Pandemic is Over Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. GUTHRIE. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 75, I call up the bill (H.R. 382) to terminate the public health emergency declared with respect to COVID-19, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.
The Clerk read the title of the bill.
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Mr. GUTHRIE. 382.
Mr. Speaker, today, I rise to push for immediate and overwhelming passage of my legislation, H.R. 382, the Pandemic is Over Act.
President Biden and I both agree that the COVID-19 pandemic is over. In fact, on the eve of the Pandemic is Over Act going on the House floor, President Biden finally announced that he is going to end the COVID-19 emergency declarations. I am glad that my bill finally forced the Biden administration to act.
However, President Biden has taken too long to act on his statement last September that the pandemic is over, which is why I am moving forward with my bill to end the COVID-19 public health emergency and finally restore checks and balances between Congress and the executive branch.
There was a time and place for the COVID-19 public health emergency. On this day 3 years ago, then-Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Azar first invoked the COVID-19 public health emergency.
The COVID-19 public health emergency was used at the beginning of the pandemic to establish Operation Warp Speed and provide for CMS waivers that led to millions of seniors receiving critical healthcare services through mediums such as telehealth and removing various forms of red tape getting in the way of healthcare providers' ability to care for their patients.
Now, exactly 3 years later to the day of the original disaster public health emergency declaration, we are in a much better position to address COVID-19. We have proven therapeutics in addition to 95 percent of the population either being previously infected with COVID-19 or vaccinated. A senior administration official even stated, ``We are in a pretty good place in the pandemic. . . . Cases are down dramatically from where they were the past two winters,'' according to Politico reporting.
It is long overdue for President Biden to unwind the public health emergency. Despite overwhelming evidence that COVID-19 is now endemic and that the pandemic is over, Secretary Becerra just renewed the public health emergency for a twelfth time.
The Pandemic is Over Act sends a loud and clear message to President Biden: The American people are tired of living in a perpetual state of emergency, and it is long overdue for Congress to take back the authorities granted under Article I of the Constitution.
The Pandemic is Over Act would immediately terminate the COVID-19 public health emergency. Nothing in my bill ends title 42, despite the administration stating that it will. Let me repeat: Nothing in this bill ends title 42.
The Biden administration alone controls title 42. That statute was written in 1944 before the authority of the public health emergency even existed. If the Biden administration chooses to end title 42 when the public health emergency ends without working with us to secure the border, then that is just another one of his failures to add to the list.
To be clear, we support the ability to declare a public health emergency to address clear and serious public health threats. Maintaining these regulatory flexibilities during a public health emergency is crucial, but these authorities should only be used for limited periods of time based upon the particular circumstances and prevalence or immediacy of the public health threat.
Now, it is time to rescind the President's emergency powers, and Congress can address the present and future needs that may arise with COVID-19.
Since President Biden took office, we have seen the pandemic used to justify countless executive overreaches. The President has used the pandemic for one-size-fits-all vaccine mandates for healthcare workers, mask mandates, and eviction moratoriums.
While ending the COVID-19 public health emergency will not relinquish all the President's power that has been used to make those decisions, it does make it more difficult to justify bypassing Congress to enact his policies.
Finally, I want to address the arguments about our unwinding the public health emergency too quickly. Democrats had unified control and could have extended, or the administration could have undertaken rulemaking to unwind, the COVID-19 public health emergency.
Congress is already working. We need to work together on extending a number of provisions tied to the COVID-19 public health emergency.
Where are their bills that would extend or unwind these things? Where was the hearing on this last Congress if this was such an issue?
Mr. Speaker, the pandemic is over. I urge my colleagues to support H.R.
Mr. Speaker, we have been asking for a year for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to start showing us a plan for unwinding the pandemic public health emergency.
Now that we are here doing this today, it seems like we are starting to move in that direction. Unfortunately, we didn't have any hearings last Congress to deal with that, but we are going to begin that, working together today.
Mr. Speaker, we are ending the emergency powers of the President. We are not conceding that COVID-19 is over in this country, and it is not. People have to take mitigation. We certainly don't want it coming across our southern border, so we support keeping title 42 in place.
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Mr. GUTHRIE. Mr. Speaker, I just point out that the omni gave the States clarity in how to deal with the Medicaid situation moving forward. We also extended telehealth, so a lot of things we have been trying to do, we have been asking the administration for a year to address some of the things that my friend from Oregon just brought up.
