Coronavirus

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, after passing five bipartisan COVID-19 relief bills last year to support the American people through the pandemic, our Democratic colleagues kicked off this year with a different approach. They made no attempt to try to negotiate another consensus package, as we had done five times before last year, and insisted on skirting the normal legislative process so they could pass a purely partisan $1.9 trillion spending bill.

Well, the problem with that is it was really mislabeled. One, it vastly overshot the target, and it spent less than 10 percent of the money--which, purportedly, was for COVID-19 relief--on COVID-19, and less than 1 percent of that was related to vaccines, which was clearly the most urgent need.

But the money that we had appropriated last December hadn't even been spent yet, but, apparently, the Biden administration wanted to demonstrate that it could get things through but, in the meantime, appropriated $1.9 trillion, threatening us with something we haven't seen rear its head in a long time, which is inflation.

But the bill, as I said, included a lot of unrelated and unnecessary partisan priorities, ranging from blank checks for mismanaged union pension funds, funding for climate justice, backdoor money for Planned Parenthood, and an exclusive paid leave program for Federal bureaucrats.

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