Roy Blunt: “I am tempted to talk about all of the problems we have had in getting to this point with this legislation, but I am…”

“I am tempted to talk about all of the problems we have had in getting to this point with this legislation, but I am wondering if now is not the time to talk about why we need to get this done. We have heard a lot about who is wrong and who is right and who is taking advantage of the moment, but this is a moment at which we need to do something. This is truly an emergency piece of legislation that deals with a set of circumstances that nobody has ever seen before in our country. We have a virus that people are reacting to in a way that both encourages them and, in some cases, requires them to withdraw from the normal economic activity of the country. This is different than 9/11. With 9/11, the American people said: We are going to show those terrorists that they can't slow us down. In many cases, people got out even more aggressively into the economy than they had been before. In 2008 and 2009, we clearly had a huge economic problem, but that economic problem didn't get dramatically changed by people's unwillingness to participate, but there was a concern about participating. Now we have, fundamentally, a very strong economy that people have been asked to withdraw from or have chosen to withdraw from or have been advised to withdraw from, and we need to figure out what to do about that both on the healthcare side and on the economic side. Our role here is limited. We can't legislate an end to the coronavirus. If we could, we would.…”