The Democratic Party woke up Saturday morning to its 31st day of leading both the executive and legislative branches of government. They had run on “immediate [economic] relief” to Americans put down and out by largely Democratic COVID shutdowns. Relief, you might notice, that hasn’t actually come.
On Jan. 14, less than one week before taking the oath of office, President Joe Biden promised, “We’ll make sure that our emergency small business relief is distributed swiftly and equitably, unlike the first time around. We’re going to focus on small businesses, on Main St. We’ll focus on minority-owned small businesses, women-owned small businesses.”
But so far in the first full month that Sen. Chuck Schumer, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and President Biden have been in control, the only money that has gone toward American relief has been from that money allocated while President Donald Trump and Sen. Mitch McConnell still joined Pelosi in power, including $1 trillion that remains unspent.
Instead of their promised relief, over the past month Democrats have tried the former president, re-entered the Paris Climate Accords, locked down the U.S. Capitol, and freed up American tax dollars to go to aborting children abroad.
So what about American business owners, parents, and workers suffering under COVID-19 restrictions? Anything for them? So far nothing.
Well, not exactly nothing. President Joe Biden has mandated masks on busses, for example, and Vice President Kamala Harris has claimed credit for the Trump administration’s vaccine development. Biden has also established a COVID board, created a COVID task force, developed a COVID plan, reviewed COVID, assessed COVID, and held a COVID town hall. Lovely.
“Our rescue plan will provide flexible grants to help those hardest-hit small businesses survive the pandemic,” Biden promised more than five weeks ago. His administration, he said, would “help entrepreneurs of all backgrounds create and maintain jobs, plus provide the essential goods and services communities depend upon.”
Instead, at this week’s CNN town hall Biden told Wisconsin brewer Tim Eichinger, a Democrat who is struggling to keep his employees on and his business afloat, to give White House staff his address so they could mail him that COVID plan — the one he laid out five weeks ago. It’s the same one Democrats have been sitting on for a month while they fight over things like a $15 national minimum wage hike unlikely to pass the Senate and which even the president admits likely isn’t going anywhere.
Whether it does or doesn’t will be no help to Tim Eichinger. Nor will taxpayer money for abortion, nor any of the other completely unrelated left-wing projects jammed into this apparently necessary COVID relief.
Meanwhile, a Republican push for domestic abuse survivors to not have to go through their former abusers for access to their checks was denied by Democrats. So too was a push for schools to even have a plan to reopen their doors before receiving money. So too is Republicans’ completely accurate complaint that there is still $1 trillion in unspent relief money allocated by the last Congress.
In exchange for electing him president of the United States, Biden promised “immediate relief to Americans hardest hit and most in need.” But promises are cheap, and one whole month into his administration he hasn’t accomplished a single bit of it.