To hear incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tell it, the nation is crying out for $2,000 checks to stimulate the economy, on the one hand, and radical climate legislation that will cripple it, on the other. And the Senate, he argues, must act quickly, because America has never been in a worse place.

“The nation,” Schumer writes, “is facing unprecedented challenges: the greatest economic crisis in seventy-five years, the greatest public health crisis in a century, the climate crisis, and worsening income inequality and racial injustice.”