Schumer Floor Remarks Ahead Of Meeting With New Postmaster General And On The Need To Pass A Coronavirus Relief Bill That Meets The Needs Of The American People
Washington, D.C.—Senate
Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor ahead of
a meeting with Postmaster General DeJoy regarding the importance of securing
funds for the Post Office amid nationwide reports of delays. Senator Schumer
also spoke regarding the need to pass a COVID-relief bill that meets the real
and urgent needs of the American people. Below
are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:
Negotiations on the next round of
COVID-relief continued yesterday and will continue again today. Speaker Pelosi
and I are making progress with the White House but we remain far apart on a
number of issues.
As I mentioned yesterday, the
fundamental disagreement between our two parties is the scope and severity of
the problem. This is the greatest economic crisis America has faced in 75
years, the greatest health crisis in 100. There must be a relief package
commensurate with the size of this historic challenge.
A skinny package—a package that
doesn't solve so many of the problems America faces—would hurt the American
people, and we cannot have it. But our Republican friends are wedded,
ideologically, to the idea that government shouldn’t take forceful action; that
we should leave the welfare of the American people to the whims of the private
sector. It just doesn’t work like that, especially in a time of national
emergency. The private sector cannot do it.
So while we have started to generate
some forward momentum, we need our partners in the White House to go much
further on a number of issues. Let alone the Republican Senate, where 20 or so
Republicans—by the Majority Leader's admission—don't want to do anything.
One example: the administration has finally
come around to the view that we should extend the moratorium on evictions, but
they continue to refuse to provide actual assistance to renters themselves.
What good does that do? We can prevent Americans from being kicked out of their
apartments for another few months, but if they can’t pay the rent, they’ll be
right back at square one when the moratorium expires, with even more unpaid
bills piled up. Extending the moratorium only solves one half of the problem.
Republicans continue to stonewall support
for state, local, and tribal governments, who have already shed more than a
million public service jobs this year and will continue to lay off teachers,
and firefighters, and more if Congress does nothing. In the early days of the
crisis, state and local governments fought this disease basically on their own.
The Trump Administration couldn’t be bothered to coordinate a national response
or supply them with the necessary resources. And now Leader McConnell and
others on the Republican side say our states should just go bankrupt.
They put zero into their proposal for
state and local. I'd like Republican Senators to go home and tell their
governors, tell their mayors, tell their county executives, we want zero for
you. That’s what our leader is for. Well, it’s not acceptable.
On unemployment insurance, a few
Senate Republicans have belatedly accepted the view that we should extend the
enhanced benefit at $600 for an extended period of time, as Democrats have
proposed and voted for in the House. Of course many Senate Republicans, most
Senate Republicans, still object to that, but at least a few have come around.
At the moment, however, the White House is not there. And we are not going to
strike a deal unless we extend the enhanced unemployment benefits which have
kept nearly 12 million Americans out of poverty.
The same goes for health care:
testing and tracing. How is it that everyone in the White House can get tested,
everyone in the NFL can get tested, but average Americans still cannot access
tests easily or get results back fast enough? More than seven months into this
crisis, this administration does not have the adequate capacity for testing and
contact tracing. It is a shocking failure on the part of the Trump
Administration and the Republican Senators. So Democrats are insistent that we
provide enough resources to finally slow the spread and defeat this disease—the
single most important thing to our recovery.
The American people know that the
Trump administration and the Republican adherents in the Senate are to blame
for this huge failure in testing and tracing. They demand we act and act fully
now—not with some half-baked, poorly funded plan that won't do the job, which
is where the administration seems to be at right now.
And Democrats are insistent that
every American should be able to vote this November, safely and confidently, in
person or by mail. COVID has affected how we will vote. Many more will vote by
mail. There will be a need for polling places, maybe more of them. And a need
to space people out as they vote. We are not going to stop fighting until state
election systems and the post office, which is part of getting the mail there
on time, get the resources that they need.
Elections are a wellspring of our
democracy, and the only answer as to why neither the Republicans in the Senate
nor the White House want to do anything about it is they fear a free and fair
election. That is inimitable to the core of this Republic. We're going to keep
fighting. And there have been alarming reports about recent failures at the
post office; about residents in Michigan who received their absentee
ballot only the day of the primary or just before. And reports that in
Pennsylvania families have not gotten their medicine or paychecks for 3 weeks
or more. The postal service is vital, not just for elections, but every single
day.
