[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 9 (Tuesday, January 22, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S21-S23]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
REPUBLICANS READY TO WORK
Mr. ALEXANDER. I, too, welcome Roger Wicker to the Senate. I have
known him a long time. He has been a leader for the Tennessee Valley
Authority. He is one of Congress's most knowledgeable Members, and he
has been a leader in helping to put American history back in its
rightful place in our classrooms so our children can grow up learning
what it means to be an American. He was the lead sponsor in the House
of Representatives on legislation that I introduced in the Senate that
created summer academies for outstanding teachers and students of
American history.
I would also like to congratulate Marty Paone on his service here. We
all admire him and will miss him.
I thank the majority leader for his remarks at the beginning of the
year, and I especially wanted to echo the remarks the Republican
leader, Senator McConnell of Kentucky, made. He pointed out that we
have had a Presidential election in this country every 4 years since
1788. Senator McConnell pointed that out, and he said we would not use
this year's election as an excuse to put off the people's business for
another day. In other words, it is a Presidential year, and some around
town are writing and saying: Well, they will not get much done in
Congress this year. We are saying on the Republican side of the aisle,
and I hope it is being said on both sides of the aisle, that there is
no excuse for Congress to take a year off, given the serious issues
facing our country.
A number of politicians are campaigning for change, we have all
heard. Republican Senators are ready to help, working with our
colleagues, to give the Senate an opportunity to vote for real change.
We wish to change the way Washington does business by going to work on
big issues facing our country. And not just go to work on them but to
get principled solutions this year. And because this is the Senate,
where it often takes 60 votes to get a meaningful result, that means we
invite the Democrats to work with us in a bipartisan way to get those
results.
Republicans didn't seek our offices to do bad things to Democrats. We
are here to do good things for our country, and there is plenty to do.
We see what is happening in the housing market, with oil prices, with
rising health care costs. We know we need to move quickly with a
bipartisan approach to help get the economy back on track. Our
preference is to let businesses and people keep and spend more of their
own money to boost the economy. We want to grow the economy, not the
Government.
We know we need, as Senator Kyl was saying, to intercept
communications among terrorists to protect our country. We saw the
Rockefeller-Bond bipartisan proposal passed by 13 to 2 in the
Intelligence Committee. Our solution is to make sure companies aren't
penalized for helping us protect ourselves, while at the same time
securing individual rights. We want a strong national defense.
We see there are 40 million or so Americans uninsured, and we want to
change that. We don't want to take a year off in dealing with health
insurance. We want to start this year. As the Republican leader said,
our goal is that every American have health insurance, starting with
small business health insurance plans, moving on to reforming the Tax
Code so Americans can afford to buy private insurance. There are a
number of Democratic and Republican proposals on reaching the goal we
have in helping every American to have health insurance. We can start
this year.
There is no need to wait to deal with Medicaid and Medicare spending
another year. We all know, at their present pace of growth, those two
accounts will bankrupt our Government. It is irresponsible to wait.
That is a bipartisan conclusion. There are a number of proposals from
both sides of the aisle to begin to deal with that, from Senator Gregg
and Senator Conrad, to Senator Feinstein and Senator Domenici and
Senator Voinovich as well. We should get started. These are the
principles of fiscal responsibility and limited Government.
Last year, we took some important steps to keep jobs from going
overseas by growing more jobs at home. We see the problem of
competition with China and India. We worked together to pass a bill--
the American COMPETES Act--authorizing $34 billion to keep our
brainpower advantage. Now let us implement it. Senator Hutchison of
Texas, Senators Bingaman and Domenici of New Mexico, and many others
have worked hard on this. So let us implement more advanced placement
courses for low-income students, a million and a half more; more highly
trained scientists and engineers coming in to help grow jobs in the
United States; and 10,000 more math and science teachers. That we can
do.
We know we have to be bipartisan to get a result. Some things are
bipartisan, and I have mentioned many of them, but some things should
be bipartisan that aren't. For example, the Federal Government is
saying the Salvation Army can't require its employees to speak English
on the job. Well, Americans, by 80 to 17 percent, believe employers
should be able to require their employees to speak America's common
language on the job. We have legislation to make that clear. It is
bipartisan to some degree, but not as bipartisan as it ought to be. The
principle is right there above the Senate Presiding Officer's desk. It
says: One from many--``e pluribus unum.''
