The American Rescue Plan was supposed to help businesses and struggling Americans – not convicted terrorists and serial sexual abusers. But here we are.
According to IRS records, 560,000 individuals who were incarcerated for the full tax year of 2020 received $783.5 million dollars in government checks.
Even the worst of the worst.
Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK) spoke to Fox News about the inmate checks.
“Earlier this year, every single Senate Democrat voted to give stimulus checks to violent criminals in prison,” Cotton said. “Sending cash to murderers and rapists in prison has nothing to do with solving the pandemic or improving the economy.”
Cotton and fellow Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) tried to prevent prisoners from receiving the checks back in March, but the Democrat-dominated Congress voted along party lines to keep their payments-for-prisoners plan. Cotton tweeted the following message in March:
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Bomber, murdered three people and terrorized a city. He’ll be getting a $1,400 stimulus check as part of the Democrats’ ‘COVID relief’ bill.”
Serial sexual abuser Larry Nassar also received two checks, totaling $2000. The cash went directly into his inmate commissary account – not to his victims who are owed more than $57,000 in restitution.
“The Trump administration attempted to block the initial payments from flowing to prisoners, [but] those efforts were eventually halted by a federal judge who noted that the legislation itself didn’t exclude prisoners,” Fox News reports.