The new postmaster general—a big
donor to President Trump, which many believe is his main qualification as to
why being chosen—enacted new guidelines at the Post Office that experts say
will cause severe delays in mail delivery, and then refused for weeks to even
hold a phone call with Democrats, including myself, about these issues.
I called three times. Mr. Dejoy
evidently didn't have concern to call back when I was concerned about mail
delivery in New York and the rest of the country. So we’ve insisted to Mr.
Mnuchin and Mr. Meadows on meeting with Mr. DeJoy, which will take
place later today. We need to resolve the problems at the post office. There is
lack of funding and there are new regulations that get in the way to the timely
delivery of mail. We must resolve those in a way that allows mail to be
delivered on time for the election and for the necessities that people need.
Each and every one of these issues is
critical, and there are many more. We need answers and movement on all of them,
not on one or two. But some of our Republican friends seem content to pass a
bill—any bill—so they can check the box and go home.
We cannot do that. We cannot agree to
an inadequate bill and then go home while the virus continues to spread, the
economy continues to deteriorate, and the country gets worse. So we’re going to
keep slogging through, step by step, inch by inch, until we achieve the
caliber, the extent, the depth and breadth of legislation the American people
need and deserve and want.
In stark contrast, the Republican
leader has decided he’d rather just lob partisan pot shots from the Senate
floor each morning than rather join in productive negotiations. It is difficult
to listen to the Republican leader spin such a malicious fiction about why
Congress has yet to pass another round of relief when he can't even sit in the
room with us and negotiate, when he can't even create a modicum of unity in his
disturbingly divided caucus.
For three months, Senate Republicans
put the Senate on “pause” when it came to the coronavirus.
As COVID spread through the South and
West, as states hit daily records for new cases and hospitalizations, as 50
million Americans filed for unemployment…the Senate Republican majority merrily
hummed along as if it were living in a different universe.
Leader McConnell scheduled
confirmation votes on right-wing judges. The chairmen of the Judiciary and
Homeland Security Committees held hearings on the president’s wild conspiracy
theories about the 2016 election and conducted desperate fishing expeditions
hoping to dig up dirt on the family of the president’s political rival. When
the Republican majority did put legislation on the floor, it wasn’t even
remotely related to COVID.
All through that time, Democrats came
to the floor to practically beg our colleagues to consider COVID relief
legislation. We asked consent to pass urgent relief no fewer than 15 times. And
every single time, Republicans blocked our requests.
Once Senate Republicans finally
decided to write a bill, it was the legislative equivalent of a dumpster fire.
Republicans bickered amongst themselves for over a week and half before finally
giving up. They didn’t even release a coherent bill, just a series of nibbling
proposals, rife with corporate giveaways and K-street carve-outs.
Republicans proposed a tax break for
three-martini lunches but no food assistance for hungry kids. $2 billion to
build a new FBI building to boost the value of a Trump hotel, but not a dime to
help Americans afford the rent.
And then, to top it all off, almost
as soon as the Senate Republican plan on COVID was released, it became clear
that even Senate Republicans didn’t support it. President Trump called it
“semi-irrelevant.” “Semi-irrelevant” is what President Trump called the
Republican proposals. Leader McConnell basically gave up, and left Democrats
and the White House to negotiate the next bill.
So it strains reason for Leader
McConnell to criticize those of us who are actually engaged in negotiations
while he is intentionally staying out of them. His Alice-in-Wonderland
rhetoric, flipping everything on its head and accusing the other side of the
sins that Leader McConnell, is in fact, committing, is extremely
counterproductive. Since Senate Republicans clearly cannot reach a consensus,
any agreement is going to require a lot of Democratic votes. Suffice it to say,
the Republican leader’s rhetoric and positions are not helpful in that regard.
While Republican leadership continues
to sit on the sidelines, Democrats are in the room, working hard. That’s what
the American people expect of us. They want to see us working to get something
done in this time of extraordinary challenge.
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