Providing for Consideration of H.R. Restaurant Revitalization Fund Replenishment Act of and for Other Purposes

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

I completely agree that we should be trying to help small businesses who have gotten absolutely railroaded and run over by the power of government, which amounts to, essentially, a taking. They have had their livelihoods taken away through the sheer power of government, Federal, State and local. It is absolutely extraordinary.

It is one of the reasons that I worked with my friend, Dean Phillips, on the other side of the aisle, on the PPP Flexibility Act 2 years ago. I would have preferred we not go down this road; that the government not go down and shut down our economy. But the government did. And I think that amounts to something akin to a taking.

But now, here we sit and, yet again, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have not met an issue that they can't make worse; and that is what we are faced with right now.

Mr. Speaker, my colleagues are bringing forward a $55 billion bill which they say is paid for, which is paid for and relies on recaptured, fraudulent relief funds. We have fraudulent relief funds because you just dumped $2 trillion out in the economy when you came in here and did it by voice vote 2 years ago.

So you have got these fraudulent funds that we may or may not recapture that is, allegedly, what is paying for this. This bill should be fully paid for out of existing COVID money that has not yet been spent. And that is what we are offering as an alternative.

But the real problem that the American people need to understand that my colleagues have got themselves in a pretty vicious box, is because the administration, with the full support of my colleagues here, made the allocation of dollars race-based. They made it criteria-based. And they got slapped down by the court. They got slapped down by the Sixth Circuit.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found race and sex prioritization was unconstitutional and ordered the Small Business Administration to halt the practice. But most of the funding had been spent. It was underfunded. But most of that funding had been spent.

The court said: ``The case is about whether the government can allocate limited coronavirus relief funds based on the race and sex of the applicants. We hold that it cannot.

``The stark realities of the Small Business Administration's racial gerrymandering are inescapable.'' ``It is indeed `a sordid business'. . . . ``quoting our Chief Justice John Roberts, `` . . . `a sordid business' to divide `us up by race.' '' ``And the government's attempt to do so here violates the Constitution.''

That is the real story. I have introduced the Restaurant Revitalization Fund Fairness Act. We have got other bills on this side of the aisle that would pay for it; that would ensure that it won't be race-based; that would make sure that the 177,000 applicants who were left on the outside looking in because of race-based governing by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, that that would not occur; and that, again--I want to reiterate--should be paid for without relying on the possibility of collecting the fraudulent expenditures.

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