[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 216 (Saturday, December 19, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7838-S7841]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Coronavirus

  Mrs. BLACKBURN. Madam President, isn't it interesting? Here we are, 
Christmas week, the weekend before Christmas, and we are talking about 
needing targeted relief. Now, the Democrats have spent their year 
pushing off targeted relief. They have had their opportunities to 
tackle this issue. They have chosen not to tackle this issue. They have 
chosen to play politics with this issue. So, on the Saturday before 
Christmas, when we should be home and visiting with our families--I 
would love to be home with my children and grandchildren--here we are.
  I honestly have decided that my friends across the aisle must not be 
paying very much attention to what is going on back home because the 
people back home in Tennessee are very frustrated with them. They seem 
out of touch. They seem to not care. They don't seem to be interested 
in taking care of people with needs who have been adversely impacted by 
COVID. They seem to be more interested in taking care of themselves.
  This year really did not have to end this way. As I said, our friends 
across the aisle could have addressed this back in the summer. In July, 
the minority leader and his colleagues in the House immediately 
rejected our HEALS Act proposal in favor of Speaker Pelosi's mega-
trillion-dollar--$3 trillion--wish list that they had dubbed the 
``Heroes Act.'' You know, they always give such nice sounding names to 
things. Who could be against this? Yet they rejected the HEALS Act 
proposal that was targeted-specific relief and went with the Heroes 
Act.
  It was a very partisan bill. It contained provisions that had nothing 
to do with COVID relief and that the House and Senate Democrats knew 
were going to be stumbling blocks. Their bill was filled with things--
nothing to do with taking care of people, but, oh, they had it filled 
with poison pills. Why? They wanted to make certain that relief didn't 
come. They wanted to make certain that they could run this out and get 
it past the election. Then we found out from Speaker Pelosi herself and 
from some of the other Democrats who are in leadership why they did 
this. Oh, politics. It helped them with the election, they thought. 
They used people as pawns.
  That Heroes Act that they continue to like to talk about would have 
undermined State voter ID requirements and given the green light to 
some ballot harvesting schemes. Isn't it interesting? What are we 
talking about? What are Tennesseans talking about so much? Yes, you got 
it--ballots, elections, some of the harvesting, some of the tricks. 
Those items they had in the Heroes Act didn't have anything to do with 
targeted relief, but do you know what? They were willing to play these 
games and to withhold that relief. Why? They thought it would help them 
in winning an election.
  That was all back in July. Then comes September 10. The Democrats 
again block the forward motion on another targeted bill, throwing a 
procedural hurdle in between the American people and desperately needed 
relief. They got by with it in July, so September rolls along, and it 
is about time for people to start getting ballots and mailing in 
ballots. What do they do? They decide to mess with it again--to play 
politics, to use people as pawns.
  They lower the bar even further on October 21, throwing away $500 
billion in targeted relief. They all vote no in an attempt to tear our 
focus away from another round of funding for small businesses, support 
for schools, and more money for COVID-19 testing.
  Think about this. Time and again, they say: Oh, we have to have more 
PPP. We have to have more unemployment insurance. We have to have more 
money for vaccines. We have to have more money for testing. We have to 
have more money for getting schools open. But they vote no. They have 
turned their backs on the American people repeatedly. They did it in 
July. They did it in September. They did it in October. They have 
turned their backs.
  Think about what a plus-up of unemployment insurance would have done 
for a family had they decided to vote yes and worked with us in July. 
That would have been a lot of money if they had had that plus-up every 
single week through August, September, October, November, and December.
  I mentioned the October 21 vote. One day earlier, on October 20, the 
Democrats had blocked Senate action to extend the PPP. That was for all 
of our small businesses--and yes, indeed, they are hurting. We are 
hearing from them on the phone and through email. They are begging for 
relief. The minority leader threw another possibility of compromise out 
the window by again insisting that the Democrats would accept the full 
Heroes Act or nothing. Isn't that amazing? That is what small 
businesses have gotten, is nothing, because my colleagues across the 
aisle have basically said: Give us everything we want, or we will just 
vote no. We will just leave people suffering.
