[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 28 (Wednesday, February 27, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S906-S908]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                      Congratulating Senator Kaine

  Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I rise very briefly to commend my friend 
of 33 years for his maiden speech and thoughtful exposition of the 
challenges which face our country. I have had the opportunity to know 
and work with Tim Kaine since we were in law school together. There is 
no one who is brighter; there is no one who brings more relentless 
optimism to any challenge. He is going to be a great addition to the 
Senate.
  I know so many colleagues from both sides of the aisle have come to 
admire his intellect, his fairness, and his willingness to always do 
the right thing. I just wanted to rise briefly to commend my good 
friend. I know it is his first speech, but it will not be his last.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.
  Mr. SCHUMER. I would like to add my congratulations to the junior 
Senator from Virginia for his maiden speech. We knew when he decided to 
run that he would be an outstanding Member. As his speech showed, he is 
living up to those high expectations. His speech was thoughtful, 
relevant, and showed both sides of the issue. That is the kind of 
trademark the junior Senator from Virginia has, and we look forward to 
working with him in the future.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. If no one yields time, the time will be 
charged equally to both sides.
  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I wish to continue to share my concerns 
about the appointment of Mr. Jack Lew to be the Secretary of the 
Treasury of the United States, one of the four senior Cabinet positions 
that are so important to America.
  I have delineated how he proposed the budget in 2011. He announced on 
CNN and several other Sunday morning shows--this is when he was going 
to introduce the budget the next day, and he was giving a preview of 
it.

       ``Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to 
     the point where we can look the American people in the eye 
     and say, we're not adding to the debt anymore; we're spending 
     money that we have each year, and then we can work on 
     bringing down our national debt.''

  Now, that would be a thing to celebrate. But I am convinced that he 
and the White House officials had met and they decided they weren't 
going to change the tax-and-spend and deficit policies of the United 
States, but they knew that wasn't going to be popular after 2010's 
shellacking of big-spending politicians. So what did they decide to do? 
They decided to prepare a budget that made no real change in the 
spending trajectory of America, continuing us on, as Secretary Geithner 
said just a few weeks later, an unsustainable course, while telling the 
American people they did what they wanted.
  As I indicated earlier, this budget he presented never had a single 
year in the 10 years of that budget in which the deficit fell below 
$600 billion. That is larger than any deficit President Bush ever had 
in his 8 years, and it was going up during the last 5 years.
  They said the deficit would go up $740-some-odd billion in the 10th 
year. The Congressional Budget Office took their very same proposals--
the independent CBO--and concluded that it would be $1.2 trillion in 
the 10th year, in debt--a totally unsustainable debt course and getting 
worse in the outer years.
  So I am very much of the belief that this Senate should not accept a 
man for the Secretary of the Treasury, to promote him to that august 
position, who makes this kind of representation about the budget he 
prepared as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. The budget 
got zero votes in the House twice and zero votes in the Senate twice. 
It has been panned by editorial boards all over America. He has been at 
the center of the political financial maneuvers of the Obama 
Administration from the beginning.
  A lot of people are wondering why an agreement hasn't been reached 
around here: Why don't you agree? It is hard to agree if the man you 
are negotiating with is as out of contact with reality as the Wall 
Street Journal said of Hosni Mubarak shortly before he fell in Egypt. 
So I am baffled by it.
  I wish to share now a few more thoughts about how this sequester we 
are talking about so much now happened, how it came about, and Mr. 
Lew's role in it. In fact, he designed it. He proposed a budget later 
in February 2012 that would eliminate it, and now he denies ever 
creating it in the first place. From Bob Woodward's book--he studied 
this carefully and talked to people, and I saw him on television this 
morning being quite firm about this. He has written a recent op-ed 
piece explaining the situation.
  This is what Bob Woodward said in his book ``The Price of Politics'':

       Lew, Nabors, Sperling and Bruce Reed, Biden's chief of 
     staff, had finally decided to propose using language from the 
     1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction law as the model 
     for the trigger . . . It would require a sequester with half 
     the cuts from Defense, and the other half from domestic 
     programs.
       Later in the negotiations, Obama adviser David Plouffe 
     reportedly said that he couldn't believe that Republicans 
     were going to agree to any deal with sequester as a trigger.


[[Page S907]]


  Who started this? According to Mr. Woodward, no doubt about it, it 
was Mr. Lew.
  In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, Bob Woodward quoted Lew in 
saying this:

       There was an insistence on the part of the Republicans in 
     Congress for there to be some automatic trigger . . . [it] 
     was very much rooted in the Republican congressional 
     insistence that there be an automatic measure.

