[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.