Fostering Undergraduate Talent By Unlocking Resources for Education Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona for yielding.

Madam Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this bill. And when you think about where we are as a country, we are in the middle of a global pandemic. And at the beginning of this, after China lied--and let's be very clear--China lied, not only to the United States, but to the entire world about this disease that started in Wuhan.

And what they did, while they were lying, they corrupted the World Health Organization, that entity that typically we all would look to for guidance, and WHO literally was regurgitating the Chinese Communist Party's talking points, saying it wasn't spread from human-to-human contact, which was a lie. And we now have evidence to show that they manipulated and deceived the rest of the world.

While they were doing that, Madam Speaker, they were hoarding PPE. They were not only buying it up around the world, they make most of it in China. We need to change that, by the way.

We should be spending our time here on the House floor, not limiting the President's ability to keep Americans safe, which, fortunately, President Trump was able to do. He did so effectively, properly; he stopped flights coming in from China when we knew the disease was coming from China, for goodness sake.

Why would you want to stop the President from being able to keep Americans safe?

What we should be spending our time on right now, Madam Speaker, is bringing more manufacturing back to America so we don't need to rely on China, because they told even American companies like 3M that were making PPE, you can't ship it back to the United States when our nurses and doctors need it.

So President Trump said, we are going to use the Defense Production Act. We are going to start making more of that here in America.

We need to put incentives to bring more of that back from China, so we are not relying on them.

But no, we are not spending our time on that today, Madam Speaker. We are spending our time with this bill that would limit and make it more difficult for the President of the United States, any President--just because some people don't like this President, they are going to make it harder for any President to keep Americans safe, whether it is from terrorists abroad, or whether it is for health pandemics that might break out again in the future.

This is lunacy that we would be trying to make it harder for a President to keep Americans safe. Thank goodness President Trump used his executive powers to act like he did to stop the disease from spreading more into this country. He saved thousands of lives.

If China wouldn't have lied to him, we would have had a few more weeks. There is data that shows scientifically that tens of thousands of lives would have been saved in America.

But at least the President was able to act when he had the proper information. I know people like Joe Biden said it was xenophobic, for goodness sake; criticized the President stopping people from coming in from the place where the disease started. And others criticized him for doing it as well. But it was the right thing to do. I am glad he took that action.

The last thing we need to be doing in the middle of this pandemic is making it harder for the President to keep Americans safe. I urge everybody to vote ``no'' on this bill.

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