[Pages S799-S838]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

HONORING HOMETOWN HEROES ACT

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I move that the Chair lay before the
Senate the message to accompany H.R. 1892.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
The motion was agreed to.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

House message to accompany H.R. 1892, a bill to amend title
4, United States Code, to provide for the flying of the flag
at half-staff in the event of the death of a first responder
in the line of duty.

Pending:

McConnell motion to concur in the amendment of the House to
the amendment of the Senate to the bill, with amendment No.
1930, in the nature of a substitute.
McConnell amendment No. 1931 (to amendment No. 1930), to
change the enactment date.
McConnell motion to refer the message of the House on the
bill to the Committee on Appropriations, with instructions,
McConnell amendment No. 1932, to change the enactment date.
McConnell amendment No. 1933 (to (the instructions)
amendment No. 1932), of a perfecting nature.
McConnell amendment No. 1934 (to amendment No. 1933), of a
perfecting nature.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The President pro tempore.
Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, is it proper to speak as in morning
business?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I rise today to speak in strong support of
the bipartisan Budget Act which will hopefully pass later today.
This bill, as the name implies, is the result of rigorous,
bipartisan, and bicameral negotiations. I am pleased to have played a
part in this endeavor, and I am gratified to note that in addition to
keeping the government open and providing much needed resources for our
troops, the bill before us addresses a number of longstanding
priorities of the Senate Finance Committee, including many that I have
personally been working toward for years now. Indeed, this legislation,
once passed and signed into law, will be the combination of years of
work put in by members of the Finance Committee on both sides of the
aisle.
I want to take some time to say a few words about some of the
bipartisan victories that will be achieved through this legislation. I
should warn my colleagues that this will take a few minutes because
there are quite a few provisions to discuss.
For starters, let's talk about healthcare. Among the more prominent
victories in this bill is an extension of the Children's Health
Insurance Program for an additional 4 years. As we all know, last month
Congress passed a historic 6-year CHIP extension, which was eventually
signed into law. The bill before us would add another 4 years on top of
that 6-year provision, providing a total extension of 10 years--10
years. That is remarkable. I have a long history with the CHIP program.
I was the original author of the program, and I have always been an
outspoken champion of it.
We have had some back-and-forth here in the Senate about CHIP in
recent months, and some of it has gotten pretty fierce. However, today
the Senate will pass legislation--bipartisan legislation--to provide
unprecedented security and certainty for the families who depend on
CHIP and the State governments that need more predictability to map out
their own expenditures.
I am sure my friend, former Senator Kennedy, is up there watching. I
am very happy he came on this bill in the early stages and helped to
put it through.
In addition to the CHIP extension, the budget bill includes a
bipartisan Finance Committee bill entitled the ``Creating High-Quality
Results and Outcomes Necessary to Improve Chronic Care Act of 2017''--a
fairly long title. Senator Wyden, the Finance Committee's ranking
member, and I have been working for years on this legislation, which,
once enacted, will improve health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries
living with chronic conditions. It will also help bring down Medicare
costs and streamline care coordination services.
We have been working with our colleagues, stakeholders, and advocates
for quite some time. We moved the bill through the committee last year,
and the Senate actually passed it once already without a single vote in
opposition. This legislation will finally get the CHRONIC Care Act to
the President's desk.
I thank Senator Wyden for the time and effort he has put into this
action. I also thank our other colleagues on the Finance Committee,
particularly Senators Isakson and Warner, who joined us on a working
group to develop this important legislation and move it forward. This
bill, as promised, will relieve a great deal of suffering for Medicare
beneficiaries and will do so in a fiscally responsible manner.
The budget bill also contains a package of bipartisan provisions that
have come to be known as Medicare and health extenders. These
provisions are high priorities for a number of our Members throughout
the Senate, and I am very pleased we were able to include them in the
final package of the spending bill.
While these are all important, I would like to highlight that there
are a few provisions we were able to permanently resolve and not just
extend. One such provision will repeal a flawed limit on the amount
Medicare would pay for outpatient physical and other therapy that
threatened access for some of the most vulnerable patients. I worked
with other Members in both Chambers to find a lasting solution to this
decades-old problem, again demonstrating that Congress can tackle hard
problems and not just kick the can down the road.
In addition to the Medicare extenders, the bipartisan funding bill
also includes some key reforms to the underlying Medicare Programs.
These include expanding access to in-home treatments for patients with
Medicare Part B and improved means-testing for the premiums paid by
high-income earners under Medicare Parts B and D, all of which will
help improve the overall fiscal outlook for Medicare.
Furthermore, the bill repeals the Independent Payment Advisory Board
that was created under the so-called Affordable Care Act. This, too, is
a step that has garnered bipartisan support, as it should, showing that
many Democrats have joined Republicans in recognizing just how ill-
advised the creation of this panel really was.

[[Page S800]]

The bill addresses a number of other healthcare priorities as well,
including continued funding for various public health programs, some
delays for burdensome Medicaid reductions that have been on the
horizon, and it provides relief to Puerto Rico's healthcare challenges
faced after the hurricane devastation by increasing Medicaid funding.
I would also like to say, in any big package, there are a lot of
policies in here that give me concern. Some of the offsets,
particularly related to Medicare Part D that my Democratic colleagues
insisted be in this package, are very troubling to me, and I look
forward to working with my colleagues to address this moving forward.
In addition to these healthcare priorities, the funding bill extends
a number of important tax provisions in order to help families,
individuals, and small businesses throughout the country. We made
progress on producing and passing tax extenders legislation with the
passage of the PATH Act in 2015. Still, many more important items
remain to be handled, and we have worked to address Member priorities
to extend certain provisions. The provisions included in the spending
bill all expire at the end of 2016. This legislation will extend them
through this year.
Finally, the bill takes some major steps forward in the area of human
services, which is also under the jurisdiction of the Finance
Committee.
In addition to continuing funding for important child and family
services programs, the bill includes the Family First Prevention
Services Act, another bill originally introduced by Senator Wyden and
myself to strengthen families and reduce inappropriate foster care
placements. This legislation will help keep more children safely with
their families instead of placing them in foster care. Under this bill,
States will be able to fund effective services that have been shown to
prevent children from entering foster care. It will also encourage
States to place children with foster families instead of in group
homes, and it will reduce the bureaucracy faced by relatives who seek
to take in children rather than have them end up in foster care.
Also included in the spending bill is the Social Impact Partnership
Act, a bill I introduced along with Senator Bennet, which will support
innovative public-private partnerships to address critical social and
public health challenges. As a result of this bill, States will
identify key social challenges they want to address, state the results
they hope to achieve, and the Federal Government will pay for a
rigorous, independent evaluation to verify that they achieved the
outcome.
As you can see, we have been very busy in the Finance Committee for
the past few years. Obviously, we have seen success in some of the more
high-profile items, like tax reform late last year, as well as long-
term highway funding and renewing trade promotion authority in 2015,
but our work has gone far beyond these efforts. Thankfully, with
passage of this spending bill, many more of the committee's efforts--
virtually all of them bipartisan--will come to fruition.
I thank the Senate leaders from both parties who have worked with us
to include all of these important provisions. I thank my colleagues on
the Finance Committee--both Republicans and Democrats--who have put in
so much time over the years on all of these efforts and congratulate
them all for the success we look forward to seeing this week.
Of course, we do still have to pass the bill. Therefore, I urge all
of my colleagues, on both sides of the aisle, to vote in favor of this
bipartisan legislation.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, before I make my remarks, let me just
say that in what we might call the current unpleasantness in
Washington, what a pleasant thing it is to be here on the Senate floor
and hear the respected chairman of the Senate Finance Committee say the
positive words he has said, describe his success at expanding CHIP and
call to our memory the name of Senator Kennedy--who was his friend and
ally in creating that program upon which so many children across
America depend.
So I thank him for a lovely moment in an otherwise somewhat, shall we
say, challenging Washington environment.
Mr. President, in the spirit of back-and-forth--which is often the
spirit of the Senate--I am following Senator Hatch, but I see Senator
Wicker also on the floor. If time is pressing on him, I would be
willing to consider yielding for a few moments. I don't know how much
time he intends to consume.
Mr. WICKER. Mr. President, the Senator is very kind, and time is not
that pressing. I am actually expecting two or three colleagues, and
perhaps we will engage in a colloquy after that. I do appreciate my
friend's courtesy.

Climate Change

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, in that event, let me commence my
196th ``Time to Wake Up'' climate speech.
The last year has been a lousy one for environmental policy in the
United States. While the rest of the world began implementing the Paris
Agreement to reduce the carbon emissions that are changing our climate
and our oceans, this proud body, the U.S. Senate, sat on its hands.
When President Trump handed the keys to his administration over to
what I call the three stooges of the fossil fuel industry--Pruitt,
Perry, and Zinke--the Senate sat on its hands. The recent interview
with British journalist Piers Morgan shows Trump willing to make a
scientific fool of himself on the question of climate change to please
the general managers pulling the strings of his administration, the
Koch brothers.
This record puts them all way out of line--way out of line--with most
Americans. Overwhelming numbers of younger Americans demand climate
action and plan to hold politicians who stand in its way accountable.
Faith groups, universities, State and local governments, and businesses
have stepped up their climate leadership. Businesses hear from their
customers and know the American people want action, but if corporate
America is serious about climate action in Washington, corporate
America needs to explain why the Big Business lobby groups in this
town--the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute,
and the National Association of Manufacturers--stand so resolutely in
the way of climate action. These three industry groups have been
instrumental in blocking climate action, using lobbying, dark money
election spending, and threats of dark money election spending.
Today, I want to take a look at the biggest and swampiest of the
three, the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce. First, let's clear up
some common misperceptions about the chamber. It is not a government
agency, and it bears almost no relation to your hometown chamber of
commerce.
Instead of representing the interests of small businesses, the
chamber represents the interests of giant corporations, international
corporations, and the ultrarich. The chamber president, Tom Donohue,
admitted as much in a letter to the tobacco company Philip Morris. He
wrote that small businesses ``provide the foot soldiers, and often the
political cover, for issues big companies want pursued.''
Why this service to giant corporations and the ultrarich? Easy
answer: They pay the bills. The vast majority of the chamber's $275-
million-per-year budget comes from just a handful of donors. For
instance, in 2014, just 119 donations accounted for over $160 million
of the chamber's fundraising haul. Who are these donors? Well, the
chamber doesn't want you to know. It does all it can to resist
transparency, but thanks to voluntary disclosures by some corporations
and the tax filings of some nonprofit groups, we know that its donors
include many of America's biggest corporations as well as political
front groups run by the billionaire Koch brothers and Karl Rove.
The chamber took in at least $5.5 million from Koch-backed groups
between 2012 and 2014, and a Karl Rove-affiliated group gave the
chamber $5.25 million in 2014 alone. It would be interesting to know
how much of the Karl Rove money is actually Koch money laundered
through the Karl Rove front group.
What does the chamber do with all of this money? It lobbies, it
litigates, and it runs political attack ads on television, radio, and
the internet.
Let's start with the lobbying.
The chamber spends far more than anyone else in lobbying the Federal

[[Page S801]]

Government. It spent more than $80 million last year alone--far more
than any individual company. Over the last 20 years, the chamber has
spent more than $1.4 billion--that is billion with a ``b'' and the nine
zeros after it--in lobbying the Federal Government. That is three times
more than the next largest lobbying spender--a swamp monster, indeed.
Much of this lobbying is against environmental policies, with the
chamber's lobbying Congress, the White House, the EPA, the Department
of Energy, and the Department of the Interior on behalf of--yes, you
guessed it--the fossil fuel companies. The chamber champions the fossil
fuel agenda. It opposes limits on carbon emissions and supports
drilling and mining on public lands and in offshore waters.
The chamber champions only the fossil fuel energy agenda and attacks
renewable energy despite that industry's being responsible for more
jobs than the fossil fuel industry. In 2016, for instance, the chamber
lobbied the Federal Government on at least 14 separate issues in favor
of the oil and gas industry and on at least 7 issues in favor of the
coal industry. On renewable energy, there were zero--not one.
It was the chamber that paid for the debunked study that claimed the
Paris Agreement would kill jobs and weaken economic growth, which Trump
cited as justification for withdrawing from that agreement.
The chamber also spends a lot of effort in importuning the courts. In
a recent 3-year period, the chamber was involved in roughly 500 cases
as either a plaintiff or an amicus curiae--an interested party deemed a
``friend of the court.''
Once again, the chamber fronted for the fossil fuel industry. In just
3 years, it sued the EPA 15 times and filed amicus briefs against the
EPA in another 11 cases, making the EPA the chamber's most frequent
target in court. The chamber sued against the Clean Power Plan and has
consistently opposed the EPA's authority to regulate carbon emissions
under the Clean Air Act.
The chamber also wrote an amicus brief that urged the Supreme Court
to strike down limits on election spending. It got its wish in the
Citizens United decision. Citizens United allowed dark money groups--
outside groups--to spend unlimited sums in corrupting our elections.
The chamber and the fossil fuel industry have been the biggest
beneficiaries--the biggest users--of this horrible decision.
Over the last 10 years, the chamber has spent more than $150 million
in dark money on Federal elections, and we don't know how much it has
spent on State elections other than we know it has contributed millions
to other outside spending groups that are active at the State level.
In 2016, the chamber was the largest dark money spender in
congressional races. It often ran vicious attack ads in races across
the country. Many of these ads supported the fossil fuel agenda. Here
is one from the 2016 Senate race in Pennsylvania. The chamber was again
the largest dark money spender on this race in its having spent over $6
million. It ran a series of attack ads against Katie McGinty and
slammed her for supporting legislation to reduce carbon emissions.
Here is the ad:
A couple of moms are watching their kids, and the kids are playing on
the playground. One is complaining that McGinty supports taxing energy
from fossil fuels, and the other mom remarks as to how much energy
their kids have, to which the first replies: Oh, if McGinty finds out
about that, she will tax the kids. Right on cue, an actor who is
supposed to represent McGinty, the candidate, arrives--of course in a
chauffeured black sedan--ready to tax the energetic kids. The ad ends
with one mother screaming at her son, Jimmy, to run away.
So that is what we get--the chamber as the enforcer for the fossil
fuel industry. Dare to support climate action or oppose fossil fuel
interests, and the chamber will go after you with everything it has.
It is actually worse than that because there is one thing more
insidious than spending millions of dollars on attack ads, and that is
the threat of spending millions of dollars on attack ads. You see, once
Citizens United allowed the chamber and other outside election spending
groups to spend unlimited funds, the corollary was that it could
threaten to spend those unlimited funds. All the chamber and other
outside election spending groups now have to do is threaten to fund a
challenger in order to bring many candidates and elected officials to
heel. This Citizens United-sanctioned intimidation explains why we
cannot make good climate policy in Washington, and the chamber is its
leading proponent.
Several big American companies have stopped funding the chamber over
its anti-climate agenda. Apple, PG&E, Costco, Hewlett-Packard,
Starbucks, Mars, and others have all left. Yet plenty of other
corporate climate champions still fund the chamber. It is unbelievable
but true.
Here is an ad that was run last spring by several big companies that
urged Trump to stay in the Paris Agreement. These companies--Facebook,
Gap Inc., Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, and
Salesforce--signed this full-page ad that supported the Paris
Agreement. At the same time, they were donors to the chamber, which was
out attacking the Paris Agreement. How do you publicly support the
Paris Agreement while funding the swamp monster that attacks the Paris
Agreement?
The Trump administration is also seeking to cut funding for renewable
energy research by 72 percent. America's business leaders should want
to maintain U.S. technological leadership and create millions of high-
paying, clean energy jobs in the future, but the chamber's so-called
Global Energy Institute's website is promoting Keystone XL, the Dakota
Access Pipeline, and offshore drilling. I kid you not--offshore
drilling. Facebook, Gap Inc., Google, Intel, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley,
and Salesforce--offshore drilling? What do you bet those companies
won't take out full-page ads to support offshore drilling? They do come
to Washington to lobby, but when Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft,
and Salesforce came to lobby Congress through their trade association
TechNet, they didn't even mention climate change. They didn't even make
clean energy a priority. Instead, they fund the biggest, baddest
opponent of climate action and clean energy.

Why do companies that are so committed to increasing their own use of
renewable energy not lobby Congress in favor of renewable energy? It is
a battle here, folks. Where is the corporate cavalry?
As long as pro-climate companies do nothing in Congress and allow
fossil fuel front groups like the chamber to be their voices here in
Washington, how do they expect to make progress? The Chamber of
Commerce they fund throws around hundreds of millions of dollars on
lobbying and elections to ensure that Congress will not take the
climate action they seek. What are Facebook, Gap, Google, Intel,
Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, and Salesforce waiting for? Do they expect
some kind of immaculate political conception of a climate bill--climate
action that suddenly floats magically down from the clouds? It is not
like they don't lobby themselves. For Pete's sake, they know how the
game is played. They just don't lobby for this. They just don't lobby
for climate action.
Look, good corporate policies on climate are important. They are very
important. I get that, and I appreciate that. But we know well that
good corporate policies will not reach those Paris climate goals. To
reach those goals, you have to pass a bill. You have to do something on
climate here in Congress. When the fossil fuel industry's blockade
stopping such a bill is right here in Congress, this is a battlefield
you have to show up on. It is great to take out ads--it helps--but it
would really help to be present here in Congress and accounted for.
Fighting for climate action in Washington is indispensable in order
to finally break the stranglehold of the chamber and its dark money
allies. So please, corporate America, show up.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.
Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to engage in a
colloquy with my colleagues Senator Casey and Senator Wicker.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

[[Page S802]]

Coast Guard Authorization Act

Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I rise with my colleagues Senator Wicker
from Mississippi and Senator Casey from the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania to talk about legislation that I believe is of vital
importance to every State in the country--certainly to mine, the great
State of Alaska. Most importantly, it is vitally important legislation
to the men and women who serve in the U.S. Coast Guard. I am going to
talk about them for a minute. Yet, in addition to the legislation we
are talking about here, it is also vitally important to our maritime
and fishing communities.
This is very important legislation. Which legislation am I talking
about? S. 1129, the Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2017. It is
legislation that has broad bipartisan support, including from Chairman
Thune of South Dakota and Ranking Member Nelson of Florida of the
Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee; my colleague from
Alaska, Senator Lisa Murkowski; and many, many others, Republicans and
Democrats. The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee,
which has jurisdiction over the Coast Guard and our fishing fleets and
our fisheries, marked up this important legislation back in May of
2017. Unfortunately, due to a lack of an agreement on one particular
provision--although we have very strong support, even for this
particular provision, of over 60 Senators--the Coast Guard bill overall
remains stuck.
We always talk about the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines. I love
them to death, but sometimes we forget about our fifth branch of
service. These men and women do incredible work every single day for
our country.
This bipartisan bill, the Coast Guard Authorization Act, will give
the Coast Guard the resources it needs to protect our waterways and
coastlines, to block illegal drug traffickers and smugglers, and to
more efficiently procure future Coast Guard cutters. It will authorize
the Coast Guard in terms of policies and spending through fiscal years
2018 and 2019. Most importantly, it will take care of the men and women
who serve in our Coast Guard, who hail from every State in our great
Nation. They do so much.

So we are going to be debating the continuing resolution that will
have very significant funding for our military but also for natural
disasters. Think about the natural disasters that occurred in the
United States in Florida, in Texas, in Louisiana, and other places in
the last several months. The Coast Guard undertook thousands of rescue
operations--men and women risking their lives, literally, to save their
fellow Americans. This bill focuses on them.
In constructing this legislation, we worked in a bipartisan manner
for months. However, it appears that the Coast Guard authorization
bill, unfortunately, remains stuck.
I serve as the chairman of the subcommittee responsible for the Coast
Guard. In Alaska we know all about the men and women of the Coast
Guard. I would like to say that prior to 9/11, the Coast Guard was
probably the only military service among all five branches that had men
and women out there risking their lives every single day for Americans.
Unfortunately, since 9/11 and the big challenges we have had from a
national security perspective, we have had men and women from all
branches of services, every single day, risking their lives. But the
Coast Guard does it at home and abroad.
What is happening with this bill? Well, this bill, which is
bipartisan, not only contains critical needs and authorizations and
policies for our Coast Guard and the men and women who serve, but it
also contains provisions of vital importance to our maritime industry
and fishing communities. Included in this legislation are important
elements of another act, the Vessel Incidental Discharge Act, which we
call VIDA, to address an issue that has been around for years
pertaining to the incidental discharges for those in our fishing fleets
and maritime fleets.
Currently, vessel owners and operators in the fishing and maritime
industry are forced to comply with a patchwork of burdensome State and
Federal regulations and laws for vessel ballast water and incidental
discharges--the discharges of water that come off the deck of fishing
vessels, for example.
Think about it. When thinking about the Constitution and the commerce
clause, this is an issue where a fishing vessel moves in different
waters in the United States--State waters from one State to another--or
a maritime ship goes from one State to another, and it has to comply
with a patchwork of different State laws and regulations as it moves
through different waters controlled by different States. This creates
inefficiencies, adds to business costs, and, particularly in the
fishing fleet, inhibits economic prosperity for States and people in
the industry, whether in Alaska or other places throughout the country.
So the VIDA provision, which we all worked on and which has very
strong bipartisan support, would provide the maritime and fishing
industry with a consistent, uniform regulatory structure across the
country, restoring efficient and cost-effective commerce while ensuring
that environmental protection remains at the highest levels for our
ports, waterways, and harbors.
We have been working together for months, and I want to commend my
friend from Pennsylvania, Senator Casey, as we have tried to
accommodate the concerns of many other Senators. We changed this part
of the Coast Guard bill numerous times to try to address those
concerns. I think we have gotten almost every Senator on board, with
the exception of just a few.
Notably, one of the measures that we have strong bipartisan support
for in this bill, which would help a number of my constituents--
thousands in the fishing industry--is the provision we have agreed on
that provides a permanent exemption on incidental vessel discharges for
all fishing vessels and small commercial vessels. Right now, believe it
or not, if you have a small commercial vessel and you are gutting fish
caught on the vessel and you hose down the guts of those fish back into
the water, you need a permit from the EPA. Think about that. Think
about a regulation that is going to hurt small businesses.
We are trying to encourage all of our colleagues to help us move
forward with the Coast Guard bill. We move the National Defense
Authorization Act that covers the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines
every year, but we should be moving the Coast Guard bill every year, as
well, to make sure we are taking care of the men and women in the Coast
Guard and we are not forgetting the fifth branch of the military that
does so much for our men and women. We also need solutions to the issue
of the vessel incidental discharge challenges, and we need to get this
provision of the Coast Guard bill unstuck.
I thank my colleagues again for being on the floor with me. Again,
this is a bipartisan issue, and we wanted to call out the importance of
this issue so that our colleagues in the Senate can say it is time to
act.
It is time to move on the Coast Guard bill. It is time to include
this very important VIDA provision, and I am hopeful we can do it soon.
I yield to the Senator from Pennsylvania, Mr. Casey.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania.
Mr. CASEY. Thank you, Mr. President.
I want to start by commending the Senator from Alaska, Mr. Sullivan,
for moving this legislation forward and for his work and the work of
his staff over many, many months now.
I want to thank our staff, as well, and the staff of Senator Wicker
and so many other offices that I will not have an opportunity to name.
We are especially grateful for their bipartisan efforts, which every
once in a while work around here. I am grateful that Senator Sullivan
and his team have put in the amount of time that they have.
This legislation is part of broader Coast Guard legislation, the
Commercial Vessel Incidental Discharge Act. The so-called C-VIDA Act is
critically important to get done this year. As Senator
Sullivan mentioned, there is bipartisan support, and we should pass it
immediately.

When I introduced this legislation back in January of last year,
working with Senators Wicker, Sullivan, and others, it was included in
the larger Coast Guard Authorization Act. That was passed by the Senate
Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee in May of 2017. Since
that time, we have conducted extensive negotiations with our
colleagues--and that

[[Page S803]]

may be an understatement--to address important environmental as well as
enforcement concerns.
This legislation fulfills at least two priorities for Pennsylvania.
First, it allows us to be in a position to enact strong environmental
protection standards for our waterways in Pennsylvania, and second, it
supports our maritime industry. Currently, vessel owners and operators
are forced to comply with a patchwork of overly burdensome and
confusing Federal and State regulations for vessel ballast water and
incidental discharges. This act, the C-VIDA Act, would establish
uniform national standards and requirements governing ballast water
discharges and other discharges that occur during normal operations of
vessels. C-VIDA would provide the maritime industry with a consistent,
uniform regulatory structure while ensuring that there are
environmental protections in place to protect our Nation's ports and
waterways.
The national standard in C-VIDA ensures that vessels with the best
onboard environmental equipment are calling at our ports. That is
critical for Pennsylvania, which has coastal, inland, and Great Lakes
vessel traffic.
There have been concerns raised about the environmental protections,
as I mentioned, in the act and the lack of involvement of the EPA and
States in developing and enforcing these protections. Once again, I
want to commend the work of the staff. Staff from several offices have
worked very hard to address these concerns and to ensure that the EPA
is involved, that C-VIDA has strong environmental standards, and that
we update and revisit these environmental standards as science evolves.
Both ballast water and incidental discharge rules will be developed
with the Coast Guard in concurrence with the EPA and in consultation
with the States. State-specific incidental discharge standards would
remain in place until new Federal regulations are enforced.
The original bill eliminated State standards upon the enactment of
the legislation. Additionally, States would have coenforcement of these
standards with the Coast Guard. If a State believes there should be a
more stringent national standard, then the State can submit a petition
to the Coast Guard. If that standard is found to be technologically and
economically viable, the State standards will become the new national
standard. Senators in both parties have been working in good faith and,
as we can see, have made substantial changes to the original
legislation.
We have an opportunity to pass an important bill that vessel owners,
operators, and maritime labor all agree on. The maritime industry is
exactly at the point where we would want other industry sectors to be,
developing good business in a clean environment. They have asked the
Senate to enact a long-term regulatory framework, and we shouldn't let
this opportunity slip by.
I want to yield to Senator Wicker. As I said earlier, I am grateful
to have been working with Senator Wicker all these many months and our
staffs, as well, and, of course, with Senator Sullivan and all those
involved.
I yield the floor.
Mr. WICKER. I thank my friend from Pennsylvania and would observe
that he has exercised excellent leadership on this issue. It is a very
important issue. It is not at the top of the news media's treatment,
but it is an important issue, and it is one that we are close to being
able to resolve in a bipartisan way. I also want to thank my colleague
from Alaska, who has been a champion for this issue.
I would make a couple of points to underscore what my friends have
just said.
We are talking about ballast water in the waters of the United
States. Some of it gets out; they let some ballast water in, and they
have to let some out. It is incidental to operating a boat in the
waters of the United States of America.
We want this water to be clean. We want it to be as environmentally
pure as possible. That is what this bill attempts to do and attempts to
do on a uniform basis, rather than having a patchwork of regulations
from State to State and area to area. It would give us one strict
national standard regarding the incidental discharge of this ballast
water.
The water that gets into our lakes and rivers needs to be safe for
the environment, needs to be safe for fish in our American waters, and
needs to be safe for marine plant life.
What this bill would do is have the EPA involved in writing the
regulations and determining what is safe for American waters. So EPA
would be the scientific part, and the Coast Guard would be a part of
the enforcement. EPA has readily stated that they are not able to be in
the enforcement business in the waters of the United States. So they
are going to help with the science, according to this new proposal, and
the Coast Guard is going to help with the enforcement.
Who is for this? Well, 300 businesses, labor unions, ports, and
terminal operators. They are all in it together, and they all say that
this would work. This is not an example of one side getting up some
numbers on a partisan basis and deciding to try to run over the others.
As a matter of fact, this is such a bipartisan idea that we have over
60 Senators in favor of this proposal.
I just want to assure anyone who has doubts about this legislation
that the EPA is going to sign off on these standards. They are going to
sign off on standards that are safe, but we are really doing this for
jobs and commerce in the United States of America. Imagine you are in
the business--the barge business or the commercial maritime business
anywhere in the United States--and you have to worry about compliance
from State to State. And it might be just a reporting requirement.
Clearly this is a burden on people who want to do the right thing but
simply would like to have one standard nationwide to comply with. That
is what we are trying to do. We are close.

I would simply say to my friend from Alaska, who has done more work
on this really than anybody in my memory, I would observe to the
Senator that I think we are close to being able to do this on a
bipartisan basis and perhaps putting this as an attachment to a must-
pass piece of legislation. I think we can do it because we have
demonstrated, through our friend from Pennsylvania and other Democrats
and Republicans, that we have been careful to include everyone and to
be bipartisan about it.
Would my friend agree that we are at a point where this really needs
to be signed into law?
Mr. SULLIVAN. Absolutely. I want to thank Senator Wicker for his
leadership on this issue, and I think what we are seeing here in this
colloquy is the strength of the bipartisan support for this bill, not
only in the Senate but throughout the country. I appreciate my
colleague's words about who is supporting it. It is a very broad-based
coalition--fishing vessels, passenger vessels, labor unions, the Navy
League of the United States, marine terminals, port authorities.
I think both Senator Wicker and Senator Casey made a very strong
point: This is going to keep the highest standards on the environment
for our waters. This isn't about cutting corners, but it is going to
make these standards uniform, which is what our Nation needs.
What we also need to do is to make sure we pass the Coast Guard bill
as well as this important component of it. The men and women of the
Coast Guard are serving our Nation just like the other members of the
military, and somehow, by delaying this bill, we are undermining their
longer term interests. I think the Senate can do a much better job.
I agree with my colleague from Mississippi that we are close. There
is clearly bipartisan support across the board for the VIDA Act and the
Coast Guard bill, and we are hopeful that within the next few weeks or
few months, we are going to get this done, and it is going to benefit
literally every State in this great Nation of ours.
Mr. WICKER. Mr. President, I thank my friend from Alaska for once
again segueing to the larger issue there. Vessel incidental discharge
is a very important part but only a part of the Coast Guard
authorization. The Senator from Alaska makes the very valid point that
we really need to get to a point where we take up the Coast Guard
reauthorization on a regular basis because it is a very vital part of
our national security. The Coast Guard is actually one of those
domestic discretionary programs that provide us

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with a great deal of national security. Our Coast Guard currently
operates ships in its high-endurance cutter fleet that are more than 45
years old. We need some reforms in the Coast Guard. The Senate and the
House need to pay attention to the reauthorization on a very regular
basis. So the larger issue is absolutely well-taken on the part of the
Senator from Alaska.
I would once again say that my friend the Senator from Alaska has
exercised excellent leadership. He has been relentless on the Coast
Guard reauthorization and particularly the vessel incidental discharge,
and he and others who have fought so hard really deserve some results
because there are no substantive objections that can be raised at this
point.
Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Mississippi
for his strong leadership on this issue as well.
I think we are seeing here that Democrats and Republicans are pretty
much all united on this issue. We are hopeful to move not only the VIDA
Act but also the broader Coast Guard bill out of the Senate, get it
passed, and get it to the President's desk. That is going to be good
for the men and women of the Coast Guard, it is going to be good for
our maritime and fishing interests, and it is going to be good for the
country.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sasse). The Senator from Arizona.
Mr. FLAKE. Mr. President, I rise today in opposition to the massive
spending increases included in the proposed budget measure. To propose
increasing Federal spending by nearly $300 billion over the next 2
years, on top of the spending increases already established, is simply
beyond comprehension. This is all with a national debt of $20 trillion
a year, and the current deficit is running $600 billion to $700
billion. Yet we are about to vote on a bill to abandon self-imposed
limits on Federal spending. As anybody who has spent time in Washington
will know, once you raise spending limits, you just don't get them back
down.
I love bipartisanship, but not when it is bought and paid for with
billions of taxpayer dollars. That is precisely what this measure does.
If you sprinkle enough money around, you can get bipartisan support.
While I was in the House for 12 years, I kept a journal of events. In
December of 2007, when we passed a massive omnibus bill, at that time,
I noted in my journal:

The Democrats singled out the funding for the Iraq war,
which required a separate vote. The tally board on the House
chamber wall explaining the vote said the following:
``Agreeing to House amendment to Senate amendment to House
amendment.''

