Unanimous Consent Request--S. 3685

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Because a lot of my colleagues have been so thoughtful, I will have some brief remarks, and then I would ask unanimous consent that Senator Cortez Masto could follow me because she is facing a tight schedule as well. I know all of my colleagues are.

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Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, I join my colleagues this afternoon in appreciation of Senator Brown, who has been relentless--absolutely relentless--in prosecuting this cause of trying to get a fair shake for millions of Americans who are walking on an economic tightrope. Every single month, they balance the food bill against the rent bill against the energy bill, and Senator Brown--whether it is supercharged unemployment benefits, whether it is housing, whether it is taking on the big pharmaceutical companies--is there again and again and again to stand up for people who don't have power and don't have clout, and I want to thank him especially for giving us this opportunity to focus on the avalanche of evictions that I believe will be headed in our direction in weeks if the Senate doesn't act.

Yesterday, Dr. Fauci talked about soon possibly seeing as many as 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day. You simply cannot have a healthy economy in a country suffering from mass illness and death.

There are already tens of millions of Americans out of work as a result of a pandemic that is only continuing to spread, and it has hit the whole affordability of rent for millions of Americans like a powerful storm.

According to the Census Bureau, 40 percent of Black and Latino renters are worried they will not be able to make the rent this summer due to the pandemic. That in and of itself is an outrage and an injustice.

My question for our Republican colleagues today involves this frightening day at the beginning of the month--the frightening day when families sit around a kitchen table, all across the country, and you can see the anguish in their faces when you talk to them because, around that kitchen table, they are saying to themselves: What am I going to spend our scarce dollars on this month? Is it going to be the rent? Is it going to be groceries? What about that big pile of medical bills that is off in the corner that we have to pay?

It is July 1, and the rent is due. Our question for our Republican colleagues is, What is your plan?

Senator Brown has been leading us every day--day in, day out--with a set of sensible policies that respond to what those families are saying around their kitchen tables. We fought for the moratorium on evictions that was included in the CARES Act, but it goes poof in a few weeks.

Already this week my Republican colleagues have blocked funding for State and local governments that could have been used to help people who are walking that economic tightrope.

This morning, Leader Schumer and I laid out a plan that I think is a path to a dependable safety net in America and, specifically, an extension of supercharged unemployment benefits, which ties the benefit to economic conditions on the ground. It will be a financial lifeline for millions and millions of people. Republicans have been opposed to that. Those benefits are going to expire in a matter of weeks, and as I said to colleagues: Better know what you are going to be looking at when you go home in August if there hasn't been action on our legislation to make sure that there are supercharged unemployment benefits so that people can pay the rent and buy groceries.

If they are home all August long, in the heat with families, and they are going to have nowhere to turn in terms of paying for a roof over their heads and groceries, this is going to be a long, long, hot summer that will never be forgotten.

So let's be clear what is at stake. Long before the pandemic hit, housing cost too much. Homelessness was way too common, and, in my view, the rate of homelessness among children is a true national scandal.

In the wealthiest Nation on Earth, no child should be without a home. But even before the COVID crisis, 1.5 million children were experiencing homelessness--1.5 million youngsters living outside, living in cars, sleeping on floors, sleeping on the ground.

Colleagues, in my home State, they have said that school buses have had to go to the parks. They have had to go to the parks to pick up kids who are living outside with their families.

It rains once in a while in Oregon. It is cold in Oregon. And to think that kids in the richest country on Earth are spending the night in the parks and the school buses have to come and get them while we have huge tax cuts for those who are powerful and have lobbyists shows that things are really out of whack.

What I describe as it relates to those kids living in the parks-- those kinds of conditions exist for youngsters all over America, and that was before the joblessness crisis hit and threw so many more working families into economic hardship.

If the Senate doesn't step up to help families stay in their homes, it is going to get much, much worse because there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of kids facing this recipe for disaster. They are out of school. They are isolated, and they are more exposed to neglect and abuse. I am so pleased that my friend from Nevada has been talking about those families and talking about those kids.

They are hungry. Their families are facing the threat of eviction. If the Senate just sits back and allows these children to fall into homelessness, they may never have a chance to get ahead.

