National review
Why Six Senate Republicans Vote Against COVID Relief Bill
Congress on Monday night passed a $ 900 billion coronavirus relief package. Dollars after months of political net-locking, with the Senate voting almost unanimously in favor of the measure, with the exception of six Republican senators. Ticket of 5,593 pages approved by Parliament 359-53 before being approved by Senate 92-6. The six votes against the measure came from Republican Senators Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), Rand Paul (Ky.) Rick Scott (Fla.), Ron Johnson (Wisc.), Mike Lee (Utah) and Ted Cruz (Texas). six senators were mostly critical of the economic and physical scale of the bill. Paul called the bill a “consumer monstrosity” and said “so-called conservatives” who vote for the measure would not be better than Social Democrats. “When you vote to pass out of free money, you lose your soul and you give up forever any kind of moral or fiscal integrity,” he said. He instead supported opening up the economy and cutting wasteful spending in the budget to stop creating additional debt for future generations. Johnson also said in a statement that the government “does not have an unlimited checking account.” “We need to spend federal dollars – money we borrow from future generations – more carefully and set limits on how much we pledge our children’s future.” He clarified while supporting the far-reaching CARES law in the spring, when rapid, massive action was needed to “prevent an economic breakdown”, that this time he would have a more targeted approach; in September, he proposed a smaller $ 600 billion in emergency bill Scott also pushed toward the “massive bill for omnibus spending that mortgages the future of our children and grandchildren.”> We must help Americans and small businesses in need, but we can not continue to operate this way. Once upon a time, in the classic Washington style, vital programs were linked to a massive bill for omnibus expenses that pledged the future of our children and grandchildren, which is why I can not support this bill. ) December 21, 2020He said in a tweet that he would not support the bill, adding in a statement that “Washington does not seem to understand that new spending today will be paid by increased federal debt and result in a tax increase on families down the road. “The easy route is simply to go when Congress continues to harm future generations of Americans, but I will not be a part of it,” he said. Johnson said, however, that while he was “happy that a government shutdown was avoided and the financial relief will finally reach many who really need it, “he was critical of the ‘dysfunction’ in the process.” The dysfunction in Washington, DC was in full swing as Congress combined covid relief with a massive omnibus spending bill three months past the deadline and into the current fiscal year, ”Johnson said. “This outrage was 5,593 pages long and went on for only nine hours after the Senate first saw it.” “I simply could not support this dysfunction, so I voted no,” he said. Cruz and Lee also pushed back against legislators being given equal hours to read thousands of pages of legislation. In response to a tweet from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., NY), in which the progressive lawmaker regretted having to vote on the bill without being given sufficient time to review it, Cruz agreed that the process is “absurd.” “It’s ABSURD to have secretly negotiated a $ 2.5 trillion bill and then – hours later – demand an up-and-down vote on a bill that no one has had time to read,” Cruz tweeted. . @AOC is right. >> It’s ABSURD to have a $ 2.5 trillion bill negotiated in secret and then hours later demand an up-and-down vote on a bill that no one has had time to read. CongressIsBroken https://t.co/EQp8BfRBHj >> – Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) December 21, 2020 Lee repeated this criticism and posted a video to Twitter showing how long it took just to print the bill: three minutes to just the first 100 pages of the massive bill. “Because of the length, it is impossible for anyone to have the opportunity to read it until the time when we will vote,” Lee said in the video. “And I’m pretty sure this has been paved together by a very small handful of members of Congress and their staffs and with the exclusion of 98% of the members of both political parties’ congressmen in both houses.” “This process, in which members of Congress are being asked to blindly expose legislation that has been negotiated in complete secrecy by four of their colleagues, must come to an end,” he said.> 1/4 This is the spending proposal that is under consideration in Congress today. I received it just moments ago and will probably be asked to vote on it late tonight. It is 5,593 pages long. I know there are some good things in it. I’m just as sure there are bad things in it. pic.twitter.com/SoWXnEWYfV >> – Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) December 21, 2020Cruz and Blackburn also criticized some of the $ 1.4 trillion in funding that the COVID Aid Act brought together . Cruz said the bill “promotes radical left-wing interests, special interests and swamp lobbyists, with funding to extend the authority of more H-2B visas to foreign workers, while an almost record number of Americans remain unemployed.[.]”It also sets the stage” for the Democrats to implement the ‘Green New Deal’ by claiming a ‘need’ to meet the power needs of the United States through clean, renewable or energy sources without emissions, ‘he said. While Blackburn acknowledged that the legislation had a number of positives, including vaccine development and distribution, help for schools and help for small businesses, she said it cost too much and contained a number of measures she could not support. “I can not support nearly $ 2.4 trillion in spending that will make recovery even more difficult,” she said in a statement. “I have serious concerns about provisions buried in the 5,593-page bill, such as extended visas, Pell subsidies for prisoners and households with illegal aliens who receive financial consequences. For these reasons, I voted against the passage of this legislation. “