I said at that time:

That clears it up. But that's the point. Liberal Democrats
could vote against the war funding and for more domestic
funding. Conservative Republicans could do the opposite.
Enough moderates in the middle would vote for both pieces of
legislation to ensure that each passed separately.

I continued:

Then we could all of us, Republicans and Democrats, go beat
our collective chests and go home for Christmas.
Bipartisanship at its best.

I wrote further in my journal at that time:

All these shenanigans led one Republican colleague to lean
over to me on the House floor and muse: ``You know, Jeff,
sometimes the toughest thing about being a member of Congress
is remembering everything you're supposed to be outraged
about.''

I agreed.
Here we are today, and it is clear what we should be outraged about--
a $300 billion spending hike, a return to trillion-dollar deficits, and
an apparent end to any attempt to rein in Federal spending.
Fiscal responsibility is more than a political talking point to trot
out when the other guys are in charge. The rules and principles do not
change with the legislative session. It should not take hundreds of
billions of dollars in government spending to prompt bipartisanship or
to secure a budget agreement.
If we Republicans support precisely the kind of reckless spending
that we have for so long criticized, it will mean an end of genuine
fiscal conservatism in Washington, and it will establish a government
without any meaningful spending restraints.
I urge my colleagues to consider their commitment to conservatism and
whether their past protests over government spending were anything more
than convenient political props. Let's be conservative no matter who is
in charge, no matter who is in the White House or who controls each
Chamber in Congress.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I come to the floor, as I have over the
past few months, urging the U.S. Senate to come together in a
bipartisan fashion to address important issues facing our Nation. The
American people expect it. They understand how closely divided we are--
49 Democrats, 51 Republicans in the Senate--and for the most
controversial issues, 60 votes are required. Unless we work in a
bipartisan fashion, we achieve little or nothing.
After many months of difficult negotiation, I stand here today in
support of a bipartisan, 2-year budget agreement announced by Leaders
McConnell and Schumer that will finally produce results for the
American people. For too long, this gridlocked Congress has lurched
from one continuing resolution--that is a temporary spending bill--to
another. That has prevented us from working together to craft
appropriations bills that save taxpayers money and that invest in
things that are important at every level for our future.
While this budget deal doesn't include everything I would like to
see, it certainly includes some highlights of things that I think are
critically important for the State of Illinois and our Nation.
I am particularly disappointed that it does not include a solution to
the DACA--or Dreamer--crisis that was created by President Trump on
September 5 when he announced that he would eliminate the program that
provides protection from deportation for almost 800,000 people in the
United States. That was over 5 months ago. President Trump challenged
this Congress--challenged this Senate--to come up with a legislative
solution. As I stand here today, we have not produced it.
I will certainly acknowledge that Senator McConnell, the Republican
leader, together with Senator Schumer, the Democratic leader, has
charted a course for us next week. We are going to do something in the
Senate we haven't seen in a long time. We are going to come to the
floor of the Senate and act like Senators. For some of my colleagues,
it will be their first-time experience of a bill on the floor, open to
amendment and actual debate. Yes, it is going to happen right here.
Stay tuned on C-SPAN. Next week could be historic.
It has been over a year and a half since we have had a meaningful
debate on the floor, but next week we will. The topic: immigration and
DACA. We know we have to. The March 5 deadline is looming, when this
program will end by President Trump's prohibition of the program and,
at that point, 1,000 young people each day, on average, will lose their
protection from deportation and their legal right to work in America.
They will walk off the job because we failed to act, unless we get it
together.
I am sorry this bill that includes so many good things doesn't
include that solution, but we are poised to do it anyway, and I look
forward to that debate next week. I hope this agreement will provide a
spirit of bipartisanship that will be felt next week when we come
together and discuss the fates of hundreds of thousands of Dreamers
across the United States.
Let me tell my colleagues what this budget agreement does, which I
think is well worth our bipartisan support. It includes a huge
investment for America's military. We will prepare our men and women in
uniform to be not only ready for battle but to continue to be the
strongest and the best military in the world. That is something we have
seen go by the boards and, frankly, be ignored in the past, but now we
are going to focus on it.
I have the greatest confidence in General Mattis, in terms of his
commitment to our military, both in his personal life and in his new
role as Secretary of Defense. I believe he will direct the spending
appropriately so we can prepare our men and women for

[[Page S805]]

battle and prepare our Nation to defend itself under any threat and, if
necessary, use our force for good around the world.
We also make a dramatic investment in nondefense spending. In the
past 8 or 10 years, we have seen a dramatic downturn in nondefense
spending in our budget. Many people have said nobody will notice. Well,
America noticed as we cut back our investment in education, in
healthcare, and in so many fundamentals.
There is one particular area I want to highlight. When I had to make
a decision as to whether to run for another term in the Senate, I sat
down and made a very short list of things I wanted to accomplish or
work on if I were given another 6-year term. At the top of that list,
of course, were Dreamers, but second was medical research. I came back
here and sat down with my colleagues, including two Republicans,
Senator Alexander and Senator Blunt, and my wonderful friend and
colleague in leadership, Senator Patty Murray. I said: We need to do
something.
Dr. Collins at the National Institutes of Health had told me the
problem with medical research is, if it is not certain that next year
you will receive a grant to continue your medical research, you get
discouraged, and then you start looking for another job. We can't let
that happen. We can't lose the best and brightest who are searching for
cures to diseases which haunt and plague many families across America.
Dr. Collins suggested 5 percent real growth in the budget of the
National Institutes of Health. I salute especially my colleagues,
Senator Blunt, a Republican, and Senator Murray, a Democrat. They
really made good on that promise. We worked together, and they
delivered. This will be the third straight year we have had a more than
5-percent increase in medical research. If there is ever an issue that
is bipartisan, it should be this one.
The good news is, this budget agreement will go beyond 5 percent. We
are talking in the area of 7 or 8 percent real increases in spending
for medical research.
Dr. Collins told me years ago, when he talked about this goal that if
we could provide this kind of reliable increase in medical research,
dramatic breakthroughs would occur. We are starting to see them. Some
of the cancer therapies that are curing cancers today were unthinkable
just a few years ago, and there is more to follow.
Think about all of the news reports now about flu and what it is
doing to children, some of whom tragically have lost their lives, many
of whom stayed home from school, and others around our Nation and the
world plagued by influenza each year. At this moment, NIH is working on
a universal flu vaccine. If it is discovered, it will be a lifesaver.
It will change the basic life pattern that many of us have faced our
entire lives. It can happen. I am old enough to remember when Dr. Jonas
Salk came up with the polio vaccine, and that was a breakthrough many
of us never imagined. It can happen. This budget will help it happen,
and that is why I am so happy to see it in this bill.
I also want to say they have done a great job in providing resources
to fight the opioid crisis, the worst addiction epidemic in the history
of our Nation.
Funding our community health centers is a critical part of public
health and of making certain that basic primary care is available to
every American; healthcare for our children through the CHIP program
and improving our veterans health facilities. We will be investing, for
the first time in years, billions of dollars in new veterans healthcare
facilities, some of it long overdue.
Also, we are going to help fix our Nation's aged and broken
infrastructure.
This bill provides resources and funding for Florida, Texas,
California, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. There are many
people from Puerto Rico who live in the city of Chicago. Some of them
are extremely close friends. I am happy to report that this bill makes
the investment we need to make to get that island back on its feet: $2
billion to put into electrical infrastructure, in and of itself, can
bring Puerto Rico back and restore electrical service to the families
who have been waiting months for what each of us takes for granted each
and every day. This disaster relief will make a difference in their
lives.
How did we achieve this amazing outcome where Democrats and
Republicans would come to the floor and praise it? Well, we sat down
and made a compromise. We gave on both sides, and we realized it was
time to roll up our sleeves, stop squabbling, stop fighting for
headlines, stop putting out press releases, and get down to work.
I hope next week that spirit continues when we enter the debate on
immigration and DACA. It is my sincere hope that we will have a
bipartisan breakthrough on immigration next week--not just for the
Dreamers and their families but for the good and the future of America.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.
Mr. ROUNDS. Mr. President, I come to the floor to offer my support
for the Bipartisan Budget Act, which we expect to vote on later today.
This bipartisan agreement includes a number of priorities that will
benefit Americans, including $20 billion in new investment and
infrastructure over the next 2 years, $6 billion to combat the opioid
epidemic, disaster relief assistance for those impacted by recent
hurricanes, funding for community health centers, a permanent repeal of
ObamaCare's Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, and the
creation of two select committees to address pension reform and
Congress's broken budget process.
Most important is that this bipartisan agreement removes the
arbitrary spending caps that have hampered our Armed Forces. For the
first time in years, we prioritize our national security by adequately
funding the military. Of all the positive aspects of this agreement
that will benefit the people of my home State of South Dakota and
American families across the country, the addition of $165 billion in
defense funding over the next 2 years is crucial.
As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I have been
deeply concerned about the underfunding of our military. If we are
going to adequately recover readiness levels that were lost over the
last 8 years, as well as modernize our Armed Forces in this
increasingly dangerous and complex world, adequately funding our troops
is vital. This is the reason I support the Bipartisan Budget Act.
I had previously expressed my strong displeasure for short-term
funding measures or CRs, but this agreement makes significant progress
toward rebuilding our military, and, finally, after years of
underfunding, provides the Department of Defense with a much needed
spending boost. This will provide the resources to adequately train and
rebuild the Armed Forces at a time of increasing global threats, but
don't just take my word for it. Let me quote Defense Secretary James
Mattis, who testified before the House Armed Services Committee earlier
this week. He said:

Let me be clear: As hard as the last 16 years of war have
been on our military, no enemy in the field has done as much
to harm the readiness of the United States than the combined
impact of the Budget Control Act's defense spending caps,
worsened by operating for 10 of the last 11 years under
continuing resolutions of varied and unpredictable duration.

Secretary Mattis went on to tell the committee that:

The consequences of not providing a budget are clear . . .
should we stumble into a year-long continuing resolution,
your military will not be able to provide pay for our troops
by the end of the fiscal year; will not recruit the 15,000
Army soldiers and 4,000 Air Force airmen required to fill
critical manning shortfalls; we will not maintain our ships
at sea with the proper balance between operations and time in
port for maintenance; we will ground aircraft due to a lack
of maintenance and spare parts; we will deplete the
ammunition, training and manpower required to deter war; and
delay contracts for vital acquisition programs necessary to
modernize the force.

Sadly, we are hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee many of
the Secretary's predictions are already proving true.
Earlier this week, I spoke on this floor about this very issue and
described various readiness issues that our Armed Forces are currently
facing. Some examples I shared include the F/A-18 fleet taking twice as
many man-hours to maintain, with less than 50 percent of the fleet
available. Those are the primary aircraft you will see flying off of
our carriers in harm's way today.

[[Page S806]]

The maintenance backlog of our submarines. Because of the backlog, 15
nuclear attack submarines have been docked for a total of 177 months or
nearly 15 years. That doesn't mean they are being repaired, it means
they are sitting at dock because they are not even licensed to dive
anymore. What a waste of taxpayer money.
The tragic human cost found in the lack of readiness--as F/A-18
Hornet training programs have had dozens of mishaps over the past
several years, some leading to loss of life. We believe some, if not
all, of these mishaps could have been avoided with the additional
training and maintenance that would have been forthcoming with
appropriate funding.
The American people expect us to adequately fund the defense of
America next year and every year to come. Providing for the defense of
our Nation is the No. 1 responsibility of the Federal Government and of
this Congress. Nothing else matters if we cannot protect ourselves from
our enemies.
I am pleased this agreement finally recognizes the need to eliminate
arbitrary budget caps that have put our national security in jeopardy.
The Bipartisan Budget Act is truly bipartisan. There are parts in
this that I most certainly very strongly agree with, and there are some
areas I would have done differently, but this is a bipartisan agreement
and must meet the standards of both Republicans and Democrats. While I
would have preferred to see an increase in defense funding without
having to pair it with other spending increases, because we need a
bipartisan majority of 60 Senators to agree to this proposal, we
reluctantly accept the increased spending on nondefense discretionary
programs in order to achieve the very necessary and critical increases
in our Defense appropriations.
Perhaps one of the more important aspects of this agreement is that,
for the first time since the Budget Control Act of 2011, we are able to
overcome the demands of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle
to match defense spending and nondefense spending on a dollar-for-
dollar basis.
Under this agreement, defense spending will receive a larger increase
than discretionary funding--$165 billion for defense over the next 2
years, as compared to $131 for nondefense discretionary spending over
the next 2 years. I would have preferred not to raise discretionary
spending to this level, but not achieving a path forward without the
higher defense limits was simply not an option.
We must still be diligent in addressing our Nation's debt crisis, and
we have already begun to take the steps to do so. Just a couple of
months ago, we passed historic tax reform that is already helping to
unleash the full potential of our economy, thereby bringing in much
needed additional revenues. We have also been working with President
Trump and the administration to reduce burdensome regulations and
streamline Federal programs so we can save taxpayer money by making the
government more efficient. These are positive things that will help to
control our debt.
However, the most important thing we must do to rein in spending is
to control the skyrocketing costs of mandatory payment programs:
Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. In fact, prior to our tax
relief plan, we were warned that without taking action to properly
manage these programs, by the year 2026, when our country turns 250
years old, spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and
servicing the national debt would take up 99 percent of all the Federal
revenues generated.
Today, mandatory payments already account for nearly three quarters
of our total Federal spending. This is because Medicare, Medicaid, and
Social Security have never been properly managed, and Congress does not
exercise appropriate oversight.
These programs run on autopilot. Given that they are our largest
Federal expenditures every year, it is vital for Congress to take an
active role in managing these necessary--I will say that again:
necessary--mandatory programs in order to get our fiscal house in
order. This does not necessarily mean making cuts. It simply means
giving Congress the authority to periodically and consistently review
them to make them as efficient as possible and to make certain they are
available for individuals who need them, both now and in the future.
I am pleased that this agreement creates a joint select committee to
address ways to fix our broken budget process, which is desperately
needed.
At the end of the day, no amount of cuts to defense and other
programs will have a meaningful effect on debt reduction without also
controlling the cost of these necessary mandatory-payment programs.
I will wrap up by thanking my colleagues on both sides of the aisle
who support this agreement, for recognizing our country's need to
adequately fund our troops who sacrifice everything to protect our
freedoms. Without a strong military that can deter and defend against
aggression, nothing else really matters.
Maintaining the best, strongest military force in the world is vital
to keeping Americans safe. By increasing funding now, our troops will
be better equipped to do exactly that. We cannot risk a perceived
weakness in our force by our enemies, who may wish to draw us into a
major conflict. A major conflict or war is not only significantly more
costly in terms of dollars, but it has more serious cost in the loss of
human life. No one wants to see that, especially if we can avoid it
now.
This agreement adequately funds our troops. I intend to vote for it,
and I encourage my colleagues to do so as well.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I will be brief and speak briefly in my
capacity as vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. There
are things here that could be exciting to talk about, and some things
are kind of dry, but when we talk about the budget, the consequences
affect every single one of us, in every single State, and for multiple
generations.
The consequences of the Budget Control Act sequestration cuts since
2011 have been devastating and are going to last for generations. Its
impact on military readiness led Defense Secretary Mattis to say that
no enemy on the field has done more harm to our military than what we
have done to ourselves through sequestration. By not investing in our
domestic priorities, we allowed our infrastructure to crumble, care to
our veterans to be delayed, and investments in education to fall
behind.
The bipartisan budget deal announced yesterday by Senator McConnell
and Senator Schumer is the first step toward providing much-needed
relief from sequestration and stability in the appropriations process.
I have followed very carefully what they have been doing. My staff,
especially on the Appropriations Committee, has been very much
involved. Defense caps have been increased by $80 billion in fiscal
year 2018 and $85 billion in fiscal year 2019. Nondefense caps are
increased by $63 billion above the caps in fiscal year 2018 and $68
billion above the caps in fiscal year 2019. Those are the numbers.
Let's look at a couple of things these numbers mean.
This additional funding will allow us to increase support our troops,
improve care for our veterans, repair our crumbling infrastructure,
take care of our seniors, and invest in our economy in real ways.
This bipartisan deal we have worked out--and I stress that it is
bipartisan--advances our priorities by guaranteeing that we can make
real investments in addressing the opioid crisis. We can all give
speeches about the opioid crisis, but speeches don't solve the problem.
Actually putting money in there to fund the necessary resources does.

It lets us fund medical research. Keep in mind that we can't turn
medical research on and off. We can't say: Oh, you are making great
steps in cancer research, but I will stop it for a few years, and then
we will come back with money. You have to continue it.
It is also going to improve college affordability. Everywhere I go in
Vermont, I hear people say: I haven't been able to buy a house because
I have had to borrow so much money for college.
I am particularly pleased that the bill includes an important
provision I worked on with my colleague and the chairman, Senator
Cochran, which is going to improve assistance to our Nation's dairy and
cotton farmers. In

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Vermont and across the country, it is going to mean immediate relief
for struggling dairy farmers who can't wait for the next farm bill for
assistance. We will work on these problems in the next farm bill, but
in the meantime, until that farm bill comes, we need some immediate
assistance.
This deal finally fulfills our promise to communities recovering from
recent natural disasters--from wildfires out West, to the shores of
Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, Texas, and Florida--by
providing $89 billion to help them rebuild. States in the West, Puerto
Rico, Virgin Islands, Texas, and Florida are all part of the United
States. Just as Vermont sought help when we were hit just a few years
ago by a natural disaster and others came to our aid, people I talked
with in Vermont say: Of course, we help others in our country.
The agreement also provides continued funding for several healthcare
programs that Congress has allowed to expire. We include long overdue
funding for community health centers, which have been struggling
because of the uncertainty of continued funding for months. Now they
will have some certainty.
The bipartisan agreement funds the Special Diabetes Program to make
advancements in Type I diabetes. It ensures ambulances can continue to
serve rural areas and closes the Medicare Part D coverage gap by 2019.
It continues the maternal health home visiting program and permanently
repeals the Medicare Therapy Cap, allowing Medicare beneficiaries the
certainty of therapy services after an accident or a stroke without an
arbitrary cap on coverage. And the bill extends funding for the
Children's Health Insurance Program for an additional 4 years, ensuring
children and their families can benefit from the program for the next
10 years.
I am pleased that this deal finally extends tax provisions, many of
which lapsed in 2016, that will benefit individuals and small
businesses. Inexplicably, the $1.5 trillion Republican tax bill left
these important credits orphaned when they passed their corporate tax
bill. With this deal, we finally restore them.
Now, not everything I wanted was included in this deal. I see my
friend from Texas, a member of the leadership. Not everything he wanted
is in here. That is why we have a compromise. Nobody gets everything
they want, but we are a lot better off than we were.
I worry about the fact that it does not provide protection for our
Nation's Dreamers. These are law-abiding strivers who call America home
and seek nothing more than to contribute to our society. They are
individuals like Dr. Juan Conde of Vermont, who came to the United
States as a child and is studying to treat cancer patients at the
Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont. Do we tell him
to leave, a man who might be part of those who find a cure for cancer?
I recently wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper in Vermont.
They had talked about the stone carvers in Vermont, and I had talked
about one stone carver in my letter. My maternal grandfather emigrated
from Italy to Vermont. He was a master stone carver from the Friuli
region, near the Aviano Air Base in northern Italy, and he talked about
the business he started. My mother was then born in South Ryegate, VT.
My great-grandparents came to central Vermont from Ireland, on my
paternal grandparents' side. My grandfather, after whom I am named,
Patrick Leahy, was also a stone carver. I never knew him because, like
so many, he died of silicosis of the lungs when my father was a young
teenager, but I am proud to be named after him. My wife Marcelle's
parents emigrated from Canada. She was born in Vermont and became a
medical surgical nurse.
Now, everybody in these families added to and improved our State of
Vermont. We must realize that immigrants bring diversity, strength, and
skills to our country and make us greater. So when we talk about the
Dreamers, we shouldn't forsake their cause. Their cause is our cause.
Their dreams are part of the American dreams of my grandparents and my
parents-in-law. Those dreams are a part of our American dreams. So we
have to continue to work to get legislation passed to protect them.
Leader McConnell has given his word that he will allow votes on
legislation the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers. I can assure you
that the American people expect him to keep his word.
I am also disappointed the agreement does not include the CREATES
Act, a bipartisan solution to lowering the cost of prescription drugs
by prohibiting the anticompetitive behavior that keeps generic drugs
from entering the market. We can all agree that high drug prices are a
problem, as President Trump noted in his State of the Union Address,
and the CREATES Act offers a commonsense, bipartisan way forward. I
hope the Senate passes this important legislation soon
As I said, the agreement does not contain everything I would like.
Very little I have seen in legislation does contain everything I want.
But, on balance, it is a good bill for the American people. It allows
us to complete the 2018 appropriations process. Through what we call
regular order, we can have a real debate on the fiscal year 2019 bills.
We will start working on those next week.
So I thank Senator McConnell, and I thank Senator Schumer for their
hard work in coming to this agreement. I work almost daily with both of
them. I know how hard it was. Compromise is not always easy. Often, it
is not popular. Well, nobody came here thinking everything was going to
be easy, and, if they do, they don't belong in the Senate. You should
be here to be a legislator.
I encourage all Senators: Help us pass this bipartisan deal. Allow
the Senate Appropriations Committee to resume its work, and we will
next week. I hope the House will do the same before tonight's midnight
deadline.
I will continue, as I have, working with my friend Chairman Cochran
in the coming weeks, as I will with all Republicans and all Democrats
on the Senate Appropriations Committee. This agreement will finally let
us do the job we are supposed to.
Mr. President, I see the Senator from Texas. I yield to him.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Perdue). The majority whip.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I want to express my gratitude to my
friend from Vermont for his service on the Appropriations Committee and
working with us specifically on this particular legislation as it
relates to the disaster relief aspect of it.
Obviously, my State was devastated by Hurricane Harvey, but I must
tell my friend, I have new empathy and understanding for how bound we
are together as to what happens in one part of the country should be of
concern to those of us in other parts of the country because
eventually, sooner or later, disasters are going to visit all of us.
It is good news that the majority leader was able to announce
yesterday that we reached a compromise on government funding through
not just the end of this fiscal year but next year as well. This
agreement ensures that our Armed Forces will finally have the resources
they need.
My colleague and fellow Texan Mac Thornberry, the chairman of the
House Armed Services Committee, along with the senior Senator from
Arizona, Mr. McCain, said it best. They said:

This budget agreement is indispensable for our national
security. Without it, our military would not be able to
defend our Nation.

Hard stop. Let me repeat that.

This budget agreement is indispensable for our national
security. Without it, our military would not be able to
defend our Nation.

I think, of all the demands made on the taxpayer dollars that are
sent to Washington, DC--and many of them have a lot of merit, some more
than others--but I have to say, if you were going to ask me to
prioritize how do we appropriate money here in Washington, DC, national
security would be job No. 1.
In addition, the funding bill will provide support for our veterans,
those who have worn the uniform but have now left the military service,
as well as their families, and it will clear the way for new investment
in our Nation's infrastructure.
I am grateful to the majority leader for his hard work during this
series of long and delicate negotiations. We all know it could not have
been easy. Even more than that, I am glad, as I indicated at the
outset, that the funding package finally sends disaster relief to

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Texas--disaster relief that had been long promised but had been delayed
time and time again.
Today, the Senate will be considering supplemental appropriations for
disaster aid that affects the victims of Hurricane Maria, Hurricane
Harvey, as well as the wildfires and mudslides out West. Last August,
Hurricane Harvey made its landfall near Houston, along the gulf coast.
When that storm hit, communities like Port Arthur, Beaumont, Rockport,
and Victoria were crippled, not to mention Houston, where most of the
major media covered, one of the largest cities in the United States.
The National Hurricane Center's official report released last month
confirmed what those who lived through the storm already guessed: It
was the most significant rainfall event in the United States. During a
period of about 5 days, the skies opened up and dropped 50 inches of
rain--50 inches of rain. The report called Harvey ``unprecedented'' and
``truly overwhelming.''
As someone who witnessed the devastation firsthand, I can say, with
certainty, that those are not exaggerations. It was an event that
happens perhaps once every 1,000 years. At least 88 people lost their
lives. Many more crashed their vehicles, were electrocuted, were unable
to receive medical services, and could not attend school or missed
work. They spent last fall tearing the sheetrock out of their homes or
their businesses.
Since the time of the storm, Congress has appropriated roughly $35
billion in Federal aid through two separate emergency bills. Working
closely with the majority leader, my Texas colleagues and I were able
to increase the first disaster relief bill last fall by adding money
for community development block grants. This ensured a larger
downpayment for Texas to rebuild and repair.
Thank goodness we were able to get that money then--because of the
delays we have seen up until today in additional disaster relief for
Hurricane Harvey. Once that money was appropriated, we worked with Dr.
Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, to accelerate
the allocation of these funds, which he graciously did. Congress
followed up by passing a tax relief bill for individuals and small
businesses that sustained financial hardships as a result of the
hurricane.
Finally, we worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to identify
and prioritize key projects for coastal protection to mitigate the
impact of future storms. This is not the last hurricane that will hit
the coast of Texas or Florida. We need to prepare for the future as
well.
In spite of that work, tremendous challenges remain. That is why we
kept fighting month after month, and today marks the culmination of our
efforts. The supplemental appropriations bill we will consider today
includes $89 billion in disaster relief--$8 billion more than the House
passed last December. It ensures that Texas will have increased access
to the pool of community development block grant dollars, and it
provides funding and flexibility to ensure that the Army Corps of
Engineers are able to carry out necessary projects in the State.
It includes funding to help Texas address lingering transportation
issues resulting from Hurricane Harvey and allows us to move forward on
flood mitigation projects like the Sabine Pass to Galveston Bay.
Finally, it includes a provision--this is important to the
agriculture community in my State--to make cotton an eligible commodity
under the farm bill safety net. That is really good news for the folks
in West Texas, the largest cotton-growing area in the largest cotton-
growing State in the Nation, and they have been waiting a long time.
Some of them lost bales of cotton or even entire gins because of all
the water they sustained as a result of the storms.
I applaud the Texas congressional delegation for taking the first
step and passing a disaster supplemental appropriation last year, and I
appreciate Governor Abbott and the Senate Appropriations Committee,
including Senator Leahy, for working with us to strengthen the bill in
the Senate over the last month or so. Helping Texans recover and
rebuild has been my top priority. I am now urging my colleagues, on
both sides of the aisle in both Houses, to pass this critical relief
bill as soon as possible.
I thank Chairman Cochran, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations
Committee, for his leadership steering the Appropriations Committee,
which has its work cut out for it and has certainly done yeoman's work
to date.
I thank the junior Senator from Florida and my other colleagues--
particularly Senator Cruz, my colleague in the Senate--who have fought
with us side by side for relief from the numerous disasters that have
affected Florida, Texas, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and of course
the wildfires and mudslides out West.