Another challenge that should be more bipartisan, because most
Americans see the wisdom of it, is addressing a shortage of medical
care in rural America caused by lawsuit abuse. OB-GYN doctors are
abandoning rural areas across America and mothers are driving too far
for prenatal health care and to have their babies. We should work
across party lines to change that. The solution we have offered is to
stop runaway lawsuits that make doctors pay $100,000 or more a year for
malpractice insurance. That is why they leave the rural areas. This is
the principle of equal opportunity.
There is plenty of work to do. Thirty years ago, I began my service
as the Governor of Tennessee. I was a young Republican Governor and the
State was very Democratic, thank you. So the media ran up to the big
Democratic speaker of the house, Ned McWherter, and said: Mr. Speaker,
what are you going to do with this new young Republican Governor? And
to their surprise, the speaker said: I am going to help him. Because if
he succeeds, our State succeeds. And that is the way we worked for 8
years.
Now, we are not naive about politics in Tennessee. We had, and have,
our fights. We argued about our principles. If I had a better schools
program, they had an even better schools program on the other side. But
we kept our eye on the ball. In the end, we worked together. In the
end, we got results. That is why we brought in the auto industry and
created the best four-lane highway system and created chairs and
centers of excellence at our universities that still exist, and we
began to pay teachers more for teaching well.
I would like nothing more than to move that kind of cooperation from
Tennessee to DC. I sense that from Democrats and Republicans all
through this body. Of course, we will argue. We were elected because we
have differences. This is a debating society. But we don't stop with
our disagreements, we should finish with our results. So we are here to
change the way Washington does business, as the Republican leader said,
and I look forward to a constructive year of helping our country move
ahead with a steady
[[Page S22]]
stream of specific solutions to big problems that get results because
they either are bipartisan or because they should be bipartisan.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I would like to join my distinguished
colleague from Tennessee who recently was elected to the leadership on
this side of the aisle. His responsibility and mine is to help try to
find a way to work together, not by sacrificing our principles but to
try to find that common ground rather than what divides us.
But first let me also express my congratulations to our new colleague
from Mississippi, Senator Wicker, who had a distinguished career in the
House of Representatives and comes here, I know, with a lot of hopes
and aspirations. I look forward to working with him as he represents
his State and as I represent my State, the State of Texas, and as we
all work together to represent the United States, hopefully, to provide
for the aspirations and dreams of the American people to make it
possible for them to live their dream. That is what the United States
has always been; that is what it should remain.
I cannot help but reflect, returning from our holiday recess, I had
somebody this morning in the cafeteria say: Welcome back from your
vacation.
I said: Well, I prefer to call it the alternate work period because
it was not entirely a vacation, although I did get some time off, as
did my colleagues. But I trust that we all came back refreshed and
rejuvenated and ready to take on the challenging work that lies ahead.
I have to say, if I heard it once, I heard it a thousand times as I
traveled the State of Texas, people are frustrated with Washington, DC.
They think Washington is broken. They do not hear about those occasions
when we work together to pass legislation on a bipartisan basis. They
hear the conflict and the divisiveness and the partisanship, and they
do not like it. I had to tell them, each of my constituents when they
mentioned that: Well, I do not like it very much either. I did not run
for the Senate and I do not serve in a position of public trust to come
up and pick fights.
Everybody knows in politics it is always possible to pick a fight,
but it does not take any particular genius to do that. What we ought to
be doing, and what it takes hard work to do, is trying to find common
ground. There is plenty of common ground.
Senator Alexander mentioned a number of tremendous bipartisan
accomplishments--the America Competes Act. There have been a number of
opportunities for us to work together in a bipartisan way. I am
particularly proud of some legislation that Senator Pat Leahy, the
chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and I were the cosponsors of that
the President signed into law in December, the first reform of the
Freedom of Information Act in perhaps as much as 25 years.