  It is not the Republicans who have voted no. The Republicans have 
consistently tried to help people, and my friends across the aisle are 
consistently trying to help themselves and use people as pawns.
  At the beginning of this month, the minority leader took to the floor 
again. He rejected targeted relief again, and he demanded that the 
Republicans come to the table. Well, we have been at the table. They 
are the ones who reject proposal after proposal and don't want to move 
forward on things on which there is agreement. They want to hold out. 
They have not been paying attention to what is going on outside the 
four walls of this Chamber. They continue to say: We have to have money 
to bail out cities and States. They call it aid to cities and States, 
but they are bailouts for these big blue cities and States that were 
having problems long before lockdowns came along and that have really 
made an uncomfortable spot for themselves because of having 
irresponsible spending policies.
  I know that Tennesseans do not want to see their tax dollars going to 
bail out people who have chosen to waste their taxpayers' dollars, and 
I can't help but wonder how much longer the Democrats are going to 
allow industries and small businesses and individuals to twist in the 
wind because they

[[Page S7839]]

feel like this is a great time to push their socialist agenda and get 
us on that fast track. Oh, that is what they would like to do.
  We had a hearing this week in the Commerce Committee and had some of 
the venues and the live entertainment industry come before us--the 
people who tend to the stages when the curtains go up, the people who 
are working backstage. We heard from Michael Strickland, out of 
Knoxville, whose company, Bandit Lites, helps these shows look great. 
You have millions of people who are in these support industries. We 
heard from the motor coach industry. We heard from some of these 
smaller venues. They are totally shut down. They were totally shut down 
when the country went into lockdown. They were the first to be totally 
closed, and they are going to be the last to reopen. These are people, 
joined by small business retailers and restaurants, who can't open 
their doors, and they are small business manufacturers who have to wait 
for the supply chain to kick back up so that they can reopen their 
production lines.
  And they are saying: We need the help. They are asking us: Who is 
blocking it? Who is holding out? And we tell them repeatedly they could 
have had relief in July or they could have had it back in September or 
a couple of times in October or November or earlier in December. And it 
is not Republicans who have blocked that relief.
  Time and again, the Democrats have blocked Republican proposals to 
send funding where it is needed most. They have rejected every single 
lifeline that we have tried to throw.
  I think it has become clear that the Democrats in Washington, DC, 
never really saw getting assistance to the unemployed, getting help to 
small businesses as a priority. Instead, they looked at this, they saw 
a crisis, they said: Well, this is an opportunity. Let's not let this 
crisis go to waste.
  They have used it so that they can push their message, their agenda: 
Do what the Federal Government says or we will let you drown.
  So they know that their bills weren't meant to act as help. Maybe 
they were meant to be a push for their leftist agenda. They know that 
the emergency financial provisions of the CARES Act were never meant to 
replace private markets or be used as a mechanism to bail out State and 
local governments. But you know what? They are going to push to try to 
make it so to further a leftist agenda. Crisis management is no 
substitute for fiscal policy.
  So I would say to our friends on the left, these tactics have failed. 
It is time to stop using the American people as pawns. Read your mail; 
listen to the phones. People want targeted relief that will help them 
to get to recovery.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Young). The Senator from Pennsylvania
  Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I want to address the ongoing debate over 
the content of a relief bill that I think we have made a lot of 
progress on and I am hopeful that we can get finished.
  Many of our colleagues have been down here and have reminded all of 
us, quite rightly, of the terrible difficulties that many Americans are 
facing.
  We are not in a full-blown financial crisis anymore, but we are 
experiencing a lot of economic hardship that tends to be concentrated 
in certain sectors and industries, and we have a full-blown healthcare 
crisis. So it is a very, very serious moment, and it demands a 
response.
  I am hoping we can get that done as soon as possible, and I want to 
discuss one of the terms that I have advocated for in this legislation. 
