[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 196 (Wednesday, November 18, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7061-S7064]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Coronavirus

  Mrs. SHAHEEN. Madam President, I come to the floor today to raise the 
concern about the need to pass another package of assistance to address 
the coronavirus.
  I had a chance over the weeks that we were in our home States in 
October and after the election to travel around New Hampshire and to 
talk with a number of our small businesses, representatives from 
nursing homes, from our hospitals, from so many of the people who are 
affected by what is happening with COVID-19.
  And what I heard was that too many people are struggling; too many 
people are hurting, and they need help.
  New Hampshire has a small business economy. It is an economy where 
over 50 percent of our workers are employed by small businesses, where 
about 98 percent of the businesses in New Hampshire are considered to 
be small businesses.
  And I was very proud of being able to work with Senators Cardin and 
Rubio and Collins to design the Paycheck Protection Program as part of 
the CARES Act that has helped over 24,000 small businesses during the 
time after it was passed--small businesses and nonprofits.
  That also was instrumental in bringing $2.5 billion into New 
Hampshire and keeping 200,000 people employed.
  Many of those small businesses have bounced back to where they were 
before COVID-19, but too many of them still need help, and they are 
worried about whether they are going to be able to get through the 
winter.
  Of special concern are businesses in the hospitality industry--our 
hotels and restaurants. Tourism is our second largest industry in New 
Hampshire.
  Recently, I had a conference call with a number of folks from the 
Hotel and Lodging Association. One of the things that they told me is 
that they are not sure how they are going to get through the winter.
  For many of our restaurants, about a third of their business has come 
over the summer from outdoor eating, and that, of course, is ending in 
New Hampshire as the weather gets cold. How they are going to make that 
up is a real question.
  Restaurants were the first businesses to be shut down in New 
Hampshire; they were the last businesses to open up; and now we have a 
huge industry that is not sure how it is going to get through the year.
  The second highest number of workers in this country are in the 
restaurant industry. We have got to provide some help for them, and it 
needs to be significant. We also have to look at the hotels. Again, a 
big piece of what we have got to address.
  There was a recent report from the American Hotel and Lodging 
Association that showed that business travel over the holidays is going 
to be down significantly. That is a big source of

[[Page S7062]]

