Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I heard your comments earlier today--and I couldn't agree more--on the importance of us dealing with the issues that were on the floor today that we failed to deal with. I heard our good friend Senator Scott's response to the way his hard work was looked at and, frankly, ignored. When the Congress stops resembling an honest and open discussion of the issues, I think it gives us a lot to be concerned about. The solution should be the goal. When Members of Congress are more interested in a bill that they believe to be perfect rather than seriously engaging in a debate, it raises a lot of concerns about how we protect liberty and how we do our constitutional duty. I have been in the Congress for a while, as some of my friends are more than eager to point out, and I have never voted for a perfect bill--ever. I have introduced a couple of perfect bills, but I have never voted for a perfect bill. I have never voted for a bill that couldn't be improved. Our good friend Tim Scott said something the other day that struck me as a truism. He said: I think most Americans are tired of Republicans and Democrats talking about Republicans and Democrats. Most Americans, as Senator Scott's point was made, want us to solve problems. They want us to come up not with the best answer possible; they want us to come up with the best possible answer. What is the difference between the best answer possible and the best possible answer? The difference is figuring out when you have gotten done as much as you can get done and you decide that, in this process, you want to accept that and come back at a later time and see if you can do a little better. They don't want us to reject a promising solution just because someone from the other party said it first. They don't want us to reject a promising solution just because it doesn't solve everything. Nothing around here happens as fast as we would like it to. Debate, discussion, and compromise all take time. Remember, the Constitution was put together by people who didn't trust government. They didn't want to make it easy for government to do things, and they didn't. One of the great successes of all time was the success of making it hard for our government to do things. It is hard to explain in other countries where they have parliamentary systems where, if the leader doesn't get what the leader wants, the government collapses. That is not the way this government is designed at all. It is designed to take some time, but you have to be willing to take the time. It is designed to reach compromise, but you have to be willing to reach compromise. We think our job should be to, again, come up with the best solution we can come up with and try to do the job that we are sent here to do, trying not to wait and say: Well, we are too close to an election. Apparently we are too close to an election all the time now. We never want to give away anything that could be a political issue because it is better--maybe in some minds--not to solve it than it is to solve it. Today's disappointing vote doesn't have to be final. The majority leader changed his vote at the very end. It was 56 to 44--3 Democrats and all of the Republicans wanting to move forward, but it takes 60 votes here to move forward. By the way, it also takes 60 votes to get off the bill to have a vote. There was nothing to be lost by seeing if we couldn't make Senator Scott's bill better. In fact, I understand from his speech earlier that he agreed to 20 amendments that had the possibility to do that. That is what we are supposed to do. We are here to vote. We are here to make decisions. We are here to move forward or to decide we don't want to move forward. There are times when a decision is that this is not the right solution to this problem. That was not what we were dealing with today. Our colleagues in the House planned their own legislation. There was that moment of hope when the Speaker of the House said she looked forward to taking their product--their bill--to conference. Well, you only get to take a bill to conference if there is a conference, and you only get to take a bill to conference if we pass a bill and the House passes a bill. By the way, if they are exactly the same bill, there is no reason to go to conference. That bill goes to the President. We pass a bill, the House passes a bill, we go to conference, and then we come back. And 44 of our colleagues were unwilling to go through that process. On a bill like this, you get a lot of votes. You get the vote to go to the debate. You get the vote to go to the vote. You get the vote to pass the Senate bill. It has been, actually, a while since I heard somebody say what used to be said often: I am voting for this bill. I don't think it is where it should be yet, but I look forward to voting for a better process coming out of conference. You used to hear that all the time: I am voting for this bill so we can get to conference, and in conference I am going to do everything I can to work to make it better. That is how the process works. This ``take it or leave it,'' nobody shows up--our friends at the House show up one day to vote on a bill that God knows who decided what would be in that bill, and that is the bill we either accept or reject. What a foolish way to do business. What an unsatisfactory way to fail to debate the issues that people sent us here to decide. But, again, the House will pass a bill this week, and unless we reconsider this decision, that will be the end of it. That will be the end of it. The House has passed a bill. We are not going to take up the House bill. There is no Senate product to go to conference. That is the end of it. It is an issue that we need to find a solution to. It was an issue we needed to find a solution to after what happened in St. Louis in 2014. It is an issue we have needed to find a solution to. The dates seem to keep getting closer, to where this year three things happened in a row--maybe more than three--that shouldn't have happened, and things have happened since those three things that shouldn't have happened. We need to lead on this issue. We need to find a way to make a successful conclusion to the best we can do. The best we can do today doesn't mean that is the best we can ever do; it just means, when you have something that you are agreeing with--and this isn't even a bill where--Senator Scott's bill--I didn't hear Democrats say: I agree with 80 percent of what is in the bill. They were more likely to say: 80 percent of what I want to do is in the bill. Take 80 percent of what you want to do to conference and hope it comes back with 90 percent of what you want to do or 96 percent of what you want to do. But if you don't trust the process, the process cannot produce a result. People are tired of us failing to do our job. We need to vote. We need to have amendments. We need to have bills on the floor on issues like this that the American people are in the streets of America saying: Solve this problem. You can't solve this problem by turning your back on it. You can't solve this problem by saying: If I don't get this exactly the way I want it, I would rather not have anything. I will tell you what that gets you. That gets you nothing. In a democracy, that does not work. If you are getting your way all the time--at home, at church, at school, at work, in the Congress--there is something wrong with you. There is something wrong with you. Nobody gets their way all the time. Compromise is the essence of democracy, but you have to be willing to go to the place where compromise happens. On this bill, that would have been at conference, to see if we can't come closer to a bill that everybody believes is the best we can do. I think Senator Scott did a great job with his bill. I think Senator Scott thinks his bill could be better. But his bill is not the House bill, and the House bill is not going to be the final bill either What a mistake to walk away from the chance to solve a problem.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, reserving the right to object and with great consideration for Senator Klobuchar's dedication on these issues, many of which, as she has pointed out, we have worked together on, and I think we will continue to, I just don't think this is the time to make this kind of fundamental change. I will admit that at its very first legislation after the 2018 elections, the House passed a bill, but, again, it was a bill that would provide the Federal Government with unprecedented control over elections in this country, despite the fact that for almost 250 years now, the States have been responsible for this particular government responsibility. To quote yet another time, Senator and then-President Obama, in October of 2016, pointed out that the very strength of our system was the diversity of the system. I think one of the strengths of the system is the amount of local responsibility and local answerability, frankly, for how the system works on election day. Senator Klobuchar pointed out that we are fewer than 6 months until the election. As a matter of fact, in our committee, I intend to hold a hearing next month on the problems we have seen develop with this move toward more people wanting to vote not at the polling place on election day and how some States have dealt with those problems effectively and how others haven't. I will also say, to follow up on one of Senator Klobuchar's points, I think funding is one thing. Helping the States help themselves is something I think we can still do. We have done a considerable amount of that up until now, since the 2016 elections, with a big commitment in the CARES Act to make money available for States to regulate their elections and be able to afford to do that. I think we can, will, and should take another look at that, but 6 months before an election is a dangerous time to change responsibility. I think, to be absolutely clear, that at any time, this is a responsibility that is better done at the local level. But when you implement a new voting system with a big first election, that is a problem. We saw that in Georgia recently. Georgia was complying with the request that both Senator Klobuchar and I and others had made to get a system in place that has an auditable ballot trail--an absolutely worthy goal. Georgia followed up, but even then, it might have been better if they could have followed up on an election that wasn't quite the same high-profile, high-turnout election that their first experience had. The responsibility for changing the system is hard enough in the best of times. I think the States have had lots of time. My State and other States have changed their law to allow more access to absentee ballots in some States--and as a matter of fact, not even absentee ballots. I got corrected by that with one of our election officials the other day. Really, now we call them mail-in ballots. In Missouri, up until now, we always called them absentee ballots. Though, one of the absentee excuses had always been ``unable to get to the polls because of health.'' But in the mail-in ballot ability, in our State, to eliminate, for some ballots because of COVID-19 or health--eliminate the notary requirement, States have done this. They had a lot of time. They had a lot of notice. Most of them dealt with this. More importantly, if it works, they get the credit. If it doesn't work, they don't have anybody else to blame. They are working really hard because of that to make it work. The House bill was offered the first time in this body not long after it passed. In March of 2000, I objected, again, to the federalization of the election process--not the assistance, not the help but the federalization of the process. In May of 2020, the House passed yet another bill. I think that is the bill we are talking about today or something like it. This time, it was a bill that Democrats said would assist States with the pandemic. First, we were going to assist States because of ballot security. Now we are going to assist States because of the pandemic. There has been a real desire at the Federal level to take over the election process again. I don't think that is a good idea. If it was a good idea, it wouldn't be a good idea 6 months before the election. The provisions in the new bill are about the same as the provisions in the old bill. They would provide the Federal Government with unprecedented control over elections in this country. This bill represents a one-size-fits-all Federal answer to a problem that I think the Federal Government is not the best place to answer. The estimated money needs of the States are something I am willing to, and think we should, continue to talk about. But funding to accept the new situation they find themselves in is different than centralizing the process. Instead of providing States with flexibility to deal with emergency situations, for instance, this bill does just the opposite. This bill tells States how to run virtually every aspect of their election. It takes away authority to the States to determine their own process for voter registration. In fact, it requires all States to institute online voter registration at a time when we are more concerned than we used to be about what can happen to elections online. This bill tells States how many days of early voting they must have and where the early voting locations need to be. It requires that all States accept online absentee ballot requests. You have online voter registration. Then you have online absentee ballot requests and offers the requirement for no-excuse absentee ballots, which I guess, according to my friend, the election administrator, would be mail ballots. I am going to get better at explaining that phrase. It tells States how and when their ballots must be delivered. It tells them when they have to be counted. It requires States to permit ballot harvesting. Ballot harvesting is the only thing, I think in a decade, that a candidate elected to the House of Representatives was not seated because the House--this House, the current House of Representatives-- decided that ballot harvesting was the reason that person shouldn't be seated; that people went around, collected ballots, apparently decided which ballots they were going to mail in and which ballots they were not going to mail in--if you look at the House determination that this person wasn't lawfully elected. But this bill actually requires States to allow individuals to go and collect ballots and turn them in, in groups rather than some other way. If States want to do that, they can do that. But apparently, it was not good enough to seat a Member of the House of Representatives from my party. It tells States how they must authenticate their ballots. It prohibits them, however, from using any form of voter identification to authenticate who the person is. It tells States what kind of envelopes they have to use to put their ballots in. What doesn't it do? It doesn't recognize, again, that for almost 250 years, States have successfully run elections in this country. If the returns were in question, the people who were the local election officials and the State election officials were the people who were questioned. There was no ability to say ``Well, that is out of our hands'' or ``Well, we don't really have anything to say about that. Some person in Washington tells us what we have to do about that.'' States have successfully run elections during national disasters. States have successfully run elections during pandemics. States have successfully run elections during wartime. On March 3, 2020, on Super Tuesday, early that morning, a tornado struck three counties in Tennessee. Election officials were able to use the flexibility they had as State officials to, No. 1, adjust the polling location and, No. 2, move election equipment and carry out the primary election successfully and without challenge. None of that, in my view would have been allowed if this bill had been in effect. Similarly, in response to the pandemic, many States, as I suggested Missouri has, have changed their law and looked for ways to make this process work. They have had a chance to try--in most cases already in the primary or in some other elections, States have changed their primary dates; they have expanded absentee balloting; they have expanded early voting; they have altered polling place procedures to ensure cleaning and sanitizing; and they have worked to recruit more workers. This bill, in my view, doesn't acknowledge the important responsibility and answerability that local and State officials have on election day. That was a job I had for about 20 years, part of that as the chief election official in the State. I will just state that on election day nothing is more important than voters feeling like their vote was cast in the right way and counted in the right way, and there was nobody but me to blame at the county level and then again at the State level if that didn't happen. So I think my friend Senator Klobuchar's comments are well-intended and well-motivated. I just think we have a fundamental difference on who makes these decisions. I would recommend to all of my colleagues that if we ever make these kinds of changes, we should make them long before 6 months before a Presidential election. If this bill were law, State and local officials would not only lose the flexibility they now have, but they would have a new place to pass the buck. This is one of the desks that Harry Truman used on the Senate floor, and he didn't have a ``pass the buck'' symbol yet, but he famously had behind his desk, as President, a sign that said ``The buck stops here.'' On these issues, the buck stops with the person you have chosen locally and statewide to run your elections. I think that continues to be the best course for us to follow. Madam President, I object.