The terms I have advocated for have been mischaracterized, including by 
the Senate minority leader and others, and so I want to set the record 
straight on what this is all about and why I think this is so 
important.
  And to that, I think it is worth remembering what brought us to this 
point. Back in March, when the coronavirus was first ripping across 
America and wreaking so much havoc, the response, in many, many places, 
was a complete economic shutdown--a complete prohibition against doing 
business, against going to work, against earning a livelihood.
  And I understand why that was done--that we were in a healthcare 
crisis, and that was the response that was believed to be most likely 
to prevent an overwhelming of our healthcare capabilities. That would 
have been absolutely horrific, and so we had this economic disaster.
  And what we discovered in March was this shutdown brought us to the 
brink of a financial crisis as well.
  If you think about the financial markets where people are providing 
capital to businesses and municipalities and individuals, they only do 
that if there is some confidence that they know, at least generally 
speaking, what the future looks like. We had never seen anything like 
the government shutting down our economy before.
  And so not really shockingly, the financial markets were on the verge 
of completely freezing up, shutting down, and preventing even the most 
basic functioning of our economy. I mean, we might well have gotten to 
the point where a business couldn't go to its bank and borrow the money 
it needs to make payroll on Friday or they couldn't issue the bond that 
they need to do to pay off another bond that is coming due, and so that 
would put them in default and force them into bankruptcy and require 
them to lay everyone off.
  I mean, the knock-on effects would have been devastating had our 
financial system completely frozen up, and it was on the verge, some 
would say it was actually in the process, of freezing up.
  And so that is why the Treasury Secretary and the Federal Reserve 
Board Governor came to Congress and said: Look, we need some 
extraordinary, unprecedented new facilities that we can stand up very, 
very quickly, and we can use them to be a backstop, to restore 
confidence, and to enable private credit to start flowing again so that 
this economic recession that we are certainly going to go through--back 
in March it was clear that was going to happen, but it was not clear 
that we had to suffer through a financial crisis that would create a 
depression. That was something we thought maybe we can avoid.
  So these facilities were set up, as I say, to restore the normal 
functioning of private lending and private capital markets--not to 
replace those markets, not to pick winners and losers and decide, well, 
who gets credit and who doesn't depending on whether we like their 
business, not to subsidize, not to say: Well, look, you know, let's 
just give cut-rate loans to the people we like to give them to. None of 
that was the intention. None of that was the purpose.
  The purpose was to ensure that creditworthy borrowers could access 
credit through the normal channels. That was it. That was the purpose 
of what has been widely described as the 13(3) lending facilities. 
There were several of these facilities. That was the intention for 
these facilities.
  And guess what. They worked. They worked amazingly well, remarkably 
well. Within days, certainly weeks, markets were again functioning, 
credit was flowing, and as a matter of fact, within a matter of months, 
credit was flowing at an alltime record pace; corporate bond issuance 
hit an alltime record high. Across the credit quality spectrum, 
municipal bond issues were at an alltime record high. Borrowers, 
businesses that wanted to keep their workers and continue to survive 
until we got past this COVID crisis--they were able to draw down lines 
of credit from their banks. It worked.
  The creation of these facilities gave the confidence to our financial 
markets that restored the normal functioning of those markets. It was 
really quite extraordinary.
  Now, that doesn't mean that the economy got perfect after that. 
Certainly not. The economy is not perfect today. But it meant that a 
recovery would be possible. We would be able to function. We would be 
able to begin to pick up the pieces of a closed economy and, sure 
enough, we have made tremendous progress. More than half of all the 
people who lost their jobs are back at work. So that is not anywhere 
near where we need to end up, but we are on the right track, in part, 
because these facilities did exactly what they were designed to do.
  Now, what does my language in this bill do? What my language does is 
it puts an end to these three programs that did their job--they 
functioned; they restored the private credit markets; and so they don't 
need to continue.

[[Page S7840]]

  What are these three programs? There is a corporate bond credit 
facility, there is a Main Street Lending Program, and there is a 
municipal lending program. Actually, they were hardly used at all. So 
quickly did the normal private credit markets resume their normal 
functioning that very few borrowers took advantage.
