John Thune

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Reserving the right to object. On behalf of my colleague Senator Lee, who cannot be here to object on his own because he is chairing an Energy subcommittee hearing, I object.

Mr. THUNE

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 Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, in the beginning of September, the Congressional Budget Office issued its latest budget outlook. The news wasn't good. CBO announced that next year our country's debt is projected to exceed the amount of our gross domestic product. In other words, the size of our debt will be greater than the size of our economy. That is a very bad position to be in. Countries with that kind of debt-to-GDP ratio face time-sensitive decisions if they want to avert an all-out economic crisis. Greece is just one recent example. We all know the kind of economic devastation and accompanying turmoil that Greece has experienced in recent years. Now, as the United States, we can probably hang on a little longer than most other countries before entering a full-blown debt crisis. It is helpful that our economy was surging before being waylaid by the onset of the coronavirus, but even we can't hang on forever. Sooner or later, if we don't address the size of our soaring debt, we are going to have a problem--a lot of problems, in fact. That is not something most of my colleagues across the aisle want to hear. They would like to spend as much as they want, whenever they want, on whatever new government program that they have come up with, and they imply that Republicans are miserly for not wanting to join them. Republicans, Democrats imply or sometimes say, just don't care about the ordinary Americans who would supposedly benefit from Democrats' spending. In fact, the opposite is true. In the face of the pandemic, Republicans have been willing to spend huge sums to help our fellow Americans weather this crisis, and Republicans are worried about our spending and our debt precisely because we care deeply about ordinary Americans. We know what the consequences of unchecked debt and spending can be, and we want to protect Americans from those consequences. To start with, the larger our debt grows, the more interest we are likely to have to pay--and we are already paying a lot. Right now, we are paying roughly $484 billion a year in interest on our debt. That is a substantial chunk of our yearly budget, and that is money that could otherwise be going to other priorities. And the problem has only snowballed. By 2029, the yearly interest on our debt is projected to reach $807 billion, according to one estimate. Now, that is going to eat up a lot--a lot--of money that could otherwise be spent on important investments: healthcare, veterans, infrastructure, defense, seniors, education. We would have a lot more money to devote to those priorities if we weren't paying hundreds of billions in interest each year on our debt. Then there are the economic consequences of a huge debt: The economy will struggle. Unemployment will grow. Businesses will create fewer jobs, if they create jobs at all. Wages and benefits will likely stagnate. The stock market will struggle. We have had to borrow a lot of money this year to meet the coronavirus crisis, and there is no doubt it is money we needed to borrow. That happens sometimes during a crisis. But we need to be very aware of the fact that we have driven up our deficit by $3.3 trillion just this fiscal year, further increasing our Nation's debt, and we need to be very careful about any additional borrowing and ensure we are borrowing only what is absolutely necessary. Republicans have caught a lot of flak from Democrats for not being willing to use the coronavirus as an excuse for unchecked government spending, including for noncoronavirus-related measures, but we have made a priority of scrutinizing additional spending because we don't want to get our country out of one economic crisis only to plunge it into another. Unfortunately, that is a lesson that is lost on many of my Democratic colleagues. We think the debt is bad now, and it is, but it is nothing like what our debt will look like if Democrats take Congress and the White House in November and start putting some of their bigger spending plans into effect--plans like Medicare for All, which would cost, as a conservative estimate, $32 trillion over 10 years; or the Green New Deal, Democrats' $93 trillion boondoggle. That is right, Madam President; you didn't mishear that. The Green New Deal is estimated to cost over $93 trillion over 10 years. To put that in perspective, the size of the entire Federal budget in 2019 was $4.4 trillion, or substantially less than the cost of 1 year of the Green New Deal. Now, you might think a pie-in-the-sky fantasy like the Green New Deal would have been abandoned by Democrats by now, but you would be wrong. More than a year after its introduction, it is apparently still going strong. Yesterday, I spoke on the floor about Democrats' threat to eliminate the legislative filibuster in the Senate, and that is the Senate rule that helps ensure that bills that come before the Senate require bipartisan cooperation. Shortly before I spoke, the Senator from Massachusetts, who introduced the Green New Deal resolution in the Senate, appeared on National Public Radio, where he was asked whether he thought there were any parts of the Green New Deal that could attract bipartisan support. The Senator's response: The whole thing needs to be enacted--and if Republicans don't allow that to happen, Democrats should change the Senate rules to eliminate the legislative filibuster. Apparently, Democrats aren't willing to even moderate their proposal. If the Senator from Massachusetts has his way, Democrats will shove the entire $93 trillion down the throats of the American people. I guess the American people will just have to survive the resulting debt crisis. When you ask about the pricetag for Democrats' socialist fantasies, Democrats will make noise about somehow paying for it. We will tax the rich, they say. The rich, they say, aren't paying their fair share. The problem, of course, is that increasing taxes on the rich isn't going to pay for these proposals. You could tax not only the rich but a good portion of middle class at rates nearly 100 percent and not come up anywhere close to getting $93 trillion that would be necessary to pay for the Green New Deal. There is, in fact, no way to pay for these proposals. They will be financed by enormous additions to our national debt, and ordinary Americans will suffer the consequences: a shrinking economy, fewer jobs, lost jobs, lower wages, lack of opportunity, and much more. I hope we will take action on our debt before it is too late. One thing we have to consider is how to shore up and protect Social Security and Medicare, which are currently the main drivers of our national debt. Thanks to an aging Baby Boomer population, these programs are under a great deal of strain. My colleague from Utah, Senator Romney, recently introduced legislation, called the TRUST Act, to begin to address these endangered trust funds and to start to rein in our national debt. Bipartisan legislation like this would be a good start to preventing our country from facing an economic crisis in the coming decades. The Republican Senators sponsoring the legislation were joined by a handful of Democrats, which gives me hope that perhaps not all of my Democratic colleagues are determined to explode our national debt with their socialist fantasies. Unfortunately, too many Democrats--including the Democrats' Vice Presidential candidate--are open to bankrupting Americans with the Green New Deal and other plans. I hope they will not have the chance to implement their legislation because our economy and the American people might never recover from the consequences. I yield floor.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito).

