[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 101 (Tuesday, July 16, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5698-S5700]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                           Order of Procedure

  Mr. SCHUMER. I ask unanimous consent that all future time in quorum 
calls be divided equally between the two sides.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I note the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum 
call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Madam President, during the debate over the budget, Dr. 
Coburn and I offered an amendment to create a separate and independent 
inspector general within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
  We introduced this amendment because, thanks to a quirk in Dodd-
Frank, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the only major 
Federal agency without its own inspector general. I think people know I 
tend to rely a great deal on inspectors general within the bureaucracy 
to be an independent check to make sure the laws are followed and that 
money is spent according to the law.
  Dodd-Frank created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but it 
did not create a protection bureau-specific inspector general. Instead, 
because Dodd-Frank funded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau 
through the Federal Reserve, this Consumer Financial Protection Bureau 
ended up sharing an inspector general with the Federal Reserve.
  This has created a problem. Right now, the Consumer Financial 
Protection Bureau's inspector general has a split role. He serves as 
both inspector general for the Federal Reserve and for the Consumer 
Financial Protection Bureau. I believe this creates a great deal of 
confusion and, obviously, a bureaucratic battle for resources. In fact, 
the inspector general has already had to create two separate audit 
plans. He also has had to hire employees who can oversee both the 
Federal Reserve and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
  The end result is an office split by two very important but very 
different priorities. Dodd-Frank created the Consumer Financial 
Protection Bureau within the Federal Reserve in order to fund the 
Bureau without having to come to us on Capitol Hill to get 
congressional appropriations. This is a problem but not a problem I am 
going to deal with right now. We had a marriage of convenience, the 
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau within the Federal Reserve.
  The Bureau's function is very different from the Federal Reserve. 
Despite this, years after Dodd-Frank was passed, this unique situation 
remains. My concern is if you have one inspector general trying to 
cover two different entities, the end result is neither gets fully 
overseen. In other words, we don't have adequate checks within the 
bureaucracy to make sure that laws are abided by and that money is 
spent according to law.
  Since the passage of the Inspector General Act of 1978, Congress has 
believed that each Department and each agency needs its own independent 
inspector general. This has been a longstanding bipartisan position.
  Currently, there are 73 inspectors general, in every single Cabinet-
level Department and almost all independent agencies. Even small 
independent agencies such as the Federal Maritime Commission and the 
National Science Foundation have their own inspector general.
  In each of these agencies, if each of these agencies has their own 
independent inspector general, shouldn't the Consumer Financial 
Protection Bureau--particularly since this Bureau doesn't have to come 
to Congress for appropriations. We don't get appropriations oversight 
since some of their decisions can't even be challenged in the courts.
  Now we are in this situation. The majority has opposed commonsense 
changes such as this to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
  During the budget debate when Dr. Coburn and I introduced the 
amendment to create a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau-specific 
inspector general, the majority would not allow it to be brought up for 
a vote. The position I heard over and over was the majority did not 
wish to relitigate Dodd-Frank in any way. I did not hear any concerns 
related to the merits of this proposal. Our amendment wasn't about 
relitigating anything, it was about creating accountability and 
oversight at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and doing that 
through an independent inspector general, such as 73

[[Page S5699]]

other independent agencies have these sorts of checks and balances.
  Because the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded directly 
by the Federal Reserve, there are few, if any, congressional oversight 
checks on the Bureau. This makes an independent inspector general even 
more important.
  Right now, it seems to me, since we don't discuss Dodd-Frank very 
often, we don't have legislation related to it. We don't have 
opportunities to amend. This nomination of Mr. Cordray, now before the 
Senate, is the only tool the Senate has to create transparency and 
accountability within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As we 
consider this nomination, I hope we will remember that and consider the 
Senate's role in overseeing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 
what steps we can take to make the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau 
more transparent and, hence, more accountable to Congress, and in turn 
to the American people.
  I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Manchin). The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum 
call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, now that the so-called nuclear option has 
been averted and the Senate can now turn its attention to other matters 
of substance, rather than internal matters of how the Senate operates, 
I think it is important we evaluate how legislation that has passed 
this body is working. I wish to focus specifically on the Affordable 
Care Act, which is better known as ObamaCare.
  Amazingly, Senator Reid on Sunday, in one of the talk shows, was 
quoted as saying: ``ObamaCare has been wonderful for America.'' The 
House minority leader, former Speaker Pelosi, has said that 
implementation of the health care law has been fabulous.
  This stands in stark contrast to what Senator Max Baucus, chairman of 
the Senate Finance Committee and one of the principal Senate architects 
of ObamaCare, has said--what he told Secretary Sebelius, the Secretary 
of Health and Human Services--that the implementation of ObamaCare is a 
train wreck in the making. And then you contrast that with what 
President Obama himself said about the Affordable Care Act, about 
ObamaCare, and he said it is ``working the way it is supposed to.'' 
Well, not all of those things can be true at the same time, and they 
are not. Indeed, in the real world, unfortunately, it looks as though 
ObamaCare is a slow-motion disaster in the making.