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to spend a few moments talking about a man who has been one of my closest friends for a long time. Springfieldian Ed Pinegar passed away on May 23, 2020, at the age of 74. He was the kind of person that many people will remember as one of their best friends. Ed loved his family, his church, and his community. He grew up in Willard, attended Missouri State University, and became one of the most successful auto and truck dealers in the middle of our country. Never forgetting his rural roots, he eventually established Pinegar Land and Cattle and became the leading breeder of Limousin Cattle in North America. As with everything he did, this was an extremely successful business. Ed never forgot where he was from. For the last several years, one of my favorite things was to go to Ed's farm with him early in the morning to see what his plans were for the farm and catch up on what was happening with the business and his family and friends. I will miss those visits, but I am so glad to have shared those times with Ed. Ed's life of service is too long to list, as are the recognitions he received along the way. He served on the Missouri State University board of governors and their board of trustees, was inducted into the Missouri Limousin Breeders Association Hall of Fame, honored by the Ozark Empire Fair Ground Gold Buckle Gala for his dedication to youth, and with his wife Carol received the outstanding Willard Alumni Award. He recently received the 2019 AFP Outstanding Philanthropist of the Year Award. Ed was dedicated to his family, his community, athletics, and his faith. He was a loyal friend with a great sense of humor and an even better perspective on life. He was a devoted Christian, active in his church, and used the blessings of his work to invest in the places and people he loved. He was generous in his giving and generous in spirit. The Pinegar Arena is an indoor horse center and classroom that is part of Missouri State's agricultural center. This is one of many examples of how Ed gave of his time and resources investing in people and things to help others. Much too soon, Ed suffered a stroke, which took a serious toll on his health and quality of life. Abby and I were encouraged by his early recovery from those challenges and inspired by his family's dedication to him as each of them, with Carol in the lead, loved and cared for him. Much of his legacy will continue to live on through Carol and their children Angela, Tad, Amy, and Abigail. Ed also leaves behind nine grandchildren, who were lucky enough to spend time with their grandfather who, despite his busy schedule, prioritized games, events, and school performances. I am grateful to have known Ed Pinegar and thankful for his impact on my own life and that of those who knew him.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, over the weekend we celebrated Flag Day, when we honor our country's flag as a symbol of unity. It is also a symbol of all of the struggles we have gone through as a nation and the struggles ahead of us. Harry Truman, whose desk--one of his desks used on the Senate floor-- is right here in front of me, once said that Flag Day is also a chance for us to consider what we want the flag to stand for. So I think it is appropriate that we are considering the best way to make sure that the flag stands for all we want it to stand for--and for all of us. Senator Tim Scott has introduced the JUSTICE Act, which would bring us closer to that idea. I was glad to be a cosponsor of the bill. I think this bill has the potential to make a real difference in how we deal with the important and difficult issue of police reform and making sure that our communities are both safe and secure. You know, you can be safe in the sense that you are not in danger, but people also need to feel secure, meaning they have confidence that they will remain safe and that they will be treated fairly while they are safe. We need to be sure that all of the people of our country believe that justice can be blind and that it can be dispensed without fear or favor. Policing, by its very nature, is mostly a local function. There are around 18,000 police departments across the country. Most of the reforms can be made at the local level or the State level. There are different ways that police systems are structured around the country. There are different levels of law enforcement and how they relate to each other, and I don't think we are going to do anything effectively in the Congress to impact that, but I think there are some things we can do both in Congress and the administration. I think Senator Scott has done a really good job finding what many of those things are and how to make them happen with bipartisan support. There is a lot in this bill that simply increases transparency and accountability: more reporting so that the Justice Department has an idea of areas where problems seem to arise more frequently and maybe shouldn't; an area of reporting so that a troublesome officer has all of those troubles reported if they have had problems with issues of fairness or constitutional protection; and if that officer is applying at another law enforcement agency, that information should be readily available. There are two important ways to give people a sense of security. We do that by recognizing that the majority of police in this country are only not a problem, but they do an incredibly hard job, and they do it in an incredible way. It is a job that we have to have. It has to be conscientiously, professionally, and courageously done, and law enforcement officers all over America do it. They get up and do a hard job every day. They run to danger when others run away. It is a hard job. Frankly, I think the hardest job in America might be the spouse of a law enforcement officer. Law enforcement officers generally have a sense--there are occasions when this isn't the case--but generally have a sense of whether they are in imminent danger or not. The person who cares about them, the person who loves them, wonders all day: What, at this exact moment, is that individual facing, and are they safe? The problem in policing is there are very few officers and maybe even fewer numbers of police departments where there is a systemic problem. I think if there is a systemic problem in a department, it is hard for that department to solve that problem. Some of Senator Scott's legislation helps create the tools they might need to get that done or the tools that we might need, as outside helpers, to say: Here is a department that somebody needs to look at. His legislation can assure us that for the small group of people in law enforcement who aren't conducting themselves in the way that everybody else in law enforcement does, there is transparency and there is reporting. Things can't be just swept under the rug, and an officer can't go from one department to another without the new department knowing exactly what they are getting. This legislation sets up more funding to make sure that body cameras are widely available and have to be used if you have them. I think there has been plenty of evidence since 2014, when we had the beginning of the modern body-camera movement, that if you have those cameras on your body and you have them turned on, the escalation of violence, for whatever reason, happens much less frequently. The police officer knows that camera is on, and the person they are dealing with knows that camera is on, and it seems to make a difference. Reporting when there are deaths or serious injuries due to the use of force--and those are investigated, I believe, in every department in America, but there is no reason they shouldn't also be reported to see if there is a pattern that involves either an individual or a pattern that involves a department that needs to be looked at. Sharing records, as I said before, is critically important so that one bad officer doesn't get passed from one department to another. There are things in the realm of training where this legislation helps officers get training on tactics to deescalate a situation when it gets out of control. Officers want this kind of training. Officers want the kind of training that makes it easier for them to understand that if they are in a situation where mental health is the problem or opioid addiction is the problem or drug addiction is the problem, are they dealing with a real criminal here or are they dealing with somebody who has gotten themselves in a situation in which they need to figure out how to get them in a different and better place While we need to move quickly to take up this legislation, I think there are some areas where the administration can act and is acting, based on announcements that were made this week and things that weren't announced this week. I talked to Attorney General Barr a couple of weeks ago as these incidents began to become more clear in the sense of problems that could be within entire police departments and encouraged him to restore more of the pattern and practice reviews that were part of what the Justice Department used for about a decade. They were in place until November of 2018. I think they need to be back in place. We know from past usage that they don't have to be used on any situation or every situation, but they can be used. We have seen them used in my State in Ferguson, MO, in surrounding St. Louis County, which had a much bigger department and asked for a voluntary review, and the city of St. Louis, which has a big police department but not as big as St. Louis County in 2014 and 2017. Whether that review was voluntary or even if it involved a consent decree, I think that the case can be made that things happened in those three departments that might not have happened otherwise. The Attorney General and I both agreed that if you don't have a tool in the toolbox, you can't use it. It is important to see what you need to do to put every tool in the toolbox, even if it is a tool that you have previously taken out and said: Well, maybe we don't need that any longer. If you don't need it, you don't have to use it. But you are certainly not going to be able to use it if you don't have it. President Trump took some additional steps that I was supportive of and talked about earlier this week when the Presiding Officer and I were at our leadership stakeout: officers with better tools to deal with mental health, homelessness, addiction issues. Missouri is one of the eight Excellence in Mental Health States. This is legislation--bipartisan legislation--that I have worked on for several years with Senator Stabenow from Michigan. It allows law enforcement to connect people with the help they need and wind up having them someplace more appropriate than either jail or court. In fact, the Department of Health and Human Services, in monitoring this program, says that it has led to a 60-percent decrease in jail time. Part of that is, a lot of people don't wind up going to jail because it makes it more possible for people in many of the departments in my State and in others to have a constant contact with that mental health professional. Maybe it is on the iPad that they are carrying with them, where they can get that 24/7 connection with a healthcare professional. It certainly benefits from the training that many Missouri officers have had now in crisis intervention. In Kansas City, in St. Louis County, in St. Louis city, in Springfield, I have ridden with officers and talked to officers and watched how this happens, and that builds confidence. Senator Scott's bill builds the same kind of confidence. I have heard some of our friends on the other side say: Well, I am for 80 percent of what is in that bill. No, they don't even say that. They say: I am for 80 percent of the bill. Now, what is the difference? Being for 80 percent of the bill means that there are things in it you don't want, but they also say more frequently: No, that bill has 80 percent of what I want in it already. Well, let me remind our friends how you make a law. Under the Constitution, the House passes a bill, and maybe you like that better. The Senate passes a bill, and maybe the Senate has 80 percent of what you would like to see in the final bill in Senate bill, and then you go to conference. It was taught in every civic school book that every Member of the Senate studied, and we don't do it much anymore. You can't get to conference unless there is a Senate product. No matter how much you love the House bill if you are a Member of the Senate, you don't get to weigh in on the House bill unless you have a Senate bill that allows you to go to that conference. This would be the perfect time when Members of the Senate say--and you and I should be listening carefully over the next few days when they say ``80 percent of what I want is in that bill or 85 percent of what I want is in that bill,'' particularly, if they--usually, they are not saying ``There is nothing in the bill I don't want; it just doesn't have everything I do want.'' Well, if 80 percent of what you want is in the bill and the House passes another bill that you like better, maybe you come out of that conference with 90 percent of what you want. If a solution that gets you 90 percent of what you want or 80 percent of what you want is the alternative to zero percent of what you want, if you want to be a legislator, you have to figure out that that is a better path for you to take than the zero-percent path. It would be tragic next week if the result of the House deliberation and, this month, if the result of the Senate deliberation is that there is no further discussion because everybody has decided that if it wasn't everything they wanted, they didn't want to have the process that we used to call--and the Constitution calls and civic books call-- the legislative process. These are not the first struggles we have faced together as a nation. We have come a long way. We still have a long way to go. Remember, the Constitution doesn't even promise a perfect Union. It promises a more perfect Union. You get to a more perfect Union one step at a time, not all at once. My guess is, we will always be on the journey toward a more perfect Union. Senator Scott has given us an opportunity to take some of the important steps on that journey and make the Union more perfect than it is right now. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, reserving the right to object, let me say that we just got this bill assigned to the Rules Committee. The bill would have the effect of abandoning agreements we have entered into with the States and the States have entered into with us. I would certainly like to have some time to decide if we should have a hearing on this. I would like to get the opinion of people who are taking similar statues out of the building. I would also like to find out what other States have in mind as their part of the agreement. The Democratic leader just said that States and localities are removing these statues. Each of these States would have the right to remove this statue, and some are. This is an agreement with the States. It goes back to 1864. By 1933, Statuary Hall was full, and Congress, again, authorized this program by saying that these statues could be placed in the Capitol. It took until about 2000 until there were 100 statues from the States. States are limited to two from each State. With 50 States, there were 100 statues by 2000. At that point, the Congress passed another law providing a way that the States, for the first time, could take a statue out. Even in 2000, there was no suggestion then or before then that Congress would decide whether the statue that the State wanted to put in could be put into the building. As a matter of fact, the Presiding Officer's State, Nebraska, just recently replaced Williams Jennings Bryan with Chief Standing Bear under the provisions made to do that. Congress has been very prescriptive on how this happens. The State would have to pass legislation; the Governor would have to sign it to put a statue in the building; and Congress would determine only if the statue met the requirements that the other statues had been held to. Until now, that has been the congressional part of this agreement with the States to take a statue out of the collection and replace it with another one. My State, Missouri, is replacing Thomas Hart Benton with Harry Truman. The legislature had to agree what statue would go out, what statue would come in, and Congress would then accept that statue if it met the standards. Again, we can do away with that program. We could do a lot of things. But we have entered into that agreement. The forts, as an example--and, again, the minority leader mentioned the forts. The forts are named totally by the Congress. I expressed my belief this week and last week that it would be absolutely appropriate, in my view, to review the names that the forts have been named after, including the forts that are named after Confederate military leaders, and change those names. We can do that all on our own. We haven't told North Carolina that a fort has to be named after General Bragg. We haven't told Texas that a fort has to be named after Confederate General Hood. We can change those. I am very open to looking at that and likely doing that. I just think, for my friend from New Jersey, that this is a more complicated arrangement than activity on the floor today would suggest. I would also point out that in 2000, since Congress said that you can replace statues with another statue--you have to take a statue out to put a statue in, but you can replace statues, eight of those statues have already been replaced, and eight more are in the process of being replaced. I think four or five of the statues that have been replaced or would be replaced were in the standard of the Confederate statues. I am encouraged that States are looking at their history, and they are looking at who has come since they put those statues in. Arkansas replaced Uriah Milton Rose, a Confederate statue, with Daisy Gatson Bates, a civil rights leader. Florida replaced Edmund Kirby-Smith with Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator, a Presidential adviser, and civil rights leader. Arkansas is in the process of replacing one of these statues. I think that today's action would violate our agreement with the States. I frankly thank my friend from New Jersey for encouraging the Governors, encouraging the speakers of the house to do what they have every right--and the Congress, in fact, in 2000, gave them the right-- to do. The minority leader was the chairman of the committee that determines all of this just a handful of years ago and took no actions to do what the Senate is talking about doing today. So with that in mind, I object

Mr. BLUNT. If I could have the chance to respond here----

Mr. BLUNT. This bill was just assigned to our committee. This is a discussion that, I guess appropriately, we might have had before I was asked to come to the floor to assert the rights of the committee, to have the opportunity to think about that. I don't know that I want to negotiate that right here. But as I said, and my friend heard just a moment ago, I would like to hear from the States that are replacing statues and I would like to hear from the States that are thinking about replacing statues if this is a problem in the process of, under the current structure, solving itself. I am glad to have continued discussions about this. I certainly don't impugn my friend's motives. You know, you can question somebody's decision to maybe bring a bill this quickly to the floor without giving us a chance to talk about it, but I have no interest, then, in impugning my friend's motives and understand some of the concerns my friend would have on this topic.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, this week we are considering the bipartisan Great American Outdoors Act. I think it is fair to say that this is one of the most important packages of conservation legislation that we have seen in a long time. It might be fair to say that it is the most important piece of legislation since President Theodore Roosevelt dramatically made additions to the National Park System just a little more than 100 years ago. The bill essentially combines two important provisions--the Restore Our Parks Act and the Land and Water Conservation full funding act. I am a cosponsor of both of those. We have been trying to do the things that those two bills both do for a long time, and here we are. During World War II--we are just within a few days of D-day-- President Eisenhower--at that time General Eisenhower--had a view that sometimes if a problem is too big to solve or seems to be too hard to solve, you solve it by making it bigger. Interestingly, what we have done here with two things that we have been trying to do for a long time--to have full access to the reason the Land and Water Conservation Act was created and to do a better job maintaining our parks--that has all been combined into the Great American Outdoors Act. The first thing this act does is, frankly, make a significant investment for the deferred maintenance we have on all kinds of Federal land. It is one of our challenges as a government generally. It has been specifically one of our challenges as it relates to the National Park System, to the Forest Service, to the Fish and Wildlife Service, to the Bureau of Land Management--every one of those has deferred maintenance issues that have been there for a long time. In fact, some of them have been there for decades. I mentioned earlier that the Park System as we now know it is a little more than 100 years old. Some of these maintenance issues are decades old, maybe 50 years old. Maybe half of the life of the entire Park Service we have had these issues on a list of something that needs to be done. In Yellowstone, the high bridge that thousands of cars go over every summer--that bridge needs to be repaired. The water maintenance systems in our parks where particularly they have overnight accommodations and other things--many of those systems are almost as old as the parks themselves. There are buildings we have in all those locations where the access is no longer appropriate and hasn't been for a long time. Sometimes that meant you just closed the visitor center. You closed that part of the park that people previously had a way to get into and see a display, look at an exhibit, but because of disability issues that should have been fixed long ago, they haven't been able to. We have been saying--I have been saying certainly for several years now that the second century of the Park System needs to be different from the first century of the Park System. We need more private-public relationships. We saw a great example of that at the renewal of the arch and the museum and the area in St. Louis that just had a significant effort made, almost all by either local or private funds--very few Federal dollars there. But if you are going to have a private-public partnership, the public needs to do its part, and we are talking today about how the public would do its part in maintaining the parks, expanding the parks, building a new facility, repairing a facility, changing access to a facility. But a lot of this deferred maintenance will not be all that obvious. It is just something that has to be done. And because it is not all that obvious--the bridge hasn't collapsed yet, and the water system still appears to be producing water that people can use, so let's worry about that at some future time. Well, the future time is here. This act will work to help improve the visitor experience at the park--certainty at the units in my State and, Mr. President, your State. I have been to a number of the facilities in Georgia that will be impacted by this. In Missouri, there is the westward expansion that is celebrated at the arch, and we just made a significant investment in that facility. The Truman home in Independence will be a National Park Service facility. The first park in America dedicated to an African American, a national park, the George Washington Carver park at Diamond, would be a place that would potentially benefit from this. The new park that we have established in Ste. Genevieve, MO, that has more of the original French architecture left--vertical log architecture and big porches that would have looked like a farmhouse in Normandy with a Caribbean porch put on it--numbers of those are going to create one of the best walking historic parks in America. That park would benefit. So the Federal Park System benefits, but this legislation also includes permanent annual funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. When you think of the title of the fund, why would you have to do permanent funding to be sure that the Land and Water Conservation Fund got spent on land and water? It doesn't seem to be a genius move to do what we are doing here. What we are doing here with this fund is taking about $900 million a year that has been going in many cases for other purposes and saying: No. We collect the fund for this purpose. Let's use it for this purpose. It is not like we ran out of things to do with the money, and so we decided to put it somewhere else. But this does what the fund is supposed to do with the fund. In our State, again, in Missouri, over the past 50 years we spent about $150 million out of that fund. The fund is being used to protect historically significant sites like the Mark Twain National Forest, the Ozark National Scenic River, and the Big Muddy National Fish and Wildlife Refuge. They have all been beneficiaries of that fund to some extent. The Wilson's Creek National Battlefield has been a beneficiary of that fund. The fund was created for the purpose that this legislation will ensure it largely serves. We know that we have to build important relationships between local communities, between the Park Service, and between the American public to ensure that these sites are managed in the right way, that they are preserved for the future, and that they are safe to use for the millions of Americans who are going to use them this summer and next summer and the summer after that, and this winter and next winter and the winter after that. In addition to the preservation and conservation efforts, the bill will help, frankly, bolster Missouri's outdoor recreation industry, and it is significant. The Outdoor Recreation Industry Association says that we generate about $14 billion--almost $15 billion--in our State in consumer spending, and about 133,000 jobs are created in Missouri because of outdoor recreation. About 5 million American jobs are created and around $800 billion of economic activity are created because of the ability to use these and other outdoor resources. This is obviously not a normal year. So anything we can do to encourage people to use these facilities in a better way is important, as is anything we can do, as we look to the future, to maintain them and hand them over. And we have a chance here on all of these areas, whether it is the bureau of public lands or the national forests or the national parks, we have a chance to hand them to the next generation in better shape than we got them. We have a chance to look at projects that have been on the ``we need to do this'' list for 40 and 50 years and do what is needed to be done for 40 or 50 years. I am proud to be an original cosponsor of this bill. I am proud of the leadership, particularly of Senator Gardner and Senator Daines, on our side on this effort, and the best bipartisan support that this bill will have. I look forward to voting for it. I urge my colleagues to vote for it, and, even more importantly, I look forward to seeing this bill have the impact that it absolutely will have and has to have on the important resources that we need to make the right kind of investment in. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, today we are on the Senate floor at a time when, once again, we are attempting as a country to reconcile things that should have been reconciled long ago. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery shocked and outraged the country. The three of them, in a very short period of time, brought again this division we have in our country where we look at the country and particularly look at law enforcement in two different ways. The discussion I have had with my sons is different from the discussion that many of my African-American friends have had--in fact, as far as I know, all of my African-American friends who ever talked to me about this have had--with their sons. With my sons, I would say: If you get in trouble, look for a police officer. That is not the police officer discussion that African-American fathers often have with their sons. That discussion goes more like this: If you are picked up by the police, do exactly what you are told until I get there, and we will straighten it out once I get there. Those are the two views of what happens. We see in all of these cases some reason to believe that those concerns are absolute and legitimate. Because of that, there is a wide support for the protests going on around the country. At our leadership stakeout today on the Republican side, everybody was great, I think, understanding the emotion and empathy, and they talked about the importance of peaceful protests as we see these things that have happened. The problem is we have protests peacefully during the day that turn into violence and chaos at night. The peaceful protests shouldn't become a cover for violent activity. In fact, one of my good friends who planned some protest marches told me today that there has never been a peaceful protest march planned for the nighttime. Nighttime is not the time for peaceful protest marching. It might be the time for a candlelight vigil, but not a time for peaceful protests. What we see at night are people who either weren't part of that daytime protesting activity or were there in the daytime so they could transition to violence and looting at night. It is absolutely outrageous and absolutely unacceptable. We saw George Floyd's brother yesterday go to the place where his brother died and say: If I am not looting, if I am not rioting, if I am not destroying other people's property, why would you be doing that? He was saying: I lost my brother, and I am not trying to destroy my neighborhood because I lost my brother. I am not trying to destroy his neighborhood because my brother is gone. Yet we see activities happen that are unacceptable on all fronts. Last night, in St. Louis, we had four police officers shot in the line of duty. Sometime earlier in the day, it had been anticipated that at the City Justice Center there would be a planned violent activity. You don't manage to shoot four police officers unless you are thinking about it and normally thinking about it in advance, but that is what happened. Fortunately, those wounds were all survivable. I talked to people in the police department in St. Louis today, and they had six other events last night where police were shot at during the course of the night. We need to realize that the police officers who work and the National Guard men and women who are working are out there risking their lives trying to protect others. We need to realize that when they go to work every day, the members of their family have every reason to be concerned all day and every day of what might happen. They don't know what door the person they love may be asked to knock on, what car they may stop, or what moment may happen that makes the difficult life of being in law enforcement even more difficult. We have certainly seen plenty of tragedies there in recent years, too. It hasn't been that long ago that police officers were being ambushed routinely and a number of police officers were killed while on duty, not while they were trying to apprehend a felon, but when somebody just walks up behind them in the car or on the street and their life is ended. Then we see the horrifying image of George Floyd's murder. We have the same fear for people in that situation and the people whom they love. In fact, nobody should live in fear in our society of just their personal safety--not the law enforcement officers, not their families, not people who are peacefully protesting, or people who have violated the law and are being arrested, as they should be, but not with the result that we