By Sen. Mike Braun Judge Amy Coney Barrett is a consummately qualified jurist who has proven on and off the bench that she has the decency, the intellectual rigor, and the fundamental respect for our country and its Constitution to serve honorably on the Supreme Court. Though Democrats are sure to continue their misguided campaign to paint Judge Barrett as an extremist, it's clear when reviewing her record as a jurist and teacher the only thing extreme about her commitment to moral character and generosity. When Barrett was elevated to the appellate court by President Trump in 2017, every one of her fellow full-time faculty members at Notre Dame Law School supported her appointment. Though they came from a wide spectrum of political beliefs and approaches to jurisprudence, her colleagues made clear in their letter that they are in total agreement that Barrett is the "model of a fair, impartial, and sympathetic judge." Barrett has shown through her nearly one hundred written opinions on the appellate court that she is a strong Constitutional originalist who will not cut the American people out of their own government by treating the Supreme Court as a third chamber of Congress. As a teacher, Barrett is known among her students as a thoughtful, tireless educator who encourages a variety of opinions among her students and frequently draw long lines to her office hours, both to discuss the course and to seek her advice as a mentor. In her personal life, Barrett has shown an uncommon generosity by adopting a boy and girl from Haiti following the 2010 earthquake while already raising four children, including a son with Down syndrome. But at Barrett's 2017 confirmation hearings, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee seemed to have her mistaken for someone else. Foreshadowing Senator Kamala Harris' silly attack on the Catholic philanthropic group the Knights of Columbus a year later, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois asked Judge Barrett ominously if she was an "orthodox Catholic." Senator Dianne Feinstein followed up with her now-famous concern that "the dogma lives loudly within" Judge Barrett. The message was clear: anyone who disagrees with the modern liberal orthodoxy regarding abortion and activist jurisprudence must be animated by an extreme religious cult. "From beginning to end, in every case, my obligation as a judge would be to apply the rule of law," Barrett responded to Durbin, echoing sentiments she has been abundantly clear on throughout her public life. As Barrett unambiguously concluded in a 1998 essay that will surely be cherry-picked for misleading quotes in her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, "judges cannot -- nor should they try to -- align our legal system with the Church's moral teaching whenever the two diverge." The fact that Democrats do not share the same reservations about if Joe Biden, a Catholic, could do the job of president makes it clear that their anti-religious rhetoric is a clumsy last-ditch attempt to keep jurists who will respect the limits of the Constitution off the bench. I agree that faith should be the key word in Judge Barrett's confirmation hearings, but I believe the relevant question of faith is if she will faithfully interpret the Constitution. Her record unmistakably indicates that she will. Amy Coney Barrett's sterling record as a Constitutional originalist demonstrates that she will be a phenomenal Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and I believe her reputation as an educator and a model for decency and citizenship will make Americans proud to have her on the highest court for many years to come. I fully support Amy Coney Barrett's nomination and will vote to confirm her without hesitation.

By Sen. Mike Braun For the past six months, the American people have been subjected to an unprecedented effort by the media and Democrats in Congress to rewrite the history of the coronavirus pandemic, and it has real consequences for our ability to fight the virus and reopen in a smart and safe way. Every single American death from this pandemic is a tragedy that we will never forget. With the benefit of hindsight, we will slowly grow to see how our response could have been strengthened and what missteps we made along the way. It is important to remember that decisions are made on the basis of the information you have at the time, not what you learn after the fact. We learn more every day, but the media and Congressional Democrats have had their minds made up from the start. Flip on the news or flip open a national newspaper and you'll find unwavering negative spin: to them, every decision President Trump has made during the virus outbreak has been destructive, and any clearly beneficial decision either didn't go far enough, wasn't implemented properly, or -- as a last resort -- may lead to "complacency" as case numbers improve. Though the scale of loss from this virus is staggering and sobering, it's important to remember where the models showed we could be. On March 29, Dr. Deborah Birx referenced two models of projected virus fatalities, with one -- the so-called "blue mountain" - estimating between 1.5 and 2.2 million Americans could lose their lives to the coronavirus by August 1 without mitigation efforts. Every major media outlet reported that the Coronavirus Task Force predicted 100,000 to 240,000 Americans would lose their lives even with mitigation. As Dr. Birx said on NBC's TODAY the next morning about defying those projections through strong mitigation efforts: "If we do things together well, almost perfectly, we could get into the range of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities." President Trump made the unprecedented decision to shut down large sections of the American economy for fifteen days, and later to extend those guidelines for another thirty. The President asked us all to do our part to flatten the curve and bring those projections down from millions to 200,000. The country responded, and millions of Americans faced incredible hardship to do their part to slow the spread. Though those original projections were quickly forgotten, it was Americans' embracing President Trump's national guidelines for "fundamental changes to how we live, work, and interact each and every day" that made those numbers an impossibility. President Trump took similar action to prevent several other predictions from coming true as well. The media said we'd run out of ventilators. We didn't, because President Trump seized his authority under the Defense Production Act to ramp up a government and private sector response unprecedented since World War II. They said our hospitals would be overrun. President Trump mobilized the Army Corps of Engineers to rapidly build emergency field hospitals and retrofit convention centers to provide thousands of extra hospital beds. Thankfully, most of them never saw a single patient. Further, President Trump directed his Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to issue a broad range of temporary regulation waivers and new rules to give the healthcare system the flexibility to rapidly increase treatment capacity. On February 2, while the media and Democrats in the House and Senate were still obsessed with their impeachment