United States House of Representatives passes budget resolution, paving way for President Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan

 

© Greg Nash

Story by The Hill

Written by Nive Elis 

The House on Friday approved the Senate-amended budget resolution, setting in place the process to pass President Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan without the need for GOP support.

The bill passed 219-209 with one Democrat voting against it.

“Our work to crush the coronavirus and deliver relief to the American people is urgent and of the highest priority,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a letter to Democrats ahead of the vote. 

“With this budget resolution, we have taken a giant step to save lives and livelihoods.”

The budget resolution’s adoption kicks off a process called reconciliation, which can pass the Senate with a simple majority, bypassing a possible GOP filibuster. 

The resolution includes instructions for Congress’s authorizing committees to write legislation that will affect federal finances. 

Those instructions followed the contours of Biden’s proposal, which includes $1,400 stimulus checks, extended emergency unemployment benefits, funds for vaccine distribution and testing, aid to state and local governments and increases to child tax credits and earned income tax credits, among other things.

Pelosi said the House is aiming to finish up the package by the end of the month.

The budget resolution arrived fresh from the Senate, which spent a marathon, overnight session considering amendments to the original proposal. The House had approved an earlier version of the measure on Wednesday.

The final version, which passed at 5:30 in the morning following 15 hours of debate and voting, included some strong signals from centrist Democrats that they expect changes to the proposal.

Democrats are relying on party unanimity and Vice President Harris’s tie-breaking vote to pass legislation in the 50-50 Senate — any one Democratic "no" vote could sink a relief bill.

The Senate approved amendments calling for stimulus checks to be more narrowly targeted and for funds to be set aside for rural hospitals. The amendments were largely non-binding, but served to signal where Congress stood on some key issues.

More controversial amendments relating to fracking, the Keystone XL pipeline and whether stimulus checks would go to undocumented immigrants were stripped out in a final amendment offered by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). 

Democrats said they supported restricting stimulus checks from undocumented immigrants, but argued that the language in the amendment would prevent children of citizens and undocumented immigrants from receiving the benefit, which would be a change from the last round of relief.

Biden has signaled that he prefers that the bill pass with bipartisan support, but is willing to move ahead with Democrats alone, or with just a handful of GOP votes that fall short of the 10 he’d need to pass legislation in regular order.

On Monday, he spent two hours meeting with 10 GOP Senators over their $618 billion counter-proposal for COVID-19 relief.

Biden has consistently made the case that overshooting with the size of the relief bill is preferable to undershooting, a lesson he says was learned the hard way with the Obama stimulus bill during the Great Recession, which many economists say was too small.

• “One thing we learned is, you know, we can't do too much here; we can do too little. We can do too little and sputter,” Biden said Friday ahead of a meeting with House Democratic leaders.

Democrats will also have to contend with strict budgetary rules in the Senate that could endanger significant aspects of their relief proposal, most notably the plan to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2025.

Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) allowed a GOP amendment on the subject to pass by voice vote. The amendment, he said, only restricted the minimum wage rising to $15 during a pandemic, which was not part of the gradual increase proposed in the bill anyway.