[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 32 (Thursday, February 27, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2881-S2883]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                               The Budget

  Mr. President, I also want to express my great frustration and my 
great sadness in many ways over priorities that President Bush has 
recently exhibited relative to our young men and women in uniform and 
the likely war we are about to embark upon.
  Americans all across this country, including my wife and myself, are 
about to send our finest young men and young women into harm's way in 
the Iraq region. We can debate the wisdom of that. But that is the 
reality. I think we all see this coming. We can take great pride in 
these men and women in uniform, the courage they show, and their 
commitment to America. They are asking for so little and, yet, they are 
willing to do whatever is required of our American military. They are 
the greatest military ever fielded in terms of the sophistication of 
technology they deal with and the requirements they meet.
  But while we put this military together and send them on their way 
with flags flying and salutes and the prayers of all of us, the 
President simultaneously has recommended now in his 2004 budget 
recommendation that we cut impact aid education funding for the 
children of these very troops who we are sending into war. Is it 
because we can't afford to finance quality

[[Page S2882]]

education of the children of our military? No. President Bush also, as 
we recall, has called for over $100 billion of tax cuts for primarily 
the very wealthiest of Americans--primarily on Wall Street. So rather 
than asking America's wealthiest families to sacrifice at a time of 
war, the request seems to be of the middle class and the working 
family, send your sons and daughters into combat, and we will ask 
America's wealthiest no sacrifice whatever. In fact, we will cut their 
taxes and we will come back to these families who are sending their 
sons and daughters into combat and tell them we can't afford to educate 
your kids while you are gone. And these spouses remain. The Guard and 
Reserve and active-duty spouses in South Dakota and across every State 
in our land are worried to death about the prospects of their loved 
ones, but proud, and upholding America's ideals as they go into heaven 
knows what kind of combat circumstance they will face with weapons of 
mass destruction arrayed against them. We hope whatever combat occurs 
will be swift and decisive and conclude positively for us. But 
obviously we all know there is great risk for everyone's sons and 
daughters who go into circumstances such as this.

  Is it asking too much of President Bush to at least not cut the 
education funding for the children who are left behind? Is that asking 
too much? It says a lot about the priorities of this administration, 
that we would array the world's finest military on the one hand, 
provide tax relief for the world's wealthiest people on the other hand, 
and simultaneously beg poverty when it comes to the schools for the 
children of our military personnel. Shame on the President. Shame on 
the President for these kinds of priorities. America deserves better. 
Our fighting men and women deserve better than this. Fiscal 
responsibility is not the issue. Priority is the issue.
  Then when our military personnel come home again, what do they find 
but the Veterans Administration underfunded yet again. The 
administration is asking for higher copayments, higher deductibles, and 
denies hundreds of thousands of our veterans access to VA health care 
they were promised. What kind of signal does that send? How are you 
going to continue to attract the very best of America's young men and 
women to wear our Nation's uniform when they find that while we do that 
and pat them on their back and salute them and send them onto combat--4 
years, 5 years--at the same time we are not going to take care of their 
kids. When they come home, we are not going to take care of their 
health care obligations as we promised we would.
  It is long overdue that some of these priorities be met off the top 
of the barrel, rather than the bottom of the barrel and the crumbs that 
are left over half doing other things.
  I don't know how we can expect in the day and age of a voluntary 
military to continue to attract the best and the brightest of our young 
people who deal with the sophisticated kinds of technology they are 
requested to do now, if they know simultaneously--and they increasingly 
do--that once they leave home and once they come back, they will in too 
many cases be treated shabbily by our government, which is too busy 
stuffing its pockets with cash rather than meeting its obligations to 
those who are laying their lives literally on the line for America's 
freedom and American values.
  As a member of the Senate Budget Committee, today I also expressed 
alarm at recent news reports of still larger than expected Federal 
budget deficits, after an unprecedented 4 years in a row of budget 
surpluses during the final 4 years of the past Clinton administration--
the years in which we were in the black. We were paying down on the 
accumulated national debt. We were not borrowing from the Social 
Security trust fund. We now find the bipartisan Congressional Budget 
Office telling us this red ink will be an astonishing $199 billion. As 
recently as 2001, we had a surplus of $127 billion.
  Mr. President, in 2001--2 years ago--we had a surplus of $127 
billion, which followed 3 preceding surplus years in the black. That 
was responsible budgeting. Some experts now are saying that the 2004 
deficit is going to break all records, at over $350 billion, if war 
expenses and the cost of the Bush tax policies are assumed.
  The budget surplus, the paying down of the national debt, and the 
preservation of the Social Security trust funds--which was what we all 
had when this administration commenced--have all gone away. The days of 
not borrowing from the Social Security trust fund are over. We are 
back. And we are told by the White House budget people at OMB that we 
will continue to borrow under the President's budget and tax plans out 
of the Social Security trust fund for the remainder of the decade.
  The paying down of the national debt has gone away. The ability to 
avoid continued high debt service so we can redirect those dollars, 
instead, to education, to health care, to our veterans, to our 
military, whatever it might be, has all gone away, because we are going 
to increasingly pay debt service under the President's budget plan.
  The CBO indicates that our Nation will not see a budget surplus again 
until 2007, and then only if there are no war expenses, no additional 
tax cuts, and no Medicare prescription drug legislation. We all know 
that is not going to happen. We are going to have war expenses. We do 
not know what they will be. We will pay whatever it takes to make sure 
our men and women in uniform are supported. Whatever the cost is, we 
will pay it. But the war and the follow-on occupation is likely to cost 
at least $100 billion.
  We know the President has tax cut after tax cut lined up primarily 
for his wealthiest contributors. And then we know, as well, that we 
need to move on to prescription drug legislation that is long overdue. 
We are the only major democratic society in the world that does not 
have some kind of prescription drug or national health care strategy.
  So what we find here is President Bush's proposal to borrow yet 
another $1 trillion. Now we are not even talking ``B,'' we are talking 
the ``T'' word. Mr. President, $1 trillion over the coming decade in 
order to finance Wall Street tax breaks has to be approached with great 
caution. This seems, to me, to be part of an agenda designed to make it 
impossible to have strong Federal funding for education, veterans, 
agriculture, and seniors for generations to come.
  This overall strategy strikes me as one that we saw a glimmer of in 
the 1980s; and that is, a strategy designed to primarily break the 
Federal Government, to deny all resources. Because when our friends in 
the far political right try to advance the cause of eliminating 
Medicare, downsizing Social Security, downsizing or eliminating 
veterans health care, withdrawing from supporting our schools, getting 
out of the afterschool and daycare programs, getting away from rural 
electricity and rural development programs--when they try to do that, 
they are always met with resistance from the American people, Democrats 
and Republicans alike.
  They have never been able to win that war because Americans want that 
kind of partnership--that constructive partnership--between Washington 
and our communities and our States. So in a very cynical tactic, what 
has been discovered here is that while they cannot win the war on the 
merits of eliminating that partnership, they can try to break the 
Government, to deny it the revenue it needs, so that they can come to 
the American public and say: Well, we would love to support 
those afterschool programs, we would love to have more police on the 
beat, we would love to help our fire departments, and we would love to 
make sure all our young people could afford to go to college or 
technical programs, but, oh, we are broke; we don't have the money.