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito).

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito).

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito).

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from North Carolina (Mr. Burr) and the Senator from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito).

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito).

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito).

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito).

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito).

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, would the Senator from Illinois agree, however--because I think it is important to point out that this is not something that happened in the last few years. The Senator from Alaska had a colleague elected in 2008 who, when he ran again for election in 2014, the argument could be made against him that he had never gotten a vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate on a single amendment in a 6-year term in the Senate. I came here in 2005. In the first 8 years that I was here as a Senator, I witnessed time and again the very thing you are talking about, where amendments were shut down, the tree was filled, in the parliamentary language that we use here in the Senate. So I would ask the Senator: Is this not a--this is not an issue that has cropped up in the last few years. Is this not a problem that originated some time ago and, as the Senator is suggesting, that we need to do away with the supermajority requirement that requires us here as Senators to work together in a bipartisan way to find common ground to fix what ails the Senate? I would argue and a lot would argue that what ails the Senate right now requires nothing more than behavioral change. We have to agree that when somebody offers an amendment on one side, that it is not going to be blocked immediately and we get into this lockdown. That is what happened in recent years and in the last couple of examples we have had, as recently as last week, blocking the motion to proceed to the bill. I mean, if you want to have an amendment process, you have to get on the bill in the first place. That has been, now, the routine that has been executed by the minority, is to prevent even a motion to proceed, which would enable us to get to an amendment process. So this is not something that happened when Senator McConnell came; this was happening well before that. As I pointed out, the Senator from Alaska's colleague went through an entire 6-year term without getting a vote--a Democratic colleague--when he was in the majority here in the Senate.

