March 17, 2020 - Issue: Vol. 166, No. 51 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 2nd Session
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CORONAVIRUS; Congressional Record Vol. 166, No. 51
(Senate - March 17, 2020)
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[Pages S1775-S1777] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] CORONAVIRUS Mr. SASSE. Madam President, we are in the midst of two crises at once--one health-related and one economic. I tend to think that the prudent path forward on the health front is that even as we hope for the best, we should continue planning for the worst. If this nasty disease continues to ramp in roughly the same proportions as it has in Italy and Spain, it will overwhelm our hospitals. So I think the social distancing recommendations from the President and from the CDC over the last 4 days are a prudent action. At the same time, we are also in the midst of a genuine economic crisis. Lots of moms and dads are worried that they might be laid off, and lots of businesses are evaluating whether they are going to make payroll and whether they are still going to be in business months down the line. They are scared, and DC needs to act more urgently than we usually do, but just saying we need to act urgently is not a substitute for actually having good ideas and actually advancing good policies. There is a herd mentality around this building right now where a lot of normally smart people are literally saying things like: The most important thing is to be fast, even if the ideas that are being advocated for are not really ready for prime time and can't really withstand the scrutiny of debate. That is a really dumb idea. It is a ready-fire-aim approach. We do indeed need to work fast, but working fast is no substitute for working smart. Again, I agree that this virus and the strategies necessary to contain it are producing some of the worst economic upheavals we have seen in a generation. Further, we need to be preparing for these unexpected economic hardships to last for 6 months or even longer. But that fact is a reason to prepare; it is not a reason to panic. That fact is a reason to debate hard and fast but still to debate what good policy looks like; it is not a reason to allow garbage policies to get by because someone simply says: No, no, no, we have to go faster. You can't ask questions about the policy. Over the next 48 to 72 hours, this body will be making some crucial decisions about somewhere between one and four spending packages. I agree with the President that this is an unprecedented economic situation and that the Federal Government, at the health level, obviously has a fundamentally crucial role to play in helping us get through this pandemic, which recognizes no borders or boundaries; thus, the Federal Government has to spend real money. As the third or fourth most conservative Member of the Senate by voting record, that is not language I use a lot, saying that we are going to have to spend real, significant amounts of money, but that is clearly true in this moment. But saying we should spend real money is not the same as saying we should spend like idiots. Unfortunately, Washington, DC, so far has been handling our responsibilities exactly as a lot of voters fear. Right now, the proposal on the table, which just came over from the House of Representatives, is for Washington, DC, to pull out its checkbook-- which is really your checkbook--and just start firing. If you are an industry with a good lobbying team, you are told to line up at the door of the Treasury Department and get in line because bailout after bailout is probably in the offing. Right now, the plan around here is basically just to start shoveling money out of a helicopter, and the most important debate is whether Democrats or Republicans get to shovel the money first. This is a bad idea, and Washington should know better because 12 years ago something just like this was tried, and the consequences were really significant and lasting. They are still with us. I want to be clear. I am not talking primarily about the total price tag. The price tag matters, but the point I am trying to debate today is whether we are going to spend the American people's money wisely or foolishly, and we are not having a lot of debate about that. We are hearing a lot of people saying that the only important question is whether we can act fast enough. If you act fast but you spend money that is ineffective, you didn't effectively act fast. The Congress 12 years ago shoveled lots and lots of money into supposedly shovel-ready projects which still can't be found today. One trillion dollars in spending, and you can go to your Governor and you can go to your State legislature and go to your business roundtables and you try to find people who know where the $1 trillion of shovel- ready money went--I challenge you, that is not an easy thing to achieve. More than just the spending and the debt, though, it also produced serious backlashes of national political movements on both the right and the left. The Occupy Wall Street movement, some of which became the Bernie Sanders constituency, and the tea party were both spawned out of 2008 and 2009 and are still with us in lots of ways that are not ultimately constructive for our body politic. We don't need a policy where Washington, DC, handpicks winners and losers. There is no one here in this Chamber who is actually competent to do that. We are indeed in a period of extraordinary uncertainty, but no politician actually knows what happens next week, let alone 6 months from now, and humility would require us to admit that a bit more. The proposal