US President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled plans for fighting COVID-19 and injecting US$1.9 trillion into a battered US economy, but already his ambitious first 100-days agenda is overshadowed by the looming US Senate trial of his soon-to-be predecessor Donald Trump.
Biden promised “a new chapter” for the nation on the day after Trump became the first US president to be impeached twice, as the incoming president sought to seize the narrative in a prime-time address and encourage Americans to look forward again.
“We will come back,” he said in a speech from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
Photo: AFP
“We didn’t get into all this overnight. We won’t get out of it overnight, and we can’t do it as a separated and divided nation,” he said. “The only way we can do it is to come together, to come together as fellow Americans.”
With his Democrats narrowly controlling both houses of the US Congress, Biden, 78, has a shot at passing what would be the third massive COVID-19 pandemic aid package.
However, what he is less keen to talk about is the impending trial of Trump, something that would potentially introduce a nightmarish mix of scheduling complications and political drama into an already tense Senate.
In his 25-minute televised speech, Biden made no mention of Trump, impeachment or the deadly violence that nearly overwhelmed Washington last week.
Instead he addressed “the twin crises of a pandemic and this sinking economy,” a challenge exceeding even that which faced him as vice president to former US president Barack Obama when they assumed office following the 2008 financial crisis.
The pandemic continues to hit new peaks, the COVID-19 vaccination program is stumbling and there are fears that the economic recovery from last year’s cratering could backslide.
His proposal, dubbed the “American Rescue Plan,” would include a host of measures aimed at revitalizing the world’s largest economy.
Among those are raising the minimum wage to US$15 per hour, aiding struggling state and local governments, safely reopening schools, rolling out a massive COVID-19 vaccination campaign, extending unemployment benefits and boosting the size of stimulus checks.
US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said they would hit the ground running to assure the plan’s success.
“We will get right to work to turn president-elect Biden’s vision into legislation that will pass both chambers and be signed into law,” they said in a joint statement.
Biden, who is to be sworn in on Wednesday next week, is also promising to get vaccinations off the ground, with an eye-catching slogan of 100 million shots administered in the first 100 days.
Biden plans to tackle all of this at the same time, putting one of the darkest periods of US history in the rearview mirror.
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