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Mr. GUTHRIE. Mr. Speaker, we are trying to end the emergency powers of the President during the pandemic. We recognize COVID is still an issue that people have to deal with. We absolutely know that we are going to be working together over the next few weeks and months to make sure we have in place the proper protections.
Mr. Speaker, I agree with my friend from Michigan that we absolutely have to look at putting things in place and keeping things in place that protect our citizens from COVID-19. We are not dismissing that.
What I am saying, or what we are saying, is it should be a legislative branch-wide issue, that we believe that if things are going to stay in place or be put in place, it should be by an act of Congress, signed by the President, as the Constitution says, instead of just the President making decisions for almost 3 years now--two administrations, almost 3 years now.
That is what we are saying. We look forward to working together to solve these issues and moving forward.
I think I did use the word ``cut,'' and I think I corrected myself. We are spending less money in Medicare, so you are taking money out of Medicare under the Inflation Reduction Act, but that money wasn't really put back in to shore up Medicare. It was spent in other programs, so there is $288 billion less being spent in Medicare.
As we stated today in our organizational session, she is the first chairwoman in the history of the oldest committee in Congress.
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Mr. GUTHRIE. Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, one of the points that my friend from California just brought up--we have this 3-year running telehealth that is moving forward. We all know that we can't put the genie back in the bottle. We have to work on telehealth, but we know for a fact there have been diversions of controlled substances through telehealth. We know that. So why don't we take back our authority? Let's negotiate moving forward.
Let's think about where this has gone. Three years ago today, Secretary Azar--two administrations--declares a public health emergency. It started doing a lot of things. One is that it allowed emergency use authorization, so we had therapeutics and had all these things come forward.
Also the status--not necessarily every statute under Health and Human Services, but because you have the status of a public health emergency, you can invoke other statutes: the Defense Production Act by President Trump to get respirators and moving a ship outside of New York so the people in New York and New Jersey could have an extra hospital, a mobile hospital.
I mean, all of those things happened. When we delegate our authority, those are the things that we move forward.
On January 20, 2021, almost a million people were being vaccinated. President Biden came in to continue the vaccination process. Then, a year into his administration, we, on our side of the aisle, sent a letter to the Health and Human Services Secretary saying that this needs to end. We can't continue to operate under emergency authority. Let's have a plan.
Everything that they have talked about today, every speaker they have had: Let's have a plan to end this emergency, and let's do it in a way that we can address the issues that need to be addressed.
We have learned a lot during the pandemic about things that worked. Let's do things that work. Let's fix things that don't work, like the telehealth diversion of controlled substances.
Some of those are the things--we have been a year in, since February 1 tomorrow, almost a year since then, and we haven't seen a plan. We haven't seen anything.
There was some stuff done, I know, in the omnibus with telehealth. That is what we are saying. We don't need to continue to operate the country in an emergency status. We need to end it.
So why bring the bill up? They say this is irresponsible, the bill moving forward. The bill was in Rules last night. We have had no word from anybody in the executive branch that they are going to deal with this.
While the bill was being considered in Rules, they come out that it is going to end on May 11?
So this bill is needed. It is needed because it is moving us forward.
What we can do now, as the bill makes its way to the Senate--I don't know if the Senate is going to take it up or not, but what I will pledge to my friend from New Jersey and my friend from California, who is the ranking Democrat on the Health Subcommittee, is that we will work to make sure we find the areas that we need to continue the lessons that we learned, that we need to put into place, into statute, and to take care of things that need to be taken care of.
What we don't need to do is allow the carte blanche, 3-year open emergency pandemic that we know has had issues, as well. I mean, we always talk about the things we want to keep. We can talk about those and work on them.
The things that we need to address, using telehealth to divert controlled substances, we know that that has taken place. There are examples of that. We absolutely need to address that.
I will pledge that we will work, on our side of the aisle, with our friends on the other side of the aisle to find things to make sure that we continue to address the fact that we still have COVID-19.
One thing to note is we are still going to have COVID-19, and we don't need it coming across our borders. Because we are doing this, we also still need to keep title 42 in place.
I look forward to working together. This is necessary. It has moved this administration, hopefully, forward. We can say that, May 11, we move forward on this. I am proud to be the sponsor of it, and I urge my colleagues to support it.
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