scheme, President Trump was restricting travel from China to slow the rate of new infections on our shores. As someone who sat for the entire impeachment debacle, I can tell you firsthand that Democrats in Congress and the D.C. press had only one thing on their minds this February, and it wasn't refilling the national strategic stockpile of N95 masks which had been depleted and not restored by the Obama administration. On March 22, when Governor Andrew Cuomo said New York would need 110,000 hospital beds based on curve predictions, President Trump deployed the hospital ship USS Comfort to the Hudson River and approved plans to turn the Javits Center into an emergency hospital. When the state hit its peak in April, New York had 19,000 patients hospitalized. While President Trump received praise from Governor Cuomo for delivering for New York, the media quickly pivoted to their next doomsday scenario and ignored his strong response to the projections. Due in large part to these and other actions taken by President Trump, the U.S. has weathered this pandemic better than many other countries. Currently the U.S. ranks 8th in COVID-19 deaths per capita in countries with more than 50,000 cases -- lower than the United Kingdom, Belgium, Peru, Spain, Italy, Sweden, and Chile. Yet the media constantly and misleadingly reports that the U.S. leads the world in total coronavirus deaths without adjusting for population to create the most negative impression possible. This constant negative spin has real consequences for Americans' health and safety. President Trump's Operation Warp Speed is an unprecedented all-hands-on-deck mobilization of American industry to deliver a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine, and we are already seeing promising progress on clinical trials. Yet in Pew Research's most recent survey, 27% of U.S. adults said they would not receive a COVID-19 vaccine when it comes to market. That becomes less surprising when you consider how intense and uniform the media's negative spin about the White House's coronavirus response has been. We should all be proud of the sacrifices we have made and continue to make to help slow the spread of this disease. In the past six months we have learned a great deal about how to treat and mitigate the spread of this terrible disease, and a smart reopening for our economy and our schools requires clearheaded decision-making guided by the facts and not by resentful ideology.

By Sens. Chuck Grassley and Mike Braun The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated economic fallout have exposed America's broken health care system once again. Countless patients are returning home from the hospital with no knowledge of the devastating medical bills awaiting them. And employers face new, COVID-induced health care costs at the same time their revenues have come under pressure. To bring long-overdue financial certainty to health care consumers, we introduced the Healthcare PRICE Transparency Act in the Senate. This bill will finally bring real prices to health care by requiring hospitals and health insurers to publish their discounted cash prices and secret negotiated rates. No American should ever again face the anxiety of being blindfolded from prices, only to receive medical bills laden with confusing codes and outrageous charges in the mail weeks or months after treatment. Under the status quo, where real prices are hidden, hospitals and insurers have carte blanche to raise prices on the backs of powerless and price-blind patients. This opaque dynamic is a significant reason why inflation-adjusted, per-capita health care costs have roughly doubled since 2000 to make up 18 percent of national GDP. Yet other areas of the economy with transparent prices, including LASIK eye surgery and cosmetic procedures, have seen flat or decreased prices over the same timeframe. Our bill will allow Americans to shop for care as they do for nearly every other good and service in the economy. When consumers have access to prices upfront, hospitals and insurers must compete by distinguishing price and quality to attract patients. Those with ridiculous prices like $24,000 to treat a broken arm, $2,800 for stitches, or $600 for a bandage will lose their patients to providers that offer fair prices. Patients, business owners, and local, state, and federal governments will then be empowered to identify the best quality care at the lowest price, greatly reducing runaway health care costs. Our fellow legislators should support this reform that is backed by 9 out of 10 Americans. Hidden prices facilitate pervasive health care waste because providers and insurers can pass on redundant and unneeded costs to consumers with no economic consequences. According to a JAMA study last fall, waste accounts for 25 percent of the nearly $4 trillion the U.S. spends on health care each year. Such widespread waste could never exist in other economic sectors where providers are held accountable by informed consumers to cut costs. No wonder there's ample economic and anecdotal evidence that health care price transparency dramatically lowers health care costs. Economists Art Laffer and Larry Van Horn found that cash prices for care are, on average, 39 percent less than insurance negotiated rates. Some intrepid employers, fed up with perpetually rising coverage costs, have reduced their health care burden by 30 to 50 percent by steering their employees to price transparent providers. Sen. Braun knows the power of health care price transparency firsthand. In 2008, he cut his company's health care costs and encouraged his employees to seek options through transparency by shopping around. Americans, currently facing an uncertain economic climate, need these health care savings now more than ever. According to a recent study, one-third of small and medium-sized businesses expect to close for good. Tax revenues have plummeted, putting strains on government budgets nationwide. Cutting health care costs through price transparency will partially relieve one of the biggest cost burdens facing all Americans. These health care savings will provide a significant economic stimulus at no cost to taxpayers. Patients will keep more of their paychecks to put toward good use, while employers will enjoy higher net earnings, which they can use to rehire the American workforce. Governments will devote a greater share of taxpayer dollars to services. Hospital associations have fiercely lobbied against health care price transparency efforts to maintain their enormous profits. Yet this reform can help level the playing field between rural hospitals and their big-city competitors. When smaller hospitals can distinguish themselves based on price, they can attract new customers who otherwise bypass them for the name-brand hospital systems.Health care reform, like health care itself, has been infected by unnecessary complexity for decades. The marvel of real prices can achieve policymakers' long-standing goal of bending the health care cost curve. The associated economic stimulus will boost the national recovery and put more money in Americans' wallets. Chuck Grassley is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Mike Braun is a member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.