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I would say, through the Chair, to my colleague from Alaska that that is absolutely the case. I don't think there is any question but that, if the legislative filibuster is done away with in a future Senate--and, again, Members on the Democratic side are talking openly about doing that if they gain the majority after the election in November--it will transform the institution of the Senate and, by extension, transform our country. The institution that was designed to protect minority rights and to put a check on a majority will no longer be a functioning institution in the way the Founders intended. In fact, it will essentially become, as the Senator from Alaska pointed out, the House of Representatives with longer terms. I think that would be unfortunate for a country that was based upon a system of checks and balances and that recognized very early on how critical it was that minority rights be a part of our public debate and discussion and that those voices not be muffled or that those voices not be completely put out of the public debate. I would simply say to my colleague from Alaska that I think this is a monumental issue in terms of what this institution has meant to this country and what it will continue to mean in the future if these rules are changed and this constitutional protection, as we have pointed out, is done away with. It will transform the Senate, and it will transform the country in ways that would be very detrimental to what the Founders intended.

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I have one last question for the Senator from Illinois. I don't disagree that, again, we can do a better job--both sides--of making the Senate a more open place where we have an opportunity to debate, which I think is the history and tradition of the Senate, but I don't think blowing up the Senate rules accomplishes that. I just want to read for you from this morning--I was on the floor here, but in an interview on NPR, the junior Senator from Massachusetts was asked if there are parts of the Green New Deal that might attract bipartisan support. How did he reply? He replied that we need to enact the whole thing, and if Republicans disagree, Democrats should eliminate the filibuster. Now, wanting to preserve the filibuster doesn't mean we can't reform the Senate, but it does mean that we shouldn't allow a majority to steamroll a minority. That is what the filibuster and the rules of the Senate were designed to protect. What your Members are talking openly about doing--including your leader--is nuking the filibuster, blowing up the Senate, and changing and transforming it in a way that will transform not only the Senate and the way the government, I think, was designed to work by our Founders but also transform the country.

Mr. THUNE. Would the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. THUNE. I will be happy to yield to the Senator from Alaska

