The $2 trillion dollar COVID response stimulus bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. President Trump happily signed the bill into legislation in order to aid suffering Americans.
While Republicans have been pushing for an additional $250 billion in aid to small businesses, Democrats have other plans in mind.
According to reports, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are busy planning the next stimulus bill, expected to exceed $1 trillion dollars.
Among their wishlist?
Funding for abortion, checks to illegal aliens, and new surveillance programs to name a few.
CNN provides the following details:
Still, congressional leaders will have no shortage of options to choose from as they put together the next spending bill, with proposals coming from every corner of the country and ideological spectrum.
Democratic Reps. Joe Neguse of Colorado, Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, Andy Levin of Michigan and Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, for instance, introduced a bill on Tuesday to give small cities and towns access to $250 billion in direct relief funds, expanding on the $150 billion fund for state and local governments in the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill.
“A number of us felt that did not go far enough,” Neguse said in an interview. “A number of us believed the fund should be much larger — in addition, the structure should be changed so that cities and counties under 500,000 people could access directly federal resources from the Treasury Department.”
Another quartet of House Democrats — Reps. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, Marcia Fudge of Ohio, Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — urged House and Senate leaders to boost funding for food stamps, pushing for an increase to both the maximum and minimum benefits available under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
And a bipartisan, bicameral group of lawmakers — Sens. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, and Reps. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, and Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican — want congressional leaders to include funding in the next bill for small broadband providers to provide internet to low-income families.
While many of the proposals would add or tweak the stimulus legislation passed last month, a group of House lawmakers wants to revise the 2017 Republican tax cuts to repeal the cap on state and local tax deductions that hit hardest in states like California and New York — now hotspots of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Now is a time when state and local governments are facing serious funding issues and relief from the cap would help not only individuals, but the state and local governments addressing the crisis we all face,” wrote the dozen lawmakers, led by Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York.
Most of the backlash over the proposed bill comes from provisions allowing illegal aliens to tap into relief funds and increasing the use of mail-in voting.
Check out the reponse on Twitter:
It's unfortunate that we have legislators who would rather focus on including unrelated progressive "goodies" in a bill designed to specifially address the needs of Americans during the COVID crisis.
Breitbart details the progressive wish list:
Increased abortion funding. Stimulus checks for illegals. Permanent housing guarantees. Mail-in voting for elections. Minimum wage hikes and more union access. The large-scale release of imprisoned criminals. An extensive national disease surveillance program.
These are just some of the far-left, Big Government proposals being peddled by influential progressive organizations for Democrats to include in the next round of emergency stimulus funding, which the groups say should be at least as large as the $2.2 trillion CARES Act.
The Center for American Progress (CAP), which functions as an idea factory for the Democratic Party, compiled its wish list for the next round of recovery legislation during the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
Reprising the repurposed progressive anthem of never letting a crisis go to waste, the CAP’s list of recommendations for the next stimulus package clearly seeks to use the coronavirus crisis to achieve many longstanding progressive policy aims.
The CAP tells lawmakers that the pandemic “requires Congress to significantly expand the measures included in the CARES Act and other COVID-19 packages to reflect the expected magnitude and duration of the disruption.”
The CAP recommends the construction of a robust surveillance program, including the following (below are direct quotes from the CAP plan):
- Surveillance testing (including training volunteers) and to build tracing teams.
- App development (or funding for state licensing of the technology if privately developed) that will be necessary for instantaneous contact tracing.
- Additional funding for developing a national disease surveillance program going forward.
CAP wants to use the pandemic to fundamentally transform the voting system, requiring all states to “significantly expand vote-by-mail opportunities; implement at least 14 days of early voting; adopt online and same day voter registration.”
Here, CAP, which is funded by billionaire activist George Soros, joins a slew of other Soros-funded progressive groups seeking the expanded use of mail-in balloting for elections by citing fears that coronavirus makes it too dangerous to vote in person.
Republicans specifically fear the prospect of voter fraud, since mail-in voting would be harder to authenticate.
Stimulus payments in the next round of legislation must also include “undocumented individuals and mixed-status families where even just one parent is filing their taxes with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number and the other parent and all children have an SSN,” CAP writes.
Instead of turning off extra unemployment insurance benefits after the coronavirus pandemic is over, CAP advocates that unemployment insurance “and other stabilizers” – ostensibly stimulus checks — “should be automatically tied to economic conditions, so that continuing and future crises don’t require ad hoc action.”
The next stimulus package must ensure that “permanent stable housing must be connected to wraparound services or a continuum of care that is flexible and tailored to the individual or household’s needs.”
Bloomberg aired a segment on Nancy Pelosi's ideas for her next trillion dollar stimulus bill below:
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