  In fact, I am pretty sure in the corporate credit facility that was 
set up under these 13(3) facilities, I don't think anything was done at 
all. In the Main Street lending, there was very little. In the 
municipal lending, there were two borrowers. That is it.
  These are the programs that were funded by the CARES Act, were set up 
at the time of the CARES Act for this narrow, specific purpose, and now 
they have achieved their purpose.
  By the way, there are lots of other programs that have been set up 
over time--some were set up recently--that my legislation doesn't touch 
in any way, shape, form, or fashion. The Commercial Paper Funding 
Facility--unaffected. The money market fund liquidity provision--
unaffected. The Paycheck Protection Program, primary dealer liquidity 
facility--untouched. All of them untouched, and, quite contrary to what 
some have suggested, this is no big rewrite of the Fed's 13(3) lending 
facilities. It couldn't be further from that.
  What it is is an acknowledgment that the three programs we created in 
March--and which, by the way, we put an expiration on them in March. We 
said they end on December 31.
  But now we have folks on the other side of the aisle who have a novel 
interpretation of the statute, saying: Well, they don't really have to 
end or, if they do end, we could bring them back to life.
  We shouldn't even be having this conversation, but we are because we 
have got this interpretation that we have to deal with.
  What my language simply does is it follows the statute and calls for 
the end of this.
  How do we do this? There are three steps. One is we rescind the money 
that never got used because, as I said, the markets responded so 
quickly we never ever needed to use this money. And I think our 
Democratic colleagues agree on this provision.
  The language that I am trying to get in this package reiterates that 
these CARES facilities end on December 31, as Congress intended. You 
know, I was in the room when we were writing this bill, and nobody 
thought that any of these programs were going to last beyond the end of 
the year.
  But, as I say, because of this novel legal interpretation, we need to 
reiterate, in an unambiguous way, that they end on December 31, as 
Congress intended.
  And, finally, we ensure that they can't simply be restarted next year 
or sometime thereafter or duplicated without congressional consent.
  Now, we have folks on the other side of the aisle who are raising all 
kinds of objections. They are very upset about this. And it is fair to 
ask: Why? Why would that be?
  Well, it certainly isn't because the credit markets are back in 
turmoil, and they think we need to restore the flow of private credit. 
That would be ridiculous. The credit markets are functioning as well or 
better than they ever have. It is not even a close call. So it is not 
that.
  No, what it is is something very different, and that is the problem 
that some of my colleagues want to morph these facilities into a use 
that was never intended for them. They want to convert them away from 
these temporary emergency liquidity facilities designed to stabilize 
markets and restore the flow of credit--to convert it away from that--
and instead to use them to implement fiscal policy and maybe social 
policy and certainly to allocate credit based on their political 
preferences.
  What is one of the ways that our Democratic colleagues would like to 
do that? No. 1, they want to bail out irresponsible States. Now look, I 
get that there are some States across the Union that have suffered 
financially because of COVID. There are other States that haven't been 
harmed at all; in fact, they have more revenue coming in this year than 
they had last year. It varies, and there is definitely a category of 
States and municipalities that have suffered a loss of revenue. We can 
and should have an ongoing debate in this body about what to do about 
that, if anything, but that is our responsibility.
  If we are going to send money to States and municipalities, we should 
have a bill, appropriate the funds, and have a vote in Congress so that 
the American people can hold us accountable. That is what happens. We 
get held accountable.
  When an action like that is done through legislation, it is out in 
the open. It is transparent. It happens in the light of day, and the 
American people know who to hold accountable.
  That is not what our Democratic colleagues want to do. They want to 
force the Fed to do this for them.
  How do we know that? Because they passed a bill called the Heroes 
Act, H.R. 6800, that instructs the Federal Reserve to use the municipal 
facility for exactly this purpose--superlong-term, ultralow-cost loans 
to municipalities, up to 10 years, at one-quarter of 1 percent interest 
rates. States wouldn't even have to attest that they couldn't secure 
ordinary credit; they could just show up and get it. So the Fed 
wouldn't be playing its traditional role as the lender of last resort 
in a national crisis; it would be the lender of first resort to their 
preferred constituency.
