Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, the United States has well over a million confirmed cases of COVID-19. We are quickly, unfortunately, approaching 80,000 fatalities.

Alongside this great crisis of public health, this shocking and heartbreaking loss of life, there is a looming economic catastrophe. There are now more than 30 million newly unemployed Americans, over one-tenth of the population in the United States and the highest number since the Great Depression. Many believe this number underestimates the real total.

Once this crisis is over, there is no guarantee that these millions of newly unemployed Americans will be able to resume their old jobs. How many people will find new jobs? At what salary? Even the most optimistic scenarios predict a period of extended high unemployment. Others suggest we are looking at the kernels of a second Great Depression.

Here on the Senate floor, for the second week in a row, we are living in the alternative reality of Republican Leader McConnell's making. He has scheduled no legislative business here on the floor related to COVID-19--none--no measures for the unemployed, no relief for renters or homeowners, no legislation to increase testing capacity, no proposals to help State and local governments retain teachers, firefighters, busdrivers, and police officers.

Looking at the Senate calendar, you would never know that we are working in the midst of a national crisis. It looks like any other session--a few executive nominations, hearings on rightwing judges, and legislation from previous months that the leader should not have delayed. It is just totally, totally divorced from reality.

Despite the obvious health risks, Senators are ready to do our jobs. Why don't we actually do our jobs and focus on COVID-19? For the sake of common sense and the good of the Nation, the Senate should be focused on COVID-19. We should be holding multiple serious oversight hearings every week. Several of my colleagues on the other side, including the Republican leader, have said they want to see how the legislation we have already passed is working before doing anything else. At the same time, the Republican majority is slow-walking the hearing process.

Finally, after a lot of Democratic pressure from myself and many others, the leader is sort of eking out, week by week, hearings. We have just heard that we will hear from Powell and Mnuchin on the 19th. That will be almost 2 months after a bill that let $4 trillion of lending authority be released before there is a hearing.

Why didn't we hold a hearing 3 weeks ago, 5 weeks ago, or last week? It is just outrageous. How can the Republican Senators say we want to see how this is working and not have a whole bunch of hearings to exam how it is working, instead of squeezing them out under direct pressure from us Democrats?

Now, tomorrow, in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee there will be a hearing conducted remotely with Dr. Fauci. This is the kind of hearing we need, not once a week but several a day. The American people need to hear from experts in a fair, open, and truthful setting.

Until now, we have mostly heard from the members of the Coronavirus Task Force through the distorted lens of the White House press conference, where the President often prevents them from answering fully, interrupts their responses, or even contradicts their fact-based advice.

This will be one of the first opportunities for Dr. Fauci to tell the American people the unvarnished truth without the President lurking over his shoulder.

Dr. Fauci, let it rip.

But it shouldn't be this one committee hearing tomorrow, and it shouldn't be Dr. Fauci alone testifying, or even with the two he is testifying with. This is the routine oversight business of Congress, and we are now in a crisis. It should occur in every committee every week. There should be testimony from administration officials, ranging from Dr. Birx to Secretary Mnuchin, to Secretary DeVos and others.

We should also be debating another major emergency relief bill. As we speak, more and more businesses are going under, more and more people are losing their jobs, and more and more families don't have enough food to feed their children or are sitting for hours in car lines to get to food banks.

Speaker Pelosi and I completely agree. The new bill should be big, and it should be bold, and that is what the House is working on right now, while the Senate, under Leader McConnell's leadership, dithers.

Already, however, we have heard that congressional Republicans are telling everyone they want to slow down. Leader McConnell says he wants to hit the pause button. President Trump and administration officials are saying we might not need to do anything more to help the country. This would be a catastrophic mistake.

At the outset of the Great Depression, President Hoover was also reluctant to use national resources to attack the problem. He, too, was ideologically opposed to a vigorous and strong response from the Federal Government. President Hoover's failure was likely responsible for extending the length and deepening the severity of the Great Depression.

If President Trump and our Republican colleagues go the way of Herbert Hoover, if they oppose or slow-walk government intervention to save the economy that is hurtling downward, I fear the Nation could suffer a similar fate--a second depression. We must avoid that at all costs. Now is not the time for timidity. Now is not the time for small thinking. Now is the time for action--big, bold, continued action.

There are so many issues that deserve our attention. On a daily basis, President Trump talks about the need to reopen our country. Well, President Trump, the only way we can safely reopen the country is if we have testing. To finally beat this disease, we need testing. To reopen businesses safely, we need testing. To reopen schools and sporting events, we need testing. To contain a resurgence in the fall or early next year, we need testing. Testing is, by far, the No. 1 priority from a public health standpoint and, maybe, from an economic standpoint as well.

For many countries, mastering the challenge of testing and contact tracing their population was their first priority. Here in the United States, unfortunately, the Trump administration is still trying to catch up. Three months ago--3 months ago--President Trump said: ``Anybody that wants a test can get a test.'' That is still not even close to being true.

Americans have gotten sick, and because they could not get tested, they never knew if they contracted COVID and never knew if they passed it on to loved ones, colleagues, workers, or friends. For many who could get tested, they had to wait weeks for an answer, long after the disease had run its course and potentially spread to others.

We may never know the full extent of the human consequences that resulted from President Trump's administration's failure to rapidly develop a testing plan in the early days of coronavirus, but we do know that countries that did it successfully--such as South Korea, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand--were able to deal with the virus much better than we have. And to think the United States, which has always been the leader in public health, is lagging behind these other countries because of the President's denial and ineptitude should bother every single American, no matter what your politics.

Congress provided $25 billion in the most recent relief legislation to increase testing capacity and contact tracing, and we are going to need to do more. If President Trump is so keen on speeding up the process of reopening the country, we should endorse what Democrats have urged him to do: Create a national testing regime immediately.

On one final matter, education, in the CARES Act, Congress provided a little over $30 billion to help States, school districts, and higher education systems respond to the coronavirus after many schools were forced to close or to move to remote learning. We need more money than that, of course, and I think Democrats in both Houses agree.

It has come to our attention that Secretary DeVos has been using a portion of the existing funding not to help States or localities cope with the crisis but to augment her push for voucher-like programs, a prior initiative that had nothing to do with COVID-19.

We have also learned that Secretary DeVos has added restrictions to the fund that weren't included in the law, including guidance that DACA recipients cannot receive aid. Shameful--there is no other word for it. Secretary DeVos is exploiting emergency relief funding to further her own rigid ideological agenda and deprive students of desperately needed Federal assistance. The Secretary of Education should reverse course immediately.

Subsequently, DeVos should testify in Congress as soon as possible. As someone who has habitually skipped congressional hearings, Secretary DeVos has a lot to answer for. If our students had the same attendance record as Secretary DeVos, they would have flunked out of school. Secretary DeVos needs to come clean about how her Department is exploiting congressional relief efforts intended to help schools recover and reopen.

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