Nomination of Amy Coney Barrett

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, first, let me thank the Presiding Officer, the staff on the floor, and the staff in both caucus rooms, for putting up with a very, very late night to take the floor just past 3:30 in the morning. I thank my friend Senator Schatz for picking up about an hour and a half, from 2 until 3:30, and I know that Senator Kaine will be joining the floor shortly.

This is an exceptional night because we are living in exceptional times. We are likely to see tomorrow a record number of COVID cases diagnosed in this country. I know that it now feels like the new normal 7, 8 months into this pandemic, but this is unthinkable that our country has been ravaged by a virus that less than a year ago no one had ever heard of.

Sometime in November or December of last year, COVID-19 started popping onto the international public health radar screen in China, and a few months later, it was here in the United States. Most countries were able to come up with a plan to control, contain, or essentially eliminate the threat of COVID-19 in a matter of months. The United States was not, because of an abysmal failure by this administration.

We are now living with a third wave of COVID. As we speak on the floor tonight, we are looking down the barrel of 300,000 Americans dead by the end of this year. No one is safe. There are millions of kids who can't go back to school, businesses that have gone under, and 10 percent of our workforce that is out of work.

This is an exceptional night because we are living in an exceptional moment, and I will talk over the course of my remarks about the President's failure to meet the moment and to be able to rescue this country from this pandemic--in fact, his daily actions now to actively spread the disease. There is no one who is doing more to spread COVID- 19 across the country today than the President of the United States, who is holding daily superspreader events, who is shaming individuals who wear masks, and who is deliberately trying to reduce the number of tests that are done in this country.

I also want to acknowledge that the vote that we have pending, ready for action tomorrow, is directly connected to the question as to whether this country is going to be able to turn the corner on COVID, because the first case Amy Coney Barrett will likely hear after she is confirmed by this body, as it looks like will happen tomorrow, will be a case on the Affordable Care Act--a case that asks the Supreme Court to invalidate the entirety of the ACA.

It draws issue with one specific provision in the ACA, but the remedy it seeks--the remedy the President of the United States is asking for-- is the complete invalidation of the Affordable Care Act. That is 23 million people losing healthcare. That is 130 million people all across this country who have preexisting conditions potentially losing protections that, under the ACA, prohibit insurance companies from charging them more.

I have heard my Republican colleagues come down to this floor and go on television and give press conferences in which they suggest that those of us who say the Affordable Care Act is about to be struck down due to the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett are engaging in hyperbole, that we are exaggerating. Well, I have been in the Congress for the last 10 years, the House and the Senate. My eyes haven't been closed. I have watched an unrelenting campaign from the Republicans to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

When I was in the House of Representatives, the call from the Republicans was to repeal and replace. The Presiding Officer will remember this because I think we served together during that period of time. The idea was, of course, that the Republicans didn't like the Affordable Care Act, but they acknowledged that they couldn't get rid of it with nothing else to replace it. Now, that in and of itself was an acknowledgment of the merits of the Affordable Care Act. The Republicans may not have liked the details, but given the fact that they were not supporting repealing it but supporting repealing it and replacing it with something else, they knew the American public would not allow for the Affordable Care Act to disappear and have nothing else to stand in its place.

We waited month after month and year after year for a replacement plan to be offered by the Republicans. We waited month after month and year after year. That replacement plan never arrived. The closest we came to seeing a replacement plan was in the summer of 2017. As we were debating its repeal here in the Senate shortly after the election of Donald Trump, Speaker Ryan, then still in charge of the House of Representatives, presented a replacement.

The problem is the replacement was worse than simple repeal. The Affordable Care Act covers around 23 million individuals, and the Congressional Budget Office said that Speaker Ryan's replacement plan would have resulted in 24 million people losing healthcare, going backward from the status quo ante.

Seventy different times Republicans, either in the House or the Senate, tried to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act. You may say: Well, that sounds unfair. It is not fair to create an equivalency between efforts to repeal all of the Affordable Care Act and efforts to repeal just some of the Affordable Care Act.

OK, on 31 different occasions, Republicans tried to repeal the entirety of the Affordable Care Act--31 times, which is a lot--with no replacement that would have covered everyone that receives coverage under the Affordable Care Act, with no meaningful effort to protect those who have preexisting conditions.

My eyes were open to that. My constituents were watching all of that. We saw how Republicans, 31 times, tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

I have listened to Republicans out on the campaign trail. I have watched what Republicans have said to the press and to their constituents. We are not blind. We know that Republicans, for 10 years, have been trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. We know that for 10 years Republicans have not had a replacement that would insure anywhere close to the number of people insured by the Affordable Care Act or provide protections to people with preexisting conditions.

So don't tell us that we are overhyping this desire by Republicans to take steps in this body that would lead to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act because that is the lion's share of what Republicans have been doing for the last 10 years.

In the summer of 2017, Republicans mounted their last stand to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. They had control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. This was the moment to do it.

In fact, most of us expected that it was a foregone conclusion, having told the American public in the runup to 2016 that, If you elect us, we will repeal the Affordable Care Act, and having won the House and the Senate and the Presidency, despite, by the way, getting less votes than Democratic candidates for the Senate and the House and their President having gotten less votes than the Democratic candidate for President, by virtue of the way in which we select representatives through gerrymandered districts, through the way in which States with smaller populations have greater representation in the Senate and through the mechanism of the electoral college. Despite getting less votes than Democrats all across the country in 2016, Republicans did take control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. And those are the rules. Those are the rules. Republicans played by the rules in running for office in 2016. I am not begrudging the fact that they did in fact win control of all three lawmaking chambers of U.S. democracy-- the Presidency, the House, and the Senate. It was to be expected that Republicans would repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017.

But, curiously, they could not, and the reason they could not is pretty simple. Democracy took hold. The people of this country didn't allow this Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They rose up in record numbers. Thousands of people turned out to townhalls all across the country. The phone lines here were lit up. There were protests that spring and summer outside this building on a near daily basis. It was 100 percent clear that if Republicans voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replaced it with nothing or made our healthcare system worse, as Speaker Ryan's plan would have done, there was going to be hell to pay from the American electorate.