revenue for many of those businesses, and we have got to provide some 
help and some additional help for those businesses as we look at trying 
to get a package of assistance.
  Another round of the PPP program is probably important. We know we 
had about $125 billion left in that program, but we need to think about 
how we can target it best to those industries that are most affected, 
also to minority businesses that may not have a relationship with a 
financial institution.
  So as we think about what we have got to do, that is one of the big 
pieces.
  I had a chance to visit a restaurant over in the western part of our 
State. It was a business that I visited 6 years ago, right after it had 
opened--a restaurant and pub.
  When I went there, they had five employees. It is a young man and his 
mother who run the business. I asked him if he was able to get a PPP 
loan. He said, yes, but he said: My mother and I haven't taken a salary 
since March because it didn't seem right to lay off one of my five 
employees who have families just so that I could take a salary. He 
said: So we are doing everything we can to get by. We hope we will be 
able to make it, but it is not at all clear that we will be able to do 
that.
  I looked around the restaurant, and in the middle of the restaurant 
was a big barrel, and it was filled with canned goods and dried goods--
food. On it was a sign that said, ``Take what you need,'' because we 
have so many people who are desperate--desperate for food, desperate 
for housing.
  As I talked to the mayors in New Hampshire, particularly in our two 
largest cities, Manchester and Nashua, housing and homelessness is a 
huge issue. Homelessness has increased exponentially. In Manchester, 
our biggest city, we have 35 encampments of the homeless. The biggest 
one is on the grounds of the State superior court.
  What does it say when, in the richest country in the world, we have 
so many people who are homeless? And the problem is getting worse. I 
talked to the community action agencies in New Hampshire, which are 
providing help for people with housing. They told me they are seeing 
people they have never seen before--people who need help because of 
COVID.
  Then there are the childcare centers and camps. In New Hampshire, our 
camps have been a special part of our summer experience. We have people 
from all over the country who come to camps in New Hampshire. Only six 
of our overnight camps were able to operate through the summer, and 
they operate on a margin that says if they don't make it in the summer, 
they are not going to get any revenue for another year until next 
summer. They are worried about whether they are going to go under 
between now and next summer.
  Our childcare centers--I heard from Jackie Cowell, who runs an 
organization called Early Learning New Hampshire, which is an umbrella 
organization for childcare in New Hampshire. What she told me is that 
if they get no help, by next year 50 percent of the childcare centers 
in New Hampshire will be out of business.
  As I talked to employers at some of those small businesses, they tell 
me one of the challenges they have is being able to bring workers back 
when they are able to operate because they don't have any childcare for 
their kids. And, of course, with schools going so remote, there is a 
real concern about parents and how they are dealing with their kids. 
Most parents and most schools want to bring the kids back, but in order 
to do that, they have to make sure that it is safe, and they need help 
in order to make sure it is safe. They need help with HVAC systems and 
with the cleaning supplies and the PPE that are necessary in order to 
make sure the schools are safe for the students. We have to provide 
help for those schools. We have to provide help for the childcare 
centers and help for our small businesses.
  Then, of course, I met with nursing homes in New Hampshire. Long-term 
care facilities have had about 40 percent of the deaths as a result of 
COVID-19 in this country, and yet they have only gotten about 4 percent 
of the funding. In New Hampshire, where we have the highest percentage 
of deaths in our long-term care facilities of any State in the country, 
82 percent of our deaths have been in nursing homes.
  Right now they have a workforce shortage that averages about 25 
percent. It is so bad that our Governor this week reinstituted a 
stipend for long-term care workers. It is something that he started 
back in April. It ran through July. As things got better, they needed 
less help. But now they are back in a situation where they can't get 
the help they need.
  I visited a nursing home in the northern part of New Hampshire, Coos 
County, our northern most county that borders the Canadian border. What 
they told me is that while they have some personal protective 
equipment, they don't have enough to guarantee what they need long 
term. So here we are, 9 months into this pandemic, and we still have 
nursing homes that can't get the help they need, can't get the personal 
protective equipment that they need. They are struggling to get by, 
struggling to get the workers they need.
  Then there are the hospitals. In New Hampshire we have a lot of rural 
hospitals. One of them has gone bankrupt in the last couple of weeks 
because of COVID. The hospitals in our two biggest cities have had the 
majority of the hospitalizations that we have seen in New Hampshire. We 
have four hospitals, two in Manchester and two in New Hampshire, that 
have dealt with the most COVID patients in the State. Just when they 
were beginning to see their patients come back in September and early 
October, we are now seeing the cases rise again, and hospitalizations 
are up. So they are looking at financial shortfalls at the end of this 
year. If we can't provide help for those hospitals, if we can't provide 
help for some of our rural hospitals, we are going to see more 
bankruptcies. That means not just an impact on the healthcare that they 
provide, but for many of those institutions, they are the biggest 
employer in their community, so more people are going to be out of 
work.
  So we are looking at this downward spiral that is going to get ever 
worse if we do nothing to address the needs of our businesses, of the 
people who are unemployed, of hospitals, childcare centers, and our 
schools. It is critical that we come to some agreement. We ought to be 
able to reach a bipartisan agreement. It is one of the things I heard 
as I was campaigning around New Hampshire. People need help. They need 
help now. Why can't we work together to get that done?
  I think we need to all double down and try to come to some sort of 
compromise that allows us to provide help to people who need it 
immediately because if we don't, it is only going to get worse. The 
number of coronavirus cases are only going to continue to increase, and 
we need to work to address that.
  We need to have a transition that allows the next administration to 
work with the current administration to make sure that the efforts to 
get this new vaccine out--the two vaccines that look like they are 
promising--are going to be effective and we are actually going to be 
able to get people immunized and have the funding to do that. In order 
for that to happen, we have to see a change in the transition, and we 
have to work together to make that happen to provide the help that the 
States need.
  So I am going to be continuing to do everything I can here in this 
body to see if we can't come to some agreement around a package that 
would provide help to those who need it, and I hope that all of my 
colleagues will do the same, that we will all double down on the 
efforts. I am not saying we should help people who don't need it. That 
is obvious. But we should help the people who need help because they 
are struggling, and it is not going to get any better unless we provide 
some assistance.
  I hope we are going to see some action in the next couple of weeks 
between now and the end of the year
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arkansas.
  Mr. COTTON. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to complete my 
remarks before the scheduled 4:30 vote if my remarks run beyond 4:30.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                    Anniversary of the ``Mayflower''

