Setting Forth the Congressional Budget for the United States Government

Floor Speech

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Mrs. MURRAY. We are in the middle of a pandemic. Families are struggling, and we should be doing everything we can to make it easier for them to get the care they need from providers that they trust.

The title X program has been incredibly helpful to people seeking all kinds of healthcare, from cancer screenings to STI screenings, to birth control, and more. And before the Trump administration's gag rule slashed the capacity of the title X network in half by cutting out trusted healthcare providers, over 4 million patients a year turned to title X-funded providers for their healthcare.

These patients are disproportionately young people, women who have low incomes, and women of color. An overwhelming majority of them have historically turned to providers like Planned Parenthood, which would be permanently kicked out of the program by this bill.

We need to be tearing down barriers, like former President Trump's title X gag rule, that are jeopardizing access to care for patients, not reinforcing them. And we need to be focused on addressing the pain of this pandemic and on taking steps to finally end it, not wasting time with blatantly ideological bills that appeal to the far-right base at the expense of our families.

While Republicans seem intent on keeping patients from getting the healthcare they need, I am glad we finally have a President who is listening to women and men across the country. He has made clear that he wants healthcare to be a right, not a privilege, and he has already directed his administration to review the damage of title X gag rules that have been so harmful to so many people--an important step toward rescinding the rule, as I continue to push for.

So I urge my Republican colleagues to stop these attacks on women's healthcare and turn their attention to something families actually want, which is serious action to end this pandemic.

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Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I rise today to discuss the urgent challenge our Nation is facing and the urgent response that it requires.

I am always willing to work across the aisle to look for common ground and commonsense solutions. I think my colleagues know this and my record shows it. I am going to keep talking to my Republican colleagues in hopes that there are areas where we can find common ground to help our workers and our families and get our arms around this pandemic. But what we cannot do is allow the possibility of further delay or weaken our response efforts.

With the resources in this resolution, we will be able to reinforce our public health workforce, our community health centers, and our supply chain, all of which are stretched incredibly thin.

We will be able to scale up testing and tracing and vaccination and genomic sequencing and surveillance for new strains of virus and address harmful health inequities that continue to make this crisis so much more deadly for communities of color.

We will be able to provide needed support to our students, our educators, our public schools, and those in higher education as they grapple with this crisis and work towards safely reopening for in- person learning.

We will be able to provide to parents in need of quality, affordable childcare and to a childcare sector staring down mass closures and layoffs.

We need to help workers who are struggling today to make ends meet, who are unemployed, and who are worried about their retirement being thrown into jeopardy. We need to help families across the country who are struggling today to make ends meet, by providing them with direct financial assistance. We need to help States and Tribes and cities and communities whose budgets have been stretched dangerously thin, by providing needed funds.

I see no reason why pursuing this path has to be partisan. After all, if Republicans can use budget reconciliation to give huge tax breaks to the wealthiest corporations, surely they are willing to use it to give relief to communities and families who are struggling in this economic crisis. If they can try to use reconciliation to cause a healthcare crisis by taking health coverage and healthcare protections away from hundreds of millions of people, surely they can support this process, using it to fight the healthcare crisis that has claimed over 440,000 lives in our country and counting. But if they do not, if they insist that using this process to provide relief during a historic pandemic is a partisan vote or that the amount of the relief is too much, I think they are going to have a tough time explaining what and whom they stand for.

Democrats have no problem going on the record as the party that fought for people during the pandemic because, when your house is in flames, you do not argue about how much of the fire to put out or how much water to use or how many lives to save; you do whatever it takes until the crisis is over and everyone is safe, and you do it as fast as you can.

This crisis is not over. Everyone is not safe--not from this virus and not from this economic crisis. There are 440,000 people who have died. We are still averaging 140,000 new cases a day. New strains are presenting new challenges. Underlying disparities are growing deeper, and we are already seeing with vaccination rates that communities of color are being left behind.

We do have to take action, and that is exactly what Democrats are doing today.

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