[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 8 (Wednesday, January 23, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S191-S195]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY
Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, President Obama may have been vague
on details in his inaugural speech on Monday, but I will give him this,
he couldn't have been clearer about the tone and the direction he has
in mind for the second term. Gone is the postpartisan rhetoric that
propelled him onto the national stage and into the White House. In its
place is an unabashedly leftwing appeal for more bureaucratic control
and centralized power here in Washington.
On Monday, we saw a President and a party that appeared to have
shifted into reverse and jammed on the gas. For Democrats in the Obama
age, the era of big government being over is officially over. And
anybody who disagrees with their approach isn't just wrong, they are
not just standing in the way of progress, they are malevolent, they are
the bad guys, they are the ones who want to take food away from
children, they want the old and the infirm to suffer, they want to
choose between caring for the people who built this country, as the
President put it on Monday, and investing in those who will build our
future.
I don't know if the President buys all this stuff; I don't know if he
believes his own caricature--I certainly hope not--but one thing I do
know is that questioning the intentions of one's political opponents
makes it awfully hard to get anything done in a representative
democracy. As the President himself said, without so much as a hint of
irony, we cannot mistake absolutism for principle or substitute
spectacle for politics or treat name calling as reasoned debate.
The President won the election. I congratulate him on his victory. It
is his prerogative to lay out an agenda and to make an argument--
against all evidence--for the efficacy of big government, more
Washington spending, and centralization. It is even his prerogative to
argue--mistakenly, in my view--that America's greatness somehow rests
not on its communities and voluntary associations, its churches and
charities, on civil society, but instead on the dictates of Washington.
But to suggest that those of us and our constituents who believe
otherwise don't want the best interest of our parents or our children
or our country's future is, at best, needlessly provocative; at worst,
it suggests a troubling inability to view those who don't happen to
share your opinions as beneath you.
To suggest, as one of the President's spokesmen did earlier this
week, that both the American political system and those who belong to
the party of Lincoln aren't worthy of this White House or its agenda
isn't the way to get things done. It makes it impossible to tend to
problems we simply have to face up to and that we will only solve
together. Frankly, it calls into question the President's own belief in
the wisdom and the efficacy of the constitutional system of checks and
balances that the Founders so wisely put in place.
The postinaugural period is usually a chance to pivot to governing
after a long campaign. It is an opportunity for Presidents to reach out
to the minority and to forge compromises. But that is not what we are
seeing this time around. Even before Monday we all noted the harsh
change in tone, the reboot of the campaign machine, and how, instead of
offering an olive branch to those who disagree with him, the President
had already decided to transform his campaign operation into a weapon
to bulldoze anyone who doesn't share his vision. Well, I would suggest
that one thing the American people don't want is a permanent campaign.
That is the last thing the American people are looking for--a permanent
campaign. They want us to work together on solutions to our problems.
And deficits and debt are right at the top of the list.
I wish to suggest this morning the President rethink the adversarial
tone he has adopted in recent weeks. Our problems are simply too urgent
and too big for the President to give up on working with us. I appeal
to him once again to work with us on the things we can achieve
together, and let us start with the deficit and the debt. Because the
only way we will be able to tackle these problems is by doing it
together.
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If he refuses, if he insists on spending the next 4 years pushing a
polarizing hard-left agenda instead, I assure him he will meet a
determined opposition not only from Republicans in Washington but from
the very people he seems to believe are squarely on his side in the
push to remake government in his image.
The irony in the President's attacks, of course, is that the kind of
reforms Republicans are calling for are the only conceivable route to
saving the programs the President claims he wants to protect. Failing
to reform the entitlement programs of the last century now--right now--
is the best way to guarantee they no longer exist in their current
form. I mean, one could practically hear the ring of the cash register
with every new promise the President made. At a time when we can all
see the failure of such policies by simply turning on the news, he
seems blissfully--blissfully--unaware of the fact that from Athens to
Madrid the sad, slow death of the left's big government dream is on
display for all to see. If we want a less prosperous, less dynamic,
less mobile society, that is the way to go--just ``Europeanize''
America.
