Rob Portman

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I strongly support this amendment. The most important thing we can do right now is to get the vaccines distributed. One of the problems we have is that about 40 percent of Americans are still saying they are uncomfortable getting the vaccine. Part of that is because we haven't been able to get a proper public awareness campaign out there--not with politicians but with folks with white coats and people who are respected and trusted on this issue--to say it is necessary for us because these are safe and effective, and by getting these vaccines in place, we can turn things around. I support the amendment. Vote on Amendment No. 716

Mr. PORTMAN

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the floor today to talk about the way forward for this new Congress and the new Biden administration. Specifically, this afternoon, we are talking about the budget resolution that the Democratic side has proposed. There was a vote today to begin to proceed on that. My understanding is that by the end of this week, we will have a number of amendments about the budget, and this all goes toward a process called reconciliation. If the two budgets are agreed upon, that would enable us--with 50 votes rather than the normal 60 votes--to take on a really important issue, which is the issue of how we should address the COVID-19 pandemic. But, to me, this is an even bigger question. It is a question about how we are going to proceed, as a Congress, working with this new administration. If you recall, the Senate is now a 50-50 split. That is as closely divided as you can possibly be. There are 50 Senators on this side and 50 Senators on that side. The House is more closely divided than it has been in years. And, significantly, the American people are more divided than they have been in years. I think the American people, as a general matter--not everybody, but I think the American people are looking for us to deal with these divisions here in the country by working together to try to get something done, by working together to help heal the wounds that are out there. As for me, one Senator, I am very interested in helping President Biden make good on the pledge that he made on the steps of the Capitol. On the west steps, just that way in the U.S. Capitol, on Inauguration Day, January 20, the President said that he wanted to bring our country together. He wanted to help heal those wounds. He wanted us to work across the aisle. He wanted to go back to an era here where we actually sat down, debated things, worked them out together, and, therefore, helped bring our country together. I hope, with regard to the COVID-19 discussions, that Republicans and Democrats will agree to keep working on charting the Federal response to the ongoing healthcare and economic crisis in a bipartisan way. It is the one area where we have done it. Yet when you think of all the division in all of the times when we haven't been able to find agreement on things around here, one place we have been able to find agreement has been with regard to COVID-19. Specifically, we have passed five different bills--five bills--with big majorities, bipartisan majorities. One was actually by unanimous consent. The most recent one was just 5 weeks ago or less, at the end of the year, when Congress passed a $900 billion COVID-relief package in an entirely bipartisan way. And $900 billion, by the way, makes that the second most expensive legislative package that Congress has ever passed--$900 billion. The first one was the CARES Act, which also related to the coronavirus pandemic that we are in. Over $4 trillion-- that is trillion with a ``t''--has been spent on this, larger than our typical annual budget for everything in government. And do you know what? It is a crisis, and we needed to step up to the plate. But now, while the ink is still drying on the bill that we passed at the end of the year, the Biden administration has proposed another $1.9 trillion to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. My own view is that, again, this is an area where we have been able to come together. Let's do it again. Is there more need out there? Well, when Congress passed the $900 billion legislation, we all said: This is a bridge to get us to between now and when the vaccines are readily available, which we all hope happens sooner rather than later. But there may be some things we need to do in the interim--I think there are--and maybe some things after the March, April time period that we hadn't thought about for the vaccine availability. The vaccines are moving out more slowly than expected. So I, for one, am willing to sit down wit Republicans and Democrats alike, as we have done, again, five different times, to work on how we can come together to provide that bridge to a better time when the economy will improve because the COVID-19 issue will have been addressed. My concern is that, again, today, we started down a track, by starting on the budget, to end up with budget reconciliation, which would mean a 50-vote rather than a 60-vote margin because the other side of the aisle--Democrats--think it would be better not to try to work out something on a bipartisan basis but to simply use their majority to get something through here that they would like to do that is consistent with where President Biden's $1.9 trillion package is. We will see. Maybe they could be successful at that, maybe not, because it would require every Member on that side of the aisle to agree with the $1.9 trillion package, which is a comprehensive, complicated package, which includes a number of things addressed to COVID-19 but another number of things that are unrelated to COVID-19, some of which are popular on the other side of the aisle in particular, like changes in tax law that have nothing to do with COVID-19, changes to the Federal minimum wage that have nothing to do with COVID-19. But we will see. But even if they could pass it by the barest majority, given that it is a 50-50 Senate, it is not the right way to go for our country. I don't think anybody truly believes it is the best thing for our country. Again, if we can't come together as Republicans and Democrats, as we have proven that we can time and again over the last year, what can we come together on? And wouldn't that poison the well? Wouldn't it make it harder for us, then, to find that common ground on things like infrastructure investments, on things like retirement security? I think it is going to be harder if we start off on the wrong foot, if we start off in a purely partisan way. I was part of the group of five Democrats and five Republicans who sat down--we call ourselves the 908 Coalition because we put together a bipartisan framework, actual legislation, on COVID-19. This was over the last few months before Christmas. Then, at the end of the year, Congress passed the $900 billion bill. Our framework provided a basis for that. It wasn't exactly the same, but it provided a basis for that. Frankly, because Republicans and Democrats alike--five and five--were able to agree, it helped get our leadership more focused on how to find a bipartisan result, as we had done previously, because things weren't going very well. They weren't talking to each other. They weren't making the progress that we had hoped. That group has shown that we can, indeed, come together and make tough choices. Not one thing in that legislative effort was not bipartisan. By the way, there were five of us on the Republican side, five on the Democratic side. None of us agreed with all of it. It was a matter of compromise--a word that maybe isn't too popular anymore, but that is how you get things done around here. You have to figure out: What is that common ground? What is the way in which you can make progress without having everything your way? We have shown we can do it. The 908 Coalition is ready to go again. I will say that what we were able to do with that coalition was to help move the process forward in a bipartisan way. And, in the end, we got $69 billion in funding for vaccine development and distribution, $82 billion to support our students in school, $325 billion to restart the highly successful small business program called the Paycheck Protection Program. At unprecedented deficit times, where we want to be sure every dollar is wisely spent, that $900 billion was about one-seventh of the size of the Democratic proposal that was originally out there and was supported by a lot of Democrats here in the Senate--not one Republican, by the way. That was a $3.5 trillion bill called the Heroes Act. We ended up doing something that was smaller but more targeted and more effective in dealing with the immediate problems with no extraneous provisions that had nothing to do with COVID-19, which was the case of the Heroes Act. So we have done it time and time again--five different times. Let's do it again. If we are going to continue responding to this crisis in a smart way that meets the needs of our constituents, it is going to require us having that kind of a good-faith, bipartisan negotiation. Again, in his inaugural address, President Biden said: ``This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward.'' I don't think he meant just unity with one party or another. Clearly, the context of that speech and his other comments were about outreach to Republicans and Democrats alike to get back to an era where we worked together. Unfortunately, since that address, the President's team and his party appear to have chosen a different path, introducing this new COVID-19 package I talked about without any input, any consultation with any Republican or, for that matter, I think it is fair to say, any Democrat in this Chamber. I may be wrong. But I know the Democrats who are on the 908 Coalition were not consulted, period. That is not the way forward. Why would we do that? Why wouldn't we, once again, do what we have proven we can do, particularly following what I thought was an excellent speech, talking about how we can work together. The $1.9 trillion package that was sent up does have extraneous matters that have nothing to do with COVID-19, as the Heroes Act did. I understand that these are popular proposals, particularly on the Democratic side. We can debate those, and we can have a vote on those, but let's do it outside of the COVID-19 context. We should have a debate about minimum wage. We should have a debate on changing the child tax credit, the earned-income tax credit, which would not affect COVID-19 at all because no one believes that a year from now that we are going to be in this position, which is when people could take advantage of those tax credits. But they are in the legislation, as an example. There are provisions in there for clean energy. That is a good debate for us to have but not in the context of this. There are provisions in there for cyber security--$10 billion for improving our cyber security in the Federal Government. The Presiding Officer and I actually like that idea, to have cyber security funds and to set up a new way to push back against these terrible cyber attacks that we have had, particularly recently--a massive one. But that is not appropriate for the COVID-19 bill. As much as I would like to have that debate, let's do it separately. By the way, that can be bipartisan as well. The $1.9 trillion proposal also has a new round of stimulus checks that are written so that a family with three kids making $290,000 a year can end up getting a check from the Federal Government, even if they have had no negative impact from COVID-19. That seems, to us, to be wrongheaded. And, I think, frankly, a lot of Democrats agree to that, too, and believe it ought to be more targeted toward those who need it the most. The economic analysis in this is clear, which is that these higher income individuals who have received earlier stimulus checks have ended up not spending them, meaning they don't stimulate the economy, which is the whole idea of the stimulus checks. There is some recent data out by an economist named Chetty, who is well respected, that says, of the $1,400 that the proposal that the President has laid out going to these families--of that $1,400, if someone makes over $78,000 a year, likely they only spend about $105 of that money. The rest they will save, put in the stock market, do something else with it but not spend. So let's target it. We are not against stimulus checks, but we are against sending stimulus checks to people who are wealthy, who don't need it. That seems like not an effective use of taxpayer dollars at a time of these unprecedented deficits and debts, with our debt being the highest it has been, as a percent of our economy, since World War II. We also have to realize that the $900 billion that was in the package that just passed 5 weeks ago or less has not been fully spent. In fact, most analyses show that less than half of that $900 billion has gone out the door. So we can't know what the impact has been of what we just spent--again, the second largest expenditure of funds ever in the history of this Congress because half of it has not even got out the door, or more. Let's do an analysis there. Apparently, without taking the time to see if there are 60 Senators willing to move forward with this new idea of a new bipartisan package, this reconciliation approach I talked about earlier is the one that Democrats seem to want to take. It is a rare process. You have to have a budget passed