currently on the table from Speaker Nancy Pelosi is to blow through a massive amount of money on a policy core that isn't actually well thought out. When you ask hard questions about the bill that has come over from the House, there is nobody who actually defends it as really good, well-thought-out policy. That is why the first version of their bill, which passed so urgently last week at 120 pages, last night required over 90 pages--we are right at 90 pages--of technical corrections. Think about that. Imagine your kid does homework and--you say you wrote a 12-page essay, and after you turn it in, you say that 9 of the 12 pages actually have to be thrown away and rewritten. That is what happened last night in the House of Representatives. They tried to pass a 90-page fix to a 120-page bill that was supposedly really urgent last week. By the way, when you talk to the architects of that legislation in private, when the cameras aren't rolling, and you ask them hard questions about how their policy actually works, everyone starts pointing at everyone else, [[Page S1776]] and a lot of people admit that the bill might actually accelerate layoffs from small businesses. Think about that. The reason this first bill--if it ends up remaining independent rather than being bundled with the other ideas that are coming down the road in the form of industry-specific bailouts--this first bill, which is supposed to slow the pace of layoffs from small business, when you ask questions about it, the architects of the bill will admit to you in private that it might actually accelerate the pace of layoffs from small business. Nonetheless, despite admitting that today's version of the Rube Goldberg policy might have the opposite of its intended effect, the main answer you get is ``We have to go very, very fast.'' This is wildly irresponsible, what is happening here. Once the first couple hundred billion dollars of money is gone, that means there is less money left for the next round of stimulus and action and recovery and relief that are required. But besides money, it also means that there is less public trust left. There are gonna be more rainy days ahead in the coming weeks and months, and there is not a lot of grassroots American trust in the wisdom or the work ethic of this institution. Simply screaming that we should go faster is not a substitute for debating and advocating for the actual policy. We have many politicians pretending right now that they know how to centrally plan rifle-shot bailouts industry by industry. It is not true, and even they don't believe it. This is a game of pretend: Hurry up and look busy. If you are not sure what to do, just spend more of the people's money, but do it faster. That is not good policy. That is not good stewardship of our responsibility. The Senate is supposed to exist to calm down the passions that lead the House to move fast and write policy that is bad enough that a 120-page bill requires 90 pages of technical fixes. The Senate's actual job in our bicameral constitutional structure is to ask hard questions of legislation just like this. Here is the good news: We don't have to mindlessly go down this path again. We can do better than this. We can affirm the policy goal that we do need to help get resources to the people who need them, but we can also make smarter, more responsible, less risky decisions right now that will provide a lifeline to people in need but will also leave room for further action in the future, hopefully, as we know more in the coming days and weeks. So here is an alternate idea: Instead of DC pretending it is omnicompetent, let's admit that a complex situation like what is actually happening in the small business environment in all 50 of our States will actually require differentiated solutions. Let's be sure we are accurately naming the problem here, because I am not talking now about the public health issues, like speeding the development of a coronavirus vaccine, where DC obviously needs to maintain a leading role, but I am talking precisely about the economic problem of the next 90 days. What is that economic problem? The question before us is, How do we minimize the number of layoffs, and how do we minimize the number of small business bankruptcies that are looming across our country? How do we make sure that more families can keep putting bread on the table rather than becoming long-term dependencies on the State? We should be laser-focused on what the question is that we are actually debating in this Chamber this week. That is the question. Over the next 90 days, are there policy steps we can take to minimize the number of bankruptcies and layoffs that are going to affect American families so painfully? Here are some needed truths: The feds don't know the precise answer because there isn't a single precise answer. The answers--plural--are going to vary across our continent-sized Nation of 325 million souls. If we pretend that we have a one-size-fits-all solution for this problem or if we pretend that DC can be fair, going industry by industry with rifle-targeted bailouts, we are going to screw up badly. The lobbyists are going to dominate the day, not the public interests. Again, I am open to spending in this moment, but that is not an excuse for failing to spend well. We need to spend the people's money well, we need to steward our callings with humility, and we need to spend much better than this current House bill does. Let's take the money that is being proposed and let's direct more than half of it to our Governors so they may distribute it to families and small businesses. I trust Pete Ricketts, who is my Governor. I trust Pete Ricketts a