Executive Session
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, well, the World Health Organization has now reported that there are 79,000 cases of coronavirus across at least 30 countries, with at least 53 confirmed cases here in United States.
As the virus continues to spread, the global economy is already beginning to suffer. All of the warning lights are flashing bright red. We are staring down a potential pandemic, and the administration has no plan. We have a crisis of coronavirus, and President Trump has no plan, no urgency, no understanding of the facts or how to coordinate a response.
We must get a handle on the coronavirus and make sure the United States is fully prepared to deal with its potentially far-reaching consequences, but the Trump administration has been asleep at the wheel.
President Trump, good morning. There is a pandemic of coronavirus. Where are you? Where is your plan?
It is just amazing. As the crisis grows and grows, we hear nothing.
Coronavirus testing kits have not been widely distributed to our hospitals and public health labs.
President Trump's State Department overruled the recommendations of the scientists in the CDC and allowed infected passengers from a cruise ship to be flown back into the United States.
Amazingly, at a time when we know that these pandemics can spread, this administration cut the CDC--the agency in charge of fighting these global viruses--with a 16-percent senseless cut to its budget.
My fellow Americans, that is what they do on all these things. They just cut, and then the President tries to claim credit after we restore the money. He did it in his State of the Union. He was claiming, because of his great work with NIH, we are curing cancer. He has cut the NIH every budget, including this one.
It is a disgrace how this man can say one thing and do another and confounding that it doesn't catch up with him with too many Americans and none of my colleagues on this side of the aisle, and it is probably, right now, most dangerous and most egregious when it comes to coronavirus.
It wasn't just that the President cut CDC last year. It follows years of drastic cuts to the global health division at CDC by the Trump administration.
In 2018, CDC was forced to reduce the numbers of countries it operated in from 49 to 10. That is how bad it is.
We have crises, and we have a world that is different, and this administration, instead of stepping up to the plate, runs away, listening to the clarion call of the far right: Just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, no matter how it affects people.
In 2018, even worse, President Trump ordered the National Security Council to scupper its entire global health security unit and asked the Department of Homeland Security to do the same. We don't have epidemic teams in the National Security Council or DHS.
I hope and pray to God that corona doesn't spread here, but if it does, we have been inadequately prepared because of President Trump's lack of leadership, lack of understanding science, lack of ability to listen to experts and do something about them instead of being concerned--it seems all the time--with his own ego.
The President has not even taken the simple, sensible step of designating a single official to lead response efforts.
In 2014, President Obama made the smart decision to appoint Ron Klain to lead an interagency response to the Ebola outbreak. But President Trump, in contrast, has hollowed out so many agencies that one of the key figures responding to coronavirus is Ken Cuccinelli, an immigrant hard-liner with no experience in public health. Unbelievable. A man totally unprepared for coronavirus, an ideologue--a rightwing, nasty ideologue who has spent his career kicking around immigrants--is now in charge of our fight against coronavirus. This is after the President cut CDC, eliminated the global health security units in Homeland Security and at the NSC, and we are in trouble.
President Trump has not only failed to marshal a capable domestic response to the coronavirus; he has been slow to take action to confront the virus abroad. We all know that the best thing to do is to stop it from spreading abroad before it spreads to these United States.
Of course, the President--ego above anything else--has been afraid to criticize President Xi or the Communist Party of China for silencing dissent and obscuring the truth about the coronavirus--where it originated. When China obscures the truth, it puts Americans in danger. Where is President Trump's voice?
The videos emerging from behind the Chinese Communist Party's internet wall show Chinese people pleading--pleading--with the international community to expose the scope and scale of this epidemic.
The response so far by the Trump administration is exactly what happens when science skeptics with alternate facts try to run emergency response that requires expertise, planning, knowledge, money, cooperation, and science-based actions.
But being anti-science is not just rhetoric. It hurts us. It hurts every American in many ways, and that is what President Trump and his administration do, and our Republican colleagues just blithely go along.