  That is apparently how some people hope this debate will conclude. 
They cannot win on the merits of the policy, but what they can try to 
do is come up with a tax policy that enriches the wealthiest 
contributors while simultaneously making it increasingly impossible for 
this Federal Government to live up to its obligations to its people and 
to build a stronger society, offering more opportunity for every young 
American--Black, Hispanic, Native American, Caucasian, whoever they 
might be.
  I feel great frustration. I hope the American public understands what 
really is going on here relative to the President's budget-and-tax 
agenda. It is a radical agenda. If you don't believe

[[Page S2883]]

it is a radical agenda, look at what this President is willing to do, 
even to the children of our men and women in uniform. It is appalling.
  Look at what the President is willing to do to try to stack the 
court, possibly with ideologues, far outside the mainstream of American 
jurisprudential thought, to bend the Constitution, to break the 
Constitution, by bringing nominees to this body who will not share with 
us their judicial thoughts, who have no scholarly writings, who have no 
past judicial decisions to look to. They are stealth judges, secret 
judges.
  We cannot allow that to stand. We cannot allow that to happen in our 
Nation. Our country has been a beacon of democracy, a beacon of 
openness, a beacon of opportunity. We cannot walk away from that. The 
Constitution has been the bulwark of making sure that those remain our 
ideals. For this body to walk away, and to allow for a rubberstamp 
process to go on, that any individual can come before the Senate 
Judiciary Committee and the full Senate without the Senate or the 
committee having any idea who he is or what his agenda really is would 
be a travesty. It is completely unacceptable.
  So, again, I have been proud to work in a bipartisan manner on the 
confirmation of roughly 100 judges--virtually all conservative 
Republican judges. But I draw the line here. This is unprecedented, and 
the constitutional ramifications of what would occur and what precedent 
would be set would be devastating to this Nation. It would make a 
mockery of our oath, a mockery of the Constitution, for this body to do 
anything other than to insist that this nominee share with the body his 
philosophy relative to legal issues, his jurisprudence.
  So I hope we can soon either get to the bottom of who this individual 
is or move on to other issues that are pressing before our Republic--
ranging from health care, education, support of our men and women in 
uniform. There is much we need to be doing.
  Frankly, there is very little pending on the floor at this time, but 
there is much that ultimately we need to be doing. I hope, in the 
context of taking on these additional issues, we will do it with fiscal 
responsibility, which not only involves not succumbing to the 
temptation to sink our country deeper and deeper and deeper into red 
ink as far as the eye can see, but also involves correcting President 
Bush's budget priorities to the degree that we take care of these kids 
of our military men and women, that we resist the President's 
temptation to take money away from these schoolhouses in order to give 
it to Wall Street and to wealthy contributors for political campaigns.
  That isn't what we are here for. Those aren't the people we 
represent. Those aren't the ideals we represent. And this Nation 
deserves better.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.