American Rescue Plan Act of 2021
Floor Speech
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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, when Senators were last in this Chamber, our Democratic colleagues were shooting down amendment after amendment to ensure their largely non-COVID-related spending plan remained very liberal and purely partisan.
Republicans proposed amendments to cap extra government help for wealthier Americans, to ensure that direct checks would only go to citizens and legal residents and not to people in prison, and to rein in runaway State and local bailouts and refocus the bill on urgent COVID-related actual needs. But Democrats banded together to defeat every one of these commonsense changes. As the Democratic leader happily explained to reporters later on Saturday, his whole conference put lockstep party unity ahead of substance and ahead of bipartisan compromise.
So the nearly $2 trillion partisan spending spree that President Biden's Chief of Staff brags is ``the most progressive domestic legislation in a generation'' is on its way over to the House. Already, we hear reporting that this giveaway will simply wipe out the budget deficit of New York State and eliminate a big part of the deficit in San Francisco, courtesy of the taxpayers in Kentucky and Middle America. Already, we hear the administration saying they want some of these sweeping new welfare policies to become permanent, like a no- strings-attached benefit that disregards all the pro-work lessons of bipartisan welfare reform. Meanwhile, it only manages to spend about 1 percent on vaccinations and less than 9 percent on the entire health fight.
Democrats inherited a turning tide. The vaccine trends and economic trends were in place before the bill was ever voted on, before this President was sworn in, but they are determined to push to the front of the parade with an effort to push America to the left.
Meanwhile, House Democrats are wasting no time pursuing even more purely partisan legislation. Last Wednesday, the House passed H.R. 1, their effort to rewrite the ground rules of American elections and seize power from States and localities. Just like the spending plan, in both Chambers, once again the only thing bipartisan about the bill was the opposition.
This is House Democrats' bid to put Federal bureaucrats in charge of local election rules; to undermine voter ID requirements with massive loopholes that undermine them; to require every State to permit ballot harvesting, which lets paid political operatives produce stacks of ballots with other people's names on them; to overturn or change hundreds of State election laws; and to turn our highest election authority, the equally balanced FEC, into a partisan majority body to crack down on speech and ideas they don't like.
It is quite the recipe for rebuilding public faith in our democracy on all sides--a purely partisan effort to seize unprecedented power for Washington, DC, on a razor-thin majority. It is a hugely harmful idea at the worst possible time.
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