Coronavirus
Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. I want to thank my colleague from New York for his comments this morning. He is right. We have seen this play before. We know how it ends. Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, comes to the floor and proclaims that his latest creation is bipartisan; the Democrats have a choice to vote yes or no; take it or leave it; we are done.
We have been through this over and over again. That is not how Congress or human activity works. We have a split government between Democrats and Republicans. When we sit down together and compromise, good things can happen. We proved it March 26. The vote was 96 to 0 for the CARES Act, a $3 trillion bill early on to address the coronavirus pandemic and to deal with the serious challenges to our economy.
Thank goodness we did it. It gave $600 a week in additional Federal supplements and unemployment to families who were facing layoffs and closures of their businesses. We helped small businesses injecting billions of dollars back into protecting their payroll and keeping the lights on for the day when they can return.
It worked, and it worked on a bipartisan basis, but where we are today reflects a failure and a repetition on the Republican side.
Explain to me this: Why did the Republican Senate leader refuse to physically present himself at any stage of the negotiation since March 26 for relief from this coronavirus pandemic? That is right. Senator McConnell refuses to enter the room where representatives of the White House and Democratic congressional leaders were meeting to discuss a bipartisan compromise. We can't reach a compromise unless we clearly have all the parties at the table. When the Republican congressional leaders--McConnell, McCarthy of California on the House side--boycott these meetings for negotiations, nothing happens.
I can't tell you how many times back in Illinois during the August recess I was asked, so are you going back to Washington?
I said: Yes, we are planning on going back the first week in September.
What are you going to go?
I said: I don't know.
At this point, there has been no negotiation and compromise. Today we have a vote. We have been through this before. It is a McConnell proposal that was not put to any kind of bipartisan negotiation. It is a one-sided offering. It fails in so many respects.
Think if you are unemployed, trying to make your mortgage payments, car payments, medical bill payments, credit card payments, put food on the table, make sure the kids are ready to go back to school, and Senator McConnell announces, well, we are going to cut that check you have been receiving for unemployment benefits in half. It will not be $600 a week; it will be $300 a week.
Why? For that family, their needs and their bills are still the same. The economy is still hurting, with 30 million-plus Americans out of work, 800,000 in Illinois receiving unemployment benefits, I am sure thousands in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. And yet the reality is, what is going to be proposed by Senator McConnell today will create a hardship on these families they never envisioned.
Is there any money in there to protect these families from being evicted? No. Wait a minute. How about food stamps and SNAP? Many of these families are struggling to put food on the table. Any help in this bill for them? No. How about money for testing so that we can find out if people have positive results and should quarantine themselves and stay away from others? No, not the kind of investment that is needed at this moment in history.
Time and again, what this Senator from Kentucky has given us is just an effort to say we tried. But he didn't. He didn't present himself at one of the negotiations to make a bipartisan bill.
There is one provision I just want to spend a minute on here that really is troubling. Senator McConnell has announced for months that nothing will move, nothing will help Americans unemployed or small businesses until he gets what he called his redline proposal on liability immunity.
Basically, what they have done is to write a provision in this bill which absolves businesses from their responsibility to the public and to their employees when it comes to safety in the workplace and the marketplace. They have argued they have to do it because of the tsunami of frivolous lawsuits they anticipate because of COVID-19.
It turns out that that so-called tsunami has never materialized. The lawsuits that are being filed are primarily by businesses against insurance companies to decide coverage under insurance policies and by inmates in prisons who are protesting what they consider to be inhumane conditions in the midst of a pandemic. It is only a handful of lawsuits that have been filed against businesses or malpractice suits related to COVID-19 infections
Here is the bottom line: Conscientious businesspeople in Illinois and across America are prepared to make their business place safe for the people who work there in the marketplace.
What they need is a rational, clear statement of public health experts as to what they must do. I heard this over and over again. They said to me: Senator, give me the standards on social distancing and labeling and sanitizers and masks, and we will live up to them.
We can never guarantee that someone will not file a frivolous lawsuit, but we should be able to say to people, if you will follow the public health experts with a real standard of care, then your motion to dismiss is going to prevail in that lawsuit, and that will be the end of it.
But Senator McConnell thinks there is a better way to really absolve them from meeting any standard when it comes to public health. In fact, what he proposes today basically says: If you try to comply with any local ordinance, good enough; enough said; it doesn't have to be any standard of public health that is credible.
This doesn't keep America safe. What it is going to do is encourage the bad actors to do little or nothing. If we are going to deal with this pandemic, everyone has to be serious about it--from wearing these masks to social distancing, to putting up with what has become a tedious responsibility of staying away from friends and family when you want to be with them to get this behind us.
When it comes to the business and marketplace, the same thing applies. They are going to have to pitch in, if they want to reopen-- and I wish they could today or tomorrow--but if I, they went to reopen, they have to pitch in with a good-faith effort to meet a good public standard. I will stand by them, and everyone else will too.
Senator McConnell's approach absolves them from responsibility. It is liability immunity and an invitation for bad actors to do little or nothing in protecting innocent people, including their own employees.
I am going to yield the floor at this point and say that we can do better than what Senator McConnell is offering the Senate today. We can gather on a bipartisan basis and reach a compromise if he will attend the negotiations.
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Mr. DURBIN. Harris) and the Senator from Massachusetts (Ms. Warren) are necessarily absent.
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