The President's vision of an all-powerful government that rights
every wrong and heals every wound may warm the liberal heart, but it is
completely divorced from experience and from reality. So today I wish
to do my part to bring the President and his allies in Congress a
little closer down to Earth. I know it may be hard for them to accept,
but the reality is this: We have a spending problem--not a taxing
problem, a spending problem.
Let's take a look at the chart to my right. The green represents
historic and projected tax revenue. And we can see it goes right
straight across here out to 2040. The tax increases of 3 weeks ago were
delivered by operation of law. In other words, the law expired and all
of the Bush tax cuts were over. The Congress, 2 hours after everybody's
taxes went up--in other words, after all the Bush tax cuts expired--
restored tax relief for 99 percent of the American people, and they did
it on a permanent basis to guarantee we wouldn't have another cliff, as
we inevitably have. When a law sunsets, we have a cliff.
So the President was able to get some new revenue by operation of
law, and that represents this dark blue line right across here. You can
see that is pretty steady out to 2040.
The President, of course, said that wasn't nearly enough. He said: We
need more taxes, and we will be back asking for more taxes later. So as
nearly as we can tell, based on what he has said, the taxes he would
like to add to the ones he got by operation of law 2\1/2\ weeks ago is
this light blue line right across here.
If the President were given all the tax increases he says at the
moment he wants, that would provide this amount of revenue going out to
2040. As you can see, that doesn't do anything to solve the problem
because the red represents spending in the past and the spending
escalation that will occur if we don't do anything to solve the
spending problem.
Look at this line dramatically going up to 2040. So as you can see,
there is not enough revenue we can raise without completely shutting
down the economy to solve the problem. In fact, it produces a rather
static and totally insignificant amount of revenue in order to deal
with the massive spending problem.
So this constant demand for more and more tax increases on, I guess,
whom people assume is the more successful guy down the street may be a
great campaign tactic, but it doesn't do anything to solve the problem.
Even if the President were able to get every bit of taxes he wants, we
still have an enormous gap in spending if we don't deal with the real
problem, which is spending. We have a spending addiction. I didn't make
this up. This is a fact. This is reality.
So the tax issue is over. Congress has restored permanent tax relief
for 99 percent of the American people. Even if the President were to
get--and he will not--any more tax revenue, it is perfectly obvious
that doesn't do anything to solve the problem.
So the challenge for us--and looking at the chart we can see--is
revenue today is just about where it has been for the past 30 years or
so. The President spent nearly his entire first term arguing that we
needed to tax the so-called rich to solve our fiscal woes. He harangued
Congress about it. He argued for it in rallies and debates. He
threatened to push us over the cliff if he didn't get his way.
In the end, by operation of law he got part of what he asked for. And
the reason he got it, as I said earlier, is because the tax relief we
passed in 2001 and 2003 carried an expiration date. President Obama got
some of the tax increases he wanted because the law expired. Then
Congress, led by Republicans, voted to make Bush-era tax rates
permanent for 99 percent of all Americans. Now, permanency is
important. It has been kind of lost on the general public, but the
importance is we don't have another cliff, another expiration date
where all of a sudden everything changes.
Given how much time he devoted to that one topic, one would think his
tax hike would have closed the deficit, eliminated the entire national
debt, and left us with extra cash to spare. But do you see that tiny
little blue line I pointed to right here? That is how much additional
revenue he got. This blue area is the revenue he says he wants. He will
not get it; but if he did, it is pretty apparent it has nothing
whatsoever to do with solving the spending addiction.
So if this revenue doesn't come anywhere close to solving the
problem, the real challenge, obviously, is how we are going to control
all of this red. What do we do about this? Well, we are clearly
spending way more than we take in. The real uptick, interestingly
enough, occurs about the time the President took office. It has been
hard enough to find ways to close the President's trillion-dollar
deficits. But as I just pointed out, they are nothing next to what is
going to hit us when tens of millions of baby boomers reach retirement
age--nothing compared to what is heading our way.
I pointed out the massive slope. That is what is headed our way.
Nothing short of a bipartisan effort is going to fix this problem, and
there is only one way we can do it. We can't tax our way out of this
problem. The revenue question is behind us. The law we voted for, as I
said, made current tax rates permanent. I am pretty confident not a
single Republican in the House or Senate will vote to raise any more
taxes. But even if we were to do that, all the taxes the President
asked for would only put us here in 2040. And look at what would be
spent.
