Unanimous Consent Request--S. 3685

Floor Speech

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Mr. CRAPO. Madam President, reserving the right to object.

To date, Congress has appropriated nearly $3 trillion to protect, strengthen, and support Americans in all walks of life, to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and to stabilize the infrastructure and our economic system.

Senator Brown and I worked on a big part of that package together on a team which was put together by Senator McConnell to try to make sure we addressed, in a bipartisan fashion, the way to respond to this pandemic.

The CARES Act has been central to the effort and includes measures to help families directly, to provide aid to small businesses, to assist those in the medical field and on the frontlines of our response effort, and to stabilize our markets.

Soon after, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act--or CARES Act--codifying and extending these protections and providing financial relief to renters--yes, to renters.

Title IV of the CARES Act contains three housing provisions. Section 4022 imposes a 60-day eviction and foreclosure moratorium for single- family borrowers with federally backed mortgage loans. It allows struggling homeowners 1 year of loan forbearance.

Section 4023 extends similar relief to multifamily borrowers who are current on their mortgage payments. They can request up to 90-days forbearance as long as they do not evict the tenant or charge late fees during the pandemic.

Section 4024 imposes a 120-day moratorium on evictions, fees, and penalties. That moratorium will not expire until August 31.

As with much of the CARES Act, the provisions dealing with stabilizing our economy and helping to support and sustain workers, small business owners, homeowners, and home renters are all playing out right now as we speak.

Yet the real objection here is that Senator McConnell and the Republicans have said we want to work on looking at the next package of support, but we want to see how this one is playing out first and identify those places where we need to target the relief most.

The objection is that there is a desire, once again, to go rapidly into passing the House bill and not having regular order follow in the Senate as we work to approach this issue as the existing CARES Act plays out.

All of our housing agencies have extended this eviction and foreclosure moratorium and are working to help address the issues relating to tenants. HUD has expanded issuer assistance to include Pass-Through Assistance Program support, which allows servicers to apply for assistance in meeting principal and interest payments, and the FHFA has announced that no mortgage servicer will be responsible for advancing more than 4 months of missed principal and interest payments on a loan. All of these things have been done to stabilize the housing markets and to assist low-income home ownership and home construction and assistance.

While I am open to looking at the question of whether additional assistance is needed for renters, homeowners, and others in our society, I am not willing to simply bypass the process in the Senate-- ignore the considerations that our leadership has called for as we look to see how our current support programs are playing out--and simply jam the House bill through the Senate without having any debate or process.

This was the biggest rescue package in the history of Congress, and we included a variety of oversight mechanisms in the legislation to ensure that the dollars and programs associated with it reached their intended marks. Many of the provisions in the CARES Act and those appropriated dollars are still making their way to these individuals and families and businesses and markets across the country.

So we must work together to address these critical issues rather than simply try to jam one party's or one side of this Congress's approach to the solution without going through regular order.

I would say the arguments that are being made that we or any of us are somehow turning a blind eye to the problems that exist could not be further from the truth. As I said earlier, the reality is that we passed the largest relief program in the history of this country. We are working to provide liquidity, as well as actual dollar relief, in the amount of trillions of dollars, and those programs are still playing out.

We need to work together rather than, by unanimous consent request after unanimous consent request after unanimous consent request, try to jam down one side's approach without looking to find the cooperative solutions that I know we can.

Like I said, I am open to working on these very issues, but the way to do it is not to come to the floor with a unanimous consent request-- take it or leave it. We need to let proper, regular working order operate in the Senate, and we have time to do so.

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