  Woodward went on to say:

       The president and Lew had this wrong.

  That is what I just read about him saying the Republicans insisted on 
it. Mr. Woodward said in his piece:

       The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive 
     reporting for my book ``The Price of Politics'' shows the 
     automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and 
     were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional 
     relations chief Rob Nabors.

  Was Mr. Lew correct in insisting somebody else did it, or he and the 
White House?
  Furthermore, on Senator Burr's questioning of Lew at the February 
Finance Committee confirmation hearing, Woodward says:

       [Senator] Burr asked about the president's statement during 
     the debate, that the Republicans originated it.

  That is, the sequester.
  Mr. Woodward writes this:

       Lew, being a good lawyer and a loyal presidential adviser, 
     then shifted to denial mode:

  ``Senator, the demand for an enforcement mechanism was not something 
that the administration was pushing at that moment.''
  That is how he handled that in the committee. Did he give a straight 
answer? No.
  Then, during the negotiations for compromise that people had been 
hoping would happen for really the first 4 years of President Obama's 
administration because we are on an unsustainable path, and it is not 
going to be fixed without leadership from the President--if he opposes 
it, the Democratic majority in the Senate will not pass it. You can put 
that down. They have not bucked him one time and won't buck him on a 
comprehensive financial settlement to put America on a sound path. We 
have seen that the whole time. We have Senators meeting and talking and 
indicating they might agree, but fundamentally they are looking over to 
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They don't want to break rank with the 
President. That is just the way it is.
  So Lew was now the top negotiator for President Obama. He has been 
called an ``obstructer of compromise.'' Reportedly, more than any other 
person in the room, Lew sabotaged agreement. Jack Lew has a long 
history of showing a failure to compromise on the drivers of the debt, 
the kinds of spending programs that are out of control, and we have to 
look at them. We can't have fundamental, large programs growing at 
three times the rate of the GDP, three times the rate of the economy.
  Going back a long time ago, when Speaker Gingrich and now-Ohio 
Governor John Kasich--Kasich chaired the Budget Committee, and Mr. Lew 
was a deputy in President Obama's OMB office. Mr. Kasich reportedly 
told President Obama's economic adviser Gene Sperling at the White 
House that Lew ``did not know how to get to yes.'' That is Kasich's 
view of it.
  A recent National Journal article on Lew quotes former Senator Judd 
Gregg, who chaired and was ranking member on the Senate Budget 
Committee, of which I am ranking member today. Judd Gregg, a highly 
respected Senator who didn't seek reelection and remains a very 
valuable contributor to the national discussion on debt and spending, 
said this:

       ``He's like a labor-union negotiator. He's not going to 
     give you an inch if he doesn't have to . . . He's a true 
     believer in the causes.''

  Well, that is apparently what we have been having because we can't 
ever get to an agreement that would do something significant.
  The same National Journal article went on to say:

       By causes, Gregg means Medicare and the rest of the social 
     safety-net. These are the progressive ideals close to Lew's 
     heart, friends and former colleagues say . . .

  So Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps have been growing at very 
rapid rates, and they are very large programs. And all of them, every 
program, can be examined, looked at, and we will find waste, abuse, 
fraud, mismanagement, and they can be reduced. But Mr. Lew said no.
  When it came to the sequester, let me remind my colleagues that food 
stamps, which have gone from $20 billion in 2001 to $80 billion in 
2012--11 years--went up four times. There is no way to make that 
program better? We have the inspector general finding fraud in some of 
these programs. Medicaid has been rising well above the economy's 
growth rate, and it definitely has the potential to be reformed and 
made more efficient. Not a dime was cut from food stamps. Not a dime 
was cut from Medicaid. Only 2 percent was obtained from Medicare, but 
it was taken in a way that just cut the payments to doctors and 
hospitals, which is not going to be able to be maintained much longer, 
experts tell us.
  What kinds of examples do we have from Bob Woodward's book ``The 
Price of Politics''? This is what he says:

       [Brett] Loper [House Speaker John Boehner's policy 
     director] found Lew obnoxious. The budget director was doing 
     75 percent of the talking, lecturing everyone not only about 
     what Obama's policy was, but also why it was superior to the 
     Republicans'.

  That is Woodward's take. He goes on to say:

       [Barry] Jackson [Boehner's chief of staff] found Lew's tone 
     disrespectful and dismissive.