So the reality the President needs to face--and quickly--is that
there is no realistic way to raise taxes high enough to even begin to
address this problem. That is why Republicans are saying we need to
start controlling spending, and we need to do it now. That is why if
the President wants to do something good right now, he should put us
out of the liberal wish list and put us out of the character attacks
and join us in this great task. It is the transcendent issue of our
time.
If we don't fix this problem, we don't leave behind for our children
and grandchildren the kind of America our parents left behind for us.
There is no bigger issue, even though it got scant mention in the State
of the Union.
Now, I have no animus toward the President. I just want to see him do
something about the problem because the longer we wait, the worse the
problem becomes. The more we delay the inevitable, the less time
younger Americans will have to plan for the reforms we make today. That
is simply not right.
So the President has a choice. He can paint himself as a warrior of
the left and charge into battle with failed ideas we have already tried
before; he can demean and blame the opposition for his own failure to
lead; he can indulge his supporters in a bitter, never-ending campaign
that will only divide our country further; or he could take the
responsible road. He can help his own base come to terms with the
mathematical reality.
Some people over there are living in a fantasy world--a world that
doesn't exist. He could reach out to leaders in both parties--and all
of the members in both parties--and negotiate in good faith. We would
be happy to give him credit. That is fine by me. If boosting his legacy
is what it takes and it helps the country, that is all the better.
If my constituents believe they are working to help make their future
a
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little better and a little brighter, great. But we can't waste any more
time denying the reality that is staring each of us in the face. There
is only one way to solve this problem, and that is to do something
about this spending addiction that is going to sink this country and
turn us into Greece.
Senate Republicans are ready to help the President solve this
problem. I hope we have an opportunity to do so.
Madam President, I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I wonder if I might pose a question
to the Republican leader, if he would retake the floor.
Mr. McCONNELL. I would be happy to respond.
Mr. ALEXANDER. I want to congratulate the Republican leader for his
remarks.
Here is my question. We have arrived at a time when we have a newly
elected President who has had a fine inaugural day. He has an agenda
that he wants to follow which he announced in his inaugural address. It
is not an agenda that most of us on this side agree with, but he has an
agenda that he wants to follow in his second term, all of which would
ensure--in his eyes--his legacy as a President.
But isn't there one thing that in order to get to that agenda--or any
other thing--he and we have to do, and that is to address the debt?
Isn't the very best time--isn't the very best time to do something
difficult, something nobody wants to talk about, something that is
hard--the best time to do that is at a time when we have a divided
government, a Democratic President, a Republican House, and 30 or 40 or
50 of us Senators on both sides of the aisle who have been saying for 2
years that we are ready to fix the debt?
Isn't this an opportunity now? Not just because it is a divided
government, but because the House of Representatives today may very
well create a 2-month or 3-month window during which we can address all
of these issues if we had Presidential leadership?
Mr. McCONNELL. I say to my friend from Tennessee, it is
counterintuitive. But one could argue that a divided government--which
we have had more often than not since World War II--has produced four
of the most significant accomplishments for our country in modern
times.
In the Reagan administration, President Reagan and Tip O'Neill, the
Democratic Speaker of the House, agreed to raise the age for Social
Security to save Social Security for another generation. Reagan and Tip
O'Neill did the last comprehensive tax reform.
Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress did welfare reform, arguably
the most important piece of social legislation in recent times. And
Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress actually balanced the budgets in
the late 1990s.
My friend from Tennessee is correct. Divided government actually is
the perfect time--some would argue even the only time--we can do tough
things, hard-to-explain things that need to be done to save the
country. So I hate to miss the opportunity presented by a divided
government to tackle the transcendent issue of our times.
The President talked about a lot of things, and that is all
interesting, but it had nothing to do with fixing the country. Until we
fix this problem, we will not have the kind of country for our children
and our grandchildren that our parents left behind for us.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I wonder if I might pose one more
question to the Republican leader after making a short statement.
I came to this body as a young lawyer-legislative aide to Senator
Howard Baker a long time ago, in 1967. I remember very well Senator
Baker's story about how the civil rights bill of 1968 was passed. I
have discussed this with the Republican leader before. He knows that
era as well or better than I do.
