Congress approved this Wednesday, after weeks of exhausting negotiation, a historic rescue package for the economy worth 1.9 trillion dollars.
With it, Joe Biden scores his first major legislative victory, marks what will be some of the priorities of his mandate and sends a signal of unity of his party, which will be key to moving his agenda forward.
But, at the same time, the approval of the plan clearly shows the limits of what it will be able to achieve and how difficult it will be to fulfill its project, tirelessly reiterated during the electoral campaign, of building bridges between the two parties and achieving consensus.
The bill, which the president must sign in the next few days, has received unanimous rejection, in both houses of Congress, by some Republicans who consider it an exorbitant outlay of public money, and a Trojan horse to introduce progressive policies, that ignores the signs that the health crisis is subsiding.
Its processing, with small Democratic majorities in both chambers, has constituted a true odyssey, with marathon days that lasted until dawn.
Its agonizing approval in the Senate last week required so many concessions to the centrist sector of the Democrats that the text had to be returned to the House of Representatives for it to rule on it again, which it did this Wednesday by 220 votes to 211. No Republican has voted in favor and one Democrat has voted against.
Along the way was the rise in the minimum wage, from $ 7.25 to $ 15 an hour, which was one of the priorities of the progressive sector of the party.
The approval comes in Joe Biden's seventh week in office, and when more than 60 million people in the United States have already received at least one dose of vaccines against covid, a disease that has killed more than half a million Americans in a year.
Known as the American Rescue Plan, the Democrats' goal was to have the law in place before mid-March, when the unemployment benefits contemplated in the previous bailout expire for millions of citizens.
"It is an extraordinary, historic, transformative piece of legislation that goes a long way in crushing the virus and solving the economic crisis," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, said Tuesday.
For Democrats, encouraged by their control of the White House and both houses of Congress, as well as by polls showing strong support for the president, the bill embodies some of their core beliefs.
It constitutes a catalog of their political priorities, and the claim that public spending need not be the curse that Republicans paint, but can provide the solution to society's problems and become a transformative force.
Nor did the Republicans, when they were in power and passed a historic tax cut three years ago, behaved as saviors of the public debt, which is approaching $ 22 trillion.
Contrary to that tax cut to companies and higher incomes, the emphasis of the measures of the rescue package approved this Wednesday is on low- and middle-income families.
In addition to another direct round of payments to citizens (of 1,400 dollars), supplements to the unemployment benefit and funds to accelerate the vaccination campaign, there are historical measures against child poverty, aid for childcare, for food and for the rental of housing.
The law includes funds for schools, local administrations and particularly hit sectors such as travel and culture.
And it also contains specific aid to states that expand public health coverage to low-income workers.
The euphoria among Democrats led them, according to
The Washington Post,
to contemplate the possibility that the checks that are going to be delivered to citizens bear Biden's signature, something they criticized when Trump did with the previous remittance.
The possibility was ruled out, but the White House does study a series of president rallies across the country to promote the passed legislation, which Democrats see as one of the most significant national political achievements in recent history.
According to a poll released yesterday by Pew Research, they have public support: Up to 70% of Americans support the plan, including 41% of Republicans.
It is the third rescue package that has been approved since the coronavirus hit a year ago: the first, the largest in history with a volume of 2.2 trillion, came forward in the spring unanimously in Congress;
the second, of 900,000 million, also achieved almost total support in December.
But the particular relevance of this, with the new legislature underway, and some Republicans in the opposition who have not yielded a single vote to the first plan designed by Biden, lies in the fact that the light at the end of the tunnel and the plan is already visible. sets the priorities and direction of the comeback.
The legislative battle is over, but the political struggle has only just begun.
Republicans will lash out at a supposed progressive wasteful feast.
The Democrats, for their part, do not want to fall into what they consider an error by the Obama Administration, which failed to capitalize on the stimulus plan it approved when it reached the White House, to combat the effects of the Great Recession.