Remembering Lieutenant General Daniel James III

Mr. President, on a separate and unrelated note, I wish to recognize
the passing of retired Lt. Gen. Daniel James III. He served as the
first African-American Adjutant General for my home State, as well as
the first African-American Director of the Air National Guard. He was
the son of Daniel ``Chappie'' James, Jr., a fighter pilot who was the
first African-American Air Force general to pin on four stars.
A highly decorated command pilot, with approximately 4,000 flying
hours, many of those in combat, General James completed two Active-Duty
tours in Southeast Asia. He was also inducted into the Texas Military
Forces Hall of Honor. Since his burial is taking place today in
Arlington National Cemetery, I wish to let all those in attendance know
I am thinking of them. I know Lieutenant General James was a mentor to
my friend General Nichols, the current Adjutant General, but he was a
role model for us all.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. PETERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act

Mr. PETERS. Mr. President, last year, Congress passed the Countering
America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which imposed tough new
sanctions on Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
There was broad bipartisan agreement on the need to put these
enhanced sanctions into place. The legislation passed in the Senate by
a vote of 98 to 2 and in the House by a vote of 419 to 3. In combining
both Chambers, the vote was 517 to 5 in favor of enacting these
sanctions. The legislation passed with a veto-proof, broad, bipartisan
majority. It can be very difficult to get 500 Members of Congress to
agree on anything, but imposing sanctions on Vladimir Putin's cronies
and those who do business with him should be a no-brainer.
Just last week, we learned that the Trump administration had chosen
not to enact these sanctions. Yet, on the same day that the Trump
administration argued the sanctions were not necessary, President
Trump's own CIA Director said that Russia will continue to attack our
democracy. He said: ``This threat is not going to go away. The Russians
have been at this a long time, and I fully expect they'll continue to
be at it.''
In January 2017, the CIA assessed: ``Russian President Vladimir Putin
ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. Presidential
election.''
In January of 2018, the CIA Director confirmed he believes that
Russia will continue to assault the 2018 elections.
Yesterday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that Russia is
already trying to impact the 2018 U.S. election and that it will be
difficult for the United States to preempt it.
It is clear that we have not done enough to deter Russia from
interfering in our democracy, but the Trump administration is choosing
not to put in place sanctions on Putin's cronies whom over 99 percent
of the Members of Congress supported.
I am a member of the Armed Services Committee. Earlier this week, we
received a briefing from Secretary of Defense Mattis on the recently
completed national defense strategy. That strategy identifies that
Russia is seeking to

[[Page S809]]

discredit and subvert democratic processes all across the world and to
shatter the NATO Alliance. Russia is expanding and modernizing its
nuclear arsenal and has a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council
that provides it veto power in a critical international organization.
In quoting directly from the national defense strategy, Russia is
attempting to ``change European and Middle East security and economic
structures to its favor.'' What does it mean, and I quote again, to
attempt to ``change . . . security . . . structures to its favor''?
One example is Russia's continued support of the Assad regime in
Syria, which continues to use chemical weapons against its own people.
Russia uses its role on the Security Council to prevent the
international community from holding Assad responsible for these
obvious crimes against humanity.
At the same time that President Trump's Ambassador to the U.N., Nikki
Haley, has called Assad's use of chemical weapons against the Syrian
people a tragedy and has called on Russia to allow the Security Council
to adopt a resolution that condemns the use of chlorine gas to
suffocate children, President Trump is refusing to enact sanctions to
punish Russia.
Russia presents real challenges to the security and prosperity of the
United States. The purpose of economic sanctions is to impose a cost on
Putin and demonstrate that the United States will punish those who
threaten this country. That is why over 500 Members of Congress came
together to enact new sanctions.
If the United States cannot take meaningful action by enacting
sanctions that have been passed on a bipartisan basis, how can we
expect to take on the more vexing challenges? This one should be easy.
What kind of signal does it send to Vladimir Putin when the
administration puts the Kremlin and Russian plutocrats ahead of the
U.S. Capitol, duly elected Members of the U.S. Congress, and the
American people?
I urge President Trump to take action on behalf of the American
people and follow through on the will of Congress by enacting these
sanctions, which are already law. The administration should use the
power provided by Congress to punish Vladimir Putin, his inner circle,
and those who do business with them to enrich the Putin regime.
I thank the Presiding Officer.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Tribute to Kirk Alkire

Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, as many of my colleagues know, I have
been coming to the floor every week to do what I consider the favorite
part of my duties serving here in the Senate, and that is to talk about
someone special in my great State. We call that person our Alaskan of
the Week.
I have been told by some of my colleagues that they look forward to
this, and I know the pages do, learning a little bit about Alaska. I do
this because I certainly want my constituents to know about so many
people in their State--what they are doing, how they are impacting not
only their community or State but sometimes even the whole country.
Much of what the country knows about Alaska is what they have seen on
TV--beautiful glaciers, giant salmon, skiing, hiking, kayaking,
boating. We want everyone to come visit Alaska. It will be the trip of
a lifetime, guaranteed.
The real beauty of my State rests in the people who call it home. It
is a State of rugged, generous, patriotic people devoted to service to
their country, their State, and their communities. In many ways, this
is what this ``Alaskan of the Week'' honor is all about.
When we talk about service to our country, Alaska boasts thousands
and thousands of Active Duty members of the military, reservists--
thousands of reservists--and tens of thousands of veterans, in fact,
more veterans per capita than any other State in the country. So many
of the veterans in my State have not just served their country but have
devoted their time and energy in ways that so many veterans do, helping
and caring for other veterans and their families.
Many in the military know it is not easy to serve, but what is often
forgotten is that service and the sacrifice of service, particularly
military service, often hits the families the hardest. When that
service results in the loss of life, the ultimate sacrifice, it is
devastating for the families, friends, and loved ones all across
communities, all across Alaska, and all across the country. When one of
our own loses their life in the fight for freedom, we all grieve. We
all grieve.
Today I want to introduce a very special Alaskan, Kirk Alkire, who
has devoted countless hours to make sure that those we have lost in
battle will never be forgotten and that the families of those who have
paid the ultimate sacrifice receive a fitting tribute to their
sacrifice.
Kirk believes that such a fitting tribute lies in a peak in one of
Alaska's vast, beautiful, almost endless mountain ranges that we have
in my great State. This is a peak that actually exists in the Chugach
range between Eagle River and Palmer, AK, overlooking the Knik River.
Kirk has been on a quest to name this peak the ``Gold Star Peak.'' It
is actually a mountain that is unnamed right now next to another
mountain that is named. That mountain is called Mount POW/MIA, but he
wants to name this other mountain for the Gold Star families who have
lost loved ones who were killed in action defending America. Kirk is
passionate about this peak, just as he was passionate about the men and
women he served with during his 23 years in the Army on Active Duty.
Let me tell you a little bit about Kirk. He was born and raised in
San Jose, CA. He enlisted in the Army right out of high school in 1986.
He married his high school sweetheart, Angie, and they had a son,
Matthew.
During his time on Active Duty in the Army, like so many soldiers,
particularly over the last couple decades, he had various assignments
in both airborne and light infantry units spread across the United
States--really with deployments all over the world--and eventually he
was stationed in Alaska. His final assignment was as a first sergeant
with the Alaska-based 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the 25th
Infantry Division, a unit that we in Alaska lovingly know as simply the
425. It is a unit that we all care about--the only airborne brigade
combat team in the entire Asia Pacific, mountain-trained and arctic-
tough.
I had the opportunity to visit a couple thousand of those troops from
the 425 who are actually serving their country in Afghanistan. These
are the best of the best, and they are always forward-deployed.
Kirk and the 425 deployed to Iraq for 15 months during the 2006 to
2007 surge. Kirk's brigade, during that tough, tough fighting in Iraq
during that time, during the surge--one brigade combat team lost 53
paratroopers over that 15 months. Fifty-three American soldiers were
killed in action from one brigade, and that doesn't even touch the
numbers that were wounded in action, which were many, many more. That
is a devastating number.
Kirk now lives in Eagle River, AK. It is a beautiful community in the
mountains overlooking Eagle River near Anchorage. Since his return, he
has climbed Mount POW/MIA a few times every year to tend to the flag
that exists on that peak, again out of patriotism. It was during one of
those hikes that he noticed the beautiful unnamed peak right next to
Mount POW/MIA, and then he knew what he needed to do.
Mr. President, it is not easy to name a peak, and in Alaska, we have
so many mountains that there are dozens and dozens of mountains that
are still not named. It is not easy to name the peak of a mountain. So
what did he do? Well, first, he secured support from members of the
Eklutna Tribe, whose region in Alaska the mountain occupies, so it was
a very respectful action toward our very important Native community in
Alaska. He then took letters of support and a petition with over 1,500
signatures from all 50 States, 4 countries, and 1 U.S. territory, to
the Alaska Historical Commission. I was

[[Page S810]]

one of the signors of that petition. He presented all of this to the
National Geological Survey, which is part of the Department of the
Interior, all to get this peak, this mountain, named for the Gold Star
families, the Gold Star Peak. So he worked this hard. He worked this
very hard.
Today, I have the honor of announcing on the Senate floor that just
this morning, the U.S. Board of Geographic Names, which is part of the
Department of the Interior, which votes to name mountains, unanimously
voted and approved naming that mountain in the Chugach Mountain range
``Gold Star Peak.'' That is great news. That is hard work.
I am honored to have Kirk sitting up in the Gallery today after his
hard work where he was working at the Department of the Interior this
morning.
I first met Kirk at a Veterans Day parade in Anchorage, where he told
me about his quest to get the mountain peak named. That is where I
signed the petition. And then I asked him--I said: Kirk, you served
your country. Why are you so motivated and focused and determined to do
this?
Do you know what he did, Mr. President? He pulled out 53 dog tags
that he had in his pocket with the names of every soldier of the 425
who was lost in Iraq in 2006 to 2007 when he was the first sergeant for
that brigade. I held them in my hand. It was powerful and moving, and
in some ways it was so horrible to look at because these are the lives
and names of the best and brightest we have in America. That is why he
did it, and that is why he was motivated.
Because of Kirk and the announcement today, families--whether they
are from Alaska or anywhere in America who come visit, families who
have lost loved ones who made the ultimate sacrifice serving their
Nation will now be able to look up at Gold Star Peak as they drive up
the busy Glenn Highway in Alaska, and they will see that 4,000-foot
peak soaring into the sky. All of America will know that their loved
ones are not forgotten and that the service and sacrifice of the Gold
Star families whom we honor are appreciated and honored by a grateful
nation.
So thank you, Kirk, for all the work you have put into this.
Congratulations on the vote today. I can't wait to get home and see
Gold Star Peak, officially named, and maybe, just maybe, get out there
and summit it with you someday.
Thank you for being our Alaskan of the Week.
I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. DAINES. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cassidy). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. DAINES. Mr. President, Washington, DC, has an addiction problem.
Washington, DC, is addicted to spending. Washington, DC, is addicted to
debt.
This budget deal takes a giant step backward. Instead of shrinking
government, it grows government by 13 percent. In fact, it is the
largest spending increase since 2009, the first year President Obama
was in office.
I spent 28 years in the private sector before I came to Capitol Hill.
I was expected to produce a balanced budget. In fact, better than that,
I was expected to produce a budget that actually took in a little bit
more than was spent. That is called a profit. This budget deal is
blowing our budget. It takes discretionary spending up $300 billion and
only offsets it by one-third.
By looking at numbers, it is pretty clear that Washington, DC,
doesn't have a revenue problem if we look at revenue as a percentage of
GDP, but if we look at spending as a percentage of GDP, we start to see
the real problem. DC doesn't have a revenue problem. DC doesn't need to
ask for more money from the American people. Washington, DC, has a
spending problem. Controlling government spending is a big challenge,
but it is one we have to rise to meet. We must rise to the occasion,
not retreat to trillion-dollar deficits.
Funding our national defense is a fundamental requirement laid out in
the Constitution. The men and women of our military, including our
veterans--absolutely crucial. Funding for our community health centers,
something I have been fighting hard for--important for our States. In
fact, earlier today I supported a reasonable proposal to address both
of these concerns without going rogue on spending.
The question is, At what point is Congress going to look in the
mirror and see that the real long-term certainty, the long-term
sustainability of these programs we all support, is directly tied to
fiscal responsibility?
Even the former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ADM Mike Mullen,
once said, ``The most significant threat to our national security is
our debt.'' We have now crossed the $20 trillion debt threshold, and
this bill simply accelerates that.
I left the private sector to run for Congress and came to the Senate
to fight for more jobs and less government. I will tell you, I think if
you look in the dictionary for the term ``more government,'' you would
find this bill. This bill defines ``more government.''
Washington's broken budget process results in bad budget deals like
this one, and we are continuing the cycle of irresponsible budgets
which creates more irresponsible budgets. It is an addiction to
spending. It is an addiction to debt, but it doesn't have to be that
way. Many of our States have figured that out. Many of our States
aren't running deficits and large debts.
The first bill I introduced when I arrived in Congress was the
Balanced Budget Accountability Act. It is not complicated. It simply
says, if Congress can't pass a balanced budget, then we shouldn't get
paid. That is the way it works in the real world. It ought to work the
same way here.
When Montanans look at their own budget, whether in their families or
in their small businesses, they have to make choices. When they take
out a loan, they are expected to pay it back. They can't just borrow
money from China like we do, kick the can down the road, and expect
that someday there will not be a day of reckoning.
Raising the debt ceiling, growing spending, and spending away our
children's and grandchildren's future is irresponsible. We talk about
mortgaging our children's future. We have done that. With this bill, we
had to take out another credit card for our kids. This is not some
glowing bipartisan moment. It is a classic example of disastrous
policy--policymaking that is justified under the well-meaning pursuit
of compromise. Make no mistake, this compromise is deeply irresponsible
and one the Senate should reject. I am ready to work with anyone here
to make the tough decisions necessary to get our budget and our fiscal
house in order.
Now, think about this past year. We were able to cut through redtape,
reducing the Federal Registry by over 30 percent. We were able to put
qualified judges on the benches of our Nation's courts--the most
circuit judges in the first year of a Presidency dating back to 1891.
We were able to pass a once-in-a-generation tax cut package for the
American people. If we can do all that, I think we can balance our
budget here as well and put forward responsible fiscal leadership and
management here in Washington, DC.
Let's roll up our sleeves, and let's get to work. That is what we
were elected to do. Until then, I will continue to stand and continue
to fight against this addiction to spending and debt of Washington, DC.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.

Tax Reform

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I come before you today to talk about the
historic tax reform legislation that was passed in the U.S. Congress
and signed into law by the President at the end of the year and talk
about what we learned since then, even in the last week.
We created this legislation with two goals in mind. One was to
provide middle-class tax relief to families. The other was to provide
our businesses and our workers with a more competitive tax code. This
is something that became very clear to all of us as we looked at it,
that unfortunately we were asking our workers here in America to
compete with one arm tied behind their backs because of our Tax Code.
It has been a couple of months now since this legislation became law,
and both of those two goals we set out

[[Page S811]]

are being achieved. It is already happening.
In January, the Internal Revenue Service updated its tables for
withholding. In other words, they went to employers and said: Because
of the tax cuts, you should withhold less money in every paycheck.
That is happening. The Treasury Department tells us that 90 percent
of American workers are having their withholding changed in a way that
is positive for them, meaning that Uncle Sam is taking less out of
their paychecks. People are already starting to see that. Tomorrow is
Friday--another payday--and you are probably going to see that on your
paycheck tomorrow or a week from tomorrow, if you haven't already seen
it. That means that people are actually getting relief directly for
themselves and their families. This is more take-home pay for folks and
enables people to have a better family budget.
With higher healthcare costs and other costs for years and years and
no salary increase, having a little more in the family budget is really
important to folks, and it is making a difference. In Ohio, for a
family of four at the median-income level, which is about $70,000 a
year, this means about a $2,000-a-year savings. That is significant for
people. I have talked to a lot of constituents who were beginning to
see this, and they are realizing they have a little more money for
retirement, maybe for healthcare, maybe to help their kids or their
grandkids. That is good.
There is something else that is in the bill that hasn't gotten much
attention; that is, the fact that there were 3 million Americans who
were paying taxes previously, who had income tax liability, who do not
now. Why? Because when you lower the tax rate, some of these people,
who are typically the working poor--in other words, they are working,
but they are not making much in income--now have the ability to get out
from under taxes altogether. This also encourages more people to not be
dependent on a government program but to go to work, if there is this
lower tax rate at the lower end of the economic scale. So that is good
too. That is in this tax legislation.
More than 3 million people do not have tax liability anymore. Part of
it is because of the lower rates we talked about. Again, the proof is
in the paycheck on that one. Part of it is because in this legislation,
we double the standard deduction and also double the child credit and
make it more refundable than it already is. That is happening, and it
is working. That goal has already been achieved--not by this Congress
but by the people we represent, the American people and families across
this great country. We are happy to see that.
The second part of this is that a more competitive business code is
benefiting workers very directly. This is something we are hearing
about just about every day. Over 300 businesses have made announcements
saying: You know what, we are going to give people a bonus because of
the tax reform legislation. We are going to give our employees a little
higher starting wage. We are going to put more in the 401(k)s or more
in the defined benefit pension plan. Maybe we are going to give a
little more to charity, or maybe we are going to invest more in
equipment and tools so that people can be more productive, because
productivity, as we know, is key to getting wages up and improving the
economy. We are hearing this across the board all over the country.
I have seen this in Ohio. I have been to companies in my hometown of
Cincinnati, in Columbus, OH, in Dayton, OH, and in Cleveland just in
the last month. I have gone and visited with these companies while they
have been making announcements and have talked to the employees in a
townhall meeting setting, where they have had the opportunity to have a
back-and-forth as to what this tax reform measure means to them. Yes,
it means direct tax cuts for them, as it does for about 90 percent of
American workers. On top of that, it means that because these
businesses now have the ability to be more competitive, it makes them
more competitive, and they are already getting some of the benefits
from that.
Last week, I joined President Trump in Cincinnati at one of these
companies. It is called the Sheffer Corporation. This is a small
manufacturing business that has decided to make new investments in its
plant and equipment. That is going to help make it more competitive and
make its workers more productive. It competes globally. It is an
incredible company. It makes pneumatic and hydraulic cylinders. It
makes them this big, and it makes huge ones. It competes all around the
world, and it is doing a great job. Frankly, this tax reform bill
really helped them.
On top of that investment it is making, it is also making a direct
investment in its employees. Every employee--all of the 126 people who
work there--received a $1,000 bonus check after the tax legislation was
signed into law. So it is helping them.
The company's president is a guy named Jeff Norris. Just before the
visit we had earlier this week, he said that for some people in
Washington, that is crumbs, referring to how some people have called
getting this tax relief crumbs. He said: ``But for the Sheffer people,
we consider that fine dining.'' Another way to put it is, this makes a
difference for people in their lives and for their families.
This was all made possible by lowering the tax rate. Of the developed
countries around the world, of the countries that are industrialized,
we had the highest statutory tax rate of all of the countries. So our
35 percent rate was higher than in places in Europe, Asia, Latin
America, and so on. We were getting higher than our competitors--
Canada, Mexico, and so on--and that is one reason people were choosing
to shift overseas, to take, literally, the company and move it
overseas. That is called an inversion.
Last year, we were told that three times as many American companies
were bought by foreign companies as the other way around. Think about
that. Three times as many American companies were bought by foreign
companies, which was largely driven by this Tax Code.
We have also heard from Ernst & Young, which is a big accounting
firm. It did an analysis, and it said that 4,700 American companies
have become foreign companies over the past 10 years or so because of
the Tax Code. If we had had the kind of Tax Code that we just put in
place with this legislation that was passed here, those companies would
still be American companies. Those are 4,700 companies. Those are a lot
of people, and that is a lot of investment.
We studied this in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations--a
bipartisan investigation--and looked at what happens when these
companies go overseas. It is probably no surprise to you that they take
their jobs and investments with them. So when a company pulls up stakes
here and goes overseas, it is not just about moving one's corporate
headquarters; we found it is also about having less employment here
directly but also indirectly because companies that supply them--
contractors--have less employment, and they are also making their
investments increasingly overseas.
As we studied this, we also found that companies were actually taking
the money they had made overseas and were keeping it all overseas
rather than bringing it back here and repatriating it, even though they
were U.S. companies. This is something we studied as part of a
bipartisan Finance Committee working group I cochaired with Senator
Chuck Schumer. We found that unless you lowered this rate and went to a
more competitive international system, you were not going to get that
money back.
Part of what this will do is what we talked about in terms of
improving the lives of workers here in America, but part of what it
will also do is repatriate. It will bring back some of that money that
has been stuck overseas, the so-called lockout effect. How much is
that? Economists think it is somewhere around $3 trillion; some say
more.
You might have seen recently that Apple announced that it was
bringing hundreds of billions back here, repatriating that money back
here. They are also going to pay I think about $38 billion in taxes to
the U.S. Treasury, but that is worth it to them to bring back that
money. We want them to bring that money here. Why? We don't want it
invested overseas in a research and development facility there or in a

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factory there; we want it invested here, right? That is what this tax
reform does.
That is why, as exciting as it is for these workers and for these
companies to make these decisions, and their helping people right now
is very important, I think of the bigger investments we are going to
hear of down the line. The next time a big American company that has a
global business asks, ``Where am I going to put my factory? Where am I
going to do my research and development?'' it is going to say, ``We are
going to do it here in America.'' That is what is very exciting to me.
Let's get back to having wages that are going up consistently rather
than the relatively flat wages we have seen really over the past couple
of decades, and let's see a renewal of hope and opportunity here. I
think this is exciting, and I think we will see more of it.
Just in the past week, by the way, we have seen seven more major
companies announce higher compensation for their employees: CVS in the
last week, Tyson in the last week, Chipotle, Best Buy, Charter
Communications, Lowe's, FedEx. This is just in the last week. In total,
these companies have 1.3 million employees who are now going to benefit
on top of all of the other 300 announcements we talked about earlier.
They are going to benefit from increased investments that these
businesses will be able to make because of this new tax reform. This is
good news, and it is good news for the people I represent.
In Ohio, some of our larger employers have already made their
announcements. Fifth Third Bank, headquartered in Cincinnati, employs
8,800 Ohioans and announced it will raise its base wage for entry-level
people and give $1,000 bonuses to all of its 13,500 employees.
Nationwide Insurance, headquartered in Columbus, employs 15,000
Ohioans. It is going to increase 401(k) matches, so the match that it
gives to people's 401(k) contributions is going to increase. That is
great for one's retirement savings. It is going to do that for 33,000
employees around the country. It is also going to give $1,000 bonuses
to 29,000 of its employees.

JPMorgan is probably the third biggest employer in Ohio now of all
the private sector employers. It employs about 21,000 Ohioans, mainly
in the Columbus area. Some of you know that because it is a huge
presence in Polaris North Columbus. It has announced it is going to add
4,000 new jobs. Its base wage is going to be raised for 22,000
employees. It is going to increase its charitable donations and its
small business lending. It says it is all because of this tax reform
legislation. That is good news.
Our biggest employer in Ohio is Walmart. It may be in your State too.
There are 50,000 Ohioans who work for Walmart. It has announced it is
going to raise its base wage for all hourly employees, distribute
$1,000 bonuses, expand maternity and parental leave opportunities, and
increase funds for employee adoption expenses. It is our largest
employer.
Other Ohio employers that have announced something include Fiat
Chrysler and the Jeep plant, up in Toledo, which we are so proud of,
and Home Depot. We talked earlier about Lowe's and AT&T. They have all
announced increased investments in their operations and their workers
as a result of the tax reform.
I am excited about this. It is actually working in a way that many of
us had hoped it would and said it would. Really, there have been more
announcements even than I think the most optimistic tax reform
advocates expected. I think we are going to see a lot more over time
because ultimately this is about making the United States a better
place to do business.
By the way, some of these companies are not American companies; they
are foreign companies that choose to invest in America. Foreign direct
investment is something we encourage because that brings more jobs here
to this country. So if a company like Honda, which is a big auto
employer in Ohio, chooses to invest more in Ohio rather than in Japan
or China or Germany or elsewhere because of this tax reform
legislation, that is also important. We are going to see more and more
of that happening, in my view, because they are looking at the lower
rates, and they are looking at the ability to expense what they have
purchased more quickly in terms of plants and equipment. This immediate
expensing is very important in this legislation for companies like that
and manufacturers. So this is not just about American companies staying
here rather than going overseas; it is also about foreign companies
that are choosing to come here and to hire American workers, which is
also good for us.
I am hoping that a combination of this tax reform and what is being
done on the regulatory front to make regulations better--particularly
for smaller businesses that were feeling a lot of that burden--and
American hard work and ingenuity, as well as rewarding that ingenuity
better, is going to help America compete in this global marketplace in
ways we haven't done for many years.
The historic tax reform is basically putting America back in a
position in which people are now going to look to us again and say:
America is the kind of model that I want to follow.
The American free enterprise system and the system where, if you work
hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead, where you can achieve
your dream in life, was something some people were beginning to
question. Now I think this helps to polish our image, which has become
somewhat tarnished as wages had been flat and we were kind of stuck in
low economic growth--1\1/2\ to 2 percent growth. Now I think we have
the opportunity to break out more and to be that beacon of hope and
opportunity for the rest of the world and, most importantly, to give
people the opportunity to achieve their American dreams, whatever they
are.
Mr. President, I want to talk about another topic, and this is not a
happy topic. It is also in the news these days, as are the growing
economy and the increased jobs and the benefits of the tax reform. But
this is news that you will also see on the front pages and on the
nightly news of your local TV stations. It is unfortunate news, and
that is the fact that we still have this growing epidemic of drug use
in this country that is connected to opioids. This is something that
has grown over time and kind of started with prescription drug use,
which grew pretty dramatically back in the 2000s. Then it became
heroin. Probably 3 or 4 years ago, one began to see people shift from
heroin to other forms of opioids that are called synthetic opioids,
such as fentanyl or carfentanil.
Unfortunately, this issue has gripped our country. In my State in
particular--and Ohio is one of the States that have been hardest hit--
we have more people addicted, we have more people who are overdosing
from these drugs, and we have more people who are dying because of the
overdoses than ever before. Last year, in 2017, we had more overdose
deaths than we had in 2016.
I think we have good ideas to begin to turn the tide. This Congress
has started to work on that, and I applaud Congress for that. We are
beginning to see some of those programs work, but we have a long way to
go.
One reason that I think the legislation we are going to vote on later
today is so important is that it provides more funding to be able to
deal with the opioid crisis. We need it. I wish we didn't. We need it.
We need it for better prevention and education to keep people from
getting into the funnel of addiction in the first place. We also need
it for treatment, and we need it for longer term recovery, which is
sometimes quite expensive, but it requires us to look at this issue in
different ways.
Historically, short-term treatment programs have not been very
successful. A lot of people go through these treatment programs and
come out the other end. They might be clean for a while, but typically
there are a lot of people who go back to their addictions. The
recidivism rate is very high.
What we want is for people to go through treatment and get clean at
the other end and be able to get back on their feet and restore their
ties to their families, their work, and their communities. This longer
term recovery, in my view, after studying this issue for many years, is
a very important part of that. It is providing, yes, the medically
assisted drug treatment that is sometimes needed for one to be able to
get through the addiction, and to get into

[[Page S813]]

a good treatment program often is assisted through medically assisted
treatment. Yet what is more important to me as I look at this and talk
to a lot of people--I have talked to probably 1,000 addicts and
recovering addicts just in the last couple of years in Ohio--is to
surround these people with the right kind of counseling and the right
kind of support, including peer support--others who have been through
addiction and recovery and have gotten on their feet, those who are
recovering addicts. There is a cost to that.
Some would ask: Well, is this really the Federal Government's role? I
would say yes. It is a national epidemic, and it needs to be approached
at every level--the national level, the State level, and the local
level. Ultimately, it is not going to be solved here in Washington; it
is going to be solved in our communities.
I will tell you that the degree of damage that this is causing to our
communities, our families, our budgets locally, and our criminal
justice system requires us to take a more aggressive role at the
national level. Take best practices from around the States and local
communities and spread those nationally as an example. Provide seed
money, combined with local money, so they can actually get treatment
programs up and going in areas where people cannot get treatment. Even
though they are ready to deal with their addictions, they don't have
beds and don't have places to go.
The Federal Government also plays a role already. With Medicaid
reimbursement, for instance, if you have a treatment center and if you
are providing MAT, or medically assisted treatment, and you have more
than 16 beds, you cannot get Medicaid reimbursement. That doesn't make
any sense. We have some very good treatment centers in Ohio that have
16 beds, but they could have twice that many or even three times that
many and provide more help. Yet, because of the way the Federal
Government chooses to reimburse, that is not practical. So there are
issues with which the government has to be involved.
In my home State of Ohio, overdose deaths are the No. 1 cause of
death in my State. Nationally, among those who are under 50, it is the
No. 1 cause of death. In Ohio, we had more deaths from overdoses from
synthetic opioids--the new drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil--than we
did anything else. About 58 percent of our deaths were from the
synthetic opioids. So it is changing from prescription drugs to heroin
and now to these synthetic drugs.
We have a real crisis on our hands. It is the No. 1 cause of crime in
my community and throughout my State. It probably is in yours too. If
you think maybe you are not affected by it because you don't have a
family member or friend or coworker who was affected, then you don't
see it clearly. I would suggest we are all affected because we are all
paying for it in additional healthcare costs, additional costs for
prosecutions and incarcerations, additional costs in crime in our
communities, in families being torn apart, and more kids in foster care
under State supervision, in some way, because we have record numbers
now in my home State because of their parents being addicted. This is a
huge issue, and I think it is one we need to focus on at every level,
including at the national level.
With regard to fentanyl, just a very little bit, a few flakes of it,
can kill you. It is incredibly powerful. It is considered to be 50
times more powerful than heroin. It is cheap, it is easily accessible,
and it can be spread to other drugs, which is increasingly happening.
We are told by law enforcement that it is being used now with cocaine
and even, in some cases, marijuana. Certainly it is packaged into pills
to make it look like a prescription drug when it is really fentanyl-
laced. This stuff can be just deadly.
This week I had some people come into my office talking about it, and
I asked them whether they thought we were turning the tide, and their
answer was no because of the fentanyl, this new drug that is
inexpensive, this synthetic that is coming into our country, believe it
or not, primarily from overseas through the U.S. mail system.
Just last week, in Logan County, OH, a 12-year-old girl brought a
plastic bag containing fentanyl to her middle school. Thankfully, a
teacher found the bag and called the police to safely remove the drug.
Think about that. In that middle school, this drug could have killed
numerous kids. While police are looking into how this possibly could
have ended up in the hands of a 12-year-old, how fentanyl ends up in
the United States is no mystery. We now know the answer to that. We
have done studies on it.
We spent a yearlong investigation looking into this issue, and what
we found out was pretty shocking, which is fentanyl, which is this
growing drug killing more people in Ohio than any other drug now,
doesn't come in the way you might think, maybe overland. It typically
comes through the U.S. mail system. Primarily, it comes from China.
Does it come from other countries? Yes. Sometimes it is shipped from
China to another country and then to the United States. Some other
countries may now be making it but law enforcement tells me it is
primarily through the mail system and primarily from China.
Now, you might ask, why is it coming through the mail system, and why
are we letting that happen? Well, it is happening because if you try to
send it through one of the private carriers like DHL or FedEx or UPS,
you have to provide a lot of information on the package. You probably
know this if you are shipping stuff. You have to provide what is in it,
where it is from, and where it is going. You have to provide that in
advance, and it is provided electronically in advance to law
enforcement. In Ohio, the DHS and UPS can go to the facilities and
target a package and say: Uh-huh. This is from a certain region. This
has a certain suspicious address where it is going, maybe it is an
abandoned warehouse and post office box where they know there have been
drugs shipped before, maybe the contents don't add up and they can
target that package and get that package offline and destroy it. By the
way, when they do that, trust me, they are wearing gloves and masks in
special rooms now where they can try to avoid being damaged by this
drug because they are incredibly dangerous; whereas, in the U.S. mail
system, there is not a requirement.
Now they are starting to require it more, and this year, thanks to
the work of some of us who have been pushing this for a couple of years
now, they are doing a better job than last year, but this last year
only 38 percent of packages had electronic advanced data on it--only 38
percent--whereas, with these other carriers, it is 100 percent. Of that
38 percent, sadly, 20 percent of the time, when law enforcement said:
OK, we hear this information about this package, we want to pull it
off, 20 percent of the time the post office couldn't produce the
package so it went to the post office box or abandoned warehouse. A
package this big can have hundreds of thousands of people affected.
Just think about it, just a few grams of this can kill you. So the post
office needs to provide that same sort of data.
We also found, in our 1-year study of this, the data the post office
did provide, origin often was indecipherable by security people because
it wasn't information that was helpful, maybe a lot of numbers or
characters that did not let people know what was in it, where it was
going, where it was from.
It is good we are beginning to make progress on this, but I think we
should have a requirement in law that says the post office has to do
what these other private carriers do, which is require people who want
to ship something into our communities to have this information so our
law enforcement has a chance to find these packages and to stop this
poison from coming into our neighborhoods.
Is this the only solution? No. The Comprehensive Addiction and
Recovery Act that I coauthored that passed this place over a year ago
now is beginning to work on prevention, treatment, and recovery. We
talked about that earlier.
We need to do more to help our first responders, to give them the
Narcan they need to reverse the effects of these overdoses and to save
lives. We need to get people into these programs rather than the
revolving door of people being addicted, having an overdose, being
saved, and then having an overdose again. That is all critical. In
fact,

