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 (Executive Session)” mentioning Tim Scott was published in the Senate section on pages S1488-S1490 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. LANKFORD. Mr. President, we are a year into the COVID epidemic--a year. If you think about it, this week a year ago, in Oklahoma City there was a basketball game going on between the Utah Jazz and the Oklahoma City Thunder. They were 2 minutes away from tip-off, and the announcer came on the speaker and said: Ladies and gentlemen, there has been a case of COVID-19 that has been discovered by one of the players. This game is postponed.
And with that one announcement, a year ago this week, all professional sports stopped across the entire country, and the country, for a moment, woke up and realized: This is more serious than we thought. And everything shifted. Within a week, the United States had shut down for 8 weeks, and we went into lockdown.
At the beginning point of that, this Congress came together in a bipartisan way and passed something called the CARES Act, $1.6 trillion, an enormous relief bill, because we were walking into uncharted territory. We created things like the Paycheck Protection Program. We created ways to be able to assist behind the scenes. We even created a way to be able to help not-for-profits, knowing that if the not-for-profit sector collapsed, there is no way government could possibly keep up.
Lots of work went into that, in a bipartisan way, to be able to resolve that, and that CARES Act stabilized our economy--$1.6 trillion. It was one of five bills that we passed in this body last year, all bipartisan, all of them with us working together to try to find out what are the essential things we have to do, knowing that every single dollar that was spent on COVID was not budgeted. Every single dollar was borrowed, all of it from last year, a total of $4 trillion.
Only $3 trillion of what was actually allocated last year has actually been spent. There is still $1 trillion allocated in last year's five bills that is still unallocated--$1 trillion. Over the weekend, this body passed on a straight partisan vote--and then the House did the same--to be able to add another $2 trillion to the spending for COVID-19. But this bill was different. There was no bipartisan conversation. In fact, 10 Members of the Republican conference went to the White House and tried to sit down with President Biden and say: Let's do a bipartisan issue. There are issues that are unresolved. But, thankfully, we are on the back side of this pandemic. We are not at the same spot we were a year ago. We can now see the end. We know that we are going to have every adult have access to the vaccine by the end of May. The economy is turning around, and things are shifting dramatically, thankfully. So let's do the things that we have to do now and keep the same commitment we had last year.
Last year's commitment was simple: Do the things we have to do, knowing every dollar was borrowed, but not more than we have to do because none of this is budgeted, and none of this has gone through committees. Let's try to do what needs to be done and not more than what needs to be done--until now. Starting the next couple of days, the Treasury will begin to process borrowing another $2 trillion.
I had an Oklahoman whom I talked to this morning who said: How are you doing spending my money at this point?
I laughed, and I said: Actually, this time, it is not even your money. It is not even tax dollars that are coming down; it is borrowed money--from the Chinese, from the open market, from everywhere that we can go get $2 trillion of additional spending to be able to spend it.
While many people will be eager to be able to receive a check for
$1,400, because there are a lot of people having a hard time right now coming out of the back side of the pandemic, getting back to work, paying some bills--they may be a little surprised to be able to find out that they are getting a $1,400 check, but so are prisoners. They are also getting a $1,400 check. They are also finding out that people who are not legally present in the country are getting a $1,400 check.
There was an interesting interchange here on the floor on the night of that debate on whether people were getting checks or not getting checks who are not legally present, and so Newsweek magazine did a fact check on, are people not legally present getting a $1,400 check? Just yesterday, they published their fact check and came out--true, people not legally present in the United States are about to receive $1,400 checks in the mail based on the bill that was just passed on a partisan basis.
There are billions of dollars in this bill that are allocated for vaccines. Republicans were audacious enough to be able to raise their hands and say: What are those billions of dollars going towards? It says vaccines, but the problem is that the Biden team has already announced they have done the purchase for every single vaccine for every single adult in America.
In other words, for every single person who can actually get the vaccine, the vaccine purchases have already been done. Those are set and ready to go by the end of May because we still have $6 billion left in the vaccine fund from last year. But this bill that just passed this week, adding another $2 trillion in debt, also includes tens of billions of dollars for vaccines. So the immediate question is, Is that for international vaccines? No; that is a different account. There is money for international vaccines to be sent out, but this is supposedly for the United States, for the purchase of vaccines. Where is that money going when we have already purchased ahead of time all of the vaccines for every single adult in America? We don't know. Unfortunately, this bill was not taken through committee, so no one even had the conversation or time to even find out why.
There is a lot of money for education in this bill, and there is a lot of need in education across the country. In fact, the bill that just passed, this $2 trillion, actually spends almost three times--in this one bill, almost three times--for education what typically the U.S. Federal Government does for the entire year for education. I would say there is a great need, except when you actually look at the unspent money for education from the five bills that were passed last year, there is still $68 billion unspent from the education funds from the five COVID bills last year.
There is no requirement that the schools actually open or use that money to open the schools. In fact, 95 percent of the money allocated for COVID relief for education CBO has said can't even be spent this year at all. The earliest it could even be spent would be next year. And it is well in excess of $100 billion.
There is a provision in this. The Small Business Administration, as I was reading through the 600-plus pages of this bill--that is a real picture of really what this bill is shaped like. One provision of the Small Business Administration allocates $390 million to administer the loan program, but the loan program itself disburses $70 million.
Let me run that number past us again. The program cost for the administrative Washington, DC, cost of running the program is $390 million; the actual amount that they anticipate that they will actually distribute is $70 million, totaling a $460 million program total. Just
$70 million of it actually gets to people; $390 million of it stays in Washington, DC, for the bureaucracy.
All of those things could have been fixed if we actually went through committee.
