In new Morning Consult/ POLITICO polling, the roughly $1.9 trillion COVID-19 economic relief package currently moving through Congress earned a very high level of support from the general public. A full 77 percent of respondents overall — and 59 percent of Republican respondents — said that they supported the move, and when respondents were specifically informed that the plan was a Democratic initiative, these levels of support barely moved. When informed of the Democratic backing, a full 71 percent of respondents overall and 53 percent of Republicans said that they supported the initiative.
NEW Morning Consult/Politico Poll
77% support for the American Rescue Plan (only 18% oppose)
59% of Republicans support the American Rescue Plan (only 33% oppose)#UNITY
REMINDER: 100% of Republicans in Congress voted no.https://t.co/YuonRZncOH
— Jesse Ferguson (@JesseFFerguson) March 3, 2021
The relief package already passed the House and is now under consideration by the Senate, and provisions include direct relief checks for many Americans, a continued expansion of unemployment benefits, funding for state and local governments, and more. Not a single Republican in Congress has so far voted in favor of the legislation, no matter the noticeably broad support for the plan among their own voters! In the Senate, Democrats are planning to pass the proposal through budget reconciliation, which means that they don’t need any Republican votes, as long as every Democrat votes in favor of the proposal.
In the Senate, Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) announced on Wednesday that he planned to “make the Senate clerk read the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion bill,” including “All several hundred pages of it.” As he put it, “Yes, it could take 10 hours but the American people deserve to know what’s in it.” Pretending that “the American people” are going to sit and watch someone read a hundreds-of-pages long bill for 10 hours is a laughably flimsy excuse for Johnson’s stunt. “The American people” can just read the entire bill for themselves on the internet, if they’re so inclined! It’s right there! Johnson seemingly doesn’t intend to actually engage in meaningful policy-making in this context. He’s just dragging out the process.
As Congress works through the COVID-19 relief, other efforts against the pandemic that are continuing to unfold include the vaccine distribution effort, and recently, President Biden announced that the U.S. was on track to have enough vaccines on hand to cover every adult American by the end of May, which is a couple of months sooner than the previous prediction.