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, last week, Leader McConnell called up a bill to the floor of the U.S. Senate. It was a coronavirus relief bill, which included a number of components that both sides had agreed needed to be in any coronavirus relief bill. It was a targeted bill. It was a fiscally responsible bill, and it was a bill that was rooted in reality. In other words, there was a belief that it could be signed into law if, in fact, it was passed by the Congress. So, when it was called up, obviously, we talked about the features in the bill, many of which are things, as I said, enjoyed bipartisan support. When I said it was fiscally responsible, it actually repurposed funds from the previous coronavirus relief bill, from the CARES Act, that had not yet been spent. So it took some of those dollars, repurposed them, used them in another way, which I think would be a fiscally responsible way in which to approach the whole issue of how we spend taxpayer dollars on any issue, including a crisis. So there was a repurposing that I think, again, represents a fiscally responsible approach to doing this. It also addressed the issue of people who were unemployed. It had a provision in there that allowed people to continue to receive unemployment insurance above and beyond what their States offered in terms of the benefits--$300 above that on a per-week basis, which, on average, represents about an 85-percent wage replacement. So it was about an 85-percent wage replacement in terms of an unemployment benefit. It also included bipartisan improvements and bipartisan amendments and modifications to the PPP program, things which both sides had agreed upon. That program has been very successful but needed to be expanded and reauthorized, so it included those changes--again, bipartisan changes. It included significant funding for both elementary and secondary education--about $70 billion there to help our schools open safely and another $30 billion to $35 billion for colleges and universities for the same purpose: to help them be able to open safely--again, a bipartisan priority. Those are just a few of the things that were included. It also included, of course, additional funding for vaccines, therapies, testing, all things that we think are vitally important if we are going to defeat the virus. Those were all components that were included in the bill last week that was brought up to the floor by the majority leader, Senator McConnell, and it was blocked. It was filibustered by the Democrats. Now, when I say blocked, I am not talking about blocking the end bill. I am talking about blocking even getting on the bill. It was a motion to proceed under the Senate rules, something that is necessary to get on a bill. It is important, I think, to point out that there are several ways in which a bill can be stopped, and they require a supermajority--60 votes in the Senate. Once you are on a bill and it is subject to an amendment process, you can, at the end of that, if you don't like the bill, you can still block it with 41 votes. In other words, it takes 60 votes to get on a bill, to proceed to a bill, and 60 votes to get off the bill, to report it out. So there are several places where if you are opposed to something and you think that you haven't been treated fairly, you can block it. But blocking the motion to proceed means you are blocking a bill-- even just the idea of getting on the bill and opening it up to an amendment process and debating it on the floor of the Senate. That is not, obviously, the first time that has happened. It happened in the police reform bill. It happened earlier this year in the original CARES package. But on the police reform bill, you had, again, a bill that had many bipartisan provisions in it. In fact, about 75 to 80 percent of the bill were things that both sides agreed upon, and, there again, the motion to proceed just to get on the bill was blocked. It was by the use of the filibuster. It was by the use of the 60-vote threshold in the Senate to prevent the Senate from even proceeding to the bill--even after, I would add, the manager of that bill and the author of that bill, Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina, had indicated through the leadership that they would be willing to accept up to 10 amendments or up to 20 amendments. They were offered unanimous consent to get 10 or 20 amendments offered in the police reform bill, but it was still blocked even on the motion to proceed by the Democrats in the Senate. So, when they blocked the bill last week, it was pointed out, I think, accurately by the media reporting on the bill. These were a few of the headlines to give you a sense of the reaction. The Hill: ``Senate Democrats block GOP relief bill.'' The Washington Post said: ``Democrats block slimmed-down GOP coronavirus relief bill. . . .'' ABC News said: ``Democrats block Senate GOP COVID 19 relief proposal.'' National Public Radio said: ``Senate Democrats Block GOP's $300 Billion Pandemic Relief Bill.'' So those were some of the headlines. Maybe this doesn't mean anything to anybody but Congress watchers, but