Progressive Lawmakers Call on Biden to Declare Emergency to Secure More Covid Funding, Bypassing Congress
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Several Democratic lawmakers are calling on President Biden to declare a national emergency to allow the government to use military funds to fight the pandemic, as another round of funding has stalled in Congress, according to a new report.
The move is taken right from the Trump playbook: when Congress chose not to fund his southern-border wall, Trump declared a national emergency, taking money from military construction projects and ordering construction on the wall to begin. At the time, Democrats criticized Trump for bucking norms and the Democrat-controlled House sued the then-president. The Supreme Court, however, declined to block the transfer of funds. Now, several progressives want Biden to do the same, according to a new report out from the Atlantic.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki has said the government must get additional funding to spend on tests, treatments and care for the uninsured, “otherwise people are going to die.” But the administration has said there is nothing it can do, as Congress traditionally must approve such funding.
Representative Barbara Lee (D., Calif.) is one of the lawmakers who believe Biden has the power to circumvent Congress for more Covid funding.
“We saw how Trump did it based on his priorities,” Lee told the Atlantic. “If they can do that, don’t tell me they can’t find another $15 billion and more for saving lives in America and around the world.”
“It would be a bold move, and I think boldness is needed now,” added Lee, who is the chair of the Appropriations subcommittee that controls funding for the State Department and foreign operations.
Meanwhile, Representative Mark Pocan (D., Wis.) told the magazine, “This fits the definition of emergency funding. The wall did not.”
“The Republicans have made this impossible to do in the normal way,” he added.
Senator Chris Coons (D., Del.), chair of the Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction over the State and foreign-operations budget, told the magazine that while he expects the administration to look into whether it could make “some sort of emergency declaration” to find more funding for the global vaccine push, he is skeptical that Biden would follow in Trump’s steps and try to secure the funding without Congress.
“If you spent the campaign and the last year arguing that it was completely illegitimate and supporting the lawsuits challenging it, it would then be a little challenging to turn around and say, ‘Well, we want to do exactly the same thing,'” said Coons, a close Biden ally.
“You’d have to persuade me that there was zero chance that we were going to [respond] to an emergency before I’d say it was okay for a president who served in the Senate for 36 years to blow up the appropriations process,” Coons added.
However, he said he would “expect those conversations to begin” if Congress still remains at an impasse in six weeks or two months.
The Democrats’ call for executive action come as Congress has already appropriate more than $5 trillion to fight the pandemic over the past two years. While not all of that money has been spent, the Office of Management and Budget says the funds specifically earmarked for Covid testing, vaccines and therapeutics have run out. The Department of Health and Human Services only has the ability to transfer a small amount between accounts, as there are separate accounts for different purposes as designated by Congress, according to the report.
However, the report notes that when Trump declared an emergency to secure border-wall funding, he cited a specific statute in the Pentagon budget to make the case that the transfer of funds was legal. Lee and Pocan did not offer the Atlantic a proposal for how Biden could justify using the military funds to fight Covid.
