[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 40 (Wednesday, March 3, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1004-S1006]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         BUDGET RECONCILIATION

  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, less than 2 months ago, President Biden 
emphasized a theme of unity at his inauguration.
  ``Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this,'' he said. 
``Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our 
nation.''
  Admirable words, but so far they haven't been met with much action. 
On the first big legislative test of his Presidency, coronavirus 
legislation, President Biden and Democrats in Congress have pursued a 
resolutely partisan course.
  They have not only failed to invite Republican input in any 
meaningful way, they deliberately excluded it by passing their 
coronavirus package using budget reconciliation.
  This allows them to pass the bill in the Senate by a simple majority 
vote, instead of requiring the concurrence of 60 Senators to move to a 
vote on the bill, which is typically how legislation is passed here in 
the Senate, including the five coronavirus bills that we passed last 
year, when the Republicans had the majority here in the Senate.
  Now, Democrats' decision to use reconciliation might be 
understandable if Republicans had declared our opposition to any 
further coronavirus legislation, but, of course, that is not the case.
  Republicans made it clear that we were willing to work with Democrats 
on additional coronavirus legislation. In fact, 10 Republican Senators 
put together a plan and met with President Biden for 2 hours to discuss 
a bipartisan agreement. But while the President listened to them 
graciously, Democrats and the President quickly made it clear that they 
intended to move forward without Republican input.
  Two days after Republicans met with President Biden, the House passed 
its partisan budget resolution to pave the way for reconciliation here 
in the Senate. Two days later, the Senate followed suit.
  Clearly, there were no plans to let negotiations with Republicans 
slow down the partisan juggernaut. In fact, Democrats have been pretty 
determined to make sure Republicans don't have a voice in this 
legislation at all.
  During markups of the COVID relief package in House committees, 
Republicans offered a number of amendments: 245 amendments, to be 
exact. Out of those 245 amendments, Democrats accepted exactly one for 
the final bill--one.
  Among the amendments House Democrats rejected were commonsense 
proposals to tie school funding to the reopening of schools. There was 
an amendment to unfreeze funding for the Coronavirus Food Assistance 
Program for farmers and ranchers. There were amendments to target 
funding to overlooked rural communities and an amendment to protect 
healthcare providers from frivolous lawsuits.
  The one thing that can be said for the House is at least it gave 
Members in the House a chance to review the bill in committee. Here in 
the Senate, Democrats' COVID package will come to the floor without any 
committee consideration. Senators are just supposed to accept whatever 
the House sent over or whatever changes the Senate Democratic leader 
makes, minus those items that are excluded from a reconciliation 
package by Senate budget rules.
  Democrats' partisan course on COVID legislation is particularly 
disappointing because up until now, COVID relief has been a bipartisan 
process.
  That is right. To date, Congress has passed five COVID relief bills, 
and every single one of those bills was overwhelmingly bipartisan.
  The Republican-led Senate took up and passed COVID relief legislation 
by margins of 96 to 1, 90 to 8, 96 to 0, 92 to 6, and one even went by 
voice vote here in the Senate.
  Back then, of course, Democrats thought that the minority party 
should have a voice in the process. In fact, the Democratic leader 
filibustered the original CARES Act, our largest COVID bill to date, 
multiple times until he got a version that he was satisfied with.
  Now that the Democrats are in the majority, however, they have 
decided minority representation can be dispensed with. It is Democrats' 
way or the highway on COVID legislation. Republicans and the Americans 
that they represent will not be allowed to contribute.
  I guess it is not surprising. After all, if the Democrats had pursued 
a bipartisan process, they would probably have had to eliminate some of 
the non-COVID-related provisions in this legislation, like the $86 
billion bailout of multiemployer pension plans, hardly a coronavirus 
emergency.
  They might have been forced to trim their slush fund for States and 
ensure that the distribution formula wasn't weighted heavily in favor 
of blue States.
  The Senator from Illinois was just down here talking about the 
importance of helping out the States. Well, under the formula that they 
have designed for this relief package, the dollars skew heavily, 
surprisingly, to States like New York, where the Democratic leader is 
from, or California, where the House Speaker is from, or Illinois, 
where the Senate Democratic whip is from.
  It seems like a lot of States around the country sort of got left out 
when it came to how to distribute what is going to be a huge amount of 
money that is going to go out to State and local governments if the 
Democrats have their way with this bill. They might have had to reject 
the measure to give labor unions and Planned Parenthood access to loans 
designed to help small businesses--again, hardly something that we 
ought to be doing in a coronavirus relief bill that is designed to make 
sure that small businesses stay viable, but it does satisfy a lot of 
Democrat special interest groups.