So what it comes down to is that the Senate has an obligation to help, and Senator Brown is on target in saying that this is the time to pass his Emergency Rental Assistance Act. I am with him. I think we have a lot of colleagues here in the queue because they, too, want to speak up for the radical idea--what a radical proposition--that in the richest country on Earth, the vulnerable ought to have a roof over their head.

Senator Brown's proposal is a vital step forward. I think we all agree that much more needs to be done. I am very interested in the proposal I call the DASH Act, the Decent, Affordable and Safe Housing for All Act. I hope we will be able to get serious about that in 2021.

The step to take today is to pass Senator Brown's bill, and I look forward to being back with our colleagues day in, day out, focusing on this crisis and making sure that nobody thinks we are going to skip away until the Republicans act.

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Stabenow, my seatmate on the Senate Finance Committee. We are a bit more socially distant now, but we still have spent this time plotting and thinking and trying to imagine a future that provides the kinds of priorities that we have been talking about today.

Senator Stabenow's reports particularly--these wonderful reports that document the cost of inaction--I have almost made them a reference tool on my desk so, when I have to look at a particular area, I can turn to one of those Stabenow reports. They are always understandable, always cutting right to the heart of the issue, which is this: How are you going to give the opportunity for everybody in America to get ahead-- not just the people at the top but everybody in America the chance to get ahead?

I am not going to take but a few minutes. I do want to note that I believe that Oregon is the only State to have produced 100 percent of its U.S. Senators on behalf of the cause tonight. This is something Senator Merkley and I enjoy doing when there is an opportunity to speak for justice.

I want to reflect for a minute on how the day started, because I guess it was almost 12 hours ago our Democratic leader, Senator Schumer, stood right there; I stood where I am; and he outlined the Schumer-Wyden proposal for the next steps on dealing with this crushing unemployment we have in our country--30 million people.

The number is almost so large that the experts can't get their arms around exactly how many people are unemployed, but what we know is that every week it goes up far more than that kind of similar period during the great recession.

We talked about what is going to happen July 31. July 31, if the Senate does not act, we are going to have a tsunami of evictions. We are going to have families, just as Senator Stabenow said, basically sitting in their living rooms, sitting in their kitchens, and trying to figure out how they are going to make ends meet that month.

Without supercharged unemployment, without the SNAP benefits that Senator Stabenow is talking about, without the help Senator Brown is talking about with respect to housing and evictions, there are a lot of people who are just going to fall between the cracks.

I thought, it being 12 hours since we began this, that I might just connect the dots for a few minutes.

In the face of this historic public health emergency, we know that millions of Americans have their health on the line, and because Donald Trump has failed to get the COVID-19 virus under control, we have now got jobs on the line. Now many people are being forced to choose between feeding their child or paying the rent to keep a roof over their head.

So you have housing, you have healthcare, you have unemployment, and we are trying very hard to be creative. I know, for my colleague from Michigan, hardly a day goes by when she doesn't talk to me about the benefit of Work Share, a creative way to make unemployment dollars stretch. By the way, Senator Merkley talks about it almost as much as my friend from Michigan because he feels very strongly about it.

So as we connect the dots, as we have over the last 12 hours, and we talk about housing and healthcare and unemployment, I also want people to understand that those challenges were serious last week and the week before.

We ought to put in context what we heard yesterday from Tony Fauci, who said that the trajectory as of right now is one where our country may possibly see 100,000 new cases a day.

So let's picture what that means for the SNAP program and how hard Senator Stabenow's work is going to be, because we have heard Chairman Roberts--and you all have worked very well--and the like, and hopefully we can get that worked out because I don't even want to begin to imagine how much hunger and unemployment and housing challenges we are going to face with 100,000 new cases a day.

So the work that Senator Stabenow is doing is urgent business. It really also brings us back to this: How can it be, in a country as strong and as good as ours, that we have all these kids going to bed hungry at night?

