American Rescue Plan Act of 2021
Floor Speech
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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, today or tonight or tomorrow, Democrats say they will break the bipartisan streak that has defined the pandemic response up until now. They are dead set on ramming through an ideological spending spree packed with non-COVID-related policies.
This is just what a leading House Democrat admitted they would do back at the start of the crisis: Exploit the pandemic as ``a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.'' To give them credit, they never hid the ball. That is how you get a 628-page bill that costs nearly $2 trillion, but only 9 percent addresses the fight against the virus itself and only 1 percent--1 percent--for the lifesaving vaccines that are ending this nightmare as we speak.
That is how you craft a bill that does nothing to immediately get kids back to classrooms. In fact, that spends only 5 percent of the K- 12 school money this fiscal year.
This isn't a pandemic rescue package; it is a parade of leftwing pet projects they are ramming through during a pandemic.
There is a costly ObamaCare bailout that will disproportionately benefit wealthier people; payments to farmers and ranchers based solely on the demographics of the recipient without any regard to actual need; and a massive cash bailout for mismanaged State and local governments, multiple times the size of COVID needs.
Instead of pushing back on the anti-science bullying from Big Labor that is locking kids out of the classrooms, they buy into it.
They want to create generous new benefits for parents who are dealing with school closures but only if they are Federal employees. To all the parents without government jobs, no such luck.
There are provisions to let abortion providers raid the small business rescue funds that were meant for Main Street businesses.
They want to pay people a bonus not to go back to work when we are trying to rebuild our economy.
There is an effort to create a brandnew, sprawling cash welfare program--not the one-time checks but constant payments--that ignores the pro-work lessons of bipartisan welfare reform and which the White House has already stated they want to make permanent.
The unrelated liberal policies are simply endless. It is like they have forgotten we have a pandemic to fight.
Larry Summers, a top economist in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, says this plan piles way more debt on our kids and grandkids than we need to spend right now. That is Larry Summers, Bill Clinton's Secretary Treasury. Jason Furman, who chaired President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, said the State and local bailouts are ``overkill.'' These are liberal economists, Madam President.
By one analysis, the Democrats' extra cash bonuses for laid-off workers who stay home will result in almost 60 percent of workers earning more money staying home than they would earn from returning to work--more money by staying home than they would earn from returning to work. What a great idea. This isn't State unemployment insurance; it is borrowing from our kids and grandkids to pay yet an additional cash bonus for not working.
This would extend deep into 2021, when we anticipate serious job growth. Just this morning, we had a jobs report that shattered expectations, nearly doubling the job growth experts had expected to see.
This is what the Washington Post says about this mess. This is the Washington Post about this mess that is before us:
For policy experts and even members of Biden's own party, the improving picture is raising questions about whether the stimulus bill is mismatched to the needs of the current moment.
That is from the Washington Post editorial.
It is mismatched all right because it was never designed to meet Americans' needs. The goal was to ``restructure things to fit'' their ``vision.'' That is why there was no bipartisan process after a year of completely bipartisan COVID bills that we worked on together. That is why the Senate Republicans who went to the White House to propose working together were told: No thanks; take it or leave it.
This is such a poorly targeted rush job that Democrats can't even settle on one set of political spin. The White House Chief of Staff is going around town admitting that they have written ``the most progressive domestic legislation in a generation.'' That is the White House Chief of Staff. Meanwhile, here in the Senate, Democrats are still pretending this is some down-the-middle proposal and lecturing us for not supporting it. They can't even get their stories straight.
The administration campaigned on ushering in a new day of unity and bipartisanship, but in 2020, under Republican leadership, the Senate negotiated five rescue bills totaling $4 trillion, and none of them got fewer than 90 votes. That is how this Senate was run last year in a time of divided government, and now, in this supposed new era of healing leadership, we are about to watch one party ram through a partisan package on the thinnest margins. Go figure.
Republicans have many ideas to improve the bill, many ideas, and we are about to vote on all kinds of amendments in the hopes that some of these ideas make it into the final product. We are going to try to improve the bill. The millions who elected 50 Republican Senators will have their voices heard loud and clear.
Our country is already set for a roaring recovery. We are already on track to bounce back from this crisis. That is not because of this bill; it is because of our work last year. This is a trend this new Democratic government inherited. We are going to come roaring back and mostly not because of this bill--in fact, in some ways, in spite of this bill. It will be because of the bipartisan foundation we laid last year and the strength and resilience of our people. Democrats inherited a tide that was already turning.
We could have worked together to do something smart to finish this fight as fast as possible. Democrats decided to do something else.
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