[[Page S814]]

that is the most important part, but let's at least--at least--stop
some of this poison that is coming in through our own U.S. Government
Postal Service. By the way, postal employees totally agree. They don't
want to be a conduit for this stuff. They certainly don't want to be
exposed to it.
There are some horrible stories of people who were exposed because
with these international packages coming in, sometimes there is some
leakage.
One story that is probably one that would get the attention of every
law enforcement official in America is, there is a guy in Ohio, a law
enforcement officer. He pulled over two individuals. He went up to the
car. He pulled them over for a traffic violation, but he noticed they
spread some white powder around the car to try to hide it. Wisely, he
realized this might be something dangerous. He put on his mask and
gloves and found it was fentanyl.
He arrested these two individuals. They got booked. He went down to
the police station. This officer was a big guy, by the way--6 feet 2
inches, over 200 pounds, in good shape. He looked down on his shirt
when he was in the police station talking to his fellow officers, and
he saw some flecks on his shirt of something. So he reached over and
brushed it off with his hands like that. It was fentanyl.
Immediately he overdosed. He became unconscious, lying on the floor.
Three times Narcan was administered to try to save his life. They had
to rush him to the emergency room ultimately to save his life. As his
police chief said: If we hadn't been right there, this police officer
would not be with us today. Think if he had gone home and hugged his
kids.
This stuff is dangerous. It is dangerous for our postal employees, it
is dangerous for our Customs and Border Protection people who bravely
are out there every day trying to stop this stuff. It is dangerous to
the postal inspectors and dangerous for the Drug Enforcement Agency
individuals. We need to give them every tool we can to let them know
where the suspect packages are so they can stop this stuff. At a
minimum, what will happen is there will be less supply, and there will
be higher prices on the street. That is not a bad thing because the
cost of this drug is one reason it has become so popular and so deadly.
Our legislation is called the STOP Act. It simply says: Let's do what
we should have done many years ago and require this information. After
9/11, this Congress got together and said: We are worried about stuff
being shipped into this country, and so we are going to require private
carriers to provide this. In 2002, there was legislation passed. That
was 15 years ago, almost 16 years ago now. That legislation said at the
time: You have to do this if you are the FedExes or UPSes of the world,
but for the post office, we recommend you do it. We want you to do a
study on it.
The thought was, in Congress, that they would need some time but that
they would be able to do it as well--again, it has been almost 16
years. Now we have this immediate problem, which is, in my view, a
crisis, and it is a public health problem. It falls on us as the
Federal Government to deal with it--this Congress to deal with it.
I know there are those in the Postal Service who are concerned about
whether they can require other countries to provide this data. Do you
know what? We provide it for all our packages going to them. Again,
most countries in the world are now being asked to do it. The rest of
the countries ought to be asked. Certainly, China ought to be required
to do it for all their packages. They now say about half of the
packages from China have some sort of information. It needs to be
better information. We also need China to do more.
After our report came out last week, Chinese Government officials
responded and said they were concerned. They wanted to do more to
cooperate with the United States. That was good. I am glad to hear
that, but, frankly, we have been hearing that for a while.
I was in China last year on a congressional delegation. I raised this
information with Premier Li, the No. 2 ranking official in the
government there. Again, we heard the right things. We want to help to
be able to stop this at the source. We need more help.
We believe there are thousands of chemists or chemical companies in
China that are producing this poison. Again, I am not suggesting it is
exclusively China, but we are told by law enforcement it is still
primarily from China. Let's shut them down.
They have made illegal some of the precursors, some of the drugs that
go into making this fentanyl. Let's make sure that is being enforced.
Let's make it an illegal activity to ship it. Let's do the prosecutions
that are necessary and arrest people.
There were two individuals who were indicted here in the United
States who were Chinese nationals. My understanding is, they have yet
to be prosecuted, and they have been indicted for shipping poisons into
our communities and killing our people.
Yes, there is a lot that has to be done here. We need to be sure we
are doing a better job on prevention and education to keep people from
falling into the addiction in the first place. We need to do much
better on treatment and recovery. We talked about that earlier. At a
minimum, let's protect this country. So I encourage my colleagues, if
you haven't already cosponsored the STOP Act--Senator Amy Klobuchar and
I introduced this legislation together last year. We want your help. We
would love to have your cosponsorship. We have about 30 cosponsors now.
It is bipartisan. We need to get 100 cosponsors. Everybody in this
Chamber should be for this. We should be able to at least tell our own
U.S. post office: Help law enforcement to stop this poison. That is
part of the answer here, along with so many other things we need to do
to keep the fentanyl off the streets, to keep the overdoses and the
death toll from rising.
Again, I thank my colleagues for including in the legislation we are
going to vote on later today additional funding over the next 2 years.
I will say, with regard to that funding, which is significant--it is an
unprecedented amount--we have increased the funding over this fiscal
year from last fiscal year by $1.4 billion. That is through the so-
called CURES Act and CARA legislation. Now we have additional funding,
$3 billion this year and $3 billion next year. I do think there is a
good framework for spending this money and that would be the programs
in the CARA legislation, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act.
There are about a dozen different programs, including recovery
programs, including helping pregnant women who are addicted to help
them avoid having their addiction passed along to their kids. This is a
big issue in our States right now. All of our neonatal units back home
in our hospitals are dealing with this.
There is legislation to help our first responders with training and
with Narcan, certainly to help them deal with this fentanyl danger they
face, the risk they face every day.
We have the programs in place. There is not adequate funding in some
of these programs to respond to the many requests coming in. So this is
one place for us to provide some help.
The CURES legislation goes directly to the States. That legislation
was passed as part of an appropriations process to help the States be
able to identify where they had the highest priority. Some of that,
frankly, is in training individuals who can be counselors.
We talked about the importance of not just providing medicine to help
people get over their addiction but to also surround them with the kind
of treatment they need, the kind of support they need. In other States,
it was a matter of building those treatment facilities. One million
dollars of this, or so, was used in Columbus, OH, for an innovative
program, where there is now a new emergency room that is dedicated to
people who overdose, which is better for the individual who overdoses
and better for the taxpayer, rather than taking them to an emergency
room that has the capability to handle gunshot wounds and trauma and so
on. This is dedicated just to overdoses. Most significantly, in this
same facility where the overdoses go, you have a 50-bed treatment
center. So often what we find is that people are treated for the
overdose, maybe in a detox unit, but then there is no treatment center.
There is no treatment bed available, so that person goes back to

[[Page S815]]

the community, back to the old neighborhood.

During that waiting period, even though they are ready for treatment
as they come out of the overdose--because often they have kind of seen
their life flash before their eyes--there is not the availability and,
sure enough, that person gets back into the use of the drug--heroin,
fentanyl, prescription drugs--and ends up overdosing again, sometimes
again and again and again. You hear this from your first responders.
Go to your firehouse, and you will hear in every firehouse in
America, I will guarantee you, about this issue. I will guarantee that
in most firehouses--certainly all of them that I have been to in Ohio,
and I have been to many--it is the No. 1 thing people are doing. In
other words, there are more calls for overdoses than there are calls
for fires. There are more calls for overdoses than there are calls for
heart attacks.
This is an issue that, again, affects every one of us whether we feel
it directly or not. So this is an opportunity for us to get these
people into the emergency room setting to save their lives, using this
miracle drug, Narcan, using the best help of our incredible medical
professionals, who are doing an awesome job on the frontlines, but then
to get them right into treatment, to say: By the way, here is an
opportunity; come right now. We think that is going to close that gap
and help to avoid this issue of people not getting the help you want
them to get. Probably 8 out of 10 people in Ohio are not getting the
treatment they should be getting.
So I am encouraging my colleagues to vote for the legislation this
afternoon or this evening, whenever we vote on it, in part, because it
does have that legislation in it regarding opioids. It does have this
new funding--an unprecedented level of funding.
It is going to be left to the Appropriations Committees here to deal
with how it is spent. Again, I know they have a lot of great ideas,
including legislation that we have already passed called the CARA Act,
the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. We spent 3 years putting
together that legislation. We had five conferences here in Washington.
We got best practices from around the country. This is all about
sending funds out to programs that have been studied and that do have
good results. It is not just a matter of throwing money after this
problem. We have to be sure that it is done effectively and that,
again, it leverages more money at the local level.
The million dollars I talked about that went into this treatment
center in Columbus, OH--that was matched by county money, it was
matched by State money, it was matched by private-sector money and
individuals who were giving funds to this because they realized what a
problem it is. That is how we should work together. Ultimately, this is
not going to be solved here in Washington, DC. It is going to be solved
in our communities. It is going to be solved in our families. It is
going to be solved in our hearts. This is an issue that ultimately is
going to require all of us getting engaged on.
Mr. President, I thank the Presiding Officer for the time today.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Gerber Spokesbaby of 2018

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, there is good news, there is great news, and
then there is the story of Lucas Warren of Dalton, GA. I don't
personally know Lucas. In fact, he is only 18 months old. So he, of
course, has the good sense not to engage with or get to know
politicians, especially in Washington. But like so many millions of
Americans who have not met Lucas, I will never forget him.
Yesterday, the Gerber baby food company selected little Lucas as its
``Gerber Spokesbaby'' for the year 2018. Lucas' winning photograph,
sent in by his parents Jason and Cortney, was selected from more than
140,000 entries. Even at a glance, it is not at all hard to see why.
This picture deserves much more than just a mere glance. I don't just
mean because of the bow tie. You see, Lucas Warren was born with Down
syndrome, which is to say that Jason and Cortney Warren are among those
Americans blessed to know, to love, and to be loved by someone with
Down syndrome. According to the Global Down Syndrome Foundation, only
38 percent of Americans are so lucky.
Those of us who are so lucky know the warmth and the tender cheer of
individuals with Down syndrome--the warmth and tender cheer they carry
with them everywhere they go. With little more than a smile, like
Lucas' in this picture, they make gentle the life of the world. All of
us are born with that mission, but we don't always fulfill it. Children
like Lucas and parents like the Warrens don't just carry their share of
that burden. They carry some of ours too. We owe them more than we can
possibly know.
``I am a child of God,'' begins a children's song of my faith.

And He has sent me here,
Has given me an earthly home
With parents kind and dear.
I am a child of God,
And so my needs are great.

Those lyrics take on a particularly special poignancy when you know
families with special needs children, for children with special needs
not only deserve special love; they give it. They give it unceasingly
and unreservedly, just like the God who first knitted them together in
their mother's wombs.
We should all commend the Gerber baby food company for its choice of
its new spokesbaby and especially thank the Warrens for the gift of
little Lucas.
In Washington, we are often reminded of the old maxim that there are
no solutions in this life, only tradeoffs. Sometimes, it is tempting to
believe that this is true, but this photograph proves otherwise. In
this fallen world of ours, that smile--that little boy--is pure good, a
blessing to us all.
Yesterday, after the announcement, Lucas' mom Cortney said:

He may have Down syndrome, but he's always Lucas first. . .
. we're hoping when he grows up and looks back on this, he'll
be proud of himself and not ashamed of his disability.

So should we all hope for Lucas and for the rest of the world too.
Thank you, Mr. President.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. CASSIDY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Capito). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. CASSIDY. Madam President, I wish to speak about some issues
relating to the spending bill and things that happened in Louisiana.
Louisiana had two catastrophic floods in 2016 that affected not just
our State but also Texas and Mississippi, with over 100,000 disaster
victims who became eligible for SBA--Small Business Administration--
disaster assistance loans.
Here is one picture. Oh my gosh. Here is the window. The water is as
high inside the patio area as outside, and the woman has a face of
despair.
Here is another picture, which shows a family being evacuated in a
boat. Obviously, it is a neighborhood with stop signs and nice trees
and streetlights, and they are being evacuated. We can imagine what
their family home looked like.
Fifty-six of Louisiana's sixty-four parishes had Federal disaster
declarations. The August storm alone caused an estimated $10 billion in
damage to private property, which, apart from hurricanes, made it the
most expensive U.S. disaster in the last 100 years.
The most devastating thing was how little time people had to react.
The storm was missing key cyclone characteristics, so the National
Hurricane Center had no expectation of how devastating the storm would
be, and the first parishes hit by the flooding had no time to evacuate
or prepare.
Many families who were impacted by the great floods of 2016 in
Louisiana lived outside what are called special flood hazard zones and
were not required to and did not carry flood insurance. Indeed, about
80 percent of flooded homes did not have flood insurance.

[[Page S816]]

Last year, I worked with the Louisiana delegation to obtain about $2
billion in community development block grants to help cover portions of
those uninsured losses for Louisiana families and small businesses. We
also got about $500 million in disaster tax relief to help with the
uncompensated disaster losses. But with CDBG--community development
block grant--funding, which is distributed through the Restore
Louisiana Homeowner Assistance Program, it is arcane--there is
something which is an arcane and arbitrary rule called duplication of
benefits. The duplication of benefits rule states that if an individual
is eligible for and received a loan from the Small Business
Administration, that individual is ineligible for a grant from the
Restore Louisiana Homeowner Assistance Program. The rule makes no
sense. An individual who did the right thing and drew upon all
available resources to rebuild their home and begin to put their life
back together is denied relief.
Language that fixed this issue was included in the disaster
supplemental passed by the House last year. The Senate was prepared to
consider this in December, but the legislation was delayed--frankly,
held hostage--by the minority party using it to gain leverage to get
more government spending as part of the budget negotiations we are now
in.
Now that this disaster supplemental has been rolled into the budget
negotiations, we saw that the provision to fix the duplication of
benefits issue was added, but it only covered Texas, Florida, and
Puerto Rico. So I worked with my fellow Louisiana Senator, Mr. Kennedy,
and members of the Appropriations Committee to make sure Louisiana is
treated the same as Texas and other States. Now this provision applies
to individuals who were eligible to receive an SBA loan but did not
take out a loan. What does this mean?
According to the SBA, 100,000 homeowners were eligible to apply for
an SBA loan from the March and August 2016 floods; 38,000 applications
were received, and 18,000 were approved.
As I am told, if you are eligible but don't take out the loan, you
don't qualify for the Restore Louisiana grant. Again, I am told that if
you are eligible but did not take the loan from the SBA, then you are
not eligible then to receive the Restore Louisiana grant because of the
duplication of benefits rule. There are roughly 82,000 homeowners who
could potentially be eligible to receive relief from repealing or
altering this duplication of benefits rule.
Now, there is some confusion in my State. I want to be clear. This
does apply to the $2 billion CDBG grants the Louisiana delegation
secured to help families recover from the 2016 floods in Louisiana.
Senator Kennedy and I also helped secure additional Army Corps
resources to fully fund the Comite River Diversion, a diversion that
takes floodwaters from the Comite River into the Mississippi and would
have helped prevent many homes from being flooded--probably the homes
these folks are being evacuated from--in the great flood of 2016.
We also secured $12 billion in mitigation grants specifically for
Louisiana and about five other States, which is much more targeted for
disaster States than the House bill. Again, the Senate bill is the same
number of dollars but for fewer States, therefore, more targeted than
in the House bill.
So the disaster relief portion of this legislation has taken some
steps in the right direction. However, we still need additional
clarification around duplication of benefits issues and legacy FEMA
appeals matters.
I thank my Senate colleague from Louisiana for his work on this and
hope to receive further commitments from the Appropriations Committee
to continue to work on these important disaster recovery issues.
I yield the floor.
Mr. COCHRAN. Madam President, I urge the Senate to approve the
Further Extension of Continuing Appropriations Act, 2018.
This legislation is more than a continuing resolution to sustain
government operations at current levels through March 23.
It incorporates a 2-year agreement setting defense and nondefense
spending levels for fiscal years 2018 and 2019, the product of
bipartisan and bicameral negotiations. This overdue agreement is
necessary for Congress to meet its responsibility to provide
appropriations to meet national security and other important needs
around the country.
This deal gives my committee a real opportunity to complete the
fiscal year 2018 appropriations process with significant funding to
begin rebuilding our military and address national priorities like
veterans, infrastructure, and the opioid epidemic.
This measure also provides necessary emergency funding to help
victims of recent hurricanes, wildfires, and other disasters to rebuild
their lives and communities.
I appreciate the many hours of negotiations that have gone into this
legislation. The cotton and dairy provisions are the outcome of months
of joint efforts with my friend, Vice Chairman Leahy, to help cotton
and dairy producers overcome economic hardships that threaten their
livelihoods.
I hope we continue in this cooperative and bipartisan fashion as we
undertake the challenging work of crafting responsible legislation to
finish the 2018 appropriations cycle and begin work on next year's
bills.
Mr. CASSIDY. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the
order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, here we are at a quarter to 6.
Funding for the government expires in just a few hours. A bipartisan
agreement before us funds our troops at the level requested by the
Pentagon. It addresses the opioid crisis, which is extremely big in the
Commonwealth of Kentucky and around the country. It funds our veterans
and many other shared priorities. The Speaker of the House supports the
bill. He is waiting for it to pass the Senate. The President of the
United States supports the bill and is waiting to sign it into law.
I understand my friend and colleague from Kentucky does not join with
the President in supporting the bill. It is his right, of course, to
vote against the bill, but I would argue that it is time to vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic leader.
Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I very much appreciate my good friend,
the junior Senator from Kentucky, for his fidelity to spending--
something we don't agree with--and for his fidelity of trying to get
his amendments on the floor and debated--something we do agree with. I
recently supported that right when the FISA bill came up, which I know
was very important to him.
The difficulty we have here is that the government will shut down. We
still have the House that has to vote. Frankly, there are lots of
amendments on my side, and it is hard to make an argument that if one
person gets an amendment that everybody else will not want an
amendment, and then we will be here for a very long time.
So I would plead with my colleague, given the exigencies, that maybe
a budget point of order might work, which would make the same point;
that is, he believes the spending is too high. Then we could move
forward and get a bill done and not risk a government shutdown. We are
in risky territory here as both of my friends from Kentucky know. If
that would accomplish the same thing and not hold us up here, we could
let the House do its will and then, maybe, get the bill to the
President, because we want to move things forward.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, I propose that we give the Senator
from Kentucky an opportunity to make a budget point of order, which
would give him a vote on the substance of the matter he is concerned
about.
Therefore, I ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding rule XXII, at
6 p.m. today, the Senate vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the
motion to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R.
1892 with a

[[Page S817]]

further amendment; further, that if cloture is invoked, all postcloture
time be yielded back and Senator Paul be recognized to make a budget
point of order; that the majority leader or his designee be recognized
to make a motion to waive; and that following the disposition of the
motion to waive, the Senate vote on the motion to concur with further
amendment with no other intervening action or debate.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I ran for
office because I was very critical of President Obama's trillion-dollar
deficits. Now we have Republicans, hand in hand with Democrats, who are
offering us trillion-dollar deficits. I cannot, in all good honesty and
all good faith, just look the other way because my party is now
complicit in the deficits. But, really, who is to blame? Both parties.
We have a 700-page bill that no one has read and that was printed at
midnight. No one will read this bill. Nothing will be reformed. The
waste will continue, and government will keep taking your money
irresponsibly and adding to the $20 trillion debt.
There are no amendments being allowed. This is the most important
debate we will have in the year over spending, and no amendments are
allowed. We should have a full amendment process. We have been open for
business for 10 hours today. You can do four amendments an hour. We
could have done 40 amendments. So it is a canard to say that we cannot
have one amendment and cannot spend 15 minutes debating whether or not
it is good for the country to add $1 trillion of debt.
Madam President, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Madam President, the Senate will vote today on a bill that
will add $1.5 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. This is a
large amount of money and something that we should be very wary of.
This is in addition to what we were already running a debt of, that of
nearly $1 trillion. So we are adding a couple hundred extra billion
dollars a year to a budget and a country and a Congress that had
already recklessly let spending get out of control.
The bill is nearly 700 pages. It was given to us at midnight last
night, and I would venture to say that no one has read the bill. No one
can thoroughly digest a 700-page bill overnight, and I do think that it
does things that we really, really ought to talk about and how we
should pay for them.
One of the things this bill does is add $500 billion in spending over
a 2-year period. This bill increases spending 21 percent. Does that
sound like a large amount? Is anybody at home getting a bonus or an
increase in his paycheck of 21 percent? Yet your government is going to
spend 21 percent more without really having a full debate and without
having amendments.
The exchange you just watched was my asking to have a 15-minute vote.
I have been asking all day for it. I have been asking all week for it.
We could have, literally, had dozens of votes today, but we squabble
because people don't want to be put on the spot.
The reason I am here tonight is to put people on the spot. I want
people to feel uncomfortable. I want them to have to answer people at
home who ask: How come you were against President Obama's deficits, and
then how come you are for Republican deficits? Isn't that the very
definition of intellectual dishonesty? If you were against President
Obama's deficits and now you are for the Republican deficits, isn't
that the very definition of hypocrisy? People need to be made aware.
Your Senators need to answer the people from home, and they need to
answer for this debate. We should have a full-throated debate.
My amendment says simply this: We should obey the budget caps.
What are budget caps? These are limits we placed on spending for both
military and nonmilitary. We placed them in 2011, and guess what. For 1
or 2 years, the government actually shrunk, but now the government is
taking off, and this new stimulus of deficit spending will be as big as
President Obama's stimulus. Don't you remember when Republicans howled
to high heaven that President Obama was spending us into the gutter,
spending us into oblivion? Now the Republicans are doing the same
thing.
So I ask the question: Whose fault is it? The Republicans'? Yes.
Whose fault is it? The Democrats'? Yes. It is the fault of both
parties.
You realize that this is the secret of Washington. The dirty little
secret is that the Republicans are loudly clamoring for more military
spending, but they cannot get it unless they give the Democrats welfare
spending, so they raise all of the spending. It is a compromise in the
wrong direction. We should be compromising in the direction of going
toward spending only what comes in. Yet this goes on and on and on.
You will hear people say: Well, the military is hollowed out. We have
not enough money for our military. Yet we have doubled the amount of
money we have spent on the military since 9/11 of 2001.
Look, I have family members in the military, and I have retired
members of the military in my family, and I care very deeply about our
soldiers. In fact, do you know what I would do? I would bring them all
home from Afghanistan. The war is won. People are talking about having
a parade. Declare victory in Afghanistan; bring them home; have a
parade; and give them all a raise. Yet we go on and on and on, finding
new wars to fight that make no sense, where we have no idea who the
good guys are and who the bad guys are. The wars are so murky that
halfway through the war we sometimes change sides or the people we
support change sides.
We are at war in Afghanistan after 16 years. It costs $50 billion a
year. So they need more money for the military because we are in too
many places for too long. We have no exact mission of why we are there,
but it is not a militarily winnable situation in Afghanistan. There
will never be a victory in Afghanistan. There may be a negotiated
settlement, and they may flee when we come, but as soon as we leave,
they come back. Are we to be there forever?
For the umpteenth time, Congress is going to exceed its budget caps.
We had something passed back in 2010 that was called the PAYGO Act. It
was supposed to say: If you are going to pay new money, you have to go
find an offset somewhere else. You can only pay as you go. It was sort
of like a family would think about it. If you spend some more money,
you have to raise your income or you have to save some money.
Do you know how many times we have evaded the issue since 2010?
Thirty-some-odd times. When I try to get them to pay attention to their
own rules, three or four people will vote to pay attention to the
rules.
We are in a terrible state, and $20 trillion in debt is bigger than
our entire economy.
Do you wonder why the stock market is jittery? One of the reasons is
that we do not have the capacity to continue to fund the government
like this. We have been funding it with phony interest rates that are
concocted and given to us by the Federal Reserve, but they aren't real.
What if interest rates become real again?
Does anybody remember when interest rates were 5, 10, or 15 percent?
I remember them as a teenager being 19 or 20 percent. But historically,
they have often been at least 5 percent. Do you know what happens to
the Government when the interest rates go to 5 and they have to borrow
for Social Security and Medicare and all the other stuff we have to do?
There will be a catastrophe in this country.
Already the rates are ticking up. The stock market is jittery. If you
ask the question why, maybe it has something to do with the
irresponsibility of Congress spending money that we don't have.
So the bill's going to exceed the budget caps by $296 billion. That
is not counting the money they don't count. So these people are really,
really clever. Imagine them running their fingers together and saying:
How can we hide stuff from the American people? How can we evade the
spending caps so we can be even more irresponsible than we appear? So
$296 billion is the official number. That is about $300 billion over 2
years that will be in excess of the budget caps.

[[Page S818]]

But there is another $160 billion that is stuck into something called
an overseas contingency fund. The budget caps don't apply there. So we
are $300 billion for 2 years over the budget caps, and then another
$160 billion over the caps that they just don't count. They act as if
it doesn't matter: We are just not going to count it.
Then we come to catastrophes. You might say to yourself: Well, I have
great sympathy for the people's houses who were flooded in Texas and
Florida. I do. My sister's house was flooded near Houston. So I have
great compassion. But even for my family, I can't take the money from
you and borrow it from the next generation and say: Here is a pot of
money. Go rebuild your house.
We should do it in a responsible fashion. We have already spent $30-
some-odd billion on emergency relief for the hurricanes. There is
another $90 billion.
Do you know what I have said? Instead of just plunking $90 billion
down or, actually, printing it over at the Federal Reserve or borrowing
it--instead of just doing that--why don't we take the $90 billion from
somewhere in the budget that it shouldn't be?
People come to me all the time and say they want something from the
Government, and I say: Well, if you want something from Government,
tell me where to take it from, because I am not going to borrow any
more.
Where do you get the $90 billion from? I have some suggestions. Do
you know how many votes they get? About 10 or 15 people vote with me.
Let's not send it to Pakistan this year. They burn our flag. They put
Christians in jail. They put in jail Dr. Afridi, the guy who helped us
to find bin Laden. We finally got bin Laden, who had been living high
on the hog a mile or two from a military academy. Everybody in the
Pakistani Government probably knew he was there, and he lived
uninterrupted. We finally got him when Dr. Shakil Afridi gave us
information.
Do you know what Pakistan did to this doctor? He is in jail.
Do you know what they did with a Christian by the name of Asia Bibi?
Pakistan has her on death row. She went to the well in a small village
to draw water. As she was drawing water, the women in the village began
stoning her and beating her with sticks. As she lay on the ground
bleeding, everybody watched and gawked. She was crying out for help,
and the police finally arrived, and she thought she had been saved--
only to be arrested for being a Christian.
Yet we have given $33 billion to Pakistan over the last decade--good
money after bad. Almost everybody up here loves it. They just want more
of your money to go to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China--you name it. They
will send your money anywhere, and we have a country that needs it
here.
Instead of nation-building abroad, why don't we build our country
here at home? Why don't we do some nation-building here at home?
We have $90 billion that we need for emergency relief. Even as
conservative as I am, I would say that we could probably find that. We
are a great, rich country. We could probably rebuild, and the
government can be a part of that. But you know what; why don't we quit
sending it to Pakistan? Why don't we quit sending it to countries that
burn our flag and chant ``Death to America''? Why don't we keep that
money at home? Why don't we say to the government, writ large, that
they have to spend a little bit less?
Does anybody ever have less money this year than they had last year?
Has anybody had a 1-percent pay cut? You deal with it.
That is what government needs--a 1-percent pay cut. If you take a 1-
percent pay cut across the board, you have more than enough money to
actually pay for the disaster relief, but nobody is going to do that
because they are fiscally irresponsible.
Who are they? Republicans. Who are they? Democrats. Who are they?
Virtually the whole body is careless and reckless with your money.
So the money will not be offset by cuts anywhere. The money will be
added to the debt, and there will be a day of reckoning.
What is the day of reckoning? The day of reckoning may well be the
collapse of the stock market. The day of reckoning may be the collapse
of the dollar.
When it comes I can't tell you exactly, but I can tell you that it
has happened repeatedly in history when countries ruin their currency,
when countries become profligate spenders, when countries begin to
believe that debt does not matter.
That is what this bill is about. But here is the confusion. Some at
home would say: We just want them to cooperate. If they would just hold
hands and sing ``Kumbaya,'' everything would be fine.
Guess what. That is what you have.
You saw the leadership of both sides opposing me because they are now
clasped hand in hand. Everybody is getting what they want. Everybody is
getting more spending. The military, the right is getting more military
spending, and the left is getting more welfare spending, and you are
getting stuck with the bill--not even technically you. It is the next
generation that is being stuck with the bill. Your grandkids are being
stuck with the bill.
But mark my words: The stock market is jittery. The bond market is
jittery. There is an undercurrent of unease amidst this euphoria you
have seen in the stock market. A country cannot go on forever spending
money this way, and what you are seeing is recklessness trying to be
passed off as bipartisanship.
So we have gotten together. They are all holding hands, and there is
only one bad guy standing in the way. One guy is going to keep us here
until 3 in the morning.
You know what? I think the country is worth a debate until 3 in the
morning, frankly. I think it is worth a debate on whether or not we
should borrow $1 million a minute. I have been saying that for a few
years: We borrow $1 million a minute. I think that really brings it
home. When we were talking about it with my staff today, they said: You
know, it is almost $2 million a minute now--$2 million a minute.
Can you imagine that? This is exploding. This deficit is exploding.
There isn't the alarm you should see.
Guess what. Every one of these people, you will see them come home to
your State. You will see them come home, and they will tell you how
earnest they are and how the deficit is bad, and Big Government
spending is bad and we have to reduce waste.
It is dishonest. They are not doing anything about the waste. The
waste has been out there for probably a half-century or more. Nothing
has been done in the last 40 years for one precise reason: There is no
oversight.
Do you realize that what they are passing is all of the money glommed
together in one bill? No one will read the bill. No one knows what is
in it. And there is no reform in the bill. That I can say with absolute
certitude. No one will read it. There is no reform, and nothing gets
better. The debt will grow.
When the Democrats are in power, Republicans appear to be the
conservative party, but when Republicans are in power, it seems that
there is no conservative party. You see, opposition seems to bring
people together, and they know what they are not for. But, then, they
get in power, and they decide: Hmm, we are just going to spend that
money too. We are going to send that money to our friends this time.
The hypocrisy hangs in the air and chokes anyone with a sense of
decency or intellectual honesty.
The right cries out: Our military is hollowed out--even though
military spending has more than doubled since 2001.
The left is no better. Democrats don't oppose the military money as
long as they can get some for themselves--as long as they can get some
for their pet causes. The dirty little secret is that, by and large,
both parties don't care about the debt.
The spending bill is 700 pages, and there will be no amendments. The
debate, although it is somewhat inside baseball, is over my having a
15-minute debate, and they say: Woe is me; if you get one, everybody
will want an amendment.
That would be called debate. That would be called an open process.
That would be called concern for your country--enough to take a few
minutes. They are like: But it is Thursday, and we like to be on
vacation on Fridays.
So they clamor, but we have been sitting around all day. It is not
like we

