Abortion Funding, Surveillance, Mail-in Voting: Progressives Unveil Wish List for Next Coronavirus Stimulus Bill
Increased abortion funding. Stimulus checks for illegals. Permanent housing guarantees. Mail-in voting for elections. Minimum wage hikes and more union access. The large-scale release of imprisoned criminals. An extensive national disease surveillance program.
These are just some of the far-left, Big Government proposals being peddled by influential progressive organizations for Democrats to include in the next round of emergency stimulus funding, which the groups say should be at least as large as the $2.2 trillion CARES Act.
The Center for American Progress (CAP), which functions as an idea factory for the Democratic Party, compiled its wish list for the next round of recovery legislation during the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
Reprising the repurposed progressive anthem of never letting a crisis go to waste, the CAP’s list of recommendations for the next stimulus package clearly seeks to use the coronavirus crisis to achieve many longstanding progressive policy aims.
The CAP tells lawmakers that the pandemic “requires Congress to significantly expand the measures included in the CARES Act and other COVID-19 packages to reflect the expected magnitude and duration of the disruption.”
The CAP recommends the construction of a robust surveillance program, including the following (below are direct quotes from the CAP plan):
Surveillance testing (including training volunteers) and to build tracing teams.
App development (or funding for state licensing of the technology if privately developed) that will be necessary for instantaneous contact tracing.
Additional funding for developing a national disease surveillance program going forward.
CAP wants to use the pandemic to fundamentally transform the voting system, requiring all states to “significantly expand vote-by-mail opportunities; implement at least 14 days of early voting; adopt online and same day voter registration.”
Here, CAP, which is funded by billionaire activist George Soros, joins a slew of other Soros-funded progressive groups seeking the expanded use of mail-in balloting for elections by citing fears that coronavirus makes it too dangerous to vote in person.
Republicans specifically fear the prospect of voter fraud, since mail-in voting would be harder to authenticate.
Stimulus payments in the next round of legislation must also include “undocumented individuals and mixed-status families where even just one parent is filing their taxes with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number and the other parent and all children have an SSN,” CAP writes.
Instead of turning off extra unemployment insurance benefits after the coronavirus pandemic is over, CAP advocates that unemployment insurance “and other stabilizers” – ostensibly stimulus checks — “should be automatically tied to economic conditions, so that continuing and future crises don’t require ad hoc action.”
The next stimulus package must ensure that “permanent stable housing must be connected to wraparound services or a continuum of care that is flexible and tailored to the individual or household’s needs.”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/10/abortion-funding-surveillance-mail-in-voting-progressives-unveil-wish-list-for-next-coronavirus-stimulus-bill/