  They might have had to tie funding for schools to school reopening--
seems like a fair consideration. There was an amendment offered during 
the budget resolution when it was being considered on the floor of the 
Senate that would have required schools where every teacher had the 
vaccination to reopen in order to qualify for Federal assistance under 
this legislation, but there is nothing about that in this bill. There 
is nothing that, of all the money, the $128 billion that will go out to 
schools--by the way, we put $68 billion out there already, much of 
which hasn't been spent. But with all this money that would go out to 
schools, there is no stipulation anywhere in this legislation that 
would attempt to tie funding for schools to their reopening so that we 
can get our kids back to school and learning again in that environment.
  In fact, it would be arguable, I think, that the schools, if the 
teachers can get vaccinated--and that was the very language of the 
amendment that was offered in the budget resolution by Republicans. It 
was defeated here in the Senate on a 50-50 vote. All Republicans voted 
for it, all Democrats against it. But again, all it simply said was 
that if you are going to get Federal funding under this bill and all of 
the teachers in your school are vaccinated against the coronavirus, 
then you have to reopen. If you don't reopen after all the teachers 
have been vaccinated, then you don't get funding under this bill. That 
seems like a fairly straightforward request, given the fact that so 
many schools across this country and so many of our kids continue to 
have to learn virtually at a time when we need to have them in the 
classroom. This is obviously something that wasn't included in this 
legislation.
  I would argue that all the changes that I have just mentioned would 
have made the bill better, but they might not have made the Democrat 
allies as happy. This whole process could have been different. We could 
be here today with another bipartisan COVID bill that would speed up 
vaccination and help our country through the rest of the pandemic. In 
fact, as I said, there were lots of Republicans who were interested in 
negotiating, sitting down with Democrats to do just that.
  The Democrat whip, the Senator from Illinois, was down here saying: 
Wouldn't it be great if this could be bipartisan like the other bills 
we have

[[Page S1005]]

done earlier that were bipartisan? I would simply point out the 
obvious, and that is that all of the bills that were done last year 
when Republicans had the majority here in the Senate were bipartisan 
because we did them under regular order. We did them under the 60-vote 
threshold that is required to move legislation through the Senate.
  What the Democrat leadership has opted to do is to use a rarely used 
legislative vehicle here--budget reconciliation--to do a bunch of 
things that they could do simply with 51 votes, and it was pretty clear 
to me that they had no intention ever of including Republican ideas or 
involving Republicans in developing this legislation or, ultimately, 
having Republican support for at the end. In fact, that was probably 
made most clear by a statement made by the Chief of Staff to President 
Biden in the White House when he described this as ``the most 
progressive domestic legislation in a generation,'' suggesting, of 
course, that this is filled with all kinds of liberal priorities, most 
of which have very little to do with the coronavirus.
  In fact, if you look at where the funding goes in this, the $1.9 
trillion, less than 10 percent--less than 10 percent--deals with 
funding for public healthcare; in other words, funding for vaccines, 
either for production or distribution; funding for providers; funding 
more mental health; funding for anything related to healthcare. If you 
look at the $1.9 trillion, it is less than 10 percent. Less than 10 
percent of it is actually directed at addressing the actual healthcare 
crisis that we are facing as a nation.
  I would simply say that it is pretty clear to me that if Democrats 
had wanted to, they could have had--easily could have had--a bipartisan 
bill. There are 10 Republicans I know of today who would have voted for 
a bill that would include funding for vaccines, that would include 
funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, that would include funding 
for unemployment checks, that actually would have included funding for 
direct checks to go out, which I know is a very popular thing. But that 
consultation never occurred. That desire to get input never happened--
that offer to allow the committees of jurisdiction to even have a voice 
or any input into this.
  Frankly, if I am a Democrat here in the Senate, I would be outraged 
that my committees were bypassed completely. There was no consideration 
at any committee--any committee--here in the Senate about what the 
contents of this legislation should be or what the substance of it 
should look like in the end. It was literally ramrodded, coming from 
the House of Representatives, taken up by the Democratic leadership 
with no input from the committees--Republicans, for sure, but also 
Democrats, of all people, who you think would want to be heard. I mean, 
they got these chairmanships of these committees for a reason. They 
finally got the majority, and they have committee gavels and all that, 
and here we are, talking about $1.9 trillion in spending, and the 
committee chairs, the committees themselves had no action when it comes 
to shaping or in any way producing this legislation.

