Paycheck Protection Program Flexibility Act of 2020

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairwoman and the ranking member for their leadership. I really want to give a strong statement of support and thanks to my colleague, Dean Phillips, for the way in which our offices have worked together and in which he and I have worked together on this. I have nothing but positive things to say about him, and I look forward to working on other measures to get, frankly, this body back to the work of the American people and to make Congress work again, to use a phrase that might be interesting. But we need to make Congress work again for the American people.

This is a simple bill. It is a seven-page bill. We need more of that, more single-subject bills that we can wrap our hands around and move through the Chamber in ways that will impact American people's lives without things being decided by a handful of people in back rooms that cost trillions of dollars and have 2,000 and 3,000 pages.

That is a statement, frankly, on both sides of the aisle. We need to find a way to work together, to have simple approaches to do the work of the American people.

This piece of legislation, in particular, is important to me because I represent about 2,300 restaurants and about 53,000 employees who work there in central Texas. It is the most in Texas. It has to be pretty high up nationwide. Austin, Texas, and San Antonio, Texas, both have a great number of live music venues, as they are famously known, and my wife and I have availed ourselves of them over our lives.

In fact, my courtship of my wife began in a lot of these places. Our first date was at Stubb's Bar-B-Q in Austin, Texas, a great institution for a Willie Nelson concert. We were at Threadgill's for our rehearsal dinner in South Austin, Texas, with live music.

I represent the Broken Spoke. I represent Luckenbach, Texas, if you remember the famous song. I represent a number of great restaurants in San Antonio. The Cortez family has a bunch of restaurants in San Antonio. Many of you, if you have been on the River Walk or have been in downtown San Antonio, would have experienced these places. They are a part of the culture of our lives, our fabric of what we do every day when we visit with our families and our communities.

We need to save these great institutions and not just restaurants. I am talking about the barbershops, the hair salons, the live music venues, and the hotels that are struggling.

I just talked to a hotel operator an hour ago, just before coming down here to the floor, who is struggling and said: Look, I can't make it 8 weeks. I can't stay alive. I don't have enough heads on the pillows. We are working toward reopening.

These are real businesses with real employees and real lives tied up into this who are struggling.

The thing is, the PPP program has been a great success in getting $650 billion out the door in a matter of weeks to help almost 4 million businesses, as has been noted on the floor, and that is awesome. That is fantastic. We should be proud of that. But as we work to get America open again, we have to be mindful of the fact that times are continuing to move on. These businesses are struggling, and they can't meet some of these restrictions and deadlines.

I will note a little moment of partisanship perhaps, in that I believe the unemployment insurance provision that was adopted is actually the root of the problem because you can't pay people more not to work than to work and then expect businesses to go back and rehire people to meet the requirements we put in the bill to meet and hold people in employment in the businesses. We need to address that. I hope that as a body we will not extend that when it expires in July. This is something I think is fundamentally important.

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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, one thing I want to point out here is that the ranking member and the chair have gone through the provisions in the bill. This is an important vote because we have to do this to help small businesses, but it is an important vote because I think it gets back to the heart of simple legislating and working together to accomplish things.

Let's provide the flexibility for businesses. Let's make sure that we let America open. But let's work together to solve the problems of the American people together, like Mr. Phillips and I did. I am proud to cosponsor this with him.

Mr. Speaker, I hope the Senate will take this up and move it expeditiously so that we can help businesses this week. There is no reason to delay that.

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