Now, it turned out that there was, anyway, because Americans watched the attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and were just slightly less infuriated than they would have been if repeal had actually gone forward.

But repeal failed. On this floor, late one night in the summer of 2017, the bill went down, and Republicans at that point had figured it out. Having tried 31 times--70 times, whatever your number is--to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans figured out that they weren't going to be able to get it done through Congress, that the American people weren't going to let them.

So they decided to try another way. Later that year, the Republican tax bill passed the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives and was signed into law by the President of the United States, and inside that tax bill was a curious provision, a provision that eliminated the tax penalty for individuals who don't have insurance. That was a really important part of the Affordable Care Act, not a super popular part of the Affordable Care Act. Nobody likes putting a financial penalty on individuals who don't have insurance, but it was really critical to protecting people with preexisting conditions.

I won't go into the details of it, but I actually sat in the Presiding Officer's chair during Senator Cruz's filibuster overnight, on a late night like this one. I was probably presiding as a freshman Member of the Senate at about this hour, and in that filibuster--I wouldn't recommend going back and looking at it on tape, but you could--you would listen to Senator Cruz explain that, in fact, the individual mandate and the tax penalty are critical to protecting people with preexisting conditions. Because if you don't require people to get insurance but you also require insurance companies to rate folks who are really sick the same as they rate healthy patients, the whole insurance system falls apart. Because if you aren't required to get insurance but you are not penalized if you wait to get insurance until you are really sick, then that is exactly what you will do. You won't get insurance until you are really sick. You won't have to pay any more once you have that expensive cancer diagnosis, for instance. Then, without any healthy people buying into the system and with only sick people part of our insurance pools, the insurance system collapses.

So Republicans went into this 2017 tax bill, and they removed the provision that would provide a financial penalty. But it really wasn't actually that curious. It wasn't that difficult to figure out why they were doing that.

Republicans were doing that because, a few years before, the Supreme Court had ruled that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional because of the existence of that tax penalty. It was an interesting decision, one that I disagree with, but Justice Roberts ruled for five of nine members that the Affordable Care Act could stand as constitutional because of the existence of that tax provision.

So you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why Republicans had inserted this provision into the tax bill--because they believed that they had a new route, a new pathway, to invalidate the entirety of the Affordable Care Act.

Now, having failed to be able to get the elected branch of government to undo the Affordable Care Act, they could essentially plant a constitutional landmine in the Affordable Care Act and attempt to get it invalidated through the courts.

Now, again, let me tell you, I don't agree with the Supreme Court decision--I think it was in 2012--that suggested the Affordable Care Act would be invalid if you removed this tax penalty. But that decision stands, the NFIB decision, and Republicans figured out that they could sabotage the Affordable Care Act and run a case through the court system that would end up getting done what they had been trying to do for 10 years--take insurance from 23 million people and the preexisting conditions protection.

And that is exactly what they did. That is exactly what Republicans did. Twenty Republican attorneys general, joined by a whole host of conservative political organizations, launched a court case claiming that because of the change made in the 2017 tax bill, the Affordable Care Act was now, all of a sudden, unconstitutional. It had to be struck down.

The case went before the district court, and a Republican-appointed judge ruled in favor of the Republican attorneys general. The case then went to the circuit court, and in a 2-to-1 decision, with a Trump- appointed, Senate-confirmed judge making the difference, they ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and now that case sits before the Supreme Court, and it is to be heard by the Supreme Court in 2 weeks--in 2 weeks.

So now you might be starting to figure out why we are here. Why are we rushing through Amy Coney Barrett's nomination in record time? You never had a Supreme Court Justice confirmed this close to the election. In my political lifetime, I have never seen a Supreme Court Justice rushed through in this amount of time.

We have been here all weekend. It is 3:30 in the morning. We took a vote on Saturday. It is now becoming apparent why we are rushing this through.

It is probably partially because Republicans are worried they are going to lose their Senate majority in this election and the President is going to lose, and it will be much harder to push through a nominee in a lameduck session. It is probably because there are potentially cases to come before the Supreme Court regarding this election, and this President wants to make sure he has as many of his nominees stocked on the bench as possible if there are any questions that arise before the Court regarding the validity of the election.

But I think mostly the reason that we are here, rushing through Amy Coney Barrett's nomination, in the dead of night, in record time, 1 week before an election, is because the Affordable Care Act case is up before the Supreme Court in 2 weeks, and it is likely--in fact, almost certain--that without Amy Coney Barrett on the Court, that case brought by Donald Trump and Republicans across the country will not succeed, and that only by rushing through Amy Coney Barrett's nomination 2 weeks before this case is to be heard by the Supreme Court can Republicans finally get done what they have been trying to do for 10 years--repeal the Affordable Care Act and end insurance for 23 million Americans and strip away protections for everybody who has a preexisting condition.

Now, I know my Republican friends get really angry when they hear us suggest that their goal is to end insurance for 23 million Americans or to strip protections away from people with preexisting conditions, and they will stand up here and say: No, of course, that is not what we want to do. We are going to protect people with preexisting conditions. We will find a way to insure all those people.

And I truly do believe that my Republican colleagues do, in a perfect world, want people with preexisting conditions to be covered. The problem is they have worked themselves into a trap that they can't get out of and that they know they can't get out of.

They say they want to cover people with preexisting conditions, but they have never been able to put on the table a plan that would do that. They have made this promise that they will repeal the Affordable Care Act, and they have put themselves on this path that they can't get off of to repeal the Affordable Care Act through legislation or through the court system, such that, even though they say they want to protect people with preexisting conditions, they are acting in a way that does the opposite.

So you have to forgive us when we say that you want to strip protections for people with preexisting conditions. Because despite the fact that you say you don't want to do it, everything you are doing ends up in that result. So at some point, we have to watch what you do, not what you say.

Your President had the chance to go to court. Well, first of all, your President didn't have to go to court at all on behalf of the plaintiffs. In fact, 99 percent of the time, a President will defend the statute that is being attacked, even if that President doesn't agree with the statute. That is generally seen as the responsibility of the executive branch, to defend the statutes of the United States, whether or not you agree with them. That doesn't happen in every case, but that is generally how it works.

In this case, not surprisingly, the President went to court and said: I am going to join with the plaintiffs. I am going to ask for the court to invalidate the Affordable Care Act.