[[Page S819]]

have had 100 amendments today and we are all worn out and we can't do
one more. We are going to have zero amendments--zero, goose egg, no
amendments.
So it is a binary choice. They love that word. It is a binary choice;
take it or leave it.
You know what. I am going to leave it. I didn't come up here for
this. I didn't leave my family throughout the week and travel up here
to be a part of something that is so much inertia and so much status
quo that they are not leading the country. They are just following
along, and it is a big ball rolling down the hill, grabbing up your
dollars as the boulder rolls down the hill, and it is going to crush
us. But nobody has got the guts to stand up and say no.
Over the past 40 years, only 4 times have we actually done 12
individual department-of-government appropriations bills.
Have you heard of the Appropriations Committee? This is where the
spending is. You have the Department of Defense, the Department of
Commerce, and the Department of Health and Human Services. We are
supposed to pass each individual bill. What would happen when we pass
the bills is that they would go through committee and each committee
would look and see: Well, this spending seems to be working. We are
getting a great result, and we want some more next year. This spending
appears to have been put in a closet and lit on fire. So next year we
are not giving that to the person who put the $10 million in the closet
and lit it on fire. We are not going to give them any more money.
But guess what. That doesn't happen. So people keep putting your
money in the closet and lighting it on fire.
You heard about FEMA, this emergency organization. You have heard
about people without food. So there were 350 million meals they needed,
I believe, for Puerto Rico--350 million meals. Do you know who got the
contract? A person who had no employees.
Now, raise your hand--you are not allowed to, actually; but let's
say, raise your hand in a figurative way--if you think it is a good
idea to give a contract for 350 million meals to someone who has no
employees and who is not already in this business. They just know how
to fill out the forms in the Federal Government to trick us into giving
them the contract.
They were woefully short, and there are still people waiting in line
for meals. It is not compassion or no compassion. It is idiocy versus
more idiocy. We gave the money to someone who doesn't even do this--350
million meals.
Over the past 40 years, 4 times have we actually done the right
thing--passed 12 individual appropriations bills, bundled them
together, had a budget, and done the right thing. There is no guarantee
that everybody will be wise in their spending, but it has to be better.
It can't be worse.
What do we do instead? It is called a continuing resolution. We glom
all the bills together in one bill, like we have done tonight--
Republicans and Democrats clasping hands--and nobody is going to look
at it. Nobody is going to reform the spending. As a consequence,
wasteful spending is riddled throughout your government. Only four
times in 40 years have we done the appropriations process the way we
are supposed to.
Recently, they did a Pentagon study--the beginning of an audit--and
they audited part of the Pentagon. This partial audit showed that $800
million was misplaced or lost--just $800 million. I don't think they
actually put it in the closet and burned it, but they can't find it.
A while back they looked at some of the military expenditures, and
they had $29 billion worth of stuff they couldn't find. Overall, the
audit found that over $100 billion in waste was found at the Pentagon--
$100 billion. Well, their budget is like $700 billion. So we are
talking about a significant portion, over a 10-percent problem with
figuring out our waste. It doesn't get any better because we don't vote
on all these things individually, and we don't parse out the
difference.
I will give you another example. In the Department of Defense--last
year we found this out--spent $45 million on a natural gas station in
Afghanistan--$45 million. It was projected to cost $500,000--86-some-
odd cost overruns to $45 million.
So you are scratching your head and saying: Natural gas station, what
is that? We don't have one in my town.
We don't have any in my town, either. They didn't have any in
Afghanistan, but do you know what? They decided they needed to reduce
the carbon footprint of Afghanistan. They would reduce the carbon
footprint of Afghanistan. I thought the military's job was to kill the
enemy. So is the military's job now to reduce their carbon footprint?
So they bought a $45 million gas station that served up natural gas,
and guess what they discovered. They kept waiting. There was a guy
sitting next to the pump. He was sitting on a stool, and he was waiting
for customers. No one ever came.
Someone said: Oh, my goodness, they don't have any cars that run on
natural gas.
That would probably be the same if you came to my town in Kentucky.
Almost no one has a natural gas car in America. They live in a
primitive state in Afghanistan, and you are expecting them to have
natural gas cars?
So they said: Well, gosh, we already built this $45 million gas
station, maybe we should buy them some cars. So they bought them some
cars with your money. They paid for the gas station with your money,
and now they bought them some cars with your money, but then the people
still wouldn't come in because they said: We don't have any money.
They said: OK. Well, we got the gas station, and we have gotten you
cars. You need a credit card, so we gave them credit cards. So they
have a U.S. credit card that you pay for, to take their natural gas car
that you paid for, to go to a natural gas station because we are
reducing the carbon footprint in Afghanistan. When did that become the
job of the military? Why does that go on year after year after year,
the waste?
(Mr. KENNEDY assumed the Chair.)
For 17 years, we have been trying to get the Pentagon to be audited.
Do you know what their response has been? We are too big to be audited.
How is that for your government? Your government is telling you they
are too big to be audited and that scrutiny is just not your business.
Is it any wonder, really, that our debt is a $20 trillion debt? Fifty
years ago, William Proxmire was a Senator. He was a Democratic
Senator--a conservative Democrat, in some ways. He began handing out
something called the Golden Fleece Award, and we will talk about a few
of them.
This is 50 years ago. The reason I want to point this out is, as you
look at this and listen, you will find that some of the stuff we are
doing today is just as bad as 50 years ago. Some of it is the same
agencies. So you scratch your head and you ask: Fifty years? We have
been through a couple of generations of politicians, and they are still
not learning anything from finding this waste? Some of it is the budget
process--the process that we pass these enormous bills that no one
reads, that no one scrutinizes, and that do not reform the spending.
William Proxmire used to do his Golden Fleece Award, and I remember
this as a kid in the early seventies. Here are a couple of things he
pointed out, and this is sort of some of his best.
The National Science Foundation spent $84,000 trying to find out why
people fall in love. Now, there is something that sounds like a really
worthwhile science project with a real specific answer. I think the
conclusion was, they are not exactly sure.
The National Science Foundation, which you will see is a recurring
theme in bad and wasteful spending, also spent about $500,000 to try to
determine why rats, monkeys, and humans bite and why they clench their
jaws. Well, now, you could say that is really important. Maybe we will
discover something from that or you could say, when we are running a
deficit, and we are borrowing the money, maybe some of these things, it
may not be the most worthwhile to borrow the money for them.
This is a good one. This is from the early seventies. The Federal
Aviation Administration spent $57,000 studying the body measurements of
what they called in those days airline stewardesses. These were
trainees, and it was for the purpose of purchasing their safety
equipment. Someone got $50,000 to measure the body measurements of
airline stewardesses.

[[Page S820]]

The Administrator of the Federal Energy Administration--this is still
from William Proxmire 50 years ago--spent millions of dollars to find
out if drunk fish are more aggressive than sober fish. I am not going
to tell you the answer. I am going to let you ponder that one. Do you
think drunk fish are more aggressive than sober fish?
This is your government, this is your money, and this is the debt you
are handing down to your kids and grandkids--and this was 50 years ago.
So now we will get into some of the things we have been doing more
recently.
We do a waste report where we point out some of these things, and
every week we have a new one. I will say, if you want to look at our
waste report, we have that, I believe, on our Facebook and on our
website.
This is one of my favorites. Do you remember when Neil Armstrong
landed on the Moon? He said: ``[O]ne small step for man, one giant leap
for mankind.'' Some people think he said: ``One small step for a man,
one giant leap. . . . `' So there has been some very heated discussion
over whether he said ``one step for man'' or ``one step for a man''--
the preposition ``a.'' Did he or did he not use the preposition ``a''?
So your government, in their infinite wisdom, took $700,000, which,
by the way, was supposed to go to autism research, and they decided to
study Neil Armstrong's statement. So somebody at some university
decided to play the tape over and over to see what he said, and
$700,000 later, they couldn't decide. You know, inquiring minds want to
know, but we still don't know. Did he say ``a man'' or did he say
``man''?
This is the same kind of stuff you were seeing with William Proxmire
50 years ago, but this is last year. I think it is the same group--the
National Science Foundation. I think I am probably going to get some
hate mail from them.
This is $850,000, and we call this one the Game of Waste. You think,
when we are spending money in Afghanistan, well, surely it is to kill
the enemy. Sometimes it is building bridges, and sometimes it is
building roads--stuff we don't do in our country anymore. This one was
$850,000 for the development of a televised cricket league. Since self-
esteem is important, we want the Afghanis to feel good about
themselves, and we want them to be able to watch the national sport on
TV. So we spent $850,000 to get it televised, but the only thing we
didn't reckon is, it was kind of like the natural gas car--they didn't
have TVs. I don't know if we are in the process now of buying them TVs,
but we did spend $850,000 of your money to get a televised cricket
league for those people in Afghanistan.
This is a good one. Everybody likes to take a selfie, right? If you
don't do them, your kids will do them, your grandkids will do them.
This was a study of $500,000 to see if taking selfies makes you happy.
Whether you are smiling or you are frowning and you look at yourself in
the picture, does it make you happy? Now, inquiring minds want to know.
If you want to study that, good for you. Go get somebody to voluntarily
give you some money to study that. All right? I really would like to
watch you going around the neighborhood knocking on doors asking for
money to study whether selfies make you happy.
This stuff has been going on for 40 years. Why don't we root this out
and stop it? Well, one, they will come to you all high and mighty, and
they will say: But, sir, it is science, and you are just a layperson
and don't understand how important selfies could be, and you aren't
qualified to talk about selfies because you don't know about happiness.
We have experts in happiness that can tell that we could make the world
happy again. We could all be happy if we had more selfies. So it goes
on. They give us this scientific mumbo jumbo that somehow we are not
smart enough to have common sense enough to know what we should be
spending money on, but this goes on decade after decade.

School lunch program. You might say: Well, we need to help those who
can't buy a school lunch, so we have a school lunch program, except for
what we discovered was $158 million of Federal money was given to the
Los Angeles School District, and it turns out they were buying things
other than lunches because nobody was watching them. Nobody was
auditing the program. Nobody was doing the individual appropriations
bills. They were passing--clasp hands together--continuing resolutions,
where nobody looks at it: 700 pages and nobody reads it. When nobody
reads it, they buy sprinklers and buy things for themselves like new
televisions for the faculty to watch. It is $158 million that was not
spent on school lunches but was wasted and spent on other items.
Everybody has heard about climate change. There are some undertones
and overtones of politics in climate change. In case you haven't heard
of climate change, the people who want you to hear about climate change
want to spend some of your money to make sure you are listening to them
about climate change, so they spent $450,000 on a video game. This is
also the National Science Foundation. So a whole new generation will be
able to play this video game on climate change, complete with great
graphics. We have this game that your kids can play on climate change.
It is just one thing after another.
All right. You may have been on this one if you are in Washington.
This one we call a Streetcar Named Waste. There is a streetcar over
here a few blocks on H Street, and they spent $1.6 million on it. I
think they had already spent more on it before that, but they spent an
additional--it goes a mile. It goes from nowhere to nowhere. You get
on, and there is nobody on it, and it just cost a fortune. You could
walk from one end to the other in about the same time it takes you to
go on the subway or on this tramway.
You have to ask yourself, when you see this government spending,
would you give money to this? I ask this question often when I am home.
I ask people: If you had $100 you were going to give because you wanted
to help people, would you give it to the Salvation Army or the Federal
Government that spends $1.6 million on a streetcar that goes from
nowhere to nowhere and no one rides?
So I talked about whether we should be spending the money somewhere
else or here. This is $250,000 that was spent on bringing 24 kids from
Pakistan to Space Camp and to Dollywood. You can say: Well, that is
good relations. Now we are going to have good relations with Pakistan.
They are no longer going to kill Christians and put them in jail or
burn our flag--maybe. I am not against interaction. In fact, if this
were some kind of privately funded group that wanted to have some money
to have interaction between us and Pakistan, I would probably be all
for it. First, the pricetag is a little scary to me--$250,000 for 24
kids. I represent a lot of people in Kentucky who don't have the money
to drive down to Huntsville and go to Space Camp with their kids, so
really should we not sort of readjust our priorities and start
thinking, do we need to take care of ours at home here before we start
shipping our money overseas or do we really need to think about can we
afford to just keep borrowing money for projects like this?
This is the Department of Defense, and this I think we referred to
earlier. This was $29 million worth of heavy equipment that they lost--
can't find it in Afghanistan. It is even worse than that. See, they
lost that, but we also made the decision, as we were downgrading the
war in Afghanistan after the last surge we did in Afghanistan, that we
didn't want the other side to have our stuff so we blew up a lot of our
own stuff. We blew up billions of dollars' worth of humvees, tanks, you
name it. When they were looking and counting it up, they found $29
million worth that they couldn't find. If you really think about it,
and you are thinking, how could we have more money for both our
national defense, and how could we have more money for infrastructure--
you hear people talk about infrastructure. People want to build roads.
Republicans and Democrats want to build roads, but guess what. There is
no money. We are a trillion dollars short this year because we passed
these--clasp hands--spend whatever the hell you can find, whatever is
not tied down, spend it and give it away. Both sides spend it like
there is no tomorrow.
If you ask: How could we change our government? Where would there be
some money that we could actually

[[Page S821]]

save? Well, really, some of it is in our foreign policy. We do not have
enough probably for our military to be involved in seven wars. We might
have enough to be involved in maybe three or two or one or maybe we
should not be involved in any of the ones we are involved in at this
point.
The thing is, we said after 9/11 that we are going to go after those
who attacked us, those who aided the attackers and those who abetted
them or supported them. They are all dead. We killed them all. That is
good. We should declare victory and come home from Afghanistan.
Right now, we are over there nation-building. Why do we have trouble
with nation-building? I will give you a story from a Navy SEAL I met a
couple of years ago. He had been in 19 years. He was a tough guy, like
they all are, and he said: Do you know what? We can go anywhere. We can
kill any of our enemies. We can do whatever you ask us to do, but, he
said, the mistake is when the politicians tell us to plant the flag and
create a country. We are just not very good at it.
Most of our military don't want to be policemen. They don't want to
create countries. They would just as soon kill the enemy and come back
home to their family, but we kill the enemy, and then we stay and we
stay and we stay, and we build them schools, we build them roads. There
are some schools that have been built four or five times and blown up
four or five times by the Taliban. It is terrible that the Taliban
doesn't want girls to go to school. It is terrible that the Taliban
would do this, but don't the people who live there have some
responsibility, after we have given them a trillion dollars, to do
something for themselves? Will people do something for themselves if
you keep doing it for them? So really there has to come a time when we
come home. We spend $50 billion a year in Afghanistan. Our mission is
over, and we should come home.
It is $50 billion a year that could be spent on infrastructure, if
you wanted to do that, or in maybe not having a trillion-dollar debt
next year or deficit next year.
We are in a bunch of different places though. When the soldiers were
killed in Niger not too long ago, a country in Africa, many people
didn't even know where the country was, much less that we had 800
troops there. You say: Well, it is only 800; it is not that many. Well,
the problem is, 800 sometimes becomes 8,000, and it sometimes then
becomes 80,000 because when we get in the middle of a civil war and
some of our guys get killed, we are like, well, gosh, we have to do
more, not less. Nobody wants to come home after people have been
killed. They want to go in and punish the enemy. I don't know who the
good people are in Niger or who the bad people are and what they are
fighting about. So I think sometimes it is very unclear who the good
guys and bad guys are.
We have been involved in the Syrian civil war for a long time, and we
aided a group of people who many up here call the moderate Syrian
rebels. Well, it turns out the moderate Syrian rebels were jihadists
often. They hated Israel. The only people they hated about as much as
Israel was us. We gave anti-tank weapons to one group, and the leader
of the group, within a week of getting our anti-tank weapons, said--we
wanted them to fight ISIS--they said: The hell with ISIS. We want to
attack Assad. When we are done with Assad, we want to attack Israel and
get the Golan Heights back.

These are the people we gave weapons to. We poured hundreds of tons
of weapons in there. There are a lot of weapons running through Qatar,
running through the United Arab Emirates, running through Saudi
Arabia--we just poured it in there. A lot of them wound up in the wrong
hands. We kept supporting these moderate fighters who didn't fight. We
spent $250 million training 10 of them. We trained 10 fighters for $250
million. We sent them into battle, and they were captured in the first
30 minutes.
Guess what happened recently. I will give President Trump some credit
for this. They decided to ally with whoever was fighting the best over
there. It turned out the Kurds were, both the Syrian Kurds and the
Kurds who live in Iraq, and they did fight. Now the question is--Turkey
is unhappy with that, so we will throw the Kurds under the bus in favor
of Turkey, which has a leader who has no use for us at this point
either. It is very confusing who the enemy is and who our friends are.
It is also very expensive. We have to defend ourselves, and we may
occasionally have to attack the enemy overseas.
The thing is, if we go and stay for decade after decade--in Iraq, we
didn't stay long enough. How long is long enough? Is it 100 years, 200
years--forever? They don't see us as we said they were going to treat
us--as liberators. They see us as occupiers.
Afghanistan has hated every country that has come in there. They
didn't like the Russians occupying them. They didn't like the British
occupying them. They don't like us there.
There was a movie not too long ago with a depiction in a scene where
they were in a village and freed the village. The general was telling
them: You are free. You are free. The elders of the village gathered
and said: Will you leave now?
They realized that wasn't the end. Eventually, the Americans would
leave, and when they left, the Taliban would come back.
We have to rethink: Are we going to be at war forever? Can we afford
it?
Maybe we have to think about whether or not we should do nation
building here at home and not always abroad. We have to think about the
unintended consequences of what we do as well. I will give you an
example of that. We recently signed a deal to give Saudi Arabia $350
billion worth of military equipment. Currently, Saudi Arabia is using
that equipment to encircle and blockade Yemen, the country next to
them. Yemen is a very poor country. They import about 80 percent of
their food. This is one of the poorest countries on the planet, and
currently 17 million people live on the edge of starvation. But people
convinced themselves that, well, there are some Shia who are supported
by Iran, and we don't want Iran there, so we have to support the
Sunnis.
Does anyone remember who attacked us on 9/11? It wasn't the Shia; it
was the Sunnis. Most of the radical jihadists, the ones who have been
trying to get into our country--in fact, I don't know of any Shia
terrorists who have been here, to tell you the truth. We have had
plenty of Sunni terrorists. All 16 of the hijackers were from Saudi
Arabia. We just released documents last year, the missing pages of the
Saudi Arabia investigation with the 9/11 Commission, which show there
is a possibility they were complicit in those things. They are not
exactly a free country. They are a monarchy that could actually have
power to consume and concentrate, in one person's hands, more and more.
We have to decide what wars we need to be involved in. Our Founders
were very clear about this. Our Founders didn't like war, by the way.
Our Founders had seen virtually perpetual war in Europe. Everybody was
always fighting somebody, and it went on even after founding our
country--cousins fighting cousins, fathers fighting brothers, brothers
fighting brothers; everybody was related. All the royal families of
Europe were related and always fighting with each other. They didn't do
the fighting. They sent the common man to do the fighting.
So when we got to our country, we said: We have these oceans; enough
of that. We want less war. One of the things they included in the
Constitution was a very specific provision that said: When we go to
war, we have to declare war. It has to be passed by Congress.
There was a debate over whether that power should be in Congress or
should be in the hands of the President. Madison said that the
executive, the President, is the branch most prone to war; therefore,
with steady care, we gave that power to the legislature. War is
supposed to be determined by us--ultimately, by us as representatives
of you.
It doesn't happen that way. It hasn't happened that way in a long
time. Why are we at war in seven different places? We don't vote on it.
We haven't voted on anything, really, since the proclamation of the
Iraq war, which I think was a mistake, but we at least voted on it in
2002.
We voted in 2001 to go into Afghanistan for those who attacked us. We
haven't voted on anything since. They

[[Page S822]]

said that the 2001 proclamation gives us the power to go anywhere. Most
people fighting weren't even born and have nothing to do with 9/11 or
Afghanistan. Yet we are in a perpetual war, and we haven't voted on it.
Once again, it is the process that is broken, like the budget. We
have extraordinary waste, and your money gets burned and put in a
closet and thrown down a waste hole. We don't do the right process of
following your money.
War is somewhat the same way. We get involved in war in too many
places because we don't have a vigorous debate.
When we go to war, I tell people that should be the most important
decision we ever make--the most important decision a legislator ever
makes. It should be a profound, moral, and personal decision, as if
your kids were going or as if you were going. It should be a heartfelt
debate, and everybody should speak out, and we should try to figure out
whether it is right to go to war.
Interestingly, when we have been attacked, we have been nearly
unanimous. When we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, they voted. One
person opposed it, and everybody else voted for it. When we were
attacked on 9/11, it was the same thing. I would have voted for that
response. We should have responded. That was the right thing. We voted
and did the right thing.
Since then, we are now at war everywhere, in countries most of us
haven't heard of, fighting on one side or the other, and we don't even
know what we are fighting for. It costs an extraordinary amount of
money, but we are not voting on it. Maybe if we did the right thing--
maybe if we passed the appropriations bills, maybe if we voted on war--
we wouldn't be in so many places. They are all interconnected because
they are intersected to the shortness we have in money.
The last thing I will get to is something called the debt ceiling.
The debt ceiling is something that has been a limitation on how much we
spend, and we have to vote on it. It is an unpleasant vote. They try to
do it for a long period of time or try to stretch it beyond elections.
So this 700-page bill, which no one read, which will continue all
spending and will not reform your government and is irresponsible, and
which we will pass later tonight--that 700-page bill also allows the
debt ceiling to go up. Historically, we would let the debt ceiling--our
borrowing limit--go up a dollar amount. We would say: We have to borrow
money, and it looks as if we will need a trillion dollars. Do you know
how they do it now? Like everything else, we break the rules, and
somehow there is a little bit of deviousness to it. The debt ceiling
will go up in an unspecified amount. As much as you can borrow between
now and November, go for it. So there is no limitation; the debt
ceiling becomes not a limitation at all. They are still taking the
vote--although maybe they don't want to vote on it anymore; they want
it just to happen.
They say: Well, you voted for the spending. I personally think the
more obstacles we have in place to spending money we don't have, the
better we would be.
The debt ceiling will go up in an unspecified amount that will be a
credit card that has no limits, issued to the United States. This is a
problem. Everything about this process stinks, to tell you the truth.
The media doesn't get it. The media does you such a disservice. They
can't understand what is going on sometimes. They say: Bipartisanship
has broken out. Hallelujah. Republicans and Democrats are getting
along.
In reality, they should be telling you: Look for your wallet. Check
your pants to make sure they haven't taken your wallet.
When both parties are happy and both parties are getting together and
doing stuff, guess what. They are usually looting the Treasury. That is
what this bill does. It is going to loot the Treasury. It spends money
we don't have. We will have a trillion-dollar deficit this year.
What I would say to my Republican colleagues--you don't see them
here; I am not sure where they are. What I would say to my Republican
colleagues is: I know every one of you. I have seen your speeches. I
saw every one of you go after President Obama. Was that all empty
partisanship? Do you not really believe it? I promise you, every one of
them went home--and probably will go home next week and say how they
are fiscally conservative and against the debt, and almost all will
vote for this new debt. Almost all will vote for a trillion-dollar debt
in 1 year, and every Republican, at least, was against President
Obama's debt.
At least the Democrats are honest. They are not too concerned about
the debt. They are sometimes concerned about the debt when it comes to
taxes because they don't want people to keep more of their own money.
They are afraid somehow of the imbalance of that.
The thing is, we do have to watch the balance of money--how much
comes in and goes out. Some have said: How can you be a deficit hawk if
you voted for the tax cut? One, because I think you own your labor. You
own the fruits of your labor. You own all of it. You give up some of
your labor to live in a civilized world. My question to you is--
everything you make, everything you own, everything that comes from the
sweat of your brow and work of your hands is yours. If you give up
some, you are giving up your liberty. You give up a little bit of your
liberty, you give up a little bit of your wages to live in a civilized
world, to have law and order and have some government. I am OK with
that.
I ask you: Do you want to give up more or less? Do you want to give
up 100 percent of your paycheck or give up 10 percent of your paycheck?
We should always be about minimizing government. Taxes really are
about how much of your liberty you get to keep--how much of your
liberty to continue spending your own money.
The other side of the ledger is spending. Are we going to have some
government spending? Yes. The Constitution laid out very specific
requirements for what was allowed. Article I, section 8 says what
Congress can do. They are very few and limited. Yet what happened over
time is that we began doing a lot of things that aren't there.
What they said in the Bill of Rights was pretty important, though, in
the Ninth and Tenth Amendment. The Ninth Amendment says that those
rights not listed are still yours and not to be disparaged. So the Bill
of Rights was not a complete listing of your rights. You have many
other rights--such as the right to privacy and the right to property--
that aren't exactly spelled out in the first eight amendments.
The Tenth Amendment said something important too. It said that if the
Constitution didn't explicitly give that power to the Federal
Government, it is left to the States and people respectively. This is
the other reason for our debt. There are checks and balances within the
process. We are supposed to do appropriations bills and all of that.
That might or might not work. It can't be any worse than what we are
doing now.
The real check and balance is the Constitution. The Constitution has
these limits on how big government can get and what government can do.
If we obeyed the Constitution, we would have a balanced budget every
year. If we had a balanced budget every year, would there still be
things the government does? Sure.
We have to assess as a people and we have to decide--and really, this
is the ultimate decision the American people have to make. Are you
going to cheer for the Republicans and Democrats holding hands and
having a trillion-dollar deficit or are you going to say to yourself: I
am suspicious that the Republicans and Democrats are clasping hands and
giving us a trillion-dollar deficit. Is it a good thing? Are we so
excited about civility that we don't care what the result of civility
is? Or are we really sort of misguided in thinking that people aren't
yelling at each other and they have bridged their differences, but the
compromise means we are all going to spend more money, we are going to
ignore the Constitution, the waste is going to continue, and nothing
will be fixed. Are we so sold on civility that we are willing to give
up on it and say: Well, at least we are getting along together. As long
as we are getting along, that is all we want.
I think we are smarter than that. I think the American people are
more perceptive. I think, in the end, the American people will see
through this.

[[Page S823]]

I think they are going to see it as the future unfolds and as the stock
market continues to be jittery. I think they are going to see it as we
move forward and the ramifications of having so much debt come home.
There could be higher interest rates. Those affect not only you
personally but also the massive government programs we have--Social
Security and Medicare. The borrowing we do for our interest is one of
the larger items. I think it is the third largest item we spend right
now. As interest payments grow, they crowd out other things. Right now,
we are still paying government interest in the low 2 percent or a
little bit more. Imagine what happens when it is 5 percent. Even if
interest stays at 2 percent, because government is growing and we have
a bigger debt, we will have an $800 billion interest payment. It will
be the No. 1 one item. It will crowd out everything else.
There are ramifications. There are people who say that when you are
at a 100 percent of your GDP--when your whole economy equals your debt,
you are at the precipice, at the point where you may reach a point of
no return.
There are ways we can fix this. Later this year, I will offer a
budget that freezes spending. You say: Well, how bad could that be? We
will give government the same amount they had last year. If we freeze
all spending--I mean everything we spend money on--we would balance the
budget within about 5 or 6 years, and we would get things back in
balance if we did it.
If you talked to people up here, they would freak out. I promise you,
we will get 10 or 15 votes for freezing spending to try to get it back
in order.
This is what we have to ask as American people: Are you happy with
your government? Are you happy with a trillion-dollar deficit? Are you
happy with people who just don't seem to care? Somehow they care more
about this clasping of hands and everybody getting everything, and then
they get to go home for the weekend.
I think the ramifications for our country are severe and significant.
What I would ask my colleagues, as well as those across the country,
is basically this: What do you want from government? Do you want some
physical item? Is government here so someone can get you something and
give you some physical item, such as a cell phone or a car? Is that
what government is for, or is government here to preserve your liberty?
Most of us--or I would say some of us--believe that your rights are
from God, that they preexist government, and that government's job is
not to get you stuff; government's job is not to get somebody else's
stuff for you; government's job is to preserve your liberty, to
preserve our natural, God-given rights. In doing that, through your
liberty or through your hard work, you may acquire stuff, and the
government helps to prevent your neighbor from stealing it, but your
government shouldn't be the one stealing it from your neighbor and
giving it to you.
Besides, we look at the ramifications of a society where we do think
that we are going to take from one and give it to another, and we are
going to do it through this government transfer program, and we look at
that and ask: Is that good for a person?
A good friend of mine talks a lot about self-esteem, and I like the
way he puts it. He says that self-esteem cannot be given to you. People
say: Well, we need to have--everybody gets a trophy, everybody gets
first place, and whether or not Johnny can read, we need to pat him on
the back and make sure he feels good about whether he can read or not
read. In reality, the only self-esteem you can get is from achievement.
Some people say: Oh, that is easy to say if you have achieved or done
something. But you can have achievement at anything. It is a little bit
akin to this talk we have had about the merits of immigration. There is
merit to hard work, like picking tomatoes. There is merit to being a
doctor, a lawyer, or a professor. There is merit to so many jobs, and
that is also where your self-esteem comes from.
One of the things we are doing in our country is we are destroying
the self-esteem and motivation of the country. What goes along with
that? When we have destroyed your self-esteem, you no longer leave your
house, weight problems, drug problems, and all of the things that ensue
from that. People say: Oh, you are simplifying addiction; it doesn't
all come from Big Government. Maybe. Maybe not. But I think there is a
correlation to not working and the disease that comes from nonwork.
You say: You are heartless. You are just saying that everybody should
work, and there are not jobs. There is virtually full employment now.
We have less than 4 percent unemployment. Yet, the way we measure it,
we still have communities that have 30 percent nonworkers because they
are no longer counted. This is where a lot of the problem exists in our
society. A lot of the drug problem is coming from nonworkers.
So I think we have to reflect on what we want from government. Do you
want something material from government? Do you want government to give
you something that your neighbor has that you don't have, or do you
want government to protect your God-given liberty?
I think that if we realize that the abstraction of liberty is
something amazing and incredible and that is what our government is
about, maybe we would bicker less and we would become more unified as a
people, knowing that what you are trying to get is not something--they
talk about whether coveting something is a bad thing. When you covet or
you really want something of somebody else's, some of it is because it
is somebody else's, but some of it is because it is a material thing
you want instead of sort of the freedom to search and seek out, through
work and through life and through art and through literature, your own
bit of self-esteem.
I think that if we knew what government was about and we recognized
the true function of government, we wouldn't be in this state. I can
tell you that I am very, very saddened by where we are. I am saddened
mostly by the debate on my side. I have disagreements with the other
side, but I know where they are as far as these issues are concerned. I
am saddened that on my side, many people who give lipservice to
believing and saying they are fiscal conservatives will vote for a bill
that adds $1 trillion to the debt. I think that if we were really
honest with ourselves, we would say no.
They say: The government will shut down.
I don't want the government to shut down. I think it is a dumb idea.
In fact, I proposed legislation called the Government Shutdown
Protection Act. What my legislation would do is this: You have a year
to do your appropriations bills. There are 12 different units of
government, and that is your job. How do we make these people do their
job if they won't do their job? What we say is that over this 12-month
period, if you don't do your job, government will continue spending,
but government will continue spending 1 percent less. So government
would go on spending 99 percent of what they spent the last year, but
every 90 days, we would take 1 more percent from government until the
people in government decide to do their job.
I see some Members of the House did their job last year; they passed
all 12 appropriations bills. Yet the Senate I think finally, in the
end, passed one, 4 or 5 months into the fiscal year.
So I think if we look at it that way and say ``How can we convince
Congress to do its job?'' that is part of the answer: passing the
individual appropriations bills but also evaluating them for waste and
being concerned with waste.
Probably equally important is understanding that the function of
government, the powers of government are few, defined, and limited.
That was a big thing that Madison talked about. When you read the
Federalist Papers, he is talking about how there are very specific
functions of government. Government wasn't supposed to do everything.
There is nothing in the Constitution about education. You say: Oh my
God, he would get the Federal Government out of the education system?
Absolutely. Get them completely out. The Constitution said nothing
about them being in it, and we don't have the money for it, and the
State governments are better at it. I am not saying the State
government can't be involved, but the Federal Government

[[Page S824]]

shouldn't be involved at all in education. As a consequence of
government, it gets bigger and bigger.
We take on new functions of government that really were never spelled
out in the Constitution. The Department of Commerce--it could be gone,
and you would never know it, probably. It could be gone and we would
save $35 million. And most of its functions are not in the
Constitution.
We have to have some of that debate over what is the proper role,
what is the constitutional role. How will we have that debate if we are
not allowed to amend the bill? If we are given a 700-page bill the
night before, nobody reads it, and they say it is done, it is a binary
choice--their favorite word--binary choice, take it or leave it. I am
leaving it. I could not go home and look my wife in the face; I could
not go home and look my friends in the face; I could not go home and
look in the faces of anybody who voted for me and say: Oh yeah, you
know, President Obama, he was terrible. He had trillion-dollar deficits
as far as the eye can see. But the Republican deficits are not quite as
bad because they are just $1 trillion.