  Mr. COTTON. Madam President, a great American anniversary is upon us:

[[Page S7063]]

400 years ago this Saturday, a battered old ship called the Mayflower 
arrived in the waters off Cape Cod. The passengers aboard the Mayflower 
are, in many ways, our first founders. Daniel Webster called them ``Our 
Pilgrim Fathers'' on the 200th anniversary of this occasion. 
Regrettably, we haven't heard much about this anniversary of the 
Mayflower. I suppose the Pilgrims have fallen out of favor in 
fashionable circles these days. I therefore would like to take a few 
minutes to reflect on the Pilgrim story and its living legacy for our 
Nation.
  By 1620, the Pilgrims were already practiced at living in a strange 
land. They had fled England for Holland 12 years earlier, seeking 
freedom to practice their faith. But life was hard in Holland, and the 
Stuart monarchy, intolerant of dissent from the Church of England, 
gradually extended its oppressive reach across the Channel. So the 
Pilgrims fled the Old World for the New.
  In seeking safe harbor for their religion, the Pilgrims differed from 
those settlers who preceded them in the previous century, up to and 
including the Jamestown settlement just 13 years earlier. As John 
Quincy Adams put it in a speech celebrating the Pilgrims' anniversary, 
those earlier settlers ``were all instigated by personal interests'' 
motivated by ``avarice and ambition'' and ``selfish passions.'' The 
Pilgrims, by contrast, braved the seas ``under the single inspiration 
of conscience'' and out of a ``sense of religious obligation.''
  Not to say all aboard the Mayflower felt the same. About half of the 
102 passengers were known as ``Strangers'' to the Pilgrims. The 
Strangers were craftsmen, traders, indentured servants, and others 
added to the manifest by the ship's financial backers for business 
reasons. The Strangers did not share the Pilgrims' faith, suffice it to 
say. Winston Churchill, in his ``History of the English-Speaking 
Peoples,'' wryly observed that the Strangers were ``no picked band of 
saints.''
  So these were the settlers who boarded the Mayflower, which Dwight 
Eisenhower once characterized as ``a ship that today no one in his 
senses would think of attempting to use.'' One can only imagine the 
hardships, the dangers, the doubts that they faced while crossing the 
north Atlantic. The ship leaked chronically. A main beam bowed and 
cracked. The passage took longer than expected--more than 2 months. 
Food and water--or beer, often the beverage of choice--ran dangerously 
low.
  But somehow, through the grace of God and the skill of the crew, the 
Mayflower finally sighted land. Yet the dangers only multiplied. 
William Bradford, a Pilgrim leader whose ``Of Plymouth Plantation'' is 
our chief source for the Pilgrim story, recorded those dangers:

       They had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to 
     entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or 
     much less town to repair to, to seek for succor. . . . And 
     for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters 
     of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and 
     subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to 
     known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, 
     what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness.