  Notwithstanding the President's comments that it is working the way 
it is supposed to, the administration seems to be acknowledging by its 
own actions that it is not working the way it is supposed to. Indeed, 
the administration has chosen to delay the so-called employers mandate, 
and they have begun to admit what Americans have been saying since at 
least 2010 when ObamaCare passed--that it has simply proven to be 
unworkable.
  Rather than accept the reality and support full congressional repeal 
of the law, the administration is instead refusing to enforce the law 
and is choosing to apply it selectively. The law clearly states that as 
of January 2014 all businesses with 50 or more full-time employees have 
to provide their workers with health insurance or else pay a penalty. 
To be clear, I didn't support the Affordable Care Act--ObamaCare--but 
that is what the law says. Our Democratic colleagues, 60 of them in the 
Senate, and the majority in the then-Democratically controlled House 
passed the law and President Obama signed it, and that is what it says. 
But the President has chosen to take unilateral action and to refuse to 
enforce the law that he himself signed and that congressional Democrats 
passed without a single Republican vote.
  Whether you supported it or you didn't support it, many of us now are 
forced to acknowledge and I would think the administration itself would 
be forced to acknowledge, that the law simply is not working as 
advertised. It is now obvious that the employer mandate has prompted 
many businesses to reduce the number of hours and transform full-time 
jobs into part-time jobs in order to avoid the employer mandate. This 
has contributed to a surge in the number of people working part-time 
jobs for economic reasons. Last month alone that number was 8.2 million 
people--8.2 million Americans who would like to have full-time work but 
simply can't find it, in large part because of the implementation of 
ObamaCare.
  As I said, I voted against ObamaCare 3 years ago. I remember being in 
this Chamber on Christmas Eve at 7 a.m. in 2009 when our Democratic 
colleagues passed ObamaCare without a single vote from this side of the 
aisle. Many of us were voicing concerns about the provisions of 
ObamaCare, including the employer mandate, long before it became law. 
The problems with the mandate will, of course, still be there in 2015 
notwithstanding the 1-year unilateral delay by the administration, and 
they reflect broader problems in the Affordable Care Act as a whole.
  I believe the most commonsense thing we can do is simply to repeal it 
and to start over and replace it with patient-centered reforms that 
actually address the biggest challenges that face most families in 
America.
  The President said: If you like what you have in terms of your health 
coverage, you can keep it. Millions of Americans are now finding that 
not to be the case. The President said a family of four will find their 
premiums reduced, on average, $2,500. Actually, rather than a reduction 
in cost, they are finding their premiums are going up and will go up 
even more when ObamaCare is implemented.
  My point is that whether or not you voted for ObamaCare, it is 
important that we now acknowledge the sad reality that it is not 
working the way even its most vigorous proponents wished it would. 
Indeed, it seems to be working out in a way most of its critics thought 
it would.
  But what is important now is that we work together to give permanent 
relief to this public policy train wreck for individual Americans and 
for small businesses. That is actually how we are supposed to function 
under our Constitution. Even under uniformly Democratic control, as the 
Congress and the White House were the first 2 years of this President's 
term, if things don't work out the way even the most ardent proponents 
of a piece of legislation wish and hope it will, then our job under the 
Constitution is to work together to try to provide some relief and 
solutions for the American people. That is true whether you objected to 
the law in its first instance or you simply supported it. If it turns 
out not to work as advertised, it is our job to fix it, and we can do 
so by replacing it with high-quality care that is more affordable and 
is much simpler to use. Rather than have the Federal Government dictate 
to you and your doctor what kind of care you are going to get and under 
what terms, you can, in consultation with your private doctor, make 
those decisions in the best interest of yourself and your family.
  The bigger problem is that President Obama is simply deciding which 
aspects of the law to enforce and which not to enforce, and that is 
becoming somewhat of a trend, based on political convenience and 
expediency. Time and time again he has made clear that if a law passed 
by Congress and signed by the President--whether it is him or another 
President--is unpopular among his political supporters, he will simply 
ignore it and refuse to enforce it.
  Shortly after ObamaCare became law, the administration began issuing 
waivers from the annual limit requirements, which made it seem as if 
certain organizations--oftentimes labor unions--would simply be 
exempted from and would receive preferential treatment based on their 
political connections. Meanwhile, to help implement ObamaCare, the IRS 
has announced it will violate the letter of the law and issue health 
insurance subsidies through Federal exchanges, especially in those 
places where the States have declined to issue State-based exchanges, 
even though the law makes clear these subsidies can only be used for 
State exchanges.
  Let me restate that. The law says you can only use taxpayer subsidies 
for State-based exchanges, but because many States have simply said 
that this makes no sense for them and are refusing to create State-
based insurance exchanges, these individuals will now be

[[Page S5700]]

in the Federal insurance exchange. And even though the law says 
taxpayer subsidies are not available for those, the IRS is papering 
over that provision of the law and simply disregarding it.