That is what we are doing here. The Republican side is telling
America that trillion-dollar deficits are bad when they are Democrats,
but they are OK when they are Republicans. So they are telling you that
deficits are bad when the other guys do it but not so bad when we do
it. This is the height of hypocrisy.
This is sort of maybe the uncomfortableness that this debate
engenders. If having this debate is uncomfortable, this is maybe why we
don't have amendments. It is sort of backfiring because I am going to
talk about this for quite a while, and we are going to vote at three in
the morning because they wouldn't let me have a vote during the day,
and I probably won't get a vote. I think it is misguided. We should
have had 20 votes. There are votes Democrats wanted that I probably
would disagree with, that I would have voted no on, but I would have
voted to let them have amendments.
This is a big deal. This is our spending. This is what the Congress
is supposed to do, assess our spending and how much we spend. Yet we
are not going to have amendments to it. It is predecided by some secret
cabal of leadership from both sides who have now clasped hands to say:
We have won. The country has won. We now have a $1 trillion deficit
this year.
The American people are losing by this, so I think we have to figure
out a better way. We have to figure out a way where we do our job,
which is that for each of the individual appropriations bills, we look
at them and we scrutinize waste.
I showed you some of the William Proxmire Golden Fleece Awards from
1968, and the same agency that has been wasting that money is still
here. We haven't limited their budget. Their budget is probably tenfold
bigger than it was in 1968, and we are still doing the crazy stuff.
Actually, let's do the one I can't resist. Here is a good one from
the same group of people who brought you Neil Armstrong and $700,000 to
study. What did he say? One small step for man, one large step for
mankind. These people--they one-up even Neil Armstrong. They wanted to
know whether Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine.
Inquiring minds want to know.
The thing is, I think we--I wish that there were a button and that we
could ask people to just sort of dial in and push a button. Do you
think Japanese quail are more promiscuous on cocaine? We spent $356,000
studying this. This is the craziness.
Why do we do this every year? Why isn't it getting better? We don't
look at it. So if you have a 700-page bill and nobody ever looks at it,
how are we going to find this? Even in an appropriations bill--if we
did an appropriations bill that included this, it would still be 500
pages long and you would have to hunt long and hard to find this. Why
do we have conditions on how you spend your money? Because we don't
look at it. Nobody reads any of these bills. We don't do individual
bills.
People come to my office and say: I am for legal aid, and I think
people should be able to have a lawyer, and poor people should get
help. I listen to them, and I say: Well, you know, I have never voted
on that, and I probably won't ever vote on that. I won't even vote on
the department of government that oversees legal aid because I am given
a 700-page bill that has all of the government spending.
What is ironic about this is that we have dozens and dozens of people
who come to our office every day saying: We like this part of
government. I say: Well, I never get to vote on it, so I don't know if
I can help you or hurt you because I never get to vote on that part of
government. They make me vote on all of government, so it is either all
or none. The binary choice is shut it down or keep it open, but don't
reform it. I think that is a terrible choice.
I did a hearing this week and I called it ``The Terrible, Rotten, No-
Good Way to Run Your Government.'' That is what I believe. It is a
terrible, rotten, no-good way to run your government, and we shouldn't
do it.
I will tell you this. This is a secret. So don't tell anyone. I have
talked to probably 50 Senators in the last 3 weeks, and most of them
say: I kind of agree with you. It is a really crummy way. This is the
last time I am voting for it.
Didn't you tell me that last year and the year before, that this is
your last CR, that you were never going to vote for another one?
Do you know what would happen? Let's say that this speech was so
persuasive that all of my colleagues came in here and got a conscience
and voted down the spending and said: Hooey with all of you; we are not
going to spend all that money. The government would shut down over the
weekend. We would come back on Monday and do our job. We would start
looking at each thing individually, and we would say that these are
things we shouldn't spend it on and these are things we should, and we
would begin that process.
The other thing is, if you pass one appropriations bill, then you
don't have to worry about that part. That is more than one-twelfth of
government; it is probably about a third of the government. You passed
that, so then you don't have to worry about shutting down. Each time
you pass an appropriations bill, you move on to another. We have to do
that.
I think the thing that is disappointing to probably everybody in
here, Republican and Democrat--they will tell you: Oh, it is a terrible
way to run the government. Yet we are doing it. We did it a week ago,
we did it 3 weeks ago, and we did it a month ago. This is the fourth
time we have done it this year. Since I have been here, we have never
passed all of the appropriations bills. We have never had extended
debate in committees.
I was thinking about this the other day. I was thinking, what if the
first day you got sworn in, the leadership sat in the chair, and all
100 people were required to be here or requested strongly to be here,
and we had a frank discussion, and we said to both sides: This is the
year we are not doing any continuing resolutions. Guess what--it will
just shut down if we don't, but we are going to do our job. In the
first 3 months of the fiscal year, we are going to have hearings, and
the main job will be to authorize and appropriate the money--3 months
for each committee. That is a pretty long time, actually. Then maybe
spend a whole week or 2 weeks in the committee with amendments for
specific things like, we have decided this year not to study what
cocaine does for Japanese quail, so this would be the year we finally
stop doing that. You would have that debate, 3 months on committees,
and 9 months left to do the spending bills.
Then, if you were sitting in the chair, you would say: This is the
way we are going to do it. And each appropriations bill--we are going
to take 3 weeks on the floor to do it--3 weeks. We are not going to
putter around, obfuscate, and not have any amendments.
One reason we are going to send this over to the House at midnight is
that we are hoping they are too tired to vote no. So we are going to
send it over late tonight or at 3 in the morning, but it is
purposefully done. We don't do amendments. We don't do anything in a
timely fashion. We wait around until the very end, and at the very end,
we are trying to wear people out so there isn't sufficient energy to
really scrutinize your government and its spending.

[[Page S825]]

We have had all week; we could have done all this.
But let's say we did committee hearings for 3 months, and then for 9
months--the rest of the fiscal year--we did the appropriations bills,
and then we spent 3 weeks on the floor and let people bring amendments.
My first amendment would be that the National Science Foundation would
no longer be able to do most of the stuff they do. The only way you do
this is by giving them less money--maybe half as much; I don't know, 25
percent of what they get--a lot less, because they are spending a lot
of it on things they shouldn't be doing.
This goes on throughout government. We have the same debate all the
time. We had this debate with the post office. They are losing $1
billion a quarter. That is quite a bit of money. They came before our
committee and said we need to pay them sufficiently. You can't have
good-quality people unless you pay them. They pay the top guy like $1
million, $1.5 million to keep talent? How much talent does it take to
lose $1 billion a quarter? I can lose half a billion for $500,000 a
year. So it is the ridiculous notion of government.
Sometimes I wonder, are people in government--is government
inherently stupid or populated by people who are inherently stupid? I
don't think so. I think there are well-meaning people in government, so
they are not inherently stupid, but they don't give the right or proper
incentives.
Think about it in your life. If I were to ask you for $10,000 each
and say ``I have this business proposition; will you give me $10,000?''
you are going to think long and hard about what you had to do to get
the $10,000. And if you give it to me, you are probably going to have a
little pang inside, hoping that I pay dividends to you and that you get
your money back. But it is really a heartfelt decision. It doesn't make
it always the right decision, but it is a heartfelt decision, and you
really struggle with every fiber of your being to make sure you made
the right choice, even though it is not always going to be right.
In government, imagine your city council person, $10,000--it is not
their money. Then imagine that you go to the State legislature, and it
is not $10,000, it is $2 million. Then imagine you get up here, and it
is now $2 billion or maybe $200 billion. It is not their money.
So when we look at government and ask why government is so bad,
Milton Friedman hit the nail on the head. Milton Friedman said:
``Nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as he spends his own.''
That is the truth of it, and that is the way government is. Government
will never be efficient because of the very nature of government. It is
not an argument for no government, but it is an argument for minimizing
how big government is.
Government should never be involved in something that somebody else
is already doing, that the private sector can do, because government
will never be as efficient because nobody spends somebody else's money
as wisely as they spend their own. This actually goes hand in hand with
what the Founders thought. The Founders thought people ought to be left
free to do most things themselves, so they very significantly limited
what the Federal Government is supposed to do.
So as we move forward in this debate and as we look at what can be
done to bring back the greatness of this country, I think we do have to
be worried about the debt we are accumulating. My hope is that both
sides of the aisle will look long and hard and say that this isn't the
way we should run our government--not just say this and say ``next
time'' but maybe say ``this time.''
I promise you, both sides of the aisle have told me this week: It is
a terrible way to run government; you are exactly right. Continuing
resolutions, putting all the spending in one bill, not reading it,
having no analysis, and not getting rid of the waste, is a terrible way
to run the government. But almost everybody who told me that this week
is going to vote for this.
So the only way this ever gets fixed is to call these people and
convince them they need to do their job, which is do the individual
appropriations bills. They need to pay attention to the Constitution,
or, frankly, you need new people. That is what the American people have
to decide: Do you need new people, or are you happy with them borrowing
$1 trillion?
I think it is completely and utterly irresponsible and something no
American family would do. I don't care whether you are a Democrat, a
Republican, or an Independent, no American family lives the way your
government does. It is completely and utterly irresponsible.
As we look at this debate, my hope is that both sides will come
together and say: Enough is enough. This is the time--tonight--I say
no.
Thank you, Mr. President.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, please inform me when 10 minutes has
expired.
I rise tonight to let the military know that we may have a short
night in the Senate, but you are going have better days ahead. This
whole exercise, for me, is about you. It is about those who have been
fighting this war for the last 17 years. It is about stopping the
madness created by the Congress in 2011.
What we did in 2011 was we came up with a budget proposal called
sequestration. If we could not find a bipartisan path forward to cut
$1.2 trillion in the Federal budget over a decade, we would punish the
military by taking $600 billion out of the military and $600 billion
out of nondefense spending and leave entitlements alone. Nobody thought
it would happen. There was a penalty clause in the Budget Control Act
to make sure that the supercommittee would act responsibly. Guess what.
They didn't. There is no use blaming them over everybody else. The
bottom line is, we couldn't reach a budget agreement. We spent $47
trillion over the next 10 years, which is how much we will spend. We
couldn't save $1.2 trillion, so sequestration kicked in.
What has it done to our military? This is what General Mattis, the
Secretary of Defense, said:

Let me be clear: As hard as the last 16 years of war have
been on our military, no enemy in the field has done as much
harm to the readiness of U.S. military than the combined
impact of the Budget Control Act's defense spending caps,
worsened by operating for 10 of the last 11 years under
continuing resolutions of varied and unpredictable duration.

This is the Secretary of Defense telling the Congress that no enemy
on the battlefield has done more damage to our military than the budget
agreement that we reached in 2011.
I want to congratulate President Trump for keeping his campaign
promise to rebuild the military.
In case you couldn't understand what I said, here it is in writing.
Spend some time looking at it. This is one of the most respected
warriors of his generation, who is now Secretary of Defense, telling
the Congress to end the madness. Tonight we are going to end the
madness. If we have to lose some sleep, we are going to end the
madness.
We are going to spend $160 billion over the next 2 years rebuilding a
military that has been in decline since 2011. How bad is it? It is
terrible. If you don't believe me, just listen to what our commanders
say. About 60 percent of the F-18s in the Navy aren't able to fly. We
have lost more people in training accidents than we have lost on the
battlefield. If you ask every military commander, they will tell you
that sequestration has done a lot of damage when it comes to our
military readiness. This $160 billion infusion of cash is much needed.
When you talk about deficits, here is what I can tell you. We are
spending, GDP-wise, at the lowest level on defense really since World
War II, when you look at GDP spending on defense. It has been above 4,
close to 5 percent of GDP; we are in the 3.5-percent range. When I hear
Senator Paul say we have doubled the defense budget, compared to GDP
spending on defense, we are at the low end.
What has happened since 2011? This is the way the world has turned
out since we passed sequestration through the Budget Control Act. The
Syrian civil war came about, the collapse of Libya, the rise of ISIL,
the invasion of the Ukraine, and the annexation of Crimea by Russia.
China is building islands over land claimed by others. Yemen is falling
apart. North Korea is pressing toward the capability to hit the
homeland with a nuclear-tip missile. We have had cyber attacks come
from North Korea.

[[Page S826]]

The bottom line is, since 2011, all hell has broken loose, and we
have been standing around here looking at each other instead of
listening to our commanders. President Trump has listened. President
Trump is behind this budget agreement--2 years of funding to rebuild
the military at a time they need every dollar they can get.
As to the deficits, yes, they bother me, but here is what I can tell
the public without any hesitation: You can eliminate the Department of
Defense, and you are not going to change the debt situation long term
for the country. Two-thirds of the debt is driven by mandatory spending
in interest on the debt itself. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security
are entitlement programs that are growing in a tremendous fashion
because the baby boomers are retiring en masse. We have fewer workers,
and all these trust funds are failing. That is what drives the debt,
not military spending. One-third of the Federal budget is discretionary
spending. Out of that one-third comes the military, and it is about 50
percent of the one-third.
All I can say is that I want to applaud Senator McConnell and Senator
Schumer for reaching an agreement. The nondefense spending is about
$160-something billion. What does that mean? That helps the FBI.
Without this infusion of cash, the FBI will have fewer agents in 2018
than they did in 2013. They are on the frontline of defending the
Nation as much as anybody else. The Department of Homeland Security,
the CIA, the National Security Administration--all of these nondefense
agencies have a defense role, and they will benefit from this budget
agreement.
Sequestration did not get us out of debt. Fixing sequestration is not
going to add to the debt in any serious way.
Every Republican voted for the tax cuts because we believe the $1.5
trillion and then some will be made up by economic growth. I think we
are more right than wrong about that.
When it comes to defense spending, Republicans and Democrats have
finally listened to this statement by General Mattis, and all of us
came together behind our President to increase defense spending in a
fashion relevant to the need.
To those who believe that the military is well-funded, you are not
listening to anybody in the military. You haven't spent any time in the
field. I have been to Iraq and Afghanistan 42 times in the last decade.
I can tell you the pressure that has been placed upon our military. You
have to put all of the money in deploying people--robbing Peter to pay
Paul--so training suffers and readiness suffers.
It has been a miserable experience to be in the military the last 4,
5 years. Families go lacking. People are deployed more than they should
be because we are not big enough. This $160 billion is going to allow
us to grow the Navy. We are moving toward a 350-ship Navy, not 278. We
have the smallest Navy since 1915, the smallest Army since 1940--that
is where we are headed under sequestration. This turns it around.
President Trump, thank you for keeping your promise to rebuild our
military.
To Senator Schumer and Senator McConnell, thank you for working
together in getting us on track to rebuild the military and help some
accounts that need help outside the military.
To the Members of the body, there are a million reasons to vote no on
any bill. While I respect how you vote, I don't know how you go to the
military and explain your vote if you vote no. How do you tell those in
uniform, who are getting by under incredibly difficult conditions
because they don't have the money to train and be ready--they are in a
hot war. What do you tell them--well, I voted no because this and that?
The deficit and debt are a problem. Senator Paul, to his great
credit, is willing to reform entitlements. I have worked with him and
Senator Lee to reform Medicare and do something about Social Security
to keep these programs from going broke. I will compliment Senator
Paul. He is a man of great political courage when it comes to taking on
hard issues like entitlement reform. But when it comes to military, I
could not be more different. He is holding us up. He has every right to
do so.
I just want to let our soldiers know, and all their families, that we
are going to wait him out and that you are not the reason we are in
debt. The money we are giving you, you take gladly. There will be a
smaller pay raise in here. But Senator Paul's solution to raising pay
for the military is to withdraw from Afghanistan.
I have not heard one general tell me we can leave Afghanistan safely.
That day will come, but we are nowhere near that day. All I can tell
the public is, the last time we took our eye off Afghanistan, we got 9/
11. I don't know how much money we spent after 9/11, but we lost almost
3,000 Americans. Based on 19 people who were willing to kill
themselves, they took almost 3,000 of us with them. Just think what
would have happened if we had left too soon. We are not going to do
that again--never again.
I trust those in our military leadership. I am proud of my Commander
in Chief, President Trump, for giving them the ability to fight the
war. The gloves are now off. They just need the resources to take the
fight to the enemy and turn it around because what happens over there
matters here. If you don't believe me, remember 9/11.
Whatever it takes and as long as it takes, we are going to increase
defense spending in the next 24 hours. Then we are going to start
marching to fix other problems. The Dreamers have waited a very long
time to bring certainty to their lives. Next week, we will take up
their problems, their plight. The one thing I can tell you today is, in
the next 24 hours, we are going to end the nightmare for the military.
Next week, we will take up solutions to help the Dream Act population
and secure our borders. We can do two things at once.
If you want to get the country out of debt, count me in. If you want
to tell younger people they have to work longer and cannot retire at 65
because we live so much longer, count me in. If you want people at my
income level to take less from Social Security because I can afford to
give some up, count me in. If you want people in my income level to pay
more into Medicare because we should, count me in.
The one thing for which you cannot count on me is to use the military
as a punching bag and blame it on them that we are in debt. We are not
in debt because of them. What General Mattis said is we can always
afford freedom, and we can afford survival.
If you don't believe the people we are fighting would kill us all if
they could, then you have a short memory. The only reason 3,000 died on
9/11 and not 3 million is they couldn't get the weapons with which to
kill more of us. If North Korea keeps going the way it is going, God
help us all. If the Iranians ever go nuclear, God help us all. We live
in dangerous times.
If radical Islam could get its hands on a chemical or a biological
weapon, it would use it. The best way to keep them from hurting us here
is to stay over there and partner with our Afghan partners, our Iraqi
partners, and others. More Muslims have died in this fight than anybody
else. They have seen the face of the enemy, and I have certainly seen
it. The best way to keep it off our shores is to have a strong military
that creates lines of defenses over there so we can be safe here.
I am very happy tonight. I had to miss my flight, and I am not going
to get much sleep, but what we are doing pales in comparison to what
the military has done for the last 5 or 6 years--a lot with less. They
have taken on too much danger and too much risk because the Congress
has sat on the sidelines and watched Rome burn. Those days are over.
Whenever we vote, we are going to vote. I will make a prediction that
we are going to get more than 60 votes to fund the military. When it
gets to the House, to my fiscal conservative friends, I understand
there are things in the nondefense spending aspect of this they will
not like--I get that--but there are Democrats in this body, and there
are Democrats in the House, and they have a say. That is just the way
it is.
So I will sleep well tonight. I may not sleep long, but I will sleep
well in knowing that the men and women in uniform, who have suffered so
much for so long, will be better off in the morning. A short night for
me will mean better days ahead for them.

[[Page S827]]

All I can say to my colleagues is not to let these groups mislead
them about what their job is. Their job as Members of the U.S.
Congress, in my opinion, is to defend this Nation above all else.
Without national security, Social Security really doesn't matter.
Without national security, everything we enjoy could be lost.
The primary role of the Federal Government, in my view, is to give
the men and women in uniform, who are all volunteers, what they need to
keep us safe. Come tomorrow, they are going to have more. If it means
we stay up late tonight, so be it.
To the congressional leadership, thank you. To the President, thank
you for being a Commander in Chief we have desperately needed for the
last 8-plus years. To my colleagues, vote yes. You may get some
criticism from people who run blogs, but the next time you see a
soldier, you will know you voted right.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
Mr. GRAHAM. Thank you, Mr. President.
I will be making a unanimous consent request in just a second. The
reason I am doing this is that every hour we go without funding the
military, every day that we wait, and the longer we continue this
madness, the worse it is for those who fight in a war we can't afford
to lose.
I think that Congress, in the words of General Mattis, has done more
damage to the military than any enemy on the battlefield. So tonight I
am speaking for you. We are going to end this madness as soon as we
possibly can.
I respect Senator Paul, who is a fiscal conservative--every bit of
it--but when it comes to national security, not so much. He wants to do
entitlement reform. God bless him. That is where the money is at.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding rule
XXII, at 8 p.m. today, the Senate vote on the motion to invoke cloture
on the motion to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment
to H.R. 1892 with a further amendment; further, that if cloture is
invoked, all postcloture time be yielded back and the Senate vote on
the motion to concur.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I think no
one in this body more than I wants to continue funding the military. I
have three nephews serving in the military. My father-in-law is a
career Air Force man, and my dad served in the military. However, I
think it is also important when we talk about how we have a strong
country that we have to talk about solvency. There comes a point in
time when you borrow so much money that it actually becomes a threat to
your national security.
It was Admiral Milliken, the former Chief of Staff, who said that the
biggest threat to our national security currently is our national debt.
I think there is an irony that those who criticized President Obama
for trillion-dollar deficits are now in the body saying: Oh, we must
pass this trillion-dollar deficit.
Yes, I do think it is important that we have this debate. What I have
been arguing for tonight is not a delay, not any kind of permanent
delay. What I have been arguing for is an open debate.
So if we are having all the spending, every last bit of spending has
been glommed together in one bill, 700 pages. No one has read it.
Nobody has any idea what is in it, and there is no reform. I think if
we are going to do that, I think we ought to at least have amendments
and have an open debate.
If we are not going to have an open debate, if it is going to be
``take it or leave it,'' frankly, I will leave it because I think my
duty. What I told the American people was that I care. I care about how
much debt we are accumulating in this country, and I think it is a
danger to our national security to accumulate so much debt.
Therefore, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
Mr. GRAHAM. I know what is in it--$160 billion over the next 2 years
that is absolutely necessary to rebuild a military that is in decline.
If you don't believe me, ask the Secretary of Defense.
There are other things in this bill, some of which I like and some of
which I don't. I know this: If the President of the United States, who
is our Commander in Chief, says he will sign it if we will send it to
him, and the reason that we are not going to send it to him right now
is because Senator Paul has every right to object, this is a debate
worth having.
What is the most important thing for our country?
The deficit and debt are real, and, to his credit, Senator Paul is
willing to do the hard things, such as to change the age of retirement
and to means test those benefits. That is how you get out of debt.
What we are doing tonight is putting money into the pipeline of a
military that has suffered mightily since Senator Paul and others voted
for sequestration in 2011.
Enough is enough. The day of reckoning is upon us. Every hour, every
minute matters to me. So this is what I am trying to tell people back
in South Carolina: If you are worried about the debt and deficit, count
me in. But to go there, you have to do something that very few people
will do, and Senator Paul is not in the category of the very few.
On the debt and deficit, I give him high marks--on national security,
not so much.
He said tonight on television that the best way to give the military
a pay raise is to withdraw from Afghanistan. Go over to Afghanistan
before you say that. Name one military commander that believes that is
a rational approach to increasing military pay. You had better pay them
a lot more because they are going to be fighting for a lot longer if we
leave now.
How much has 9/11 cost us? It is this kind of thinking that led to 9/
11. The only people I know who like that idea are the Taliban. They
wish we would leave tomorrow.
ISIL is now present in Afghanistan. I wish the world were not so
dangerous, and I wish it wasn't so complicated, but it is. Have we
learned nothing from radical Islam? ``Leave them alone, and they will
leave you alone'' does not work. Their goal is to destroy their faith
and rebuild it in the image of their view of Islam, to destroy our
friends in Israel, and to come after Christians, vegetarians,
Libertarians. They are coming after you, and the only thing between
them and us are the men and women in the military--the 1 percent who
have suffered mightily.
In the words of General Mattis: No enemy has done more damage to our
readiness than budget cuts plus continuing resolutions.
He is a nice man. Let me say it more directly: Congress has shot down
more planes through budget cuts then any enemy could hope to. Congress
has crippled the Navy more than the Chinese or the Russians could have
ever hoped to. Congress has made it harder for people to be with their
families because our military is too small for the times in which we
live.
The times in which we live are the most dangerous since the 1930s. I
will repeat that again. The only reason 3,000 of us died on 9/11 is
that they couldn't find a way to kill more of us. If they could ever
find that way, they will do it. As long as we have some soldiers in
Afghanistan, Afghanistan is not likely to be the platform for the
second 9/11.
If you think this is over the top, talk to the people fighting the
war. Go there yourself. I spent a lot of time in Afghan prisons and
detention centers, looking at the enemy, as a reservist and as a
Senator. I know exactly what they have in mind for us.
Here is my pledge to those who are doing the fighting. We are going
to end this insanity. We are going to rebuild the military.
President Trump, thank you so much. Thank you for understanding that
debt and deficits are no excuse to leave the warfighter hanging out.
What do you tell somebody who doesn't have the equipment they need to
go to the fight? Well, the debt and deficit are the reasons you don't
get any more. If we have to raise taxes--whatever it is--to make sure
that we can keep our military going, I will do it.

[[Page S828]]

I have come to conclude, like Ronald Reagan, that the best way to
help the economy is to cut taxes. Ronald Reagan cut taxes, he rebuilt
the military, and he engaged in entitlement reform. We should follow
his lead. Ronald Reagan did not believe in this isolationist approach.
He believed that on the other side of that wall is an evil empire, and
he stared it down.
I went to the military in 1981. The first thing I got was a 25-
percent increase in pay by Ronald Reagan. I liked that guy from that
day until now. The morale was low after the Carter years, and readiness
was in decline. Reagan changed everything.
President Trump, I think you are on course to change everything. We
are taking the gloves off. We are changing the rules of engagement. We
are going to provide the equipment and training that our men and women
desperately need. We are going to set aside these budget cuts.
To Senator McConnell and Senator Schumer, thank you for coming
together. To those who object to some things in this bill, I get it.
But what is more important--the debt or deficit or the war in which we
are in? There is nothing in this bill, if it went away tomorrow, that
would get us out of debt. The debt that we are adding to defend the
Nation can be fixed in 5 minutes if we did some entitlement reform.
When I was 21, my mom died. When I was 22, my dad died. My sister was
13. We moved in with an aunt and uncle who never made more than $25,000
in their life working in the cotton mills. If it wasn't for survivor
benefits and social security going to my sister, we would have had a
hard time making it. If it weren't for Pell grants, she probably
wouldn't have gone to college.
I am 62, and I am not married. I don't have any kids. I make $175,000
a year. I will gladly give up some of my Social Security so people who
need it more than I can have it. I will gladly pay more into Medicare
to keep it from falling apart. I think a lot of people like me would do
that if they were asked. So I don't need any lectures about the debt
and the deficit.
We are in a shooting war. We had more people die in training
accidents than we had in combat because we made them do too much for
too long without enough. That is going to end.
So, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding rule
XXII, at 8 p.m. today, the Senate vote on the motion to invoke cloture
on the motion to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment
to H.R. 1892 with a further amendment; further, that if cloture is
invoked, all postcloture time be yielded back and the Senate vote on
the motion to concur.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I think there
are some interesting points when we look at our debt, in trying to
figure out how best to fix it.
What we have been dealing with today is a spending bill of about 700
pages, but it does deal only with what is called discretionary
spending. This is military and nonmilitary spending, and it is about
one-third of what we spend over all. The other two-thirds is called
entitlement spending or mandatory spending.
So often people will say: Well, we can't cut the discretionary
spending because we are not doing anything to the two-thirds of the
spending that is mandatory; this is Medicare, Medicaid, Social
Security, food stamps, and some welfare programs. It is true that they
are growing at a rapid rate. They are growing at about 6 percent and
the military and nonmilitary are growing at about 2 percent.
So there is more of a problem on the entitlement side, but often you
will hear people come to the floor and say: Well, we can't. We have cut
all this discretionary spending, and what we really need to do is
entitlements.
Yet this is a bit of a canard, because I have been here 6 years, and
I have tried to push entitlement reform and tried to push cost savings,
but we have never had a bill come to the floor.
So people say: Well, I am not going to cut this, but if the other
were to come to the floor with mandatory spending cuts--how come nobody
brings it to the floor? It never comes to the floor. So two-thirds of
the budget or spending is never being cut, and it is growing at 6
percent. It is a problem. Entitlements have to be contained.
Some of the problem is not the Republicans' or the Democrats' fault.
It is basically a function that we are living longer. When Social
Security was created, the average life expectancy was 65 years or less.
Now the average life expectancy is about 80. So you can see how the
costs have risen dramatically. We are living a lot longer.
The other thing that happened is that somewhere along the way, when
we were victorious in World War II, we came home and had a lot of
babies, for one reason or another. They are the baby boomers--60 to 70
million of them. There is an enormous cost of retiring baby boomers and
we are living longer.
These things have added to entitlement costs. There are things we
could do. I recommended that we gradually raise the age of eligibility.
People say: Oh, you don't want people to get their Social Security at
65? Well, it is already 67, actually.
On Medicare, the problem is that if we leave things as is, Medicare
is $35 trillion short, and Social Security is about $7 trillion short.
So we are $7 trillion short in Social Security and $35 trillion short
in Medicare. You have to do something about the entitlements.
However, the same grievance I have with the process here is the same
grievance I have with entitlement reform. I have been pushing for it
for 6 years. I have produced bills that never get here. So the
leadership on both sides--and in fact, I have heard this before--will
say: You can talk about it, but don't put it on paper.
So many people are for entitlement reform until it comes to the
specifics. You saw this in the debate over ObamaCare. Try getting rid
of any kind of entitlement or lessening it or making it less effective,
and people freak out at that.
It is true that we have to look at entitlements. If we were to look
at entitlements, it would take some pressure off of the military
spending, but it is also important to put military spending in
perspective. We have doubled military spending since 2001. We have put
a lot of money into the military.
Then there is the question of what is national defense. Is defense
having weapons to defend ourselves against attack, having troops and
armaments and being able to defend and occasionally go to where the
attackers are, or is it the job of the military to be involved in every
civil war around the world?
Currently, we are involved in at least seven different wars. None of
them have been voted on. Our Founding Fathers said that the executive
branch was the most prone to war, and, therefore, they gave that power
to Congress. Yet we haven't voted on any of the seven wars we are
involved with. There are seven different wars around, at least.
There have been people talking about authorizing war, and they want
us to be involved legally somehow in 34-some-odd countries. So we
should have a more robust debate. We haven't been able to force a
debate on whether or not we are at war for the last 7 years. I have
been trying to get a vote on whether or not we are at war. We certainly
appear to be at war. We are in Yemen. We are in Somalia. We are in
Ethiopia, Djibouti, Niger, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. We are in a
lot of different places. Yet the Senate has never voted on going to
war. And you say: Well, we are going after those people who attacked us
on 9/11. Well, we killed those people. The people whom we are now
embattled with are sons and daughters of other people who might have
the same ideology, but they are spread all across the world.

