Watson Coleman Leery of Stimulus Bill as it Currently Stands
The House is scheduled to vote Tuesday on the Senate version of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill and U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-12) is still mulling how she’ll vote.
“I didn’t think that when we were going to be fighting for working people we’d be fighting with our own party,” said the Congresswoman.
She hasn’t ruled it out yet.
But she has real concerns, especially when it comes to the minimum wage hike championed by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and jettisoned in the final version of the senate bill.
In the lead up to Saturday’s 50-49 passage of the relief bill in the Senate, Watson Coleman tweeted the following:
“This trend is outrageous: Eliminating $15/hr Reducing thresholds for payments [cutting off ~400k New Jerseyans] Cuts to weekly payments What are we doing here? I’m frankly disgusted with some of my colleagues and question whether I can support this bill.
There are good things in the bill, however, she said on Monday morning.
But what she’s seeing in regard to negotiations at this time is that the establishment again wants to make working class and middle class families compromise while at the same time, “when it comes to the wealthy, there seems to be no ceiling on what we’ll give them [i.e. tax cuts, etc.].”
“It seems there’s never a ceiling for the rich when they want a tax cut,” Watson Coleman said. “And there’s never a floor for the poor when they need help.”
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