The best and most popular ways to get unpopular or unnecessary bills passed is to attach them to popular and necessary bills and demand that in order to get the latter, the former — meaning, therefore, that the entire bill, containing vast amounts of pork — must get passed. It is apparently the way we do things in this country.
Why would the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 be called The Coronavirus Stimulus Bill? Well, no doubt because those two words coronavirus and stimulus, are the words of the day — the first one addressing the health issue we’ve all been living through, and the other, the word that brings up thoughts of the checks many of us will be getting.
No one really believes that $600 here and there, and now $1,400 will really make up for all the money that many of us have lost, or pay off all the bills that have accumulated, but at least it does show some caring, coupled of course with some doing. And while we know that some people have used this pandemic to take advantage of the system by making false claims to give themselves payments they did not deserve, we also know that many people have waited far too long for payments that were rightfully theirs, but were never sent.
Having had a chance to at least glance at the 594-page document passing as the Coronavirus Stimulus Bill, we can all agree that the name of the bill sounds promising. But we cannot say that it truly reflects all that’s in the bill.
Shakespeare once said, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
In a way, we know he was right. Yet could we really say that which we call the Coronavirus Stimulus Bill smells exactly like the pork-filled (and uncooked pork at that) “American Rescue Plan Act of 2021”?
We believe that what’s in a name makes a lot of difference to those who hear the better, easier to accept name, such as the Coronavirus Stimulus Bill, because it focuses on the two things that matter most to people these days: relief, to whatever degree it will be, for massive measures to help halt the COVID-19 pandemic (coronavirus), which includes: —mounting a national vaccination program, safely reopening schools, including setting up community vaccination sites nationwide, scaling
up testing and tracing, eliminating supply shortage problems, investing in high-quality treatments, providing paid sick leave to contain spread of the virus, addressing health disparities, and making the necessary investments to meet the president’s goal of safely reopening a majority of K-8 schools in the first 100 days; plus —relief, in the form of checks (those ever-popular stimulus checks) to help the economy rebound, and as the president always makes a point of saying, Build Back Better, and deliver immediate relief to working families bearing the brunt of this crisis; plus —providing direct housing and nutrition assistance, expanding access to safe and reliable childcare and affordable healthcare; plus —Supporting communities that are struggling in the wake of COVID-19 by providing support for the hardest-hit small businesses, especially small businesses owned by entrepreneurs of color, and protecting the jobs of the first responders, transit workers, and other essential
workers we depend on.
Of course everything smells like roses because that’s the way it is supposed to smell, but we noticed in the great big list of wonderful things that we just brought to your attention they failed to mention things like the $1.5 million for the Seaway International Bridge (connecting New York to Canada). Did we really need that at this time?
It wouldn’t help the roses smell as sweet if the name of the bill was the “American Rescue Plan and Many Assorted Plans for Personal Causes Act of 2021.” In fact, we can almost smell the sweet scent of the roses quickly fading as we learn about more of those Assorted Plans for Personal Causes.
But the good news is that the bill is getting passed, and the checks will be in the mail, and while We the People do not get to agree or disagree on the items in the legislation, some of it will be extremely helpful. Then, when election time rolls around again, we can express how we feel about some of the not-so-helpful items in the bill by doing a little research on those who inserted said items into the Coronavirus Stimulus Bill and making our votes really count.
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