In this COVID bill, there are things like new customs duties for South Korea. I have yet to figure out what South Korea and customs duties have to do with COVID.
There is also slipped in, for the first time ever, Federal funding for abortion. I have yet to see what abortion has to do with COVID, but this bill, for the first time in 44 years, uses Federal tax dollars to start paying for abortion. That has not been done before. In fact, when Joe Biden used to sit in that chair right over there, he often spoke about that we should not use Federal funds for abortion funding. Yet, in the COVID bill, somehow abortion funding has become relevant to fighting off COVID.
I have had some people ask questions about whether this bill could have been better if we had actually done it in a bipartisan way. It could have been significantly better. If you ask how I know that, it is because I saw the five bills we did last year, and they didn't have problems like this in them last year because we worked it out together. This one is different.
This bill could have been significantly improved in a major way. One of them is the way we deal with charities. You see, in previous bills, we sat down and talked about our not-for-profits.
I have a very strong belief personally that we have three safety nets in America. Families are the first safety net; nonprofits, churches, faith-based houses of worship are the second in society; and the third safety net is government.
Government can never keep up with all of the needs in America. If families collapse and if our not-for-profits collapse, government will never be able to keep up. So in previous versions, we have actually addressed that with not-for-profits. We did that in the Paycheck Protection Program to make sure that not-for-profits could get assistance and get help to be able to survive through this.
We also added in a way that we would encourage individuals to be able to donate to not-for-profits. We gave them a write-off. In the very first bill, we added in $300. If you gave to a not-for-profit, you get to write that off your taxes right away. In the December bill, we reupped that--$300 for an individual and $600 for a family that you could write off on your taxes immediately if you would donate to a not-for-profit.
Why did we do that? Well, I brought that issue up, quite frankly, and we had wide bipartisan agreement to say that was a good idea because we should encourage not-for-profits because we need them for that safety net. Not-for-profits are the faces that take care of the hungry and the homeless and the hurting in our society, and we need them to be strong. But in this bill that came out, we didn't address the not-for-profits. We didn't have the option to be able to bring it up and debate it and say: What should we do? So it just got left out.
Why should we continue to be able to push on this issue? Because we need them to be strong. They are a remarkable part of our economy, our safety net, and our community. They are Americans doing what we do best--serving each other, serving our neighbors, and helping in every possible way that we can.
So a group of us have gathered together to be able to drop a bill dealing with these not-for-profits and encouraging us, again, to accelerate this issue of giving Americans the ability to be able to write off on their taxes, whether they itemize or not, a below-the-line deduction for their taxes to be able to make sure that we encourage people to be able to give to not-for-profits. And it matters. If you want to be able to help do something significant, help those close to you and the ongoing work that they are doing.
Those folks have felt it a lot. According to a study by Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, between March and May of 2020, our nonprofits have projected job losses around 1.6 million workers. They leaned in and helped anyway, even though they were in real trouble. As of December 2020, the nonprofit workforce still remained down by about 930,000 jobs.
We have a long way to go to have that sector actually fully recover. They are such a significant part of our economy. According to the latest data--again, available from Johns Hopkins--it was found that nonprofit organizations employed the third largest workforce in the U.S. economy; nonprofits, a group that people just drive past all the time, but many people drive to or walk to because they need real help.
What happened when we actually passed the CARES Act and we added this deduction in and encouraged Americans to start donating to not-for-
profits to help them survive this year? What happened with that? Well, I can tell you what happened because now we can look back and see the data. The most recent data we have for the fundraising effect for this project shows that there was an increase in the third quarter of 2020 of charitable giving--a 6-percent increase in donors and an 11-percent increase in new donors when compared to 2019.
We put that incentive out, and people saw the need across the country and the opportunity to do that, and people gave. We saw increases in all donor categories in the third quarter of last year, the largest increase in giving coming from donors giving $250 or less. That increased by 17 percent just in the third quarter of last year.
I understand there are a lot of factors to that. There were a lot of needs, and people were doing what they do best and engaging. But we need to continue to encourage the strength of our not-for-profits because if there is a focus to say ``Well, government should do that,'' government can send checks, but government has a hard time actually meeting human needs. That requires a face and a person and a commitment, and that is done differently when it is a not-for-profit.
We have great Federal workers all across the country who work really hard, but they also work often from a distance. Local not-for-profits in small, rural communities will have a much greater connection to individuals to be able to help in their time of crisis than someone 1,000 miles away who means well but doesn't see them on a daily basis. If we want to help human needs, we will find ways to be able to help not-for-profits.
Tuesday of this week, Senator Coons, Senator Lee, Senator Shaheen, Senator Scott from South Carolina, Senator Klobuchar, Senator Collins, Senator Cortez Masto, and myself--we all introduced the Universal Giving Pandemic Response and Recovery Act. We are just asking a simple question: Can we continue to strengthen our not-for-profits and encourage Americans to give to those not-for-profits with their time, with their money, and with their passion and joy? When you actually engage with a not-for-profit, you will find you are the one who really receives.
There is not a moment that I talk to somebody who serves in a not-
for-profit that they don't tell me how hard the work is and how draining the work is, and then with a smile, they will say how rewarding it really is. There is not a time that I walk into a homeless shelter or a food bank and they don't tell me about the people they meet on a daily basis and the joy for them going home, talking to their own family, and remembering the blessings that they have, and the joy they have to get up the next day to be able to help those in greatest need. Let's encourage that.
If you want to have a Biblical example, Biblically, the calling for government is to encourage those who do good and punish those who do wrong. We have a lot of nonprofits around the country that are doing good. Let's encourage them, and let's encourage Americans to be able to be engaged in volunteering and in giving.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
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