But President Trump could have asked for only part of the act to be invalidated. He could have asked for the part of the act that protects people with preexisting conditions to remain, but he didn't, and, frankly, Republicans in this Chamber didn't pressure him to do so.

Republicans here could have begged the President, privately or publicly, to go to the court and ask for the portions of the act that protect people with preexisting conditions to remain, but the President didn't do that. He sent his lawyers to court. His lawyers will be in Court in 2 weeks arguing that the entire Affordable Care Act be struck down--the whole thing.

So let me say it again. Don't blame us for watching what you do, rather than what you say. Republicans say they want to protect people with preexisting conditions, but then everything they do and everything this President does seeks to destroy those protections.

That is why we are here. We are here because Republicans have gotten themselves on this train that they cannot stop--this effort that has been underway for a decade to strip away the Affordable Care Act protections. Two weeks from now, the Republicans will get a little bit closer to what they have been asking for, for 10 years, when this case comes before the Supreme Court and Amy Coney Barrett sits on it as the deciding fifth vote to invalidate the Affordable Care Act.

And why this matters more now and why I led my remarks referencing the COVID epidemic is because it is unthinkable in ordinary times for 23 million people to lose health insurance or for folks that have a history of heart disease to all of a sudden not be able to buy insurance.

In my State, that is about 260,000 people who get their insurance through the Affordable Care Act who would lose it. We are a small State, about 3.5 million. A quarter million people losing healthcare insurance in our State--that is a humanitarian catastrophe at any time, but in the middle of a pandemic, that is a nightmarish, cataclysmic dystopian future to wish for. In the middle of a pandemic, to take health insurance away from 23 million people, to go back to the days in which insurance companies could discriminate against you because you had a preexisting condition?

COVID is going to be a preexisting condition. Let me just level with you. There are 8 million people in this country who know that they have had COVID. But, eventually, if people start taking antibody tests, there will be five times that many who have a medical history that includes COVID. All those people will have a preexisting condition, and insurance companies, if the Affordable Care Act disappears, can either decide to not insure those individuals or can jack up their rates. That is on top of the 130 million people who have other preexisting conditions.

So think about both of those things happening. Think about, in the middle of a pandemic, when there are over 1,000 people dying every day in this country, where we are seeing reports of hospitals literally being filled to total capacity in parts of our country, for over 20 million Americans to all of a sudden not have the ability to pay for healthcare.

We are in the middle of a pandemic, but we are also in the middle of a giant depression; right? I mean, 10 percent of America is out of work. Guess how those individuals get health insurance when they are out of work--through the Affordable Care Act. People that lose their job, many of them get insurance through the Affordable Care Act. They qualify for the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act, or they end up buying insurance through these exchanges.

I have story after story from my constituents in Connecticut of people who lost their jobs in the middle of a pandemic and were able to get health insurance because of the Affordable Care Act.

It is not just that you have all these sick people who are going to lose insurance when the Affordable Care Act is repealed but also all these folks who are out of work and have no other way to get insurance at an affordable rate other than the Affordable Care Act. Stripping it away in the middle of a pandemic is just inhumane. On top of that are all of the people who will have COVID as a preexisting condition.

Wayne lives in Rocky Hill, CT. Rocky Hill is a small town south of Hartford. I wish his story were exceptional, but you have all heard these stories, my Republican and Democratic friends:

Thank you for your continued support of the Affordable Care Act. Our family has extensive medical needs, and we rely on the preexisting conditions and no lifetime cap coverage provisions that the ACA provides. Both of our sons have serious health issues. Harrison is developmentally impaired. Has a rare genetic disorder, cerebral palsy, hearing loss, and a rare form of intractable Epilepsy, characterized by multiple, uncontrolled daily seizures.

Imagine having a son like that.

Jacob, who just turned 15, has Hemophilia A with an Inhibitor. If you are unfamiliar with this disease, it means his body not only lacks the protein needed to clot his blood in case of an injury, but it also rejects the typical medicine used to treat his bleeding disorder. This means his only alternative for treating his often spontaneous internal bleeds is a very expensive synthetic clotting factor, which costs around $9,000 a dose. When he has been injured in the past, he has to receive doses every 2 hours for the course of several days. This happened on over six occasions since he was first diagnosed in 2011.

Think about how lucky you are if you have healthy kids. I am lucky. I have two young boys who are healthy. Harrison has cerebral palsy, hearing loss, epilepsy, daily seizures. Jacob has hemophilia--medicine that costs $9,000 a dose.

Wayne writes:

We have had to maintain double insurance coverage through both my wife's and my employers as well as Medicaid in Harrison's case. We would have easily been dropped by any number of insurance companies for exceeding both boys lifetime expense caps--

Well over 1 million each-- and might not have been able to obtain insurance in the first place due to their preexisting conditions. If these provisions were not made law by the ACA, there would be no way we would have obtained or ever afforded health insurance. We would not have been able to keep our home and would likely have had to file for bankruptcy by now. Both boys together have been hospitalized on over 36 separate occasions, with Harrison having spent almost his entire first 6 months of life in the NICU . . . at a cost of over $1,000 a day.

Remember, the ACA says insurance companies can't deny you coverage because you have a preexisting condition. They can't deny your family coverage because your child has a preexisting condition, but the Affordable Care Act also says insurance companies can't cap your insurance. They can't say: Hey, if you have an expensive disease, we are going to insure you for up to this amount of money, and then we are going to stop paying for healthcare.

They can't do that on an annual basis either. The Affordable Care Act says they can't, as an insurance company, give a dollar amount of coverage over the course of the year and then cut you off, because that is not really insurance, right? The whole idea of insurance is that you pay in whether you are healthy or you are unhealthy, but you are banking money and you are using other people's banked money in case you get really sick, in case your family member gets really sick.

If your insurance plan doesn't cover you in the case that you have kids like Harrison and Jacob, then it is not really insurance in the traditional form of insurance. That is why the Affordable Care Act said: No, listen, health insurance is going to have to cover you if you are really sick or your children are really sick, and they can't pull that coverage after a certain dollar amount on an annual basis or a lifetime basis.

