Coronavirus

Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, I so agree with the comments that the Senator from Wyoming was just making, and I hear them repeated every day in Tennessee by my constituents.

I thank my colleagues who have asked me this week how Tennessee is doing. You know, we had another terrible storm. It was our third this year. We have had two tornadoes, and we had lots of power outages and damaged trees that were down in Middle Tennessee. The tornadoes, the storms on Sunday evening, and COVID are a lot for anybody to handle, but I think the Senator's point is so well taken.

Wyoming and Tennessee--these are States that are saying: We can do this. We are going to use the resources that are there for us because, yes, we want to get back to work, and we want to get back to normal.

What is normal is a question and the right question for people to be asking because what is it going to look like and how is that daily routine going to be reshaped? How do we give up these worries that we have about health and wellness and safety and protection for ourselves and our families, our employers, our employees, and healthcare workers? All of this goes into the shape of a new routine for the day--the things you worry about, the things you are focused on, about your jobs, about businesses, about the future.

Another point that comes up regularly from Tennesseans was well made by a Wall Street Journal article that ran on Monday, and it was discussing that the U.S. Government would borrow $4\1/2\ trillion this year for this fiscal year. Now, that is something that I think legitimately could be added to the worry list for those of us who are fiscal conservatives, and we are looking at $25 trillion in debt. We are looking at this debt load and thinking about that in relation to our GDP and thinking about the importance of federalism. We are very concerned about this. We are going to have--CBO says our annual deficit is going to be the highest it has been since World War II.

When we think about that, we have to think about the fact that the ``greatest generation'' looked at that, and they said: Let's get in behind this, and let's get that debt down. They were good about that. I think about the parents and relatives and grandparents, and what did they say? If there is a task to be done, let's go do it. That is why they lined up and they fought in World War II, and they reshaped the way our communities worked. They planted victory gardens. They changed their daily routines, and they went to work. They said: Let's get in here, and let's get this job done. They then put their focus on economic growth when they came out of the war, and look at what they accomplished.

So while we think about the economy shrinking and jobless numbers growing and our vulnerable citizens, we have to think about the high price that is being paid there. We also have to think about what it does to our children and our grandchildren because our forebears certainly thought about that for us, and our children and grandchildren deserve no less.

When I am talking with Tennesseans who are stuck at home, and they are watching the news every night and they are listening to what we are saying--they are in on Zoom meetings, and we are communicating with them daily--they have a tendency to say: How did we get here with a situation that is this bad that occurred this quickly? Should we not have seen this coming?

In February, we had some of the best numbers we have ever had economically, and now you look at what has happened in this short transition. And what they will ask is, what kind of breakdown took place in our international order that could have allowed COVID-19 to spread beyond China's borders and into our neighborhoods and our communities?

I have to tell you, they are upset about this. They are angry that lives have been disrupted.

I had a call from a lady who has high school children, and she said: You know, Marsha, I have to tell you, I went to the grocery store, and I looked at where every product was made before I put it in my cart.

The reason she is checking where products are made--she said: I am so angry with China. I am angry with the lies, the deceit, and the lack of information. I am angry that lives have been lost and livelihoods have been lost, and I am angry that my children have missed class days, field days, school sports, graduation, prom, summer camp, and summer jobs. It is a season of their lives that they are not going to recover. It is a loss of life and livelihood.

The order that we had is the reason that Tennesseans are turning to us and they are saying: We expect you to investigate what happened, to review it, to oversee it, and to make certain that our preparation is better and that more forethought is given to how we are going to address this--addressing all of these Federal agencies and making certain that the bureaucracy doesn't get in the way of the decisionmaking.

At this point, we do know that there are a lot of unknowns, but what we do know is this: The Chinese Government--the Chinese Communist Party--the Chinese Government spent the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak destroying testing samples, intimidating doctors, expelling journalists, hiding information, and lying to the world. You know, it is so interesting that they still have not let the scientists from the CDC into that Wuhan virology lab. They still don't want anybody in there. They lied to everybody about how dangerous this was, and they did that on purpose. Think about it--an intentional act of deception, repeated acts by the Chinese Communist Party to hide something that was an outbreak and try to keep it from the world.

This seems inconceivable, that a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council and a former and likely future member of the Human Rights Council would be so careless with the lives and livelihoods of billions of people, but they did it. If you consider their track record, it does start to make sense because China is not a new problem; it is just a newly recognized problem.

I fear America has forgotten the lessons we learned as we watched the Communist dogma burn its way through Eastern Europe, Russia, and Asia, twisting the minds of ambitious men who leveraged political mass murder as a messaging tool, killing tens of millions of innocent people in the process.

During the Cold War, the divide between the Soviet bloc and the West was pretty clear. We could see that alignment with the Soviets would derail our global fight for democracy. We also caught glimpses of Mao's China, where upwards of 30 million people died of starvation and disease directly at the hands of party officials--not an appreciation for the sanctity of life--one of our first principles and tenets.

Today, the Chinese Communist Party is still following that Soviet playbook, and it is time for the world to remember what that means before time runs out. Although Xi Jinping and the CCP have modernized their methods--they are all about cyber, and they are all about technology--here is what we have to remember: Their philosophy and their goals are exactly the same. They want to dominate the world militarily, economically, and politically. They are wanting domination, and they will step over and run over whatever gets in their way.

What we have to do is to remember that China is capable of funneling mass amounts of cash, equipment, and physical support to developing countries. They are doing it all in exchange for loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party's agenda. For example, debt diplomacy schemes--that is their new thing--debt diplomacy schemes have ensnared Sri Lanka and Djibouti and other countries in Africa and Asia. Those countries have in turn opened doors to strategically important ports and waterways and granted access to valuable natural resources. To be clear, these are not aid programs; they are tools of manipulation offered to nations in desperate circumstances.

For nations not in desperate circumstances, Beijing has to work a little harder, but they still are working to get the job done. They count on the promise of cheap labor and production and low cost products to open doors with nations that normally are not going to work with somebody with such an abysmal human rights record as China has.

The world is recalling some very hard lessons right now, but there is a path forward. We must secure our supply chains, and we must begin to return these critical infrastructure supply chains to the United States to make certain that we can bolster ourselves and that we are not completely dependent on China for some items that are essential for us.

The pharmaceutical supply chain is one on which I have focused, with Senator Menendez, with our SAM-C legislation. This week, Senator McSally, Senator Daines, and I introduced the Stop COVID Act to hold China legally liable for the damage caused by the spread of the novel coronavirus. Our colleagues have other pieces of legislation that have the same focused accountability for China and making certain this doesn't happen to us again. I encourage all of my colleagues to look at those.

I also encourage my colleagues to accept that our relationship with China is broken right now and that it was never that great to begin with. But right now, it is broken.

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