We had a manned raid in Yemen not too long ago where we have not
declared war. When we had the manned raid, sadly, a Navy SEAL died, and
a bunch of people in the village died. We were told we had information
to get the enemy, but we also have to look from the perspective of the
people who live there. You say: Oh, you would look from the perspective
of our enemies? Well, no. You have to understand your adversaries, you
have to understand your enemy, and you have to understand their
response if you ever want to figure out a final solution or some kind
of ending of a war.
You have to think about when the manned raid came at night with night

[[Page S829]]

vision goggles to a small village. Let's say the people were bad
people. Let's say they were terrorists and someday might have come
here. Well, we killed them, but we also killed their wives and their
children too. I don't fault our soldiers. Our soldiers go in in the
middle of the night, and they are given a command. It is not the
soldiers' fault; it is ours for having an unclear mission or for
sending them into an impossible mission.
There is no clear-cut war. There are three or four different factions
fighting in Yemen, and here is the point I have been making. The
neoconservatives are histrionic about, oh, Iran is supporting the
Houthi rebels. Well, on the other side are Sunni extremists who are
supported by Saudi Arabia, which also supports Sunni extremism across
the world. There is also a third party in Yemen that is al-Qaida in the
Arab Peninsula. My fear is that when you go in and you say ``Oh, the
Iranian-backed Houthi rebels--we must kill them, and we are going to
support the Sunnis from Saudi Arabia,'' you have to ask yourself
``Well, what about al-Qaida? Do they get stronger or weaker?''
Here is my fear. We go into a civil war that nobody in America knows
about, and nobody can know up from down on, and we decide to get
involved. What if the end result is chaos? What if out of that chaos
arises al-Qaida? What if the end result of our getting involved in the
civil war is that they all kill each other and we end up with a civil
war in which al-Qaida becomes stronger?
Mr. GRAHAM. Regular order.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Mr. PAUL. The interesting thing about it is that as you look at the
war in Yemen, it is----
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection to the request?
Mr. PAUL. Yes, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
Mr. PAUL. So as you look at the war in Yemen and you go back and
forth and you say ``What are the results of getting involved in this
civil war?'' it may well be that al-Qaida gets stronger.
If you look at what happened in Syria, the neoconservatives went
crazy and said: We should support the moderates in Syria who are
fighting against Assad. Well, it turns out the moderates in Syria were
al-Qaida-linked, ISIS-linked jihadists. In fact, with one group the
neocons said that we must give weapons to, it turned out that as soon
as they got anti-tank weapons from us, they said--and this is a quote
from one of the leaders days after they got anti-tank weapons from us:
When we are done fighting Assad--not ISIS, Assad--we are going to
attack Israel to take back the Golan Heights.
We did this, and we pumped millions of dollars and hundreds of tons
of weapons into Syria, and it didn't work. When we finally quit doing
the funding and sending of weapons, that is when the Kurds rose up,
with our help, and actually did a much better job.
The thing is, there is a perpetual war crowd that ignores the
Constitution, and they will say that we should be at war everywhere,
and we don't need to vote on it. One, that is a terrible insult to our
forefathers and a terrible insult to the Founding Fathers, but as you
look at this and you look at the debate, it is also incredibly draining
to the Treasury and often has unintended consequences.
As we got involved in the Syrian civil war, the so-called moderates--
many of them jihadists, many of them al-Qaida; the fiercest fighters
actually were more al-Qaida linked, al-Nusra--began pushing back on
Assad, and there was chaos. Guess who arose in the chaos there: ISIS.
So really ISIS became a result of or at least was accentuated by our
intervention in Syria, and then we had to go back in and fight ISIS.
Here is a scenario that could happen in Yemen. We decide we are going
to go into Yemen and we are going to support the Sunni extremists, whom
the Saudis are for, against the Houthi extremists, whom Iran is for.
But in the chaos, perhaps al-Qaida rises again, and we have to get more
heavily involved. I think there is no end to the idea that we are going
to kill a terrorist group in the middle of the desert in Yemen and,
somehow, there will not be more.
I will give you an example of how sometimes what we get involved with
actually backfires and causes more terrorists to arise. We have been
feeding the Saudi planes bombs. We probably have sold them the bombers
as well. But we have been feeding them bombs, we have been helping them
with targeting, and it turns out they have been targeting civilians.
They targeted a funeral procession. The Saudi bombs that we gave them--
we paid for and we gave them; they may have paid for them indirectly,
but with the Saudi bombs that are U.S. bombs, they ended up bombing in
Yemen a funeral procession and killing about 150 people who were
unarmed and wounding 500.
You say: Oh, well, I don't care what they think. I don't care what
their response is. Well, think about what their response might be and
then decide whether you care, and I am not saying I am sympathetic to
the people. I don't know the people enough to be sympathetic or not,
but I am aware of their response to being bombed in a funeral
procession.
My guess is that 1,000 years from now, the people and their families
will, through oral tradition, remember the bombing of the funeral
procession. I am not kidding you. These people have a long memory. The
Sunnis and the Shia have been fighting for 1,000 years. They remember
the massacre at Karbala. I promise you they still celebrate when one
side massacred the other, and that was at least 500 to 600 years ago--
maybe more. So there is a long memory going on in this, and we have to
decide whether it is more beneficial to kill one of them than to have
the result of 10 new terrorists created by that. The thing is, they are
everywhere. There is a branch of Islam that is radical and that does
wish our demise and wish us harm, but we have to decide what the best
way of containing this is. What is the best way of defending our
country?
If you look at it, what I think you will find is that there have been
a great deal of unintended consequences. One is an enormous drain on
the Treasury, but two is a lot of unintended consequences as far as
sometimes actually making it worse. I think our intervention in Syria
actually exacerbated the rise of ISIS. I think our intervention in
Yemen could well exacerbate or cause or allow the rise of al-Qaida in
the Arab Peninsula again.

It is confusing when you ask: What do the soldiers want? The only
soldiers who are allowed to speak are the ones at the very top or those
who are retired. Even at the very top, most generals who are still
active can't give a full opinion. They may give it to the
administration but typically not on television or to the public. But
the average soldier really is never asked for his or her opinion. I
understand that, and I understand the role of the order of the
military--that you have to take orders.
The interesting thing is, as you meet the average soldier--I promise
you this is true. If people were able to do this and we were able to
actually take a poll of thousands and thousands of ordinary soldiers, I
think you could ask them: Do we still have a purpose in Afghanistan?
Are you ready for another deployment? You have been on six deployments
to Afghanistan. Are you excited about the next deployment? Freedom is
going to ring out in Afghanistan. They are going to be a great, self-
sufficient country, and we will have won the war.
I think most of the soldiers who have been there will actually tell
you the opposite. I have met dozens and dozens and dozens of these
soldiers who have come home and actually are unclear now as to what our
motives are. They are unclear as to what our goal is, and they are
unclear as to what the end result is.
We had two Under Secretaries recently in the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. One was Under Secretary of Defense and another was Under
Secretary of State. One of the Senators asked them: How many Taliban
are there? How many people are we fighting? They seem like pretty
honest questions. He said: You don't have to tell me the exact number.
Tell me about how many we are fighting.
Neither one of them knew. They said: We have to wait until fighting
season, and then we will find out. Well, any time you are in a
situation where there is a fighting season--and every year

[[Page S830]]

there is a fighting season--maybe that indicates this is a perpetual
war that is not going to end. But neither of these guys knows whether
there are 100,000 Taliban or there are 10,000 Taliban.
Interestingly, for the neocons who think this is going to end like
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and there will be unconditional surrender, it
will never end that way. Even Secretary Mattis--when I have asked him
``Will there ultimately be negotiation with the Taliban?''--says that
actually there will be. The Under Secretary of the Department of
Defense, in our meeting, said that the goal was to push them toward
negotiation.
Here is the interesting thing about Afghanistan. We have had as many
as 100,000 troops--President Obama, who ran on a message of having less
war and less involvement and was mercilessly criticized by the
Republican side, actually escalated the war in Afghanistan to a great
degree. So President Obama put 100,000 troops into Afghanistan, and
what happened? The enemy melted away. I am sure we killed some. We won
some battles, but they sort of melted away into our good ally Pakistan,
for the most part. But then they come back, and people say: We left too
early. Well, how long are we going to stay? Are we going to stay
forever?
We put in 100,000 troops, and it temporarily pacified Afghanistan.
After we brought the troops down, now the Taliban control maybe one-
third--some say maybe half--of the territory. You say: Well, if we
leave, the Taliban will take over. Well, how long is it going to take
until the Afghans step up and fight for themselves?
One of the biggest problems we have had is infiltration of the Afghan
Army and their actually shooting us on the base. It is ostensibly not
the soldiers; it is people from the enemy who have infiltrated.
At the same time, there has been such enormous corruption there. When
Karzai ruled Afghanistan, his brother was accused of being in the drug
trade. My good friend, Thomas Massie from the House of Representatives,
often says that we spent $8 billion eradicating their poppy crop. Poppy
is the plant they use to make heroin. They had their best crop last
year, so something is not working. He often comments that for $8
billion he could buy a lot of Roundup and probably do a better job. But
the thing is, we are aren't doing a very good job. The mission doesn't
seem to have the purpose that it once had.
Look, if I had been here, I would have voted to go there after 9/11.
We needed to disrupt the terrorist networks, we needed to punish them,
and we needed to make sure they couldn't attack us again. It was a
noble endeavor, but there has to be an end. I think part of our problem
is that we are unsure how to define victory, so we never can have it.
There was a proposal to have a big military parade, and many of my
friends who have served in the military were a little bit worried about
that because the image has been somewhat an image we have seen more in
totalitarian governments than in our own. We really haven't had a habit
of it, but I was looking at a story, and it said that we did have a big
parade after we had won the first Iraq war, and the troops did parade
through. I am not completely against having a parade necessarily, but
my suggestion is this: Why don't we bring the 14,000 troops home from
Afghanistan, declare victory, and have a parade because then there
really would be something to celebrate--bringing those 14,000 troops
home.
I think if we were involved in less war, we could pay our troops
better. We have an enormous number of veterans retiring after 15, 16
years. We have never been at war constantly for 16 years. We have a lot
of veterans who have been wounded, and to take care of them, it is
going to take enormous resources. All of us want to provide those
resources, but the thing is, if we continue in this perpetual war mode,
are we eventually going to run out of money so that we can't even take
care of our own veterans?
What we are really looking at tonight is a trillion-dollar deficit,
and I do think that deficit really does threaten our national security.
I think our foreign policy threatens our national security in the sense
that there are things that we need to upgrade. We need to take care of
our nuclear arsenal. We need to take care of our bombers. We need to
have the most modern planes and technology, but we often can't have
them because we are involved in so many wars.
People talk about the Romans getting overextended. We are everywhere,
and we always think somehow it is our responsibility to take care of
everything. I think that in many parts of the world, particularly in
Afghanistan, they see--since Genghis Khan, people have been going
across Afghanistan, conquering it, going back across it, and then
somebody new comes. But each time the indigenous people have been
strong enough to ward off and eventually get rid of their attackers.
Their attackers wear out.
It is the same way now. Some of the people like our being there. Some
of them have been honest, upright, good people. Some have been crooks.
Karzai and his family were involved in the drug trade.
The other problem is this--and this is a real problem that the other
side fails to acknowledge. Afghanistan is not really a country.
Afghanistan is an area of Central Asia that Westerners drew a line
around in the late teens or twenties; it may have been 1922.
We draw this line around Afghanistan, and we call it a country, but
it is not really a country. The far western part speaks Farsi or is
related, in many ways, to the Iranian people and has more in common
with them. The northern tribes have more in common with the Uzbeks, the
Kazakhs, and different nationalities to the north. The Pashtuns are on
both sides of the Pakistan border. If you ask any of these disparate
people whom their allegiance is to, they will tell you, primarily,
their allegiance is to their local warlords, the local elders, or local
council, but they don't have much allegiance to Kabul. They have never
really seen themselves as subservient to the capital. So when we go
there and say we are going to create a nation, it isn't a nation that
can be created because they are people who may not want be to part of a
nation.

Iraq has a little of the same thing. You have the Sunni-Shia split
that is 1,000 years old. You have people who aren't necessarily that
comfortable under the yoke of one country. So as we try to force them
in together and try to have them dominate, what you find in a lot of
these areas is that you end up having a strongman, and the strongman
rules with an iron fist. This was Saddam Hussein.
The interesting thing about world politics and balance of power is,
when we went in and toppled Saddam Hussein--let freedom ring--we
actually made it more difficult for us in the world, and we made the
Middle East more unstable because Iran and Iraq fought a fierce 8-year
bloody war. They had come to somewhat of a standstill. Saddam Hussein,
for all his warts, was somewhat of a counterbalance to Iran. So when
Iraq was toppled and Saddam Hussein was gone, you once again have a
power vacuum. In a power vacuum, al-Qaida will fill it and did. You
upset the balance of power between Iran and Iraq, and now Iran seems to
be more threatening throughout the region.
As we look at our spending, without question, there is part of the
spending that isn't in this bill--the mandatory spending. For those who
say: Oh, we are not going to do anything for the part of the bill we
are actually voting on, and we are OK with the trillion-dollar deficit,
I think there is sort of a litmus test. It is a litmus test of
hypocrisy. If they were against trillion-dollar deficits for President
Obama, why is it OK to have a Republican deficit of a trillion dollars?
There is no escaping the hypocrisy of that.
I think there is also no escaping the dire warnings we heard. Almost
all of the Republicans--I venture to say every Republican in the
Senate--has made dire warnings about the debt, which was critical of
President Obama. I was one of them, but we need to be honest enough to
look in the mirror at ourselves when we are in charge of all three
branches of government.
When the Republicans took over the House, they said: Well, don't have
too high expectations. We only control one-half of one-third of the
government. Then we took over the Senate, and they said: Well, we still
can't do anything because President Obama is there. Now, we have a
Republican

[[Page S831]]

President. I don't know what the excuse is going to be. Some say: Well,
we must govern. If by govern, they mean act like the other side and run
up huge deficits, I guess it is not what I am interested in as far as
governing.
Governing is about making tough choices. I think what has happened in
our country--because we basically have a printing press, a Federal
Reserve that replenishes and pays our debt, buys our debt simply by
creating money and buying Treasury bills with it or Treasury bonds--is
that we have sort of a limitless notion of debt. That is what has been
going on. We keep adding to it.
To a large extent, we haven't had a catastrophe. I think we were
close in 2008. Some of that is related to accumulation of debt. I think
you also will see some of that in the near future. There is an
unsettling notion out there--the stock market, having risen so far, so
fast, you are seeing this jittery notion out there.
There is the worry about interest rates. There is the worry that
historically we funded this massive debt at about 2 percent interest.
What happens if we get back to more normalized rates of interest? I
think this is an important debate. It is important to get also back to
the crux of the debate.
What I have been arguing for tonight is that we have amendments. The
most important job the Congress does is to pass spending bills. It is
the most important thing we do, and the most important oversight we
have. If we are to do that oversight, we should have a debate. We
should have amendments.
What we are looking at is a bill that was decided in secret--700
pages that were printed last night at midnight--and, for the most part,
it has not been read. It is very easy not to have a full understanding
of a bill that is nearly 700 pages that comes forward, but within the
midst of this, we know a couple of things.
We have gotten rid of fiscal responsibility. There were spending caps
put in place to try to control spending. For a couple of years--2011,
2012, 2013--we were actually seeing a slowdown on the rate of growth of
spending. You heard everybody squawking about this sequester. The
sequester is so bad. The interesting thing about sequester is it wasn't
a cut in spending. It was a slowdown of the rate of spending, a
slowdown of the rate of growth of spending. If you look at curves over
a long period of time--actually the rate of growth--you still had
government growing, but we slowed down the rate of growth. As revenue
was picking up, we actually were whittling away, at least a little bit,
at the annual deficit.
Then the cries came that were, actually, mostly from my side. They
said the military is being hollowed out. We have to have more military
money. The dirty little secret around here is you can only get more
military money if you give the other side more welfare money. We have
warfare and welfare. That is guns and butter. It has been going on a
long time. We spent a lot of money, and both sides have now agreed to
do this. The leadership has agreed to do this.
In this spending bill, what you are going to have is a looting of the
Treasury, basically. Both sides are really culpable. Both sides are
somewhat equally responsible for this bill and for the debt that will
ensue.
The real question has to be--I think most importantly for my side--if
you were against President Obama's trillion-dollar deficits, why are
you for trillion-dollar deficits when you put a Republican name on it?
I think people are going to see through this. You are already seeing
some of the clips in the media putting forward the comments from 2010
and 2011 about President Obama's debt. These are comments coming from
Republicans who are now for this bill. As they say in some parts of the
country, you have some explaining to do.
That is the question. Are people going to look at this and say: My
goodness, is everybody out there just a partisan politician and all
they care about is party; and that the debt is bad when it is a
Democratic debt and not bad when it is a Republican debt? That is sort
of what we are facing.
My recommendation is that we really look long and hard at this. Most
of the Senators will say: This is the last one. I am never voting for
this again. These are terrible. This is a rotten way to run your
government. I object to doing it this way. I will vote for this one
because I don't want the government to shut down.

I don't want the government to shut down. I also don't want to keep
it open if we are not going to reform it. It is damned if you do;
damned if you don't. We could have done better. We could have moved
forward with a responsible spending package that had amendments that we
could all offer on the floor--an open amendment process and debate. We
chose not to go that way. That is why we are here.
Some will say: You are responsible for this. It is all your fault. If
I am responsible for drawing attention to the debt, so be it. Somebody
has to do it. I didn't come up here to be part of somebody's club. I
didn't come up here to be liked. I didn't come up here to just say:
Hey, guys, I want to be part of the club so I am going to always vote
with whatever you tell me to do. I have often voted with Democrats. I
have often voted with Republicans. I probably have two dozen bills I
cosponsored with Democrats. I am also seen as one of the most
conservative Members of the Senate. I think there is a way you can have
bipartisanship.
Bipartisanship doesn't mean you have to give up on everything you
believe in. That is what this spending bill is. It is a bipartisan
spending bill that gives up on everything that Republicans ostensibly
believe in as far as deficit, debt, and spending. I will vote against
this bill.
I will continue to advocate. If they want to vote earlier, they can
vote earlier, as long as I get a vote on an amendment where we would
have an open debate and an explicit vote that says: Are you for or
against breaking the spending caps that we put in place?
Thank you, Mr. President.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I was talking with the pages earlier
asking if they knew what was going on. I am not sure if people watching
the debate know what is going on. Let's talk about the mechanics of
what is happening right now.
We have a measure before the Senate right now that cures at 1 a.m.
tonight. At 1 a.m. tonight, we are going to vote on something we could
vote on right now. The outcome is going to be something my friend from
Kentucky will oppose, but it is going to happen because the majority of
Republicans believe that funding the government is a pretty important
thing to do.
I am in a club. I am in a club that says we need to keep the
government open. I am in a club that says we don't need to be telling
people they are going to be furloughed tomorrow when we know darn well
that at 1 a.m. tonight, we will be back open for business. I am in a
club that tells everybody we obligated ourselves to pay our bills, and
we are going to pay our bills.
I don't like this. I served as speaker of the house for 4 years. We
paid our bills on time and got our budgets done on time. We had regular
order. I agree with all that stuff.
Right now, we are in a position to where this is very simple. We can,
right now, provide certainty to the thousands of people who expect the
government to be open or we can play this game until 1 a.m. I, for one,
think we should do it right now. If we want to go through the theater,
and we want to go until 1 a.m., that is going to be the end result.
Employees out there, I apologize on behalf of people who can't give
you certainty right now at 9 p.m. At 1 a.m., you will have it. I am
sorry we have to go through this process. We seem to go through it far
too often.
I will also tell you something else I have to speak briefly on, and I
am going to offer a motion.
This whole idea about this concept of let's just withdraw from
Afghanistan--I have been to Baghdad. I have been to the Kurdish region
in Iraq, and I have been to Afghanistan. I have heard people in Iraq
say the worst thing we did was a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. We
can debate whether we should have gone in there, but we are in there,
and now we have to figure out a way to exit that doesn't put Iraqis at
risk and American men and women who are serving this country. You don't
do it through a precipitous withdrawal. It is irresponsible, and I will
guarantee you, there is not a single person in uniform who would agree
with you that is the

[[Page S832]]

right way to protect our troops and protect the people of Afghanistan
and the many allies we have there trying to take the fight to the
Taliban and al-Qaida. It is irresponsible. So I am a member of that
club.
I am a member of a club that says when the United States said we are
going to protect a country and try to get it on the right path, we stay
there until we get it done and do everything we can while there to keep
our men and women safe. If that is the wrong club to be in, so be it. I
happen to think it is the club that every single one of us should be
in.
This is not the sort of discussion we should be having tonight.
Tonight is about funding the government. Tonight is about actually
having a great discussion about regular order, getting appropriations
bills on the floor, having a debate like we are going to have on
immigration next week--but now is not the time to have this discussion.
We have to decide, what do you want to be as a Senator? Do you want
to be a Senator who wants to make a point or do you want to make a
difference? Do you know what? I don't see how points alone make a
change in America. What makes a change in America is when we ratify a
bill or get a bill out of here, we send it to the President, and it
becomes law. If all we do is a speech on the floor, and it doesn't
produce an outcome, time after time, then you may want to rethink how
you are trying to get your point across.
What happens when you don't produce an outcome here? You haven't
convinced 50 or 51 Senators your idea is good enough to support. Go to
work. Build a coalition. Make a difference. You can make a point all
you want. Points are forgotten. There are not a whole lot of history
books about the great points of the American Senate. There are history
books about the great results of the American Senate--the great bills,
like the tax reform bill, and the other things we have done in this
session but not points.
People aren't here to talk about a good point. They are here to talk
about a good outcome. How do good outcomes happen? When we take votes
like the vote we should be taking at 9 p.m. tonight. We may take it at
1 a.m. I am a night person. I am all right with that, but we should be
taking it now.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding rule
XXII, at 9 p.m. today, the Senate vote on the motion to invoke cloture
on the motion to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment
to H.R. 1892 with a further amendment; further, that if cloture is
invoked, all postcloture time be yielded back and the Senate vote on
the motion to concur.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, the question
is often asked, if not now, when? We have all been told: Now, Senator,
is not the time to discuss this. If we can do this through the
committee in an orderly fashion, there is always going to be a better
day. But the day never comes.
The vast majority of the Senators will admit that the way we do our
budgeting and the way we do our spending around here is abominable. It
is an abomination. Most people are opposed to it. Yet they come to the
floor and say: Let's just keep doing it the way we have always done it.
So until a majority of us will say no, enough is enough, it will
continue to be the same thing.
The promise of making it different in the future is somewhat of an
illusion or a false promise that just never gets here. There have been
four times in 41 years that we did the right thing, that we did the
appropriations bills--four times in 41 years.
So what I am proposing--and this actually would have been nice to
vote on tonight--people come to the floor and say they want to vote,
but they don't want to vote on anything they don't agree with. They
don't want to have any kind of an open amendment process where we can
have votes. I am interested in putting forward something that is called
the Government Shutdown Prevention Act. This is legislation I have put
forward that says that if, after a year of being able to put forward
your appropriations bills, you haven't done your job, then the spending
point will go down by 1 percent.
Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, regular order.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Does the Senator object?
Mr. PAUL. I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from North Carolina.
Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, again, I have the motion before us. I
believe the Senator from Kentucky did object to the motion.
Just one brief comment. And I thank the Senator from Louisiana for
presiding. I know I was supposed to be in the chair 30 minutes ago, and
I will be there in a couple of minutes.
I also wanted to take a moment to talk about the great opportunity we
have next week to pass immigration reform, the great opportunity that
we have to fulfill the promise to the DACA population of some 1.8
million that the President has proposed to provide a path to
citizenship. It is a proposal that has $25 billion allocated over 10
years, with maybe $2.5 billion to $5 billion appropriated in the bill
that we will take up or in various amendments that we will take up next
week.
The first pillar is DACA, and we have satisfied that, and I believe
we have broad consensus. There may be a few things around the edges,
but we are pretty close to done.
On border security, we are done because the President himself has
said it is not a monolithic wall over 2,300 miles. It is not even a
wall over half that territory. It is about maybe 1,000 miles. And 1,000
miles of wall includes some walls that are secondary. So when you see a
mile-long wall, it is actually two walls because there is a secondary
barrier.
We are also talking about technology and infrastructure so that we
can start working on the opioid epidemic. Tons and tons, millions of
doses of heroin, fentanyl, and other drugs come across our border every
month. By implementing border security--a lot of people think this is
just about preventing people from crossing the border. This is about
securing our Nation. Fortunately, many of my colleagues on the other
side of the aisle recognize that.
Some think that the proposal--many of them; I don't know that all of
them do--many of them believe the Department of Homeland Security and
the Border Patrol have put together a great strategy that makes sense.
I have always said--I got criticized last year--I said there is no way
we are going to build a wall. We don't need a wall across all 2,300
miles, but we need security. We need it so that we know what is coming
into this country, whether they are people crossing the border
illegally or whether they are pumping hundreds and hundreds and
millions of doses of poison into the thousands of people who die every
year from opioids. In my State of North Carolina, more people die from
opioid overdoses every year than interstate accidents--over 1,400.
So I am glad to know that pillar one--a path to citizenship for some
1.8 million DACA recipients--has an opportunity to become law, to make
that difference I was talking about, and then $25 billion to secure the
border.
Now we are having a great discussion about what is called the
diversity lottery. It involves about 50,000 visas every year that are
allocated in a random way today that makes no sense. We want to do it
in a way that actually makes sure that underrepresented countries have
an opportunity to come here, maybe some 15,000 a year, many from Sub-
Saharan Africa, and the other ones can be used to draw down a backlog
of people who have been trying to get to this country for as long as 17
years.
We talk about how we want more people immigrating, but the reality
is, if you get in line today through the legal process, it can take you
10 to 17 years to get through the process. We are trying to figure out
a way, through that allocation of the diversity lottery, to make that
half the time. So we can clear out the queue for people waiting for 17
years, and others in the queue will never have to wait that long--about
9 years in total. I think we are making great progress.
The last thing we have to work on is chain migration or family
reunification. Today, about 72 percent of the 1 million to 1.1 million
people who come to this country every year are through what they call a
family petition. So there are people who may have some

[[Page S833]]

relationship here--it could be a brother, a sister, a mother, or a
father. That is important to do, but it is also important for us to
take a look at what our economy needs, what America needs, to make sure
we have the resources and the people who best provide a great platform
for the Americans whom we have to fight for--for all of the Americans
whom we have to fight hard for in this country.

So there would be simple provisions, such as if you have an advanced
degree--maybe we should allocate some of what is going into purely
family reunification into getting engineers, doctors, scientists,
highly educated people who want to come to live in this country.
At the other end of the spectrum, we need people of various skills,
with a community college certification, maybe--a welder, a technical
drawer. There are a number of things you can get at a community
college. I know this because I went to a community college--actually
two of them. There are a number of skills that you get over 2 years
that you may have gained in a foreign country, or you may want to come
here and complete the degree and then stay here.
That is all we are talking about in terms of adding a merit component
to what right now is purely random or purely family-based immigration.
I think there is a way to bridge that gap. I know people are kind of
drawing their swords on certain issues, but let's look at what we are
trying to do: No. 1, promote immigration to this country; and No. 2,
make sure that it is very much focused on the kinds of needs we have in
this Nation to help the economy grow.
By the way, if the economy is growing, there is going to be a lot of
resources and people to support that growing economy. So I think that
at the end of the day, if we do this, it could have the effect of
actually promoting a case for more legal immigration over time.
I want to thank Senator Durbin and Senator Graham and a number of
people who have spent years trying to solve this problem. By the same
token, I would tell them, you have spent years trying to solve the
problem with a single solution, and it hasn't worked. It hasn't worked
in a Republican administration, and it didn't worked when President
Obama was in power. It didn't even work when you didn't need a single
Republican to vote for comprehensive immigration reform.
There was a time here--because no Republican voted for ObamaCare, so
there was clearly a time here that the table should have been set for
whatever immigration solution you wanted, in the same way the table was
set for whatever healthcare solution President Obama wanted. I don't
begrudge him for taking advantage of the opportunity, whether or not I
disagree with the policy. But it is very telling, if that solution,
which started back in 2001, couldn't make it through a sympathetic
Republican President's administration, if that legislation couldn't
make it through after 2008, with President Obama's clearly sympathetic
administration, why on Earth would we simply propose the same thing
that has failed for 17 years when we are so close to coming up with
something that is balanced and compassionate?
I have had all kinds of people mad at me because I support a path to
immigration for 1.8 million people. I wear that as a badge of honor
because it is the right thing to do. It is also the right thing to do
to secure the border, to fix the visa lottery, and to work on migration
here that still maintains roughly the same numbers but does it in a
responsible way that also protects the interests of the American
people, the people who are here today, and creates a better environment
for the people who want to move here tomorrow.
I thank the Presiding Officer for standing in my place for a moment.
I will yield the floor and come to the Chair.
(Mr. TILLIS assumed the Chair.)
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Johnson). The Senator from North Carolina.
Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that
notwithstanding rule XXII, at 9:30 p.m. today, the Senate vote on the
motion to invoke cloture on the motion to concur in the House amendment
to the Senate amendment to H.R. 1892 with a further amendment; further,
that if cloture is invoked, all postcloture time be yielded back and
the Senate vote on the motion to concur.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, reserving the right to object.
I think it is interesting, as we follow the debate this evening, and
people watching at home may be interested because it kind of turns on
some inside baseball things, and you are not sure what to know or
believe.
One side says they are ready to vote, and the other side says we are
ready to vote. That is the way it has kind of been, except for one side
wants to vote only on what they want to vote on and they have agreed to
beforehand. The other side wants an open debate, where we would have
amendments. That is the side I am on.
I have been arguing all day, basically, to have open amendments, and
I want to do an amendment that would say that, basically, we should
obey the spending limits. Instead of having a $1 trillion debt, we
should obey our spending limits.
So it is about open debate. It is about voting. I am all in favor of
voting, I am in favor of voting right now, and I have offered the other
side a 15-minute vote on containing or retaining the spending caps.
So I object because I think there should be amendments, and there
should be sufficient debate on this subject.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from Texas.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that
notwithstanding rule XXII, at 10:30 p.m. this evening, the Senate vote
on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to concur in the House
amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 1892 with a further
amendment; further, that if cloture is invoked, all postcloture time be
yielded back and the Senate vote on the motion to concur.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I think it is
very important that the American people know why we are here this
evening, and why we are here is because Washington is completely
broken.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, regular order.
Mr. PAUL. We are spending money like it is out of control. This bill
will have a trillion-dollar deficit, as bad or worse than any of
President Obama's. So what I ask my Republican colleagues is, Why are
we doing this when we condemned it on the other side?
Mr. CORNYN. Regular order.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Mr. PAUL. I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that
notwithstanding rule XXII, at 11 p.m. this evening, the Senate vote on
the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to concur in the House
amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 1892 with a further
amendment; further, that if cloture is invoked, all postcloture time be
yielded back and the Senate vote on the motion to concur.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Reserving the right to object, I think it is interesting
how much energy we are expending when we could have had a 15-minute
vote on this, but nobody wanted to vote.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask for regular order.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Regular order is called for.
Is there objection?
Mr. PAUL. I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from Texas.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that
notwithstanding rule XXII, at 11:30 p.m. this evening, the Senate vote
on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to concur in the House
amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 1892 with a further
amendment; further, that if cloture is invoked, all postcloture time be
yielded back and the Senate vote on the motion to concur.