  There is the Main Street lending facility. If they can replicate 
that, who knows what kinds of conditions they would impose on low-
interest loans there, whether it is climate or other policies that 
ought to be debated on this floor and ought to be determined through an 
accountable process.
  So, as I say, none of this is speculative. Our Democratic colleagues 
have talked about this. They passed a bill that actually does this.
  It is ironic that when we were developing the response to the crisis 
of March, earlier this year, some of our colleagues described this $500 
billion fund that was intended to capitalize these vehicles that would 
lend and restore liquidity. They called it a ``slush fund.'' In one of 
many examples, Senator Warren, on March 30, 2020, said the CARES Act 
created ``a half trillion dollar slush fund that the Trump 
administration could use to help its political friends and punish its 
political enemies, and I think that's a bad thing.''
  Well, now there is a new administration, and now they want to keep 
the slush fund.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to complete my remarks before 
the vote.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection.
  Mr. TOOMEY. So this is a very bad idea for many reasons, not the 
least of which is to put the Fed in this position of being pressured to 
make these giveaway transactions based on political pressure that would 
completely politicize the Fed. It would be the end of independence of 
the Fed. That is why this has never been the role of our central bank, 
the Fed. We have never asked the Fed to engage in fiscal policy or 
promote social policy or to allocate credit based on political 
standing. That is guaranteed to politicize the Fed and undermine Fed 
independence.
  Fiscal and social policy is the rightful realm of the people who are 
accountable to the American people, and that is us; that is Congress.
  I want to address another accusation that is completely false and 
totally unjustified, and that is that somehow this is an effort to 
hamstring the Biden administration and prevent them from doing what 
they want to do.
  Let me assure the Presiding Officer and my colleagues, my efforts to 
ensure that this would be a temporary facility began when we began 
discussing the facility. It was in March that I was arguing--actually, 
I argued that we should have this end as soon as the financial markets 
had restored their normal functioning and no later than September 30. I 
didn't win the argument. We ended up settling on December 31. But that 
is when I started pushing to have a finite period of time and a short 
period of time. There was nobody in the room who thought that this was 
supposed to go on indefinitely. Once we started working on another 
COVID-related bill, starting in the summertime, and I became aware of 
this alternative interpretation of the language, we put it in our bill, 
and we voted on that in September. So this

[[Page S7841]]

language or the substantively similar language has been public for 
many, many months now.
  I also want to stress that we are not making permanent changes to 
laws and Congress can always act again. The CARES Act already made 
these facilities temporary. They were supposed to end at the end of the 
year, and, of course, no change in law is ever permanent. Any future 
Congress can change it.
  Back in March, when this crisis hit, the Fed and Treasury knew that 
they needed to come to Congress for the tools to solve it. They came to 
Congress, and we turned around in an extraordinarily rapid fashion 
these massive new facilities that had never been imagined before. We 
responded quickly. And if there is some kind of future event that calls 
for a future set of facilities of this particular sort, they can come 
back to Congress.
  There are three facilities--three facilities that were launched in 
conjunction with the CARES Act, funded by the CARES Act, and I am 
saying that they have achieved their purpose. They should come to an 
end. They should not be restarted, and a replica should not be created. 
That is all.
  Some have suggested that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve has some 
opinion on this. I would challenge anyone to find a statement in the 
public record that he has made in criticism of this. He is very well 
aware of what is going on.
  The last point I want to make: Some on the other side have suggested 
that our language may be too broad, and maybe it captures potential 
facilities that shouldn't be captured. If that is the sincere concern 
of my colleagues on the other side, I urge them to give me a call. It 
is very easy to track me down. If you have an objection to the way we 
have worded this and you want language that is narrower, I am all ears. 
We can work this out.
  With that, I yield the floor.