Unanimous Consent Request--S. 3685
Floor Speech
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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I thank Senator Inhofe so much for his allowing me to say a few words. I know it is his time. And I thank my friend Jack Reed.
Today is July 1, which means that rent and mortgage payments are due, and as I speak today, so many families across this country are being forced to make the difficult decision about how they will make this month's payment to stay in their homes.
Even before the pandemic began, almost one-fourth of all renters, or 11 million households, were forced to pay more than half of their income for housing--half of their income. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, more than half a million people experienced homelessness on a given night before the pandemic, and that has just gotten worse.
That is why I am a strong supporter of Senator Brown's Emergency Rental Assistance and Rental Market Stabilization Act, which will provide $100 billion in emergency funding. I am also proud to support Senator Reed's bill as well as the work of Senator Menendez.
The pandemic, as we know, has wide and longstanding racial disparities in housing. We had a 30-percent gap in Black and White ownership rates before the pandemic due to discriminatory practices, and it has only made it worse.
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, a leader and a good friend, has repeatedly reminded us that this means investing in programs like section 8 housing, which still remains unavailable to so many families.
Yes, we need to address this shortage of affordable housing. We need to take action now. I thank my colleagues. We have an opportunity. The Fourth of July is at the beginning of July, but by the end of July, we had better have gotten something done, and that means help our State and local governments; that means funding for elections; and that means making sure we are responding to the crisis in housing.
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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I want to thank the Senator from Michigan for her leadership on the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee, helping to pass and leading the last farm bill in the Senate, along with Senator Roberts and so many of us who are on that committee.
We understand that rural America is hurting right now, and rural America is actually part of the solution as well for so many people who are hungry and who need help.
This pandemic and its economic impact has left 41 million Americans unemployed and strained the financial security of hundreds of thousands of families across this country.
I have always worked to ensure, from the minute I got on the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee, that we focus on nutrition. Programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program--or, as it is known, SNAP--are the place to do this: to provide meaningful relief to families, children, senior citizens, veterans. People all over this country, people who never thought they would be out of a job, people who used to--and I heard this story in Minnesota-- volunteer in food banks, now they are standing in line at food banks because they unexpectedly lost their jobs.
Many of us have seen this. I have visited these food banks. Even before the pandemic, more than 37 million people, including more than 11 million children, were living in a food-insecure household.
Analytics released by the national nonprofit Feeding America in April projected these numbers to increase this year to more than 54 million people, including 18 million children.
The 350 food shelves in my State operated by Second Harvest Heartland are seeing double or triple the number of visitors. So this weekend, on Sunday, I visited one of our biggest food shelves, Second Harvest Heartland, with Director Allison O'Toole, with a number of people who were working there around the clock. They just released a study. What the study said is that before the pandemic 1 in 11 Minnesotans were living with hunger. Now, they project for August--only a little over a month from now--that one in eight Minnesotans will be food insecure-- one in eight.
They said, tracking our State's history back to the Great Depression, they have never seen anything like this since the Great Depression--not even the economic downturn 10 years ago, not the ups and downs in unemployment that we have seen in our rural areas, the farm crises up in Northern Minnesota--nothing like they are projecting to happen.
July begins with the Fourth of July. The Fourth of July is when we celebrate our country. We celebrate what America means. My hope is that we will end July by actually passing the Heroes Act. I know we are going to negotiate it, colleagues. I know we will make changes over what passed in the House, but we cannot let our States go bankrupt. We must help local areas.
I was on the phone today with our friends in the Fargo-Moorhead area, and we have seen it there too. We have seen it all over our State.
The SNAP program was originally designed to respond to changes in the economy by expanding to meet increased need during economic downturns and contracting as economic recovery alleviates the need for food assistance.
Under the farm bill that was signed into law under Senator Stabenow's leadership in 2018, we preserved this critical lifeline. The conference report, which passed with 87 votes in the Senate and 369 votes in the House of Representatives, avoided making cuts to benefits or changes to eligibility that would take away benefits or create obstacles.
At this difficult time, we should ensure that we are getting assistance to all of those who need it, not put up new barriers--not with what we are seeing with more COVID cases in the southern part of this country and in the western part of this country.
In fact, the facts and the numbers bear out that we should be increasing those benefits. The House has taken action to do just that by passing a 15-percent increase in SNAP benefits during the pandemic. That is what they did in the Heroes Act. That is what we should do here.
At the same time, the middle of a pandemic is the wrong time to be cutting SNAP benefits or kicking participants out of the program, and that is why I have called on the administration to withdraw rules that would take these benefits away from families in need.
As for food deserts, again, the pandemic has simply put a big, fat magnifying glass on a problem that already existed, and that is that 23.5 million Americans live in a food desert where the absence of a grocery store within 1 mile of their home makes it more difficult to purchase fresh, nutritious food.
Low-income Americans and people of color are much more likely to live in a food desert, and people in rural areas live in these food deserts all over America
That is why Senator Brown and I wrote a letter with 20 Senators urging the Department of Agriculture to prioritize these programs intended to minimize food deserts and support local and regional efforts for these projects.
We cannot overlook the capacity needs of food shelves, and that is something I talked about with our friends at Second Harvest Heartland just this weekend.
The WORK NOW Act is something that--I appreciate Senator Wyden is here as one of the cosponsors, along with Senator Brown and Senator Schatz--supports nonprofit organizations, to make it easier for them to hire people who are actually out of work, who could then help other people.
It is why I joined Senator Stabenow and several of my colleagues in the Agriculture Committee in introducing the Food Supply Protection Act to help food banks increase their capacity and strengthen partnerships to prevent food waste while feeding more families.
One of my predecessors, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, whose desk I stand in front of today--his name is carved in the desk--served on the Agriculture Committee. He grew up in a small town in South Dakota. He became a professor eventually, but his father was a pharmacist. He understood the importance--growing up in that family, seeing the ups and downs of rural America--of stable government policy for both agriculture producers and families struggling to put food on the table.
He was a leading advocate of Federal nutrition programs and played an instrumental role in the passage of what was then called the Food Stamp Act of 1964, which turned what was then just a pilot program into the permanent program we know today.
He knew that the moral test of government is how government treats its most vulnerable citizens: those in need, those who are seniors, those with disabilities.
He once said this: ``We will be remembered not for the power of our weapons but for the power of our compassion, our dedication to human welfare.''
In these times of uncertainty and with rising food insecurity, we need to work to ensure that the nutrition needs of our most vulnerable citizens are met.
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