That is why Wayne talks about the importance of the Affordable Care Act for his family. He says: We would have had to sell our home. We likely would be bankrupt if not for the Affordable Care Act.

He says:

If these key provisions are removed--

Which seems entirely likely-- millions of individuals and families with loved ones having serious illnesses will be adversely affected.

That is a kind way of explaining what would happen to Wayne's family. They would be adversely affected. Wayne would lose everything if insurance companies were able to go back to discriminating against people with preexisting conditions and placing back on insurance plans these annual caps and these lifetime caps.

Again, the President of the United States had the choice to go to court and ask for the entire act to be invalidated or for specific provisions to be invalidated. He asked for the entire act to be invalidated, which means these provisions which protect Wayne and his family will be gone if Amy Coney Barrett and four other Justices decide to rule for President Trump on his request to invalidate the entire Affordable Care Act.

Don't tell us that we are overhyping this threat, that we are making up this idea that Republicans want the Affordable Care Act to disappear. It is much of what Republicans have been doing for the last 10 years. There has been no viable replacement plan that protects Wayne in the way that he needs and Wayne's children in the way that he needs

While no one can be guaranteed as to what the Supreme Court is going to do, Donald Trump himself told you that he is only going to put people on the Supreme Court who will invalidate the Affordable Care Act. He criticized John Roberts over and over again as a Republican appointee for upholding the Affordable Care Act. He signaled to you that he was not going to appoint someone to the Supreme Court like John Roberts--someone who would find a way to uphold the Affordable Care Act. He told you that was John Roberts' primary sin and that he wouldn't make that mistake again.

He, in fact, told you once again just a few days ago that he hoped the Supreme Court would strike down the Affordable Care Act. If that is his hope, then I don't know that we can rely on the idea that he would have then coincidentally been picking Justices to serve on the Supreme Court who would follow through on that request.

Julie is from Sandy Hook. Julie says:

On March 25, 1994, I received a lifesaving kidney transplant at Hartford Hospital. At the time I was working at a job that was not fulfilling, and I was trying to complete my Master's degree in Education to get my job in teaching. I finished my degree, got married, had two children, and got a dog. Later, I finally landed a full time teaching position at Newtown, CT. I know if the law were overturned today, I would not have been able to transfer to my husband's health insurance plan and ultimately would not have been able to achieve my dream of becoming a teacher.

Now, that is a different story than Wayne's, right? It is not equally important, but it is important. What Julie is telling you is that she had a dream to become a teacher, and she needed to take the time out of the workforce in order to pursue that dream, and she needed health insurance during that time.

What the Affordable Care Act has allowed for--and this was back in 1990s that Julie is telling the story. Why she is telling it is because the Affordable Care Act gives you the opportunity to maintain health insurance while you are out of work or while you are transitioning from one job to another. It provides a nimbleness, a flexibility in the workforce that didn't exist without the Affordable Care Act protections.

Julie goes on to write:

In August of this year, I was diagnosed with B-cell Non- Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I am currently receiving chemotherapy treatments. . . . I am scared to death [she writes] to imagine what would happen if I am not able to return to work and I lose my benefits. While my husband does have the opportunity to get health insurance benefits through his employer, if the ACA were overturned I might not be eligible for benefits because of my multiple pre-existing conditions. This could mean financial ruin for my family since I need continued follow up care even after I finish my chemotherapy treatments.

Julie is now in this sort of classic situation in which she has a preexisting condition. She is currently receiving treatment, and she is living in fear about what will happen to her and her family if all of a sudden the days of discrimination against people with preexisting conditions come back. She is also telling the story about what happened to her earlier in life when she went out and got herself reeducated to become a teacher but had fear about what was going to happen to her insurance benefits because of that. That fear doesn't exist for Americans any longer because they have access to these private healthcare exchanges when they lose their coverage, perhaps even voluntarily because they want to go get another job. Now she is in this classic situation in which she has a serious, serious illness. She talks about the fear that she has about what will happen if the Affordable Care Act is struck down.

I think that is important to recognize, as well, because there is a generation of young adults who, frankly, don't even remember the days in which you could be discriminated against by insurance companies because of a preexisting condition, who don't know what it is like to obsess and obsess and obsess over that question. There are folks who are 30 years old today who during their entire adult lives lived under the ACA, who are having kids now--kids who may have complicated medical conditions--and don't have to worry about that child living a life in which they are constantly chasing insurance. It just doesn't happen any longer.

Now that prospect has returned because of this case before the Supreme Court. Now those parents are starting to worry. What will happen if Amy Coney Barrett provides the fifth vote to invalidate the Affordable Care Act as President Trump is asking the Supreme Court to do? What will happen?

Well, what likely will happen is those protections for people with preexisting conditions will be struck down, and once again, parents of children with complicated illnesses will spend their lives worrying about how this illness will define their child's future. Now, if you have a serious illness, it is going to define your future no matter what, but on top of the daily search for treatment and the daily search for wellness, there is the worry of whether you are going to be able to pay for that. It is a nightmare that we don't have to choose to endure as a nation because right now we have a law that protects against it.

I always remember this very simple story from a few years after the Affordable Care Act was passed. I was at a community pool in Cheshire, CT, with my son, who was then 4 or 5 years old. This young guy--maybe a few years younger than I--sheepishly approached me in the pool as I was playing with my son. He said: Thank you.

I asked: For what?

He said: I want to say thank you for the Affordable Care Act. I am here with my son. My son has a rare heart condition. I used to stay up nights worrying about what his life was going to be like. I still have lots of worries, but now I have one less because of the Affordable Care Act. Now I know we are not going to go bankrupt paying for him. Now, more than anything else, I know his future is not going to be dependent on whether or not he can find a job that provides him healthcare benefits. He can pursue his dream without the constant worry of how he is going to pay for health insurance.

That sounds like a simple thing, but it is not. For any parent here, the idea that your child can be whomever they want to be or at least their life won't be dictated by whether they can afford healthcare for their expensive disease that they have through no fault of their own, through no choice of their own--that is a big deal as a parent. The Affordable Care Act relieves much of that worry. That is why people are so concerned about what Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to the Court will result in.

Malaine from Branford says:

In 2015, my husband co-founded a Biotechnology company, which is located at the UCONN Incubator in Farmington.

