[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 183 (Saturday, October 24, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6436-S6437]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                  Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 5084

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, in order to proceed to the consideration of 
H.R. 5084, Improving Corporate Governance Through Diversity Act, 
legislation to require corporations to disclose--just disclose the 
racial, ethnic, and gender composition of their boards, which again 
passed the House with bipartisan support, I ask unanimous consent that 
the Senate proceed to legislative session.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The objection is heard.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I will hold the floor for just another few 
moments.
  I have watched Senator McConnell--and I am sorry to call some of my 
colleagues spineless, Senator Johnson, but, you know, when the 
President made comments about our soldiers who had died in battle, I 
didn't hear hardly any Republicans speak up. I admire the courage of 
the Presiding Officer. I admire Senator Murkowski and her courage over 
a number of things. But I see my colleagues--I hear what you all think. 
I know what Senator Sasse said during that townhall. I know many of 
you, if not most of you, maybe all of you--probably not--think that 
about the President's lack of integrity and lack of character and 
dishonesty and the lies he tells. And I know, I have watched, and I sat 
right here and I looked across the aisle during impeachment and I saw 
the look of fear in my colleagues' eyes because they didn't want to 
cross the President; they didn't want to get the President to tweet 
about them or even get a primary opponent to them. That is why I use 
that term, but more importantly to the citizens of this country, we 
spent most of the last month after month after month after month, 
confirming very conservative, very young judges. I understand why you 
want to do that, but we are not doing anything for the public.
  We had a high moment in March when Senator Johnson said we 
unanimously approved the CARES Act. A study shows the CARES Act kept 12 
million Americans out of poverty. But then we ask to continue the CARES 
Act and do something similar like the Heroes Act, and instead Senator 
McConnell--and I know the lobbyists that line up in front of his door, 
I know they have a lot of influence on him, but we saw Senator 
McConnell say: no urgency, no urgency.
  My favorite Abraham Lincoln quote is Lincoln wanted to--his staff 
wanted him to stay in the White House and win the war and abolish 
slavery and protect the Union, and they wanted him to stay in the White 
House. And he said: No, I have to go out and get my public opinion 
baths. Are none of my colleagues hearing the pain of laid-off workers 
who have lost their unemployment?
  Haven't they seen schoolchildren--their parents saying: ``I want to 
send my kids back to school, but they are not safe'' because we aren't 
voting dollars to help?
  I talked to my daughter last night. Just a few days ago, they 
announced that instead of school opening in person in Columbus next 
week, it is going to open in January, if even then, because we are not 
helping schools open.
  We are not helping people avoid eviction. We are not helping local 
governments keep police and firemen on the streets and people who work 
in the parks and people who provide help for abused children and all 
the things that local governments do--we are doing none of that, but we 
have plenty of time to do judges. That is the frustration and why I 
made the comments I made
  It just breaks my heart that we all sit here. This is a group of 
pretty affluent and pretty privileged people. Yet we can't look out for 
people who are hurting like this country hasn't hurt for decades.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
  Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, this deserves a response.
  The pandemic is an act of God. Maybe--maybe--and we don't know. We 
don't know what complicity China had in--the chance that it was 
developed in a lab in this. We just don't know. But we certainly know 
that China controlled the spread in China while they allowed their 
citizens to go all over the world and spread the pandemic. It is an act 
of God. It is certainly nobody's fault in the United States.
  As chairman of Homeland Security, we have had before our committee 
the men and women in charge of these agencies who are trying to respond 
to an incredibly difficult situation.
  I never criticized President Obama or Vice President Biden during 
H1N1. It was a contagious disease, and 60 million Americans were 
infected by it. I am not sure there is anything you really can do to 
prevent infections.
  Now, I think we have actually been pretty successful in flattening 
the curve, people taking responsibility, becoming germophobes. We shut 
down our economy. Now, I never thought we should shut it down to the 
extent that we have because I have always tried to keep things in 
perspective, the human toll of the economic devastation of those 
shutdowns. But again, I find it galling when I know people like Pete 
Gaynor, General Giroir--the men and women--Dr. Birx, Dr. Hahn, the men 
and women in this administration who have been working 24/7 to respond 
as effectively as they can to an act of God, a pandemic.
  Now, I have been on the conference calls. This administration has 
been as transparent as any I have seen. To accuse this administration 
of hiding the truth--I don't know where you were during the early 
months of this, but I was watching the hour- and 2-hour-long press 
conferences where the truth was being laid out in all its gory detail. 
Any American who watched that that wasn't concerned about COVID, I 
don't know what they were looking at. There was no hiding the ball 
here. President Trump and his administration made it very obvious what 
was at stake.
  I am also aware of the fact that because of this act of God, because 
of this pandemic, there was an enormous demand for products that should 
have been in the national stockpile but wasn't there because the 
previous administration had run the stockpile down, and then we, all of 
us collectively, took our eye off the ball and didn't restore it. So 
the product just wasn't there. But I do know, in a very difficult 
situation, when demand outstrips supply by two or three times, the men 
and women in this administration, again, working tirelessly, allocated 
that PPE.
  I am not aware that anybody ran out. Now, I know that everybody 
didn't get everything they wanted because some tough decisions had to 
be made. We had to surge PPE product to those hotspots, and where the 
pandemic wasn't raging, people didn't get everything they needed