I am sure the irony is not lost on anybody who follows this process. The Democrats used the legislative filibuster. When I say blocking a motion to proceed, it was the use of a legislative filibuster to block a bill last week--as I mentioned, several times earlier this year--at the same time that they are calling for an end to the legislative filibuster. Imagine that. Think about the irony of that. On Friday, NBC News reported: ``Democratic insiders are assembling a coalition behind the scenes to wage an all-out war on the Senate filibuster in bullish anticipation of sweeping the 2020 election. . . .'' So the very mechanism that they used repeatedly here just in the last year--but, frankly, for the last 6 years that they have been in the minority--to block or, in some cases, even to improve a bill that comes to the floor of the U.S. Senate, they are now talking about getting rid of that very rule. I mean, think about that. The irony of that is pretty rich. It was a disturbing confirmation that the campaign by some Democrats to eliminate the Senate's nearly 200-year-old practice for considering legislation has become official. It used to be sort of whispered around here and talked about, but now they are talking openly about getting rid of the filibuster. It puts into stark contrast the choice the voters are going to face in November. So what is the legislative filibuster? Well, it is the product of the Senate's tradition of unlimited debate. The legislative filibuster is essentially the requirement that 60 Senators agree before the Senate can end debate and vote on a contentious bill. In other words, you need 60 percent of the Senate to agree before you can pass a bill Now, what this means in practice is that unlike the House of Representatives, where legislation can easily pass with the support of just one party, in the Senate, you generally need the support of at least some Members of the other party before you can pass legislation. Nowadays, the Senate's filibuster rule could be said to be the primary thing that distinguishes the Senate from the House of Representatives. That matters because the Senate is supposed to be different from the House of Representatives. The Framers of the Constitution designed the Senate to be, as the minority leader once said--alluding to the legendary exchange between Washington and Jefferson--the cooling saucer of democracy. Wary of--to quote Federalist 62--``the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies, to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions,'' the Founders created the Senate as a check on the House of Representatives. They made the Senate smaller and Senators' terms of office longer with the intention of creating a more stable, more thoughtful, and more deliberative legislative body to check ill- considered or intemperate legislation. As time has gone on, the legislative filibuster is the Senate rule that has had perhaps the greatest impact in preserving the Founders' vision of the Senate. Thanks to the filibuster, it is often harder to get legislation through the Senate than through the House. It requires more thought, more debate, and greater consensus. Those are good things. Historically, Senators of both parties have recognized this. They have seen beyond the narrow partisan advantage of the moment and fought for the preservation of the filibuster. In 2005, when there was talk of abolishing the judicial filibuster, Democratic Senators, some of whom still serve in this body today, fought fiercely to safeguard it. At a rally in March of that year, the current Democratic leader said: They believe if you get 51% of the vote, there should be one party rule. We will stand in their way! Because an America of checks and balances is the America we love. It's the America the Founding Fathers created. It's been the America that has kept us successful for 200 years and we're not going to let them change it! . . . We will fight, and we will preserve the Constitution. That is from the current Democratic leader back in 2005, speaking about proposals to eliminate the filibuster. Well, unfortunately, the Democrats changed their tune a few years later when they thought abolishing the judicial filibuster would serve their advantage. But even then, Democrats--and later Republicans--sought to distinguish between confirming nominees and the importance of preserving debate on legislation. Now they are talking about abolishing the fundamental practice of the Senate, the legislative filibuster, for the same prospect of temporary partisan gaming. ``Nothing's off the table,'' the minority leader said when asked about Democrats' intentions for the legislative filibuster if they win back the Senate. It is a far cry from what he said just a few years ago. Eliminating the legislative filibuster would permanently change the nature of the Senate. The cooling saucer that the Founders envisioned would essentially be gone, and the one-party rule the Democratic leader decried back in 2005 would become a reality. Some might ask why one-party rule is a problem. After all, sometimes one party wins the Senate, the House, and