Bernie Sanders Secures Deal to Remove Amazon, Corporate Welfare from China Bill

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) secured a promise from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to remove corporate welfare from the Democrats’ China competition bill.

The Senate is set to vote on Monday on H.R. 4521, the America COMPETES Act of 2022. The Senate invoked cloture on the bill, and senators have voted for the procedural motions on the bill with a strong bipartisan coalition.

The cloture motion received 66 votes, with 29 votes against and five senators not voting for either for or against the bill.

As the bill remains poised to pass next week, Sanders wanted to ensure that he could remove corporate welfare from the legislation.

Schumer struck a deal with Sanders to “do whatever I can” to get an agreement to have votes on his two motions after the House sends the bill to the Senate.

Sanders wants to remove a provision that would provide $10 billion for a NASA project contracted to Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin.  His other motion would remove $50 billion for the microchip industry; Sanders has said that the industry is already “very profitable.”

While the legislation has received bipartisan support, many conservatives have lambasted the bill for becoming stuffed with leftist pet projects and failing to hold China accountable.

“I voted against the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act before it got to the House, and now Nancy Pelosi has turned it into a Trojan Horse for Build Back Better: this bill fails to meaningfully hold China accountable, is packed with unrelated junk, and will spend hundreds of billions we don’t have – adding to the national debt which is our biggest threat to competing with China in the long run,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) said in a statement this week after the vote.