On the recordMarch 2, 2021
Mr. President, I join my colleagues in the discussion over the relief package we are going to be voting on later this week. We need to go back to last year and recognize what happened in this Chamber on five different occasions. I have been in the Senate now for 6 years, and very seldom do we see both parties come together and recognize we have a problem and we have to relieve the American people. We had a historic pandemic, first of its kind, in 100 years. COVID hit our shores. What did we do? We spent days and weeks, but over the course of those days and weeks, we came together with five bipartisan packages that really address the root problems and the challenges created by COVID. We passed the Paycheck Protection Program, something that I think was extraordinary. The banking community got together even before we had the rules on how the loan should be underwritten and how they would be forgiven, and they decided to mobilize and provide desperately needed capital and liquidity to businesses, and they saved many, many businesses in North Carolina. We passed Operation Warp Speed, a program that for the first time in this Nation's history, or any nation's history, we went from a known virus to two multiple vaccines with high degrees of efficacy that are now being put into the arms of Americans at a rate of almost 2 million a day. We did that because we focused on a problem and we fixed it and we continue to evolve it--five different bipartisan bills.…