by both sides. It only happens every few years. The reconciliation is in the underlying budget we are voting on over the next couple of days here. It is something that can be used-- reconciliation--only for budget-related issues, only for mandatory spending and for revenue, for taxes, and for reducing the debt. So it has to be budget related. Actually, some of the things in the $1.9 trillion dollar package can't even be done by reconciliation, which would mean we would have to be changing the rules of this body in order to include them in reconciliation. That is another bad idea. First bad idea, not to work on a bipartisan basis. At least try. At least try. The second one is, using reconciliation, which is a mere 50-vote margin for something that is not directly related to the budget that has a direct impact. It can't be merel incidental to the budget, as an example. There are a number of provisions in there that fit that category. And there is at least discussion, I am told--and we have heard it openly from my colleagues on the other side of saying: Well, we are just going to overrule the Chair--essentially nuke--going the nuclear option, as they say. The nuclear option means that you overrule the Chair--and by a mere 50 votes, change the rules of the Senate. Please don't do that. That would be, again, setting us down a path of partisanship we don't need to do. It would be poisoning the well. It would be saying--just as getting rid of the filibuster would--we are going to change the rules now that we are in charge. The rules are there for a reason. And that is to ensure that, to the extent possible, the Senate is a body where you find at least some modicum of bipartisanship to move forward because you have to get those 60 votes, not just 50 votes or 51. By trying to jam through this $1.9 trillion legislation, it sets exactly the wrong tone for the country and also for the administration. I think President Biden has a real opportunity to help heal our country--I really do. By the way, I think he sincerely wants to. That is why I don't understand this process. Our 908 Coalition--this bipartisan group, which is now 20 Members, 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats--and we took it up to 10 Republicans because we wanted to show that you can get to 60 votes. If you had 50 Democrats, you would have 10 Republicans willing to work with them. And I am sure there are many, many more than those 10. I know there are. This group is now being tested. This group was bipartisan under President Trump. I hope it will be bipartisan under President Biden. I hope that that bipartisanship shows up quickly before we go down this path. We had a meeting last week of our 908 Coalition, and our Democratic colleagues asked us: What can we support? If it is not $1.9 trillion, what is it? Fair question. Again, many of us think we ought to find out what happened to the $900 billion first, hard-earned tax money that hasn't been spent yet. But we said: OK. We will put together a proposal that we could support--not that we support all elements of it but we could support in order to respond to the President's $1.9 trillion package in addressing all of the major issues that he addressed. Over the weekend, we outlined a $600 billion package that does just that. It addresses the most urgent needs of our country. It does not include any of the unrelated provisions in the Democrats' package that have nothing to do with COVID-19. What it does contain is the same $160 billion that is in the $1.9 trillion package as it relates to healthcare. What does that mean? It means that if we are going to get out of this crisis we find ourselves in, we have to address the COVID-19 issue, right? We are not just going to have an economy improve immediately to the extent we would like to see it without dealing with the healthcare crisis. That is what is driving the fact that restaurants are closed down, the fact that people are losing jobs through no fault of their own, the fact that we have these economic issues related to COVID. So the sensible thing to do is to be sure we are dealing with the vaccine, development and distribution, dealing with testing, dealing with tracing, making sure we have proper PPE. All of that is in the $160 billion that is in the Biden proposal. It is also in the proposal that we Republicans on the Coalition put forward--$160 billion, the same. For those issues, we are consistent with President Biden's plan on additional healthcare support. Our proposal also prioritizes getting kids back to the classroom, which we think is really important. Specifically, we have $20 billion toward getting children safely back into classrooms, which is on top of the $82 billion we just spent on schools at the end of year. As a parent, I couldn't feel more strongly about this; we need to get our children back to school, and we need to make sure we it is safe--and we can do both. We also provide an additional $12 billion for nutrition programs to combat food insecurity and ensure that families, kids have food on the table. This is consistent, again, with the Biden administration plan. These are ones that we agree on. Our proposal also includes $20 billion for the childcare and development block grants so our childcare facilities across the country can stay open, so the parents can go back to work. Childcare is incredibly expensive. Again, this is where we agree. We have a new round of $50 billion in financial support for small businesses, but we use it in a program we know works rather than setting up a new program, which would take a long time to put in place. We help the hardest hit families and individuals through expanding unemployment insurance for those who lose their job through no fault of their own. We expand it from where it currently ends now, in mid-March, to the end of June, so June 30. We extend it at $300 per week, which is the Federal supplement now in place. There, the Biden administration wants $400 rather than $300 and wants to extend it into September, to September 30. There is no economic data that says that that will be necessary. If it is, we can take it up again. So there we have a proposal that is similar but more targeted to meet the real needs of our economy. Our proposal also provides direct stimulus checks to Americans who really need that extra amount of money to pay their rent or put food on the table or pay their mortgage. By the way, we do it by lowering these limits. Instead of going to families that make 300,000 bucks a year or more--if they have got three or four kids, we say let's cap it at $50,000 for individuals, $100,000 for families, an additional $500 per child. Again, all the economists say that is what makes sense because those are the folks who are really going to spend it and need it. Let's target this to those who really need the help. We accomplish all these things at one-third of the cost of the Biden proposal. Much of the difference between our proposal and the Biden administration's is we don't include the extraneous matters, but also it is how we address these two crises: the healthcare crisis to defeat the underlying disease and the work we are trying to do to ensure the economy can recover. Both proposals rightly provide the resources needed to address the healthcare crisis, as I said. But with regard to the economic crisis, we take a little different approach. Our focus is on getting targeted aid to those who need it the most. In contrast, a large portion of the administration's $1.9 trillion package is about spending taxpayer dollars to stimulate the economy that, based on all the data, is already beginning to recover. And that is something that, frankly, is not an effective use of taxpayer dollars. Just yesterday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, reported that the economy is growing quite well right now. They project a 3.7-percent real economic growth in this year we are in, in 2021. That is significant economic growth. That takes into account inflation, real economic growth at 3.7 percent. That just came out yesterday. By the way, the Wall Street Journal does a survey of a bunch of economists--60 economists--and their consensus for the economic growth in this year is not 3.7 percent, it is 4.3 percent. Even better. So the economy is projected to grow quite well this year. Importantly, the CBO also said that the economy is expected to recover to prepandemic levels by the middle of the year. They say that by June 30, the economy will be back to where it was before the pandemic, which was a very strong economy. In fact, a year ago February, this month, we had 19 straight months of wage growth of over 3 percent. We had the lowest poverty rate in the history of our country. There was a lot of good things going on in our economy. And they say we are going to get back to that--this is CBO, not me--by the middle of this year. Meanwhile, after record-high jobless claims we saw last spring when unemployment hit 14.7 percent, the national unemployment rate has fallen to 6.7 percent, which means Americans are able to find work, for the most part. Is it where I would like it to be? No. But the CBO says the unemployment numbers are going to go down, as does everybody else who has projected this over the next year. They say it is going to drop this year to 5.3 percent. Five percent used to be considered full employment. We would like to see it even better than that. But the point is, the economy is improving. And as we get these virus pandemic issues under control, the economy will improve even more. Having the vaccines readily available is going to make a big difference. And, of course, again, that is why we put so much money into that in our proposal. CBO is basing these projections, by the way, without factoring any of the new $1.9 trillion. They don't assume that there will be any more stimulus than what we just passed several weeks ago. In other words, while the Biden Administration says we need $1.9 trillion in new spending or our economy will tank, CBO says very clearly that is not true. Instead, we need to help those who are still struggling and cannot find a job because their industry shuttered or their business isn't allowed to reopen, and that is what our targeted proposal will do. Other respected sources agree with CBO's optimism. I mentioned these 68 economists indicating 4.3 percent economic growth. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said yesterday that the CBO data underscores the need for a targeted package, saying: ``It shouldn't take $1.9 trillion to fill a $400 billion or $800 billion hole'' in our economy. We have more data to suggest that the economy is on a path to recovery. For example, we know that household incomes rose slightly-- but they rose--in December. This was the first increase in 3 months. The personal savings rate in December rose significantly--13.7 percent--indicating there is a lot of pent-up demand right there for people to get out and start spending money again. To me, all this points to a pretty clear conclusion that in the immediate aftermath of the $900 billion bipartisan package just passed at year end, there is simply not a strong argument to spend an additional $1.9 trillion on stimulus. Instead, we need to use this next COVID-19 package to focus on the ongoing healthcare challenges of the pandemic--that is the key thing--and on getting targeted economic relief to the hardest hit Americans, which is what our $600 billion proposal does. I appreciate that, in the last few days, President Biden has expressed more willingness to work with bipartisan Members of Congress on this critical challenge. After we wrote to President Biden on Sunday requesting a meeting to discuss our targeted COVID-19 relief proposal, he quickly accepted, and, yesterday, we had a lengthy and, I thought, very productive discussion at the White House. While we didn't come to an agreement on a proposal--and as you can see today on the floor, Democrats are moving forward with this budget process, regardless--it was a productive discussion and gives me hope that we can follow the bipartisan approach we have taken from the previous five COVID bills. The meeting reaffirmed that there is a lot of common ground for us to build another bill upon and that we share the belief that we need to ensure the hardest hit individuals and families and small businesses get more support they need during this crisis. My hope is that we can use these two proposals as a starting point for negotiations on a COVID-19 response package that Congress can pass, as we have before, consistently, with bipartisan support, not through partisan parliamentary maneuvers. This pandemic gives us an opportunity to come together as Republicans and Democrats and show the American people we can put aside the partisanship and the divisions that have become the norm around here and get things done. If we can't do it on COVID-19, as we have five times already, where can we do it? I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle and with President Biden to follow his desire to make good on his pledge in the inaugural address to work together to respond to this crisis. