H.R. 3807, the ‘‘Relief for Restaurants and other Hard Hit Small Businesses Act of 2022,’’ would provide $55 billion for Small Business Administration grants, including $42 billion for restaurants and $13 billion for small businesses, supposedly to help those small businesses that were most harmed by the Covid pandemic. On the House floor, Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.) noted that H.R. 3807 is “yet another spending bill that will add to our Nation’s debt and deficit and continue to spike inflation,” and that “if Democrats were serious about helping restaurants and small businesses, they would have called for an end to the ever-changing mandates and lockdowns that forced so many businesses to close their doors.”
The House passed H.R. 3807 on April 7, 2022 by a vote of 223 to 203 (Roll Call 123). We have assigned pluses to the nays because not only is such spending not authorized anywhere in the Constitution, but this additional deficit spending would contribute to the ruinous inflation that is currently plaguing Americans. The economic harms to restaurants and other small businesses that H.R. 3807 is supposed to remedy were due to the unconstitutional federal and state Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates in the first place.
