Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. THUNE. Madam President, the minority leader just got up and attacked the Senate for not doing anything and then proceeded to announce that we are going to be voting today on the Director of National Intelligence. It seems like a pretty important position--the person who is in charge of all the intelligence activities that we conduct around the world to make sure that we keep our country safe.

So if the Senate is here and not doing anything, it seems like a real contradiction to suggest that we are actually going to vote today on a position that is important to America's national security interests.

It is just one of many that we are going to be voting on and have been voting on over the past several weeks.

The other thing the Democrat leader forgot to acknowledge is that last week we passed reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a piece of legislation that is also important to national security, that authorizes and funds all our intelligence activities and also included reforms--reforms that many in this body on both sides of the aisle wanted to see adopted. That was an important piece of legislation and one that I think has tremendous consequences--I would add grave consequences--for the United States of America and our national security interests.

The Senate has also been very involved--I would suspect maybe to the Democratic leader's chagrin--in examining and looking at all the coronavirus legislation that we have already passed and the impact it is having and whether it is being effective and where we need to do more and where we need to fix things or refine or tweak things in a way to make those programs that we funded and authorized work better.

But to suggest that the Senate hasn't done anything on the coronavirus--really? Really? My gosh, we passed four bills--four bills--totaling almost $3 trillion through the U.S. Senate, through the House of Representatives, on the President's desk, and signed into law--$3 trillion, four pieces of legislation, and it was done in a bipartisan way. Democrats and Republicans cooperated because it is important to our country to make sure that we are responding to an enormous crisis, an extraordinary crisis that required an extraordinary response, and the response, I would argue, has been extraordinary.

Never in my lifetime or certainly my time in the Senate--or, for that matter, I would argue anybody else's time in the Senate--has the U.S. Senate done anything of that scale, scope, or consequence. And in many of those programs that we authorized and funded, those four pieces of legislation which passed as recently as a couple of months ago, the dollars are still getting out there. They are in the pipeline. They are going out to State and local governments. They are going out to healthcare providers, hospitals, nursing homes. They are going out to small businesses. They are going out to workers, employees, people who have been unemployed through the unemployment insurance program. There are a lot of dollars in the pipeline, a lot of resources that have been expended by the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, and signed into law by the President.

So it seems logical, I would think, for us, as stewards of the tax dollars, as representatives of the people of this country, as policymakers, to make sure that the policies we are putting into place are having the desired effect and are actually working.

So what has the Senate been doing for the past 3 weeks? Well, exactly that--taking a look on a committee-by-committee basis at whether some of the things we have already done are being effective.

The Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee had in the head of the CDC, the head of the NIH--two critical agencies when it comes to fighting the health emergency of this country--to determine and to ask them questions about what is working, what is not working, what have we done, what should we be doing differently, what can we do.

That was a hearing the Health Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee had last week, widely participated in by Members on both sides of the aisle.

I sit on the Senate Commerce Committee. We have had several hearings. We had a markup yesterday. We marked up 14 bills yesterday, but we also have been looking at the impact of coronavirus legislation on those constituencies that are under the jurisdiction of the Senate Commerce Committee, one of which is the airline industry. We had a hearing examining the impact of the coronavirus on aviation, the airline industry in this country, and on things that we have done to help assist and support the airline industry in this country. That was another thing that the Commerce Committee did.

Then, more recently than that, we had a hearing on broadband, connectivity, and the way in which people, through the coronavirus, are able to stay connected, the way business is conducted, and actually, frankly, for that matter, the way government is conducted because, obviously, we are doing a lot of things through connectivity as well.

We looked at what is working, what is not working, and are there areas, in terms of making sure that parts of the country that don't have high-speed internet services and that don't have broadband services could be better connected, and is that something that ought to be a part of any future legislation that we look at.

This week, the Banking Committee had the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and had the Secretary of the Treasury in front of that committee to ask them questions about what is happening in the financial services industry and what is the effect of all the money that we spent, that we put out the door, how is that working out there, and, again, what can we be doing differently, how can we improve, and how can we do this better as we look to the future.