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I can say with certainty that General Austin has no better friend or ally in this Chamber than Senator Dan Sullivan, who has seen him as a person and seen him as a commander. Those votes will occur later today. Madam President, I rise today on the floor to talk about what happened yesterday at the Capitol and what happened 2 weeks ago at the Capitol. Yesterday, we had the 59th Presidential inauguration right here. The citadel of democracy was once again the place where a President and Vice President were sworn in for 4 years. Starting in 1789, every 4 years, America and the world have witnessed this remarkable event that provides for the peaceful transfer of Executive power and the continuity of government--something we sometimes take for granted but is rare, even today. It has happened through wars. It has happened through economic recessions. We have had our inaugurations today and during this unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. What is more, the inauguration took place 2 weeks to the day on the very west steps of the United States Capitol where a violent mob stormed this building, desecrating these halls, and tried to stop our constitutionally mandated deliberations in this body. It was the ninth inauguration ceremony I have attended. I was proud to be there as President Biden and Vice President Harris were sworn in. I am here on the floor today to thank the Capitol Police and other law enforcement agencies, including the Secret Service and its Director, Jim Murray, who took the lead on this national special security event to ensure that things went smoothly and that we, indeed, had a peaceful transfer of power. I also want to give special thanks to the men and women of the National Guard, who worked to ensure this ceremony was safe and secure. Over the past 2 weeks, 25,000 National Guard troops from across the country, including all 50 States and 3 territories, answered the call, leaving their families and friends and, for most, leaving their regular jobs to help defend this sacred celebration of democracy that occurred at this place yesterday. This number of 25,000 troops includes nearly 1,000 guardsmen from my home State of Ohio. I had the opportunity to meet with a couple hundred of these citizen soldiers from Ohio yesterday. I was able to tell them how much we appreciate their commitment to the mission and what they have done, truly, to protect democracy and to help our Capitol Police during a stressful time. Because of their efforts, the ceremony was safe for everyone in attendance, and we were able to proceed with this transfer of power. When I thanked them, they all told me the same thing--they were just doing their duty. They were proud to be here. They were protecting their country and their fellow citizens I have seen this firsthand over the years when I have visited Ohio National Guard installations around our State, including the Mansfield Air Base, the Toledo Air Base, the Springfield Air Base, Rickenbacker Air National Guard. During this pandemic, when more Americans than ever are facing severe food insecurity, I have had the chance to hand out food with members of the Ohio Army National Guard who have been working around the clock at food banks I have been at, like Greater Cleveland Food Bank or Central Ohio Food Bank. They are working hard alongside volunteers to respond to a true crisis. But that is not all. The Ohio National Guard has played an essential role in providing critical assistance to our prisons and our jails when guards were out with the COVID virus. They have helped with testing. They have helped to get the COVID-19 vaccines distributed across our State, and they are continuing to do that. We can't thank them enough for what they have done during this time of crisis. As I have visited with the Guard this week, both with regard to the Ohio members and Guard from all over the country, including some conversations I had this morning, I have told them all what I have heard from the Capitol Police this week. I have heard that they really appreciated the backup at a time when shifts have been long, sleep has been rare, and the effects of the attack on the Capitol are still acutely felt. It has been a tough 2 weeks on our Capitol police officers. It has been a tough 2 weeks since the attack on the Capitol. I want to take this opportunity to also express the gratitude of all of us in this Chamber and all Americans to the Capitol Police for bravely holding the line against an illegal, violent mob that threatened this building, our proceedings, and our colleagues. In effect, the men and women of the Capitol Police Force put their lives on the line to defend democracy. It is that simple. As I said on this floor that terrible night 2 weeks ago, it was because of their courage that we were safe and because of their courage that we were able to demonstrate to the American people and the world that we were going to accomplish our constitutional duty of certifying the election. They allowed us to do that. As a Congress, we have begun a complete, impartial, and nonpartisan investigation into what went wrong that day. I am working across the Senate with the committees of jurisdiction--the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where I will be the ranking Republican, the Rules Committee, the Appropriations Committee, and the Intelligence Committee to ensure that our Capitol Police are never put in that kind of position again. We are performing oversight to ensure they have what they need to be able to protect the Capitol going forward. Without prejudging our investigation, we must consider what reforms need to be made and take a hard look at the physical security of our Capitol Complex. While these buildings must remain accessible to the people, we need to look at incorporating the best practices in physical security, to include shatterproof windows and doors that can't be easily breached. This will cost money, but it is absolutely necessary, based on what happened on the 6th of January. I look forward to helping lead this bipartisan effort, and I urge my fellow Members of Congress to join in. Again, I don't want to prejudge our review, but I know among the findings we will make is a finding that the officers on the line were heroic, and those officers deserve our gratitude. We must never forget those who lost their lives that night, including a law enforcement officer and member of the Capitol Police, Officer Brian Sicknick, who, since 2008, had patrolled these halls and had been a familiar face to many of us. He was tragically killed defending this Capitol. He gave his life in heroic defense of us and our democracy. Only a couple of days after the attack, I learned the tragic news that we lost another officer, a friend, Officer Howard Liebengood. Howie was on duty the day the Capitol was attacked and responded to the attack just as his many brave comrades did. He experienced some difficult experiences that night. I was devastated to learn of his death the next day. Howie was someone I used to see almost every day. He was usually stationed in the Russell Building, where my office is located. He was an utmost professional--someone who took great pride in his work and had an ironclad commitment to keeping people safe. His dad was Sergeant at Arms here at one time. He brightened my day every time I saw him. The last time was a few weeks ago, when he was standing guard outside the doors to the Russell Building, alone in the cold, alert, vigilant, and good-humored. Today I reread a letter that I wrote to the Chief of the Capitol Police several years ago, commending the exceptional work of Howie and his partner, Chris Gallo, for their ``professionalism, coupled with their kind demeanor.'' Howie represented what is great and good about not just our police force but our country. Rest in peace, Officer Brian Sicknick and Officer Howard Liebengood. Through the tragedy of that day 2 weeks ago came other stories of bravery and valor too. We have heard about the heroic actions of Officer Eugene Goodman, an Army veteran whose quick thinking under intense pressure protected us here in this Senate Chamber by leading the mob away from the Chamber while many of us were still inside. He unselfishly put himself in danger and, despite the risk, handled himself with the professionalism that defines the Capitol Police, and I was pleased to see his promotion. Officer Goodman's heroic efforts are, to me, representative of the actions of all the brave officers of the Capitol Police, who, on that day of violence and lawlessness, held the line against the mob. I am proud of another member of the Capitol Police. This is the supervisor. Inspector Tommy Lloyd is commander of the Capitol division--as compared to the House and the Senate, commander of the division to protect the Capitol itself. This is a powerful photograph that I saw in TIME magazine. It is a photograph of him facing the mob, shoulder to shoulder with his line officers. The Capitol was breached, but because of the valor of these men and women, we were able to complete our job and are able to be here today, discussing the workings of our democracy, confirming members of the new administration, doing our job. The actions of law enforcement in the Capitol should serve as a reminder to all of us of the risks our police officers take every single day to keep us safe--not just here in the Capitol but around the country. On Monday, for example, the city of Toledo, OH, lost one of its own when Officer Brandon Stalker of the Toledo Police Department was killed in a standoff with a gunman. Officer Stalker, only 24 years old, was the father of two young children and engaged to be married. He had a promising life ahead of him. My thoughts are with the friends and families of Officer Stalker and the friends and families of Officers Sicknick and Liebengood during this difficult time. Even with all the threats and challenges they face, our officers of the law here and around the country carry on in their duties to protect and to serve. They are truly the best of America. Officer Stalker's fellow officers will continue to patrol the streets of Toledo to keep its citizens safe. Yesterday, despite the hardships they have faced, the Capitol Police, once again, lined the Halls of Congress, keeping watch over the inauguration of the next President and Vice President of the United States. Together, the National Guard, the Capitol Police, the Secret Service, and other law enforcement protected a Presidential inauguration that was at once like none other in recent memory, and yet also a continuation of a long and great tradition--an unbroken chain of peacefully transferring power that our Nation has cherished since 1789. They did their duty, as they do every day, in defense of the values we Americans hold dearest--democracy, liberty, rule of law--and we all owe them a debt of gratitude. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. Vice President, you have fulfilled your duties as President of the Senate tonight with distinction, and we all appreciate it. I thought about changing my mind and not speaking tonight, given the lateness of the hour, and I know all of my colleagues would have appreciated that greatly. But I thought it was necessary to speak because I want the American people, particularly my constituents in Ohio, to see that we will not be intimidated, that we will not disrupted from our work, that here in the citadel of democracy, we will continue to do the work of the people. Mob rule is not going to prevail here. Now, let's face it. We did not reclaim this Chamber tonight. Brave and selfless law enforcement officers stood in the breach and ensured that the citadel of democracy would be protected and that we would be defended, and we are deeply grateful for that--as is the Nation I have listened carefully to comments of my colleagues, and I have listened over the past couple of weeks as this issue has been discussed, and I tell you, for me, it is not a hard decision. I stand with the Constitution. I stand with what the Constitution makes clear: The people and the States hold the power here, not us. My oath to the Constitution and my reverence for our democratic principles make it easy for me to confirm these State certifications. By the way, I opposed this process some 15 years ago, when some Democrats chose to object to the electors from my home State of Ohio after the 2004 elections. I opposed it then, and I oppose it now. I said at the time that Congress must not thwart the will of the people. That is what we would be doing. Let's assume for a moment that those who object to the certifications are right, that the Constitution intended that a bare majority of Members of Congress could circumvent the States that have chosen to certify the popular votes of their own State citizens. I ask the objectors to think about the precedent that would be set if we were to do that. What if the majority in the House and the Senate were of the other party when a Presidential candidate of our party came through a close Presidential election? Would you want a Congress controlled by the Democrats to play the role you now intend for us? It is asking Congress to substitute its judgment for the judgment of the voters and its judgment for the judgment of the States that certified the results. And even forgetting the dangerous precedent that would be set, what would be the basis for objecting in this election? Look, I voted for President Trump. I supported him because I believe the Trump administration's policies are better for Ohio and for the country. And I supported the Trump campaign's right to pursue recounts--they had every right to do it--and legal challenges. I agree that there were instances of fraud and irregularities in the 2020 elections. I think we all do. And by the way, there are fraud and irregularities in every Presidential election. But it is also true that after 2 months of recounts and legal challenges, not a single State recount changed the result. And of the dozens of lawsuits filed, not one found evidence of fraud or irregularities widespread enough to change the result of the election. This was the finding of numerous Republican-appointed judges and the Trump administration's own Department of Justice. Every State has now weighed in and chosen to certify its electoral slate based on the popular vote, as set out in the Constitution. I understand that many Americans who would never storm this Capitol don't trust the integrity of the 2020 election, don't think the States should have certified, don't think we should have accepted the results from the States, and are insisting on more transparency and accountability. In the 2016 elections, lest we forget, many Democrats objected to the results and distrusted the election. I challenge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to listen but also to do our part to try to restore faith in our elections. We should all work to improve the integrity of the electoral system and the confidence of the American people in this bedrock of our great democratic Republic. Today, I will do my constitutional duty and oppose these efforts to reject the State-certified results. And tomorrow, in the wake of this attack on the Capitol, the pandemic that engulfs us, and other national challenges, let's work together for the people.