  He goes on to say:

       Lew was incredulous when he considered the Republican 
     proposal as a whole. The changes they were considering 
     sounded simple. But the speaker's office was laying down 
     general principles and looking to apply them to extremely 
     complex programs. The devil was always in the details.
       Boehner was sick of the White House meetings. It was still 
     mostly the president lecturing, he reported to his senior 
     staff.
       The other annoying factor was Jack Lew, who tried to 
     explain why the Democrats' view of the world was right and 
     the Republicans' wrong.

  Look, when you are in a negotiation, it is not the time to have an 
argument over what your world view and my world view is. What you have 
to try to do is find out: Aren't there some things we can agree on that 
are consistent with both our world views and get us in a position so we 
can reach an agreement to save the Republic from financial disaster.
  Why would not the Office of Management and Budget Director, unless he 
believed this bogus, phony statement--which he does not; he knew it was 
not accurate--why would he not want to do something historic and try to 
get America on a sound course? It was within the grasp.
  So Mr. Woodward goes on:

       ``Always trying to protect the sacred cows of the left,'' 
     Barry Jackson said of Lew, going through Medicare and 
     Medicaid almost line by line while Boehner was just trying to 
     reach some top-line agreement [on what they could do].

  It was a very unsatisfactory situation. An agreement that could have 
been reached, I think, was not reached. And you keep looking around for 
fingerprints about how it fell apart, and it looks as though Jack Lew 
was the person doing that.
  Mr. Lew is ideologically driven very strongly. That has become more 
clear as I have looked at the data and researched his background.
  During the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations, Lew reportedly would not 
entertain even an idea by Senate Republicans that included any reforms 
to Medicaid. Everybody knows Medicaid has to be reformed. This is a 
health care system for poor people. Governors all over America are up 
in arms about Federal regulations and restrictions. The program had 
been surging in cost. It needs to be evaluated and improved. It has to 
be. It had no changes whatsoever in sequester because Jack Lew said no.
  The publication Politico reported that ``Democrats and 
progressives''--progressives are, apparently, not liberals. 
Progressives are folks who--I do not know. One of the things 
progressives do is they tend to be postmodern and they pretend not to 
pay much attention to the meaning of words. They have an agenda, in my 
observation, and they interpret the Constitution or the laws of the 
United States--well, they are more flexible. What do you want it to 
mean today? They are not into the plain meaning of words so we can have 
a common understanding of what people mean when they sign an agreement 
or pass a law.
  Anyway, Politico reported that ``Democrats and progressives'' were 
``cheering Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew's 
promotion to White House chief of staff, saying he has a decades-long 
history of protecting entitlement programs--especially Medicaid--

[[Page S908]]

  It goes on. Politico reported that:

       Lew played a crucial role in protecting Medicaid from the 
     across-the-board cuts that would take place if the 
     supercommittee didn't get a deficit deal--which it didn't. 
     When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's aides pressed 
     for including Medicaid as part of the sequester during a 
     last-minute conference call, Lew shouted, ``The answer is . . 
     . No, no, no!''

  So this has not been a healthy situation. This country is now in a 
fix. We have the sequester that is hammering us and disproportionately 
and unwisely mandating cuts on the Defense Department.
  We can do better than that. Mr. Lew wanted that. He got that. Maybe 
he knew all along the White House was not going to agree to the things 
that would make this system work better and maybe, therefore, put us on 
a sound path and, he was quite happy to have the Defense Department--
one-sixth of the government--get half the cuts and happy to protect 
huge segments of the government from any cuts.
  Well, you cannot cut our interest payment. We do not want to cut 
Social Security, but need real reform that puts the program on a sound 
basis.
  So that is how we got into this fix.
  I would say to my colleagues, if you believe the President's budget 
that Mr. Lew submitted on CNN on February 12, 2011--if you believe he 
was correct to say: ``Our budget will get us, over the next several 
years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye 
and say we're not adding to the debt anymore; we're spending money that 
we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national 
debt,'' then you should vote for him. If you think that is a true 
statement, I would like to have somebody explain to me how it is true. 
And if it is not a true statement, should not the Congress of the 
United States, the U.S. Senate, stand up and say we cannot accept high 
government officials giving us this kind of answer?
  With his budget, the lowest deficit we would have had is $600 
billion. We would have added $13 trillion to the national debt over 10 
years and maintained, as Secretary Geithner said, this Nation on an 
unsustainable debt course.
  Mr. President, I see my colleague, the assistant Democratic leader, 
Senator Durbin, and I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I thank my friend from Alabama for 
yielding the floor.