After months of tiptoeing around the Chinese Communist Party, after 3 years of cutting funding for our epidemic response programs, President Trump simply has left the United States unprepared to confront a possible epidemic like corona.
I will have more to say this week about what the administration must do to right the ship. National Defense
Mr. President, on another front, again, the frustration of how this administration has conducted itself is unprecedented. I know some of my colleagues like to say that it is just like Obama. It isn't even close.
Here are some more examples, unfortunately, on the trampling of the rule of law in this country.
Emboldened by the refusal of Senate Republicans to hold him accountable in his impeachment trial, President Trump has been interfering with the Justice Department and retaliating against officials in his administration who dare testify truthfully before Congress.
In the short week that we have spent in recess, the President has managed to plunge our country even deeper into chaos and certainly has shown the need for having a trial during impeachment with witnesses and documents, getting the truth and not rubberstamping President Trump's behavior.
The President continued to purge his administration, firing officials who refused to pledge allegiance to the President over their allegiance to the Constitution. The President classified Bolton's book in another blatant attempt to cover up the facts. This is what dictatorships do-- dictatorships. They say something is classified; they hide the truth. It is a disgrace.
The President continued to abuse the pardon power, in one instance commuting the sentence of a notoriously corrupt former official without rhyme or reason. Maybe most egregious of all, the President, angered that the Director of National Intelligence had the gall to conduct a bipartisan briefing for the House Intelligence Committee on foreign interference in our elections, replaced him with a political lackey--a yes-man as the head of DNI, where truth needs to be spoken probably more than any other place in the government. He has no experience in the intelligence community and is simply known as an acolyte to President Trump.
With each of these actions--I hate to say it, but it is true; any objective person will know--President Trump brings our Nation closer and closer and closer to a banana republic, a government not of laws but of one man, a government where officials are asked to swear loyalty not to our country or the Constitution but to the President himself, a country where truth is obscured or covered up or deemed fake simply because it is not flattering to the President and is not what he wants to hear.
President Trump's decision to dismiss the DNI Director, the Director of National Intelligence, is particularly pernicious. Our intelligence community is an institution that is supposed to report on threats to our country with accuracy, without regard to politics, to speak truth to power, to protect us. For the President to install a yes-man at the top of the intelligence community, to politicize a part of our government designed to be apolitical, to so debase the morale of the brave men and women in the CIA and the NSA, many of whom risk their lives for our safety, is a disgrace.
There are media reports that our intelligence community has found that Putin continues to engage in activities to influence the outcome of our election. That is reportedly what former DNI McGuire's team was briefing Congress about.
So today, along with my Democratic colleagues on the Banking and Foreign Relations Committees, I am sending a letter to Secretary Pompeo and Secretary Mnuchin urging them to impose new sanctions on Putin and his cronies using existing sanctions authority. They have it; they can do it. Let me repeat that. The Trump administration has broad authority to impose sanctions for meddling in our elections. It does not need new legislative tools or approval.
Our message is clear: Secretary Mnuchin, impose sanctions now.
No one on the Intelligence Committee, Democrat or Republican, has disputed that Russia is attempting to interfere in our elections. Most say Russia has already started to do so. So this should be an easy, bipartisan effort. We are being attacked today in real time by foreign adversaries. This is not about party politics. It is not about what Trump doesn't want to hear. The Russians wanted him to win in 2016 and in all likelihood will want him to win in 2020. It is about the oath we swear to defend our Republic. Americans--I don't care what their party, what their ideology--if they start believing our elections are not on the level, this democracy will be in big trouble.
I hope my Republican colleagues will join us. The administration could impose sanctions tomorrow, and it should. A repeat performance of 2016--another campaign of foreign influence in our elections--is perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy. The Founding Fathers thought so. Read what James Madison said.
We demand that Secretary Pompeo and Secretary Mnuchin identify and target all those determined to be responsible for ongoing election interference. Anything less would be an abdication of their responsibility, their sacred, solemn responsibility to protect and defend the United States from the serious threat to our national security and the integrity of our electoral process.
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