  So to suggest, as the Democrat whip, Senator Durbin, did earlier, 
that he really hopes that this will be bipartisan, I just--it is hard 
to take that even seriously, given how this is proceeding and how the 
Democrats opted to do this relative to how the other five coronavirus 
relief bills were passed last year under the Republican majority.
  We are looking instead at a partisan bill that directs billions of 
taxpayer dollars to projects and policies that have nothing to do with 
overcoming COVID. And just as one observation--again, I made this point 
on the floor yesterday. But one thing that we need to remember here is 
that we are talking about real money here, and we are talking about it 
all being borrowed money. This is all money that goes on the debt. 
Every dollar that we are going to provide of the $1.9 trillion that is 
proposed in this Democrat bill is a borrowed dollar. These are all 
dollars that go on the debt, the debt which has grown dramatically in 
this last year, in some cases because we had to move aggressively, as 
we did last year at this time in March with a bill that would get 
immediate assistance out there to people who desperately needed it. We 
were fighting at that time a major emergency, a major crisis. Well, 
here we are, a year later. We have a very different perspective on the 
world today than we did 12 months ago. But that $1.9 trillion, when 
added to the other coronavirus relief bills, ends up being about $6 
trillion--$6 trillion. That amount of money is absolutely hard to 
comprehend and hard to fathom. And we are talking about compounding the 
$4 trillion or so already out there with another $2 trillion with this 
bill, and as I pointed out yesterday, at some point--at some point--the 
chickens come home to roost. You cannot continue down this path without 
consequence on the economy.
  Now, the argument in support of this legislation made by Democrats is 
that we need to do more; we have got to get this out there; we have got 
to stimulate the economy. My fear in a lot of respects right now is 
that the economy could be overstimulated. The Congressional Budget 
Office said just recently that without any additional assistance, the 
economy is going to grow in 2021 at 3.7 percent, and we are flooding 
the zone with so much money that the money supply numbers have been 
exploding.
  The 2020 money supply was up--the M2 as they measure it--was up 26 
percent. Year over year, from 2000 to 2019, it averaged about 6 
percent. This year it is going to be up another 12 percent. There is a 
lot of money out there in the economy. What does that mean long-term 
for our economy and for the individual workers in our economy? Well, 
first off, it means that as there are more and more dollars chasing 
fewer goods, you are going to get inflation. That is inevitable. When 
you get inflation, typically what happens is interest rates follow 
because those who are buying that debt, if it is being lost to 
inflation, want to make sure that they are getting a return on their 
investments, so interest rates start to go up.
  When interest rates go up, the amount of money we borrow becomes even 
more expensive because we have to pay interest. We have to finance that 
debt. So the amount of interest--the amount of Federal tax dollars that 
we will be using to pay for interest on the debt will explode and will 
swamp--it will swamp, literally--the amount of tax revenue coming into 
this country. We know that because the debt is so large already, and we 
know that because interest rates have been low for a long time, which 
has lulled everybody into a sense of complacency that this is not going 
to have any impact, that there is no downside. We can just keep 
borrowing because interest rates are low.
  Well, if you keep putting as much money out there as we are--another 
$2 trillion out into the economy--I would argue that you are not only 
going to unleash inflation, which has a dramatic consequence for our 
fiscal situation as a country, but it also has a dramatic consequence 
for the personal financial situation of the American family because 
when inflation takes off, everything that people have to buy, from food 
to gasoline to clothing--all those things go up. Inflation pushes the 
prices of things higher, which means they are more expensiv to the 
average family in this country.