  And to those physical dangers, you can add legal and political 
danger. While the Mayflower had found land, it was the wrong land. For, 
you see, the Pilgrims' patent extended to Virginia, but Cape Cod was 
hundreds of miles to the north. According to Bradford, ``some of the 
Strangers,'' perhaps hoping to strike out on their own in search of 
riches, began to make ``discontented and mutinous speeches.'' These 
Strangers asserted that ``when they came ashore, they would use their 
own liberty; for none had the power to command them'' in New England.
  Maybe they had a point. But Stranger and Pilgrim alike also had a 
problem: They couldn't survive the ``desolate wilderness'' alone. 
Before landfall, then, they mutually worked out their differences and 
formed what Bradford modestly called ``a combination.''
  This ``combination'' is known to us and history, of course, as the 
Mayflower Compact. But this little Compact--fewer than 200 words--was 
no mere ``combination.'' It was America's very first constitution; 
indeed, in Calvin Coolidge's words, ``the first constitution of modern 
times.''
  Likewise, Churchill called the Mayflower Compact ``one of the more 
remarkable documents in history, a spontaneous covenant for political 
organization.'' High praise coming from him, so it is worth reflecting 
a little more on a few points about the Compact.
  First, while the Pilgrims affirmed their allegiance to England and 
the monarchy, they left little doubt about their priorities. The 
Compact begins with their traditional religious invocation: ``In the 
name of God, Amen.'' They expressed as the ends of their arduous 
voyage, in order, ``the Glory of God,'' the ``advancement of the 
Christian faith,'' and only then the ``honor of our King and Country.'' 
And much like the Founding Fathers' famous pledge to each other before 
``divine Providence'' 156 years later, the Pilgrims covenanted with 
each other ``solemnly and mutually in the presence of God.''
  Second, they respected each other as free and equal citizens. Whether 
Pilgrim or Stranger, the signatories covenanted together to form a 
government, irrespective of faith or station.
  Third and related, that government would be self-government based on 
the consent of the governed. The Pilgrims did not appoint a patriarch; 
they formed a ``civil body politic'' based on ``just and equal laws, 
ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices.'' And immediately after 
signing the Compact, they conducted a democratic election to choose 
their first Governor.
  Fourth, again prefiguring the Declaration, the Pilgrims did not 
surrender all rights to that government. They promised ``all due 
submission and obedience'' to the new government--not ``total'' or 
``unquestioning'' or ``permanent'' submission and obedience. That 
obedience would presumably be ``due'' as long as the laws remained 
``just and equal,'' and the officers appointed performed their duties 
in a ``just and equal'' manner.
  Finally, even in that moment of great privation and peril, the 
Pilgrims turned their eyes upward to the higher, nobler ends of 
political society. They listed their ``preservation'' as an objective 
of the new government, but even before that came ``our better 
ordering.'' The Pilgrims understood that liberty, prosperity, faith, 
and flourishing are only possible with order, and that while safety may 
be the first responsibility of government, it is not the highest or 
ultimate purpose of government. This new government would do more than 
merely protect the settlers or resolve their disputes; it would aim for 
``the general good of the Colony.''
  There, aboard that rickety old ship, tossed about in the cold New 
England waters, the Pilgrims foreshadowed in fewer than 200 words so 
many cherished concepts of our Nation: faith in God and his 
providential protection; the natural equality of mankind; from many, 
one; government by consent; the rule of law; equality before the law; 
and the impartial administration of the law.
  Little wonder, therefore, that Adams referred to the Mayflower 
Compact and the Pilgrims' arrival as the ``birth-day of your nation'' 
or that Webster, despite all the settlements preceding Plymouth, said 
that ``the first scene of our history was laid'' there.
  But that history was only just beginning. The Pilgrims still had to 
conquer the ``desolate wilderness'' and establish their settlement. 
Considering the challenges, it is a wonder that they did. As Coolidge 
observed, though, the Compact ``was not the most wonderful thing about 
the Mayflower. The most wonderful of all was that those who drew it up 
had the power, the determination, and the strength of character to live 
up to it from that day.''
  They would need all that and more to survive what has been called 
``the starving time.'' Upon landfall, the Pilgrims ``fell upon their 
knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast 
and furious ocean.'' But it would be a ``sad and lamentable'' winter of 
disease, starvation, and death, as half the settlers died and seldom 
more than half a dozen had the strength to care for the ill, provide 
food and shelter, and protect the camp.
  As anyone who has endured a New England winter knows, at that rate, 
there might not have been any camp left to protect by spring. But what 
can only be seen as a providential moment came in March, when a lone 
Indian

