Senators began the long, slow grind Thursday afternoon toward final adoption of a budget blueprint that would grease the wheels for a partisan coronavirus relief package.
The “vote-a-rama” that began at 2:30 p.m. will feature numerous GOP messaging amendments on a range of hot-button topics such as illegal immigration, reopening public schools and nursing home deaths during the pandemic.
As of Thursday afternoon, over 700 amendments had been filed; though only a fraction will actually get a vote, the deliberations could still go late into the night or early Friday morning. “I have a feeling it’ll be a very long night, but I assume we’ll get out of here at some point,” Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders said before the vote-a-rama kicked off.
The underlying budget resolution would carve out room for up to $1.89 trillion in spending and tax cuts in a subsequent reconciliation package, which would need just a simple majority for passage rather than the usual 60 Senate votes.
The House adopted a very similar blueprint on Wednesday, but the version the Senate wraps up will need to go back to the House for final adoption in that chamber because of some technical differences as well as amendments the Senate added. After the final House vote, Democrats will start writing the actual COVID-19 aid package in a dozen committees next week.
The goal is to get a final bill to President Joe Biden’s desk before enhanced unemployment benefits expire March 14. Airline payroll support provided in the same December aid package lapses at the end of March, and major carriers are serving notice that thousands of furloughs are coming if no further relief is forthcoming.
The vote-a-rama process is mostly an exercise in the minority party seeking to extract a political pound of flesh from the majority. One of the lone Democratic amendments filed, from Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse, would seek to get rid of vote-a-ramas altogether.
But some amendments are bipartisan, such as an amendment from Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker and Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema backing support for restaurants and bars that will be difficult for Democratic leaders to ignore in the final aid bill.
Many of the amendments, like the Sinema-Wicker proposal which was adopted 90-10, would provide for a “deficit neutral reserve fund” to adjust budget levels to accommodate future legislation. In practice, such amendments are nonbinding, but they can send signals that influence future legislative efforts. And even with a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill, Democratic leaders can’t afford to take the votes of centrists like Sinema for granted.
West Virginia’s Joe Manchin is another Democrat that party leaders can’t afford to buck. His amendment with Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, intended to ensure upper-income households don’t benefit from the $1,400 checks Democrats want to include in the relief bill, was adopted on a 99-1 vote.
‘Nothing to do with COVID relief’
Sanders criticized partisan GOP amendments, saying many of them “have absolutely nothing to do with COVID relief” which is the subject of the underlying budget.
“My Republican colleagues have filed amendments to make President Trump’s tax breaks to the wealthiest people in our country and the most profitable corporations permanent, which would provide a massive windfall to the top 1% and the billionaire class, who have already seen their wealth go up by over $1 trillion during this pandemic,” he said.
Sanders also slammed amendments on undocumented immigrants, which he said are designed to “exacerbate the … xenophobia which exists in this country, despite the fact that many undocumented workers are doing some of the most essential and dangerous work in our country.”
But Sanders also made a pitch for elements of the Biden proposal that Republicans say have nothing to do with the pandemic, such as raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
“Let us be clear, the minimum wage in this country has not been raised since the year 2007 and now stands at $7.25 an hour,” he said. “That is a starvation wage. That is an embarrassment. That minimum wage must be increased so that we can give a pay raise to some 32 million workers.”
Budget ranking member Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, acknowledged that the Senate in the past used reconciliation for partisan purposes, as when Democrats used it to complete the 2010 health care overhaul and Republicans used it to overhaul the tax code in 2017.
But he said using it for pandemic relief is different and he continued to urge Democrats to work with Republicans on a bipartisan bill.
“This was the one area there was bipartisanship up until recently,” Graham said. “This is the one area where the Congress has been able to work together across party lines and that’s providing relief to the American people who have been long-suffering under the COVID pandemic.”
Republican amendments
Before the voting marathon, Republicans highlighted several amendments they were offering to put Democrats on the spot. Those include an amendment from Indiana’s Todd Young and Tom Cotton of Arkansas which would bar giving $1,400 tax rebate checks or any other temporary, tax-based direct payments to undocumented immigrants. It was adopted 58-42, despite opposition from Democratic leaders.
Tim Scott of South Carolina, John Barrasso of Wyoming and James Lankford of Oklahoma collaborated on an amendment that would potentially withhold funding to states that underreport nursing home deaths resulting from COVID-19. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer‘s home state has been in the news on that topic of late, after New York Attorney General Letitia James said the state underreported coronavirus-related nursing home deaths by 50%.
The nursing home amendment was rejected on a party-line vote.
Lankford and Scott joined Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, in an amendment to bar tax increases on small businesses during a national emergency related to a pandemic; Democrats decided not to fight that one, and it was adopted, 100-0.
Another tax-related amendment from John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, seeks to protect people who went to work in other states during the pandemic in many cases to support the fight against COVID-19 from being hit with an “unfair” tax burden. The amendment, adopted by voice vote, is aimed at limiting the authority of states or other taxing bodies from taxing that income.
Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, and Scott teamed up on an amendment that would limit or cut off emergency pandemic funding to K-12 schools that do not reopen after their teachers are vaccinated. It was rejected on a party-line vote.
How much is too much?
Earlier in the debate, Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen expressed the view of many Democrats that it is riskier to provide not enough aid than to provide too much.
Van Hollen blamed Republicans for negotiating down a previous relief package and causing a slower economic recovery than was necessary.
“We’ve been in this place before,” he said, referring to the financial meltdown in 2009 when Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed a roughly $800 billion stimulus package.
“So we ended up with a divided Congress, and an inadequate recovery bill,” Van Hollen said. “And our Republican colleagues spent the next many, many years complaining that the economic recovery after the downturn had taken too long, was the longest and slowest economic recovery in history, when if we had been permitted to go big and bold, we could have changed that trajectory.”
But Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey laid out a case that the $1.9 trillion plan Biden seeks is excessive.
“It appears not to be informed by any objective measure of needs, and the only organizing principle in this bill that I can figure out is the desire to spend a massive amount of money on things that aren’t required,” he said.
For example, referring to the $350 billion in state and local aid proposed by Biden, Toomey said state and local tax collections set a record in 2019 and then were up $21 billion in 2020.
“They broke the record,” he said, adding that Congress had already provided $572 billion in aid to states and localities in one form or another in 2020 through several aid bills.
“Look, let’s not kid ourselves,” he said. “This is just a complete bailout of insolvent and irresponsible states.”
David Lerman contributed to this report.