That is exciting. That was an incubator that I helped conceive as a State legislator and then as a Congressman.

She writes:

He did this because the ACA made it possible for our family and the company employees to have healthcare. The company now has 10 employees, all high-paying, Connecticut based jobs. This entrepreneurship would absolutely, positively not have been possible without the ACA. In 2018, the company transitioned to employer healthcare. Now through the Trump administration's incompetence in the handling of the coronavirus pandemic, sales of the company's product--

They sell to other companies that are still closed because of coronavirus-- have plummeted and so our company, like so many, is struggling. If we lose our livelihood, we also lose the company health insurance, which means we co-founders . . . would need to depend on the ACA's health insurance, if it still exists.

Once again, this is another story about how the ACA allows for financial innovation, allows for economic innovation. This is a company that was started in Connecticut, a biotechnology company. Because the ACA allowed in the early days for those entrepreneurs to insure themselves, their families, and their early employees through the Affordable Care Act before they had enough money in the company, they were able to provide employer-based insurance. All of that goes away. That cushion for entrepreneurs will disappear if this act is invalidated.

These stories go on and on and on, individuals who will have their lives ruined and changed if the Affordable Care Act disappears. Again, we might be months away from that occurring--months away from that occurring--in the middle of a pandemic, people losing their insurance right at the moment when they need it the most because of the costs of confronting COVID, because of the fact that they lost their insurance because of the recession or are at risk of losing insurance, like Malaine's family is. What a nightmare.

That is not my only worry, though, when I think about Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation. Frankly, I nor my constituents have had enough time to really understand the consequences of Amy Coney Barrett's nomination because of how rushed this process has been. In the middle of a pandemic, when it is abnormally difficult to be able to communicate with your constituents, we rushed this nomination through, which has made it almost impossible for people to figure out who she is, what she believes, and communicate that in time to their Members of Congress. I have a feeling there is a reason for that as well.

The rush job is because Republicans need to get her on the Court in time for the ACA case, because Republicans want to get her on the Court in time to hear election disputes, because Republicans want to get her on the Court before a lameduck session makes it harder if the election goes against Republicans. But I have a feeling it is because they also don't want people to figure out what she stands for.

One of the other areas of law in which Amy Coney Barrett is likely pretty radical--certainly is radical--is on the question of America's gun laws. Obviously I care about this deeply. I have borne witness to one of the country's worst gun homicides in Newtown, CT. Right now, on the streets of Hartford, CT, as in many other cities, gun violence is spiking.

It is not shocking. Gun violence tends to attract poverty when people are desperate economically. Whether we like it or not, they often resort to violence, and we are in a moment of economic desperation. You should see the food lines at food pantries and food banks in Connecticut. It is not coincidental to that economic desperation that we are seeing an increase in gun violence.

Yet gun violence is made a lot easier in the Nation because of the ease of access to weapons. Our Nation is just flooded with weapons and many of them illegal weapons, many of them in the hands of felons-- dangerous people who shouldn't have them.

We are attempting to pass a universal background checks bill here in Congress that would make it harder for felons--dangerous individuals-- and people with serious mental illness to get their hands on guns. It is probably the most popular policy intervention in the country. I don't know that there is any other major piece of legislation that we have proposed that is more popular than universal background checks. It gets about 90 to 95 percent of support in most polls. The majority of non-gun owners, gun owners, NRA members, non-NRA members--everybody-- wants universal background checks.

It makes a difference. The States that have universal background checks have lower rates of gun homicides, suicides, and domestic violence crimes on average. It is maddening to me that we haven't been able to pass universal background checks here, but that is a political problem. That is a problem of political power. The gun lobby has had much more political power. Despite the fact that 90 percent of Americans want universal background checks, it is just a question of one side having more political power than the other. That is changing. Witness the House of Representatives' passage of universal background checks last year. I think that we will be able to pass that in the Senate if the elections go a certain way.

Yet Amy Coney Barrett has a different idea as to what the barrier should be to universal background checks. Amy Coney Barrett believes there is a constitutional prohibition against preventing all felons from owning guns. Amy Coney Barrett wants to take away the choice from Congress of who can own a gun and who can't own a gun. Now, that is not hyperbole. She will tell you that this is her belief. She wrote it down in an opinion. She didn't serve on the appellate court for very long, but while she was there, a case on a State gun law came before her, and she wrote a dissenting opinion which is a major outlier in Second Amendment jurisprudence, and it contains in it some pretty dangerous ideas that, frankly, people haven't had the time to consider because of how rushed this nomination has been.

In this case, the Kanter case, Amy Coney Barrett says that this felon--I think, in this case, it was a nonviolent felon--should be able to own a weapon. This is notwithstanding the State law that says all felons can't own weapons. Amy Coney Barrett comes to the personal opinion, in this case, that this individual is not dangerous. What she says is that it is not for the legislature to decide who is dangerous and who isn't. It is for the courts to decide who is dangerous and who isn't, and if the legislature can't prove to me, Amy Coney Barrett, that this person is dangerous, then I will declare that the Constitution doesn't allow for that person to own a weapon. The court now becomes the trier of fact.

This isn't unfamiliar because this has been a sort of interesting strain of jurisprudence among this new Federalist Society-vetted, conservative judicial crowd.

That is sort of the issue in Shelby County as well. This voting rights case comes before the Court, and the Supreme Court essentially says: We are going to be the trier of fact with respect to whether there is discrimination in this country. We are going to determine whether discrimination against people of color exists such that they need these voting protections. That traditionally would be a function of the legislature to decide whether discrimination exists so that it is necessary to require these protections, but in Shelby County, the Supreme Court says: No, we will make the decision as to whether discrimination is a problem, and if it is not, we will constitutionally invalidate these provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

Well, in Kanter, what Coney Barrett says is that courts now will decide who is dangerous and who isn't because I believe the Second Amendment to only allow for guns to be prohibited to individuals who are dangerous.

The second thing she says in that case is equally as dangerous. She says she also would require a State or the Federal Government to prove that the law is efficacious in promoting public safety. Now, that might not sound to you unreasonable, but that is not what the Second Amendment says. The Second Amendment doesn't say anything in there about gun laws only being constitutional if they can be proven to be efficacious, and there is always going to be a study funded by the NRA that will tell you that, if you take guns away from people, you make a community more dangerous. The NRA is really good at telling you that the only way to solve crime is with more guns.

