Live Updates: Biden’s Stimulus Plan and More

The House is poised to give final approval to President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package on Wednesday, a landmark moment for the new president and Democrats in Congress, who have stayed united to push through the sweeping legislation.

The vote will come seven weeks into Mr. Biden’s presidency, as the growing number of vaccine doses given to Americans offers hope that the country is on course to move beyond the worst of a pandemic that has killed more than half a million people in the United States.

With final passage of the vast relief package, Mr. Biden will have succeeded in his first major legislative undertaking, though most likely without any support from Republicans. The vote in the House is expected around midday, as debate continued Wednesday morning.

Republicans have attacked the measure as wasteful and excessive, with Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, warning that “history will not be kind to what transpires here today.”

But those arguments have yet to gain traction outside the party’s base, with 70 percent of Americans supporting the package, according to a Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday.

The bill, which cleared the Senate on Saturday, would send direct payments of up to $1,400 to many Americans and extend a $300-per-week federal unemployment benefit until early September. It would provide funding for states and local governments as well as for schools to help them reopen. The bill also contains money for coronavirus testing, contact tracing and vaccine distribution.

The legislation establishes an aggressive effort by the new president to drive down poverty, as the measure offers substantial benefits for low-income Americans, including a sizable one-year expansion of the child tax credit.

“It’s a remarkable, historic, transformative piece of legislation which goes a very long way to crushing the virus and solving our economic crisis,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday.

Mr. Biden is scheduled to showcase the legislation on Thursday during a prime-time television address marking one year since the virus prompted shutdowns across the country.

Republican lawmakers, however, have criticized the stimulus plan as a partisan product that lavishes federal dollars on liberal priorities unrelated to the pandemic. No Republicans voted for it when it first passed the House last month or when it cleared the Senate over the weekend.

Mr. McCarthy sought to equate the progressive policies in the bill with socialism, and said “House Democrats have abandoned any pretense of unity.”

“If Democrats had a potluck picnic, the Republicans would call it socialism,” Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, shot back.

The sharp partisan division over the package offers a preview of the political dynamics Mr. Biden will have to contend with in the coming months as he tries to advance other pieces of his agenda, including an infrastructure plan and an immigration overhaul.

The bill that will go before the House on Wednesday differs in notable ways from the legislation that the chamber initially approved last month. It no longer contains an increase to the federal minimum wage, which Mr. Biden had proposed and House Democrats had included in their bill, but the Senate omitted.

The president and House Democrats also sought to increase the $300-per-week unemployment benefit to $400, but the Senate kept it at its current level and tightened income caps for receiving stimulus payments.

Nevertheless, House Democrats were expected to give their blessing to the legislation, even if it falls short of what progressives desired. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, a member of House leadership, said on Tuesday that he was “110 percent confident” that Democrats would have the votes to pass it.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, will meet next week with two senior Chinese government officials, the Biden administration’s first in-person diplomatic encounter with its chief foreign rival.

In a statement on Wednesday, a State Department spokesman said that Mr. Blinken and Mr. Sullivan would meet in Anchorage on March 18 with China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, and its top diplomat, Yang Jiechi. The announcement comes days after a speech by Mr. Blinken and a White House national security strategy document identified China as a top threat to the United States.

In his speech, Mr. Blinken called China the one country able “to seriously challenge the…