Political Quotes

“this Saturday will mark 1 year since Congress passed our first response to the COVID-19 virus. That legislation, you will recall, received overwhelming support. It passed by a vote of 96 to 1 here in the Senate and 415 to 2 in the House, and we know that it was not just a one-off. Each of the five pandemic relief bills that were signed into law last year received overwhelming bipartisan support. That is not to say that everybody was in perfect agreement about the size and shape of the bills. We had more than our fair share of disagreements along the way, but both sides of the aisle understood the most pressing challenges facing our country and the types of support that were needed to sustain that fight both when it came to public health and when it came to the economic fallout and recession that resulted: resources for hospitals and healthcare workers, support for the hardest hit families, assistance for small businesses, and, of course, the development, manufacturing, and distribution of vaccines. Not only did we agree on what should be in the bills, but we, actually, also agreed on what should not be in the bills. We were all guided, I believe, by an understanding that the focus should remain on COVID-19 and that pandemic relief bills were no place to inject unrelated or partisan preferences, but now that our Democratic friends control the House and the Senate and the White House, they have tossed that principle in the trash.…”