saw. Whether that arrest was appropriate or not, no arrest is appropriate to decide you are going to be the punishing officer as well as the arresting officer. Those who are in power should be held accountable. Those who are in power should set an example. I talked this morning to the police chief in Kansas City, Rick Smith, who tomorrow will be joining a unity march with other leaders in the community and protesters in the community. Marching along with the protesters will be Chief Smith and other officers and other elected leaders. That is one way to begin to resolve this. I also think, having had some experience with this particular topic, that the Justice Department needs to reinstate their full review of department pattern and practice. This is something they have walked away from in recent years, but in our State we had three departments since 2014 that had a full pattern and practice review by the Justice Department. At least one of those entered into a consent decree with the Department as to how they would focus in the future. I think one of those three--St. Louis County--asked for the review. St. Louis County, the city of Ferguson, St. Louis city--all believe they benefited from that review. Reviewing an officer or a number of officers is just often not enough, so I am encouraging the Department of Justice to get back to having one of the options on the table a full review by the Civil Rights Division or some other division in the Justice Department, depending on the circumstances, of not only the procedures but also the pattern that a department may have fallen into. We cannot continue over and over again to have the same thing happen, as we as a society try to grapple with the same exact problem. This is not a new problem. It is long past the time we should have figured out how to deal with it. If departments need help in figuring out how to deal with it, that is one of the things that--whether it was St. Louis or Baltimore--the Justice Department has shown some ability and some success in doing. I hope they will look at that again as they look at these three instances that I mentioned today and others. It is time to move forward. It is well past time to move forward. It is a time when people should have a society--have confidence in the institutions of the society, and those who serve in law enforcement and public assistance of all kinds should also have the appreciation and respect that we should have for them, and, of course, that is a contract where you earn that respect, but you also get that respect when you have earned it, as well over 99.9 percent of those who serve every day do. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, we have seen things in the pandemic crisis that nobody in living memory has dealt with. In so many ways we are writing the book and trying to read the book at the same time, trying to figure out how we get to where we need to be. Clearly there has been an incredible strain on the American economy and an incredible strain on the American healthcare system and everybody involved with that. Public health experts told us we had to flatten the curve, and the economic cost of flattening the curve was pretty great. On the other side of that equation, the impact on hospitals was significant in that many of them have been ready and waiting for whatever they needed to do, and because we flattened the curve, the worst-case scenarios didn't occur, and in most cases they were prevented, and we had plenty of hospital beds. Before it was over, we had ventilators and all those things we will have later. But the crisis, because of flattening the curve, has certainly lasted longer and will last longer than it would have otherwise. I am not saying that is a bad thing; I am just saying measures like closing businesses and sending people home from work, practicing social distancing, putting people on the unemployment rolls have really created serious problems for people who have cause to have challenges to their mental well-being. I think the impact is that nearly half the adults in the United States say that the coronavirus has impacted their mental health. This is on top of the statistic we traditionally believe from the National Institutes of Health and other places that one out of four or one out of five adult Americans has a diagnosable--and I wouldn't hesitate to add an almost always treatable behavioral health problem--mental health problem. But coming through the coronavirus, again, one half of all adults say that their mental health has been impacted by that, whether that was social distancing or everybody trying to do everything that you normally do at other places than home. Maybe it was economic uncertainty, which, along with the isolation, can certainly create depression and anxiety. It is, in almost all cases, likely to be worse for people who had a prior mental health problem or a prior mental health diagnosis, but those aren't the only people who have been affected. Addiction issues have become a bigger problem, again, than they were 6 months ago. People who don't have access to their support system, people who were moving with great focus on the part of the Federal Government and many State governments away from opioid addiction are in a situation where they are isolated; they are depressed; they are concerned about job or family or health and beginning to think: What was that one thing that really made me feel good? Well, maybe I can just do that one more time and have that great feeling, and I wouldn't get addicted again It turns out that addiction doesn't work that way. So we see people with unprecedented challenges as this almost perfect storm impacting mental health hits us. Last month, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported nearly a 900-percent--a 900-percent--increase in the number of calls to its Disaster Distress Hotline over this time last year. Nine times as many people are calling that distress helpline, that Disaster Distress Hotline, than were calling a year ago. Practitioners in behavioral health issues see the impact every day. They are certainly warning that this could produce its own second wave of impact that lasts well beyond the time we have treatment for coronavirus because people, even if they have had the vaccine, even if they have stopped worrying about the coronavirus, have found themselves in a place with their mental health issues that they don't want to be but might not be able to figure out how to get out of. If we don't respond quickly and we don't respond forcefully, we could certainly lose more lives to this pandemic. One new study from the Well Being Trust estimates that 75,000 more people will die from things like suicide and substance abuse because of the pandemic. We are already seeing evidence that that may be a place where we are moving. My hometown newspaper, the Springfield News-Leader, reported this week that Greene County, my home county, the first place I was elected as a county official, has already seen a 25-percent uptick in suicide and overdose deaths in the last couple of months. May is Mental Health Awareness Month. I think it is appropriate for us to talk about the ways that coronavirus has widened the gap in the medical system between access to physical health issues and access to mental health issues. This is the month and the time we need to realize that you can't separate those issues. We need to realize that those issues are of equal concern and need to be treated equally. As I mentioned before, the estimate generally is somewhere in the neighborhood that one in four Americans has a diagnosable mental health issue, but the other estimate is that less than half of them seek any help or the care they need. As that number has grown now to one in two saying that they have concerns about their mental health or that their mental health is not where it was before this all started, we see a coming together of factors here that we have to figure out how to deal with. We need to take steps on how to address it. We need to realize that more needs to be done. We need to continue to work toward the normalization of treating all health the same. In the CARES Act, the Congress did provide $425 million for substance abuse and mental health services. That includes more than half of that--$250 million--to certified community behavioral health clinics; $50 million for suicide prevention; and $100 million for emergency response grants to address substance and mental health disorders. Federal resources are critical, but most of the response and most of the important work will be done at the local level, so the Congress also unanimously agreed, in the CARES Act, to extend the excellence in mental health and addictive treatment demonstration program through November 30. We added two States. I talked to CMS this morning about moving forward in adding those next 2 States to the 19 States that originally applied. This program was first authorized in 2014 in some legislation that Senator Stabenow from Michigan and I had sponsored at the time that created the whole concept of certified community behavioral health clinics that care for patients regardless of where they live or their ability to pay--24-hour, 7-day-a-week access. It was necessary, if you were going to be part of that program, that you could get preventative screenings, you would have care coordination with your other healthcare providers. By the way, if you have a behavioral health issue, it clearly has impact on what other health issues you might have. If you are dealing with that behavioral health issue in the right way, you are going to save a lot of money and a lot of caregiver time in most cases as you deal with your other issues if you are doing what you should be doing. If you are feeling better about yourself, if you are taking your medicine, eating better, sleeping better, showing up for appointments, your other health costs are going to go down. So not only is this the right thing to do, but it also, in my view, will turn out to be a money-saving thing to do, to invest money where it needs to be invested. In eight States that have the certified centers under the Excellence in Mental Health Act, those patients have reported a 62-percent reduction in both hospitalization and emergency room visits. Probably that one statistic, on its own, may have offset whatever investment we have made in this mental health program. People not going to emergency rooms, obviously, means you are less likely to come in contact with people who have COVID-19 or some other virus. We need to be sure we are using telehealth to connect you with your healthcare provider, whether that is a mental health provider or another provider. That is critically important. People who are struggling with mental health or addiction are particularly challenged right now. We need to let them know they are not forgotten, and no matter how alone they feel, they are not alone, and the Congress is paying attention to this, but we need to pay attention to the people on the frontlines who are assuring that the right things are done in the right way at the right time. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, let me join my other colleagues in appreciation for Senator Ernst and her service in Iraqi Freedom, her two decades of service, being ready and able to go whenever she was called to go, and her continued service here, and her appreciation for those who serve, which she feels in such a unique way. She pointed out that this is a different Memorial Day. Communities across Missouri and across the country have traditional events that were long planned on Memorial Day. Every year, Memorial Day looks the same. It will not look the same in very many places this year. If you did have a parade or an event planned, it was probably canceled weeks ago. Even with the best of efforts, it was probably not put together for Monday. But it doesn't mean that we still don't have an opportunity and an obligation, in fact, to remember those who served. Also, Memorial Day has long become a time, at least where I live, in the middle of the country--and it may be more southern and in southern Missouri than in other places. Memorial Day really became a day to remember all of those who have gone before us, those who passed along values to us, those who have done things that made life possible today. When I was growing up, sometimes we called Memorial Day ``Decoration Day,'' because it was the beginning of the tradition of Memorial Day, and people would go and decorate the graves of soldiers after the Civil War. That has continued. Memorial Day became a time when families would go to cemeteries, and you sort of had the genealogical lesson right there, as you walked from gravestone to gravestone, and it was explained to you how those people were related to you. Many family members who were here last year aren't here today and will not be here on Monday. Clearly, the coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on families. It has had a devastating impact on communities. It has had a devastating impact on lives. As we support this Memorial Day, as we think about this Memorial Day, we will be remembering a unique Memorial Day, where so many have given their lives in a war that was different than other wars, to an enemy that was not easily seen, to an enemy that turned out to be deadlier around the world than any would have predicted. And that is part of Memorial Day this year. Part of Memorial Day is remembering the sacrifices that people have made, and we also on this day want to remember the sacrifices that people made to try to keep people alive with this virus--the sacrifices people have made to try to give care, to bring people out of the emergency room, to bring people off the ventilators, and to do those things. It is, in fact, a unique Memorial Day. It is a Memorial Day where, 75 years ago, we were just finishing the incredibly devastating war of World War II. V-E Day ended the war in Europe on May 8. Seventy-five years ago right now, American soldiers were fighting the Battle of Okinawa. Just 2 weeks before that, our country and our allies fought the fierce Battle of Iwo Jima. These were really the two last major battles. One of the people who died on Iwo Jima was an 18-year-old marine from Bates County, MO, named George Phillips. On the night of March 14, an enemy hand grenade was tossed into the area where his squad had sought shelter. Private Phillips shouted a warning and threw his body on top of the grenade, saving the lives of every other person there, but gave his life to save theirs. For his actions that day, he was awarded the Medal of Honor. The citation was signed by another former soldier from Missouri--President Truman--honoring that bravery. That kind of unhesitating bravery is a characteristic of American soldiers over centuries of understanding what it meant to defend your family, to defend your friends, to defend those serving with you, and, in the case of our country, to be willing to defend freedom, to be willing to jump on the grenade, to be willing to do what is necessary to protect others. We have seen many examples of that in the last year. Some of those examples were in the military. Others were in those who protect us and in first responders and police and fire, and then many examples of people who risked their lives to save others with the virus that has attacked our country. We have a lot to think about this Memorial Day, a lot to dedicate ourselves toward as we look to a future where people continue to help others, where people continue to give selflessly, and for those who have served in the military, to be willing to pay whatever price, and we stand in appreciation of that on this Memorial Day, as we approach this weekend.