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, one other point from Senator Stabenow and myself, and that is that we want to congratulate and thank our colleagues in the House for working with us on this Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and, in particular, the two cochairs in the House from the Great Lakes Task Force and the two coauthors of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative legislation. That would be Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Representative David Joyce from Ohio. We would like to thank them for their good work and congratulate them on tonight's passage as well Coronavirus

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am on the floor tonight to join my colleague Senator Stabenow of Michigan to ask our colleagues to support legislation that has to do with the Great Lakes. It is called the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. We are asking to reauthorize that legislation. This is one of those public-private partnerships that work. It is not only public, like Federal public, and private; it is Federal, State, local, and private individuals coming together to figure out how to keep our Great Lakes the amazing treasure that they are. I represent Lake Erie. It is on the north coast of Ohio. It is the most shallow and also the most fertile of the Great Lakes. It has incredible fishing. There is a gigantic, $7 billion fishing industry in the Great Lakes. A lot of it is recreational fishing--$7 billion. It is being threatened right now, really, by a few different things. One is these Asian carp, so-called ``bighead carp,'' that are coming up into the lake. We are doing all we can to keep them out, but this funding, the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, focuses on that issue to keep the carp from ruining Lake Erie as they have ruined other bodies of water for recreational and commercial fishing. Second, we have to deal with our toxic algae blooms. You have probably heard about this. We have these blooms that are increasingly forming in Lake Erie, particularly in the western basin of the Toledo area. What they do is they keep people from being able to use the lake. You don't want to swim in it. By the way, you don't even want your dog to swim in it because the dogs can actually be injured by this. You don't want to fish in it, of course, and you really can't. I have gone fishing in the Great Lakes every year for the past many years. I love the Great Lakes. Part of my childhood was on the Great Lakes. When I was a little kid, with my dad, I went fishing on the Great Lakes. You really can't fish when the algae blooms come in because they are so thick, you literally can't get a lure or bait through the algae blooms, and your boat has a tough time getting through them. This is a serious issue. At one point, it got so serious in the western basin that it actually affected the water supply for the city of Toledo. So several years ago, we had to stop the city water in Toledo. I remember going there, with my pickup truck full of bottles of water, to help hand out water because people--particularly moms with babies--couldn't use the water. They were told: Don't allow your babies to have formula made from the water in the faucet because it is too dangerous, too toxic, because these algae blooms had gotten into the water system. That is how scary this is if we don't ensure that we are taking efforts at every level--State, local, in the private sector, and at the Federal. Lake Erie and the other Great Lakes now provide drinking water for 40 million people. You want to be sure that treasure continues, not just for recreation and fishing and swimming and so on but also for the water supply for so many Americans. The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative is a downpayment, really, to ensure that we can deal with these invasive species like the Asian carp and others. It is to ensure that we can deal with the toxic algae blooms and the erosion that is occurring as the water level has gone up and also some pollution issues that remain in Lake Erie and in all the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative works. I have been to about 10 of these sights all around Ohio, and I have gone often with people from the private sector and the local community and sometimes the State government, and we talk about how, again, this is a model partnership. As an example, I was at a farm in northwest Ohio, where, instead of telling them, ``Hey, you have to stop farming because you are putting nitrogen and phosphorus into the creek that goes by your farm, and that is going into the Maumee River, and that is going into Lake Erie and causing these algae blooms to grow,'' I asked, ``Hey, how can we work with you as a farmer to try to reduce your runoff?'' We have had great success in that, but there is some expense in it. Often, you have to provide for filters and pumps and so on to keep this from going into the water supply and dealing with these upstream issues with regard to algae blooms and phosphorus nitrogen. So I am pleased to say that, as of tonight, it appears that we have passed this on both sides of the Chamber through a so-called hotline. We had to work with some of our colleagues to resolve some remaining questions that they had for which we had answers because this is a program that works, and I have seen it work. I am really pleased to have partnered with Senator Stabenow. We are cochairs of the Great Lakes Task Force. She is the Democratic cochair, and I am the Republican cochair, and tonight I have partnered with her on this legislation. I thank her for her friendship, her work on this issue, and her passion for the Great Lakes. I would like, if I could, to now turn to Senator Stabenow.

Mr. PORTMAN. First of all, I want to agree with my colleague from Michigan and thank her for her work concerning behavioral health and working with us in a bipartisan group on both behavioral health and addiction because, unfortunately, during this pandemic, the epidemic of drug addiction and drug overdose and overdose deaths has increased dramatically, and it is a heartbreaking reality because we were making progress, thanks to work here in this Chamber and in the States. Around the country, we were actually reducing not just the number of people addicted but the number of people who were suffering from overdose and overdose deaths. Unfortunately, this year we are now going to see the largest overdose death rate in the history of our country, we believe. That is a sad reality, and we need to address it--that is part of the COVID-19 package--along with the behavioral health issues that are also, unfortunately, being exacerbated by the isolation that comes with the COVID-19 issue and the helpless, probably, and the joblessness that we have been seeing. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, first, I am delighted that we are finally at the point at which we are passing legislation to deal with the COVID-19 crisis that has gripped my State and our country. We have a healthcare pandemic, and we have an economic crisis. I am pleased to say that, on a bipartisan basis, we are now coming together as we did 9 months ago with the CARES Act. It shouldn't have been 9 months, but we now have a targeted bill that focuses on providing a bridge between now and the time at which the vaccines will be widely available. We need the help. The economy is faltering, as was just said, but also the healthcare crisis in my home State and in so many other places has gotten worse. So it is past time. I am told I have given 21 speeches on the floor about the bipartisan nature of this. There are so many areas of common ground, and I was pleased to be part of the 10-person bipartisan group who put together our own package over the last month. I think that helped to encourage leaders on both sides to see that there was a lot of common ground, that there were ways for us to come together. One of my colleagues is on the floor with me now, Senator Stabenow of Michigan. She is one of those Democrats whom I spoke to over a month ago about this bipartisan process, and we talked about the common ground and the ability for us to find ways to move ahead to help those small businesses that truly are struggling; individuals who, through no fault of their own, lost their jobs because of the economic crisis that was precipitated by the pandemic; and to help our schools and to help our healthcare providers and to help ensure that we are doing what we can here to help at the local level to respond to this crisis.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, to my colleague from Vermont, my understanding is that in a room somewhere near here right now, those negotiations are ongoing, and there certainly better be unemployment insurance. That was in our bipartisan framework that I worked with the Presiding Officer on. And there certainly better be not just an extension of the existing Federal assistance for self-employed workers and gig economy workers and for those who are now benefiting from the Federal extension, the 13-week extension, but also additional funding. My understanding is direct payments are also in the mix. I just wish they would get their work done. It has been 9 months since the CARES Act was done. I just hope we can figure out a way to get through the hurdles that remain. I have spent much of the day--as have my colleagues, I am sure--talking to colleagues, trying to figure out how to fix the last couple of issues that apparently are out there. But my hope is that even if it is not a perfect bill for me--and it won't be. I know it won't be. We spent 3 or 4 weeks working on legislation that is bipartisan that isn't what any of us would have crafted individually, but it provides that needed help right now. We need it both for the economic crisis that has been caused by this virus but also the healthcare crisis, which, unfortunately, is getting worse in my home State of Ohio and not better. The vaccine is on its way. That is very exciting. I believe that the vaccine development and now the distribution are actually quite impressive. I think the administration deserves credit for that, as do so many hard-working scientists who have been sleeping in their offices, making sure that we have this vaccine available. But there is going to be a bridge here. There is a time period between now and March and April when it is not going to be readily available to everybody we represent. During that time period, we need a bridge. We have needed it for a while, so my hope is we will get that done tonight.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PORTMAN

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

