Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise to speak about the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, and then I will be asking unanimous consent to consider legislation. We included the Restaurant Revitalization Fund in our March legislation on COVID relief. We did that because, of all of the industries affected by COVID-19, restaurants have been some of the most difficult businesses to survive COVID-19. They were ordered by government, basically, to shut down at the beginning of COVID-19. Then, as we started to make progress, they were at much restricted operations. And to this day, restaurants are still not up to their full capacity. Their revenues have been very much decimated as a result of COVID-19. We came together in March with bipartisan legislation in order to do something about that, and we included that in our legislation--$28.6 billion of relief for restaurants. Now, what it did is cover some of their revenue loss as a result of COVID-19. It gave them a lifeline to be able to survive this pandemic. We projected that $28.6 billion would be the need, but we were wrong. We were wrong because COVID-19 was more severe than we thought, restaurants were more badly damaged than we had anticipated, and there was a great deal of more demand and need than the $28.6 billion. We are now being told by the Small Business Administration that the right number was $71.3 billion, or an additional $42.7 billion that is needed.…”