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, this is National Police Week. It is one of the weeks that I always look forward to. For years now, it has been an opportunity to spend time with people who protect us--who protect all of us. We get a chance each day to say thank you to the Capitol Police, who work here at the Capitol. As the chairman of the Law Enforcement Caucus, I have lots of opportunities in our State to see officers in groups and one at a time, and I always try to be thankful to them when I see them. Yet this is a time every year when we get a chance to see people from all over the country come to Washington, and it is a chance for us to say thank you to them and thank you to their families. This year in particular, Chief Jon Belmar--the just recently retiring chief at the St. Louis County Police Department and good friend who was always there for advice, always brought a big contingent of officers to Police Week. So I am thinking about him and of not seeing him at Police Week in Washington. I am also thinking about the new chief of the St. Louis County Police Department, Chief Mary Barton. This is a county of over a million people, so it is a substantial job. It is a place to really affect how police work is done. I look forward to spending time with Chief Barton as she moves forward with what she can do to build on what has happened in the department over the years. Like so much else this year, Police Week is different than it has been before. There are no sounds of hundreds of motorcycles going down the streets of Washington as we celebrate the week. There are no groups of law enforcement officers or police vehicles from all over the country coming here. I am grateful for them. They protect our safety. This is a job wherein, every day when you leave home, you have no idea what events may come before you that day, and, frankly, your family has no idea what may happen that day. I have told a number of officers, in thinking about their families, including the officers who serve here at the Capitol, that they generally have some sense as to whether they are in a moment that could lead to danger or not beyond the normal readiness to serve us but that their families, with their not being with them when they are at work, have to wonder over and over again during the day what threat may come to the person about whom they care so much as that person protects others. Each year, one of the memorable events of National Police Week is the candlelight vigil that is held at the Law Enforcement Officers Memorial a few blocks from here. We gather there annually to hear the names of officers who have lost their lives and to bear witness to and be grateful for their service. Sadly, in the past year, Missouri has lost three dedicated officers. Last June, Lakeshire Chief of Police Wayne Neidenberg passed away after assisting at the scene of a rollover crash in O'Fallon, MO. Chief Neidenberg had stopped at the scene on his way home, called for assistance, and proceeded on after the situation was stabilized, but before he got out of his car at home, he had a heart attack. We lost Chief Neidenberg at that moment. He spent his entire career in law enforcement. He served in both the St. Louis County Police Department and in the Lakeshire Police Department. He was an Army veteran. He is survived by Ardell, his wife; Cori, his daughter; and his three sons, Matthew, Darek, and Aaron. On Sunday, June 23, North County Police Cooperative Officer Michael Langsdorf responded to a complaint of check fraud at a local business in Wellston, MO. The man who has been charged with his murder shot Officer Langsdorf after a struggle inside the store. He had served with the department for only 3 months, but before that, for 17 years, he had been part of the St. Louis City Metropolitan Police force. At his memorial service, Officer Langsdorf's son, Kaleb, remembered his dad this way: They say never to meet your heroes because you'll end up disappointed. Well, I had the chance to be raised by mine, and he never disappointed. He taught me that a life of rescuing, defending and serving is the only life worth living. In addition to Kaleb, Officer Langsdorf is survived by Kim, his fiancee; by Olivia, his daughter; and by his future stepchildren, Devin and Kaitlyn. Officer Christopher Walsh joined the Springfield Police Department in 2016. On the evening of Sunday, March 15 of this year, Officer Walsh responded to an active shooter situation at a convenience store. The shooter had opened fire in the store, killing three people and injuring a fourth person. Officer Walsh rushed into harm's way to protect others. The shooter opened fire on Officer Walsh and killed him. His fellow officer, Josiah Overton, was injured in the same attack. Officer Walsh was fatally wounded and died the next day. He was a U.S. Army Reservist. During his 14 years of service in the Reserves, he completed tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sheri, his wife, and Morgan, their daughter, will live with his loss for the rest of their lives. Let me share a passage from Chris's obituary. Chris, by the way, was the first Springfield officer of the town I live in to be killed on duty since the 1930s. It is a great city with the great, good fortune of its officers' managing to do their jobs without having a loss like this, but we had one this year. The quote from his obituary reads: Christopher Ryan Walsh, a man devoid of vanity and devoted to the service and to the welfare of others, would hope that out of these tragic circumstances something beautiful could take root in all of our hearts. Chris would hope that his memory would serve as an example to spur small kindnesses and acts of devotion and service to all of our community, friends and loved ones, to look past the things that separate us and to focus on the things that unite us. So Police Week is exactly the time to think about the things that unite us, to think about these officers and their courage, to think about their acts of devotion and service as we remember them. Congress wants to make sure that law enforcement officers have the support they need and never get into a situation without the resources needed to back them up. I am honored to serve as cochairman of the bipartisan Senate Law Enforcement Caucus, which advances legislation that supports the efforts of law enforcement nationwide. Senator Coons from Delaware is the other founder and cochair. Together, we sponsored the National Law Enforcement Museum Commemorative Coin Act that became law last year. The proceeds of the sales from those coins minted under the law would go to education and outreach about the service and sacrifice of law enforcement officers throughout our country's history. I am also a cosponsor of legislation that would provide resources to protect officers' mental and physical well-being, including the Law Enforcement Suicide Data Collection Act and the Lifesaving Gear for Police Act. I am glad to be a cosponsor of the Thin Blue Line Act and the Back the Blue Act, both of which are designed to better protect police officers and hold perpetrators who attack them accountable. Through these pieces of legislation and several others, the Congress has a chance to once again show its support of the men and women who serve in law enforcement. Police Week is different this year. I think we are all particularly appreciative of how law enforcement is having to step up in the crisis of the virus, doing what needs to be done, and again often making way for first responders and others to do what they can to save life and to protect other people who somehow are on the edges of this virus. They deal with people who are isolated in their homes, and because they are isolated, their mental health issues have become bigger issues. This is not an easy time for any of those who serve. Every year, we remember law enforcement, but this year I think we need to be particularly grateful for those who serve and protect us. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, let me first of all join with my good friend, Senator Cardin, in appreciating the incredible work that really so many Federal employees have done to make these programs work. I was with the SBA Director about 2 weeks ago on Friday. She said that in the first 14 days of the PPP program they did 14 months of loans in that 14-day period. I thought many times that Secretary Mnuchin set these high standards for how quickly we would get to each of these points and probably only later realized just how difficult it is to get the Federal Government to move. In this case, the Federal Government has moved. The Congress has moved working together. We didn't have the element of time on our side. We really had to move quickly. I think we all knew when we were doing so that we were going to have some miscalculations, whether it was the amount of money for PPP or a program that wasn't quite as refined as it needed to be. And, hopefully, we are right now trying to look at not only how we have filled in the blanks on the programs that we so quickly dealt with in March, but also to look forward to May and July and try to figure out what the economy is going to need and where we are going to be in this healthcare crisis in May and July. Certainly, a number of our States are beginning to reopen. States like Missouri are opening in what I think is exactly the appropriate way. The Governor looked at the whole State and said: We are going to step back from our initial order in the entire State. We are going to remove that order. He has worked thoughtfully and carefully with the mayor of St. Louis and the mayor of Kansas City, the county executives of bigger counties, and the mayors of Columbia and Springfield, and he has not gotten into fights with local officials about situations where they have every reason to know more than he does, just like the Governor of Missouri has every reason to know more than somebody in Washington, DC, about when our State should reopen I am glad the President has let Governors have that sort of authority. I think in most States, including mine, Governors have stepped back and let local officials assert their view of what should happen in the area where they have been elected to be responsible. With that combination of things, we are going to reopen and begin to see the economy reconnect again like it has not connected for the last couple of months. At the same time, we have these two fights. One is to save the economy and one is this important fight against the virus. I think in the 2 months since we went home after the CARES Act, I spent most of my time working on the healthcare side of this. Senator Alexander is the authorizing chairman for these healthcare programs. I am the appropriating chairman for most of them. These are programs that, certainly, in the last months, Americans have learned a lot more about than they ever knew about before. Who knew the Centers for Disease Control, or the CDC, was doing what it was doing or that Health and Human Services has the responsibility they have or how troublesome it was if we let our hospitals get out of whack in terms of income and continuing expenses? All of those things happen. One of the things I worked hard on has been to get that research funding at the National Institutes of Health, where Dr. Fauci runs only one of the double handful of agencies at NIH, the infectious disease part of that. The American people are beginning to see those things that the government does and also see that the government, like every other family or every other institution, doesn't respond to crisis with immediate efficiency, but does begin to work its way toward a solution. Senator Alexander and I have spent a lot of time together with FDA and all those other agencies. What we see happening is a real willingness with the total backing of the Congress to get out there and try to move these solutions at a faster rate than we ever have before. Dr. Fauci said early on that if we developed a vaccine in 18 months, that would be the world record for a U.S.-developed vaccine from a new virus to having a vaccine available. We are trying to do everything we can, not only to meet that potential world record but to beat that world record. How are we doing that? We are doing that with things like the shark tank concept at NIH, which we specifically put $1 billion behind in the last bill--$1 billion for a place where people would bring ideas for a vaccine, for therapy, for testing, and you would have that shark tank environment begin to evaluate which of those ideas deserve the help of the Federal Government to push them forward faster. How would we push them forward faster? Obviously, a vaccine is what we need to fully emerge, in my view, from this. We need therapies to deal with people who get the virus before we have the vaccine and testing to know if you had it or not. Hopefully, we would have some level of immunity or testing to know whether you have it. We have to do better on all of those fronts. We need tests that are easier to take and get a quick response. We need millions of these tests that millions of Americans will take more than once. If you are at a factory, if you are in a close situation, or if you are on a college campus, the administrator or the boss or you may decide: I want to take that test every week, and I want to call my mother every week from this college campus and tell her I have taken the test again like I told you I would. I was OK last week. I am still feeling OK. Nobody in my dorm is sick. It is OK that I am here. That is the kind of thing that will get us started. How do we get to that quick, easy response test? How do we get to that therapy, and how would the shark tank work? People bring in ideas. Let's assume on testing that the shark tank decides there are really 10 of these that have real potential to work and we are going to begin to advance them. Then, at some point, there are four of them that are still one or two steps away from being fully vetted, but you don't want to wait until they are fully vetted to go into production. That is where another billion dollars in an agency called BARDA is. Take that billion dollars and find a private partner and say that we are going to produce all four of these tests. We are going to have all four of these tests ready 30 days from now when we know which one works because 30 days really matters--30 days in getting back to school, 30 days in generating the economy. If you are 30 days ahead of where you would have been otherwise, you can put a lot of money behind that and still pay only a fraction of what we have been putting behind trying to stabilize the economy. If two of them work in that 30-day period of time when you are going ahead and manufacturing all four of them, they are just ready quicker than they would have been otherwise. We hear often the idea that failure is not an option. This is a case where actually failure is almost a certainty on some of the things you are trying. If you are not failing, you are not trying enough things. If all you did was advance four things that were going to work anyway, you really didn't take much of a chance to fast forward or dual-track what you are trying to do. We are working hard to get ready to have those tests so when you have a normal blood draw to check your cholesterol, when you turn that into your doctor, you could ask your doctor to also check for COVID-19 if they don't ask you if you want to check for COVID-19. They could say you have it. Hopefully, by the time that test is available, they can say you have it and you have enough of the antibodies or you have enough of what it took to fight this off that you should have immunity up until the time we are likely to have a vaccine. Many Americans then know they are out there with no danger to themselves or no danger to others. Many Americans then know that, in all likelihood, they can safely visit somebody they haven't been visiting for a while because they didn't want to take a chance of carrying a virus that now they know they can't possibly get. So those kinds of things will make a real difference in our economy. On therapeutics, if we don't have the vaccine for it yet and if you get the disease, we need to find and fast forward the manufacturer of the therapeutics that we think are most likely to work. It is the same with vaccines. On all those fronts, we are making headway. I think we are probably testing sophisticated testing for the antibodies and for a diagnostic test. We are having lots of interest in that. There is a lot of private sector interest for an antibody test, for this coronavirus test, where particularly, if scientists can say that you have it and you have this level of antibody that you can't get it again. Who wouldn't want to take that test? The authorizing chairman of the Appropriating Committee, Senator Shelby, Senator Alexander, Senator Murray, and I all believe that the government should pay for that test. We have said the government should pay for that test if your insurance company will not. Most insurance companies said they would pay for that test. It seems to me that if you have millions of customers and a guaranteed payer, this is one that the private sector is quickly about to take care of on their own. Thank goodness for that. This is one of those times when the most sophisticated pharmaceutical-medical science laboratory system in the world begins to pay off. That is what we are going to see here. We have other areas where companies are working together like they haven't before. I know they told our friends at the National Institutes of Health that if we can test their experiment better at our facility than they can, bring it over here to test it over here. We need an all-out effort to get this economy going again. We need an all-out effort to get people's health secure. Once that has happened, I think we will see all those things come together. I think we made great strides. I haven't heard anybody say in some time on this issue that Congress just hasn't provided enough resources to do this job on the testing, therapeutics, and the medical device side of this or the personal protective equipment side of this. People looked at what the Congress has stepped up and done and said the Congress has given us the tools. The administration, the research of scientists of America, American pharmaceutical companies, and the medical companies have to step in. I believe they are stepping in. Let's break some records here. Let's do some things quicker with the same amount of safety that we have done in the past. There is a dynamic need to do this. The American people understand why it needs to be done. People all over the world will benefit from our leadership here. I think we are seeing it. Hopefully, we can continue on these efforts to have the bipartisan determination to win these two fights: the fight against the virus and the fight for the economy that the American people deserve. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I am tempted to talk about all of the problems we have had in getting to this point with this legislation, but I am wondering if now is not the time to talk about why we need to get this done. We have heard a lot about who is wrong and who is right and who is taking advantage of the moment, but this is a moment at which we need to do something. This is truly an emergency piece of legislation that deals with a set of circumstances that nobody has ever seen before in our country. We have a virus that people are reacting to in a way that both encourages them and, in some cases, requires them to withdraw from the normal economic activity of the country. This is different than 9/11. With 9/11, the American people said: We are going to show those terrorists that they can't slow us down. In many cases, people got out even more aggressively into the economy than they had been before. In 2008 and 2009, we clearly had a huge economic problem, but that economic problem didn't get dramatically changed by people's unwillingness to participate, but there was a concern about participating. Now we have, fundamentally, a very strong economy that people have been asked to withdraw from or have chosen to withdraw from or have been advised to withdraw from, and we need to figure out what to do about that both on the healthcare side and on the economic side. Our role here is limited. We can't legislate an end to the coronavirus. If we could, we would. We can't legislate exactly how people will behave, and if we could, we probably shouldn't. We can't tell people they have to wash their hands. We can talk a lot about the washing of hands, but, legislatively, there are a lot of limits there. There are some things we can do, and now is the time to do the things we can do. How do we get the most help to the most people in the quickest way? I hope we can come together today, in the next few hours, and decide that the moment is more important than everybody's winning everything one would like to win, for this is not the moment in which to make the most of it because it will not come around again. Frankly, in my view, it is going to come around again pretty quickly. I would say that the minute we are done with phase 3, we will start talking about phase 4 because all of us know that phase 3 can't include everything that needs to be included and that it can't look at some of the details that will become only more available and obvious after we get into phase 3. What do we have to do right now? First of all, we have to create a way for people to see immediate cash assistance coming for expenses they didn't have before--either healthcare expenses they didn't have before or childcare expenses they didn't have before or other kinds of expenses. In many cases, we are going to see many, many more people who will have new or current expenses but will not have the income they had before. Under this bill, a typical middle-class family of four would get somewhere in the neighborhood of $3,000 to $4,000 sometime in the early days of April. We will immediately begin to talk about whether that needs to be repeated again as the summer progresses, but that is not the point right now. The point is, what happens 2 and 3 weeks from now? This bill will and should provide emergency funds for food and nutrition programs. It will create a temporary pandemic unemployment assistance program to give assistance to workers who normally wouldn't be eligible for unemployment yet or who wouldn't be eligible at a rate that would sustain their families' expenses. This would include an additional $600 a week for every recipient of unemployment insurance for the next 3 weeks. By the time we are done, it might be longer than 3 weeks, but the goal here is to get money into the hands of families and, more importantly, to let them know that this money is on the way. We need to help small businesses that are, in many cases, being told they have to close. Restaurants and other retail businesses have been told by Governors in several States that they have to close their businesses--that they can't be in those businesses. If you are in the restaurant business, you might still be able to open and have a business, but it will no longer be the business you used to have, wherein people would come in and sit down and order or would come in and order and then sit down and the staffing is different. People are going to the unemployment lines and on the unemployment rolls. Part of the goal of this legislation is to see that this doesn't happen. The goal is to make loans available to small businesspeople. One of the possible ways to satisfy those loans is just to keep your employees in place as part of your employee structures for as long as you can. In Missouri, we have 532,000 small businesses. More than 99 percent of our businesses in Missouri would qualify to meet that small business standard. Now, it is difficult enough to run a small business in the best of times, but these circumstances certainly don't allow us to look at this as the best of times. This legislation would provide money to make sure that workers keep those jobs. It is easier to bring somebody back to work than it is to hire somebody for work. It is easier if we can keep those employees and others in place. In fact, at the Big Business level, I think one of the criterion for some of the potential programs would be that you would have to keep your employees in place, as in the case of the airlines, through sometime in September. Hopefully, by September, businesses will have recovered to the point at which it will not be a hardship to keep those employees in place. We would start with small businesses and then look at all of the businesses, using loans to cover payroll costs, using loans to cover interest on their mortgages, if they are small businesspeople, or their rent or utilities--using loans in a way that they would if they had their normal levels of cashflow but that are not there now. Every day we wait makes it harder for a small business or any business to decide: Can I keep these people on the payroll any longer or is the only choice I have to put them on the unemployment roll? Every day we wait, there are more businesses that are making that decision. Remember, you have no income coming in. All of your money is going out, and you have nothing but a vague promise that Congress is trying to do something about this. People are getting let go every single day. There are more people out of work today than were out of work on Monday morning. There will be more people out of work tomorrow than there are today. We can have a positive impact on that if we will just act in a way that will help them keep their doors open when there is any business to be had and to keep their people who work for them on the payrolls. By the way, with a small business, it is usually not just the people who work for you but the people who work with you--the small businessperson who, in many cases, is doing every single job in the business, at some point, along with somebody else. What can we do to keep the door open, to keep the people on the payroll, and have them ready to bounce back the minute the immediate crisis is over? Then we need to do things in this bill that will support healthcare workers and healthcare providers. This bill will make sure, I think, to do that in any form it is taking at this moment. Certainly, in the healthcare part that I have worked on as the chairman of the subcommittee, testing for the coronavirus is going to be paid for. It is going to be paid for by Medicare. It is going to be paid for by Medicaid. It is going to be paid for by private insurance. Hospitals will get relief in terms of the payments they are supposed to make. It will be the regulatory relief they need to have as they are trying to adapt to a new situation. Hospitals will have the flexibility with more telehealth services. We already put that in bill No. 2. We are trying to further refine it here in this bill, bill No. 3. One thing that particularly has resonance at this moment is telehealth. If you are telling people, ``Don't go to the hospital unless your doctor tells you that you have to go to the hospital'' or ``Don't go to the emergency room as your first place to go; rather, find a doctor to talk to'' or ``Don't even go to the doctor; rather, find a doctor to talk to,'' telehealth will allow you not only to talk to a doctor but also to have that doctor look at you and have you look at him as you talk to each other. We need to be sure that doctors have what we are now all calling the personal protective equipment, the PPEs. It is a term that, 6 months ago, I am not sure I would have recognized--maybe not 6 weeks ago--but it is very much part of this discussion. As a matter of fact, it is one of the reasons hospitals are being told not to perform elective surgeries. Elective surgery is, by definition, elective, which means you don't have to have it at that moment. Yet, if people had plenty of equipment, there would be no reason for those surgeries not to happen. Make sure you have the protective equipment you need when the coronavirus hits your community. We need to figure out how to cut down the need for that equipment by expanding--again--telehealth and by not encouraging people to take the test who don't need to take the test because every one of those tests requires one to wear a pair of gloves, a unique mask, and maybe, with some frequency, different protective equipment. We are trying to figure out how to do all of that. We are adding funds for agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation so they may move toward both therapeutics and vaccines as quickly as we can. Therapeutics probably happen more quickly than vaccines, but we are looking for ways to do that and ways to encourage their early production. Community health centers matter. Certified community behavioral health centers matter. In this bill, we are looking at how we will extend the legislation to allow those entities to exist, for we will have reached the end of the authorized period in May. There is no reason to have that happen in May. This bill should take those healthcare extension programs out longer than the 22nd of May, and I believe it will. There are a lot of competing interests here that we have to balance. By the time we vote on the bill, no person who will vote on it will think everything in it is exactly what he would like to have there. We don't get to legislate that way. I am just hoping that there will not be so much in it that I won't like that it will create a bigger problem than I will want to have. I want to vote for this bill. I want to get it done. I want to get it out there for people to see. It is harder for me to do that if it includes a lot of extraneous things that will clearly have nothing to do with this healthcare emergency. I hope that we will not have to make that decision. I hope we will get focused on the task. All of those whom I, the Presiding Officer, and Senator Enzi--sitting here beside me--have talked to have pretty good cases about how this is affecting them. Charities call in and say: We just had to cancel our one, big fundraising event of the year. Charities call in and say: Our volunteers aren't showing up. The for-profit people are impacted; the not-for-profit groups are impacted; travel is impacted; agriculture is impacted. We are about to get to the season of the year where people have community festivals and community fairs--the Missouri State Fair, Ozark Empire Fair, the carnivals that occur in our State. The 6- to 10-month travel destinations, like Silver Dollar City or Six Flags or Worlds of Fun--if you lose part of that season, that season is lost, and you are not going to get that May or that June or that April back. You are not going to be able to tack it on by saying: Well, we will just be open in January to make up for the people who would have been at our theme park in June. That is not going to happen. We are going to have the Ozark Empire Fair in Springfield, MO, some different time of the year than August because August is hard this year. I noticed today they announced that the Olympics in Tokyo are going to be postponed by 1 year. You never get that year back. You never get that fair back. You never get that county fair, that agricultural opportunity to look at agriculture and horticulture and local industry back once it is gone, whether it is the midway operations or the part- time workers who make those things work. All those things are getting away from us, and we have to begin to look--and I think we will do that more in part 4 than we were able to in part 3: How do we go back in and make sure that, as much as possible, we protected these businesses and these not-for-profits so that a year from now they are still around? How do you miss all or part of this year's activity and still be there next year? So we have our work cut out for us. It won't end with the bill we are working on right now. So if anybody out there, my colleagues, is waiting until this bill solves every problem we need to solve, we will wait too long. Just as we were able to move forward with part 1 and get money out there quickly for the healthcare providers, the researchers at the Federal level, part 2 did more of that at the State and local levels, as well as beginning to think about people staying at work. Part 3 does all the things I have just talked about and more, but there will be a part 4. We have to get this done. People are unemployed today who would not be unemployed if we would have done this work on Monday. People will be unemployed tomorrow who would not have been unemployed if we finish this work today. Let's get our business done. Let's get started on finding out the gaps that still need to be filled. Let's do what the American people expect us to do and treat an emergency like it is an emergency, not like it is an opportunity. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, the response to the coronavirus has made it clear that there are lots of things that are the responsibility of individuals, things like staying at home if you are sick--frankly, staying home if you are more likely than others to be sick--and practicing the kinds of hygiene our mothers taught us we should follow all along. Personally, I may have set a new personal record for just washing my hands in the last 2 weeks. I have never been averse to washing my hands, but I don't know that I have ever washed them half a dozen times a day or more before. Those kinds of things are left up to us. Then there are things that are left up to the local level, things like determining in a local community whether things should be open or not and what kinds of activities should be the activities where you draw the lines in terms of crowds. That is more likely to be better decided at a local level by even a State or, more likely, by a mayor or a county executive than by somebody here in Washington. Then at the national level, we are moving toward our third package now in the last few days to try to deal with this. The first package was about $8 billion, which was really focused on the immediate health response--supplies, developing a vaccine, trying to figure out what the right therapies were, understanding the things we needed to do to further help hospitals get ready and to further encourage people to go places other than hospitals when that worked. All of those things were part of that first package. The package we sent to the President that the President signed last night was about $100 billion. By almost any standard, it is a huge amount of money to put together in just a short period of time. That $100 billion, while it continued to work on the healthcare side, was also very focused on just keeping people on a payroll if they are on a payroll. That $100 billion focused to a great extent on how you keep people who have decided they need to be quarantined or who were in quarantine by a doctor or by a business that, in fact, was quarantined because it was closed--keeping those people on that payroll and continuing to keep that part of our economy going. Today, we move to the third package, which is $1 trillion--$8 billion, $100 billion, now $1 trillion. That $1 trillion is designed to continue to do all the other things that I talked about but also designed to keep this economy at a point where, when we get through this, we will be as nearly to where we would have been otherwise if at all possible. You know, interestingly, here we are going into a situation where we are trying to protect an economy that didn't have any systemic problems with it. It was an economy that was by all measures unbelievably good, and then suddenly people are encouraged--sometimes required--to back away from that economy and to cease participating in lots of that economy, partly because we have encouraged part of that economy to cease being part of the active economy. What do we do there? This is going to be a different kind of response, more focused in many cases. Where, in the past, people have said ``We need more of your money,'' many of the requests are ``We just need to have access to more money that we can easily pay back when we get through this. We are willing to have securitized loans. We are willing to have lots of things,'' figuring out how to deal with that liquidity issue. Then there are some things we need to put in this package that simply the government is going to have to look at in ways we haven't looked at before. I want to spend a few minutes talking about one of those things today, which, just frankly, is securing our medical supply chain. In the past, the idea that we would worry about the supply chain would not have been at the top of the list of the things the American people would be thinking needed to be on the first list they needed to look at when they think about public health, but what we see happening now is a direct reminder that the medical supplies we use can come from all over the world. In a pandemic, everybody in the world may think they need what you think you would have received and expected to get more than they think they should send it to you. We depend on manufacturers in other countries. Approximately 40 percent of the finished drugs and 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients are manufactured overseas--primarily in China and India. The ongoing global coronavirus outbreak has really highlighted for the first time in today's supply chain what happens if you might not be able to get what you need when you need it. It is also a spotlight on our supply chain challenges generally. I think that, as a result of this, we are going to look at that sooner than we would have, but right now, in this bill, I am hoping we include an immediate look because we have quickly gone through a series of warning signs now that make us understand why we need to look at this and look at it now. On February 27, the Food and Drug Administration announced the first coronavirus-related drug shortage--February 27. On March 10, the FDA halted its routine overseas inspections of drugs and devices. Last week, State health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention raised concerns about the looming shortage of coronavirus extraction kit reagents needed to actually conduct the diagnostic test, not to mention some concerns about the swab you might need, in some cases, to take just the normal flu exam. It is more and more clear that protecting our Nation's medical supply chain is both a priority for public health and for national security. Obviously, the supply chain has become more and more global. Economic efficiency makes sense, and being more competitive makes sense. It is fine to buy things from other countries, but it is better if you have multiple options. It is better if you have other options, including domestic production. That is especially true when it comes to vital things, like medical devices, medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, or the products we need for public health and safety. We see how this is a problem. It is a problem that has sort of come upon us in this pandemic environment in a way that we had not thought we would have to deal with before, but we do have to deal with it. We are hoping, with this bill, this is one of the places we can deal with it. You know, in our supply chain, generally, if you are making something and it takes 300 parts and you have 299 of them, you are in really good shape, except you can't make what you hope to make because you don't have that one essential 300th part. If you are relying on factories in China or South Korea or some other place that have shut down temporarily, suddenly your factory has become too dependent on a partner that is no longer there. So a bipartisan group of Senators--including myself and Senator Alexander and Senator Durbin and Senator Murray--has written legislation to figure out how to assess our vulnerability in the global supply chain for medical supplies. We want the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to look at this issue and to look at it now, to look at this issue and determine how dependent we have really become on supplies from other countries and then to make recommendations as to what some of our options might be. We would also like to hear their views on how they can make our supply chain more resilient for critical drugs and equipment; what kind of backup plan we need to always be thinking about if our frontline plan continues to be that other partner in another country; what our quick, go-to backup is and how essential it is that we have that backup. That would include asking how we can encourage domestic manufacturers of some things to be able to step up and reorient what they do when they need it and in a crisis. The President, to some extent, addressed this idea yesterday by talking about a defense manufacturing strategy. That defense manufacturing strategy may need to be more robust in some areas. Whether it is component parts to a medical device or pharmaceutical ingredients or simply the gloves and masks and swab sticks and things that you need for basic healthcare when you are trying to determine what your healthcare environment is and then deal with it, we need to look at it. One example may be just, again, the daily dependence on the daily protective equipment that our healthcare providers have. We are interested to know what we need to do over the next 60 to 90 days and what we need to do over the next 2 or 3 years. That is what we are going to be asking this commission to look at, and we want it to look at it quickly. This is a priority. It has become an immediate priority. We need to know, as we now look at another one of these in a series of epidemics where this has been a concern; whether it is Ebola or swine flu, or bird flu or Zika or SARS, we have had too many of these in too short a period of time. And during that same period of time, the globalization of the supply chain has dramatically changed. So as we prepare for future hazards, we want to ensure that a supply chain is in place to allow us to provide the kind of healthcare we need, the kind of response we need, and the kind of protection we need. This should be part of the bill we send to the President, hopefully, between now and no later than the end of next week. It is one of the things that will begin to move us in a better direction and create greater security--greater health security--as we look at our other security concerns. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President.

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I must admit I was sitting here, and I thought I was coming over for H.R. 1 from the House, which was attempted to be put on the floor--a bill that was supposedly designed to create ballot security--and I got here and found out that this is the bill that will right all wrongs. I had no idea that in one piece of legislation, so many things could happen. I understand also it is a bill that stops the subversion of the Constitution. I actually always thought a principal purpose of our Constitution was to divide between the State and the Federal Government those things that could be better done by local government and those things that could be better done by State government. That certainly is not what I heard today. I also thought that the reason for this bill supposedly from the House was a bill that would create a level of election security that I never thought the bill would create, but I haven't heard that. I almost went down to ask as my friend was finishing up, am I really here for H.R. 1, or is this some other bill that does so much more than I ever could have imagined that H.R. 1 could do? In March of 2019, the House did pass this bill. It gave unprecedented control to the Federal Government over the elections of the country. You take away--you moved as far as you possibly could, with this bill, the responsibility for running an election at a precinct in a jurisdiction. At that time, the Senate requested that the bill be taken up, and it was objected to--by me, actually. In the intervening year, the bill hasn't changed. It appears to have gotten a lot better at what it might possibly be designed to do, which appears to be everything that anybody would ever want to deal with, but what it really does is it still represents a one-size-fits-all Federal power grab to take control of election administration away from the States and in most cases away from the community and in many cases away from a locally elected official whose--the very essence of the job they have been elected to do is to be sure that not only can people vote but that people have confidence in what happens on election day. That, in my view, would change dramatically if you move that responsibility from the people who have it now to some group here in Washington, DC, who would try to administer elections nationally. I am confident that wouldn't happen. In fact, the security of our elections--since the impetus of this was supposed to be more secure elections when the House first said they were going to pass a big election bill that ensures elections will be more secure, I think the thing that secures our elections the most is the diversity of the system. This bill would undermine the decentralization of the system. It would undermine the ability of local officials to be responsible. I spent 20 years as either the election official in the biggest county in our State where one person had that responsibility or as the secretary of state, the chief election official. I have been advised by and I have given advice to and I have worked with local election officials who are incredibly motivated to see that what happens on election day is what voters want to have happen--the ability to cast their ballots with minimum obstacles and with maximum confidence that what happened on election day was what voters intended to do. I think I understand how hard those election officials work and everything they do to ensure that voters will be heard. It is not just my opinion. President Obama in 2016 said that ``there is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America's elections, in part because they are so decentralized and the number of votes involved.'' I actually agree with that. I think that was right then, and I think that is right now. But this bill tells States how they could run every aspect of their election. It takes away the authority of States to determine their own process in voter registration. It requires States--many States do this. If States do this and they think it works in their State, fine with me. But this would require online registration. It would require automatic voter registration. It would require same-day registration. If we were concerned about access to the voter rolls, none of those things would be things that from Washington, DC, we would believe we could require. It requires the criteria of how you process how a voter can be removed from the voter rolls. It tells States what kind of election equipment they must use. It tells States how their ballots have to be counted. It tells States how their ballots have to be audited. It even goes so far as to tell States what kind of paper their ballots have to be printed on. That is exactly what happens when you decide you are going to make something better by making one big one-size-fits-all system. Nothing is too small for that system to decide they can do better than anybody locally could decide, even what paper the ballot is printed on. This doesn't stop at that, though. It changes Federal campaign finance law. It includes politicizing the Federal Elections Commission by changing it from an evenly divided number to a partisan, five-member Commission where three members would always be of the opposite party from the other two. It creates a program for public financing of Federal elections, which was just described as ``grants to politicians''--the most ingenious description I have heard of giving tax money to politicians to run elections. It would be a grant to politicians. This bill hasn't changed since last March, but a lot has changed since last March. The Intelligence Committee that I am a member of has released three volumes of its report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Those three volumes include numerous recommendations to combat foreign election interference in our elections. The vast majority of those recommendations are not in this law. Many of those recommendations have been passed by the Senate and not passed by the House. We are going to have a briefing in just about 50 minutes from the FBI, the Homeland Security people, and the people who are actually working to secure our elections so that every Senator can hear what is happening there. None of that is in this bill. State and local officials have moved dramatically since 2016 to upgrade their systems. All but two States, I believe, now have largely moved to where they have an auditable paper trail, which I was always insisting upon as a State election official. States are moving in that direction. They are changing their own laws. Federal officials are giving them advice when they need it but not trying to take over. This bill not only doesn't acknowledge what State and local officials have been doing, but it actually undermines what they have been doing by setting standards that the brandnew equipment might not fit-- equipment that has a paper trail, equipment that States had just bought, equipment they bought that they think would do a better job but might not be in full compliance with this new law. There certainly are things that the Federal Government can do to assist, particularly in securing local elections and giving advice to local election officials. H.R. 1 does not do most of those things. It doesn't meet the standard that it sets for itself. It doesn't address the actual challenges in elections. So, Madam President, I object.