Covid-19 Relief Bill Moves Closer to House Vote

 The House Budget Committee approved the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package Monday, setting up a vote in the full House later this week.

The Budget Committee on Monday officially fused together different portions of the legislation that had advanced earlier this month in nine different House committees. A full House vote is expected Friday or Saturday.

The bill moving through the House would extend $400-a-week unemployment benefits through Aug. 29, send $1,400 per-person payments to most households, provide billions in funding for schools and vaccine distribution, expand the child tax credit, broaden child-care assistance and bolster tax credits for health insurance. It would also increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour over four years, a point of division among Democrats.

"We are in a race against time. Aggressive, bold action is needed before our nation is more deeply and permanently scarred by the human and economic costs of inaction," House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D., Ky.) said Monday before the vote. "We are going to pass this legislation and we are going to turn this pandemic and economic crisis around."

In the past month, new Covid-19 cases have declined as vaccines rolled out to more Americans, and economists have upgraded their outlooks for the year. But officials including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have said the $1.9 trillion package is needed to dig out of the economic slump induced by the pandemic.

Republicans have criticized the bill as wasteful and said Congress should take more time to assess where more funding is needed after lawmakers passed nearly $4 trillion in relief efforts since the pandemic began.

"This is the wrong plan at the wrong time and for all the wrong reasons, " Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee said during the hearing. "The real reason for this bill is to send billions to bail out blue-state governors and reward their harmful lockdown policies," he said, referring to the bill's $350 billion in funding for state and local governments.

The committee voted largely along party lines to approve the bill Monday. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D., Texas) mistakenly voted against the bill when he joined the hearing remotely as he was getting off a flight from Texas and misunderstood the vote, his spokeswoman said. "He supports the Covid-19 relief legislation," she said. It wasn't yet clear Monday afternoon if he could change his vote.

The bill is expected to narrowly pass in the House, where Democrats hold a 221-211 majority. It will then head to the Senate, where Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said he was confident it would pass before enhanced unemployment benefits start to run out in mid-March.

"Democrats remain hard at work preparing the desperately needed Covid relief bill, which is on track to go to the president's desk before the March 14 expiration of unemployment insurance benefits," Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor Monday.

But the bill has already started a messy fight in the Senate, where Democrats are divided over whether to include a provision that would gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over four years.

Two centrist Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have already said they oppose including it in the relief bill. A larger group of 10 other Democrats haven't signed on to stand-alone legislation raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Any dissension among Democrats is problematic in the evenly-divided Senate since Democrats can't afford to lose a single vote among their own ranks and still pass the legislation. They are preparing to use a process tied to the budget, known as reconciliation, that will allow them to pass certain bills with a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes most bills need. That will enable Democrats to pass the legislation without GOP votes in the 50-50 Senate, with Vice President Harris casting the tiebreaking vote.

But Senate rules require that measures passed under reconciliation must be directly tied to the budget, and it isn't clear that raising the minimum wage will be considered permissible. The nonpartisan parliamentarian of the Senate determines which measures are eligible to pass under reconciliation in a decision that could come as soon as Wednesday.

If the minimum wage increase is permitted to remain in the bill, Democrats might seek to craft a compromise that would raise the wage to a lower level, or phase it in over a longer period. Mr. Manchin has talked about supporting an increase to $11 or $12 an hour, according to activists who met with him last week.

President Biden has said he doesn't believe the Senate's rules will permit the minimum wage increase to remain in the bill, even though he supports raising it.

"The president would not have included an increase in the minimum wage if he did not want to see it in the final package," White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Monday, but said the decision was up to the parliamentarian. "We'll see what comes out on the other end."

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