Santa Barbara Representative Salud Carbajal on the Stimulus Package

After months of weekly Zoom meetings with lots of “hurry up and wait” drills, Santa Barbara’s Congressmember Salud Carbajal got the final notice late Monday night to vote in favor of a $908 billion federal stimulus package. He’d received the first written version of the 6,000-page bill just a few hours earlier. Who knew what was in it?

Members of Congress were broken up into seven or eight groups so they could safely enter Congress and then vote. “We had 5 to 10 minutes to go in, socially distance ourselves, and then cast our votes,” Carbajal said. Then they had to hurry up and get out. “You can’t just sit there,” he said. By 9 p.m., he said, it was all over. In some ways, Carbajal noted, the whole thing reminded him of his days in the military. “But I actually felt good,” he said. “I was able to make a bigger difference in this bill because of the framework we came up with.”

The “we” Carbajal referred to is the Problem Solvers Caucus, made up of 25 Democrats and 25 Republicans committed to pursuing bipartisan solutions at a time of unprecedented polarization. Carbajal, a member since 2017, said the group had been working on it for months. On December 3 — three weeks before the final vote — Carbajal joined the whole caucus at a press conference in support of the $908 billion bill.