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the floor today to talk again about the need for us to pass a legislative package, which I would call an emergency package, to deal with our COVID-19 crisis we have in this country. As we talk today on the floor of the Senate, there are negotiators working busily in a room nearby to try to come up with that package, and that is a good thing. I know they have run into some roadblocks, at least so I have been told. We need to work through those roadblocks. They are relatively small compared to the importance of the overall mission of helping the people we represent, helping those small businesses, helping those hospitals, helping those families who find themselves without a paycheck through no fault of their own. And my hope is that we can get there. The legislation that is being looked at today, which may be part of a larger package that we will vote on either tomorrow or the next day, is, as I understand it, informed by work that a bipartisan group of us did over the past several weeks. I appreciate my colleagues so much. I see Senator Murkowski is here on the floor today. She was one of those people. Senator Manchin was one of the people to help organize it. In fact, I think the first meeting was because Lisa Murkowski invited people to have pizza at her place. And that resulted in a very positive interaction between Democrats and Republicans on a lot of detail, a lot of specific issues, to be able to put together a package that will help our country right now to work through this crisis. I wish I could say that things are better. But when I look at my own home State of Ohio, I see just the opposite. In fact, over the past few weeks, we have had weekly cases that have increased, not decreased. Our number of daily new cases is averaging around 10,000 a day now every day. That is double what it was just a month ago. At least in my State, the coronavirus crisis has increased, not decreased. By the same token, the economic crisis that is a result of the COVID- 19 crisis has continued to grow. We have seen people who have lost their jobs because their restaurant doesn't have any business, not because there is a government edict; although, there are in some States. Some States have said you have to shut down. Some States have gone so far as to say you have to shut down outdoor dining, not just indoor dining. Of course, those people have lost their jobs. In many cases, it is just because the virus is so prevalent, people aren't going out; they aren't going shopping; they aren't going to the movie theater; they aren't going to the bowling alley; they aren't going to the restaurant; and they aren't going to the hotels. Folks are losing their jobs. Again, not because of something they did or something they could control. It is almost like a natural disaster, and, therefore, they need some help and need it now. We really have kind of a K-shaped recovery here. People talk about a V-shaped recovery, where you have a recession and you come right back out the same way you went in. I wish that were the case here. Instead, it is kind of K-shaped. We do have some industries that are doing quite well, actually. In some areas of the country, they are doing OK. That is the top of the K. But the bottom of the K is those who are not. If you are in the hospitality business, the travel business, if you are someone who has a job that is no longer there because of this crisis, then you are in trouble. You are in trouble. I am told that I have now given 20 floor speeches on the need for us to do something. I think it ought to be targeted. I think it ought to be focused. What I have said is that we have this wonderful new vaccine coming out. Moderna is about to be approved, I believe. Pfizer was just approved. I am in a trial for the Janssen, J&J--Johnson & Johnson-- vaccine, actually. I think that is coming along well. We will probably have AstraZeneca coming soon. This is something that is very positive about this crisis. We actually finally have something that can help us turn the corner. I think it is important that we wear our masks. I think it is important that we social distance. I think it is important that we use the hand sanitizer--all of that. We need to keep doing it. But the difference between that and the vaccine is that the vaccine gives you the immunity we are all seeking. People talk about herd immunity and that that could come--early on people said--by so many people getting infected. We can't have that happen. Why? Because that will lead to a lot of pain, a lot more deaths. Three hundred thousand people have already died in this country from this crisis. We don't want to bring herd immunity in that way. We want to bring herd immunity from the vaccine. By the way, these vaccines are safe. They are effective. I mean, if you look at the numbers, 95 percent efficacy--unbelievable. Do your own research and look at it and make your own decision, but this is not a situation where, as with the flu, actually--when you take the flu shot, I am told, only about one-third of the time does it work and about two-thirds of the time it doesn't. That has happened to my family members, probably to you or your family members, where you take a flu shot, and it doesn't really help. But here, 90, 95 percent, 98 percent--the numbers are amazing. Take a look at them--``efficacy,'' meaning that is how effective they are. Again, in the trial that I am in, the initial numbers are quite positive. Also, it was done in a way that I think makes a lot of sense for the future in terms of public-private partnership. The government basically said to these companies that we will provide a market for you if you get busy producing this lifesaving vaccine. By the way, you can go ahead and start producing the vaccine, even before it is approved so we don't have to wait 4, 5 months after an approval to then get the production up and going. If you don't get the approval, we are going to throw away the vaccine. It was worth doing. It was probably the best expenditure of Federal money we had here in the last package, the CARES package, because it ensured that we not only would get these vaccines quickly, but we would get them distributed quickly. As an example, even while the vaccines were being approved recently--and these were the Pfizer vaccines--those vaccines were already on their way to my home State of Ohio. They were pre-positioned there. And when the approval came, we could move quickly. People are being vaccinated today in my State and in your State--primarily, people who are on the frontlines as healthcare providers. Next, we are helping with the nursing homes, people who come in and out of the nursing homes, which is where, obviously, most of this disease happens, and then the people in the nursing homes, then our EMS and other first responders, people who have health problems, preconditions that make them more vulnerable to the virus, seniors. This is really exciting. This is the answer. This is what is going to help us turn the tide, but that is going to be a ways off until that is widely available. What I think, in terms of this package, again--I think of it as a bridge. It is an emergency package to get us from where we are now to this period probably in the March, April, May time period, when the vaccine will be widely available, and we will be able to have that kind of herd immunity we talked about earlier. We don't want community spread. We want community immunity. And that is the idea. The package that the bipartisan group put together was $908 billion. Six of the ten of us voted for that. All of us voted for a smaller package, which was $748 billion. It is important to note that of that $908 billion, or $748 billion, we also repurposed a lot of money that has already been spent. So, roughly, $600 billion was pulled back from the PPP program that had not been spent yet and also from a Trump program that the Treasury and the Fed had to provide loans that were not being used. That is the 13(3) Program you might have heard about. That program, fortunately, was not tapped into because the commercial bank stepped in and provided a lot of that lending that was necessary. Rates are at historic lows right now for mortgages, as an example, and other loans, so they didn't need to step in. That money is being repurposed. So, instead of $748 billion, it is more like $148 billion; instead of $908 billion, if you went for the whole thing, it is more like $300 billion--not that that is not a lot of money. It is. But compare that to what was being talked about only a couple of weeks ago and for the previous 9 months, by the way, which was a package in the House of Representatives, called the Heroes Act, which was trillions of dollars--$3.5 trillion, initially, and then they agreed, maybe, $2.4 trillion. I think the last offer that was on the table that they didn't take was $1.8 trillion. We are not talking about those kind of numbers now. We are talking about a bridge, on an emergency basis. It is targeted and focused. I will give you an example of that. In this package--the bipartisan package, which I hope is picked up, and I think it will be by the package that the final negotiators are working on. That would be Secretary Mnuchin, who has been very eager to get an agreement that helps the American people, working for the President, but also the leadership here--the Democratic leader, the Republican leader, and in the House, the Democratic leader, the Speaker, and the Republican leader. That is the group right now. What they are saying is, we want to get a package done. I think, as an example, with the PPP program, they will end up picking up what this bipartisan group agreed to, which is to have a more narrow Paycheck Protection Program, PPP, to help small businesses but to particularly focus on those businesses that are small businesses, instead of under 500 as an example, maybe 300 people, and those that are really hurting; in other words, those that are losing money relative to where they were last year. When you do a quarter-to-quarter comparison--fourth quarter this year, fourth quarter back in 2019--if you have a loss, let's say, of 25 percent or 30 percent, that is significant. With the funding that we have, isn't it better to target that funding toward those small businesses that are really hurting? That, I think, will be in the final package. Again, I commend my bipartisan colleagues for coming up with some of these ideas and working out some of this stuff because there are some differences. By the way, no one of the 10 of us involved in this thing, agreed with every part of this package, trust me. I would have written a different package, as any of my colleagues would have, but it was necessary to get to yes, to get to a result. We have done that and, I think, again, it will inform where we end up in terms of the package coming to the floor. The Paycheck Protection Program is a good example of that. We also provided in that program loan forgiveness for small loans--$150,000 or less--in a very simplified manner, so you wouldn't have to go through all the bureaucracy and the costs and the loops and the hoops, which small businesses just can't afford to do. So I am proud of our work there as well. We also provided help to some of the hardest hit industries, including the airline industry. We want to keep a viable airline industry in this country. We don't want them to go bankrupt and planes to stop flying. We actually want, over this bridge period--between now and, as I mentioned, March, April, May--to be sure that the economy can get back on its feet as quickly as possible. That is why we don't want these small businesses to go out of business and their employees to be put on the unemployment lines. That is why we want to be sure our airlines can continue. They are having a tough time. But 90,000 jobs alone in this industry will be lost, we are told, unless we do something along the lines we did in the bipartisan package--90,000 additional jobs lost. We don't want that. We want to be sure we are positioned for growth. By the way, in my view--for whatever it is worth--I think this economy is incredibly resilient. I know it is not going great right now. We still have 10 million people out of work who were working as of February of this year. We have 10 million people who haven't found their way back to work yet. We still have relatively high unemployment compared to where we were. In my State, it is about double where it was. But we have been resilient, given what we have been hit with. I believe that if we can get to this period of time where we have the vaccine readily available, we are poised for a takeoff. I think there is pent-up demand. Among my constituents, they are going to be happy to get out and shop again--to go to the restaurants and go to the hotels, to travel, to go to the movie theaters and go to the stages, the places where there is a performance that has to be canceled now and where people are struggling to keep these venues open. Those will not just be reopened. People, I think, will flock there. We have to get through to that period. In my view, it is worth helping to ensure that in the interim period, we don't have even more pain and more loss in jobs and are prepared to move forward. On unemployment insurance, again, if you lost your job, not because of what you did but because of what I said earlier--almost like a natural disaster of the virus--we should provide additional help. We do that in the legislation. The day after Christmas, the current relief ends in terms of the Federal help and unemployment insurance. That is not something that any of us should want to see. If you are self-employed, if you are a so- called gig economy worker, then, you are able to get unemployment insurance right now if you don't have a job. If you can't work because of this virus, you can get unemployment insurance. That is not typical in my State, and it is not typical in most States. But because of the Federal law we passed, the CARES Act--again, 9 months ago--that is permitted, but it ends the day after Christmas. I have people self-employed coming up to me back home saying: I have to know. I don't know if I can pay the rent. I don't know if I can make a car payment. I need to know. I don't know if I can make my mortgage. We are going to tell them, I hope, in this legislation that passes that, indeed, they are going to get the coverage. And the 13 weeks of the Federal extension on the State unemployment will also be extended so that the day after Christmas, again, people aren't falling off the cliff. Again, the Federal supplement per week originally was $600 per week, as you know. That $600 per week, I thought, was relatively high, meaning that many people were getting