But there was a time when Senator Baker said he was in Everett
Dirksen's office--he is the man who had the job that Senator McConnell
now has. He was the Republican leader then. He said he heard the
telephone ring. He heard only one end of the conversation, but Senator
Dirksen was saying: No, Mr. President, I cannot come down and have a
drink with you tonight. I did that last night, and Luella is very
unhappy with me. And that was the conversation.
About 30 minutes later there was a rustle out in the outer office of
the Republican leader's office--the very office that Senator McConnell
now holds. Two beagles, followed by the President of the United States,
came in. Lyndon Johnson, the President, said to the Republican leader:
Everett, if you won't have a drink with me, I am down here to have one
with you. And they disappeared in the back room for 45 minutes.
The point of all that is not their socializing. The point was it was
in that very office, the Republican leader's office, that in 1968, the
next year, the civil rights bill was written and enacted. Lyndon
Johnson got the credit for that in history but Everett Dirksen made it
possible, and there were at that time many more Democrats in the Senate
than Republicans.
What I want to say to Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, the
question I want to ask him, is this. He has seen the U.S. Senate and
Presidency for the last number of years. He has seen many relationships
between the President and leaders of the opposite party. He knows how
this place works. My sense of the Republican leader and of the large
majority of us is that we wish to see a result. We wish to see a result
on this very tough issue of saving Social Security, saving Medicare,
saving Medicaid, saving these programs on which seniors depend. I
wonder if the Republican leader would agree with me that despite the
fact that we engage every day in political matters, that we have big
differences of opinion, that on this issue, without Presidential
leadership, we cannot get a result and that there are a lot of us on
both sides of the aisle who are ready to work with the President to fix
the debt?
Mr. McCONNELL. I say to my friend from Tennessee--in many ways it is
a statement of the obvious but a lot of people forget it--there is only
1 person in America out of 307 million Americans who can sign something
into law and only 1 person in America who can deliver the members of
his party to support an agreement that he makes. The only way to get an
outcome on the biggest issue of our time is with Presidential
leadership. So it was disappointing to see scant reference in the State
of the Union. Of course that is just one speech and I have not given up
hoping that this President can make solving the transcendent issue of
our time one of his premier accomplishments.
The point I think the Senator from Tennessee and I are making this
morning is there are potential partners on this side of the aisle to
make this happen. I hope we will not lose this opportunity once again
to deal with the biggest issue in the country.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Kentucky for extending his
time on the floor. On my own I wish to continue that line of thinking a
little bit.
It is traditional that when we have a new President, a newly
inaugurated President, that he has a pretty good opportunity to get
what he asks; that it is a time of maximum leverage, it is a time to do
important things, it is a time to do difficult things, it is a time to
do things that otherwise might not get done.
Presidents are defined by their skills--their communication skills,
their electoral ability--but they are also defined by their capacity
over a period of years to identify the hard issues that are important
to our country and cause people, as the President said in his address
day before yesterday, to work together to solve those problems. Now the
problem is whether you want to raise taxes on the guy down the street
with the biggest house. That is not so hard to do. The problem is to
spend money that you do not have--because you can do it; that is not so
hard to do. If the problem is to address a disaster to help people who
are in desperate shape, there might be some debate about whether it is
really a disaster or not but it is not hard to do because in the end it
is going to happen. What Presidents are remembered for is dealing with
important, difficult crises.
President Clinton is remembered for a number of things but one of the
things he did was challenge the conventional thinking in his own party
to
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deal with welfare reform. It would not have happened if he had not done
it. It would not have happened if he had not done it because a
Republican could not have made the argument. A President's job,
according to George Reedy, the former press secretary to Lyndon
Johnson, is three things: One is to see an urgent need, two is to
develop a strategy to meet the need, and the third is to persuade at
least half the people he is right.
President Nixon in the early 1960s went to China. That seems like
ancient history but that was straight against the core of the
Republican Party at that time. That was something that was
inconceivable for a Republican President to do, given the history of
mainland China and Taiwan, as they were both called.
There have been many times in our history when Presidents have had to
do the hard work. President George H.W. Bush made a budget agreement
which may have caused him to lose the election in 1992 because it
angered a number of Republicans. But it also helped balance the budget
and gave us a period of time in the 1990s when that budget agreement
plus a good economy gave us an actual surplus of funding.
