The Senate passed a massive coronavirus aid spending bill Saturday after hours of debate on GOP amendments and a protracted fight among Democrats over unemployment benefits.
The $1.9 trillion legislation heads back to the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi must sell the measure to her liberal faction of Democrats who are likely to oppose the changes made in the Senate.
The bill passed 50-49, with one senator, Republican Dan Sullivan of Alaska, absent.
While the House passed the bill last week, Senate Democrats made significant changes to appease party centrists and adhere to Senate rules that allowed them to pass the bill without any Republican support. Democrats stripped out a provision that would have mandated a $15 minimum wage and agreed to reduce the monthly enhanced jobless pay from $400 to $300.
The changes have angered the party’s liberal base, including those in the House Democratic Caucus, so it will be up to both Pelosi and President Biden to help usher through the Senate version before March 14, when federal unemployment benefits are set to expire. House Democrats control a very narrow majority and can afford to lose only a handful of votes in their own caucus since no GOP lawmakers are likely to vote for it.
House Democrats threatened to oppose the measure if it is sent back to the House with the “outrageous” changes made by Senate Democrats.
“I’m frankly disgusted with some of my colleagues and question whether I can support this bill,” Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey tweeted Friday.
Democrats agreed to the changes to win the support of Sen. Joe Manchin and other Democratic centrists who did not support mandating a $15-per-hour wage. Manchin also wanted unemployment benefits reduced to encourage people to return to the workforce.
As part of the deal, jobless benefits would extend until Sept. 6, avoiding an “August cliff” set by the earlier deadline, when the Senate is typically not in session. The deal also makes the first $10,500 in benefits tax-free.
Democrats are eager to pass the bill quickly and send it to Biden, who called the spending bill his top priority.
In addition to more unemployment pay, it would provide another round of $1,400 stimulus checks. The Senate bill lowers the income cutoff for individuals and families after some lawmakers complained that the money would go to high-income earners.
The legislation would also provide $350 billion to state and local governments and nearly $130 billion for schools, among other spending provisions.
“The American Rescue Plan will go down as one of the most sweeping federal recovery efforts in history,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, declared ahead of the vote. “Help is on the way. Our government is going to give one final push to get us over the finish line.”
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent and socialist, accused the Republicans of delaying the bill’s passage.
The Senate remained in session all night debating amendments, but the Democrats were also partly to blame. They halted action for 12 hours in order to work out a deal with Manchin on unemployment pay.
Sanders called the bill “the most significant piece of legislation for working people that has been passed in decades.”
Democrats needed all 50 senators in their caucus to vote for the bill in order to pass it. Ultimately, no Republicans voted for the bill.
After securing Manchin’s vote, the Senate proceeded to face a barrage of amendments proposed mostly by GOP senators who wanted to highlight wasteful spending in the measure that they say is unrelated to the pandemic.
Democrats defeated most of the amendments, including one by Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, that would have blocked stimulus checks from going to illegal immigrants. Democrats defeated other amendments to block checks from going to those who are incarcerated or who were convicted of a felony in the past 15 years.
Democrats also blocked an amendment by Sen. Steve Daines, a Montana Republican, that would have authorized the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which the Biden administration blocked in February, eliminating thousands of jobs.
Another amendment defeated by the Democrats would have banned coronavirus relief funds from schools that allow transgender women (biological males) to compete on women’s sports teams.
Republicans made the case that the bill spends little on mitigating the virus and that a significant amount of the $4 trillion in coronavirus spending that Congress had already passed into law remains unspent.
In a floor speech, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that just 9% of the latest spending measure was dedicated to COVID-19 treatment and only 1% to the vaccine.
McConnell called the bill “a parade of left-wing pet projects that they are ramming through during a pandemic.”
The Senate, McConnell said Saturday ahead of the final vote, “has never spent $2 trillion dollars in a more haphazard way or a less Democratic process.”
