American Rescue Plan Act of 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I was presiding on Tuesday. Sometimes my staff will give me a folder of things to review while I am presiding, and often they will be upset when I come back having not reviewed what they have given me. The reason for that is simple: When there are Members speaking before the body, I am, frankly, very interested to listen and to hear what our colleagues have to say. We don't do enough of that in this place. We are so busy during the day, we don't spend a lot of time on the Senate floor. We might have the floor on on our TV in our office, but we are not always paying attention to what our colleagues have to say. One of the benefits of being able to preside is that you do get to listen to the arguments that are being made right here on the floor.

In the hour or so that I was presiding on Tuesday, I got to hear about four or five of my Republican colleagues come down in sequence to make their case as to why they would be voting against the American Rescue Plan, and so I got to hear a number of themes being developed.

I don't think coincidentally a number of arguments were made repeatedly by many of our friends on the Republican side of the aisle, and so I decided it might be worthwhile to just spend a few minutes talking about the claims that are made about this bill by Republicans, the reasons why they are voting against it, and to talk about how some of these arguments may be a little bit more disingenuous than we might like.

The first thing that I heard was that this bill was just too expensive. It is $1.9 trillion. That is a lot of money, no doubt, but this country has never ever faced a healthcare crisis or an economic crisis like we do today. This is an unprecedented moment in our Nation's history, and it requires us to step up and do something that isn't just going to sound like it will work and help people but actually will.

What is, I guess, to me ironic about this claim that it is too expensive, that it is going to cost our kids and grandkids too much money, is that Republicans passed a tax bill that was almost to the dollar the exact same amount as this relief bill is. They passed a $1.9 trillion tax bill where the majority of the benefits went to the richest Americans who needed no more help. There was no crisis in 2017 amongst American millionaires and billionaires. Yet Republicans were very willing to draw down $1.9 trillion in debt-financed tax cuts; $1.3 trillion in corporate tax cuts; $83 billion to let heirs of huge mega- estates be able to inherit more money without taxation; $435 billion tax cut for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. So it is a little hard to listen to my Republican colleagues claim that this bill is too expensive when they were willing to spend the exact same amount of money in 2017 on tax cuts for their wealthy corporate and millionaire friends.

It is also hard to listen to this argument because just a year ago, Republicans were willing to spend $1.9 trillion to address this crisis. It isn't as if Republicans haven't understood, when they were in control of the White House and the Congress, that we needed to step up and meet this moment. Republicans have said: Well, this is different because we are turning the corner. Well, as Senator Durbin laid out very well, we may be able to see the corner, but we are not there yet.

March 24 was the day that we passed the CARES Act--almost the same amount of money as we are considering today. On that day, 737 people died of COVID-19. Yesterday, 2,369 people died of COVID-19. So in many ways, the crisis today is exponentially worse than it was a year ago when Republicans, to a person, were willing to spend $2 trillion on the crisis. Now, all of a sudden, when Democrats are in charge of the White House, when a Democratic majority leader sits here in the U.S. Senate, $1.9 trillion is too much money to spend on a crisis that is taking on a daily basis three to four times as many lives as it did when we spent this money a year ago.

By the way, the economic crisis is still acute. There may be technically more people at work today than there were in April or May of last year, but surveys suggest today 80 percent of Americans don't have enough money to pay their bills. Why? Because a lot of people are back to work, but they are working fewer hours, right? They have less reliable work. So there is still a crisis that exists amongst 80 percent of Americans today. This is no less than the crisis that existed in 2017.

Here is the second critique that is made over and over about this bill: It is a partisan bill, Republicans say. Well, that is a complaint of Republicans' own making because it is only a partisan bill in the U.S. Senate. Three out of four voters support the American Rescue Plan. This is a recent Morning Consult poll. It has been referred to before on the floor. Seventy percent of all voters support the American Rescue Plan. Not surprisingly, there is some difference between Democrats and Republicans but, frankly, not much. Ninety percent of Democrats support the American Rescue Plan, and 60 percent of Republicans support the American Rescue Plan. Why? Because everybody is hurting in this country. Everybody is hurting. Republicans and Democrats need an extension of unemployment benefits. Republicans and Democrats both want cash payments. Republicans and Democrats know that their kids can't get what they need in schools without additional support.

