The first bill that President Biden introduced, even before taking office, was a $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which really picks up most of the leftover elements on pandemic relief that Democrats were unable to advance in the CARES Act and the December COVID relief bill. Two things stood out in the bill: the topping up of $600 checks in December to $2,000 and funding to get the vaccine produced and distributed.
Those two pieces both probably have enough bipartisan support to pass, even in the Senate with 60 votes. The checks are incredibly popular and Republicans would be playing with fire to hold them up, especially if they know they can be dumped into a majority-vote budget reconciliation bill anyway (in other words, they’d have taken a bad vote for nothing). And there’s literally no amount of vaccine money that would not pay itself back and then some, by leading to reopening the country in full faster.
So there’s an argument being made, within the House especially, to just pass those two elements—what I’m calling "checks and shots"—under regular order, and deal with the rest of the American Rescue Plan later. This has a couple different benefits. First, Biden would get an early, bipartisan legislative win, creating momentum for his presidency. That’s probably the most minor benefit, since "momentum" really isn’t a thing.
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