[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 196 (Wednesday, November 18, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7048-S7050]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Coronavirus

  Madam President, now, on another matter entirely, the country is 
facing the worst phase of the pandemic. As the number of new infections 
and hospitalizations threaten, once again, to overwhelm the capacity of 
our healthcare system, we have to make sure that our nurses and doctors 
and all of our healthcare professionals have the PPE they need to 
protect themselves and their patients safely.
  We all remember the early days of the crisis, when healthcare 
professionals in some parts of the country were forced to jury-rig 
masks and gloves from spare clothing and bits of string. In my home 
State of New York, nursing homes alone were burning through 12 million 
pieces of PPE a week during the height of the pandemic in April. The 
recent surge in cases might bring us all back to or beyond the peak 
levels we saw earlier this year. We must do everything--everything--in 
our power to avoid a repeat of the widespread PPE shortages.
  So I am joining Senators Murray, Peters, Baldwin, and Murphy to 
introduce new legislation that authorizes $10 billion for the Strategic 
National Stockpile to purchase large quantities of PPE, including N95 
respirators, gloves, gowns, face masks, face shields, and surgical 
masks.
  The N95 masks don't need to be worn by every American on a daily 
basis, but

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they provide a much higher degree of protection to our healthcare 
professionals and frontline workers who are exposed to the virus more 
regularly. That is why we need the Defense Production Act and get those 
N95 masks in the hands of any healthcare professional who needs it.
  We are calling, once again, for the Defense Production Act, grossly 
underutilized by the current administration, to be invoked in order to 
expand industrial capacity to meet surging demand. Our bill will create 
a $1 billion grant program for small business to retool their 
facilities to assist in the production of PPE.
  For months, our communities have been held together by the quiet 
heroism of nurses, doctors, caregivers, and essential workers. We call 
them frontline workers because they are like our soldiers, putting 
their own lives at risk to protect the lives of others. And just as we 
would never send our troops into battle without helmets or bulletproof 
vests, we must never leave our frontline workers to battle diseases 
without the N95 masks they need, as well as other PPE like gloves and 
gowns that serve as their armor.
  So, our bill, the Protect our Heroes Act of 2020, should be part of 
the bipartisan discussion on the next COVID relief bill. Our bill will 
allow frontline workers to get the N95 masks they need and deserve. We 
urge bipartisan support for this proposal. The truth is, there should 
be a great urgency to get something done here in Congress to defeat the 
virus, save American lives, and forestall even greater pain for our 
workers and businesses
  Speaker Pelosi and I had negotiated for months, in good faith, with 
the Trump administration to find an agreement on a COVID relief bill. 
Democrats lowered our proposal by $1.2 trillion to move closer to our 
Republican counterparts. Meanwhile, Leader McConnell and Senate 
Republicans refuse to take part in those negotiations. Instead, the 
Republican leader has asked the Senate to accept several inadequate 
partisan proposals. In every version of the COVID relief legislation 
that the Republican majority has put on the floor, there have been 
poison pills included to ensure the bill will fail.
  Many Members of the Republican Senate caucus want to spend no 
dollars, so Leader McConnell has to twist himself in pretzels to put 
any bill on the floor, and the only way he can get support of his 
caucus is to put poison pills in so he can wink at them and say: Hey, 
this won't pass.
  So Senate Republicans are seeing this pandemic as an opportunity to 
try and make it harder to hold corporations accountable when they put 
their workers at risk. I heard the Republican leader this morning give 
the same long, tired speech that pretends as if Democrats haven't been 
trying to negotiate with our colleagues and that we haven't been trying 
over and over again to get our Republican colleagues to talk with us.
  The leader's position hasn't changed over the past few months. He 
said it again this morning. It is the Republican proposal or nothing at 
all. I would remind the Republican leader that the House has passed a 
bill. The Senate has not, and the only Senate bill that the leader 
brings to the floor gets zero Democratic support. And yet the 
Republican leader's position is, if you don't take my bill, get 
nothing, when he knows his bill can't pass the Senate and can't pass 
the House. It is a feeble position, as the pandemic rages, and it just 
doesn't fly.
  We Democrats lowered our proposal by over $1 trillion to move closer 
in negotiations, and what did Senate Republicans do? They didn't move 
in our direction. They moved further away by cutting their already 
inadequate proposal in half, making compromise even more difficult.
  So, look, we need to reset the conversation here. The country is in 
desperate straits, maybe more desperate than it has ever been in this 
crisis. The consensus view of economists and experts is that the 
country requires a substantial injection of aid: meaningful relief to 
our schools, small businesses, the unemployed, State and local 
governments, our healthcare system, among other things. These are not 
frivolous. These are not someone's whim. These are the desperate needs 
of people crying out for help. Almost none of them were covered 
adequately in the Republican leader's bill.
  This morning, New York's MTA announced a cut to subways and buses--a 
flashing warning sign about how desperately we need transit relief. We 
are going to fight hard for transit relief. None of it is in Leader 
McConnell's bill.
  The two vaccines in development must be produced and distributed on a 
massive scale, and they must reach underserved and minority 
communities. The House Heroes bill goes much further in getting that 
done than the McConnell bill. It is time for our two parties to sit 
down together and hash out a compromise on a bill that meets the needs 
of the American people. We have been going around in circles--the 
Republican leader, in particular--for far too long with nothing new 
added to the conversation.
  So Speaker Pelosi and I have formally invited the Republican leader 
and our Senate Republican colleagues to join us in bipartisan talks. 
Our colleagues face a simple choice: They can put the election behind 
them and work across the aisle to get something done or they can remain 
in their partisan corner defending the poisonous lies of a flailing 
President refusing to do the people's desperately needed business.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The majority whip is recognized.
  Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I think it is important to point out that 
as we discuss the issue of coronavirus relief, that Senate Republicans 
have now not once but twice brought a bill to the floor of the U.S. 
Senate that enjoyed the support of a majority of U.S. Senators. There 
were 52 Senators who voted for coronavirus relief not once but twice--
once in September and once in October. Not a single Democrat voted for 
it.
  The Democratic leader was just talking about the House of 
Representatives, where they passed a bill. Yes, they passed a bill. It 
didn't have a single Republican on it. It was a massive multitrillion-
dollar bill, liberal wish list, that included all kinds of things like 
bailouts for blue States the taxpayers would have to finance, including 
tax cuts for millionaires in places like New York and California, and 
left a lot of the American people who are really suffering from the 
coronavirus holding the bag.
  We believe that there are things that need to be done, and just 
because we can't do everything that the Democrats want to do on their 
liberal wish list, that we should do something, and Republicans came 
together behind a bill. They increased the support above and beyond 
what unemployed workers would normally get through unemployment 
insurance--increased that benefit by $300 a week. It also provided a 
significant amount of funding for schools as they continue to deal with 
the cost of trying to stay open safely. It put significant investments 
into vaccines, testings, therapeutics, support for providers, and all 
the things that will help on the healthcare front to defeat this virus. 
And, of course, it provided infusion of additional dollars for the 
Paycheck Protection Program, which has been so successful in assisting 
our small businesses as they weather and survive this crisis to try and 
keep their workers employed and keep their businesses up and operating 
and keep our economy operating in this country.
  Those are all things--all things--for which there is bipartisan 
support and on which there should be votes, not just among Republicans 
in the Senate but among Democrats as well, but unfortunately the 
Democrats have opted not to sit down in a reasonable way and come up 
with a reasonable proposal.
  The bill that came over from the House of Representatives that they 
continue to tout is something that would never pass in the Senate, and 
it would never get signed into law.
  The bill that Senate Republicans passed--I shouldn't say passed but 
got majority support for here in the Senate not once but twice--would, 
in fact, get signed into law and is something that could pass here in 
the Senate and I believe in the House of Representatives, too, because 
they are all things that enjoy broad bipartisan support.
  The difference is that our bill was targeted to those areas which 
need the support the most. It was fiscally responsible, recognizing 
that we have a $26 trillion debt growing by the day and that every 
dollar we spend is a borrowed dollar from our children and 
grandchildren.

