Fact check: Republican congresswoman didn’t take credit for the relief bill she voted against

A Republican member of Congress, Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida, has faced withering attacks on Twitter for supposedly taking credit on Friday for a part of the American Rescue Plan, the pandemic relief bill she voted against.

A Republican senator, Roger Wicker of Mississippi, had been accurately criticized on similar grounds two days prior. But the criticism of Salazar is inaccurate.

Here are the facts.

On Friday, the day after President Joe Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan into law, Salazar tweeted the word “#BREAKING” with siren images around it, then wrote, “So proud to announce that the Biden Administration has just implemented my bipartisan COVID relief bill as part of @SBAgov policy!”

Salazar, a freshman member of the House, included a hyperlink and an image that explained that she was talking about the Biden administration’s just-announced decision to give small businesses more time to pay back Economic Injury Disaster Loans.

Many commentators assumed Salazar was applauding a part of the American Rescue Plan. But she was not.

Facts First: Salazar did not take credit for any part of the American Rescue Plan. Rather, the loan policy she was applauding was adopted by the Small Business Administration separately from the American Rescue Plan. Salazar and a Democratic colleague, Rep. Sharice Davids of Kansas, had proposed a very similar loan policy in a bill they put forward in early March. This Salazar-Davids bill is what Salazar was referring to when she tweeted that the Biden administration had implemented “my bipartisan COVID relief bill.”

A White House official, National Economic Council Deputy Director Bharat Ramamurti, tweeted on Sunday to try to correct the inaccurate criticism of Salazar.

“I’ve seen some confusion on this. On Friday — separate from the American Rescue bill — SBA announced it was letting 3M+ businesses defer EIDL loan payments for an extra year. We’re glad to see bipartisan support for this and other changes we’ve made to help small businesses,” Ramamurti said.

The Small Business Administration acted “under its own authority,” in consultation with the Biden-Harris team, to make the policy change — not under the American Rescue Plan, a Small Business Administration spokesperson said Monday on condition of anonymity.

Salazar could be accurately criticized for celebrating this one element of Covid relief after having rejected a broad array of other relief policies in the American Rescue Plan. And critics could accurately note that the American Rescue Plan she opposed includes billions in additional funding for small business loans and grants.

But much of the criticism of Salazar’s tweet was plain inaccurate. Critics with six-figure or seven-figure Twitter followings — including California Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu; Fred Wellman, executive director of the Lincoln Project, the conservative group that campaigned against President Donald Trump; songwriter and activist Holly Figueroa O’Reilly; Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos progressive political website; and journalist Soledad O’Brien — wrongly alleged that Salazar was praising a bill she voted against.

Moulitsas, O’Brien and Wellman promptly posted corrections after CNN reached out to them to explain that they had been inaccurate. Lieu stood by his tweet, saying in a message to CNN that he thinks that the American Rescue Plan, and the provisions it does contain to bolster the emergency loan program, “gave SBA confidence to do the extension” of the repayment period.

(CNN anchor Chris Cuomo tweeted a question on Sunday in response to Salazar’s tweet praising the loan policy, asking on Twitter why she voted against the relief bill. On Monday, he tweeted that Salazar was correct that the loan policy is separate from the relief bill.)

It’s not clear how much of a role Salazar, Davids or their bill’s additional co-sponsors played in the Biden administration’s decision. But their bill did precede the administration’s announcement.

On March 3, Salazar and Davids introduced a proposal in the House to extend the due date for the payment of interest and principal on Economic Injury Disaster Loans — to two years from the previous one year. The loans, totaling more than $200 billion, have been aimed at small businesses and nonprofits that had suffered a temporary revenue loss because of the pandemic.

On Friday, just over an hour before Salazar’s celebratory tweet, the Small Business Administration sent out a press release saying that it would extend the due date for the first payment — to two years for all Small Business Administration disaster loans made in 2020 and to 18 months for all such loans made in 2021.