We interrupt this hiatus with a Big Fucking Deal. Congress passed a fiscal pandemic relief bill that President Biden signed this afternoon with almost immediate improvements in our fight back to normalcy (via Jacob Pramuk at CNBC):
The plan will send direct payments of up to $1,400 to most Americans. Direct deposits will start hitting Americans’ bank accounts as soon as this weekend, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday.
The bill will also extend a $300 per week unemployment insurance boost until Sept. 6 and expand the child tax credit for a year. It will also put nearly $20 billion into Covid-19 vaccinations, $25 billion into rental and utility assistance, and $350 billion into state, local and tribal relief.
“This historic legislation is about rebuilding the backbone of this country,” Biden said before signing the legislation. “And giving people in this nation, working people, middle-class folks, the people who built this country, a fighting chance.”
Other things Americans need to understand about the American Rescue Plan relief package:
- No Republican in both the Senate and the House voted for it.
- The Rescue Plan boosts health care coverage to more Americans, solidifying Obamacare and ensuring health recovery from the pandemic can get taken care of.
- No Republican in both the Senate and the House voted for it.
- The Plan expands food stamps (SNAP) funding, increases financial aid to K-12 schools, and is set to hopefully cut child poverty numbers by half, on a scale we haven't seen since the 1960s.
- And to really drive this point home, NO REPUBLICAN WAS IN FAVOR OF ANY OF THESE BENEFITS TO AMERICAN FAMILIES AND THE NATION AS A WHOLE.
You can see in real time an entire political party refusing to work towards the best interests of their nation and the majority of our citizenry, including a solid plurality of Republican voters who were okay with the ARP relief packages. The Far Right zeal for obstruction and destruction continues apace.
This is what we're going to see over the next two years: Republicans refusing to do the right thing and attacking Democrats over ludicrous and unproven accusations of culture war nothingburgers; while Democrats just go to work and get shit done.
And we're facing a serious possibility the Republicans will cheat and vote-suppress their way back to power in Congress in 2022 all because not enough Americans will pay attention to what's happening here.
Sigh.
Back to our regularly scheduled hiatus.
1 comment:
OK, two things:
One, some of the healthcare provisions have to expire at the end of next year because of reconciliation. Meaning that the midterms are now officially about either voting to reelect Democrats and save your healthcare, or voting to elect Republicans and losing it.
And two, I keep reading about how this bill marks the end of the era of dismantling government aid to children, and let's just hope that is true. We can't continue to shoot ourselves in the foot over and over again and expect to get anywhere as a society.
As a Democrat, I don't get that many opportunities to be unabashedly proud of my party as politicians, but this is definitely one of them. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi take a lot of criticism even from their own party, but they came through like gangbusters this time when they had literally zero margin for error.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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