[[Page S6437]]

  I am not aware of anybody who wanted to get placed on a ventilator 
who didn't get one because they used the war production act. We did 
extraordinary things in terms of ramping up production. Now we are 
supplying ventilators to the world.
  You can overlook all these things, and you can say the administration 
wasn't honest with the American public, but I think the actual facts 
refute those charges.
  Maybe in other people's world there is perfection, and in this 
pandemic you can stop it in its tracks. You can prevent further 
infections. But that didn't happen with H1N1, even though they tried. 
Sixty-million Americans got it. Fortunately, it was not as deadly as 
the coronavirus and COVID-19.
  Again, among many things that are galling, the false allegations--to 
me, to politicize a pandemic, to politicize a virus that is killing 
Americans, to denigrate the efforts of the men and women in these 
agencies who have worked 24/7 is just simply wrong. This is not 
something that should divide us; that we should politicize. It is 
something that should unite us as prior crises in this country have. 
So, again, there are so many more other things I can say, but I see the 
Senator from Alaska is here, and I don't want to take any more time on 
the floor.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. BROWN. One last comment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. BROWN. I just don't really understand what I just heard, when the 
President went straight to the American people and told them it was 
going to disappear. He said it was a Democratic, liberal hoax to bring 
down his campaign.
  But look at a little history. I wear on my lapel a picture of a 
canary in a birdcage. It was given to me at a workers' Memorial Day 
rally, a rally to honor workers who had been injured or killed on the 
job.
  This canary in the birdcage--you know, the mine workers used to take 
it down in the mines 120 years ago. If the canary died, the mine worker 
got out of the mine. He knew that he didn't have a union that was very 
strong or a government that cared very much. He was on his own. So I 
always cared a lot about public health. That is really the best 
prevention for the canary in the mine.
  I wrote a letter to President Trump in 2018, after he had closed the 
Office of Global Health Security in the White House and essentially 
fired or transferred Dr. Ziemer, a Bush appointee who was one of the 
world's great malaria doctors. His job--he had 40 people on his staff. 
His job was to surveil the world and look at potential disease 
outbreaks that might turn into an epidemic which then might evolve into 
a pandemic. That was his job. The President eliminated the office. And 
I wrote a letter to the President asking him to reinstate it, and he 
didn't even answer the letter.
  Then, the following year, 2019, he brought Dr. Linda Quick home from 
China. And her job was to make sure, if anything was happening in 
China, that we would know about it and could help them prevent the 
disease. Our CDC--our Centers for Disease Control, we are the best in 
the world. It was the United States of America leading the charge to 
eliminate smallpox. It was the United States of America that led the 
job to all but eliminate polio in this country. Some of us here are old 
enough--the Presiding Officer, anyway, will remember knowing people who 
had minor cases growing up in our schools. So we know what that meant. 
It was the President of the United States who pulled CDC employees out 
of China because of a trade or some--depending on when the President 
loved Xi or disliked Xi--I mean, it was back and forth with the Chinese 
leader, and we just unilaterally disarmed. Then the President denied 
that the virus meant anything.
  I know he took care of ventilators, but other kinds of protective 
equipment, just talk to nurses and doctors and healthcare workers in 
our States--in Madison, in Cleveland, in Columbus, in Milwaukee, in 
Kenosha and Fairbanks and Salt Lake City.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.