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 pages S1478-S1479 on March 11.
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. Madam President, a year ago, coronavirus cases were beginning to climb on U.S. soil. Shutdown measures were starting to take effect.
Americans have endured one of the strangest and most painful years in living memory. Nearly 2 million Americans have been hospitalized with serious cases of the virus. More than half a million have lost their lives. Millions of students and workers have had their lives completely thrown off course. But these dark times have also spotlighted some of the best of America: heroism, selflessness, ingenuity.
Last March, the night we passed the CARES Act without a single dissenting vote, I said we would see a new generation of American heroes, and so we have. Doctors and nurses and first responders have worked tirelessly to help their fellow Americans. Essential workers kept manning their posts and prevented economic collapse. Neighbors looked out for neighbors, and small businesses shifted gears almost overnight. Children and parents have fought to adapt to extraordinary disruptions, and incredible heroes in lab coats in America and worldwide worked at light speed to decode this new enemy and create lifesaving vaccines in record time.
Today, together, we are standing on the cusp of a new springtime for our country not like anything we have experienced in our lifetimes. More than 95 million vaccine doses have reached American arms; another 2 million every single day. COVID-related deaths have plummeted, now less than half of their high, particularly for the elderly and the vulnerable. Science reaffirms kids can be safely in the classroom right now. States are starting to lift blanket restrictions, freeing citizens and small businesses to follow smart precautions themselves. For weeks, every indicator has suggested our economy is poised to come roaring back, with more job openings for Americans who need work.
None of these trends began on January 20. President Biden and his Democratic government inherited a tide that had already begun to turn toward decisive victory.
In 2020, Congress passed five historic bipartisan bills to save our health system, protect our economic foundations, and fund Operation Warp Speed to find vaccines. Senate Republicans led the bipartisan CARES Act that got our country through the last year.
The American people already built the parade that has been marching toward victory; Democrats just want to sprint in front of the parade and claim credit.
So when 10 Republican Senators went to the White House to suggest working together, the Democrats said: Uh, no. Both the Democratic leader and the White House Chief of Staff now indicate they think President Obama's problem was that he was too bipartisan.
This time, as one journalist put it, the situation was ``Democrats to GOP: Take it or leave it.'' The ``it'' that we are talking about here was a bill that only spent about 1 percent on vaccines and about 9 percent on the entire health fight. The rest of the tab went to things like this: a $350 billion bailout for State and local budgets unrelated to pandemic needs, with strings attached to stop States from cutting taxes on their own citizens down the road--take the money, you don't get to cut taxes; massive Federal school funding spread over several years, without requiring quickly reopening; sweeping new government benefits with no work requirements whatsoever--a time warp to the bad times before bipartisan welfare reform--which Democrats already say they want to make permanent; and agricultural assistance conditioned not on specific financial need but solely on the demographics of the farmer, which some liberal activists are celebrating as
``reparations.'' Only about 20 percent of the spending went to $1,400 direct checks, to try to keep all of the unrelated socialism out of the spotlight.
This wasn't a bill to finish off the pandemic; it was a multitrillion-dollar Trojan horse full of bad, old liberal ideas. President Biden's own staff keep calling this legislation ``the most progressive bill in American history''--hardly the commonsense bipartisanship that the President promised.
So we pause today at the 1-year mark to remember and to mourn, but we also look with great optimism toward the future. Twenty twenty-one is set to be a historic comeback year, not because of the far-left legislation that was passed after the tide had already turned but because of the resilience of the American people.
(Mr. PADILLA assumed the Chair.)
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