I sense that there is at the White House a feeling, two things I wish
to disabuse the White House of. The first is that the budget problem is
not a real problem. I cannot believe people at the White House think
that. Everybody knows it is. Senator McConnell gave a very good
explanation of what was going on there. But let me say it this way: In
2025, according to the Congressional Budget Office, every dollar of
taxes we collect will go to pay for Medicare, Medicaid, Social
Security, and interest on the debt, and there is nothing left for
national defense, National Laboratories, Pell grants for education,
highways, or the investments that we need to make in research to grow
this country. It all goes for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and
the interest on debt, every single penny we collect. And that is only
12 years away. That is not me talking. That is the Congressional Budget
Office saying that. The Medicare trustees have said that in 2024 the
Medicare Program will not have enough money to pay all of its bills.
Whose bills? Bills of seniors, bills of Tennesseans, many of whom are
literally counting the days until they are old enough to be eligible
for Medicare so they can pay their medical bills. It would be a tragedy
if that day arrived and there were not enough money to pay the bills.
But the Medicare trustees, who by law are supposed to tell us these
things, say that day will come in 2024. It is just 11 years away and
that is the day for people already on Medicare and people who are going
to be on Medicare.
Medicaid, which is a program for lower income Americans, is an
important program. As Governor, I dealt with it in my State. But when I
was Governor, it was 8 percent of the State budget. Today it is 26
percent of the State budget. It is soaking up almost every dollar that
would go to higher education. As a result, students around the country
are wondering: Why are my tuition fees going up? It is because of
Washington's Medicaid Program requiring States to make decisions that
soak up money that otherwise would be used to fund education.
In our State of Tennessee, 30 years ago the State paid 70 percent of
the cost of going to the University of Tennessee. Today it pays 30. And
Medicaid is the chief culprit.
Everyone knows this. The President's own debt commission has told him
this and suggested a way to deal with it. Forty or fifty of us on both
sides of the aisle have been working together, meeting together, having
dinner together, writing bills together, trying to come up with plans
to do it. Senator Corker, my colleague from Tennessee, has developed a
bill on which I am his prime cosponsor which says we have found a way
to strengthen Medicare and other entitlements by reducing the growth in
spending. We understand this.
We passed a Budget Control Act a couple of years ago. People said
they didn't like it. It was not so bad because it took 38 percent of
the budget, which is all of our discretionary spending--including
national defense, national parks, national labs--and said it will go up
at about the rate of inflation. This is before we get to the so-called
sequester. But what about the rest of the budget? That is the automatic
stuff we do not even vote on: Medicare, entitlements, all this? It is
going up at about three to four times the rate of inflation. It is
going to bankrupt these programs. Seniors will not be able to have
their medical bills paid and the country will be bankrupt. That is no
overstatement. The former Comptroller of the Currency says that.
President Clinton says this is an urgent problem. The former Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says the national debt is the single
biggest threat to our national security. Why are we not dealing with
it? I think we are not dealing with it, A, because it is hard to do; B,
because on both sides of the aisle we have not been effective in
dealing with it before.
I remember when we had an all-Republican cast of characters here in
town--President Bush, a Republican majority--we tried to reduce the
growth of Medicare and we could not get the votes to do that.
This is not easy to do, but Robert Merry, who wrote a book about
President Polk, had lunch with some of us yesterday, made this
statement: ``In America's history every crisis has been solved by
Presidential leadership or not at all.''
Whether it was Lincoln in the Civil War or Reagan and Tip O'Neill or
Nixon to China or Clinton on welfare reform--we can all identify the
crises. But it takes Presidential leadership to do it. It takes that to
do it.
I was a Governor, which is much smaller potatoes. If I sat around
waiting for the State legislature, with all respect, to come up with a
road program we would still be driving on dirt roads. They were waiting
for the Governor to do it. That is how our system works.
