Coronavirus

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, the United States surpassed 11 million COVID-19 cases this past week. This comes just 6 days after our Nation recorded 10 million cases--1 million added to the 10 million in 6 days--making it the fastest transmission of 1 million new cases since the pandemic began. Nearly a quarter of a million Americans have died. This runaway crisis is alarming, it is deadly, and it demands action.

The city of Chicago began a stay-at-home advisory to help encourage people to contain the virus in our communities. Across Illinois, more than 5,000 patients have been hospitalized with COVID-19 each night for the past week. We have shattered new infection records nearly every day this month. Illinois has now experienced more than 597,000 cases, and we have sadly lost 10,875. My heart goes out to everyone who has lost a loved one.

In addition to trying to keep ourselves and our loved ones healthy and safe from the virus, Americans have also been struggling to deal with economic uncertainty, job loss, food insecurity, childcare--the list goes on and on and on. Here we are just days before Thanksgiving, and many of our neighbors are trying to pick the right day to go to the food bank so they can feed their families on this day of thanks.

Where is the sense of urgency on Capitol Hill when it comes to providing another round of economic impact payments, enhanced unemployment benefits, funding for the food stamps--the SNAP program? Our country is in desperate need of help, and they are counting on us.

You would think a crisis of this scale would be the first order of business for the Republican-controlled Senate this week. Yet, while this pandemic continues to rage, too many Republicans in Congress refuse to even come to the table to negotiate a comprehensive, bipartisan relief bill. There are those who will, and I commend them. It takes real courage. Instead, their leader, Senator McConnell, has scheduled votes this week on six barely qualified judicial nominees. The average age of this week's judicial nominees is 38.

You see, these are lifetime appointments. If you get somebody with the right answers to their political questions, then they will give you 20, 30, or more years while you have control of that court, and control of the court is more important, obviously, than coronavirus.

The youngest one of these nominees is Kathryn Mizelle. She is 33 years old. The American Bar Association took a look at her record and judged her ``not qualified.'' This is the 10th Trump nominee for a lifetime appointment to the Federal court who has been judged ``not qualified'' by the American Bar Association. You might say: I am sure that happens. Well, it didn't happen at all in the 8 years of the Obama Presidency. Not a single nominee who was judged ``unqualified'' was sent to Congress.

Another nominee, Stephen Vaden, who has been nominated for a lifetime position at the Court of International Trade, has never appeared before the Court of International Trade. He has never tried a case in any court. He will be a great judge once he figures it out.

We voted on Dr. Judy Shelton's nomination to the Federal Reserve Board. She is uniquely unqualified. Her economic views are almost humorous, they are so out of touch with reality. We are experiencing the worst recession in 75 years, and Dr. Shelton, by her stated views, is unprepared to contribute to dealing with this economic crisis.

It is the story of the 116th Congress. The Republican-controlled Senate spends month after month after month ignoring a raging pandemic and refusing to even consider the House-passed relief legislation.

Here is a good question for Members of the Senate: How many amendments has the Senate voted on this calendar year of 2020? Not counting impeachment--set that aside. But how many amendments to legislation have we considered in this calendar year? The answer is 27--27 amendments in this calendar year. That is an improvement, incidentally. In 2019, we considered exactly 22 amendments. Six of them were forced on us by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who basically said: I won't let you go home until you vote on this amendment. And, as Senator Paul has said, of course he lost every one of those amendments.

Twenty-seven amendments in 1 year; 22 the previous year. Do you know why? We don't legislate. We don't debate. We don't offer amendments. We don't pass bills. We come here with a new set of nominations every week from the Republican majority. We don't have any legislation on the pandemic. We have no legislation on economic recovery. We just have to get these lifetime appointees, some who have been found categorically unqualified. That is what this Senate is all about.

In this last week before the Thanksgiving recess, is this really all we are going to do? How about the 28 rural hospitals in Kentucky that are facing the risk of closure? How about the $1.3 billion of uncompensated losses for these hospitals across Kentucky? The Republican proposal a few weeks ago didn't provide any economic relief for hospitals, clinics, or healthcare providers like those.

Americans need leadership. They need for the Senate to step up and say: For goodness' sake, whatever the political agenda is here, how can it be more important than this pandemic?

Isn't there enough talent or will on the floor of the Senate--on the Republican side and on the Democratic side--to find a way to help Americans who are struggling, to provide unemployment assistance, to provide help to small businesses, these restaurants and small businesses that are facing closure, to give some money to local units of government that through no fault of their own lost revenue to this COVID-19 crisis? These are not wild ideas; these address the very basics that face families, businesses, and governments across this country. For some reason, that particular issue can't make the agenda.

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