On the recordOctober 25, 2020
I rise today as more than 220,000 Americans are dead from the coronavirus. There are more than 4 million fewer jobs than when Donald Trump took office. We are still squarely in the middle of this pandemic and an economic crisis, the likes of which we have not seen since the Great Depression. In recent weeks, cases of the coronavirus have risen dramatically. In my home State of New Mexico--and, frankly, across the entire country-- everyone is rightly worried about whether our schools, our childcare centers, and our small businesses can acquire the resources and the equipment they need to reopen safely. We still don't have enough resources or even a national plan for testing and contact tracing, much less for treatments and the eventual nationwide distribution of an FDA-approved vaccine that would allow us to finally get a handle on this virus. If we don't pass real economic relief in the coming weeks, many families in New Mexico will face desperate choices--between paying their bills, keeping a roof over their heads, and putting food on the table. Yet here we are, using valuable time on a Supreme Court confirmation process that should never have been taken up before the election. Senate Republicans say they aren't going to negotiate another coronavirus relief package. They say it is more important to ram a Supreme Court nominee through a broken and nakedly political process than it is to help the people that we were all elected to serve.…
