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With the stimulus plan now law, Biden and congressional Democrats gear up to sell it to the public.

With the stimulus plan now law, Biden and congressional Democrats gear up to sell it to the public.




With their signature $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue plan enshrined in law, President Biden and congressional Democrats will shift gears this week to try to sell the public on what they have done and begin tackling other, thornier pieces of their policy agenda.

Mr. Biden and several members of his administration will travel the country to promote a plan that contains direct $1,400 payments to many Americans and countless other particulars. Mr. Biden will visit Delaware County, Pa., on Tuesday and will appear with Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday in Atlanta, which helped deliver Democrats the Senate majority that made the rescue law possible. But even on Monday from the White House, Mr. Biden planned to deliver remarks about the plan in the afternoon.

A group of other administration officials, including the first lady, Jill Biden, and Ms. Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, will make their own trips.

The road show is an effort to avoid the messaging mistakes of President Barack Obama’s administration, which Democrats now believe failed to continue vocally building support for his $780 billion stimulus act after it passed in 2009. The challenge will be to highlight less obvious provisions, including the largest federal infusion of aid to the poor in generations, a substantial expansion of the child tax credit and increased subsidies for health insurance.

Back in Washington, Democrats in Congress will waste little time pressing forward with other priorities. The House is expected to consider a rush of legislation, including bills to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act and remove the deadline to ratify the decades-old Equal Rights Amendment.

But much of its week may be given over to a debate on immigration policy. Republicans are already sharpening their political knives to try to wound Mr. Biden over his handling of a flood of migrants overwhelming the southern border. Democrats, meanwhile, plan to pass a pair of immigration bills that would create pathways to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

The first would address Dreamers, young immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, and others granted temporary protected status because their countries were marred by natural disaster or violence. The other, a bipartisan compromise, is meant to help farmworkers begin the process of becoming legal residents and citizens, and put in place forward-looking changes to the agricultural visa and employment systems.

In the Senate, lawmakers will continue to work their way through Mr. Biden’s cabinet nominees. The chamber plans to vote to confirm Representative Deb Haaland, Democrat of New Mexico, as the first Native American secretary of the Interior Department; Isabel Guzman to lead the Small Business Administration; and Katherine Tai to be the United States trade representative.





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