Senate Dems Beggar the Nation for $1.9T
Passed without a single GOP vote, and it gives $1,400 checks to murderers. What’s not to like?
On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and murdered nine worshippers, all of them black.
Roof is a legit white supremacist and neo-Nazi (as opposed to all the imaginary ones that Democrats claim as the reason for keeping our nation’s capital decked out in razor wire and patrolled by National Guardsmen), and he’s rightfully on death row for his crimes. But, as Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton pointed out on Saturday, Roof will still be getting a $1,400 stimulus check someday soon thanks to the Democrats’ just-passed $1.9 trillion COVID-19 “relief” bill, deceitfully dubbed the “American Rescue Plan.”
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who in 2013 murdered three and wounded more than 260 with pressure-cooker shrapnel bombs at the Boston Marathon (in addition to ambushing and killing a cop), will also be getting a $1,400 check. So will Aaron Shamo, the drug kingpin who last year was sentenced to life in prison for killing countless Americans with the million fentanyl-laced fake oxycodone pills he sold to unsuspecting buyers.
You get the idea.
The Senate could’ve easily nixed this abomination from its bill by voting for Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy’s amendment, whose stupid-simple statement of purpose was “to ensure that the 2021 Recovery Rebates are not provided to prisoners.” They could have, except all 50 Democrats voted against the amendment and in favor of sending taxpayer-funded checks to murderers.
“Only a small part of what Democrats passed is for pandemic or economic relief,” notes the Wall Street Journal editorial board. “It’s mainly a way station on their high-speed train to a cradle-to-grave welfare-entitlement state. Most of the $1.9 trillion will flow to government unions or supposedly temporary income transfers that Democrats intend to make permanent later this year.”
As if the bill needed to be any more appealing to the socialists who now control the Democrat Party, Joe Biden shared this telling endorsement during his remarks on Saturday: “Bernie Sanders said this is the most progressive bill he’s ever seen passed since he’s been here. And the compromises were all compromises that didn’t affect the substance and the essence of what the bill is.”
Biden also said his boondoggle “puts us on the path to beating the virus,” which is flat wrong, because we’re already beating it. The vaccine rollout is accelerating, new infections are way down, we’re building up herd immunity, and, as our Nate Jackson pointed out Friday, “American businesses hired new workers at an impressive clip in February, adding an expectation-shattering 379,000 jobs. Headline unemployment dropped to 6.2%. This comes after recent news that fourth-quarter GDP growth was revised up to 4.1%, with expectations at 5% or higher for the first quarter of 2021.”
Clearly, we don’t need economic stimulus — especially the Democrats’ version of it, which is nothing more than a progressive wish list and a massive bailout for fiscally profligate blue states like New York and California. Heck, the contents of bill itself make the case that we don’t need COVID-19 relief. As Ohio’s stalwart Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted last month, “Is it really a #COVID19 relief bill if less than 9% of the bill goes to defeating COVID-19?”
If Republicans thought West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin would be an ally in their efforts to ward off this spending orgy, they were sorely disappointed. Manchin dressed up some windows by arguing for a drop in the bill’s weekly jobless benefit from $400 to $300, but little else. So much for the guy who told Fox News’s Bret Baier last month that he wouldn’t vote for a bill that didn’t have bipartisan support.
“The goal of this Democratic program isn’t Covid relief,” as the Journal’s editors conclude. “The point is to expand and solidify the role of government as the guarantor of every American’s income unlinked to any obligation to work.”
Every citizenry gets the government they deserve, and we’re getting ours good and hard these days. If there’s a bright side to the American Rescue Plan, it’s that every single House and Senate Republican voted against it, which means they’ll be able to hang it around the Democrats’ necks going forward, just like they did with Barack Obama’s comparatively puny $787 billion “stimulus” in 2009.
