The Economy
Floor Speech
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Mr. McCONNELL. Now, Mr. President, on a completely different matter, we are more than a year from the technical end of the COVID-19 recession.
There are more than 9 million job openings in the country, the most in American history by far. Three safe and effective vaccines are easily available all across our country, free of charge, for any adult who wants one. Medical contraindications are rare, and CDC data tell us that, once somebody is fully vaccinated, their risk of dying from COVID-19 absolutely plummets right down to the normal range of risk that we implicitly face on a daily basis. Vaccines may not magically eliminate the virus overnight, but the evidence tells us that vaccines can eliminate the degree to which the virus represents a unique crisis.
We may not be entirely out of the woods--the Delta uptick makes that clear--but it is time to stop governing as if we were trapped in a permanent economic meltdown. It factually is simply not the case, but the Democratic Party's far-left flank is resisting this simple fact. They were counting on this terrible but temporary pandemic to be their Trojan horse for permanent socialism. So they don't want to admit that the vaccines are transitioning COVID from a crisis into a challenge-- case in point, the surreal episode that has unfolded this past week over evictions.
For a year and a half now, the government has basically told landlords they have little or no recourse if tenants stop paying the rent. This isn't just about massive corporations that some think could eat losses forever; family businesses who own one or two units have had to keep paying their bills, their taxes, and their mortgages the whole time.
Congress already sent billions of dollars to States for rental assistance. The problem is with State governments that have been pathetically slow to get the money out, but when some Socialist House Members fail to convince their own fellow Democrats to extend this nationwide socialism through legislation, they somehow prevailed on President Biden through PR stunts--PR stunts.
One day before the President's announcement, his senior adviser said the President had ``double-, triple-, quadruple-checked'' whether he had the legal authority to do this, and he concluded he did not. The President himself admitted that legal scholars find his position untenable, but he still caved and did it.
The far left wants to turn this terrible but temporary pandemic into a Trojan horse for permanent socialism, and the administration is letting them call the shots
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