more on unemployment than they were in their jobs. That was a problem for many employers, typically small employers that had a tough time getting people to come back to work. As the economy started to improve after the March, April, May time period, when things started to pick up a little bit, it was tough. This compromise, I think, will be $300. Maybe it will be $200. I don't know what exactly they are working out. Our proposal was $300, which is a bipartisan compromise. Many Democrats would like to go back to the $600. Some Republicans think it should be less than $300. But this is a compromise, and it is a way for us to ensure that during this time period--and this is for 16 weeks only, so between now and the end of March--on this bridge that we talked about, if people are unemployed through no fault of their own, they should be able to get a little bit to be able to put food on the table, make the car payment, make the rent. That is in this package, too. There is also funding in here for rental assistance. As you know, some people have been hanging on wondering if they are going to be evicted or not. Evictions make no sense right now for the tenants or the landlords or the economy. We don't want people out on the street. Landlords don't want to go through the pain of having to go through an eviction and trying to find somebody else. They can get some help just to hold on during this period. There is funding in rental assistance to help keep people in their homes with a roof over their head as we go through this period. The final one I want to talk about--and there are a lot of other provisions here that I don't have time to go into. What I want to talk about is one that is a heartbreaker for me. For many years now, we have been challenged with this drug addiction issue, particularly opioids. It is prescription drugs and heroin and fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid--to the point that only 4 years ago, we had the highest rates of overdose deaths in the history of our country. Seventy-two thousand people were dying a year. A lot of us focused on that year. For the past 4 or 5 years, this Congress spent money and changed policies to help people get treatment and get into longer term recovery. More money went into prevention activities to keep people from getting into the funnel of addiction, in the first place. This was at epidemic levels. In 2018 and 2019, we started to see a reversal of that for the first time in really 3 decades. Every year--for something like 30 years--in my home State of Ohio, we would see more overdose deaths every year-- every year. In 2018, we had a 20-plus percent reduction in overdose deaths. It was about a 22-percent reduction in Ohio--a 22-percent reduction of deaths. That is because we all focused at the Federal level, State level, and local level, and we made a difference. We began to change this dynamic of young people and middle-aged people and across the spectrum. Regardless of the ZIP Code you lived in, you were being affected by this. We changed it so that people were actually getting the help they needed, getting out from under their addiction, getting back to work and back to their families. It was good news. The heartbreaking part of this for me is that, having made that progress, finally, we now see, during this coronavirus pandemic, an epidemic underneath it. It is the epidemic of drug addiction. There are new numbers out today that I saw that don't surprise me as much as they discourage me, which is that, this year, instead of 72,000 people dying of overdose deaths in America from drug abuse--this is not just opioids but all drugs, including psychostimulants, like methamphetamine; crystal meth from Mexico that is cheap, powerful, deadly--this year, it is expected that our overdose death rate will be the highest ever. We are getting back to where we were. Plus-83,000 is the number I saw today. Remember, I mentioned 72,000 people dying only 4 years ago. Now we are back to 83,000. This is a crisis within a pandemic, and we need to deal with it. There are lots of different opinions out there as to why this is happening. I believe strongly a lot of this is just from the isolation that comes from this pandemic. People haven't been able to go and meet with and talk to their recovery coaches, which is one of the ways that we were changing this dynamic. People were able to meet with people who were recovering addicts themselves to help them get through it. It was working for a lot of people. Yet at some of these longer term recovery places where people can be--say a home, a sober home--they had issues with the pandemic and have not been able to have the group homes provide that care. Also, people have not been able just to go see their doctors or their treatment providers. Telemedicine has helped. That is one reason in our package that we put more funding into telemedicine, because that is a way you can get to people. Both in regard to behavioral health, mental health issues, and with regard to addiction, it hasn't filled the gap. Also, a lot of people are feeling a great deal of stress and even despair and joblessness. And, obviously, if you go to the food banks in Ohio, you see people who are in their cars waiting for 3, 4, 5, 6 hours at times. There is something going on here, folks. These are people who are feeling desperation. To wait in line for 6 hours to get a box of food means that you have a real problem in your family. By the way, some of these people--because I talked to people who have gone to these food banks--have never been in a food bank in their lives. They found themselves in a tough situation. Again, it is not everybody. Remember the K-shaped recovery? For some people, it has been fine. If you are a white collar worker and you can telework from home virtually--maybe you are in the finance industry or maybe you are in the tech industry--you might be doing great. But your neighbor who has a job at that restaurant or perhaps in another business like the travel business or the motorcoach business, they don't have the opportunities to get that job. They are the ones in the food bank line. By the way, putting more funding into the food banks, as well as into helping people to be able to afford food, is, obviously, a big issue right now. The notion here is that, with this legislation, we are going to provide more help for people who are suffering from addiction, with the thought of trying all we can to try to reverse this trend. Ultimately, again, the best way to reverse it is to have this coronavirus pandemic behind us so that people can socialize again and gather again and aren't feeling the despair, aren't isolated. And that is coming. But the bridge to there is important so we save as many lives as we can. There is $5 billion in our legislation--the bipartisan bill--to do just that. My hope is, again, that that will be in the final package, and I believe it will be. I believe that what the negotiators are working on is very similar to what is in the legislation that we came together with as a bipartisan group. My only disappointment in the group is that we couldn't end up with this combination of State and local funding--targeted toward need, by the way, not the way it was done last time, per capita, but targeted for need--and liability protection for these small businesses, for these private nursing homes, for these EMS personnel, for emergency medical people who are concerned. They are concerned about it. What we tried to put together was a package that said: OK, if you are a bad actor, if you didn't follow the rules--and the rules were pretty clear--you aren't protected. You are accountable. But if you followed the rules, and you were trying your best to deal with ever-changing standards--and, let's face it; they have been quite different. Remember back in March and April, people were saying: Don't wear a mask. Now, of course, we know that was a mistake. At the time, we didn't. The notion is to protect people from frivolous lawsuits who were doing their best. By the way, there was a survey done of people saying: Do you think there should be protection for people who are doing their best, whereas people who are grossly negligent--that was the word used, ``gross negligence''--would not be protected; they would be accountable? And 79 percent of the American people agreed with that. There has also been polling out there with regard to small businesses, from the NFIB, saying that 70 percent of small businesses are very concerned and worried about this. Again, think of the business. Revenue has crashed. Profits have crashed. They are hanging on. The PPP is going to help them because we are getting more PPP. The Paycheck Protection Program, which we talked about earlier, will help to get them through this. If they are facing a lawsuit--whether they win it or not, whether they can prove that they were doing the right thing--just the cost of that lawsuit could well be the difference of that small business continuing operations or not. Nonprofits. The nonprofits in Ohio are very interested in the liability reforms, as are the education community--the higher ed people, the school teachers--as are people in the healthcare industry across the board--nursing homes and hospitals. My hope is that we can get back to work on that. Perhaps after this legislation has passed, as we look at what we do next, let's be sure that we are providing that protection in combination with providing that help to our State and local governments that need it, where they can demonstrate they need it. I don't think it will be in this package, but it should be in the next package. I will say, this legislation on COVID is needed and we ought to move it now. We cannot go home for the holidays without passing COVID-19 rescue legislation. Again, to me, it is a rescue package. It is not a stimulus package as much as it is getting us through this period, providing that bridge between now and when the vaccine is readily available. This legislation is likely to be part of a broader bill that will include a number of things, including spending for the year so we don't have a government shutdown. It is a good thing not to have a government shutdown. It is also likely that it will include some tax provisions which are so-called tax extenders. I would say one thing, that I hope it includes is the permanent extension of tax relief for our craft beverage industry. This would be craft breweries, craft vintners, craft distillers. We passed legislation a few years ago that was very important to them, that allowed them to have a reduction in the excise tax they pay on certain volumes--relatively low volumes of their product. As a result, many of these businesses have been able to expand, hire people, and now they have the possibility of this expiring at the end of the year and having a big bill due that they cannot afford. We are proud in Ohio to be the home of an industry, the craft beer production industry. It is now No. 6 in the country. It supports 81,000 jobs. It is a business that has been hurt for two reasons: One, if you think about it, the restaurants aren't doing the business they used to do, so if you are providing your product to a restaurant, you are hurt. But also, a lot of these craft distillers or craft brewers or craft vintners have their own tasting rooms or their own brew pubs, and those, in some cases, have been shut down altogether. In other cases, their revenues have crashed, so it would not be the time for them to be facing a big tax bill, and that is what the excise tax would be. Income tax you pay later in the year; excise tax you would have to pay right away. So my hope is that that will be extended permanently. More than half the Members of this body joined me and Senator Wyden on a letter to our leadership about this, urging that this extender, which has worked so well to increase jobs and opportunity in America, can continue on a permanent basis going forward. My hope is that that is part of the package as well. That will help in terms of the economic stimulus part of this, which is also important. I thank you for what you are doing if you are one of those people out there who is promoting the vaccines and talking about the importance of our getting the vaccines. If you are not, I hope you will look at the research. I hope you will look at the fact that we should be encouraging everyone to get vaccinated unless someone has a health problem that makes it difficult for them. The polling data is not encouraging on this. The last Gallup poll shows that only 58 percent of Americans are comfortable being vaccinated. That needs to change. I have heard some people say: Well, when you look at the polling, it shows that Democrats are concerned because this happened in the Trump administration, this vaccine development. This is not political. Take the politics out of it. These are scientists. They have been working around the clock over the past 9 months, 10 months, to get us to this point. These are scientists who are now working around the clock to look carefully at these vaccines to determine whether they are approved or not. These are the scientists who are making decisions, not the politicians. It is the people in the white coats. We need to trust them, for the sake of our country, because we need to reverse this terrible virus and the pandemic that is causing all of the issues that we talked about earlier today, to our communities, to our families. So the way to do that is to ensure that we do, in fact, not just have this vaccine available but that people take advantage of it and are willing to be vaccinated. I hope, if you are listening this evening, that you will pass that word along and that you, again, will do your own research. Look at it. But my hope is that the conclusion will be to get to the period we want to get, which is to have people feel like they can reengage in the economy and feel like they can be back with their loved ones and congregate and feel like they can go back to church or their other place of worship; they feel like they can send their kids back to school; they feel like they can get back to a more normal life. That will happen through the accessibility and the ability to actually get that vaccine. So my hope is that those listening tonight will do that and do their part in spreading that message instead of spreading the virus. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

