Senate Legislative Agenda
Floor Speech
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Mr. BRAUN. Mr. President, first of all, I would like to thank you for sparing me not having to be in the seat indefinitely, and I promise I will keep this short.
What a day we have come through. Senator Cramer and I have been here a little bit over a year, and I can't imagine in a little over a year being more filled with making this responsibility as a U.S. Senator worth every effort it took to get here. It finds us in an interesting place.
I am from Main Street America. I spent 37 years building my own company, a company that three of my four kids--along with a great, young executive team--run now, and here we are. We are confronted with coronavirus. Now, in a sequence of H1N1, SARS, MERS, even a threat from Ebola, this looks like it is the one that we have heard about for a long time that could really test the mettle of our country while we are going through it.
We have listened to the experts, and I think that idea of hitting this as hard as we can makes sense. You hear about flattening the curve. Yes, we need to do that. In the process, everything we are doing has now been thrown in front of probably the strongest economy that you could ever imagine. Look how frail it can be when something comes along that you don't understand and that you fear.
Over the next 2 to 3 days, we are going to be wrestling with something that probably is going to be as tough as anything we have confronted as a country. I thought, at first, well, we would get through this, especially if it wasn't going to be a real tough thing to get rid of. That is not the case. This is going to take everything we have. What we are doing this weekend ought to be based upon the commonality that all of us believe we should take care of the hard- working individuals who have been displaced by this and small businesses. We have that nucleus to start from.
Of course, it begs the question: What do you do about other parts of the economy? Well, my feeling is what we do tomorrow is not going to be the last thing we do to make sure we take this on with a full head of steam.
I am getting input from middle America, from my home State, from people whom I really trust their judgment. They are saying, yes, we want to make sure we do everything and throw the kitchen sink at it. We want to make sure that we protect the most vulnerable--the people who have a preexisting condition, mostly elderly--impacted in the State of Washington and other places.
I am increasingly asked the question: Do we want to keep plowing forward, regardless of what the results are? If the economy is starting to show what it is showing, which has so much fear and anxiety built into it, how long can we put up with it? What we are going to do this weekend is the first major effort at restoring confidence in the economy.
I am sure we will come back again soon because, like I said earlier, it is not the end of it. At some point, we need to carefully measure the progress we are making against the cause of it in the first place and make sure that that is working the way we intended it to work, which is to make sure that we take care of the most vulnerable and protect them from the ravages of the coronavirus.
So 10 days, 2 weeks down the road, I think we are going to be at a pivotal point. We are going to see if the early effort has worked. We all pray that it does. We are going to see what our efforts are going to yield and generate here this weekend, and then I want to make sure that, at that pivot point, when we need to look at this again, do we keep doing what we are doing, or do we do what seems to make sense, maybe make some adjustments, maybe focus on a different approach that does not systematically take the patient down: a healthy economy. I think we all want to accomplish the same thing. We are going to start this weekend.
Please, both sides of the aisle, don't quibble and don't bicker about some of the details because this is urgent. The American public expects us to do something. Then, here in another 10 days to 2 weeks, we need to look at it again and make sure we make the right decisions that really are in the long-term interest of tamping down the coronavirus and not killing a very healthy patient--our economy--that now looks like it is hurting.
Thank you.
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