MIDDLE CLASS HEALTH BENEFITS TAX REPEAL ACT OF 2019--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, I appreciate the leadership of my colleagues and, particularly today, Senator Hoeven, on his efforts. He chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture and Rural Development.

We are joined here by the Senator from Nebraska, Senator Fischer, and the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, my colleague from Kansas, to highlight something that is particularly going to be absent from this legislation.

Earlier this month, I asked Secretary Perdue in a letter in which I was joined by many of my colleagues--both Republicans and Democrats--to look for a way to be helpful, particularly to livestock producers. The men and women who raise cattle and who feed cattle are the backbone of the ag economy and are certainly a huge and critical component of how we earn a living in Kansas.

Both Republicans and Democrats signed the letter asking that Secretary Perdue take steps. The reason this is necessary, at least according to Kansas State University research, is that since the arrival of corona, since January, $8 to $9 billion in lost income has occurred for livestock producers in this country. That is a huge and significant amount of money and one that is hard to recover from.

The chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee, Senator Hoeven, indicated about the importance of rural America. This is absolutely about feeding not only the rest of our country but the globe in its entirety.

Before I return to this conversation about agriculture, I would highlight how difficult it is in rural America to recover from an economic challenge. Certainly, our cattlemen and our livestock producers, our farmers and ranchers, recognize that we have seen instance after instance in which farmers are going out of business. I would put on top of this that, since 2013, the farm income in Kansas is down 50 percent.

You add this crisis to the challenge, and many of my farmers and ranchers may not--probably will not--survive this crisis.

We are asking the Secretary of Agriculture to come to our aid. What we discovered is that the Commodity Credit Corporation, or the CCC, needed to be replenished. Money had been spent from the CCC. We proposed in this bill that is being debated now that the CCC be replenished--that $20 billion be restored to the Commodity Credit Corporation.

We were told by our Democrat colleagues that they wanted to make certain the money couldn't just be spent on the livestock side. So the provision in this bill, which is a bipartisan agreement, shows there is certainly agreement on the side of all of us that we care about farmers as well as ranchers. We changed the language to make certain the Secretary of Agriculture used CCC funds not only for livestock producers but also for the cultivation side, or the crop side, of agriculture.

Incidentally, my colleagues on the Democrat side asked that their names be removed from the letter. I don't understand what happened in a manner of just a day or two, in which they decided they were not interested in agriculture producers--livestock producers, in particular. Then, within the last couple of days, we now learned that the Democrats--I am not in the room. So I can't verify this. But I am told by those who presumably know that Democrats are opposed to this provision being included in the bill at all.

We cannot forget livestock producers and agriculture as we try to deal with the economic consequences of COVID-19. It is a huge challenge. I would say to my Democrat colleagues--those who signed the letter and others who visited with me and my colleagues about trying to solve this problem--that I don't know what is going on in the room that I am not a part of, but we need to make certain that the end result is where we started, which is taking care of those who produce the food and fiber of our Nation.

While I have the floor, let me point out the challenges of rural America and why it is so important to get this done today, now.

Community hospitals. There are significant resources in this bill to try to keep the doors of our hospitals open, to keep our physicians practicing medicine, and to keep the pharmacy on Main Street. They are in this bill.

The dentist is a pretty important person in a small town in Kansas-- and the optometrist. They are all a huge component in how we deliver healthcare. These are very small businesses. Many are sole practitioners, and they employ just a handful of people.

This bill will help them. Yet it is stymied. I would say that even if you are not a healthcare provider, this bill is important to every small business in Kansas. It is important to the business, not for the business's sake but for the people who work for that business. We want that sole proprietor. We want that business that employs 5, 10, 50 people.

A lot of small manufacturers in Kansas produce agriculture equipment. They are on the cusp of being put out of business, and what is so dramatic in rural America is, if we lose a business, the chances of reviving it in the future disappears.

Almost all of our businesses in small towns across Kansas and around the Nation are hanging on already by a thread. This is the factor now that may put them out of business--is likely to put them out of business--and the chances of them coming back into business when this is over are virtually none.

Our businesses are run by small families. They are run by families, by individuals, by people who often run a business for the sole purpose of making certain their community has a business. We can linger no longer and expect that it will get better if we don't take action to help them preserve their business and the people who work for them. We need to do it now, not later.

I yield to the Senator from North Dakota

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