Senate Passes Biden’s $1.9T COVID-19 Stimulus Bill

The U.S. Senate passed President Joe Biden’s historic $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill after an all-night “vote-a-rama” session and a daylong struggle to convince one key senator, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., to get on board with the bill. The bill passed 50-49 by a party-line vote and the House will vote on the bill again Tuesday before it is sent to the president to be signed into law.

The Senate finally delivered Biden’s first major legislative priority after the Senate remained in session continually for more than 24 hours of amendment voting to the bill, known as a “vote-a-rama.” Senate Republicans tried to make major changes to the bill, including an amendment proposed by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, which would cut the bill down to $650 billion. As Senate Democrats remained united in passing the bill, most Republican amendments failed by one vote, clearing the way for Congress to pass one of the largest federal stimulus packages in history.

Not a single Republican voted for the stimulus package. Since the Senate made some amendments to the version of the bill the House passed some time ago, the bill will need to be re-approved by the House again on Tuesday before it makes its way to Biden’s desk to be signed into law, before unemployment benefits expire on March 14.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said, of the bill, “A new day has come and we tell the American people help is on the way.” Democrats have hailed the bill as “the most progressive domestic legislation in a generation.”

Although Schumer was able to keep his entire caucus united throughout the voting, the bill did not pass without some major amendments to make it more palatable to the Senate’s most conservative Democrat—Sen. Joe Manchin from West Virginia. With Democrats holding the slimmest Senate majority possible (a 50-50 Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie in Democrats’ favor), the party cannot afford to lose even one vote, putting a great deal of power in the most conservative Democrats of the Senate, namely Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

After voting for the first amendment proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a progressive Democrat, to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour began (the amendment eventually failed 58-42), the vote had to be left open for well over 12 hours as Democratic leaders furiously negotiated with Manchin in order to gain his vote. After a conversation with Biden, countless negotiations with party leadership, and many, many hours, Democrats finally approved a compromise deal. This amendment would leave the federal unemployment boose at $300 per week (instead of increasing it to $400) and will expire by Labor Day weekend instead of by the end of the fiscal year. The change would also provide $10,200 in tax relief for households making less than $150,000 a year.

Manchin’s refusal to support a more progressive bill underscored the difficulty Democrats have in working with a razor-thin margin and showed a rare difference between him and Sinema. Sinema had agreed to the Democrats’ proposal to increase the unemployment benefit. She was also seen along with Sen. Jon Tester, another moderate Democrat from Montana, convincing Manchin to go along with the original plan. Even Manchin’s other colleague from his state, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., was baffled at Manchin considering even West Virginia’s Republican governor had called for a larger stimulus bill rather than a smaller one.

In the end, though, Schumer was able to unite Sanders and Manchin together and everyone else and get his entire caucus to pass through the final stimulus bill without too many major changes. “Schumer gets a lot of credit,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, on how Schumer was able to unite everyone behind the same bill. “Democrats realized it doesn’t matter how the Senate lines up. What matters is to deliver what the public wants.”

And Brown is right when he refers to the bill as “what the public wants.” Large majorities of American people from both parties back the stimulus bill, with a total of 76 percent support for the bill. 60 percent of Republicans support the bill, according to a recently-conducted Morning Consult poll. This is despite not a single Republican in either house of Congress voting for the bill.

The huge stimulus package will provide $1,400 checks to most Americans, billions of dollars in tax credits, an extra $300 per week to all unemployed Americans on top of what states are providing through Sept. 6, gives over $350 billion to state and local governments, and expand many federal welfare programs. It also provides lots of money for faster vaccine rollout, small businesses, and other assistance programs to those most impacted by the pandemic.

In the end, three amendments to the bill were adopted in the Senate. One was the compromise plan on unemployment aid to get Manchin on board, proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. Another was a proposal by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., to incentivize schools to reopen as soon as possible for in-person learning, and the third proposal was from Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., which was a bipartisan deal protecting veterans’ educational benefits.

All other amendments, including Collins’s amendment mentioned above, amendments proposed by Republicans to tie school funding to reopening, an amendment for greater transparency in nursing home investigations following New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s scandal, an amendment to cut billions of dollars of aid for state and local governments to states with a surplus (such as California), and even an amendment proposed by Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, which would require Biden to reconsider and reapprove the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which was axed by the president via executive order as soon as he took office back in January.

The amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour failed after eight Democrats—Manchin, Tester, Sinema, Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Angus King of Maine, and both Delawarean senators, Chris Coons and Tom Carper, voted it down.

It had been a grueling week to get the bill passed in the Senate. Last Thursday, after the Senate voted to begin debate on the bill, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., demanded the entire 600-plus page bill to be read aloud, causing a lengthy delay in the Senate as clerks read the bill aloud all night. Schumer called the clerks “the unsung heroes of this place” and denounced Republicans for trying to slow down the process of getting aid into Americans’ hands.

And the Senate debated throughout all of Friday night and well into Saturday morning in a more than 24-hour-long session until it was ultimately passed late Saturday morning.

Going forward, the battle to get bills passed in the Senate is only going to get harder for the Democrats. This stimulus bill was passed via budget reconciliation, meaning that it was filibuster-proof and only needed a simple majority to advance past the Senate. Unfortunately, it can only be used for certain budget-related items, and many other Democratic priorities, including election reform, LGBTQ rights, and more will face uphill battles in order to make it through the Senate.

Many Democrats have also learned from years past that collaborating with Republicans and trying to pass bills with bipartisan majorities is not going to happen, an issue that will only be further exacerbated in the future when the Democrats try to push for a more progressive agenda. As of right now, it seems the only way for the Democrats to pass other significant legislation is by nuking the filibuster, but as of now, Manchin and Sinema are opposed to doing so.