Latest from Lamar, Notes from the Senate Desk
*Important news from
this week:*
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We reflected this week on the life and service
of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg brought
decency, intelligence and principle to the Supreme Court. Her life
inspired many Americans, especially young women. Her service to our
country deserves great respect.
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This Saturday is National Public
Lands Day. The National Park Service encourages everyone to visit a
national park for free and enjoy America's great outdoors. You can click
here [link 1] for more information.
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The United States Senate
confirmed three of President Trump's nominees for the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC is charged with the important
job of protecting employees from discrimination at work by
investigating allegations of discrimination. With the confirmation of these
three nominees, the EEOC now has a full slate of members - three
Republicans and two Democrats.
*The U.S. Senate should consider
President Trump's Supreme Court nominee*
No one should be surprised that a
Republican Senate majority would vote on a Republican President's
Supreme Court nomination, even during a presidential election year. The
Constitution gives senators the power to do it. The voters who elected
them expect it. Going back to George Washington, the Senate has
confirmed many nominees to the Supreme Court during a presidential election
year. It has refused to confirm several when the President and Senate
majority were of different parties. Senator Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell is only doing what Democrat leaders have said they would do if
the shoe were on the other foot. I have voted to confirm Justices
Roberts, Alito, Sotomayor, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh based upon their
intelligence, character and temperament. I will apply the same standard when I
consider President Trump's nomination to replace Justice Ginsburg.
*Trump Administration's vaccine program on track to be an
unprecedented sprint to success*
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*It was good to talk with
Trump Administration officials Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Admiral Brett Giroir,
Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services, Dr. Stephen Hahn, Commissioner of the Food and Drug
Administration, and Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention at my health committee hearing this
week.*
In what was likely my final hearing as Chairman of the Senate
health committee, we learned from the Trump Administration how the
federal government is continuing to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The
administration officials who testified at this hearing highlighted
several success stories that will play an important role in fighting
this virus, one of which is the development of a vaccine. The Trump
Administration's program to develop and deploy a vaccine that will protect
against COVID-19 is on track to be an unprecedented sprint to success.
The program to develop this vaccine, called Operation Warp Speed,
will save lives without cutting corners on safety and efficacy. The
secret to this success is that the government - in partnership with private
industry - is, for the first time, developing and manufacturing a
vaccine in parallel. In other words, the Operation Warp Speed plan is to
manufacture tens of millions of doses of the six vaccine candidates at
the same time the clinical trials are ongoing and the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) works to determine whether they are safe and
effective. If the FDA does not approve the vaccine, it will not be
distributed. So the risk is to taxpayer money, not the safety and efficacy of
the vaccines.
*The message is clear - children need to be in
school*
Governor Bill Lee and some national researchers have
completed [link 2] a study of the learning loss for reading and math
proficiency from Tennessee children who were not in school from March through
the summer. Now, you always have learning loss in the summer, but in
March through summer, this is what they found: preliminary data
projects an estimated 50 percent decrease in proficiency rates in third grade
reading and a projected 65 percent decrease in proficiency in math.
That, in the governor's words, is a dramatic decrease and shows that
the vast majority of students learn in person with their teacher.
The
good news is that, according to the governor, 1,800 schools in
Tennessee are open, in person, and only seven of those schools have any sort
of closure incident today. So this problem hopefully won't be as
pronounced this semester in Tennessee, because except in Memphis and
Nashville, almost all of our schools are open in-person to some degree. The
governor went on to say that the March through summer school closings
produced a learning deficiency that's expected to be 2.5 times that
of a normal summer rate. He also said the learning loss impacts early
grades greater than later grades, placing those students further behind
in the learning trajectory. Students with lower proficiency rates are
also disproportionately impacted by learning loss. In other words,
students who are already behind fell behind even further as a result of
leaving school in March.
The message is clear: that children,
especially young children who are further behind already, need to be in
school so they can be taught in-person so their learning loss is less
dramatic.
*Below are a few news articles I thought you might
enjoy:*
*Elizabethton Star: Column by Sen. Alexander: Compensating
student athletes has nothing to do with education [link 3]*
*The
Tennessean: Sen. Lamar Alexander: Ruth Bader Ginsburg brought 'decency' to
Supreme Court [link 4]*
If you want to enjoy the game, sit in
the stands, not the president's box.
*#251 in Lamar Alexander's
Little Plaid Book*
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