Weekly Capitol Report

This week marks the one-year anniversary of President Biden and Washington Democrats passing the Biden Bailout Bill, a $2 trillion package that has directly led to worker shortages, billions in Washington waste, and spiraling inflation. As a direct result of that law, American families are finding it harder to put food on the table, clothes on their backs, and gasoline in their cars with a new 40-year high for inflation of 7.9 percent over the last year.

At the time the bill passed, President Biden and his Washington Democrat colleagues argued Americans wanted this bill, which spent less than 9 percent of its total funding on crushing COVID. They cited polls which showed in March 2021 that 77 percent of Americans believed this bill would help them. But I knew that once the American people actually found out what was in this bill, those numbers would quickly change.

Democrats are now faced with the reality that as of December, only 21 percent of voters believe the law has helped them in any way and 29 percent say it has actually left them worse off, and less than 40 percent of Americans today support President Biden’s handling of the pandemic. And it’s not hard to see why. The Biden Bailout Bill included in it over $500 billion to state and local governments to incentivize business closures, lockdowns, and anti-science masking policies that kept children out of the classroom – all  policies that left millions of Americans struggling. Billions of additional dollars from this law have been wasted, misused, or repurposed for projects completely unrelated to the pandemic. 

For example, in President Biden’s home state of Delaware, $40 million of ‘emergency COVID-19 funding’ from this law is being spent to build libraries; in New Jersey $15 million is going toward building a sports complex; in Syracuse, New York, $2 million is being used to plant trees; and in Philadelphia there is a proposal to spend $18 million to literally hand out free money. And of course, because there were no restrictions on who received the $1,400 stimulus checks, there were checks being sent to Japanese citizens living in Japan and convicted prisoners, including the Boston Marathon Bomber.

Remember when there was a nationwide COVID test shortage over Christmas? Well, the Biden Administration diverted $2 billion from his bailout bill which was intended to support COVID testing and vaccines to instead provide housing to the surge of illegal immigrants streaming across our southern border. You know, that surge which was kicked off after he broadcast to the world that he would no longer be enforcing our nation’s immigration laws.

Twenty-one percent of the spending in the Biden Bailout Bill went to supporting policies that destroy jobs and encourage Americans to depend on government checks instead of getting back into the workforce. And now our country is paying the price. Even before the Biden Bailout Bill was passed, Democrats like former Obama economic advisor Larry Summers warned that it’s impacts would cause “inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” Biden ignored those warnings, and now we are dealing with the consequences. One analysis showed American households paid $3,500 more last year because of inflation.

And to put the cherry on top of the waste, President Biden is trying to get Congress to approve another $15 billion COVID relief package, even though there is still $326 billion sitting unspent in government coffers from his first package.

President Biden’s legacy is now clear. He will be remembered as the President that created a massive worker shortage and instigated the highest inflation in a generation, leaving a lagging economy in his wake. As your representative, I will continue to fight back against the radical spending policies of the Biden Administration and House Democrats.

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