the Presidency. Shouldn't that party be able to pass whatever legislation it wants? Well, the answer is no. Our country is relatively evenly split down the middle, with the advantage sometimes moving to the Republicans and sometimes to the Democrats, but even if one party were a permanent minority in this country, one-party rule still wouldn't be acceptable. Let me go back to the Federalist papers for just a minute. Federalist 10 and 51 discuss two issues that the Founders were concerned about: minority rights and the tyranny of the majority. While we tend to think of tyrants as single individuals, the Founders recognized that a majority could be tyrannical as well. So the Founders created a system of government designed to prevent tyrannical majority from running roughshod over the rights of the minority, and one of those checks was the Senate. Today, the legislative filibuster may be the single most important thing preserving the Senate's constitutional role as a check on majority tyranny. By requiring 60 votes, the filibuster ensures that any legislation has to take into account the views of a broad group of Senators. With a 60-vote threshold, you are unlikely to get your legislation passed unless you bring some Senators of the opposite party on board, and that means the minority party has a real role in shaping legislation in the Senate, something the minority party in the House lacks. Democrats have repeatedly, as I pointed out earlier, used the legislative filibuster to their advantage during this Congress. In March, Democrats filibustered our largest coronavirus relief bill, the CARES Act, until Republicans agreed to add some Democratic priorities, and Democrats quickly took credit for making the bill better. You would think that Democrats would want to preserve this influence, especially--especially--now that Democrats have experienced the consequences of their decision to abolish the judicial filibuster. Of course, when they say they want to abolish the legislative filibuster, Democrats mean that they want to abolish the legislative filibuster if they win a majority in November. They have a lot of legislation they want to pass, and they don't want to have to moderate that legislation to address Republicans' or Americans' concerns. But I would remind my colleagues that no one is in power forever. If Democrats do win in November and abolish the legislative filibuster, they may quickly come to regret that decision once they are in the minority again, because no matter how permanent a majority thinks it will be, sooner or later every majority party returns to minority status. In addition to doing away with the bipartisan nature of the Senate, ending the legislative filibuster would also erode the stability of government. Legislation would become more partisan because the majority would not have to take into account the opinions of the minority party. That would make legislation likely to be reversed as soon as the opposite party gains the majority in a future Congress. Without the legislative filibuster, it is not hard to see a future in which national policy on a host of issues could fluctuate wildly every few years. Taxes could go up and down on a regular basis. Government programs could be stopped and started every few years. The consequences for individuals, businesses, and our economy would not just be unpleasant but potentially devastating. I understand the frustration of my Democratic colleagues. I have been in the minority of the Senate. I was in the minority my first 8 years here. I also know what it is like when you get into the majority and can't pass everything you want because the minority party will filibuster your bills. I have certainly had moments when I wished we could just pass legislation with a simple majority, especially coming from the House of Representatives. Democrats have stood in the way of a lot of legislation I would like to have passed this year, from Senator Scott's police reform bill, which I mentioned earlier, to additional coronavirus relief, to pro- life legislation. It is also important to note that not every filibuster has been undertaken for noble purposes. Like every tool, it can be misused. But I know that no matter how frustrating the filibuster may be in the moment, preserving it is essential to preserving the institution of the Senate and the purpose for which it was created. It is essential to protecting minority rights, and it is an essential check on tyrannical majorities that would seek to curtail our freedoms. Legend has it that when Benjamin Franklin was leaving the Constitutional Convention, someone asked him what form of government the convention had instituted. ``A republic,'' Franklin said, ``if you can keep it''--``if you can keep it.'' Today, the legislative filibuster is the key rule preserving the Senate's constitutional role as a check on partisan passion. I pray that no future Senate will destroy the Senate's essential role in our system of government for temporary partisan gain. I yield the floor.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito) and the Senator from North Dakota (Mr. Cramer).