So, conveniently, under Amy Coney Barrett's conception of the Second Amendment, so long as she or others on the Court can find a plausible argument that a gun law is not effective in promoting public safety, it can thus be ruled unconstitutional.

There are a hundred other courts out there with Republican judges who have not found the Second Amendment to say what Amy Coney Barrett says the Second Amendment says, and for courts to, all of a sudden, micromanage decisions about who is dangerous and who is not dangerous and what laws are effective and what laws are not effective sounds to me like the kind of judicial activism that many of my conservative friends have been warning against. I think the natural consequence of that would be to invalidate a whole host of background checks laws, perhaps to make it impossible--indeed, likely, to make it impossible for us to be able to expand background checks in a universal fashion as 90 percent of Americans want us to do.

So, while we are certainly spending most of our time talking about the threat to Americans' healthcare--because we are in the middle of a healthcare epidemic and because the consequences are so serious--it is important to note that it is not only on the question of healthcare that Amy Coney Barrett is going to, potentially, fundamentally change this country. Whether it be her likely vote to overturn Roe v. Wade or the same-sex marriage decision or her radical, out-of-the-box conception of American gun laws and the constitutionality of them, her views are not in the American mainstream.

Of course, that makes sense because, increasingly, the Republicans aren't using the legislature to try to mold this country into their world view, into their political view, because their conception of how this country should be is deeply unpopular. It is unpopular to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It is unpopular to make it harder for the legislature to put into place universal background checks. It is unpopular to allow States to criminalize abortion. It is unpopular to allow for more dark money to be spent in elections. It is unpopular to provide less regulation on the pollution--oil and gas--industry.

So, increasingly, the Republicans don't really try to push that agenda through Congress because they have this other way now--because the Supreme Court will get all of that done. The Supreme Court will eviscerate the civil jury to make it easier for corporations to prevail in their cases against consumers. The Supreme Court will declare that a woman's right to a safe and legal abortion is not protected by the Constitution. The Supreme Court will invalidate the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court will stop legislatures from passing universal background checks.

As the Republicans' political agenda has become less aligned with that of the broad American public's, it makes sense that the Senate has stopped legislating. It makes sense that the Senate has just become this confirmation simple machine.

I have been here for the last 2 years. We haven't debated any legislation of substance here. All we have done is just confirm judges. I checked, and we have done 20 pieces of legislation. That is half as many as a normal Senate would do. Most of the bills we have passed have been--or not most of them, but, as I checked, one-third of the bills that we have passed have been of post office renamings or commemorative coins, and we have passed half as many bills overall as we would in a normal legislative session. Legislation is just kind of grinding to a halt here.

Yes, some of that is because the House is of a different party, and it is difficult to pass a law when you have different parties in charge of the House and the Senate, but there aren't a lot of conference committees happening, and there aren't a lot of attempts to reconcile our differences. In part, this is because the Senate is just confirming judges--a record numbers of judges because, in part, there were record numbers of vacancies because Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans refused to confirm almost anybody over the last 2 years of Obama's term in office.

They essentially nullified that portion of his Presidency--his right under the Constitution to nominate and have considered judges to the Federal bench. So, when Trump won and the Republicans maintained control of the Senate, all of a sudden, they had more vacancies than ever before. They have spent the last 2 years populating the bench, filling those vacancies. That is their right to do so, I guess, but it is also part of the strategy to push a conservative political agenda through the courts rather than through the legislature. Because that agenda is so unpopular, if it were pushed through the legislature, it would jeopardize the Republicans' chances of reelection. This has been an unusually activist Court, but it is likely to get more so with Amy Coney Barrett on the Court.

I want to spend a few more minutes on why this pandemic is so intimately intertwined into this conversation about this nomination and then finally say a word on process.

There are 220,000 Americans who have died, and millions of others have had their lives changed forever by this pandemic. The number of people who have been laid off is just sort of unfathomable to think about. The President tried a feckless travel ban in February and March. It didn't work. It was not going to work. He, effectively, gave up after that. He just put the States in charge and then refused to resource the States in a way that would allow them to adequately and effectively confront the virus. One example is the President's refusal to stand up a national supply chain so that we have been in constant crisis--first, with respect to masks and face shields and hand sanitizer and then, throughout the crisis, with respect to tests and testing equipment and cartridges.

I was visiting testing sites in Connecticut just last week. I mean, we are in--what?--month 8 of the pandemic, and still these testing sites in Connecticut have no idea, from day to day, how many tests they are going to have.

I was visiting a hospital that is right in the middle of a historic hot zone in Connecticut. I did a roundtable, and there were a bunch of people there. On my way out, one of the participants in the roundtable kind of followed me out. It happens often, as my colleagues know, and she wanted to have a private word with me. She was the purchasing agent for that hospital who wanted to tell me before I left exactly how nightmarish her life was for not knowing, from day to day, how many tests they were going to be able to do and how she had to scramble every single day to figure out how to get the components for the tests and how there was no way to plan, how there was no way to say, ``OK, this week, I am going to go to this site and this site to do tests,'' because I don't know where I am getting them from.

That is just one of the ways in which this President has just fundamentally let us down, but now it is something different. Now, the President isn't trying to stop the virus. He is actively trying to spread the virus. The President is holding these political rallies at which nobody is wearing masks and where people are standing shoulder to shoulder. He knows what he is doing. He knows that the effect of those rallies is going to be to spread the virus. He is shaming people who wear masks and is chiding the Vice President for always wearing one.

He is now actively engaged in an effort to test people less because he thinks that makes the country look bad. He is at war with his own scientists and regularly undermines his own officials at the CDC and the NIH. There is nobody who is doing more today to help this virus spread than Donald Trump. Then, on top of that, to rush through a nominee who may end up invalidating the Affordable Care Act and leaving people with no insurance in the middle of a pandemic that you are responsible for as President, that is cruelty built on top of cruelty.

