[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 149 (Tuesday, November 27, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6921-S6922]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2013--MOTION TO
PROCEED--Continued
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, 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. SCHUMER. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum
call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Fiscal Cliff
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I rise to discuss the state of the
ongoing negotiations to avert the fiscal cliff.
So far there has been little progress reported at the negotiating
table. Since the President's very productive meeting with the
bipartisan leaders from the House and Senate on November 16, the
subsequent staff talks have produced no breakthroughs. Republicans in
the room are not yet acknowledging the need to let tax breaks for the
very wealthiest Americans expire, nor are they offering the kind of
reasonable reforms to entitlement programs that Democrats can be
expected to support.
But despite this impasse, as Leader McConnell described it on the
floor yesterday, I am optimistic we can still get a deal by Christmas.
I detect a great deal of progress being made beneath the surface. You
only need to turn on television these past couple of days to observe
the signs of this progress.
For nearly three decades, a rightwing Washington lobbyist has exerted
a stranglehold on mainstream Republicans over the issue of taxes,
threatening political retaliation against any lawmaker who dared to
vote for any fiscal solution that asked the wealthy to pay their fair
share. But in the 3 weeks since the election, one Republican after
another has been rebuking this lobbyist for his uncompromising stance
on taxes. Republicans in both the House and Senate are deciding they no
longer want to be married to this pledge. Republicans are saying they
want a divorce from Grover Norquist. That alone is a leading indicator
that a fiscal deal is within reach. Both sides are still far apart and
discussions over the next few weeks will be difficult. But with each
new Republican disavowing Grover Norquist, the chance of a deal rises
sharply.
First there was Saxby Chambliss, an honorable Member of this body and
a charter member of the Gang of Six, who has spent the last 2 years
trying to negotiate a bipartisan compromise in the best of faith.
Senator Chambliss is a signer of the Norquist pledge, but he went on
TV--not somewhere else but down in Georgia--last week and bravely said:
I care about my country more than I do about a 20-year-old
pledge.
Then on ABC this past Sunday, Lindsey Graham said:
The only pledge we should be making is to each other to
avoid becoming Greece.
On the very same program, my friend from New York, Congressman Pete
[[Page S6922]]
King, said the pledge no longer applied because, ``the world has
changed. And the economic situation is different.''
These were just two interviews with George Stephanopoulos. But
sometimes progress on the Sunday news shows can foreshadow progress in
the negotiating room. In fact, these comments by Senators Chambliss,
Graham, and Congressman King appear to have started a trend.
Yesterday, Senator Corker echoed their sentiments. He released his
own fiscal plan, which contains $1 trillion in new revenues. Asked
whether his inclusion of revenues puts him at cross purposes with
Grover Norquist, Senator Corker said:
I'm not obligated on the pledge. The only thing I'm
honoring is the oath I take when I serve, when I'm sworn in
this January.
Senator Murkowski said similar things yesterday. Even Senator
Sessions showed hints of compromise when he said, about the pledge:
We've got to deal with the crisis we face. We've got to
deal with the political reality of the President's victory.
And then this morning, the vaunted Wall Street Journal editorial page
even seemed to distance itself from Mr. Norquist. Of the need to
compromise with President Obama, the Journal counseled:
This is where Mr. Norquist can give some ground. If taxes
are going up anyway because the Bush rates expire, and
Republicans can stop them from going up as much as they
otherwise would, then pledge-takers deserve some credit for
that.
We disagree with the forms of revenues that most of these Republicans
have in mind. Many of the Republicans expressing openness to revenues
want to pursue them only through tax reform next year. And even then,
they are only willing to consider limits of deductions as opposed to
rate increases on the very wealthy.
Democrats, on the other hand, believe that even if Republicans want
to kick tax reform into 2013, a significant downpayment on revenues
must be enacted before January 1. And we further believe that the
fairest, most straightforward way to make that downpayment on revenues
is by decoupling the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Limiting deductions
is a necessary revenue-raising component of a grand bargain, but it
does not and cannot replace the need for restoring the Clinton-era
rates for the top two tax brackets. Republicans are not quite there yet
in terms of acknowledging this, but they are moving slowly in the right
direction.
As the Washington Post reported this weekend, for the first time in
decades there is a bipartisan consensus in favor of asking the wealthy
to pay a little more to reduce the deficit. The question is how to do
it. This is an encouraging development. It suggests that Republicans
are slowly absorbing one of the lessons of the 2012 election which is
that elections continue to be won in the middle, and victories will
remain elusive for any party that caters to special-interest groups
that occupy either the far left or the far right.
Over the years the Democratic Party has wrestled with the same issues
Republicans are facing. When I was elected to Congress in 1981, crime
was ripping apart my district. I came to Washington with the goal of
working to pass new laws to crack down on crime. Lo and behold, I found
that the Democratic Congress at the time was literally outsourcing the
drafting of crime legislation to the ACLU. I have great respect for the
views of civil libertarians. But at that time, the activists' motto
was, Let 100 guilty people go free lest you convict 1 innocent person.
That view was far outside the mainstream, but it dominated our party's
thinking on crime for better than a decade. Our party suffered for it.
We didn't snap out of it until President Clinton passed the crime bill
in the 1990s. After that, we won back the trust of moderate, middle-
class voters.
I know the echo chambers some of our Republican colleagues are in and
I know how difficult it is. But if history shows anything, after
suffering some bad losses at the polls earlier this month many
Republicans are now realizing the need to snap out of it on taxes.
Grover Norquist has had a good run. It has lasted far longer than 15
minutes. But his stringent views make him an outlier now. It is not
unlike what happened to his longtime friend Ralph Reed, who steered the
Republican Party too far right on social issues in the 1990s and is
hardly heard from anymore.
Mr. Norquist will likely not be departing the scene anytime soon, but
perhaps he could switch his focus to immigration. He makes a lot of
sense on the need for a comprehensive immigration reform bill, and I
would be first to work with him on that. But as the events of the last
weeks show, on taxes, Grover Norquist is out on an island.
In conclusion, I salute my colleagues on the other side of the aisle
who have disavowed his group's pledge. I will encourage others to do
the same. The more who do, the closer we will come to a bipartisan
agreement on our fiscal problems.
Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
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