I think perhaps the best anecdote to public skepticism about
Washington is greater transparency because I believe giving the public
information about how their Government works is a way to empower them
to hold elected officials and Government accountable. When things
happen in secret, behind closed doors, that does not happen. So I am
delighted there are plenty of opportunities for us to work together. I
think we should embrace them, not run away from them or look for
opportunities for us to pick fights and to feed that skepticism and
really the sense that I think many people expressed to me that they
feel as though Washington is increasingly irrelevant when it comes to
dealing with the challenges that affect our lives.
The economy is one that has, of course, come roaring to the forefront
as an issue on which we need to work together. I was pleased to hear
Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid say they wanted to work with
the President to come up with a stimulus package that is timely,
targeted, and temporary, something that would hopefully get the economy
moving again as it has been for roughly the last 4 years, where we have
seen an unbroken record of growth of the economy, increased number of
jobs, some 9 million new jobs created.
Frankly, the way that happened is because we allowed the American
taxpayer and small businesses to keep more of what they earned so they
could invest it, they could spend it on the education for their
children, they could do whatever they wanted to with it because it is
theirs. Sometimes I think it is helpful to remind ourselves that the
money that hard-working Americans earn is their money. It is not ours.
It is not the Federal Government's money.
Sometimes I think when people are in Washington too long they begin
to think of this as revenue pay-fors, ways to raise funds so that
Government can grow bigger and spend people's money. Well, the American
people understand there are some things they cannot do for themselves
and Government has to do, such as the common defense, and they are
willing to pay their taxes for efficient Government that delivers a
particular result that Government only can provide.
But we ought not to use this stimulus package, the downturn in the
economy, as a way to burden the American people with more taxes or find
new ways to grow the size of the Federal Government. So I hope we can
continue in a careful and judicious and thoughtful way to find common
ground to work on a stimulus package that the President will sign and
that will enjoy bipartisan support.
Now, there is a lot of skepticism, as I said, about Washington. Part
of it is that the Government does not spend the tax dollars well,
efficiently. I have to tell you there is good evidence of that. There
is a Web site associated with the Office of Management and Budget
called expectmore.gov. I hope people will look at that.
What I discovered when I looked at it is that the Office of
Management and Budget has reviewed 1,000 different Federal Government
programs and found 22 percent of them either ineffective or the Office
of Management and Budget cannot tell whether they are serving their
intended purpose.
I am not sure which is worse. Either they are proven ineffective or
else you cannot tell. Either way that is unacceptable and we need to
find a way to deal with those wasteful Washington programs that need to
be eliminated. I proposed a Federal sunset commission that is modeled
after many of the States, such as my State, the State of Texas, where
you have periodic reviews of those programs, and every once in a while
the bureaucrats have to come in and justify the reason for the
program's existence.
If circumstances have changed, the program is no longer needed, it
can be eliminated or the budget, rather than securing an inflationary
or cost-of-living increase in the size of that program each year
without any real scrutiny or oversight, they start out with a zero-
based budget and have to justify each dollar of that budget.
So I think a national sunset commission would help us eliminate more
wasteful Washington spending. As I said, I am proud of the work that
Senator Leahy and I were able to do in a bipartisan way to reform the
Freedom of Information Act to give people more information about their
Government so they can hold Government and Government officials
accountable. But I think there is more that we need to do. Recently,
earlier this month, the Government launched a new Web site called
www.usaspending.gov which allows Americans to search for Federal grants
and contracts. I am going to propose legislation--I am eager to find
colleagues on the other side of the aisle with whom I can work; I am
sure there will be a number of them--to build on this Web site and
allow taxpayers to see how the Government spends their tax dollars.
Now, I wish I could say I thought of this on my own, but the fact is,
our comptroller in the State of Texas--may I inquire how much time
remains?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Five seconds.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I am proud of the work that is being done
by the State comptroller of Texas, Susan Combs, who has created a Web
site wherethemoneygoes.gov. We need to use greater transparency and the
accountability that goes with it to restore public confidence in how
Government works. I look forward to working with our colleagues across
the aisle and hope to find common ground, not to pick fights and find
out where we differ but to find where we can move this country forward
and solve some of the problems that confront us.
[[Page S23]]
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The assistant majority leader.
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