Some of my other colleagues have done this as well, and I want to do it just so that some of these people's names end up as part of history, as part of some record other than of lonely obituaries. I am just going to read into the Record the names of a handful of the people who have died due to COVID-19 during this epidemic. I know it sounds like a futile exercise, given the fact that I will read 20 names and that 220,000 have died, but I don't really know what else to do at this point to try to convince this President to stop spreading the virus--to act in a responsible way, like an adult--other than to at least put some names to the numbers: Avigdor and Rachel Farin, Adam Russo, Maurice Berger, Robert Herman, Mary Margaret Smith, Ingrid Kisliuk, Johnny G. Gonzales, Anne Martinez, Amelia Michels, Giomar Fuentes, Carmen Carlo. By the way, those last four were related--a mother, an aunt, another aunt, and a grandmother in law. Dr. John Marvin Brown, Sr.; Sylvia Livings; Howard Kramer; Robert Patrick Perry, Jr.; Hing S. Yee; Frank Small III; Steven D. Silverman, MD; Alexander Malcolm MacMillan, Jr.; Dean Pryor Perkins; Mary Castro; Alfonso Ye, Jr.; Michelle Lee Carter; Jerome Mark Spector; John Robert Hicken; Frederick Harris; Bill Huening; Jim Sheehan; Barry Downes; Mark Blum; Florence Warshawsky Harris; Kenneth Glover; Terrence Neil Thompson, Jr.; Gordon Pickering; Robert M. Flanders; Carlos Llamas; Juan Gilbert ``Tito'' Dominguez; Sarah Ann Staffa Scholin; Anne Morreale; Roberta M. Pepitone; Barbara Ross; Jacqueline Hoover; Kerman Hain; Mario Mendoza; John Pizzetti; and William Charles Edward Prince.

These are just two pages of names of individuals who have died due to the coronavirus.

The numbers are, obviously, absolutely overwhelming, and it is, of course, not just those who have died. It is those who have lost their jobs. It is all those people who have had the illness. Eight million people have been diagnosed with COVID. Who knows what the overall number is--individuals who had it who didn't know it, thought it was something else, or people who were asymptomatic. But is that number 100 million? Is that number 50 million? It is big, and all those individuals now have a preexisting condition. All those individuals now could be discriminated against by an insurance company if the Affordable Care Act was to be invalidated, and that is the ask of the Supreme Court--a Supreme Court on which Amy Coney Barrett will be sitting if this nomination is pushed through.

That is why these two questions--of the Supreme Court nomination which is before us today and the question of how we adequately confront the coronavirus pandemic--are connected and why we talk about them together.

Finally, let me say a word about process. This is not the most compelling argument to the American people. I don't think they really care too much about the processes by which we choose to conduct business here in the Senate, but we do. We should. We chose to serve in this body.

I have thought a lot over the course of the last few weeks about the idea of restraint--the idea of restraint, the idea of temperance. It has been a sort of seminal idea that humans have been considering for millennia--the idea of deciding not to do something that you have the ability to do, the decision to restrain one's self, to not use the minimum powers available to you because of the downstream consequences of your decision to operate at maximum power, your decision to use all of the facilities available to you. It is an idea that humans have considered, as I said, for thousands of years.

It is generally applied to this body. It is generally a very important facet of democracy because the Constitution says very little about how the Senate will conduct business. It doesn't micromanage our proceedings.

Certainly, if you read our constitutional history, there was a belief that the Senate was supposed to be different than the House of Representatives. Obviously, we are chosen very differently. At the outset, we were given different term lengths. The idea was that the Senate was supposed to be able to look out for the long-term health of the country in a way that was different from the House of Representatives, given their requirement to answer to the people every 2 years.

So, over time, there was this understanding that the Senate would have, at its foundation, some concept of fairness, some ability for the minority to participate. So, over time, there have been different rules about how many votes are required for cloture or different practices of how cloture was used, how often it was used. But always there was an idea that this place would be a shared experience; minority and majority would work together.

Senator McConnell has his version of history. I think Democrats have a different version of it. But I don't think anybody can disagree that the changes to the way in which the Senate operates have come faster and more furious during the years in which Mitch McConnell has been majority leader than at any time before.

I mean, just while I have been here, we have seen the eradication of the filibuster for Supreme Court Justices. We have seen the time that we have to debate Justices dramatically shrunken. I think it is now down to 2 hours. We have seen the elimination of the blue slip--the ability for Senators from a particular State to have a say in the judges that are selected to serve in their State's appellate courts.

But we also saw this exceptional thing happen in 2016, in which Mitch McConnell, as majority leader, decided that he would not even consider Barack Obama's choice for a vacancy in the Supreme Court, despite the fact that the vacancy came about 11 months before the next President was to be sworn in.

In retrospect, Democrats didn't make a big enough deal out of it, I think, because we thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win, and, thus, ultimately, while it would be a dangerous precedent to live with, it might not have a practical effect on the country. We just couldn't imagine in the winter and spring of 2016 that Donald Trump was going to be the President of the United States.

In retrospect we should have made a bigger deal out of what was happening in 2016, because this idea that Republicans weren't going to even consider--even do a courtesy meeting, have a hearing on--Merrick Garland was and still is truly exceptional, and it fits into this pattern we have seen under Senator McConnell during the past few years, this pattern of forsaking restraint and using every conceivable power. Or let me back that up: using more powers available to the majority than ever before in order to effectuate a political agenda.

What Republicans did in 2016 was unprecedented--to just say: Forget it, President Obama. We are not considering your choice for the Supreme Court because you are a Democrat and we are Republicans.

Now, at the time, as we remember, Republicans said that it wasn't political. It was because there was an important rule they were enforcing--this rule that you couldn't consider a Presidential nominee to the Supreme Court in the last year of his or her term.

Now, I didn't hear my colleagues say at the time that the rule was only applied when the President and the Senate were of different parties. In fact, I heard many of my Republican colleagues, including the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, say that the rule was simply that, in the last year of a President's term, you don't consider a Supreme Court Justice. Famously, Senator Graham said: Write down my words. Hold them against me.

And, at the time, we all knew that Republicans probably weren't telling the truth. We knew that it was probably just because it was President Obama and they did not want Justice Scalia, a conservative Justice, to be replaced by someone who was more liberal in their views. We suspected that this idea that they were enforcing a rule was just a ruse to paper over what was simply a political decision not to give President Obama a seat on the Supreme Court.