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

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the floor today to talk again about the need for Congress to act to pass a COVID-19 bill that helps the people we represent. I am told this is the 20th time I have come to the floor to make this plea, meaning that I haven't been all that convincing, I guess. But the reality is there is hope in the air. There is a bipartisan group that is working on a package. I am part of that group, as is the Presiding Officer. It is bipartisan: about five Democrats, about five Republicans. Maybe more significantly, today the White House apparently made an offer to Speaker Pelosi to reengage in conversation to try to get to a package that meets the needs of everyone. The package that was presented was actually very similar to the package that this bipartisan group has been working on over the past few weeks. So there is hope in the air, and that is good because we need the help, and we need it now. Let's talk for a minute about why we need this help. I would guess that pretty much everybody in this Chamber has seen firsthand the health crisis that we are facing. The number of cases is up. The number of people in intensive care is up. Hospitalizations are up. And, sadly, fatalities have increased. Some of my colleagues in this Chamber have had to fight cases of COVID-19 themselves. Thank God they are all OK. But that is not true with everyone we represent. I would bet that everyone in this Chamber knows somebody and probably multiple people who have had a very tough time or who have even succumbed to this terrible disease. Last week, another friend of mine died because of COVID-19. His name was Mike Crabtree. Mike was a county commissioner in Scioto County, OH--a friend, a standup guy who helped me on a lot of tough issues in Southeast Ohio. He was always there for his community and for me. Today, of course, we offer our prayers to his wife Diane, his family, and to all of his friends in Scioto County. It is personal. In the face of these personal tragedies and the sad reality that in many States we are now experiencing this higher number of cases--in many States it is the highest we have had since the beginning of this pandemic--we do have some promising news on one front, and that is on the vaccine front. It now seems clear that later this month, and then over the next 3 to 4 months, help is on the way in the form of very effective new vaccines being developed by Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and other U.S. manufacturers. The unprecedented support that Congress has provided for vaccine development, the Trump administration's innovative approach to cut bureaucratic redtape through what is called Operation Warp Speed, and the commitment and ingenuity of our researchers who have been working around the clock, our scientists, and our manufacturers have combined to put us on a path to having multiple vaccines, at unprecedented speed, with efficacy rates above 90 percent. This is incredible. This is good news. Safe, effective vaccines are expected to be available to frontline healthcare workers, first responders, long-term care facilities, and others just in the next few weeks. This is good news. Within the next few months, we would expect that these vaccines would be more broadly available, and hopefully by March, maybe April, pretty much everybody would be able to find a way to get that vaccine, free, for them and for their family. That has to be our goal here, as quickly as possible, to get safe, effective vaccines. I am concerned--as some of my colleagues know, because I talk about it a lot--that the number of people who say they are willing to get the vaccine is too low. That is one reason I entered one of the trials myself. I am in the Janssen J&J trial. I either got the vaccine or I got a placebo--I don't know--but I did it to be able to go out and talk about it and tell people that these scientists, these experts, the people with the white coats, not the politicians, are the ones calling the shots here on these vaccines and they are being safe and they are being careful. It is going through a process at the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, that is actually more stringent than it was pre-COVID. To get this emergency use authorization, they have to go through more testing, and they have to show efficacy rates above 50 percent, which they normally wouldn't. That is good. We want it to be safe. Even with all that hard work that is being done, all those scientists and researchers working around the clock, there are some Americans who are unwilling and concerned. Part of this is because some politicians, I think, have played politics with this, and I hate that--as if, somehow, in the Trump administration, this wouldn't be trusted. Of course, this is not a political game. This is about saving lives. I am encouraged by the process that we have seen. I hope people will sign up. When I got into the trial, the Gallup poll that is being done periodically to determine whether people are saying whether they are willing to take it or not was at 50 percent--only 50 percent of Americans saying they were comfortable getting the vaccine. That number in last couple of weeks has gone up to 58 percent. It is heading in the right direction. We need people to understand that this is based on science. These vaccines are like the vaccine for smallpox or polio or measles-- virtually, wiping out these diseases in this country. My dad had polio as a kid. Now people don't even talk about it. That is because of the vaccine. They work. We have to view it that way. It is not like the flu vaccine, frankly. The flu vaccine is only effective about one-third of the time. These, what they call efficacy rates, meaning how effective it is, have come in at 90, 95 percent and higher. So we will see what the FDA says here in the next couple of weeks. I am encouraged that we are likely to get some approvals and likely to begin being able to provide these vaccines for those on the frontlines, for those in long-care facilities, for our first responders, and then out from there to the entire population. Because these vaccines won't be widely available for 3 or 4 months, we need to act here and act now to provide a bridge to more normal times. That is really how I see it. This is a short-term emergency response to a desperate need we have right now as cases are rising and the economic consequences are being felt in every family in America-- more and more pain. My hope is that Congress will make good on the promise we have seen over the last couple of weeks, where Republicans and Democrats, alike, have come together to say we do have a lot of common ground here; we actually agree on most of this stuff. Who wouldn't be for more money for vaccines and distribution? We need that. Who wouldn't be for more money for small businesses? Who wouldn't be for more money for people who are losing their jobs through no fault of their own? They are struggling to pay the rent and pay their car payment. That is what this legislation can do. I am excited about that possibility. Meanwhile, in the first week of December, we have lost 13,726 Americans to COVID-19 compared to half that many in the first week of November. In 1 month, we have had a doubling of the number of fatalities. At no point in time during this pandemic have we seen daily mortality rates like this, except in the early days in March and April when New York and New Jersey hospitals were being overrun. We have a real crisis. Of course, this healthcare crisis is having a direct impact on the economy too. Even with these vaccines on the horizon, it is clear we have to do more to help the economy get through this period of time before we are back to more a normal time. We have to help, in the short term, to address the impact this healthcare crisis is having on families, on employment, on businesses, on schools, on nonprofits, and, yes, on State and local governments. As I see it, our job is to provide that bridge so that the economic rebound that we have begun to see can continue. I am concerned that the recovery we have seen, which has been called a K-shaped recovery--you know, you like to see a recovery come in a V- shape, where you have a recession, you lose jobs and economic growth, and then it comes back up the way it went down. It is called a V-shape. This has been more like a ``K.'' For some people, it has been OK. If you are a big-box hardware store or grocery store in America, you are probably doing pretty well right now. If you are a small business, say, a small retail store or sitdown restaurant next to those big boxes, you are not doing OK. You may already be closed down. Your employees may already be unemployed. If not, you are hanging by a thread and hoping and praying that Congress passes legislation to help you. It has been different for different people. If you have a blue-collar job, you can't telework. If you are in the financial services industry, you are probably doing OK, but if you work in a kitchen making 15 bucks an hour, you are probably not. So it is different for different people in different sectors of our economy. I get that. For some, again, they are doing OK; for others, they are really struggling. Poverty, overall, is up because of what is happening, and this is sad to me. And we can see it in our communities. Go to your local food bank, see how many cars are lined up, how many people are waiting for 3, 4, 5, in Ohio, sometimes 6 hours just to get food for their families. Before the pandemic hit, we had very strong economic growth. I think the pro-growth policies that were put in place here in Congress really helped. The tax reform, the tax cuts, the regulatory relief, using our energy--it all was working. We were having a period of growth that was strong, but also it was a very ``opportunity'' economy. People who had been on the sidelines for years were coming back into our economy. A lot of the benefits were being felt by lower and middle-income workers. Let me give you an example. In February of this year, just before the pandemic started, we had 19 straight months of wage growth of over 3 percent. That is fantastic. We have been wanting that for a decade and a half in Ohio. We had flat wages, even not keeping up with inflation. Finally, we were seeing wage growth. That 3 percent was compounding and was really helping people feel like if they worked hard and played by the rules, they could get ahead. Sadly, when the coronavirus hit, that ended. Before the coronavirus, the national poverty rate was the lowest in the history of America. In February, it was 10.5 percent, the lowest rate since we started tracking this statistic more than 60 years ago. That is the poverty rate. That is incredible. That is what we all want. After the initial wave of layoffs in the spring, Congress passed the bipartisan CARES Act. That was 9 months ago--9 months ago. It included programs like the stimulus checks and expanded unemployment insurance. It actually helped drive the poverty rate down for a while. Since then, this continual economic pain felt particularly by low- and middle-income Americans, combined with the lack of action on our part here in Congress to help them, has meant the poverty rate has actually gone back up since May by a significant amount. It now sits at 11.4 percent. That means that 7 million more Americans have fallen into poverty since the spring--7 million. When you fall into poverty, it is hard to get back out. As long as this economy remains partly shut down--in some of our States, it is largely shut down if you are in the hospitality business or travel business. As long as this happens and we can see more shutdowns in the coming weeks and months, of course, as this crisis continues to worsen, we will see poverty levels rise unless we provide some relief. Along with the rising poverty rate, what is concerning to me is the fact that more and more people are just giving up hope. There is a stat called the labor force participation rate. It is the share of Americans who are over 16 years old, either working or looking for a job. In February, we hit a 5-year high for labor force participation. That is a good thing. In other words, we had more people participating in the workforce than we had in 5 years. Unfortunately, it has gone back down. It was up to 63.4 percent. Now it is down to 61.7 percent. The October number works out to a labor force that has nearly 4 million fewer participants than it did in February. Just people participating in the economy has gone