Pelosi Floor Speech in Support of Establishing a Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis

I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I thank him for his leadership as Chair of the Rules Committee for bringing this important legislation to the Floor today.

I also acknowledge the bipartisan cooperation of the Republicans in this House and pay tribute to Mr. Cole who is highly respected on both sides of the aisle.

I am sorry that he doesn't see a pattern in this that the Republicans have had these kinds of committees time and again. I'd never heard him question them then, but I do know he's questioning them today.

But I am very pleased that the two of them will be working together with the distinguished Majority Leader, Mr. Hoyer, and the distinguished Minority – Republican Leader, Mr. McCarthy, as well as with the leadership of Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren and Ranking Member Davis in the next – in the days ahead to consider the proposal that we have for how we can act as a Congress when everybody cannot be present.

I see in the paper that I pulled it. No, I didn't pull it. I said all along I wanted this to be bipartisan. As Speaker of the whole House, as we change how we participate, I want it to be bipartisan. When we saw that that opportunity existed, in my conversation with the distinguished Republican Leader, Mr. McCarthy, I then said, ‘We have to give this a chance.'

I do think there are many options that may be available. We want to give all the options to our Members, but consistent with the Constitution of the United States, the rules of the House of Representatives, the security of this body's information as well as, again, the technology to make sure it works when we are depending on it.

And so I yield to the distinguished – the wisdom that they will bring to all of this to give Members as many options as possible and to do so in a way that, again, is respectful of this being the coronavirus and not just for how we do business generally, but in this specific time as also a template for any other kind of emergency that might arise.

So, I thank them. I thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank you, Mr. Ranking Member Cole for your comments about willingness to discuss that. And, hopefully by the time we return on May 4th, we will have an opportunity to vote in a bipartisan way how we can do it.

And, by the way, when we're talking about the proxy voting, we have to be sure it is consistent with the wishes of the Member of Congress who's yielding a proxy, consistent with his or her representation of their district. It's not just a license to the proxy-holder to work his or her will or to the leadership to have a handful of proxies. It's the actual representation of that person whose district – his or her district – wishes to vote on the matter with not that much latitude except as spelled out by the granter of the proxy.

As a new Member of Congress, some of you may have identified with this, I would go into a committee room and think I had the best argument in the world for my new fresh idea as a Member of Congress and the Chairman would have a pocket full of proxies and there was no need to have a discussion, if he or she were not in agreement. So, I've been a victim of that and I don't want any doubt in mind, that it's a complete, accurate guardrailed reflection of the wish of the person granting the proxy.

Having said that, I want to salute our distinguished Chairman for his championship. He has gone on starvation, this, that and the other on behalf of resolving the hunger crisis – the food insecurity crisis in the country, and his enthusiasm on SNAP and as we go forward, the recognition that people are hungry in our country and that we have to do something about it.

But hearing him, as Chair of the Rules Committee, talk about that. Recognizing his history as Chair of the Task Force on Hunger, so many times going on starvation diets. And I would say, ‘Why are you doing that? I'm not sure the other side even cares if you are starvation or not.' But nonetheless, I salute you, again and again, for your leadership on that.

So, Madam Speaker, here we are – and I thank him – Mr. McGovern, our distinguished Chairman for bringing this resolution to the Floor, again, for his great leadership trying to move us forward in a bipartisan way to continue the operations of Congress during this extraordinary time. And, again, I acknowledge Mr. Cole's interest in doing that as well.

This – our nation faces a deadly virus, a battered economy with [hundreds] of thousands of sick and ill, some died and millions out of work. This is really a very, very, very sad day. We come to the Floor with nearly 50,000 deaths, a huge number of people impacted and the uncertainty of it all.

We have to be very prayerful. And we have to be as bipartisan as we can possibly be, as united, working together.

The bill we will vote on later today, which I will speak about later today, is the fourth bipartisan bill that we have – we will be passing in the Congress of the United States. Starting March 4, we had our first bill: testing, testing, testing. Shortly thereafter, the 14th: masks, masks, masks, in terms of the personal protective equipment that people needed. And, again, our big CARES Act, which was bipartisan, as is this bill today. And that's why I hope, as we continue to talk about how Congress conducts itself, we can do so in a bipartisan way.

