Coronavirus

Floor Speech

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I rise today to thank all of my colleagues who worked so hard on the bill that is coming to the floor today, the pandemic relief package.

We know all the top priorities in there--the vaccine distribution-- and I want to thank Senator Schumer and leaders and those on both sides of the aisle who put more funding into that.

I want to thank the group who has worked so hard on this agreement and this negotiation in the Senate for their work, including Senator Manchin and Senator Romney and Senator Warner and Senator Shaheen and Senator Hassan and Senator Durbin, as well as all of their Republican colleagues, Senator Collins and Senator Murkowski, Senator Cassidy, who worked so hard on this original agreement, with many others who joined in as well.

This bill contains such important priorities, including unemployment and help for our hospitals and help for our rural areas--housing, rent, small businesses, unemployment, the direct checks.

I think we all know that there is more work to be done, including next year, including for our cities and our States, but it is so important that we get this done by the end of the year.

I wanted to focus on something that I have worked on for quite a while with Senator Cornyn from Texas. We have done this on a bipartisan basis from the beginning, and it is the Save Our Stages Act.

When we first introduced it in July, we knew that it was going to be a long road, and we also knew that the only way we would get this done is by sticking together as a team and by working with other Members of Congress from red and blue States. And by the end--this bill is included in full in this package--we had 57 Senators who sponsored this bill out of 100, with many more supporting it. We had over 200 House Members.

We worked so hard to make this about America and American music and American theater and American culture.

We all know that you can't go stand in a mosh pit in the middle of a pandemic. These live entertainment venues were among the first businesses to close, and they will almost certainly be among the last to reopen.

This was about, yes, Nashville and New York, but it was just as much about the Fargo Theater or a small, small country music venue in Texas. And while we see the light at the end of tunnel with the vaccines, we know that it will be quite a while before these businesses, which operate on such thin margins as it is, can keep going.

I think we also know the importance of the arts and music, not only as a cultural icon in America but also as an economic driver. It is one of our No. 1 exports, when you combine all of it. And the fact that we were able to stick together with not only the nitty-gritty of this bill and this coalition and actually add partners as we went along is a tribute to all the musicians out there, all the venues, all the lighting operators, all the truckers--everyone who came together and said: We are going to get this done.

I know when Senator Cornyn and I first introduced this, people kind of patted us on the head and said: Oh, this sounds nice. But I think when people started to hear the facts and how much this matters to economies and even small towns, it made a difference. In the end, to quote Minnesota's own Bob Dylan from ``The Times They Are a-Changin,'' he says:

Come senators, congressmen

Please heed the call

Don't stand in the doorway

Don't block the hall

No one blocked the hall.

I want to thank my colleagues, and I want to especially thank Senator Cornyn. We have led many bills together, and we had to go back and forth a lot.

I want to thank Dayna Frank, who is the head of First Avenue in Minnesota, made famous, of course, by Prince.

Prince wouldn't be Prince if not for First Avenue. Everyone in our State, when they think about First Avenue, they think about Prince.

She is the head of the National Venue Association. She called me one night in the beginning of the pandemic and said: I just can't make it through this without some help.

They already received PPP loans, but that is not enough for these venues because of the unique circumstance where they can't partially open. You can't go to a theater right now and sit elbow-to-elbow with your friends and family.

I also want to thank my legislative director, Doug Calidas, who has worked on this from the beginning, including all the last month's late- night negotiations. He did a wonderful job.

I want to thank Senators Schumer and McConnell and Representatives Speaker Pelosi and Leader McCarthy for getting this over the finish line--Senator McConnell for putting it in his original bill and Senator Schumer, who cares so much about this because of all of the great music and acts and everything coming out of New York State. It was certainly very, very helpful--and that would put it mildly--to have Senator Schumer in the room where it happened, where the last negotiations were made.

I also want to thank Senators Shaheen and Collins, who worked on this in the original negotiation; Senators Cardin and Rubio with the Small Business Committee, who made this a priority; and finally, our House authors, our bipartisan House authors out there, Representatives Welch and Williams, for their work.

So how this works--the Small Business Administration will create a new $15 billion grant program to help venues cover 6 months of expenses and make it through this pandemic. We are very hopeful that once the summer comes, we are going to see more and more openings because of the vaccine, because of what I hope will be, with a new administration, an increased emphasis on testing, and that we will see more and more venues able to open.

The grants can be used to cover all the major costs the venues have to pay to stay in business, including rent and mortgage, utilities, employee wages, key benefits, maintenance costs, State and local taxes, payments to contractors, and purchases of protective equipment.

Venues that are at the greatest risk of closing--sadly, we have already lost a number of our venues--will have priority access to the majority of the grant funding. All venues will be able to apply within 4 weeks of the program's launch with the Small Business Administration, but in the first 2 weeks, those venues that have suffered 90 percent revenue loss over the year before will be the first to be able to apply for these grants.

So we in Congress don't want to let the music die, and we don't want that to happen to any of our other places of culture in America either. That is why over the last month or so, we have worked with the museums and with the zoos, and I want to especially thank Senator Schumer for his work on that, as well as Senator Blunt and many others who worked with us--as well as the movie theaters.

We wanted to make sure that if we expanded our coalition, that we didn't hurt the originals, which were these small, small theaters and small music venues across the country. We did not do that, because this new program will be a lifeline for small entertainment venues across the country, such as First Avenue and the Bluestem Amphitheater in Moorehead, MN.

It will also help the millions of Americans who work behind the scenes and who have been sidelined, from the engineers and truckdrivers to the ticket takers and the designers and the spot operators. It will help revive the local economies of neighborhoods and small towns across this Nation.

It is not every day that a coalition sticks together from beginning to end, that they kept with their original purpose, haven't been picked off, haven't gotten into infighting, but this group did it. Maybe it is because so many Americans at home right now cherish music and entertainment and that part of America like they have never done because they are watching things alone. They are listening to concerts by themselves. They are listening to them with their iPhones, or they are listening to them on their computers, and it is not quite the same.

We also know that all of these artists don't exactly get a big boost up by themselves with huge funding when they first start out. So many of them start out at these little venues--a country music band playing at the Bluestem Amphitheater; a little local theater troupe trying out a new play in Lanesboro, MN. They can't do it without these venues.

So today we celebrate the fact that we held together. Not only are we passing this bill as a part of this package, we actually brought in friends, and we brought in partners, and we made it an even bigger deal than it was to begin with.

So as I began by quoting the great Bob Dylan from Minnesota, I will end. He once said:

Well, I sing by night, wander by day.

I'm on the road and it looks like I'm here to stay.

Finally, we are reaching out to this group of employees and these businesses and saying: We want you to be here to stay.

So thank you to Save Our Stages and to all of our colleagues who worked so hard on this, and special thanks to my friend Senator Cornyn. Again, when we did this, we didn't know if we would be able to mount this grassroots effort, but it happened because artists and fans just wouldn't give up. So thank you very much.

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