[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 130 (Friday, September 27, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7002-S7005]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            THE DEBT CEILING

  Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I thank the Chair for recognizing me and 
allowing me to follow the Senator from Alabama whose remarks I agree 
with.
  I am disappointed in what happened this week. Those of us in the 
minority learned another lesson for the minority, is to get to a bill 
we wanted to get to, the majority then has the votes to amend that bill 
unless some of the majority would happen to side with us. And they did 
amend the bill in ways that I didn't agree with, taking the provisions 
out that would have defunded the move toward the health care plan that 
I think we are going to see more and more of the country isn't ready 
for. But the bill did go back to the House. The bill was changed from 
the bill the House sent over.
  So the bill went back to the House, and they have a chance to see 
what else they might be able to do--hopefully, in the next few days. 
But between now and the end of the fiscal year--which is Monday, by the 
way--

[[Page S7003]]

hopefully, we will find a way to make the system work better, will do 
what we should have done in the budget debate process.
  As I said here on the floor just a day or 2 ago, the great 
disappointment is that over and over we have failed to let the process 
work. Over and over we have failed to bring the bills to the floor, 
offer amendments, and set the priorities for the country.
  So here it is, the last Friday of the spending year, the last Friday 
of our budget year, the last Friday of the fiscal year, and the Senate 
has not passed one single appropriations bill--except the 6-week CR 
that says we cannot decide how to do anything new, so let's just do for 
another 6 weeks what we did last year. Surely that is not good enough, 
and we need to get beyond that.
  The vote today, taken on the Senate floor, did not send a bill to the 
President to be signed. It sent the bill back across the Capitol 
Building to see what the House of Representatives may want to do next, 
and I look forward to working with them and with my colleagues here in 
the Senate to see what that might be.
  I want to talk for a few minutes about the debt ceiling itself. The 
White House announced just in the last few days that we reach that debt 
ceiling in about 3 weeks. That number always seems to me to be pretty 
much a number that can be worked with. It is not like the end of the 
fiscal year. But it is a date that the Secretary of the Treasury has 
said we need to look at.
  The President said he would not negotiate on the debt ceiling. That 
is a very interesting position to take, and it is what is wrong with 
the government right now. I suppose the Congress could now say: And we 
will not negotiate on the debt ceiling either. So maybe that just means 
we do not have a debt ceiling increase because nobody wants to 
negotiate.
  Then the President said to a group in Washington this week that--I 
think he said that nonbudget items have never been attached to the debt 
ceiling before. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
at the conclusion of my remarks an article from the Washington Post of 
just a few days ago by Glenn Kessler who actually looked at that. Is 
that really accurate? Is what the President said accurate--that we have 
never done this before? This is totally new? This is a new demand that 
no Congress has ever made before--except, by the way, the Budget 
Control Act 2\1/2\ years ago that the President signed and a few other 
things that have happened?
  It has happened before, and I want to talk about that a little bit.
  This is not new moment for us. When Members of the Congress have been 
concerned about spending--certainly since the 1970s Budget Act, but 
even before that--when the debt ceiling had to be increased, Members of 
Congress wanted to talk about spending and other things that they could 
not get attention to any other way.
  In 1953, during the Eisenhower administration, fiscal conservatives 
in the Congress--at that time led by a Democrat from Virginia, Harry 
Byrd--did not believe we would be able to fund the Interstate Highway 
System. So they used the debt limit vote, the debt limit debate as a 
place to try to find out what they could do about the Interstate 
Highway System and how it was going to be funded. In 1953--that was a 
long time ago; almost longer ago now than the lifetime of most Members 
of the Senate--that is how it was used then.
  In 1973, when Richard Nixon was President, Democrats in the Senate 
sought to attach a campaign finance bill to the debt ceiling. This was 
during Watergate and, of course, I guess that would certainly meet the 
definition of a ``nonbudget item''--a campaign finance bill that there 
was a great effort to do in 1973 and to add to the debt ceiling 
legislation.
  In 1993, a study of the politics of the debt limit, for Public 
Administration Review, said that ``during this period, the genesis of a 
pattern developed that would eventually become full blown in the mid-
1970s and 1980s: the use of the debt ceiling vote as a vehicle for 
other legislative matters.''
  So certainly that is something we could talk about. Some would have 
economic consequences, others would not. I know one thought is, let's 
not move forward with the individual mandate in health care. Now, if 
you do not move forward with the mandate, there may be significant 
advantages in the pressure that takes off the spending in the exchange. 
But whether it is an economic issue or not, it is a fairness issue.
  The President, who now has suspended the requirement that businesses 
offer insurance in 2015--it seems to me the only fair thing to do, if 
you take the obligation off businesses to offer insurance, is to take 
the obligation off individuals who the law would require to have 
insurance if they did not get it at work. You have just taken away the 
requirement for businesses. Surely you cannot justify saying businesses 
do not have to pay the penalty but individuals do.
  I think that is a fair debate to have. It is a fair debate to have 
either over the weekend as part of how we move forward with funding the 
government or a fair debate to have if we are going to increase the 
Federal Government's ability to borrow money. We ought to talk about 
things that are going to result in spending lots of money.
  Remember, the requirement for the individual mandate that the 
President also waived was the requirement to prove income. Now, why 
does that matter? On the exchange, depending on how high your income 
is, you get a taxpayer subsidy for the insurance you buy. But the 
President said the requirement to verify income will not be there in 
the way the law envisioned for this first year.
  So again, how is that fair to the taxpayers that the taxpayers are 
subsidizing somebody's estimate of income? We just got through with the 
taxpayers subsidizing a lot of mortgages that could not be paid because 
that structure allowed people to estimate what their income would be on 
their mortgage application without submitting anything but their 
estimate of what their income could be. As it turned out, when people 
were trying to buy a house and prove they could make a mortgage 
payment, a significant number of people estimated they would make more 
money than they made. I think it is going to be equally true when it 
comes time to qualify for taxpayer assistance, a significant number of 
people may estimate--maybe even on some level of good faith--it could 
work out that way, that I am going to make less money than I made last 
year or less money than I am likely to make this year, but I am going 
to have a level of income that allows me to have a higher subsidy. I 
think it is certainly a possibility.