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  It is so important that when we do this, we do this in a way that is 
thoughtful, deliberative, reasonable, and with an eye toward making 
sure we are getting a good return for the American taxpayer and 
delivering assistance in a targeted way to those folks who need it the 
most--unemployed workers; those who are employed; the small businesses 
that employ them; the healthcare frontline workers who are out there 
every day fighting this fight against this virus, making sure they have 
the PPE to protect them--and then, of course, the important investments 
we are making in vaccines and therapeutics and testing and all the 
things that will help defeat this; money for schools, colleges, 
universities, elementary and high school students and faculty and 
administration--those who are trying to keep our kids in school, keep 
them educated by dealing with a lot of additional costs related to 
providing that education in a safe way.
  Those are all things on which there is broad bipartisan agreement. We 
could pass it today. We could pass it today in the Senate, but the 
Democrats insist on a liberal wish list, which includes a 
multitrillion-dollar proposal--multitrillion-dollar proposal--with a 
liberal wish list, an agenda that in many cases has nothing to do with 
combating or fighting the coronavirus but simply is an attempt to 
deliver on a liberal agenda for their political base. So let's just 
make that point very clearly here when we talk about what we should be 
doing.
  I believe what we should be doing is sitting down and working on a 
reasonable bill, a targeted bill, a fiscally responsible bill. 
Republicans have been more than willing to do that and more than 
willing to compromise, but the Democrats both in the House and the 
Senate continue to insist upon a multitrillion-dollar bill that 
consists, again, of a bunch of liberal wish list items--taxpayer 
bailouts for blue States, tax cuts for millionaires across this 
country, putting money into diversity studies on cannabis--instead of 
the targeted things, the things that are really going to be necessary 
to help the American people and our economy recover from the 
coronavirus.