Well, now we know it was a ruse because, all of a sudden, when presented with the exact same circumstance--well, in fact, a different circumstance in that this vacancy occurred weeks before the election rather than 9 months before the election--Republicans have now changed their tune because it is just about politics. Right? It is just about politics. It is just about getting your guys on the Supreme Court and stopping the other guy's folks from getting on the Supreme Court.

And what Mitch McConnell has said is that we are going to use any power at our disposal in order to effectuate our agenda, especially when it concerns the Supreme Court.

Restraint, which is a predicate for the effective operation of democracy, is disappearing. And, again, I know that it sounds ridiculous to make this suggestion, but there is really no logical end to how you can maximize your powers as a majority body in the U.S. Senate. There is no constitutional prohibition on the Senate majority saying that Members of the majority are going to get twice as much staff as Members of the minority. There is nothing stopping the majority from eliminating our speaking rights in committees, on the floor of the Senate.

There are a lot of things that the majority can do to make it increasingly impossible for the minority to have any role here--to be able to protest, to be able to carry out our agenda. And I know that there is a lot of speculation--much of it driven by the Republican majority--about what Democrats will do if Democrats are given control of the Senate. Will Democrats go to new extraordinary lengths to maximize their power, given the extraordinary lengths Republicans have gone to maximize their power?

That is not a conversation that is sort of ripe enough yet, but what do Republicans expect? I mean, what you did in 2016 is really wild. You basically invalidated the last year of a President's term, at least with respect to that core function of appointing Justices. And what is wild was that you didn't have to go to the lengths that you did. Republicans could have voted Merrick Garland down and, at least, have recognized the legitimacy of the nomination--voted Merrick Garland down and perhaps forcing a conversation about another nominee that might be more amenable to the Republican majority. That wouldn't be the first time that that has occurred.

One of the statues here in the U.S. Congress is of Oliver Ellsworth from Connecticut, who was elevated to the Supreme Court because George Washington believed his first pick couldn't be confirmed by the Senate. So, instead, he chose one of Connecticut's two U.S. Senators, who was beloved in this body when it operated not far away. And Oliver Ellsworth went to the Court because of a quiet negotiation with the Senate.

Republicans, under Mitch McConnell, didn't even engage in a process with Merrick Garland. They just declared that the President's choice was illegitimate. And I can't argue that they didn't--well, I can argue they didn't have the power, but certainly there was a colorable argument that Republicans in the Senate could just refuse to consider Merrick Garland's nomination.

But now having practiced that exercise of maximum power, using the majority to delegitimize a President in that way, you put Democrats, if they win control of the Senate, in a really unenviable position. Do we just unilaterally stand down and not choose to use the same tools that Republicans did in the majority? Would we expect, if we did that, that if Republicans regain the majority, they would follow our lead? Or would that be wildly naive?

No, in fact, I think there are now new rules in the Senate, and I think Republicans have set them. I get it that you can claim Harry Reid's rule change as the original sin that legitimizes everything that you have done since then, but the changes Republicans have made have come at a dizzying pace--far more changes made, far more precedents shattered than anything that happened when Democrats were in control.

And, of course, as to Senator Reid, many of us would argue that the reason that that change was made was because Senator McConnell doubled the number of cloture motions that were required in order to move legislation to a final vote. The change in the use of the filibuster by Republicans during their time in the minority was what forced that change.

But setting that aside, there is no question that changes have come much faster and much more furious, and it just doesn't bode well for the future of our democracy when everyone uses the maximum power available to them, with no concern for the minority party, in order to get what they want.

And it is not just the Republican majority that has done this. So has the executive branch. I listened to the Presiding Officer give his maiden speech on this floor about the overuse of Executive power, and there were legitimate complaints about ways in which the Obama administration had used maximum Executive power when the legislature would not act.

But, again, it doesn't compare with the ways in which this President has used maximum Executive power in the absence of authorization from Congress. Both in the executive branch and in the legislative branch, under Republicans, restraint as a practice inside democracy is disappearing. Maximum power becomes the ethos, and that is a danger to democracy--maybe not today, but soon enough.

I don't know how this body gets back into a conversation about comity. I don't know how we get back into a conversation about how we govern together.

I have, frankly, voted for more of this President's nominees to the executive branch, to political offices, and to the bench than almost all of my colleagues, maybe, on this side of the aisle, maybe with the exception of a few, because I generally have believed that if the nominee is in the conservative mainstream and if the nominee is generally qualified, they should get their post, especially for executive appointments, for nominations to Secretary positions and Undersecretary positions. I do that, in part, because I think that it is important to not use maximum power and maximum leverage, for me not to vote against every single nominee that the President puts forward just because I disagree with that nominee.

That conversation about how we restore some comity and some restraint is an important one, but it is likely to be impossible in the next Congress because of how fundamentally broken this body will be after what happened to Merrick Garland and then, on top of it, what is happening right now.

We are 8 days before an election. We are 8 days before an election. We are jamming through Amy Coney Barrett's nomination in record time, not because it is good for the country, just because you can--just because Republicans can--and, likely, because it is really important to effectuate your deeply unpopular agenda through the Supreme Court.

We don't legislate here anymore because Republicans have found out a way to get their agenda done through the court system. Amy Coney Barrett will likely be the fifth vote to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, a political project for the Republicans for the last decade, unfulfilled through the legislative branch, now achievable in the next several months through the judicial branch, but only if Amy Coney Barrett's nomination is rammed through right now.

The rewriting of the Second Amendment is not available to Republicans any longer in the legislative branch. The NRA's priority list couldn't even get a vote in the Senate with Republican control--now available through the judicial branch if Amy Coney Barrett is nominated. The consequences for the country are serious if the source of power in this town, the source of policymaking and rule setting, moves from this body across the street to the Supreme Court.

And not equally as dangerous to the Nation, but still perilous, is what will happen to this body, if all that matters political power, when restraint vanishes and whoever is in the majority uses every lever available to them to try to get what they want, to try to stop the other side from getting what they want.

It is 1 week before an election. We are here all night, ramming through a Supreme Court nominee in record time simply because you can. That is not a good enough reason.

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