He was clear that there are ways to get out of the COVID mess his state, and others are in: get vaccinated or wear a mask.
If you have a large percentage of your population which is not vaccinated, and your infection rate is going up, you have got one or two choices. If you're inside, either you're vaccinated or you have to wear a mask. Otherwise, you're at too great a risk to further spread infection, to further pack those emergency rooms, to further prevent people who have terrible accidents from getting cared for because the hospital is full of COVID. And there is a choice. On the other hand, if we don't want mask mandates, get vaccinated, the infection rate goes down, and you don't have a mandate.
And, he says, it's a "conservative principle" to have local officials making decisions on thinks like mask mandates for schools - so he's not a fan of what Gov. Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida.
On the infrastructure bill, on which he's been a key negotiator for the Rs, he said 50% of it will be scored as 'paid for' by the Congressional Budget Office, and the other half will have a lot of paid for items, given they're taking already appropriated COVID package monies that haven't been used and applying them to the infrastructure bill. And, he said, the Rs have some 'splaining to do if they're complaining about the pay-for or deficit aspects now, when they didn't before.
I will point out that president Trump proposed a $1.5 trillion package, which most Republicans were all for, and only 5 percent of it was paid for. We have $550 billion of new spending, of which we can reasonably say is paid for, but certainly one-half by CBO score. And now folks are saying, oh, can't vote for that... OK, well, that's OK. But, on the other hand, we're creating jobs. We're creating bridges. We're protecting people from flooding. Hopefully, they change their mind.
And he suggested that with the Problem Solvers Caucus on board, they should have a path for getting the traditional infrastructure bill done in the House without having it held hostage for the gigunda human infrastructure bill that the progressives want. Speaker Pelosi, he said,
doesn't need a radical left wing. She can pass the infrastructure package with just that committed group of American congressmen and women who want to see our country get better, to have the $110 billion for the roads and bridges and highways, etc., and the new jobs. They can pass the infrastructure package without having the radical left. And that, I think, opens a pathway.
Let's hope that's what happens when the House gets back to work.
Next up was Durbin, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. He talked mostly about the DOJ and the attempt by Former Guy to have the DOJ interfere in the 2020 election. Durbin noted that
...what was going on in the Department of Justice was frightening, from a constitutional point of view, to think that Bill Barr left, resigned after he had announced he didn't see irregularities in the election, and then his replacement was under extraordinary pressure from the president the United States, even to the point where they were talking about replacing him.
He didn't provide any juicy details, but he did say that president Trump asked Jeffrey Rosen, the acting Attorney General after Bill Barr resigned, "to do certain things related to states' election returns, which he refused to do," regarding the 2020 election. Rosen was being asked "by the White House, the leadership in the White House, to meet with certain people who had these wild, bizarre theories of why that election wasn't valid, and he refused to do it." History will be kind to Rosen, Durbin said - and that was not what he would have thought when Rosen was appointed.
We'll close with his reflection on what they've learned so far in the investigation; emphasis on the last sentence is mine, for the people in the back of the room.
I guess the thought that we have come to accept that this president and his bizarre conduct, we came to accept over four years as normal. It's outrageous. When you look back on the Richard Nixon episode and the Saturday Night Massacre, people out of principle were turning around and threatening to resign. The same thing happened here, incidentally, within the Department of Justice. There was a point where virtually everyone in the authority in the Department of Justice was going to walk if the president had his way. I mean, these are moments in history which you would never want to see repeated. And, with Donald Trump, they were.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) was in the Fox News Sunday classroom with Brett Bair sitting in for Chris Wallace. He's not a fan of the infrastructure bill, because it's not paid for, and "we've got to start doing things responsibly." He likes road, bridges, airports, and seaports - stuff he did when he was Florida's governor, but "less than half this bill... had anything to do with roads, bridges, airports, and seaports."
Even though his state has a 'C' on its infrastructure scorecard, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, he's not interested in adding to the debt by borrowing money to pay for it. Even though, of course, that wasn't the case when that other guy was president, Bair pointed out.
In fact, if you look at the numbers, the debt went up at the end of fiscal 2020, $26.9 trillion. The Trump administration and Republicans added $6.7trillion to the debt. That was since President Obama's last budget, a 33 percent increase. Understanding COVID had a big role in that, but there's not a great track record for Republicans recently to tout themselves as deficit debt hawks and now to be doing it here.
That's different now, Scott said. The Rs
had a caucus meeting where we said, we're not going to raise the debt ceiling without -- all Republican senators said, we will not raise the debt ceiling without structural change. That's what we all agreed to do.
On COVID, in a nutshell, everyone should be able to make up their own minds, to make good decisions, if the government would just tell them what they need to know.
Here's what I believe we ought to do at every level of government. Let's be honest. If you feel comfortable, get the vaccine. If you don't, figure out how you're going to keep yourself safe. I mean that's what I believe we ought to be doing. And I'm going to -- I'm going to do everything I can to tell people, you know, that, you know, I've -- I've been comfortable with the vaccine. I had COVID. I don't want anybody to get COVID.
He also said
This is -- you know, this is not a country where we need people telling us what to do. I love my mom. I hate her telling me what to do. Give me good information. I'll make a good decision.
We'll make "good decisions," he said? Yeah, maybe, maybe not: around 400,000 people at Lollapalooza, with widespread reporting of vaccine and negative COVID test documentation being ignored by security, and requests from public health officials urging attendees to get tested... 400 at Barack Obama's birthday part... 700,000 expected at Sturgis...
Finally, in response to Baier's last question on whether Former Guy is the leader of the GOP, Scott thinks not.
I was able to win because I went and I told people what I thought they -- I -- they wanted somebody to do. That's who's going to win. The -- in the next election, the '22 election, the '24 election is, who's got the right message and right background for that time. And that's who's going to be -- that's -- but the voters are the leader of the party.
That's an interesting concept, isn't it?
See you around campus. Make good decisions. Get vaccinated if you're able, and wear a mask when it makes sense to do so.
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