Democrats are kicking off efforts to ditch Republicans on stimulus as Biden administration defends its $1.9 trillion relief package

Joseph Zeballos-Roig
Updated
pelosi schumer
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speak after a press conference on Capitol Hill on December 20, 2020 in Washington, DC. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

  • Democrats kicked off the reconciliation process on Monday, a legislative maneuver to pass Biden's $1.9 trillion relief package without any GOP votes.

  • "The cost of inaction is high and growing, and the time for decisive action is now," Pelosi and Schumer said in a joint statement.

  • The development came ahead of a scheduled meeting between Biden and a group of Senate Republicans pushing him to shrink the size of his rescue plan.

  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Democrats are initiating efforts to sidestep Republicans on stimulus by filing a joint budget resolution in Congress, the first step in the reconciliation process. It begins to set up the passage of President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion emergency spending package without GOP support.

"Congress has a responsibility to quickly deliver immediate comprehensive relief to the American people hurting from COVID-19," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a joint statement. "The cost of inaction is high and growing, and the time for decisive action is now."

The resolution instructs committees to draft legislation for the Biden proposal by February 16. Titled "The American Rescue Plan," the plan contains $400 federal unemployment benefits until the end of September, a $1,400 top-up to stimulus payments, and $160 billion in vaccine distribution and virus testing funds among other measures.

Congressional Democrats announced the resolution an hour before Biden is scheduled to meet with a group of 10 Senate Republicans on Monday afternoon. The working group - led by Sen. Susan Collins of Maine - rolled out a $618 billion stimulus counteroffer on Monday.

It would curtail federal spending on a range of relief measures including stimulus checks and unemployment insurance. The Republican proposal included $1,000 direct payments for Americans and $300 federal unemployment benefits through June 30. And it allocated the same amount of funding for vaccines and testing as in the Biden plan.

The Biden administration strongly defended its relief proposal ahead of the key meeting.

"His view is that the size of the package needs to be commensurate with the crises we're facing. That's why he proposed $1.9 trillion," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said at a news conference on Monday. She added it is "not a forum for the president to make or accept an offer."

"It's important to him that he hears this group out on their concerns, on their ideas," she said. "He's always open to making this package stronger."

Many Democrats in Congress assailed the Republican plan as deeply insufficient to address the crisis. Notably, it did not contain aid for state and local governments, a major Democratic priority. It also did not set aside any funding for rental assistance, a larger child tax credit, or raise the minimum wage.

Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the incoming Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement the GOP proposal was "far too small to provide the relief the American people need." He warned of another unemployment cliff for millions of laid-off workers in six weeks.

The failure of Congress to approve more federal legislation would cause enhanced unemployment benefits to start expiring on March 14. Michele Evermore, a policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, said many states have struggled restarting their jobless benefit systems after Congress allowed them to lapse last month.

"These are people that have been living on poverty-level wages for months," she told Insider. "The people who are waiting the longest are the people who exhausted them before the end of December."

Read the original article on Business Insider

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