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito) and the Senator from North Dakota (Mr. Cramer).

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito).

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Cassidy), the Senator from North Dakota (Mr. Cramer), the Senator from Montana (Mr. Daines), the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Kennedy), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran), the Senator from North Carolina (Mr. Tillis), and the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey).

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. THUNE

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, once again this week, Republicans are bringing forward a proposal to provide additional coronavirus relief to help protect jobs, to get kids and teachers back in the classroom safely, and to provide funding for the treatments and vaccines we need to defeat this virus, and once again, Democrats are objecting. It is the same old song: Republicans' bill doesn't spend enough. Well, let's talk about that for a minute. First of all, Republicans are not claiming that the bill we put on the floor this week contains the last dollars we will need to spend in response to the coronavirus. We may need to spend more. This bill is simply an attempt to direct relief funds to some of the biggest priorities right now, like helping the hardest hit small businesses weather this crisis and providing more resources for testing, treatment, and vaccines. These are areas we should all agree on. Second of all, Democrats' coronavirus proposal--the $3 trillion bill they proposed--is both unrealistic and irresponsible. Our Nation is deeply, deeply in debt right now. Next year, our country will owe more than we produce for the first time since the end of World War II. That is a very bad place to be. That is getting toward the kind of debt-to-GDP ratio that helped bring about financial disaster in Greece. While the United States is not Greece, if we grow our debt enough, what happened to the Greek economy could happen here. Being the United States of America does not exempt us from financial realities. In times of crisis, sometimes you have to borrow money, and that is what we had to do earlier this year with the CARES Act and other coronavirus relief legislation. But we have an absolute responsibility to every American, to every hard-working individual in this country to ensure that we are only borrowing what is absolutely necessary. Democrats' proposal doesn't even come close to meeting the definition of ``necessary spending.'' To give just one example, Democrats have proposed appropriating a staggering $1 trillion for States even though the States still--still--haven't spent the money we provided for them in the original CARES Act. Now, it is certainly possible that at some point, we will have to provide some kind of additional assistance to States, but to create a trillion-dollar slush fund for States before they have even spent the money they have already been given would be an incredibly irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars. At least some of that money could be used for coronavirus relief. Other money in the Democrats' bill would go to measures that have nothing--absolutely nothing--to do with the virus, things like diversity studies in the cannabis industry, a soil health study, federalizing elections, and tax cuts for millionaires in States like New York and California. One of the biggest priorities in the wake of the coronavirus is helping Americans keep their jobs or to find new ones. It should be front and center in any relief bill. Yet Democrats' massive bill--over $3 trillion in the Democrats' bill--manages to mention the word ``cannabis'' more often than the word ``job.'' Diversity studies for marijuana are more important, evidently, than jobs--at least if you look at the Democrats' bill. That should tell you all you need to know about the seriousness of the Democrats' proposal. I would love for the Democratic leader to come down to the floor and explain how a bill that mentions the word ``cannabis'' more often than the word ``job'' is a serious coronavirus bill. Of course, despite the unseriousness of the Democrats' proposal, Republicans have been willing to compromise on a coronavirus bill from the very beginning. We understand how negotiation works, and we knew that we would have to give some ground and that Democrats would have to give some ground. We were and are willing to do just that. But from the beginning, Democrats have rejected serious negotiation. Sure, they sat in meetings, and they talked about a bill, but at the end of the day, Democrats refused to compromise. It was their bill or no bill, which means that so far, they have chosen no bill. The only way to get a bill through the Senate and to the President's desk is to develop a compromise bill. Even if the majority leader puts Democrats' exact bill on the floor today, there is no way--no way--it would make it through the Senate, much less be signed into law by the President. So if the Democrats really want a bill, they are going to have to compromise, and that is something they have continued to refuse to do, which leads to the logical conclusion that Democrats don't want a bill at all. If Democrats really wanted to get relief to Americans, they would work with Republicans to pass a compromise bill even if it didn't contain all the money Democrats want, because even if it were true that the Republican legislation is inadequate, some money is better than no money. If you can't get someone in need all the money you think they should have, you should get them what money you can. If Democrats really thought it was of overwhelming importance that we deliver relief to Americans right now, they would be working with Republicans to get as much relief as they could through Congress. But, for Democrats, delivering relief to Americans is not really of overwhelming importance. What is of overwhelming importance to Democrats is keeping coronavirus alive as a political issue, and if that means no bill, well then Democrats are OK with that. They would rather have no bill, zero funding, and a political weapon than to have a bill and allow Republicans to say that we helped Americans. So all indications are that when we have a vote later today, they plan to filibuster this bill. This is not the first time we have seen this. Think back to the end of June. In the wake of George Floyd's death at the knee of a police officer, Americans of all parties came together to push for police reform. Republicans put a police reform bill on the floor of the Senate for debate and amendment--a substantial bill that included 75 to 80 percent of what both Democrats and Republicans said they wanted, the product of years of research and work by Senator Tim Scott, who has personal experience on this issue. And Democrats? Well, Democrats filibustered. That is right. In the face of a nationwide call for police reform legislation, Democrats refused to even move forward to debate the legislation. Why? Because agreeing to work with Republicans on legislation would have taken away much of Democrats' ability to exploit police reform as a political issue. So Democrats filibustered even though, remarkably, they were offered by Senator Scott and other supporters of the bill numerous amendments--10 amendments, 20 amendments--votes, opportunities to improve the bill--at least improve the bill in their eyes into a form that they could pass it. It is hard not to wonder if some of the violence that we have seen in our cities across the country in recent months could have been avoided if Democrats had not decided to attempt to exploit this issue for political gain. There is not a lot Republicans can do if Democrats intend to keep prioritizing perceived political advantage over doing their jobs as legislators, but we are going to take this vote on the coronavirus relief bill this week, today, and we are going to keep offering opportunities for Democrats to work with Republicans to help the American people. Maybe some of the Democratic rank and file will decide that they have had enough of their leaders playing politics and will work with us to resolve and to get some things done for the American people. Republicans are ready to negotiate. We just need Democrats to come to the table. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. THUNE

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