In our home State--the State Senator Merkley and I have the privilege to represent--one out of every four Oregonians worries about putting food on the table. Our Oregon Food Bank, run by the inimitable Susannah Morgan, is doing a fabulous job. But the fact is--and I was really struck by this--the Oregon Food Bank has told my office that demand for emergency food has doubled in Oregon over the past 2 months at Oregon Food Bank's five branches.

Recently, I was home. Whenever Senator Merkley and I are home, we try to get out and talk to a variety of community groups. I was helping distribute food baskets. I was struck because we were all being socially distant. They were handing me the bags, and I was putting them in the back of the cart. I got a chance to have a little bit of a conversation with those people. The cars were backed up for blocks and blocks on the east side of our community, where Senator Merkley and I both live.

There were people who had not faced this kind of challenge before. You looked at them, and they looked at you, and you could see in their faces that they never expected this, particularly the seniors.

My colleague has heard all the Gray Panthers stories. Senator Merkley heard them 50 times; you only heard them 25 times. But a lot of those seniors going through in their cars, it was clear, also, that was the big outing for the day. They didn't get really dressed up, but kind of, and the car was perfectly clean. They came through, and they wanted to visit. But you knew that, without that food, they wouldn't have a chance to make it through the day.

What this comes down to is what Senator Stabenow is basically doing, is being in the Tikkun Olam business. That is a phrase Jews often use; it is about perfecting the world. It is about the moral obligation we have in America to do everything within our power to make sure that kids and families do not go hungry. Susannah Morgan was real clear about the things she wanted Senator Merkley and I to talk about on the floor of the Senate and make sure they got out. She wants to make sure that people can get assistance through a regular EBT card.

The Trump administration, of course, has pushed to impose strenuous work requirements, which don't make any sense--particularly in a public health crisis--in workplaces and can be dangerous. We want to expand ways to get food to SNAP participants, like home delivery, curbside pickup. We want to extend what has come to be known as the pandemic EBT through the summer and any future school closures.

This is so important because, even before the pandemic, I often would go to various kinds of programs run by community groups, and they would be serving a lunch. I would shoot baskets with kids for a bit. I would see the kids drift away, and they would take at least two lunches--at least two. I would go and visit. It was clear that they were just ravenous; they were incredibly hungry. This was pre-COVID. I would ask: What did you have to eat since you were here yesterday to shoot baskets with a Senator?

They would look at you and say: Well, I had a Milky Way.

That is what we are dealing with in America right now. What Senator Stabenow is doing with these programs is so incredibly important. When we have our priorities straight, kids who are eligible for free or reduced-cost meals would be able to get that food. I know that my colleague from Michigan has worked hard to make sure that those meals include more fresh fruits and vegetables. I heard her talk about it. She is trying to reach out to so many communities where often--and Senator Klobuchar talked about it--it is kind of a food desert. If you don't have the program Senator Klobuchar is working for, you are just going to have a lot of people like those kids I met going hungry.

I am going to close with one last thought that is important to us in our part of the country. The reality is that, for many years, none of this was at all partisan. We have all heard about Bob Dole and George McGovern and the history books, and they made their common cause with respect to agriculture, and they would round up urban legislators. We read about that, various historical figures from the East, they weren't partisan.

In our part of the world, when we talk about the practical, commonsense ideas that Senator Stabenow is offering for feeding hungry people, we just call them the Oregon Way. People always ask: Well, where is this Oregon Way, Ron? Where is this thing? Is it on the top of the capitol dome or Pioneer Square in Portland? I say: No, it is what we have tried to do for years.

I want to thank Senator Stabenow for bringing heart and a pragmatic approach to this. We saw how you just reached out to Senator Roberts. By the way, I am on the Intelligence Committee. I am not going to give out anything classified, but Senator Roberts walked by, and he said: We are going to get this worked out. We are going to figure this out.

I am going to end on a little bit of an upbeat note because that happened maybe only half an hour ago, and having watched my seatmate in action with Chairman Roberts often pull together agreements where nobody thought an agreement was possible--no pressure, don't feel like we are singling you out, but just know that a lot of us are going to be your allies in this fight because it is a fight for fairness, it is a fight for kids, it is a fight for families that are hurting, and it is a fight for an America where everybody gets a chance to get ahead.

Thank you for doing that

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