” Manchin said in a local news video. “No one called me. We’re going to try to find a bipartisan pathway forward, but we need to work together. That’s not a way of working together.”In a letter to Biden outlining their offer, the more moderate Republicans quoted his call in his inaugural address for bipartisan unity and said “we welcome the opportunity to work with you.”“We believe that this plan could be approved quickly by Congress with bipartisan support,” the letter said.The Republican proposal mirrored some provisions of the Biden plan, such as $160bn in new spending on vaccines, testing, treatment, and personal protective equipment. The Republicans said they would provide more details on Monday.But Democrats did not appear willing to wait for long to hear the Republican pitch. Senator Bernie Sanders, the incoming chairman of the budget committee, told ABC News’ This Week program: “We have got to act and we have got to act now”. More