Congress passes $1.9 trillion Covid relief package that will lift millions of Americans out of poverty amid pandemic

The House of Representatives has passed the final version of Joe Biden’s signature Covid relief legislation, sending the $1.9trn package to the president’s desk.

When Mr Biden signs the bill into law on Friday, many of its provisions will immediately go into effect:

The administration has said it plans for millions of the bill’s $1,400 direct payments – or stimulus checks – to hit people’s bank accounts by the end of March. The package extends through the early summer a Covid-era federal unemployment programme that gives laid-off Americans $300 per week in addition to their state unemployment aid. The federal government will parcel out the legislation’s outlay of hundreds of billions of dollars to states and local governments on the front lines of the pandemic response. An expanded child tax credit for families will be baked into the tax code.

The legislation passed on a mostly party-line vote in the House on Wednesday after not a single Senate Republican voted for it last week.

“How do you say no to lifting 50 per cent of impoverished children in America out of poverty?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a floor speech on Wednesday shortly before the House vote, foreshadowing the ensuing political battle between Democrats and Republicans on the bill.

With a $1.9trn price tag, the landmark legislation is estimated to be the second most expensive in US history behind last March’s initial coronavirus response package known as the CARES Act, which was worth roughly $2.2trn.

Mr Biden’s so-called American Rescue Plan Act is more than twice as expensive as the stimulus package passed by the Obama administration in 2009 to kickstart the US economy as it recovered from the Great Recession and housing and financial crises.

The White House has touted the Covid-relief legislation as “the most progressive piece of legislation in history,” pointing to economic forecasts that it will lift as many as a third of Americans currently living below the poverty line above it.

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Democrats come together

Progressive firebrands such as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have criticised Senate Democrats for paring down the legislation – narrowing eligibility for stimulus checks and bumping weekly federal unemployment checks from $400 to $300, for instance. But when it came time for the House to vote, they mostly fell in line, uniting a vast range of Democrats from across the ideological spectrum.

The Covid bill’s passage is a huge moment for Democrats early in the Biden presidency, showing that they can stick together to deliver aid to Americans despite the deep fissures on policy and governing approach that have rippled through the party in recent years.

“I’m so excited, I just can’t hide it!” a visibly and audibly animated Ms Pelosi said as she took the podium at her news conference earlier this week.

“It’s a remarkable, historic, transformative piece of legislation,” the speaker said.

Even though the bill is now in the hands of the executive branch to administer to the American people, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress know that the battle over the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) has only just begun.

Republicans have assailed the bill as, in House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s words, “a laundry list of leftwing priorities that predate the pandemic and do not meet the needs of American families.”

In a floor speech on Wednesday, the House GOP leader decried the bill’s $600m outlay for San Francisco, Ms Pelosi’s hometown, part of Republicans’ effort to recast the package as a Democratic payoff to their cronies and allies across the country.

But San Francisco is receiving no special treatment, Democrats have shot back: That $600m is less than 0.2 per cent of the legislation’s $350bn total spending to boost state and local governments.

Looming PR war

Still, Democrats know they face the daunting PR war against Republicans for the hearts and minds of Americans who have been desperate for help amid a coronavirus pandemic that has upended their economic wellbeing as well as their social lives.

The GOP is gunning to take back majorities in both the House and Senate in the 2022 midterms

From Mr Biden and Ms Pelosi all the way down to the lowliest congressional backbenchers, the Democrats have agreed on how they plan to win the Covid PR war: Shameless self-promotion of the ARPA.

“Over the next few weeks and months, we must take every opportunity we get to explain exactly how the American Rescue Plan will work for the American people,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote to his colleagues on Tuesday.

Mr Schumer exhorted his fellow Democrats to join him on a publicity campaign for the landmark pandemic relief legislation, urging them to seize every opportunity to tout the bill’s many “people-focused provisions”: $1,400 stimulus checks for more than eight of every 10 American households, an extension into the summer of the Covid-era federal unemployment benefits programme, the broadened child tax credit, and several other top-line measures.

“We cannot be shy in telling the American people how this historic legislation directly helps them,” Senate Democratic leader wrote.

Mr Biden is on board with that strategy.

On a conference call with House Democrats last week, the president explained how the Obama administration paid a political price for being too humble after signing into law the roughly $815bn stimulus package in 2009 to try to climb out of the Great Recession.

“We didn’t adequately explain what we had done. Barack was so modest,” Mr Biden lamented on the call. “I kept saying, ‘Tell people what we did.’ He said, ‘We don’t have time. I’m not going to take a victory lap.’ And we paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility.”

The president, First Lady Jill Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris will all three go on a publicity tour next week to sell the bill to any Americans who might be skeptical of its provisions and contours, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced on Wednesday.

Mr Biden will also be designating an official to rollout and execute the law.

A head start?

Despite progressives’ qualms with the new Covid package as well as Republicans’ wholesale rejection, the bill has enjoyed broad support in public polling from across the ideological spectrum.

A Monmouth University poll from last Wednesday found that more than six in 10 Americans supported the Biden stimulus plan.

That should make Democrats’ job easier when it comes to publicising the legislation to defend their congressional majorities in the 2022 midterms.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney has already suggested the Covid relief bill will be “a big piece of the puzzle” in his party’s plans to keep control of the House.

“Anytime you’re delivering for the American people, you’re strengthening your position politically. So this is going to strengthen us because it’s good policy,” he told NBC News in an interview on Tuesday.

“We should shout it from the rooftops that we are passing historic legislation that will reboot the economy and end the pandemic.”