This is a unifying proposal in the American public. President Biden made a commitment to govern in a way that unified the country. He has done that. He has proposed a bill that has the broad support of Republicans and Democrats. I don't know that it is his fault that it can't draw Republican support in Congress despite the fact that it draws Republican support from the public.

Finally, this was maybe the most interesting theme of the complaints: It is not COVID relief. I have heard different statistics thrown out by my Republican friends. Some of them suggest that only 5 percent of this bill is COVID relief. I am not sure exactly how they come to that calculation, but what I understand them to say is that anything that isn't directly related to putting shots in people's arms or treating people with present cases of COVID is not COVID relief.

Well, let's just take a look at what was broadly part of the CARES Act that was supported by every single Republican and what is broadly part of the American Rescue Plan, because my Republican colleagues thought that everything in the CARES Act was COVID relief, whether it was designed to immediately attack the healthcare crisis or whether it was designed to address the economic crisis.

There were stimulus checks in the CARES Act--not as big as the ones in the American Rescue Plan, but they were COVID relief when we passed the CARES Act. Now, according to Republicans, they are not COVID relief.

There was an unemployment extension and a plus-up in the maximum benefit under the CARES Act. That was COVID relief back in March of last year, but now, according to Republicans, it is not COVID relief.

There was money for vaccines and for testing in the CARES Act. In the American Rescue Plan, there is money for vaccines and testing.

Small business relief was, of course, conceived in the CARES Act, the PPP program. That is a big part of the American Rescue Plan, but now it is not COVID relief, according to my Republican colleagues, whereas it was last year.

There was State and local funding in the CARES Act. There is State and local funding in the American Rescue Plan.

There was rent and mortgage relief in the CARES Act. There is rent and mortgage relief in the American Rescue Plan.

All of a sudden, since Democrats took control of the White House and took control of the Senate, all of these things, which were categorized as COVID relief by Republicans in March, are no longer COVID. You are just supposed to think of these as extras, as Democratic priorities.

Ninety percent--ninety-five percent of what is in the package we are voting on today is simply an extension of the same set of funding streams that we authorized in a bipartisan way a year ago. And so this idea that this is some Democratic wish list, when we are essentially just extending or increasing the same funding streams that were in the CARES Act, is nonsense. It is nonsense. Of course, this is all COVID relief. Of course, it is COVID relief when you are increasing nutritional benefits to people who can't afford to feed their kids because they have lost their job or they have lost hours because the economy melted down due to a pandemic. That is not, all of a sudden, not COVID relief today.

This one is maybe the most bizarre of Republican claims. This bill is expensive, but it is not too expensive. This moment is unique, and we are mandated by our oath of office to meet this moment. Republicans didn't have a problem spending $1.9 trillion to give tax breaks to their wealthy friends. I don't know why they, all of a sudden, have a problem putting money in the pockets of hard-working Americans who are suffering through the worst healthcare crisis this country has seen in a century.

Republicans say this is a partisan bill. Out there in America, guess what--it is not. It is not. Republicans and Democrats support this because it is full of commonsense ideas that make a lot of sense to people, no matter what their political ideology is outside of Washington.

Republicans say this bill isn't COVID relief but a Democratic progressive wish list. No, it is simply an extension of the things that were bipartisan priorities last year. We thought they were good ideas then. We think they are good ideas now, especially given the fact that four times as many people are dying today as were dying in March of 2020, when we passed the first bipartisan CARES Act, and as the economy today is in just as dire straits as it was.

I hope we are turning the corner. I hope we get vaccines into the arms of individuals such that we are soon back to the numbers of deaths per day that we saw in March of last year. I hope that we are on a road again to full employment. But I am confident that none of that can happen unless we make this investment in COVID relief and in economic relief. It is an obligation as stewards of the economy and the welfare of the American people for us to step up to the plate and get this done this week.

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