The House passed a massive blue state bailout today that was disguised as a covid relief bill. Taxpayers should be outraged at this bailout and the huge expansion of government.
“Their scheme trickles out a paltry 9% of its total price tag for vaccine distribution, expanded testing, and health care jobs, and dedicates billions to earmarks and line items that will overwhelmingly benefit Democrat-run states at the expense of Republican-led ones.” – Senator Marsha Blackburn.
In the video below, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst rips into Democrats and the Biden administration for promoting their liberal wish list “over the hopes of the American people.”
The covid relief makes up only 9% of the bill passed today in the House by 220-211. Senator Ernst calls out Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats for the non-covid items in the bill. The blue state bailout of New York, Illinois, and California is especially egregious. These states will now receive taxpayer dollars in a big redistribution of wealth. The Congressional Research Service report found the formula that Democrats used to divvy up the $350 billion to states is different than the formula used in the previous bipartisan CARES Act. The report found that If Democrats had used a similar formula as the CARES Act, California would get roughly $5 billion less and New York about $2 billion less.
Axios reports in detail that the massive spending package was passed via budget reconciliation, a process that allows the Senate to approve legislation with a simple majority vote, rather than the usual 60-vote threshold.
-Had Democrats not clinched control of the Senate by winning the two runoff elections in Georgia in January, the size of the package — if one existed at all — would have been far smaller.
-The bill passed in the Senate last week 50-49 after a marathon of late-night amendments, which only began after Republicans forced the clerk to read the entire 628-page bill out loud — a process that took 11 hours.
-The House vote fell almost exactly along party lines, with one Democrat — Rep. Jared Golden of Maine — voting against it.
Details: The bill approves $1,400 stimulus payments for individuals making up to $75,000 and couples making $150,000. It will also extend weekly $300 unemployment insurance until Sept. 6.
Not one Republican in the House or Senate voted for this bill.
Rep. Michael Waltz (FL) warned about our debt and China:
This is $5.5 trillion we’ve spent now under the umbrella of COVID. That is more than the GDP of the rest of the world, the entire world, except for China and the U.S. We spent $4.5 trillion on World War II. We’ve now exceeded that.
One thing we need to do a better job of getting out there are some of the pay-fors that’s gone into this. China continues to be the big winner here. At the end of the day, they unleashed this virus on the world. They covered it up. Now, we are bankrupting ourselves in order to deal with it, and Chinese military planners plan for the day — which will just be in the next five or six years — when the United States goes upside down on its entitlements budget to begin their moves militarily.
I left another briefing where China has now exceeded us in research and development investments because we can’t afford to anymore. The [House] vote today [is] just putting our foot on the pedal towards bankruptcy and that fiscal cliff.
Look what they have been able to do under the guise of COVID relief. This is the largest expansion of the welfare state since Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1960s. This is headlong in-line with the liberal progressive agenda. The amount of things they have been able to cram through under the guise of COVID has been truly jaw-dropping.
