The Democrats sold you out. That’s right: With 25-plus million unemployed, and millions more taking pay cuts just to keep their jobs, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats’ newly passed $3 trillion omnibus bill doesn’t help you—the hardworking American—it spends trillions of your tax dollars funding the Left’s radical socialist agenda.
When I was an Arizona State Senator, we would see bills at the end of the legislative session described as “Christmas trees.” Since there were few bills left in the session to pass, lobbyists, other legislators, and all sorts of special interests would find a bill that was still alive, and start hanging pet projects on it – the way you hang ornaments on a Christmas tree. It appears that is what happened when Pelosi chose to not bring the House back to Washington, while crafting a bill without input from Congressional Republicans or the White House.
Pelosi’s 1,815-page, $3 trillion socialist wish list has a lot of familiar ornaments hanging on it. For starters, $25 billion for the U.S. Postal Service, another round of $1,200 payments to individuals, provisions to pre-empt state voter ID laws, funding for vote-by-mail schemes, blanket release for certain covered federal prisoners and alleged criminals, removal of safeguards in the Paycheck Protection Program that would prevent taxpayer money from bailing out the nation’s top abortion factory, and a tax break for blue state millionaires and billionaires by repealing SALT limitations for 2020 and 2021.
Shockingly, the legislation only includes a mere $75 billion for coronavirus testing and other measures designed to help stop the virus’ spread and $100 billion for hospitals, as well as some grants for certain businesses to pay frontline employees hazard pay. Don’t be fooled, these monies are intended to cover the true beneficiaries of this travesty.
The bill also includes $915 billion for state, local, tribal and territorial governments. The Democrats are calling this a “jobs bill,” but the jobs they are talking about are government jobs. We saw this with the Obama stimulus package and the infamous “shovel ready jobs” where much of the money went to local governments and school districts rather than infrastructure projects.
Make no mistake, throughout the coronavirus situation, the overwhelming majority of government workers have not been laid off, furloughed, or seen salary reductions. Quite unlike the experiences of the American people, government workers have continued to receive their full paychecks despite, for many, reduced workloads.
As if these examples aren’t bad enough, House Democrats have chosen to incentivize people not to work. Small businesses all over America are already citing difficulties reopening because Democrats snuck a weekly unemployment bonus into the initial relief bill, which makes it more lucrative for some workers to remain unemployed. Now that Democrats have extended weekly bonuses through January, it’s worth asking how they expect to rebuild the best economy in history if people are incentivized to remain unemployed?
Another dazzling ball on the Pelosi Christmas tree is a Democrat favorite—the marijuana industry. That’s right, while they couldn’t be bothered to help every day, hard-working Americans, Democrats somehow found the time to bailout pot.
There is one conspicuously empty branch on Pelosi’s Christmas tree. Democrats failed to limit the liability of businesses trying to reopen. Preventing businesses from being sued into oblivion is critically important to kickstarting our economy back into full gear. Senate Republicans are trying to do this in a responsible way with a provision that would allow bad actors to still be held accountable while providing reasonable liability limitations for businesses.
In November, when you step into the voting booth, just remember that Democrats sold you out in your time of greatest need. When you were hurting the most, Democrats chose to release serious criminals from prison, prop up the marijuana industry, bailout unaffected government bureaucrats, and give your hard-earned tax dollars to illegal immigrants. The Democrats chose politics over people and they think you’re too stupid to remember that when the time to vote comes around.
Dr. Kelli Ward is a family physician, two-term Arizona state senator, and the chairwoman of the Republican Party or Arizona. On Twitter: @KelliWardAZ.
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