[[Page S7064]]

walked boldly into their camp and greeted them in English. His name was 
Samoset. He had learned some broken English by working with English 
fishermen in the waters off what is now Maine. Samoset and the Pilgrims 
exchanged gifts, and he promised to return with another Indian, 
Squanto, who spoke fluent English.
  Squanto's Tribe had been wiped out a few years earlier by an epidemic 
plague. He now lived among the Wampanoag Tribe in what is today 
Southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The plague had also 
weakened the Wampanoags, though not neighboring rival Tribes. The 
Wampanoag chief, Massasoit, thus had good reason to form an alliance 
with the Pilgrims. Squanto introduced him to the settlers and 
facilitated their peace and mutual aid treaty, which lasted more than 
50 years.
  Squanto remained with the Pilgrims, acting, in Bradford's words, as 
``their interpreter'' and ``a special instrument sent of God for their 
good beyond their expectations.'' He instructed them on the cultivation 
of native crops like corn, squash, and beans. He showed them where to 
fish and to hunt. He guided them on land and sea to new destinations.
  And you probably remember what happened next. As the Pilgrims 
recovered and prospered throughout 1621, they received the blessings of 
a bountiful fall harvest. The Pilgrims entertained Massasoit and the 
Wampanoags and feasted with them to express their gratitude to their 
allies and to give thanks to God for His abundant gifts. This meal, of 
course, was the First Thanksgiving.
  Now, the Thanksgiving season is upon us, and, once again, we have 
much to give thanks for. But this year we ought to be especially 
thankful for our ancestors, the Pilgrims, on their 400th anniversary. 
Their faith, their bravery, their wisdom places them in the American 
pantheon. Alongside the Patriots of 1776, the Pilgrims of 1620 deserve 
the honor of American Founders.
  Sadly, however, there appear to be few commemorations, parades, or 
festivals to celebrate the Pilgrims this year, perhaps in part because 
revisionist charlatans of the radical left have lately claimed the 
previous year as America's true founding. Nothing could be further from 
the truth. The Pilgrims and their Compact, like the Founders and their 
Declaration, form the true foundation of America.
  So count me in Coolidge's camp. On this anniversary a century ago, he 
proclaimed that ``it is our duty and the duty of every true American to 
reassemble in spirit in the cabin of the Mayflower, rededicate 
ourselves to the Pilgrims' great work by re-signing and reaffirming the 
document that has made mankind of all the earth more glorious.''
  Some--too many--may have lost the civilizational self-confidence 
needed to celebrate the Pilgrims. Just today, for instance, the New 
York Times called this story a ``myth'' and a ``caricature'' in the 
food section, no less. Maybe the politically correct editors of the 
debunked 1619 Project are now responsible for pumpkin pie recipes at 
the Times as well.
  But I, for one, still have the pride and confidence of our forebears. 
So here, today, I speak in the spirit of that cabin, and I reaffirm 
that old Compact. As we head into the week of Thanksgiving, I will be 
giving thanks this year in particular to ``our Pilgrim Fathers'' and 
the timeless lessons they bequeathed to our great Nation. For as 
Coolidge observed, ``Plymouth Rock does not mark a beginning or an end. 
It marks a revelation of that which is without beginning and without 
end.''
  May God continue to bless this land and may He bless the memory of 
the Pilgrims of 1620. I extend my best wishes to you and to your family 
for a Thanksgiving as happy and peaceful as the First Thanksgiving.
  I yield the floor.