heck of a lot more than I trust Nancy Pelosi. Part of it is that Pete and I have more aligned political philosophies, but that is not really the point. The real reason I trust Pete Ricketts at this moment is the same reason why Senator Feinstein would trust Gavin Newsom at the moment, and that is because my Governor is on the ground with his 1.9 million people. He is not in DC looking across a 325-million-person nation as if our problems are undifferentiated and as if the solutions can be one-size-fits-all. That is not going to work. That is going to waste the vast majority of the people's resources. We have 50 different States with 50 different circumstances and needs. Californians have needs that Nebraskans don't in this moment and vice versa. We can get money to the Governors quickly, and they can distribute it in ways that will best help their people. The House's one-size-fits-all approach, this nationalized leave policy in this first bundled bill, is going to cause a lot of people to fall through the cracks. Why is it that different industries and different-sized firms are being treated so radically different? It is because of who was last in the Speaker's office lobbying about the bill as they cobbled together the first 120 pages that needed 90 pages of corrections. The Rube Goldberg bill is going to create a handful of political winners, but it is going to create a whole lot more economic losers. Parts of these relief packages will need to come from DC in targeted ways; I admit that. Part of this is going to need to come from DC, but the idea that all of it can or that all of it should is arrogant. It is wrong, and it will be ineffective. Our Governors know their States and their people. Our Governors know how to build public-private partnerships. Congress doesn't. Our Governors know so much better than we do what their workforce needs were before the coronavirus struck and what their workforce needs are going to be in late Q3 or in Q4 when, hopefully, the economy is humming again. Simply put, our Governors know how to target this money much more efficiently than we do so that much more of that money will make its way to Main Street. Lots of Governors have led well in the past 3 weeks. I mentioned my Governor, Pete Ricketts, and how his strong leadership has been laying the groundwork to help shield our State from some of the worst ravages of this virus. Likewise, I would recognize Governor DeWine from Ohio, who is showing strong leadership on what it looks like to put facts front and center. What we need right now at the State, at the local, and at the Federal levels is not just any action. We need responsible, effective, defensible action. This is not a time for Washington to go on an ``anything goes'' spending spree. It is not an opportunity for Washington's connected insiders to exploit personal relationships to put their pet projects first on things that they wouldn't have been able to get passed if it weren't a time of crisis. We don't have to go down that path. Instead, we can more efficiently and more wisely spend the people's resources. We can give our States and our Governors the lead in making sure that the majority of the money and the majority of the resources get where they are most needed. We can help families and businesses keep afloat during this storm by admitting that 50 laboratories of democracy are going to be more effective than a rifle shot approach from Washington. We can create room for further action, but we can also acknowledge that the particular needs are going to evolve in the coming weeks. We need less instant certainty and more humility in this building. We should not pretend that the only government is the Federal Government. Congress should eat more humble pie. There is a reason why even the least popular Governor in America is more popular than almost everyone who works in this Chamber. There is a reason for that, and the main reason is [[Page S1777]] that while Members of Congress spend lots of our time playing pundit, sadly, Governors actually lead. They manage budgets; they make decisions; they lead departments; and they engage their community in the actual private sector, not just hire lobbyists who work for the private sector. They are physically on the ground with the people they serve. That means they know a thing or two about the businesses in their community. It means they know a thing or two about the industries that are rising and falling in their cities and in their rural areas. They have a kind of decentralized knowledge about this crisis and what is needed at this moment that people in Washington, DC, lack. Cable news is focused on Wall Street, but here is the deal: Main Street is going to be the place where lots of the pain is ultimately shouldered from this crisis, and when Wall Street needs something, Wall Street hires K Street, and Congress is told by K Street what they want, and that is usually what ends up in the bill. When Main Street needs something, they drive to Lincoln; they drive to Indianapolis and Nashville and Columbus and Albany and Sacramento; and the granular understanding of their particular problems is almost always more nuanced than is understood here. That is why, as long as Congress is debating this spending this week, I am going to be fighting to make sure that we give more than half of all this money to our Governors to distribute. They know how to spend this money better than this DC-centric House of Representatives bill. That is the way we can actually get this done and help our people grit through this time of unprecedented economic uncertainty. ____________________
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