  Then the other effect, long-term, is when inflation starts to go up, 
as I said, interest rates start to follow. We are already starting to 
see some evidence of that. When interest rates go up, not only does the 
Federal Government fiscal picture get much, much worse because the 
amount of tax dollars that we have to spend to finance our debt grows 
dramatically, but the American consumer is also faced with higher 
interest rates. So mortgage payments go up if somebody is trying to 
finance a home. Interest rates on cars, automobiles, will go up. 
Interest rates on student loans go up. That also has a direct impact on 
the pocketbooks of people in this country.
  Mr. President, I am going to conclude, but I think it is really 
important to point out--and I know that my State is not indicative of 
every State around the country. There are States that have legitimate, 
different financial situations. But in South Dakota right now, we have 
3-percent unemployment. We have a growing economy. We have a State that 
has already benefited significantly from earlier coronavirus relief 
legislation to the point where there are dollars that they

[[Page S1006]]

are still trying to figure out how to use from the previous 
installations of Federal spending that we have put out there. It just 
seems to me that we ought to, given the potential adverse consequence 
of higher interest rates, higher inflation, higher debt and spending, 
think about that what we are doing here should be very targeted. It 
should be very specific.
  We know now--we have a lot more insight into where the needs are in 
the economy than we did at this point last year, in March, when we did 
the first CARES package. We are at a time now when it is very clear 
where those needs are, and we could come up with a much more targeted 
bill. Those 10 Republicans that I have mentioned have come up with a 
bill that is in the $600 billion to $700 billion range, which addresses 
the healthcare issues, addresses the unemployment insurance issues, 
addresses the PPP program. It deals with direct checks, as I mentioned. 
It has got funding for education. I think some funding is in there for 
State and local governments, which, frankly, as I said, I am not for. I 
would rather see us take those dollars, if we are going to put them 
somewhere, put them toward something that is more targeted, at least a 
formula that makes more sense.
  But let me just say that in my view it is really important right now 
that we be circumspect. We are talking about borrowed money. This is 
now--this is the house of dollars. This is not--this isn't just magic 
money that appears out of nowhere. Every single dollar that we are 
using is borrowed, will be added to the debt, will be a liability for 
somebody to have to pay back--for our kids and our grandkids. And if 
the potential economic impacts that I mentioned actually occur and 
interest rates start to tick up, it is going to be a lot more expensive 
money to finance in the future, and I think that is a very real 
consideration. It is something we ought to be thinking long and hard 
about, not just because of the fiscal situation that the country faces 
right now but because of the financial situation every American family, 
as they sit around the kitchen table and talk about these pocketbook 
issues, will be looking at. If we see higher inflation, if we see 
higher interest rates, it is going to affect their jobs; it is going to 
affect their cost of living; and it is going to make it that much 
harder for them to make ends meet.
  Less than 2 months after the President committed himself to unity at 
his inauguration, the first major bill of his Presidency will be a 
resolutely partisan piece of legislation. I hope--I hope--that this is 
not a sign of things to come.
  I yield the floor.
  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. GRASSLEY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Rosen). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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