I wonder if the President thinks that the debt is not a problem? I
cannot imagine anybody at the White House thinks that. This is a
problem. If the President does not address it during his two terms he
will be remembered by history as failing to do that. His legacy may be
a failure to address financial matters that put this country on a road
to bankruptcy. Or, if he were to do it, if he were to provide the
leadership, he would be--as the Australian Foreign Minister has said,
``America is one budget agreement away from reasserting its global
preeminence.'' Why wouldn't President Obama want to be known as the
President who caused America to reassert its global preeminence by
dealing with a budget agreement during the first 3 months of his term
and then he can get on with his agenda, about which we can argue? That
leaves me with only one thought: That the President thinks we don't
want to do it. We do want to do it and it is a misunderstanding if he
thinks that.
I know the Republican leader would not mind me saying he is a wily,
clever tactician who knows the Senate as well as anyone here. But if
you look carefully, when we got down to the last few days of the year
and needed an agreement on taxes, the Republican leader was in the
middle of the agreement. When we needed an agreement to try to avoid
default on the debt, the Republican leader was the one who was in the
middle of doing that.
I think if the White House thinks that the Republican leader or we on
the Republican side do not want to fix the debt, they are badly
misunderstanding where we are and who we are. I do not know how we can
say it more clearly. We have written bills that do it. We have held
dinners to talk about it. We have made public statements with
Democrats, 30 or 40 of us at a time, saying we support Simpson-Bowles,
we support Domenici-Rivlin, or we support this or we support that. What
is missing? Two words: Presidential leadership. This is not a partisan
comment. It just does not work unless the President lays out his plan.
Some say the President does not want to lay out his plan. He has to
lay out his plan. He is the President. We are just legislators. Senator
Corker and I have put out our plan. Who pays attention to that? Madam
President, $1 trillion in reductions and a $1 trillion increase in the
debt ceiling--it is out there. That is not going to work. However, if
President Obama, with his skills, calls together Simpson and Bowles or
his advisers and says: Here is
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my plan to save Medicare, here is my plan to save Medicaid, here is my
plan to fix the debt, and I want bipartisan support to do that, he will
get it. At first, because it is a difficult issue, everybody will say:
Oh, no, we can't do it that way. We need to sit down, talk, and come up
with a result. I think the Republican leader has shown he is prepared
and willing to do that. He has said it and done it on other issues. I
don't know what else the rest of us can do to show that.
What I am trying to respectfully say today, as much as anything, to
the President of the United States is congratulations on your
inauguration. I was there. I was proud to participate in it and have
the opportunity to speak for a minute and a half about why we celebrate
for the 57th time the inauguration of an American President. We
celebrate it because our country is distinguished from most other
countries in the world by the peaceful transition or reaffirmation of
the largest amount of power in the world. We have our political
contests, and then we have the restraint to respect the results.
After winning the election, it is important, first, to get the fiscal
house in order. The time to do it is while we have a divided
government. The time to do it is while the President is at the peak of
his popularity. The time to do it is while the House of
Representatives--the Republican House--has created a window of 2 or 3
months to deal with all the fiscal issues. The time to do it is after 2
years of discussion with Republicans and Democrats in a bipartisan way
about the need to fix the debt and the importance of it for the
country.
My hope is that as the President and his advisers look at the Senate,
they see a willingness to solve the problem of fixing the debt in a
bipartisan way. I get the feeling they don't believe that about us. I
don't know what else we can do to cause them to believe that. There is
not the same kind of comfortable, back-and-forth relationship there
should be. I have heard some people say: Well, the Johnson-Dirksen days
are ancient history. That was a long time ago. However, human nature
doesn't change. Human nature doesn't change in 50 years, 100 years, or
500 years.
There is plenty of good will across the aisle and on this side of the
aisle, at the beginning of this term, to work with a newly inaugurated
President and say: Mr. President, we are ready to fix the debt. Provide
us the leadership. No great crisis is ever solved without Presidential
leadership in the United States. You are the President; you are the
only one who can lay out the plan. We will then consider it, amend it,
argue about it, change it, and pass it. After that, we can get onto the
President's agenda, about which we will have a difference of opinion,
but he will go down in history as the man who was willing to do
something hard within his own party, which was to fix the debt and save
the programs seniors depend upon to pay their medical bills.
I hope I can say that in the spirit of someone who participated in
the inauguration and admires the President's considerable abilities. I
hope he and his advisers stop, take a look, and say: Maybe we were
wrong. Maybe this is the time to do it. Maybe we are the only ones who
can do it, so let's make a proposal and get started.
I thank the President. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a
quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
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