Pelosi: Republicans who didn’t back COVID-19 package ‘vote no and take the dough’

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Sunday criticized congressional Republicans who did not vote for the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill despite its strong support across the country, saying they “vote no and take the dough.”

“It’s only in the Congress of the United States, where the Republicans have refused to meet the needs of the American people where they didn’t vote, as I said of them, vote no and take the dough, you can be sure that all of their states and communities will be benefiting from this and they won’t be complaining about it back home,” Pelosi told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.”

Pelosi also pushed back on the notion that the package had unanimous opposition among Republicans, telling Stephanopoulos that the bill is “strongly bipartisan across the country” and “transformative.”

She also teased the idea of needing more relief as the country continues to recover from the pandemic, saying the package was “what we needed to do,” adding that “we need to do more as we go into the next step with our recovery package.”

No House or Senate Republicans voted for the relief bill, passing in both chambers by a slim margin along party lines. It marked the biggest legislative win so far for President Biden. 

The Senate opted to pass the relief bill through budget reconciliation, which does not require a 60-vote threshold and thus did not need any Republican votes to pass.