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to talk for a few moments about where we are with the coronavirus response and the supplemental. I think all Senators will have an opportunity to be updated again today. This is not a new place for us to be. This time last year, the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies held a hearing on emerging threats, and at that point we were experiencing the second largest outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, antibiotic resistance was a global danger, and there was a flu outbreak bigger than we had seen in a long time. So 1 year later, we are still fighting the Ebola outbreak in the DRC, antibiotic resistance continues to be a global problem, and, according to Dr. Tony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the flu we are seeing this year is shaping up to be one of the worst in decades. Several thousand Americans die every year from the flu--usually, at least 35,000, sometimes as high as 75,000. I think about 350,000 Americans have died from the flu in the last decade. We are now facing a new danger--the COVID-19 danger. That is the new coronavirus that we hadn't seen before. As we learned with Ebola, patient zero, who doesn't know they even have this yet, can board a plane or a cruise ship, and they can be in another country or even in another continent in a matter of hours. This lesson is, once again, reinforced. This is like all other diseases. It doesn't know any boundaries. We are no longer living in a world where our health can be separated from the health of other countries. Last week, the number of new coronavirus infections outside of China outpaced those inside China for the first time. Maybe the good news is that China is beginning to see something headed in a different direction, but the bad news is the infections in Iran, Italy, South Korea, Japan, and other places. This has moved into Europe now, and in South America a case was just announced in Brazil. This is kind of that moment where we have some opportunity to do everything we can to prepare for the worst, but we still have the option of hoping for the best. That is what happened with SARS. That is what happened with H1N1. To some extent, it is what happened with Zika. It turned out to be bad for the people who had it but not as bad as we anticipated at one point it might be. It is disturbing to see the first deaths in the State of Washington, but, certainly, the message to us is to be more vigilant and be better prepared. The Congress, in the last 5 years, has increased money--that doesn't count whatever we do this week and next week--for preparedness by 44 percent. A year ago, we created for the first time an infectious disease fund--our colleague in the House, Tom Cole, was one of the major proponents of this--to let the Health and Human Services people have access to money immediately. Because of that, they had $105 million that they wouldn't have previously had to be able to spend immediately to help contain this problem, where it can be contained, to bring Americans back here, particularly from China, and to keep them in a known location for the 14-day incubation period to see if anything happened. All of that was possible because we had given them the flexibility that they hadn't had before. The first-line-of-defense funding has been there. We are now moving toward a conclusion of what we can do to make more money available for a vaccine. A vaccine takes a while. We are not going to have a vaccine for a while. We are going to be continuing to talk to Dr. Fauci and his team about this. We are working with experts at what is called BARDA, or the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, to move those vaccines quickly. But even if we had a vaccine in 18 months, that would be the U.S. world record to develop a vaccine here with the safety that we would think it would need to have so that anybody could take a vaccine and, with that vaccine, this particular virus would likely be dealt with. So there is no treatment right now. There is no cure right now. The treatment is to handle these issues in the way that we can in a public health system that has been built over decades. There are 50 States and the District of Columbia, and all have local public health providers. We are going to have new money available to work with them, but, again, the preparedness money that they have had for the last 5 years should have been used in a way--and I believe was used in a way--that gets them all more ready to deal with this than they otherwise would have been. We need to continue so that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have what they need to improve the surveillance systems, the testing systems. I think we are going to find quickly that there will be a test that will be approved by the FDA that allows people to check, in a number of locations, and have that process in a number of locations that tests to see if, in fact, you have what you thought was a worse-than-usual cold--or maybe you thought it was a not-worse-than- usual cold. Sometimes this particular disease doesn't evidence that much happened at all. Because of that, I think there is probably, at this point, a bigger number of people who we think would be a percentage of people who would have really negative consequences-- even death--from this disease, rather than all the people who had it and didn't know they had it. We have learned in the past, through outbreaks of a flu strain that we didn't have a vaccine for, of Ebola, of Zika, that what we do to protect people in other countries winds up protecting people here. We have to be sure that we understand that a lot of our fate in this has been determined and will continue to be determined by what we do to first try to contain this virus and, secondly, to provide the money to be sure that, when we do have an outbreak, which has already begun in our country, it is an outbreak that is really held at the lowest possible level of people impacted and, if you are infected by this disease, that you have the ability to work from home, to do other things. The hospital is not always the place to go. We are working with State and local health officials right now to see that that happens. The money that has been used, I think, has been used effectively. Clearly, we are trying to agree--between the House and the Senate and the administration--to exactly the right number. I would say that, at this point, the administration has been the most agreeable to whatever money we want to provide but, obviously, would like to have that money provided quickly. I feel confident we are going to have the resources to deal with this. I feel confident that this will be a problem that will not impact more people than would usually be impacted by something like the flu. Again, we need to prepare for the very worst and hope for the very best, but our job right now is to prepare for the worst things that could happen and have the funding available so that we don't have to go through a couple of weeks again where an easy determination should have been reached. One thing we could have done is to have given the administration exactly the amount of money they asked for--we could have decided to spend it differently--2 weeks ago and then get into a discussion of what we need next. That is not the course we decided to go down. We are trying to come up with an amount of money, it appears, that would get us through this entire incident with this virus, but it is time to get that done. Hopefully, we will see a bill filed later today and the House able to vote on that bill before they leave this week. Once that number is done, I think it will be seen as almost certain that the Senate will be able to deal with that bill and approve that number. We are going to move forward. I think, again, we are going to move forward in a way that minimizes, as much as possible, the impact that this has on families and on individuals. Mr. President, I look forward to you and I both having a chance to learn more about this even today and to learn more as we move forward. The big thing we need to learn now is the amount of money we need to have to spend and how we allocate that money for a vaccine and other things.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate recess under the previous order.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I have 8 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority leaders. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate: Committee on Armed Services The Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 3, 2020, at 9:30 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on Energy and Natural Resources The Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 3, 2020, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions The Committee Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 3, 2020, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing. Committee on Veterans' Affairs The Committee on Veterans' Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 3, 2020, at 2 p.m., to conduct a hearing. Select Committee on Intelligence The Select Committee on Intelligence is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 3, 2020, at 2:30 p.m., to conduct a closed roundtable. Subcommittee on Cybersecurity The Subcommittee on Cybersecurity of the Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 3, 2020, at 2:30 p.m., to conduct a hearing. Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support The Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support of the Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 3, 2020, at 2:30 p.m., to conduct a hearing. Subcommittee on Science, Oceans, Fisheries, and Weather The Subcommittee on Science, Oceans, Fisheries, and Weather of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 3, 2020, at 2:30 p.m., to conduct a hearing.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I want to talk today about Black History Month and, specifically, about Black History Month and baseball. This month marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the first successful, organized league for professional African-American baseball players. On February 13, 1920, a group of eight midwestern team owners got together at the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City, MO, to form the Negro National League. Before then, these African-American teams had a lot of great players. They barnstormed around the country. They played sort of whomever they could and whenever they could. But in 1920, these eight owners got together and decided that everybody would benefit with more structure in the league, and they established a league to see that we got that structure. In the first 10 years of the league, the Kansas City Monarchs won the pennant four times. As the league thrived, other leagues were formed for African-American players in the South and in the East. Over the years, some of the greatest players in baseball played in the Negro leagues. Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige, and Kansas City's own Buck O'Neil played there. There were many others we would recognize who then became part of the major leagues following Jackie Robinson. There are lots of players you will learn a lot about at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City tells this story and tells it well. They don't just tell the story of African-American organized baseball, but they really tell the story of a thriving community beyond that, which is an important part of our legacy. Obviously, a more important part of our legacy is to bring everybody together, but in those years, around the time the Negro leagues were formed, African-American communities in arts and entertainment and in businesses were significant. Part of that story is told there as well. The 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro leagues is an opportunity for us to talk about that. These leagues had great talent. In fact, the Pittsburgh Grays would play here in Washington half of the time. Half of their games--their so-called home games--they played in Washington at Griffith Stadium, where the Washington Senators played. I don't think there is any argument that when the Grays played here--the African-American team, the Negro leagues team played here--there was a greater crowd than there was when the Senators played, and there was better baseball. These were great and exciting times in baseball. I think that is well told at the museum. Tim Kaine, a Kansas Citian who now represents Virginia in Congress, and I are working together to commemorate the centennial of the Negro Leagues with the minting of a new coin by the Treasury. We are joined over in the House by Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, from Kansas City in my State of Missouri, and Congressman Steve Stivers from Ohio. The way the minting of this coin works, of course, is that there is no cost to the taxpayers. You print a coin. Congress decides that this is an issue worthy of recognizing, and you mint the coin. I think I said print. Mint is more accurate. Once all of the costs of minting those coins have been met--and there is no taxpayer cost--then the money goes to the recipient organization from that point on. There would be a gold coin and a silver coin and a bronze coin at different levels available for people to buy. Now, 75 of our Senate colleagues, including the Presiding Officer and me, have cosponsored this legislation. I think we will get it passed very soon. With any luck, we might even pass it right here in the next day or so during Black History Month. I want to recognize Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, for his support in encouraging us to see if we could make this coin a reality and all that he and his board have done to preserve the history of Negro leagues baseball. I have been certainly glad to take my son Charlie to the museum. I go there with some frequency. A few years ago, I encouraged Major League Baseball to have an event there when they were having the All-Star Game in Kansas City. I don't think there was a player who went to that event at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum who wasn't both impressed and touched by what they saw there. It is an important part of our history. Another part of our history that very closely relates to this is something I will be a part of later this afternoon. Congressman David Trone of Maryland, over on the House side, and I, along with Senator Durbin and Congressman Clay from St. Louis and Congresswoman Wagner from St. Louis, are sending a letter to the Baseball Hall of Fame telling them that they need to include Curt Flood in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Curt Flood was a great player and should be part of the Baseball Hall of Fame just on his playing skills alone. He played with the Cardinals most of his entire career--7 consecutive years. That included two World Series pennants in 1964 and 1967. He won seven Gold Gloves in those 7 years and was designated the best center fielder in the National League. I remember that team well. We were Cardinals fans in my house. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, you didn't have many sports on TV. We listened to virtually every Cardinals game we could hear on the radio. My mom and dad were dairy farmers. I remember being out hauling hay at night, and whoever was driving the truck should have been almost deaf because if there was a Cardinals game going on, the radio would be as loud as it possibly could be so those of us out tossing the bales on the hay truck could hear the Cardinals game. I also remember--and I checked myself yesterday to be sure I was accurate--but on that Curt Flood team, that 1964 team, it was Bill White at first base; Julian Javier at second base, Dick Groat, short stop; Ken Boyer, third base, and Tim McCarver catching. Most of the time, and always if available, Bob Gibson was pitching. In the outfield was Lou Brock--the great Lou Brock. Curt Flood was in center field, and Mike Shannon in right field. By the way, Mike Shannon still announces the Cardinals games on the radio and occasionally on television. It was a great team, and Curt Flood was an important part of that team. Frankly, he should be in the Hall of Fame just because of that-- the two World Series, Most Valuable Player, the best center fielder in baseball, at least in the National League, for 7 years straight. In late 1969, the Cardinals decided they were going to trade Curt Flood to the Phillies. I don't think Curt Flood necessarily had anything against the Phillies, but he didn't want to be traded against his will. So he wrote a letter to the commissioner of baseball. In that letter he said: ``After 12 years in the Major Leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes.'' That began the challenge of the reserve clause in baseball. Maybe it is particularly significant here in Black History Month that an African-American player was the one who challenged the reserve clause. With the reserve clause in baseball, you would play for your team's owner as long as you wanted to play unless your team's owner decided you would play for someone else. Then you would play for that person as long as they wanted you to play, unless you decided you didn't want to play baseball anymore. It was Curt Flood who challenged that. He lost his Supreme Court case. It was a 5-to-4 loss in the Supreme Court. But it didn't take too many years before not only was the reserve clause reversed but Curt Flood was recognized in Federal legislation. There is a copy of that single-page letter filed as part of the 1970 case at the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. If there is a copy of Curt Flood's letter in the Hall of Fame, then, Curt Flood should be in the Hall of Fame. I hope those looking back at what is called the golden years of baseball look at players who didn't get into the Hall of Fame, take our advice, look at Curt Flood, look at the difference he has made for players playing the game today, and put him in the Hall of Fame. I yield back.