[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 44 (Tuesday, March 9, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1412-S1413]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Nominations

  Madam President, on a different matter, this week, the Senate is set 
to consider more of President Biden's nominations. I have consistently 
said that the President should have latitude to staff their 
administration with people of their choosing so long as they nominate 
qualified and mainstream individuals. That is why I and many other 
Republicans have supported many of the President's mainstream nominees.
  Secretaries Austin and Vilsack were each confirmed with more than 90 
votes; Secretaries Raimondo, Yellen, and Buttigieg with more than 80. 
Senator Blinken got 78 votes, including mine. Secretaries Cardona and 
Granholm each got more than 60 votes. Even with the time spent on 
impeachment, half of the nominees I just mentioned were confirmed 
faster than President Trump's nominees to the same spots, and most of 
them received a more bipartisan margin now than 4 years ago. So this 
administration is receiving perfectly fair treatment from the Senate. 
Frankly, the President and his team must be thrilled that Senate 
Republicans are proving to be more fair and more principled on 
personnel matters than the Democratic minority's behavior 4 years ago.
  But the fact remains that millions and millions of Americans elected 
50 Republican Senators--an even split--to stand against policies and 
personnel who lean too far to the left. That is why many of us voted 
against confirming Secretary Mayorkas, who stood idly by while a major 
crisis exploded on the border in just his first several weeks. Rather 
than confront the problem, he absurdly claims that a record number of 
unaccompanied children in custody, overflowing shelters, and catch-and-
release policies during a pandemic do not actually constitute a 
``crisis'' at all.
  Xavier Becerra, the partisan California attorney general with no 
significant healthcare experience, whom the President has nominated to 
run Health and Human Services during COVID-19, could not even get one 
Republican vote to get out of committee.
  So Republicans will continue to distinguish between qualified, 
mainstream people and nominees who are way outside the mainstream.
  I have already announced I will support Judge Merrick Garland, whose 
nomination to be Attorney General we will vote to advance later today, 
but we will continue to fight hard against people who are the wrong 
choices for key positions. We are going to shine a bright spotlight on 
anyone who seems more focused on far-left ideology than serving all of 
the American people
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The assistant majority leader.


                    American Rescue Plan Act of 2021

  Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I had a press conference this Sunday 
back home in Illinois to talk about what the American Rescue Plan means 
to our State. It is dramatic. Dramatic.
  Millions of dollars will be coming to our State to buy vaccines. I 
can tell you, all across Illinois, people are asking: When is it my 
turn? When do I get my chance? And we want to make sure they get that 
chance sooner rather than later.
  Think about what President Biden inherited just a few weeks ago. 
Surely they had found some vaccines--excellent vaccines by Pfizer and 
Moderna--approved by then, but he came to the White House to find that 
there was no plan to administer those vaccines across the Nation.
  Vaccine is important, but it is of little value if it is not in the 
arms of Americans. So he set out to establish a standard that we would 
be distributing this vaccine across the United States as quickly as 
possible and the mechanism, the infrastructure to make certain that it 
was administered by professionals who know what they are doing. That is 
quite an undertaking. It is the largest vaccination in the history of 
our Nation. But President Biden said he needed help to do it--not just 
money for the vaccine but money for testing, money for the genomic 
sequencing necessary to detect variants that might be emerging in the 
United States. That was a major element of the bill that passed this 
Senate last Saturday.
  He also put money in there that had already been promised to the 
American people. Remember when President Trump said $2,000 for every 
American? We agreed on a bipartisan basis. The first downpayment was 
last December, $600, and the remainder, $1,400, was included in the 
bill that passed on Saturday.
  I have yet to hear a Republican Senator come to this floor and 
criticize that sum of money. All of them--I should say most of them 
have publicly supported it, and others say little or nothing about it, 
but no one is saying that it shouldn't be given as a result of the 
promise made. We kept that promise. That was part of what we were 
doing.
  We also had a responsibility to millions of Americans who are still 
collecting unemployment. As of March 14,

[[Page S1413]]

they were going to lose their opportunity to continue that unemployment 
check.
  There were arguments made on the floor here that these were just lazy 
people and that if you give them an unemployment check, they will just 
continue to be lazy and won't go back to work. I don't buy that. I 
don't believe it. Are some lazy? Well, possibly. I think the vast 
majority of these people are desperate. They are desperate because they 
have been laid off or lost their jobs and they need to keep their 
families together.
  Unemployment benefits do that, and they also give fuel to the economy 
to recover. We were told that by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve 
and others--to put enough stimulus back in this economy so we can come 
out of it strong sooner rather than later. I believe that. Yet people 
like the Republican Senator from Ohio came to the floor talking about 
the recovery underway and we don't really need to do as much as 
President Biden had asked for. I disagree.
  All across the board, the bill that we passed, whether it is money 
for schools or money for hospitals or money for clinics or money for 
administering this vaccine, was money that will be well spent in the 
State of Illinois and all across the United States.
  Now what troubles me is this: Last year, we had two major bills for 
COVID relief. They talk about five. There were two major bills. The 
first was in March, the CARES Act that was worth $2 trillion. That bill 
passed the Senate after it had been engineered by Treasury Secretary 
Mnuchin of the Trump administration. It passed the Senate with every 
Senator voting yes, 96 to nothing. Every Democratic Senator voted for 
it.
  Then came the followup bill in December, some $900 billion for more 
COVID relief, for a temporary, first-quarter-of-this-year fix. When you 
look at the final rollcall there, it was 92 to 6. All six ``no'' votes 
were Republicans. Every Democrat who voted, voted for it--again, a 
Trump proposal that we supported on the Democratic side.
  So then the tables turned on January 20, and a new President came to 
town. Joe Biden said: Let me finish this and do it effectively. Give me 
an American Rescue Plan.
  How many Republican Senators stood up and said: Well, since the 
Democrats, in the spirit of responding to this pandemic, came around 
and supported the Trump plans last year, we will do the same this year. 
The number--zero. Not one Republican Senator supported the bill that 
passed on Saturday. We passed it with 50 Democratic votes. That is what 
it took, with one Republican Senator being missing. But what a 
disappointment that is, to think that this pandemic and the economic 
crisis that followed was addressed on a bipartisan basis with every 
Democratic vote in the major legislation last year, and this year, 
under President Biden, we couldn't get one Republican Senator to join 
us in that effort. It is a disappointment, but I hope it isn't a 
portent of things to come. We have a lot to do, and we need to do it 
together on a bipartisan basis. The American people are going to count 
on us to do it.

  I also might say a word about the nominations that Senator McConnell 
referred to earlier. It is true that some of these nominees are getting 
votes that indicate a strong majority in support, and that does 
evidence Republican cooperation, and I want to thank them for joining 
us in that bipartisan spirit. But it evidences something else as well. 
These are good nominees. These are good men and women who can serve 
this country effectively. Given the chance, they will, and the votes 
that have been cast in support of them indicate that as well.
  I won't go into the experience 4 years ago with the Trump nominees, 
but many of them had troubled records, and some of them didn't even 
file the necessary disclosures before their names were submitted to us 
for consideration. So there are a lot of things that have changed in 
the 4-year period of time. Now we have a chance to approve a team for 
President Biden and to fill out his national security team.