Congress, again, has taken important steps in addressing this crisis, as I mentioned, by passing three bills, over $2 trillion in desperately needed emergency relief. We started – emergency, emergency mitigation for the impact on the health and the economy of our country. We hope to soon get to a recovery phase, but right now we're still in mitigation.

Again, later today, when we pass this, the fourth bill, an urgently needed interim bill, I'm very pleased that it was transformed from a bill two weeks ago on the Floor where the Leader in the Senate said, ‘This is it, $250 [billion], we're not doing anything else.' That failed. It did not get unanimous consent. At the same time that other proposal was put forth, but I'll talk about that later.

But, again, we need – why we're here for this particular initiative is we need to ensure that the historic advancement of dollars in these bills and in future packages are spent carefully and effectively to save lives and rebuild our economy.

As the distinguished Chairman mentioned, President Truman, then Senator Truman, at the dawn of World War II, then Senator Harry Truman spearheaded the creation of a special committee to ensure that the dollars spent on the war effort would have oversight and accountability. Now, there's a Democratic president in the White House, President Roosevelt. This wasn't partisan in any way, nor should this be considered bipartisan. Preventing – the purpose was to prevent waste, fraud and abuse, profiteering, price gouging and the rest.

Truman said later, when he was president – interviewed about this, he said, ‘I knew that after World War I, there had been 116 committees set up to investigate the money spent in World War I.' 116 committees after the fact. He said, ‘I knew there had been 116 committees after the fact, and I felt one committee, before the fact, would prevent a lot of waste and maybe even save some lives, and that,' he said, ‘is the way it worked out.'

The Truman Committee turned into a tremendous investment for taxpayers. The total cost, at the time, was less than $1 million, and it saved lives and nearly $15 billion in preventing waste, fraud and abuse. That's the equivalent to like $750 billion today.

What made sense then makes even more sense now. That is why the House is forming a special bipartisan oversight panel, the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis. And by the way, Mr. Cole, I did inform the distinguished Leader of my intention to announce such a thing before I did.

The Committee will root out waste, fraud and abuse. We keep saying it. It will be laser-focused on ensuring that taxpayer money goes to workers' paychecks and benefits, and it will ensure the federal response is based on the best possible science and guided by health experts and that the money invested is not being exploited by profiteers and price gougers.

We already have been hearing of families facing scams. There are people out there playing scams to steal the direct payment checks. And the Secretary of HHS informed – told me of a scam that one entity was selling masks they didn't even have – they didn't even have. That's why this is so important and that timing is important, that people know we will be watching how these tax dollars are spent.

I agree with Mr. Cole: there is plenty of time later for an after-action review of what went before. We are talking about how this money is spent as we go forward, to make sure, as President Truman did – Senator Truman at the time – did to put a spotlight on the factories that were doing the work they were supposed to be doing.

We have a tall order in terms of vaccines and therapies and the rest. We want to be sure that if there is, God willing, a vaccine soon or a cure even sooner than that, that we will be able to have the resources available in the place where they need to be up in the real-time to be able to advance that.

Led by Majority Whip Mr. Clyburn, Select Committee – and I'm very proud – Mr. Clyburn, I had the privilege of naming him then to oversee what was happening in response to Katrina. He just was magnificent in his precision of thought and objectivity.

Again, this isn't about assigning blame. This is about taking responsibility and to answer – to be able to answer to what we have put forth, that it really did work.

So, the Committee will exercise our oversight to ensure that the historic investment of taxpayers' dollars, which are enormous, are being used wisely and efficiently and that nobody is ripping us off. Where there's big money – we know this – people will come up with a scam of some kind.

Whip Clyburn's leadership, again, is essential to the work and his review of the response to Hurricane Katrina, which I mentioned, and so many issues critical to working families. I'm proud that he's accepted the opportunity to serve our country in this role now.

We urge our Republicans and the Administration to join us in respecting this oversight so that we can save lives, deliver relief and protect our economy. I say this with all the hope that I can muster that we can do this in a very bipartisan way, so anyone who is thinking of a scam or a delay in terms of how the product we are looking out for is produced and how available it is to everyone in our country, will know that we, again, are watching from both sides of the aisle how the taxpayers' dollar is being spent.

With that, I once again thank the distinguished Chairman for bringing this important legislation to the Floor. I hope that we – while we may be on a different side of this vote that when the Committee is formed, we'll have much in common in how we put a very bright light on how money is spent to make people healthier, to make our economy stronger and to do so in a way that brings us all together.

With that, Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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