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.
“Nominations (Executive Session)” mentioning Mitch McConnell was published in the Senate section on pages S1412-S1413 on March 9.
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:
Nominations
Madam President, on a different matter, this week, the Senate is set to consider more of President Biden's nominations. I have consistently said that the President should have latitude to staff their administration with people of their choosing so long as they nominate qualified and mainstream individuals. That is why I and many other Republicans have supported many of the President's mainstream nominees.
Secretaries Austin and Vilsack were each confirmed with more than 90 votes; Secretaries Raimondo, Yellen, and Buttigieg with more than 80. Senator Blinken got 78 votes, including mine. Secretaries Cardona and Granholm each got more than 60 votes. Even with the time spent on impeachment, half of the nominees I just mentioned were confirmed faster than President Trump's nominees to the same spots, and most of them received a more bipartisan margin now than 4 years ago. So this administration is receiving perfectly fair treatment from the Senate. Frankly, the President and his team must be thrilled that Senate Republicans are proving to be more fair and more principled on personnel matters than the Democratic minority's behavior 4 years ago.
But the fact remains that millions and millions of Americans elected 50 Republican Senators--an even split--to stand against policies and personnel who lean too far to the left. That is why many of us voted against confirming Secretary Mayorkas, who stood idly by while a major crisis exploded on the border in just his first several weeks. Rather than confront the problem, he absurdly claims that a record number of unaccompanied children in custody, overflowing shelters, and catch-and-
release policies during a pandemic do not actually constitute a
``crisis'' at all.
Xavier Becerra, the partisan California attorney general with no significant healthcare experience, whom the President has nominated to run Health and Human Services during COVID-19, could not even get one Republican vote to get out of committee.
So Republicans will continue to distinguish between qualified, mainstream people and nominees who are way outside the mainstream.
I have already announced I will support Judge Merrick Garland, whose nomination to be Attorney General we will vote to advance later today, but we will continue to fight hard against people who are the wrong choices for key positions. We are going to shine a bright spotlight on anyone who seems more focused on far-left ideology than serving all of the American people
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The assistant majority leader.
American Rescue Plan Act of 2021
Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I had a press conference this Sunday back home in Illinois to talk about what the American Rescue Plan means to our State. It is dramatic. Dramatic.
Millions of dollars will be coming to our State to buy vaccines. I can tell you, all across Illinois, people are asking: When is it my turn? When do I get my chance? And we want to make sure they get that chance sooner rather than later.
Think about what President Biden inherited just a few weeks ago. Surely they had found some vaccines--excellent vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna--approved by then, but he came to the White House to find that there was no plan to administer those vaccines across the Nation.
Vaccine is important, but it is of little value if it is not in the arms of Americans. So he set out to establish a standard that we would be distributing this vaccine across the United States as quickly as possible and the mechanism, the infrastructure to make certain that it was administered by professionals who know what they are doing. That is quite an undertaking. It is the largest vaccination in the history of our Nation. But President Biden said he needed help to do it--not just money for the vaccine but money for testing, money for the genomic sequencing necessary to detect variants that might be emerging in the United States. That was a major element of the bill that passed this Senate last Saturday.
He also put money in there that had already been promised to the American people. Remember when President Trump said $2,000 for every American? We agreed on a bipartisan basis. The first downpayment was last December, $600, and the remainder, $1,400, was included in the bill that passed on Saturday.
I have yet to hear a Republican Senator come to this floor and criticize that sum of money. All of them--I should say most of them have publicly supported it, and others say little or nothing about it, but no one is saying that it shouldn't be given as a result of the promise made. We kept that promise. That was part of what we were doing.
We also had a responsibility to millions of Americans who are still collecting unemployment. As of March 14, they were going to lose their opportunity to continue that unemployment check.
There were arguments made on the floor here that these were just lazy people and that if you give them an unemployment check, they will just continue to be lazy and won't go back to work. I don't buy that. I don't believe it. Are some lazy? Well, possibly. I think the vast majority of these people are desperate. They are desperate because they have been laid off or lost their jobs and they need to keep their families together.
Unemployment benefits do that, and they also give fuel to the economy to recover. We were told that by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and others--to put enough stimulus back in this economy so we can come out of it strong sooner rather than later. I believe that. Yet people like the Republican Senator from Ohio came to the floor talking about the recovery underway and we don't really need to do as much as President Biden had asked for. I disagree.
All across the board, the bill that we passed, whether it is money for schools or money for hospitals or money for clinics or money for administering this vaccine, was money that will be well spent in the State of Illinois and all across the United States.
Now what troubles me is this: Last year, we had two major bills for COVID relief. They talk about five. There were two major bills. The first was in March, the CARES Act that was worth $2 trillion. That bill passed the Senate after it had been engineered by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin of the Trump administration. It passed the Senate with every Senator voting yes, 96 to nothing. Every Democratic Senator voted for it.
Then came the followup bill in December, some $900 billion for more COVID relief, for a temporary, first-quarter-of-this-year fix. When you look at the final rollcall there, it was 92 to 6. All six ``no'' votes were Republicans. Every Democrat who voted, voted for it--again, a Trump proposal that we supported on the Democratic side.
So then the tables turned on January 20, and a new President came to town. Joe Biden said: Let me finish this and do it effectively. Give me an American Rescue Plan.
How many Republican Senators stood up and said: Well, since the Democrats, in the spirit of responding to this pandemic, came around and supported the Trump plans last year, we will do the same this year. The number--zero. Not one Republican Senator supported the bill that passed on Saturday. We passed it with 50 Democratic votes. That is what it took, with one Republican Senator being missing. But what a disappointment that is, to think that this pandemic and the economic crisis that followed was addressed on a bipartisan basis with every Democratic vote in the major legislation last year, and this year, under President Biden, we couldn't get one Republican Senator to join us in that effort. It is a disappointment, but I hope it isn't a portent of things to come. We have a lot to do, and we need to do it together on a bipartisan basis. The American people are going to count on us to do it.
I also might say a word about the nominations that Senator McConnell referred to earlier. It is true that some of these nominees are getting votes that indicate a strong majority in support, and that does evidence Republican cooperation, and I want to thank them for joining us in that bipartisan spirit. But it evidences something else as well. These are good nominees. These are good men and women who can serve this country effectively. Given the chance, they will, and the votes that have been cast in support of them indicate that as well.
I won't go into the experience 4 years ago with the Trump nominees, but many of them had troubled records, and some of them didn't even file the necessary disclosures before their names were submitted to us for consideration. So there are a lot of things that have changed in the 4-year period of time. Now we have a chance to approve a team for President Biden and to fill out his national security team.
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