[[Page S834]]

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Reserving the right to object, it seems like a lot of work
for a trillion-dollar deficit.
Mr. CORNYN. Regular order.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Regular order is called for.
Is there objection?
Mr. PAUL. I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from Texas.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that
notwithstanding rule XXII, at 12 a.m., the Senate vote on the motion to
invoke cloture on the motion to concur in the House amendment to the
Senate amendment to H.R. 1892 with a further amendment; further, that
if cloture is invoked, all postcloture time be yielded back and the
Senate vote on the motion to concur.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Reserving the right to object, a trillion-dollar Republican
deficit--the hypocrisy is astounding. Every one of these Republicans
complained about President Obama's deficits. Yet now we have them out
there bragging and pushing and doing everything they can to get their
trillion-dollar deficit through.
I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from Texas.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that
notwithstanding rule XXII, at 12:30 a.m., the Senate vote on the motion
to invoke cloture on the motion to concur in the House amendment to the
Senate amendment to H.R. 1892 with a further amendment; further, that
if cloture is invoked, all postcloture time be yielded back and the
Senate vote on the motion to concur.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Reserving the right to object, I realize this charade is
about Republicans wanting a trillion-dollar deficit.
Mr. CORNYN. Regular order.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Regular order is called for.
Is there an objection?
Mr. PAUL. I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from Texas.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that
notwithstanding rule XXII, at 1 a.m., the Senate vote on the motion to
invoke cloture on the motion to concur in the House amendment to the
Senate amendment to H.R. 1892 with a further amendment; further, that
if cloture is invoked, all postcloture time be yielded back and the
Senate vote on the motion to concur.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, we are
talking about a trillion-dollar deficit.
Mr. CORNYN. Regular order.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Regular order is called for.
Is there objection?
Mr. PAUL. I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from Texas.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I have asked unanimous consent that the
Senate be allowed to vote on the pending matter, and there have been
multiple objections, of course, by the Senator from Kentucky.
I don't know why we are basically burning time here while the Senator
from Kentucky and others are sitting in the cloakroom wasting
everybody's time and inconveniencing the staff. We could easily move
this matter forward and have a vote. The outcome will be exactly the
same, and it is not inconsequential that the current continuing
resolution, I believe, expires at midnight tonight.
So the Senator from Kentucky, by objecting to the unanimous consent
requests, will effectively shut down the Federal Government for no real
reason. I know he wants to make a point. He has that right. I agree
with many of his concerns about deficits and debt, but we are in an
emergency situation.
We have our military that is not ready to fight and win our Nation's
wars the way it should be. We have military members who have died in
accidents as a result of the lack of training and being stretched too
thin because of budget cuts, and we need to fix that. General Mattis
has pointed out that more American military members have died in
training accidents and in regular operations than they have in combat.
That is a tragedy that I would hope all of us would want to address.
Then, of course, there is the disaster relief that helps people who
were victimized by Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria, the wildfires out
West, and Hurricane Irma. That is an emergency matter, as well.
So I don't understand why the Senator from Kentucky wants to insist
on shutting down the Federal Government when, after the time expires
under the regular order, the outcome will be exactly the same.
I recognize that he has that right, and he has objected to all of my
unanimous consent requests to move the vote up earlier, but it makes no
sense to me. It will not accomplish anything. I just ask him to
reconsider what he is doing in shutting down the entire Federal
Government when the outcome of this vote will not be any different
after the regular time expires than it would be if we had that vote
starting at 10:30 tonight.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I think it is interesting--the debate we are
having, an important debate--and it is important to call attention to
how we spend money in Washington and how the system is irrevocably
broken. We can cast blame where we want to cast blame, but, I think,
for the record, it is important to know that I have been offering all
day to vote.
I would like nothing more than to vote, but it is the other side. It
is the leadership that has refused to allow any amendments. So we have
what is called a closed debate. There will be no amendments. There will
be no questioning of the authority. The deal was made in secret, and
the deal will not be debated on the floor, and there will be no
amendments.
So what I am advocating for is, one, that we should reform the
process. I don't advocate for shutting the government down, but neither
do I advocate for keeping it open and borrowing $1 million a minute. In
fact, the statistics this year are closer to $2 million a minute.
This is a government that is horribly broken. This is a system that
is horribly broken, and Senator after Senator will come up quietly, and
they will say: Oh, this is the last time I am voting for a continuing
resolution. This is terrible. This is a terrible way to run a
government. This is a rotten way to run the government. Yet they keep
voting for it. They are in charge. Why have we been doing this for 40
years? Four times in 40 years have we actually done our job where we
voted on each individual appropriations bill.
Earlier today, I went through some of the waste. It is amazing the
waste that has been going on. William Proxmire was first pointing out
this waste in 1968. One of the examples he pointed to was that money
was being spent studying why men fall in love with women. You may be
curious about that, too. If you are, ask your friends to get
Crowdsourcing, and you could get a study of why men fall in love with
women. That is not a function of government. That waste goes on decade
after decade, and nothing is ever fixed.
What we have is a 700-page bill that will not have been read by
anyone. I was just reading some of the things that will be stuck in
there. Nobody will have any idea how they got in there--all of the
spending glommed together in one bill with no oversight.
This is a terrible, rotten, no-good way to run your government, and
it has been going on decade after decade. Everyone admits it is a
terrible, rotten, no-good way to run your government. Yet nobody stands
up and says enough is enough. They say: It is a binary choice, young
man. Take it or leave it. I will leave it.
I don't want to shut down the government, but somebody ought to
insist that we have an open amendment process. Someone should insist
that we root out waste in government. We have had a partial audit of
the Pentagon, and we

[[Page S835]]

found out that $800 million was misplaced or lost. What has been done
so far in the audit showed over $100 billion has been wasted in the
Pentagon. So what do we do? We reward them with more money. We have
been trying to get a complete audit of this Pentagon for 17 years, and
you know what they argue? They say: We are too big to be audited. How
galling is that, when your government tells you that we are too big to
be audited?
This goes on decade after decade. Everybody in Washington complains
about it. All the constituents complain about it. All of America
complains about it. Yet we do it time after time. Then, people say:
Well, look, this is a bipartisan deal. Kumbaya. Republicans and
Democrats are holding hands to spend more money.
It is the opposite of what you want. You want compromise in
Washington, but we should be compromising to spend less money, not
more. Every one of the Republicans--count them; you can look it up on
the internet--said that President Barack Obama was a spendthrift and he
had trillion-dollar deficits, and we railed day in and day out, year in
and year out against it, and rightfully so.
It was too much debt and too much spending. We were against that.
That is what I ran for office on. I am not about to turn my head the
other way and say it is fine because my party is doing it. That is what
this is about. It is pure, empty, partisan politics, where people are
saying: It is OK for Republicans to have debts, but it was bad for
Democrats to have debts.
It is time we stood up and said it is a rotten system and it should
end.
How will it end? It is never going to end by people always passing
the buck and saying: Oh, I am voting; this is my last continuing
resolution. I hate continuing resolutions. They are terrible. This is
my last one, but I am going to vote for one more--maybe next year or
actually in a month, because we will be doing this again in a month.
Do you realize that we are on our fourth continuing resolution? This
has nothing to do with the budget, and the media confuses this. They
say we have a budget deal. No, we have a continuing resolution deal.
This is not a budget. This isn't some sort of plan. This hasn't gone
through a committee. There are no appropriations bills that have gone
through committee. There is no oversight happening to your government.
So when I tell you that $356,000 was spent last year studying what
happens to Japanese quail when they are on cocaine--whether they are
more sexually promiscuous on cocaine--this is what your government is
spending money on. But it doesn't get any better because we never root
out the waste. In fact, the agency that has been doing this research
ends up getting more every year.
They are like: Oh, we like science. If you like science, you will
like this one. They took $700,000 from autism research, and they spent
it studying what Neil Armstrong said when he was on the moon. Did he
say ``one small step for man,'' or did he say ``one small step for a
man''? We spent $700,000 studying whether the preposition ``a'' was in
Neil Armstrong's statement. That is $700,000 that should have been
spent on autism.
This isn't really just about fiscal conservatism, although it is. It
is about how best to spend money for legitimate expenses. Every time
you spend money in a wasted way, you are taking away from something
that presumably was less wasteful. So this is a big deal.
Do I want to shut down the government? No. But do I want to keep it
open and not reform it? Hell, no. That is what is going on. It is a
trillion-dollar deficit this year. It is going to be bigger, probably,
but we were approaching a trillion dollars before they added $300
billion of new spending to this. So this is a problem. This is a big
deal.
I have said all day long that I will vote. Start the process. Open
the doors. We could have had 40 amendments today. We have been at this
all day, with the other side blocking amendments, trying to have no
debate and trying to close the door so a secret deal--a deal done in
secret--can be forced on everyone else.
So yes, we should have debate. Yes, we should have a vote. Let's have
a vote tonight on amendments. Let's have amendments. Let's determine
whether the American people or the Senate are really in favor of
busting the caps.
I have one amendment. I am not asking for a dozen amendments. I am
not asking for 100 amendments or 1,000 amendments. I am asking for one.
It takes 15 minutes.
So realize that all day these people wanted to paint a picture. They
are embarrassed, and I understand that. They are embarrassed by this
situation because they know the hypocrisy is thicker than pea soup.
They know the hypocrisy is out there. They railed and they railed
against President Obama's debt--trillion-dollar deficits. Every one of
them railed against it, and now they have to vote tonight for a
trillion-dollar deficit. That is the problem here. So there is a
certain embarrassment to bring this up. The embarrassment causes them
to say: We don't want any amendments. We don't want to discuss this.
They ought to be discussed, and so much more should be discussed.
It isn't just that we are blocking amendments or debate on spending
or that we are not doing our job on appropriations bills. We are also
not doing our constitutional duty on the declaration of war. This was
something the Founding Fathers were explicit on. The power to declare
war was given to Congress in article I, section 8--given to Congress.
In fact, there is discussion of this. There was extensive discussion of
this. Almost every Founding Father weighed in on the fact that war
should be declared by the legislature. Madison put it this way. He said
that the executive branch is most prone to war; therefore, with steady
care, that power was vested in the legislature.

When was the last time we declared war? Well, officially, we haven't
declared war since World War II, but we have sort of voted. At least we
came to Congress--at least George Bush came to Congress when we went to
Afghanistan the first time and when we went to Iraq the first time, and
there were votes. But those votes were long ago, nearly a generation
ago. They really don't apply to anything we are doing now, and there is
a certain intellectual dishonesty by those who continue to say that the
vote to go into Afghanistan has anything to do with what we are doing
over there now. There is no military solution there, and that also ties
into our budgetary problems.
We do not have enough money to build nations around the world and
think that we can build our Nation here at home. So when people talk
about nation building, I say: Yes, you are right, but we need to do
some nation building here.
The President has talked about a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, but
there is no money for it. So we are borrowing $1 trillion before we get
started with people advocating for a $1 trillion infrastructure plan.
There is no money. If we want to find the money, we have to make
difficult choices.
As people come to my office, they say: We want money for X; we want
money for Y; we want money for Z. I listen carefully, I listen
sympathetically, and I try to say: Look, we are a rich country. We
ought to be able to do what you are asking. Yet we have a $1 trillion
deficit, and everything has to be reflected by the fact that we are out
of money and horribly spending a great excess of what comes in. But
nobody is making these difficult choices because we just keep adding on
to the tab. We basically just borrow more money.
When President Obama was President, we were--under George W. Bush, we
went from $5 trillion to $10 trillion in total debt. With President
Obama, we went from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. We are almost at that
same curve again. In fact, we may be escalating that curve as we speak.
As Republicans, we all criticized that enormous debt and said that it
was a bad thing for our government. There was a debt commission, and
there was all of this discussion and a lot of pandering. I was one of
those who was concerned, and I am still concerned.
We have this debt that continues to escalate. Yet what do Republicans
do when they are in charge? You remember the stories. If you were asked
to help Republicans, they said: Well, we took over the House, but that
will only--we control one-half of one-third of government. We can't get
everything we want. So it didn't happen.

[[Page S836]]

Then we took over the Senate. We controlled one-third of government,
and they said: Well, we have to have the Presidency.
Then, lo and behold, we won the Presidency. We have all of the
branches of government, yet we still are putting forward a spending
bill that will be the equivalent of a $1 trillion deficit.
Is it wrong to point that out? Is it wrong to want better of your own
party? Is it wrong to think that we ought to do our job, that we ought
to go into an appropriations process? The House actually did it. People
say: Oh, we can't do that anymore. The House of Representatives passed
all 12 appropriations bills. It can be done.
Actually, maybe it is not the panacea I would hope in the sense that
there is still too much money being spent, even in the appropriations
process. It really needs to go hand in hand with two things. We should
still do the appropriations bill. There are 12 departments of
government; let's pass them one at a time. But we should also keep in
mind, as we are spending money or voting to spend money, that the
Constitution limits very much what the Congress can do. There are
enumerated powers given to Congress under article I, section 8. That is
what we are supposed to do. This was a big deal to the Founding
Fathers. In fact, they were very specific that those rights not listed
were not to be disparaged, so the listing of the Bill of Rights was a
partial listing of your rights. But they were also very careful to say
that the powers that were granted to the Federal Government were a
complete list, and anything not listed in the powers granted would be
retained by the people and the States--by the States and the people,
respectively.
Part of our problem is that we decided we wanted a government that is
everything to everyone. You ask yourself: Is one party better than the
other? Maybe at times. But, really--if you are looking for
responsibility--they want to cast blame. All of a sudden, I, myself, am
somehow responsible for the whole problem here. Actually, I have made
them angry, and they are very upset with me because I have made it
difficult. We are going to have to be up late tonight, and they are
angry that I am pointing out their hypocrisy. That is a big problem,
and nobody likes to have that pointed out. But if we don't, if we just
continue on this course, I think there is a great danger to the Nation.
I think there is a day of reckoning coming, and I think that our debt
eventually could get the better of us, that it could really threaten
the underpinnings, the undergirding of our country, and it could do it
in a couple of different ways.
For some time now, we have manipulated interest rates through the
Federal Reserve. We kept them below the market rate, which led to a
huge housing bubble and a housing correction. We don't really have a
housing bubble happening, but many of you may have noticed that there
has been a huge stock market bubble. There is a question as to whether
the fury of that has been fed by Fed policy and whether the desire to
keep interest rates low to make it cheap to borrow money--whether
someday we will have a boom that leads to a bust. I really think that
is a worry.
The stock market has been very jittery in the last few days. I think
some of that has to do--it is funny how people interpret it. Some on
the left will say: Oh, the stock market is jittery because the
government might shut down for 2 hours. That is the dumbest thing I
have ever heard in my life. But it could be, perhaps, that they are
jittery because we have a government that is profligate in its
spending, is perpetually spending more than comes in, and has such a
great imbalance that maybe one-third of what we are doing here is
financed.

They say: Well, it would be one thing to actually finance a house or
something like that, but if you are financing your rent or if you are
financing your groceries each month, there is a problem. We are having
trouble paying our day-to-day expenses because we are borrowing them.
Much has been said about the military needing money, and I believe in
a strong national defense. In fact, I believe that our national defense
is actually the most important thing the Federal Government does. It is
one of those things that State government can't do. So, yes, I want a
strong national defense, but you have to ask yourself whether a $20
trillion debt makes us a stronger country or a weaker country.
I think it was Admiral Milligan who said that, currently, the No. 1
threat to our country is our national debt. There is this question of
whether an insolvent nation can be a strong nation.
As we look through this, I think it would be wise to look at the
spending bill and say: This is not the way we should run a government,
and we, as Republicans--if we really, truly are conservative--should be
putting forward something that looks toward balance, at the very least,
instead of going the opposite way.
I would ask the Senate to really take a look at themselves, to look
in the mirror and say: Is this really what we stand for? Is this what
we have been running for all these years, to control government and
then be no different from our counterparts across the aisle?
I think today is a day of reflection but hopefully a day where there
will be some who will say: Enough is enough. I am not going to do it
anymore.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cruz). The Senator from Utah.
Mr. LEE. Mr. President, we find ourselves in another position like
those we have found ourselves in before. We find ourselves in a
position in which the government's spending authority is set to expire
in just a few hours. We have known this was coming for weeks, just as
we did with the last continuing resolution and the one before that and
the one before that. As Jacques Cousteau once observed: ``We are living
in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic
logic of short-term thinking.''
Every time, we approach this as if it were somehow going to be
different this time. We quibble from time to time about this or that
policy. We quibble from time to time about the price tag. Sometimes we
are so focused on the policy and the price tag that we forget about the
process. It is primarily to this subject, the process, that I would
like to turn my attention for the next few minutes.
You see, the process is important around here. We come from different
backgrounds. We come from different States. We represent diverse
interests across this great country. We are not going to agree on
everything. In fact, there are a lot of things on which we strongly
disagree. That is why we have processes.
The Constitution is, itself, all about the process. In fact, the
Constitution is more or less agnostic as to the substantive policy
outcome. It is all about connecting the American people to their
government, which is there to serve them. It is all about making sure
that there is responsiveness and accountability from the government to
the people, making sure that the government serves the people and not
the other way around.
It is for this reason--and it is very important--that each Member who
holds an election certificate in this body or in the body just down the
hall from us in the House of Representatives is allowed to express his
or her opinions and have them matter. Nowhere is this more important
than when it comes to spending bills.
You see, it is in spending bills that we have the opportunity to
exercise oversight over the Federal Government--a government that
requires the American people to spend many months out of every year
working just to pay their tax bills, a Federal Government that imposes
$2 trillion every single year in regulatory compliance costs on the
American people, a government that has the power to destroy a business
or a livelihood or, in some cases, lives.
It is important that we exercise this oversight, and without spending
constraints, there can be no meaningful oversight. Without an adequate
process, the Republican form of government cannot fulfill its role. The
American people are no longer in charge of their government when this
happens.
For this reason, it is a little disturbing that a government that
spends nearly $4 trillion every single year makes its spending
decisions in one fell swoop as it does. You see, whenever we pass a
continuing resolution, what we are doing as a Congress is effectively
pressing a reset button. It keeps current spending levels intact, in
place,

[[Page S837]]

unchanged, as if there were no reviewing body, as if there had been no
election, as if the American people didn't matter at all to the process
by which they are governed. This is an abdication of our role as the
people's elected representatives. It disconnects the American people,
and we wonder--we wonder why it is that this is an institution,
Congress, that enjoys an approval rating somewhere between 9 and 14
percent, making us slightly less popular than Fidel and Raul Castro in
America and only slightly more popular than the influenza virus, which
is rapidly gaining on us. It is for this reason--because we have
disconnected the American people from their own government, and one of
the ways we do that is when we pass a continuing resolution to keep the
government funded at current levels without any additional changes.
When these things are offered, it is often within just hours of the
expiration of a spending deadline.
We have a bill before us that is quite lengthy and that we have had
access to for only about 24 hours--a little bit less than that--and we
are asked to make a binary choice as to that legislation, yes or no.
Vote for it and, in this case, there are some things that you get. You
get $90 billion in emergency spending. You get an increase of spending
caps of about $300 billion over 2 years. You get in excess of $1
trillion in new debt. Some have estimated it could be more like $1.5
trillion, but we will be talking about a $22 trillion debt by the
second quarter of 2019 as a result of this bill.
When we received this bill, we were told: You have two options. You
can vote yes and accept all of those things or you can vote no, and
there is no opportunity for anything in between there--no opportunity
to amend it, no opportunity to improve it. If you think about it, there
is really not a meaningful opportunity for debate if you don't have a
meaningful opportunity to amend a legislative provision once it is
introduced.
Members are told over and over and over again: You are either going
to vote for this and accept the government as is, with no changes or
with changes that you might find incredibly disturbing, or you will be
blamed for a shutdown. Why is this OK?
One of the things that we hear from the American people, quite
understandably, quite justifiably, is why can't you all just get into a
room and come to an agreement? Well, this is that room. There are two
such rooms here in the Capitol. One is in the Senate, and one is in the
House of Representatives. This is the room where that is supposed to
take place. There are mechanisms by which that is supposed to occur.
Through the amendment process, people offer up legislation, and they
offer to improve legislation. If they have concerns with it, they can
offer up amendments. When Members are denied that opportunity, the
American people are disconnected yet again from that process.

Who benefits from this? Well, it certainly isn't the American people,
who find that their government gets bigger and more expensive. It does
so at their expense, at the expense of the American people. Every time
we undertake this process again--we pass another continuing
resolution--we suggest that it is somehow OK to fund the government
this way, with one decision affecting every aspect of government, in
one vote put forward under sort of extortive circumstances in which
Members are told: You have to do this, or the government is going to
shut down, and you will be blamed for that if you vote against it.
This isn't right. Why couldn't we bring legislation to the floor not
hours but weeks or even months before the deadline? Why couldn't we
allow that to occur, to allow the debate, the discussion to occur under
the light of day rather than having this legislation negotiated under
cover of darkness, behind closed doors, where the American people are
left out.
I have thought about this on many occasions, and there are very few
circumstances in our day-to-day lives that are like the way Congress
spends money.
It has occurred to me that it is as if you moved into a new area, a
very remote area, and you had access to only one grocery store for
many, many miles, many, many hours away. You were on your way home from
work and your spouse called you and said to stop at the store and pick
up bread, milk, and eggs.
You go to the store and get your grocery cart. You go to the bread
aisle and put a loaf of bread, a carton of milk, and a dozen eggs in
your cart. You get to the checkout counter, and you put out your bread,
milk, and eggs. The cashier rings those things up and says: I am sorry,
you may not purchase bread, milk, and eggs unless you also purchase
half a ton of iron ore, a bucket of nails, a book about cowboy poetry,
and a Barry Manilow album. In fact, this is a special kind of store
where you have to buy all of those things. In fact, you have to buy one
of every item in this entire store in order to buy any of these things,
including the bread, the milk, and the eggs.
That would start to approximate what it feels like to spend money in
Congress, where we are told: You can't fund any part of government
unless you are willing to fund all of government, subject to such
changes as the few people who write the continuing resolution might
insert. And you, by the way, having been duly elected by the citizens
of your State, will be left out of the process other than to exercise
the binary choice of yes or no.
So we have seen that this is how we get to be $20 trillion in debt,
soon to be $22 trillion in debt. We don't get to be $21 trillion, soon
to be $22 trillion in debt without a whole lot of agreement on the part
of a whole lot of people to do that. It is a bipartisan exercise, to be
sure. Bipartisanship is necessary, but the fact that it is bipartisan
doesn't always make it holy.
You don't get to be $20 trillion in debt without a whole lot of
Republicans agreeing with a whole lot of Democrats that we are going to
do precisely that. It might inure to the benefit of a few people who
stand to benefit every time the government gets bigger or more
expensive, every time we do things this way, but it hurts everyone
else.
So process matters. The fact is, we will not always come to an
agreement as to how much we ought to spend. We will not always come to
an agreement as to those things on which we will be spending, the
requisite amount of money. But I think we should be able to agree that
the American people deserve a process, one that allows them to be heard
through the people's own elected representatives. If not us, who? If
not now, when? At what point are we going to start appropriating funds
through this government, through a process that is open, that is
transparent, that can be observed by the American people and through
which the American people can be heard?
At the end of the day, we must remember that we are great as a
country not because of who we are but because of what we do. To the
extent that we have recognized as a nation that the dignity of the
human soul matters, that the rights of the individual have to be taken
into account, and that the government works for the people, we have
prospered and will prosper in the future. But we have to be willing to
respect the American people, and we should not be surprised--when we
ignore them over and over again and when we shut them out of a process
that directly and materially impacts their lives, we should not be
shocked when they respond with horror. We shouldn't be surprised when
wave election after wave election signals dissatisfaction with this
very body, with this very entity that serves as the legislative branch
of our Federal Government.
Each time we are presented with one of these continuing resolutions
or with a one-size-fits-all spending package where we are told that we
have to either vote for it, all of it, with no opportunity to improve
it, or we have to vote against it, I have concerns with that.
I have significant concerns with this particular legislation, and I
will vote no.
Thank you, Mr. President.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.
Mr. KING. Mr. President, I came in the Chamber just in the middle of
a couple of these statements that have been made, and I was confused
because I thought we were talking about the tax bill, the bill that
went through the Senate in December with no hearings and no amendments.
It didn't even have a fig leaf of bipartisanship. I am

[[Page S838]]

puzzled regarding my two colleagues, who seem so worried about the
deficit, both of whom I believe voted for that bill, which, according
to the Congressional Budget Office, is going to add $1.5 trillion to
the deficit.
There are two issues; one is process, and one is results. I myself am
concerned about results. I am concerned about the deficit, and I think
it is a legitimate question, but it ill-behooves one who, less than 6
weeks ago, voted for a massive, unfunded tax cut that will increase our
deficit by well over $1 trillion. So it is OK as a matter of deficit
politics to be for that bill and against a bill that funds community
health centers in my State; that funds opioid treatment, which is
desperately needed across this country; that funds our military in a
way that they can operate and actually meet the needs of the national
security of this country. That is what the bill before us does.
So we can argue about those things, but it is touching, frankly, to
hear these very lugubrious comments about process when the process on
the tax bill was one of the worst processes in the history of this
body. When tax reform was passed in 1986, there were some 33 hearings
before the Finance Committee. It took 14 months, and the vote in the
Senate was something like 90 to 10. That was a process. The process on
the tax bill in December was atrocious. It was an embarrassment. The
city council in Bangor, ME, would not have amended the leash law using
that process.
Now, tonight, people are coming and complaining about process--the
people who voted for that bill. I am sorry, I am not very persuaded by
that. At least now there has been some process in the sense that it has
been bipartisan, that our leaders have been able to negotiate, that
there has been input from the Appropriations Committee, from Members of
the rank-and-file on both sides and in both Houses. I admit it is not a
great process, but it seems to me those who are raising that issue
tonight forfeited the right to raise that issue when they voted for the
tax bill, as far as I know, without a peep about process or about
deficits.
I agree that we ought to get back to regular order. We ought to get
back to working together. We ought to get back to committee hearings.
But let's not have this amnesia from 6 weeks ago when we made one of
the most significant decisions--a once-in-a-generation decision--about
permanent tax policy that is going to affect the budget and the debt of
this country for a whole generation.
Here, tonight, we are getting all of this strong emotional plea about
process, about what amounts to a 2-year budget, which, by the way, is
the way we should do it--not according to this process, but we ought to
be talking about 2-year budgets.
So I am sympathetic on both the deficit issue and the process issue,
but the lawyer in me says that you are estopped from raising that
argument if you voted for the tax bill. You can't have it both ways.
I listened to my esteemed colleague from Utah, and I understand his
concerns. I share his concerns. If only he had said that in December.
But, instead, he says it tonight when we are talking about funding our
military, opioid treatment, and children's healthcare.
I think you have to work it both ways. You can't just take one side
of the debate and say that it is OK to do a tax cut with no process but
it is not OK to take a bipartisan, negotiated arrangement on the budget
because all of a sudden we are concerned about process.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.
Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I appreciate the keen insights of my friend
and distinguished colleague, the Senator from Maine.
I would point out here that there was a process on the tax bill. It
may not have been perfect--in fact, it wasn't--but there was a process.
We had amendments. We were allowed to offer them, to have them
considered. We did, in fact, take votes. There is no process on this.
I have been told by some of the Members of this body--some from my
party, some from the other party--that there is a process because
members of the Appropriations Committee have had input on this. That
isn't a process that belongs to the Senate; that is for one committee.
It is not a substitute for floor consideration.
There is a provision in the U.S. Constitution that makes certain
kinds of amendments to the Constitution patently unconstitutional. That
provision says that you can't do anything to alter the equal
representation of the States within the U.S. Senate. Consistent with
the spirit of that provision, we have to make sure we don't make
changes to Senate procedure in a way that creates a super class of
Senators. We don't want to get to a point, to paraphrase George Orwell,
where we say all Senators are equal but some are more equal than
others.
The process within the Appropriations Committee is not Senate
process.
We did, in fact, have a process on the tax bill. It was not perfect,
but it was a process. Here, there isn't a process. Here, there is not
an opportunity for amendments. There is not an opportunity for a single
amendment. That is a material distinction, and it is one worth noting
here.
It is also worth noting here that we have done this over and over and
over again. What is this--the fifth continuing resolution of this
fiscal year alone? This is happening over and over and over again, so
much so that many Members of this body have never seen it operate any
differently. That is a sad state of affairs and one that ought to be
troubling to Members of both political parties and to Members of this
body from every part of this great country.
Thank you, Mr. President.

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