[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 48 (Thursday, March 12, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1719-S1721]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Coronavirus

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, President Trump had chance, after chance, 
after chance to get ahead of this coronavirus pandemic in the United 
States. He failed. Congress can't make the same mistakes.
  Senators should not leave town. I just saw Senator McConnell on the 
floor. It is his decision. One Senator from one State can make this 
decision to walk away--to fail to take care of the $12-an-hour worker 
who is sick, who has to choose between going to work--perhaps getting 
sicker or perhaps infecting others--or staying home

[[Page S1720]]

and giving up her $12-an-hour, $96-a-day job when she struggles with 
her rent. We have put her in that position.
  Senator McConnell, who was standing right there--his office is just 
down the hall--could make that unilateral decision as to whether we 
stay and actually do the right thing. The Senate has no business 
leaving. We shouldn't leave town until we pass the House package to 
help workers and to support our communities.
  President Trump needs to sign it. We need to do our jobs. We need to 
take care of workers who are going to need help paying their mortgage, 
paying their rent, and taking care of their children if schools close 
or they get sick.
  It is really, really simple. It is why we need to pass paid sick days 
now and to shore up unemployment insurance funds immediately.
  We know that hundreds of thousands--who knows?--millions of people 
are going to get laid off in the airlines, in restaurants, in hotels, 
in communities where they depend on these businesses to pay property 
tax. We know there are going to be lots of layoffs.
  I am not an alarmist. I am not panicky. I think we are going to deal 
with this right. But we need the majority leader, Senator McConnell, 
who sits right here and runs the Senate, who makes the decisions on 
whether we work or don't work, whether he sends us home or keeps us 
here working--Senator McConnell needs to make the decision to keep us 
here, and as soon as the House passes this bill, the Senate takes it 
up.
  Paid sick days are one of the most important things we can do to stop 
the spread of this virus. We already know that our economy is going to 
get hurt. We know the President of the United States judges the economy 
by the stock market. He is the first President I have ever seen do 
that, but that is beside the point. We also know that the stock market 
is up and down and mostly down, and investors are uneasy at best. They 
want more predictability, and they are not getting it. But we know the 
most important thing is to deal with the spread of the coronavirus. If 
we can't contain that, if we can't do anything about that, if we can't 
stop the spread of this virus, the other stuff just doesn't matter as 
much.
  You start with the spread of this virus. The best way to stop the 
spread of the virus is to say to people if they are sick: You can stay 
home, and you can get sick pay. Every other rich country in the world 
provides sick pay for people who can't go to work because they are 
sick. It is as simple as that. If we don't pass the sick day policy, if 
we leave town right now, even if we come back next week, which we are 
not scheduled to--again, Senator McConnell's decision--even if we are 
only gone a week, that is 5 more workdays of sick people going to work 
when they shouldn't, getting sicker, infecting others with coronavirus 
or the flu or anything else, or staying home and giving up their pay, 
which they need to meet their rent payment. The House package takes 
care of this. Senators shouldn't be leaving this building until we get 
this help to the people we serve.
  People in Ohio and people in Indiana, in the Presiding Officer's 
State, are scared. They are angry, and I am angry.
  Many of us have been sounding the alarm for years, warning President 
Trump and Leader McConnell, who always does President Trump's bidding, 
as if he doesn't even represent a State--he represents the President in 
this body--that the President has made us less prepared to handle a 
crisis like this one.
  President Trump tried to gut the Centers for Disease Control and the 
National Institutes of Health.
  Think about this: The United States of America, as recently as 10 or 
15 years ago, had the best public health infrastructure, the best 
public health safety net in the history of the world. We have the 
Centers for Disease Control. We have the National Institutes of Health.
  In Cincinnati, we have the National Institute for Occupational Safety 
and Health--the only one of its kind in the world--and we have our 
county public health departments in each of Ohio's 88 counties and all 
over the country.
  We had the best in the world until President Trump began to try to 
gut the CDC and the NIH. He refused to fill key public health 
positions.
  Most importantly--this is just unbelievable when you think about it, 
and I know Senator Young, the Presiding Officer, had concerns about 
that--he got rid of the White House's entire global health security 
team 2 years ago. Let me repeat that. For 2 years, President Trump left 
us without the team that is supposed to manage pandemics. Do you know 
what that means? It means that there were about 40 people at the White 
House, led by an admiral who was an M.D.--an admiral who was also a 
doctor. His job was to survey the world and look around for potential 
illness outbreaks, to look around for potential pandemics. It might 
have been SARS. It might have been Ebola. It might have been a 
resurgence of polio. It might have been any number of things. His job 
at the White House--we are a rich enough country. We can do this, and 
we do it to protect--we care about the world. We protect our own 
people, although, as we see, if we don't, we see what happens. His job 
was to continue to look around the world and look out for these kinds 
of pandemics. The President fired him. The President fired the whole 
office. The President has never replaced them. I sent him a letter at 
the time, more than 600 days ago--back in May of 2018--telling him to 
stop dismantling our healthcare infrastructure. Now we are all paying 
the price for President Trump's decision. We see the real-time 
consequences. This was unilateral disarmament. We unilaterally disarmed 
against the world's infectious diseases.
  We know that international tuberculosis is a problem. We know that 
international HIV/AIDS is a problem. We know that international malaria 
is a problem. We work against those.
  Do you know what? One of the things I am proudest about in our 
country is what we have done about public health.
  We led the charge to eradicate small pox. Small pox killed hundreds 
of millions of people over time in this world--hundreds of millions.
  We led the charge to eradicate small pox--this country did. Then we 
led the charge to eradicate polio all over the world. I am old enough 
to remember children--not children anymore--children I went to grade 
school with who had had polio. They were recovered, but they still 
limped. They still had signs of polio--not crippling signs but signs of 
polio. We did that.