down. Why do we need this package? We have a real problem on our hands. It is a healthcare crisis, but it is also an economic crisis for so many people. Unfortunately, a record number of women and older Americans are also having to leave the workplace due to either a lack of opportunity or the need to stay home with their kids. For a lot of women, not having childcare is a real problem because the schools are closed. This is driving people out of the workforce as well. This is bad news for businesses trying to reopen, but it is also bad news for our long-term economic health. People who can't find a way off the sidelines right now won't be able to help power the eventual economic recovery we all hope for, and they will miss out on the economic recovery that does happen. It is a bad position to be in. We saw with last week's jobs report that hiring is slowing down, meaning that more people may slip out of the labor force. In all, we are still down 10 million jobs in America since February. Some of my colleagues said to me: My town is doing great or my State is doing great or this industry is doing great. I get that. It is a K- shaped recovery. For some people, it is going well. The fact is that 10 million people--10 million people--that is how many jobs we are down since February. A further slowdown in the economy is going to be tough for these long-term unemployed. My concern is some may never reenter the workforce without action here to help businesses start hiring again. Some of the hardest hit industries in our States, like the travel, leisure, hospitality industries, are facing real losses. Our airline industry is expected to cut the equivalent of about 90,000 jobs by the end of this year--90,000 jobs alone in the airline industry. I spoke to the president of American Airlines today. They are big in Ohio. He called. Guess what. He is really eager for us to pass this coronavirus legislation we are talking about. He is really eager because he needs it desperately to hold on to his employees. He doesn't want to furlough any more people, but he doesn't have the business to keep them working. According to a November survey from the American Hotel and Lodging Association, more than 70 percent of hotels have said that they won't be able to stay in business another 6 months without more assistance-- 70 percent. Almost 80 percent said they had to lay off more people. Our restaurant industry lost jobs in November for the first time since April. It is a worrying sign that while restaurants were starting to pick up, things were getting better, in November, because of the news of the high level of cases and the concern people had about going out in public and also, in some States, because of a government edict saying you can't go--in some places, they even said you can't have outdoor dining anymore, not just indoor dining. Think of what this does to those restaurants, most of which are small businesses, family-owned, and were already stressed. Some of those restaurants have closed their doors. I know some of them are never going to reopen again. It is not just restaurants. It is bowling alleys; it is movie theaters; it is the place you get your hair cut. A lot of them are suffering. A lot of these challenges are going to get worse soon because the number of the programs we put in place in this pandemic to help provide relief for people struggling are going to expire. That is another reason we have to act. At the end of this year--actually, the day before Christmas--we are going to see some of these programs begin to expire. The pandemic unemployment assistance program that helps the self-employed, that helps gig economy workers, people who would not normally be eligible for unemployment to be able to step forward and get unemployment insurance, is going to end at the end of this month. That is something a lot of my constituents in Ohio have been depending on if they have lost their jobs through no fault of their own. The pandemic emergency employment compensation program that authorizes another 13 weeks of State benefits, helped by the Federal tax dollar, ends at the end of this month. Of course, there is a moratorium on evictions that ends at the end of this month. The bottom line is that the people, State and local governments, the industries, the sectors of our economy that have been hardest hit to date by the economic crisis caused by COVID-19 are going to be the ones who are likely to be hurt most by a continued economic slowdown. As I said, these are problems that, right now, can only be fixed by all of us stepping forward. Congress needs to take action and take action now. We have about a week. We have about a week. Fortunately, again, I am pleased to say that the proposal that is in the works on a bipartisan basis here in the Senate is going to help. It has a total price tag of $908 billion, and you have all heard that, probably, if you have been following what has been going on with this continuing negotiation. It helps everybody. It helps individuals; it helps families; it helps small businesses; it helps industries; it helps those who have been the hardest hit--with targeted resources. It is focused. It is targeted. It is not the $3.5 trillion legislation that has been talked about over the last several months. It is targeted. It is focused. Actually, although it is $908 billion, it is really more like $350 billion because it takes back money that was spent in the CARES Act, which was appropriated by this Congress but not used, and repurposes it for these purposes. So I think it is a focused, targeted effort that will really help. Again, what is exciting about it is that, today, there was a proposal made that says we have this bipartisan framework, which is very similar, apparently, and my hope is that the Speaker of the House, the majority leader here in the Senate, the Democratic leader here in the Senate, the Republican leader in the House, and the President of the United States can all figure out how to get together and make this work. This bipartisan proposal that we have been working on here, I think, does provide a good template. By the way, all of those actors I talked about--all of those players--have said good things about the proposal. It has funding in there to extend the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses. It targets those small businesses that need the help the most. It is really more targeted this time. It is targeted relief for some of our hardest hit industries, including our airlines and our mass transit industry. It includes funds to help those Americans who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own--the unemployment insurance extension that I talked about earlier. As a bridge to normalcy, we need this funding. It provides funds for State, local, and Tribal governments based on their revenue shortfalls or their expenses due to COVID--in other words, needs-based. We are also working on commonsense liability reforms to give businesses, nonprofits, schools, healthcare providers, religious organizations, and others the legal protection they need to reopen with the confidence that they are not going to be subjected to frivolous lawsuits that could put them out of business. That is really important because getting these businesses back up and running is a critical part of getting our economy through these next few months. In my view, these protections are essential. I am hopeful that both sides can now come together and find common ground on liability protections that we can all support. Several of my colleagues are working on a proposal here, right now, in the U.S. Senate. All of this gives us hope that we will have better days around the corner. By the way, this proposal is not what any of us would write. It is not the proposal I would write. It is not the proposal our Presiding Officer, who is here in the Chamber, would write. Personally, I would put more emphasis on tax incentives for hiring. We have some good proposals for that. I would put tax incentives in place to get businesses to reopen safely--one called the healthy workplaces tax credit so they could get compensated for putting up the partitions or for having the PPE and providing safer work environments. I would expand the work opportunity tax credit to help those, again, who are on the sidelines in order to bring them back to work through a credit. I would help with regard to the employee retention credit, which was in the CARES Act, that could pick up some of these companies that aren't picked up by the PPP program, companies that have slightly more employees, let's say, so that they don't otherwise qualify. So there is more I would like to do, but do you know what? This proposal is needed. It is needed so badly that, of course, all of us, regardless of our particular interests or our particular ideas, know it is right, and all of us should get behind it. Let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good--I would even say the enemy of the necessary. Targeted relief now, I think, is the right approach. Most importantly, all of these significant economic problems I laid out and the healthcare crisis I laid out need to be addressed now. As I said earlier, there is a light at the end of the tunnel for the health side of this crisis, and our proposal that I have been talking about also helps us get there because it has more funding for vaccine development and vaccine distribution. I talked today to some experts in that area who know a lot more about it than I do, and they said it is necessary. We actually have to provide more funding to keep the vaccine train moving so that, by March and April, we will have it widely available. Again, my hope is that Americans will step up and be vaccinated. By the way, there is also bipartisan legislation that four of us introduced last week--two Republicans, two Democrats--to provide for a public service campaign, not with politicians talking about the importance, as I am doing tonight, but with the experts talking about why the science says that it is a good idea to get vaccinated--again, just like we do for smallpox or polio or the measles. Will another COVID-19 bill solve every problem we face right now? No, but we could do a lot with this proposal to help the most vulnerable individuals just get by for the next several months rather than slip into poverty, rather than miss out on mortgage payments or miss out on their rent, miss out on their car payments, and other bad outcomes. We can help the most vulnerable businesses keep their lights on and their employees on payroll. Frankly, this is work we should have been doing months ago, but we are here now. Let's get it done. My hope is that we can end this year by recapturing that spirit of bipartisanship that was on display in March of this year when we passed the CARES package here in the U.S. Senate by a vote of 96 to nothing. That doesn't happen very often. The CARES Act was not a perfect bill either, but we all recognized it was a bill needed for the moment. I hope we can also recognize that another bill is needed now even if it is not perfect. Let's build on the bipartisan proposal we have put forward, and let's ensure that the people we represent get the targeted economic relief they desperately need in the coming months. Folks, let's not leave for the holidays until we have done that. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask that the Chair lay before the Senate the message to accompany S. 1869. The Presiding Officer laid before the Senate the following message from the House of Representatives: Resolved, That the bill from the Senate (S. 1869) entitled ``An Act to require the disclosure of ownership of high- security space leased to accommodate a Federal agency, and for other purposes.'', do pass with an amendment. Motion to Concur

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I move to concur in the House amendment and I ask unanimous consent that the motion be agreed to and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Con. Res. 51, which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask further that the resolution be agreed to and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 587, S. 3729.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. I ask unanimous consent that the Alexander amendment at the desk be agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Veterans' Affairs be discharged from further consideration of S. 4460 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. PORTMAN. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the cloture motions with respect to Executive Calendar Nos. 912, 913, and 914 be withdrawn. I further ask that at 11 a.m. tomorrow morning, the Senate vote on confirmation of the nominations in the order on which cloture was filed; further, that if confirmed, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action; further, that following disposition of the Cooksey nomination, the Senate resume legislative session and it be in order for Senator Menendez or his designee to make motions to discharge S.J. Res. 77 and S.J. Res. 78; and if either motion is made, that there be 4 hours of debate concurrently on the motions, equally divided between the proponents and opponents of the joint resolutions, with Senator Menendez controlling 15 minutes of the proponents' time immediately prior to the first vote; finally, that upon the use or yielding back of that time, the Senate vote on the motions to discharge S.J. Res. 77 and S.J. Res. 78 in the order listed.