[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 140 (Thursday, August 5, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Page S5893]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              THE ECONOMY

  Mr. McCONNELL. Now, Mr. President, on a completely different matter, 
we are more than a year from the technical end of the COVID-19 
recession.
  There are more than 9 million job openings in the country, the most 
in American history by far. Three safe and effective vaccines are 
easily available all across our country, free of charge, for any adult 
who wants one. Medical contraindications are rare, and CDC data tell us 
that, once somebody is fully vaccinated, their risk of dying from 
COVID-19 absolutely plummets right down to the normal range of risk 
that we implicitly face on a daily basis. Vaccines may not magically 
eliminate the virus overnight, but the evidence tells us that vaccines 
can eliminate the degree to which the virus represents a unique crisis.
  We may not be entirely out of the woods--the Delta uptick makes that 
clear--but it is time to stop governing as if we were trapped in a 
permanent economic meltdown. It factually is simply not the case, but 
the Democratic Party's far-left flank is resisting this simple fact. 
They were counting on this terrible but temporary pandemic to be their 
Trojan horse for permanent socialism. So they don't want to admit that 
the vaccines are transitioning COVID from a crisis into a challenge--
case in point, the surreal episode that has unfolded this past week 
over evictions.
  For a year and a half now, the government has basically told 
landlords they have little or no recourse if tenants stop paying the 
rent. This isn't just about massive corporations that some think could 
eat losses forever; family businesses who own one or two units have had 
to keep paying their bills, their taxes, and their mortgages the whole 
time.
  Congress already sent billions of dollars to States for rental 
assistance. The problem is with State governments that have been 
pathetically slow to get the money out, but when some Socialist House 
Members fail to convince their own fellow Democrats to extend this 
nationwide socialism through legislation, they somehow prevailed on 
President Biden through PR stunts--PR stunts.
  One day before the President's announcement, his senior adviser said 
the President had ``double-, triple-, quadruple-checked'' whether he 
had the legal authority to do this, and he concluded he did not. The 
President himself admitted that legal scholars find his position 
untenable, but he still caved and did it.
  The far left wants to turn this terrible but temporary pandemic into 
a Trojan horse for permanent socialism, and the administration is 
letting them call the shots

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