Those are just three committees, off the top of my head, not to mention the fact that the Banking Committee is also reporting out the nominee to be the inspector general for the pandemic--a very important position, I might add. So they have been very active and very busy doing oversight work with respect to this pandemic.

What the Democratic leader just said is not true. It is not true; it is not accurate; and, frankly, I would think, in the eyes of the American people, it is illogical to say that we have spent $3 trillion and we wouldn't want to take a look to see how that $3 trillion is being spent and whether it is being effective and whether it is being efficient and then look at where do we need to do more before we rush headlong in there and just push another $3 trillion out the door. I think that is a rational way of looking at things. I think most of the American people would accept and believe that these are--this is what we were elected to do. They want to make sure we are taking their tax dollars and spending them as wisely and well as possible and in an efficient and effective way.

By the way, just as a reminder to my colleagues, every dollar--every dollar that we spend is borrowed from our children and grandchildren. This doesn't just magically appear out of thin air. We are borrowing money. Now, granted, it is money we needed to borrow, particularly with what we have already done. Everybody acknowledges we had a crisis. We had to put out the fire, and we have been doing that.

Every dollar, prospectively, every dollar we have already spent is a borrowed dollar, borrowed from future generations of Americans, and they are dollars that someday we are going to have to repay. Wouldn't it be prudent, wouldn't it be logical, and wouldn't it be rational for this body, the custodians, the stewards of the American people's tax dollars, to take a hard look at what is working and what is not working before rushing headlong into spending another $3 trillion--which the Democratic leader got up here and lauded and applauded the House of Representatives for blowing into town for 24 hours last Friday, cobbling together an ideological wish list.

Now, granted, there are some things in there that are probably good ideas, and may be things that, in the end, could end up in a piece of legislation, but it didn't get a single Republican vote, and it didn't have a single consultation with Republicans in the House of Representatives about how to put it together. Do you know what? In the end, they couldn't keep all the Democrats. There were 14 Democrats who voted against that in the House of Representatives. There was not a single Republican, which makes sense, if you are Republican. You never get asked. You are never at the table. You have no input whatsoever.

They come in and put this thing together--1,800 pages, $3 trillion-- and what does it have in it? Crazy stuff. Crazy stuff like studies-- studies as to whether there is diversity and inclusion in the marketing of marijuana. There are 68 references in the House bill to cannabis. There are 68 references. There are only 52 references to jobs, which is what I would think the American people are a lot more concerned about. The House of Representatives, evidently, waited, and, in the balance, thought: Well, my gosh, studies on the diversity and inclusiveness of the marketing of cannabis was more important and weighed more heavily on the scale than the jobs that have been lost to the American people. That is what it looks like.

I mean, they threw everything in there. They threw in a tax cut for millionaires and billionaires. These guys get up here every single day and talk about Republicans, you know, helping out millionaires and billionaires, and what did the House bill have in it? A tax cut for millionaires and billionaires. Now, 56 percent of the tax cut proceeds will go to the 1 percent top wage earners in America. Just think about that. Does that make sense? Does that make sense when you are fighting a pandemic? Probably not. They actually have tax increases on small businesses. No big surprise there. Tax increases are always something they are quick to do.

I just had to take issue with what the Democratic leader was down here saying and his characterization of what is going on here. This place, when you are responding to a crisis, needs to act in a bipartisan and a constructive way, not in a partisan, ideological way, and I would also think in a thoughtful way, giving a lot of consideration to what we are doing here with those borrowed dollars, borrowed from our kids and grandkids, and are we making the best use of them.

That, to me, seems like maybe the great divide here and the great debate that we have, not only in this but a lot of other issues. It just seems like the natural, instinctive solution, from my friends on the other side of the aisle, is we can just solve this by throwing a lot of money out there. I have to tell you, I don't think that is the way the American people view it because they are sitting down and making hard decisions right now about how to take care of their families and how to get through this economic crisis. I would think the decisions they are making are along the same lines of the decisions we ought to be making; that is, how are we going to spend our dollars wisely and well? How are we going to be efficient and effective? This isn't our money. This is the American people's money. This is a crisis that needs a response. We have responded in a massive way relative to anything that has happened probably in history, for sure in history--$2 trillion, $3 trillion. I mean, I can't think of a single time--when we pass annual appropriations bills, they never get up to that level. We are talking about dollars on a scale like nothing we have ever seen before because that is what was required.

