The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“CORONAVIRUS” mentioning Mitch McConnell was published in the Senate section on page S1001 on March 3.
Of the 100 senators in 117th Congress, 24 percent were women, and 76 percent were men, according to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
Senators' salaries are historically higher than the median US income.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
CORONAVIRUS
Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, last year, Congress rallied five times around historic bipartisan legislation to meet urgent and unprecedented needs. Our COVID-19 packages reinforced the healthcare frontlines, fueled the sprint for vaccines, and cast lifelines for the workers and small businesses hit hardest by shutdowns.
Together, those bills cost about $4 trillion, but none of those measures passed the House of Representatives with less than a bipartisan supermajority of about 80 percent--completely overwhelming support.
Then, last week, House Democrats rammed through the American Rescue Plan Act on a razor-thin margin of 50.7 percent. The only thing bipartisan about their bill was the opposition to it. Their bill costs about $2 trillion. That is roughly the same size as the entire CARES Act that saved our health system and economy through months of shutdowns last year. Even liberal experts admit this is far out of proportion to what is needed now, with vaccines going into arms and the economy already primed to literally roar back.
Amazingly, Democrats managed to allocate less than 9 percent--9 percent--of their massive bill to the entire healthcare response; 9 percent of the $1.9 trillion related to the healthcare response, and--
listen to this--even less than 1 percent of the $1.9 trillion to the vaccines that will actually finish the fight.
They needed to save the other 91 percent of the borrowed money for a vast catalog of liberal spending with basically no relationship whatsoever to beating COVID-19. For example, they want to send wheelbarrows of cash to State and local bureaucrats to bail out mismanagement from before the pandemic. They are changing the previous bipartisan funding formula in ways that will especially bias the money toward big blue States. This outraged a bipartisan group of Governors, largely from middle America, who went on record this week. There are generous new benefit packages for government employees. There are provisions to let abortion providers drain money from rescue programs that were built to save Main Street small businesses. There is a strange new Acela corridor kickback where they will make Medicare send more money to just New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Delaware.
Just looking at the timeframe for all of their spending belies any notion that this is an urgent rescue plan.
Take the K-12 funding which, contrary to science, Democrats say is a prerequisite for opening schools. Ninety-five percent of that supposedly urgent money would not be spent this fiscal year but, instead, over the next 7 years. Let me say that again. Ninety-five percent of the money for K-12 is not going to be spent this year, but over the next 7 years. That is not my definition of an emergency.
Grants for rural healthcare would be on a slow drip out through fiscal 2024. Agriculture-related funds would trickle out over the next--listen to this--over the next decade. It doesn't sound very urgent to me.
What the American people need are fast-acting plans to get schools reopened now, get laid-off workers back into jobs, and finish the fight against this virus right now. The Democrats have, instead, drawn up a liberal omnibus to fund miscellaneous government spending over the next decade.
We are adding all this money to the national debt, and they have a rescue package with most of the money being spent out far in the future. That is why there was bipartisan opposition over in the House. That is why aspects of the House bill are already dropping like flies before this thing even hits the Senate floor.
A pet project for the San Francisco Bay area is gone. Special upgrades for a bridge connecting New York to Canada, gone. Even CNN had to admit these were ``controversial.'' Senator Sanders' far-left minimum wage policy that would have killed 1.4 million jobs just as we try to recover appears to be gone, too--at least for now.
According to public reports, right now, as we speak, several of our Democratic colleagues are frantically trying to trim back other crazy provisions: the runaway government bailouts, the policies that will keep workers at home when we should be focusing on rehiring.
Just a few days ago, President Biden's Chief of Staff bragged that this smorgasbord of borrowed money will add up to ``the most progressive domestic legislation in a generation.''
So that is what you get when the Democratic leader persuades all of my distinguished friends across the aisle that their first undertaking as Senate committee chairmen should be to outsource all their gavels to the House.
The Senate wrote the CARES Act. In the earliest days of the crisis, this Chamber took the bull by the horns. I personally assembled bipartisan task forces that crafted urgent solutions to help America weather the storm.
This time around, on the substance, the Senate has been largely missing in action. House Democrats are bristling and publicly pushing back if our Senate Democratic colleagues even try to make their mark on this partisan bill in small ways.
So these two radically different processes have generated two radically different pieces of legislation.
The Democrats had a choice. They chose to go it alone, tack to the left, leave families' top priorities on the cutting-room floor
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