[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 129 (Tuesday, September 4, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11003-S11004]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     RETURN FROM THE AUGUST RECESS

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, as we resume our business here in the 
Senate, we do so in the hope that we have learned some lessons over the 
last 8 months. The chief lesson we should have learned, in my view, is 
that the culture of the endless campaign may win headlines, but it 
doesn't win much beyond that.
  None of us is so naive as to think that the life of an elected 
politician doesn't involve politics--obviously it does. But we also 
know that making laws often demands leaving the politics aside. The 
bitter debates over the war in Iraq and a thin list of significant 
legislative achievements so far in the 110th Congress are all the proof 
of that we need.
  That's the lesson of the last 8 months--that if we expect to 
accomplish anything here we need to lower the political temperature. 
And it is urgent as we return here today that we do just that.
  Cooperation is as important on routine business as it is on 
contentious things. We are now just 4 weeks away from the beginning of 
the new fiscal year, and we have not sent a single one of the twelve 
annual appropriations bills to the President's desk. This almost 
certainly means we will soon be looking at an appropriations train 
wreck here in the next few weeks, followed by a continuing resolution 
to keep the Government running.
  This isn't the way it's supposed to be. Indeed, it was not all that 
long ago that Democrats themselves were denouncing Republicans for 
doing this very thing.
  Faced with the same situation last year, the current assistant 
majority leader railed against the notion of a continuing resolution, 
accusing Republicans, as he put it, ``of failing to do the most 
fundamental job Congress is expected to do.'' I think the assistant 
majority leader had that right. He said that calling the 109th Congress 
a do-nothing Congress would be an insult to the original do-nothing 
Congress of 1948. And he vowed to finish the unfinished business of the 
last Congress.
  Yet now, as Democrats enter the ninth month poised to make the very 
same mistake we did, we have not heard a note of self-criticism from 
the other side. This kind of selective criticism might work on the 
campaign trail. But it's a clear recipe for frustration and defeat in 
the Senate. We need to get these bills passed and over to the 
President's desk for a signature. And relentless partisanship is not 
going to do that.
  The most heated politics have been reserved, of course, for the war. 
So if we are going to correct course, we will need to start there. The 
Congress voted in May to have General Petraeus report back this month 
on progress in Iraq, and the Congress should listen to what he says, 
without prejudice, when he gets here.
  This is not a baseless hope. We have seen some of the sharpest early 
critics of the general's new military strategy defending it in recent 
weeks after seeing for themselves the impact it has had in former al-
Qaida strongholds like Anbar Province.
  Republicans welcome this kind of honest reassessment. As more 
Democrats have the courage to acknowledge the good news as well as the 
bad news in Iraq, we all have reason to hope for the kind of 
cooperative legislative strategy that has been lacking until now.
  The political path the majority has often chosen over the last 8 
months has reduced us at times to theatrics on the war. It has left us 
scrambling on appropriations. And it threatens to prevent us from 
addressing a number of other vital issues that the American people 
don't want us to put off. We need to act, cooperatively, before it is 
too late to address these issues within the limited time we have.
  Time is short, and the list is long. We need to act on a farm bill by 
the end of the month. We need to act on vital free trade agreements and 
on the debt limit ceiling, which we will reach sometime in early 
October. We need to extend the FISA legislation.
  More than 40 tax provisions expire at the end of this year. We need 
to extend them before it is too late, and we can only do it if we 
resist calls to pay for them with equally unpopular offsets.
  The other side tends to look at the budget in terms of Newtonian 
physics: They think every cut calls for an equal and opposite hike. Yet 
we have seen that this is not the case, with money now flooding into 
the Treasury at record rates since the 2001 and 2003 cuts. We should 
acknowledge the facts and continue this prosperity without imposing new 
pain on taxpayers who responded to this relief by growing this economy.
  The current alternative minimum tax relief is current no more--it 
expired at the end of last year. In the last three Congresses, we 
extended this relief before the Fourth of July recess so taxpayers knew 
with certainty the relief would be there. Yet here we stand, after the 
August recess, with no sign of any effort to extend it again--no bill 
reported by committee, not even a markup scheduled.
  Unless this relief is extended, 20 million new taxpayers will face 
this punishing tax when they file their returns next year. They need to 
know if Democrats are going to make good on their promise to let all 
the provisions of the 2001 and 2003 tax bills expire. We are willing to 
work together on this issue, but again, cooperation will mean resisting 
calls for draconian tax increases to provide relief from a tax which 
was never intended to affect so many families.
  The Senate will soon be asked to confirm a new Attorney General. Some 
Members of this body will be tempted to turn the confirmation process 
into another occasion for seeking political advantage. Democrats have 
rightly noted that the Justice Department's work is too important to 
languish without leadership at the top.
  And they have promised that if the President's nominee puts the rule 
of law first, they will avoid confrontation. They will prove they mean 
it by not looking to secure commitments from the nominee as a condition 
of his or her confirmation, other than that he or she will faithfully 
enforce the law.
  Attempts to exact political promises and precommitments would be 
inconsistent with the goal of restoring the Justice Department to full 
strength as quickly as possible.
  Nor should the confirmation of a new Attorney General be used as an 
excuse to slow down circuit court nominations, starting with Judge 
Leslie Southwick.
  The average number of circuit court confirmations during the final 2 
years of similarly situated presidencies is 17. We have fallen off pace 
to approximate that standard.
  At this point, the Senate has only confirmed three circuit court 
nominees--three. The Senate can begin to make much needed progress in 
this area by confirming Judge Southwick. The Judiciary Committee voted 
to send his nomination to the Senate before we broke for recess and he 
deserves a vote and he deserves it soon.
  In my view, the Democratic majority has wasted too much time in the 
first months of this session playing politics instead of legislating. 
The working days we have left in this session are too few to be 
squandered. We need to put aside the political path and come

[[Page S11004]]

together to get some work done. The clock is ticking. It is getting 
late. But it is not too late. There is no better time to shift course 
than now.
  The political path has been perhaps most in evidence on many of the 
Iraq votes we have had. More of the same will only delay the 
cooperative work we need to create a policy aimed at protecting 
America's vital long- and short-term security interests in the Persian 
Gulf and Iraq.
  A good first step away from the political path would be to get the 
Defense appropriations bill to the floor of the Senate in the next week 
or two and get funding to our forces in the field. Appropriations 
should be an urgent priority for us, as Democrats insisted when they 
were in the minority. Republicans are ready to start fresh, to begin 
again, in order to get many important and necessary things accomplished 
in the coming days and weeks. We will call on our friends on the other 
side to do the same.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The senior Senator from Montana.

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