  Again, we have seen this time and time again. We saw a similar 
disregard for the rule of law during the government-run Chrysler 
bankruptcy when the company-secured bondholders received much less for 
their loans than the United Auto Workers' pension funds. Even though, 
under the law, these bondholders were entitled to the highest priority 
in terms of repayment, they were subjugated to the United Auto Workers' 
pension fund basically in an exercise of political strong-arming.
  We saw this again in the Solyndra bankruptcy. Remember that? The 
Obama administration violated the law by making taxpayers subordinate 
to private lenders. In other words, they put the taxpayers on the hook 
rather than the private lenders who helped finance Solyndra.
  More recently, the administration--and this is something that is in 
the news as recently as today--made unconstitutional recess 
appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and to the Consumer 
Financial Protection Bureau. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals 
held that the administration's argument in defense of its so-called 
``recess appointment power'' would ``eviscerate the Constitution's 
separation of powers.'' It now appears, as part of the so-called 
nuclear option negotiations, that even the White House is now being 
forced to withdraw these nominees who were unconstitutionally appointed 
and offer substitute appointees.
  We also know that the Obama administration unilaterally chose to 
waive key requirements of the 1996 welfare reform law and the 2002 law 
known as No Child Left Behind.
  A government run by waiver or by the Federal Government picking 
winners and losers is the antithesis of equal justice under the law. 
Look across the street at the Supreme Court of the United States, and 
above the entry it says: ``Equal justice under law.'' That is the very 
definition of our form of government, which is designed for a congress 
comprised of duly-elected representatives of the American people and 
the President of the United States to write legislation that applies to 
everybody and not to issue waivers or exemptions or to simply refuse to 
enforce the law because it has proven to be inconvenient or not 
politically expedient.
  The U.S. Constitution obligates the President to make sure all of our 
laws are faithfully executed. Yet, with President Obama, the pattern is 
unmistakable: inconvenient or unpopular legal requirements are 
repeatedly swept aside by Executive fiat.
  If the law is not working the way it is supposed to, the President 
should come back to Congress and say: We need to amend the law. We need 
to replace this unworkable law with one that will actually serve the 
interests of the American people.
  But we are not seeing that happen. We are seeing the White House 
decide on its own that it simply won't enforce a law. Last year, for 
example, the administration unilaterally announced a moratorium on the 
enforcement of certain immigration laws. In effect, when Congress 
failed to pass legislation the President wanted, the President himself 
simply decided not to enforce the immigration laws. As that example 
shows, this administration has frequently relied on unelected 
bureaucrats to override the people's elected representatives.
  It is simply improper and unconstitutional under our system for the 
President to decide unilaterally that he is not going to enforce the 
law. For example, when Congress refused to enact the so-called card 
check for labor unions, the administration simply turned to unelected 
bureaucrats at the National Labor Relations Board. And when Congress 
refused to extend cap-and-trade energy taxes, the administration turned 
to unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency to 
attempt to accomplish the same objectives indirectly that had been 
prohibited by Congress because it couldn't get a political consensus 
for doing it directly. Indeed, the President has now authorized the 
Environmental Protection Agency to regulate virtually every aspect of 
the American economy without congressional approval and without 
recourse to the American people.
  When Congress makes a mistake, when we do something the American 
people don't approve of, they get to vote us out of office if they see 
fit. That is not true with this faceless, nameless bureaucracy, which 
is rarely held accountable, and particularly when the President 
delegates to that bureaucracy the authority to regulate in so many 
areas and avoid congressional accountability and accountability at the 
White House.
  Taken together, all these measures represent a basic contempt for the 
rule of law and the normal constitutional checks and balances under 
separated powers. After witnessing the President's record over the past 
4\1/2\ years, is it any wonder why the American people and, indeed, 
Members of Congress were skeptical about his promises to enforce our 
immigration laws under the immigration bill that passed the Senate 
recently?
  Remember all of the extravagant promises that were made for border 
security, for interior enforcement, for the implementation of a 
worksite verification system, for a biometric entry-exit system to 
deter 40 percent of the illegal immigration that comes when people 
enter the country illegally and simply overstay their visas? If after 
17 years the Federal Government still isn't enforcing those laws 
already on the books, how in the world can the American people have any 
confidence whatsoever that the President and Congress can be trusted to 
enforce the laws that it passes?
  After witnessing the President's performance, I think the American 
people are deeply skeptical of his promises of future performance, and 
his selective enforcement of our existing laws undermines public 
confidence in the Federal Government.
  I believe the executive overreach I have described is corrosive to 
democratic government.
  If a Republican President had ignored these kinds of constitutional 
checks, had refused to enforce laws he didn't like, refused to defend 
in court laws he didn't like, and used Federal agencies to flout the 
will of Congress, you can be sure our friends on the other side of the 
aisle would be complaining nonstop about the imperial President. Yet 
they have largely given President Obama a pass.
  But whether you agree with the President on health care, immigration, 
energy policy, card check or other hot-button issues, we can all 
agree--we should all agree--that government should not be picking 
winners and losers and that we urgently need to restore the rule of law 
and faithful execution of those laws to their rightful place in the 
highest reaches of the Federal Government.
  I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as if in 
morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.