The Senate Just Passed Biden’s $1.9 Trillion Stimulus Bill

Time to warm up the money printer.

Joe Biden happy

Oliver Contreras/CNP/ZUMA

The coronavirus is a rapidly developing news story, so some of the content in this article might be out of date. Check out our most recent coverage of the coronavirus crisis, and subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.

After a marathon all-night vote on a series of amendments, the Senate passed a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill on Saturday on a 5o-49 party-line vote, moving one of President Joe Biden’s signature initiatives one step closer to becoming law.

Among other things, the bill includes $350 billion for state governments, and extends unemployment benefits at $300-a-week through September 6. And most famously, the package includes another round of checks—a full $1,400 for people below a certain cutoff. (That would be $75,000 for single individuals, $112,500 for single parents, and $150,000 for couples.)

This doesn’t have everything Biden and progressives in Congress originally pushed for. The thresholds for checks has gone down substantially from what passed the House (and what was included in earlier COVID relief measures). An effort to attach language raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour failed (with eight Democrats voting against it). And the extended unemployment benefit was unexpectedly slashed at the last minute from $400-a-week to $300—thanks to a perplexing gambit by West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the chamber.

But it is still, as the president might say, a big F-ing deal. $1.9 trillion is a whole lot of money. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont called it “the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working people in the modern history of this country.” It’s more than double what President Barack Obama and Congress secured amid the Great Recession in 2009. The specter of that effort, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, loomed over this plan from the beginning, fueling the push to go big and act fast rather than pursue Republican votes they were never really going to get. They asked for a lot and they got a lot.

“We cannot go through the situation we did back in 2009, where the stimulus wasn’t strong enough and we stayed in recession for years,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters last week.

Biden recently suggested Obama showed too much “modesty” in the wake of that effort, and implored Democrats to take a “victory lap” on legislation that polls show is overwhelmingly popular.

The bill will now go to the Democratic-controlled House. Once it passes there, it’ll go to President Joe Biden’s desk. And then, finally, you can start looking out for those checks.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate