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Rep. Peter Meijer pushing bipartisanship on COVID relief

The West Michigan Republican wants more money for testing and vaccines, not for raising the minimum wage.

WASHINGTON, D.C., USA — President Joe Biden is planning to meet with 10 GOP senators who've proposed a $618 billion COVID relief bill. 

The bill is less than half of the $1.9 trillion plan he's offered. The smaller of the two is more appealing to Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Grand Rapids).

 "That is, to me, a much more realistic short-term focus on where we need to go today," Meijer said. 

Meijer says his main problem with the Biden plan is that it "prioritizes things in the worst way possible, with some of the smallest money being allocated towards the thing that will actually get us through to the end of this pandemic." 

The Michigan freshman says the 20 billion Biden allocates for vaccines and 50 billion for testing are too low... and says they'd stand better chances for passage if they were voting on clean bills.

"This has been a bi-partisan failing for far too long: send clean bills. If you need, for the love of God, put that forward. If 20 billion dollars was requested... how much more quickly can we get to the point where 80% of the country is vaccinated if we raise that to 100 billion dollars for vaccinations?"

Meijer also says the president's plan is overstuffed with items that don't relate to COVID relief.

"It includes things like a 15 dollar minimum wage raise. A lot of other things that just have nothing to do with the task at hand... And hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out blue states who were not managing their finances appropriately before the pandemic." Meijer adds, "We should be front-loading - as much as we can - production and distribution of the vaccine. And the fact that we're spending two-fifths of what is being allocated for testing on the vaccine itself, is really putting the cart last. That's where we need to be focusing on getting everything moving forward, because that's what's going to get us through to the end of this pandemic."

Despite the meeting between Biden and the GOP senators, there's still the very real possibility that Democrats would try to push their bill through by reconciliation (a process by which they would not need a single Republican vote). If they were to do that, Meijer says that would destroy the theme of bipartisanship on which President Biden campaigned and talked about during his inaugural address.

"That just goes out the window. It becomes a 'take or leave it,' 'our way or the highway' proposition, rather than trying to have good faith negotiations... of which there are many on the Republican side of the aisle, including myself, who are ready and willing to look forward to what the problems are and how we can address them in a fair manner. Because the pandemic should not be partisan. And trying to put partisan wish list items into a large, bundled package is not the way that this is going to be a solution going forward."

"And with budget reconciliation being the mechanism proposed, it's not so much a take-it-or-leave-it... it's more of a 'we're just going to do it."

Watch the full interview:

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