  We took on tobacco in this body--Senator Durbin, Senator Blumenthal, 
Senator Merkley, and I and others. People smoke at half the rate today 
than they did 50 years ago. It is starting to go back up because of e-
cigarettes, but we have had huge public health victories in this 
country.
  Do you know what? We have a President of the United States now and we 
have a Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, who--well, he 
certainly tried to help tobacco, but I won't even talk about that. We 
have a President and we have a Senate majority leader who simply did 
all they could to dismantle the Centers for Disease Control and NIH. 
They left us unprepared when the President fired the global security 
team at the White House that looked out for illnesses. Now we have a 
global pandemic on our hands.
  President Trump needs to stop pretending he can lock out a disease by 
putting up walls at the border--that he has already allowed to spread--
and he needs to start making up for all the lost time he has wasted, 
and so does Senator McConnell.
  We need to make sure we don't end up with a financial crisis on top 
of the public health crisis. For some of us, this feels like deja vu. 
We have been in moments like this before. We have seen the market drop. 
We worried about the financial system. We bailed out the banks, but we 
didn't do anything for the workers. That is what this body always does.
  I am certain Senator McConnell will get around to--and President 
Trump--helping corporations that have been hurt. There have been 
corporations that have been damaged badly--hotel chains, transportation 
companies, particularly airlines. They have been hurt badly by this. 
That part is going to get worse. I am sure they will open the public 
checkbook to make sure there are billions of dollars for these 
industries, but we shouldn't do it until we take care of the workers.

[[Page S1721]]

  If we are going to give X number of dollars to the airlines, as we 
probably should, most of that money better end up in the pockets of the 
flight attendants, the pilots, the ticket agents, the mechanics, the 
baggage handlers, and all of the people who work for the airlines whom 
this body forgets about. Yeah, they serve us when we fly, and we don't 
even know their names. We probably know the CEOs' names, and we always 
help them, but we ought to be helping the workers.
  Right now, we have a chance to stop this from spiraling out of 
control. We don't have another 2008 on our hands yet, but we have to 
act now. We don't go home for a week or two or three because Senator 
McConnell has some whatever it is that would send us home. We need to 
act now. We need to make sure that we focus our efforts on preventing 
this virus from spreading and that we don't have one crisis--the 
healthcare crisis--stacked on top of an economic crisis, making the 
healthcare crisis worse.
  We know that job is harder because of all the ways President Trump 
and Leader McConnell have undone the many protections we put in place 
after the last crisis. They backed away from Wall Street reform 
safeguards. The President had a chance to get ahead of this virus and 
other public health threats, and he failed. He had a chance to get 
ahead of financial risks, and he failed.
  Luckily, Senator McConnell and the President haven't succeeded in 
getting rid of all of our Wall Street reform protections. They haven't 
succeeded in repealing the Affordable Care Act. Because of that, 
because of the work we did a decade ago with President Obama, we are in 
a better position now than we were in 2009. But we have to come 
together. We have to rise to this challenge. Corporate America needs 
to, too.
  One way we can do that is to suspend these stock buybacks. Congress 
gave a huge tax cut to the wealthy in this country 2 years ago. Seventy 
percent of the benefits went to the wealthiest 1 percent.
  I sat in the White House with the President and about 10 Senators. 
The President said: You know, everybody's pay is going to go up $4,000, 
some as much as $9,000. Those were the bookend numbers he used. He said 
that if we do this tax cut, it is going to trickle down and workers are 
going to get these raises.
  Well, it didn't exactly happen that way. But do you know what did 
happen? After they got this tax cut, the executives started to do stock 
buybacks, taking money that should have been invested in workers, 
taking money that should have been invested in technology and upgrading 
their companies, but it went to executives--not exactly a shock to most 
of us. That is what happened.
  Banks need to invest in their communities, not invest in their CEOs' 
stock portfolio. Right now, JPMorgan is in the middle of an ongoing $30 
billion in stock buybacks. Wells Fargo is in the midst of a $23 billion 
stock buyback, as if their executives, in all of their criminality and 
bad decisions, have earned it. That money would be better spent 
investing in small business, in medical research, and in relief for 
people who need help. The reason big banks are supposed to have that 
money is so that they keep lending and keep communities afloat when we 
have crises like this.
  It is time for all of us to come together in the Senate, in the White 
House, in the communities across the country, and, yes, on Wall Street. 
That means we don't leave this building until we have done everything 
we need to do to get this epidemic under control, to get our 
communities the testing capacity and tools they need to manage this 
crisis, and to support the workers who are going to get hurt.
  Leader McConnell's responsibility--I don't care how he votes in the 
end--is to make the decision to put the House bill on the floor so we 
can vote on it, and President Trump, the day he gets it, needs to sign 
it.
  Let's get help to the people we serve--not next week, not 2 weeks 
from now, not tomorrow; let's do it today.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. MANCHIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.