MITCH McConnell has slammed Joe Biden's Covid stimulus bill as a "multi-trillion dollar Trojan horse" designed to bail out Democratic states.
Biden, 78, is said to be "laser-focused" on getting Americans $1,400 stimulus checks after signing his landmark $1.9trillion relief bill into law on Thursday afternoon.
But McConnell, the leader of Republicans in the Senate, accused Democrats of wanting "to sprint in front of the parade and claim credit" for the recovery of the US economy.
Addressing his colleagues on Thursday, he said: "This wasn't a bill to finish off the pandemic, it was a multi-trillion-dollar Trojan horse full of bad old liberal ideas.
"President Biden's own staff keep calling this legislation quote 'the most progressive bill in American history'.
"Hardly the commonsense bipartisanship that the president promised."
The bill passed in the Senate on Saturday – without a single Republican approving it – before going back for final approval in the House.
The bill was passed on Wednesday through the House at 220 to 211 votes.
Biden said the "historic legislation is about a fighting chance" before he added his signature to the landmark package in Washington DC.
But McConnell claimed that much of the cash in the new bill went on helping state governments and "local budgets unrelated to pandemic needs".
He said only one per cent would be spent on vaccines and about nine per cent on healthcare issues, the Daily Mail reports.
"The rest of the tab went to things like this – a $350billion bailout for state and local budgets unrelated to pandemic needs, with strings attached to stop states from cutting taxes on their own citizens down the road," he said.
"Take the money, you don't get to cut taxes."
He also complained about the "agricultural assistance conditioned not on specific financial need but solely on the demographics of the farmer, which some liberal activists are celebrating as reparations".
"For weeks, every indicator has suggested our economy poised to come roaring back, with more job openings for Americans who need work," McConnell told his colleagues.
"None of these trends began on January 20.
"President Biden and his Democratic government inherited a tide that had already begun to turn toward decisive victory."
He added: "2021 is set to be an historic comeback year, not because of the far left legislation that was passed after the tide was already turned but because of the resilience of the American people."
'UNSMILING POLITICAL HACK'
It comes after former President Donald Trump slammed McConnell as an “unsmiling political hack” and called for his firing last month.
In a statement released via his Save America super political action committee, Trump said McConnell was to blame for the GOP losing Senate seats and the majority in the 2020 elections.
"Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack, and if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again," Trump said.
"He will never do what needs to be done, or what is right for our country."
Trump said that the GOP would never again be a respected and strong party with McConnell leading due to his “status quo policies.”
After Trump was acquitted in his second impeachment trial, Biden insisted that Republicans like McConnell believe his predecessor "is guilty" and "morally responsible" for the insurrection.
In his first prime-time speech on Thursday night, Biden called on states to give coronavirus vaccine access to all adults by May 1.
Speaking from the White House, Biden announced that all states would make people 18 years and older eligible to be vaccinated by that date – and that life could be "close to normal" by the Fourth of July.
To achieve that, the US is ramping up from one million Covid-19 shots per day that Biden promised in December, to beating its current pace of two million injections daily, "outpacing the rest of the world," Biden said.
Biden said that thousands of people including retired nurses have been mobilized to vaccinate Americans and that the government has opened more jab sites.
The president expects life to return to normal or close to that by the Fourth of July.
"After this long hard year that will make this Independence Day something truly special where we not only mark our independence as a nation but we begin to mark our independence from this virus," Biden said.
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