Huey Driver Loc: Texas

It’s been approximately 9 months since the first and only stimulus checks of $1,200 were sent out. It has only taken Congress about 9 months of political bickering to arrive at the second check. They are going to give you a generous $600. That works out to about $67 per month. How nice? Also in the bill, we are giving our good friends Pakistan between $10 and $25 million dollars (depending on which source the information comes from) to fund gender studies, etc. No telling what else is in that bill? All the while we have citizens who can’t put food on the table or pay their rent. Maybe we should take back all Congressional pay during that time, redistribute that money to the needy and re-issue new pay checks to Congress amounting to $67 per month? Sounds like a good idea to me! Now I ask you, don’t we have about the best and most generous government on earth?

US Congress clears $25 million for democracy, gender programmes in Pakistan | Business Standard News (business-standard.com)

flip1948 Loc: Hamden, CT

Once again, that money for Pakistan was not in the Covid bill. That was one of a number of instances of foreign aid in the general $1.4 trillion dollar government funding bill to which the 900 billion dollar Covid bill was attached. The larger bill will fund the government thru September of next year and contains a ton of money for things not related to the Corona cooties.

Frank T Loc: New York, NY

They would give Americans more but they needed to give 500 million to Israel.

Triple G

That's the usual government funding bill that contains ludicrous amounts of money for all kinds of "pet" projects from democrats, republicans and independents alike. That's where austerity programs are needed; the senators voting against the COVID relief bill should be outraged by the items in the general funding bill and use their non-votes for that alone.

Huey Driver Loc: Texas

In my book it really doesn't make any difference what bill it's in when we have people in this country in bad shape because of COVID. Citizens first then maybe the rest of the world but ONLY for worthwhile projects not some Congress man/woman's pet project.

btbg

Who cares which portion of the spending bill the ridiculous aid packages are in. Give one justification for spending funding on foreign aid while we are drowning in debt and have people with serious needs in our own country.

The two spending packages are linked together and were voted on as a single package. There is something like 130 million to study climate change in Tibet, and there are billions of dollars of pork in the bill.

On top of that, no one was given a copy of the bill in time to read it before voting on it. Over 5,000 pages brokered by four people and the rest of our house and senate had no idea what they voted for.

This is a classic example of what is wrong with our government. No one should vote on a bill that they haven't read, and no bill should be brought to a vote until there is plenty of time not only for congress to read the bill, but the general public should have time to read it and comment prior to a vote.

btbg

We agree. Six senators did the right thing and 54 members of the house did the right thing.