This institution demonstrated that notwithstanding our differences, we could work together in a constructive way and a bipartisan way to do what was necessary to deliver for the American people, and we will do what is necessary to get the American people through this crisis. Please, please, can we do that in a thoughtful, constructive, and bipartisan way? Can we do that in a way that says: Wow. Let's actually sit down and think about what makes the most sense here. Let's see what is out there and what has actually worked.

The Paycheck Protection Program, arguably, has worked really well. We put $660 billion into that particular program, and I think it has gotten pretty big dividends and pretty big results. A lot of businesses are still functioning and still operating and a lot of workers are still working. That was what that was all about, which was to keep those jobs and keep those workers working.

Now, there have been some hiccups, and there have been some things that need to be fixed. We ought to look at what we can do to refine it and make it work better and make it work more efficiently. The same thing is true for the dollars that go out to State and local governments. We have $150 billion in the pipeline that have gone out to State and local governments, many of which, I might add, are probably going to need help, particularly with revenue replacement. There are a lot of dollars in the pipeline out already, in addition to the $150 billion that we have done for State and local governments that went out in previous versions, in previous legislation. Of the four bills that we passed, the total sum of dollars that have gone to State governments is about $500 billion, or half a trillion dollars.

It is not just $150 billion that we put out. A lot of that is still in the pipeline. A lot of it--before we put more out there and before we say, oh, let's put another trillion out there, which is what the House is proposing, maybe we ought to look at what the need is. Maybe we ought to find out what the revenue loss actually is because those numbers are just coming in.

This thing really hit us hard a couple of months ago, so the real impact of this is going to be felt April, May, and into the summer. But as things start to open up again, hopefully, we will gradually climb out of this, and those numbers will start to improve. May those horrible unemployment numbers and those horrible revenue numbers on the State level, may those start to come--may we start to see the economy get going back in a more normal direction.

Before we rush out there with another several trillion--and who knows at what point you hit the wall when it comes to borrowing? I mean, we think that the Federal Reserve thinks it has lots of levers and they can leverage their balance sheet and they can still do things, and they think that, fiscally, we have some headroom that we can maneuver within, but if you think about this, before this all started, our debt- to-GDP ratio was 79 percent--79 percent. You know what, for 2020, our debt-to-GDP ratio is going to be? And that doesn't include anything that we do from here on. It just captures what has already been done. Our debt-to-GDP ratio will be 101--1 to 1. That was always the level when we saw the Greeces of the world and all these countries that were just completely in this downward spiral, this quagmire of debt. That was always the metric, 1 to 1, 100 percent debt to GDP. That is the breakpoint. That is when you start entering into that really dangerous territory.

Well, imagine if we add another $3 trillion on top of that. The $3 trillion that we have already done, taken the debt to GDP from 79 percent to 101 percent, is the biggest increase--the biggest increase in debt to GDP that we have seen since 1943 when we were powering up for World War II.

Now, granted, this is like a war. This is a fight that we have to win, and we need to do whatever it takes to win it, but let's do it in a smart way, in a thoughtful way, and in a way that gives consideration to the future generations whose liability everything that we spend today will become, because everything that we do is borrowed money, and we have to remember that.

I came down here to talk about the internet, and I guess it is a speech I can save for another day. I was going to talk about China and the things that we need to be doing with China when it comes to protecting our cyber security, but I see my colleague from Illinois here is waiting to speak. I just thought it was important that we take a moment and pause and think about where we are and what we have done, and as we think about what we are going to do next, make sure we are doing it in a thoughtful, smart, conscientious, right way and efficient and effective way on behalf of the American people and the American taxpayer.

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Mr. THUNE. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Alexander), the Senator from North Carolina (Mr. Burr), the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski), and the Senator from South Dakota (Mr. Rounds).

Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Alexander) would have voted ``yea.''

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