  One of these two things is happening right now. We need to look at 
the equity and fairness of having an individual penalty and the 
President saying we do not have a penalty for businesses that do not 
provide insurance.
  Let me get back to a few more examples.
  In one of the debt limit debates, major changes in Social Security 
were attached. An amendment in one of the debates was to end the 
bombing in Cambodia. Twenty-five amendments that were nongermane to 
spending were in this discussion between 1978 and 1987.
  The President maybe is proving here more than anything else that you 
better be very careful when you say something has never happened, 
particularly if it has happened over and over, and particularly if you 
think that somehow, as President, you can decide that the future of the 
country is nondebatable, that you can decide that how high the debt 
limit is is nondebatable. Whatever the Secretary of the Treasury says, 
that is what we need. And what would the President say about that? He 
would say, well, that is because we have already obligated this money. 
The fact that this money may be already obligated does not mean we 
should not look at every other way we are spending money or every way 
we control spending and do what we need to do about that.
  In 1982, the Senate majority leader at that time, Howard Baker, said 
we will have a free-for-all on the debt ceiling legislation, and 1,400 
nongermane amendments became part of that debate. They included 
limiting Federal jurisdiction over school prayer and other things.
  In 1980, the House and Senate rejected a central part of President 
Carter's energy policy--an oil import

[[Page S7004]]

fee--as part of the debt ceiling discussion. No bigger stretch than not 
going forward with the individual mandate as part of the debt ceiling 
discussion.
  Less than 10 percent of the debt limit bills passed between 1978 and 
2002 contained amendments not related to the debt or budget. But many 
of them contained an amendment that was related to how we spend our 
money. When you are spending too much money, when you already owe $17 
trillion, it is time to talk about: How are we spending this money and 
what can we do to do something about it before we further extend the 
line of credit?
  If any of us went to a banker and said: We have spent all the money 
we have already borrowed. We still have a lot of bills coming in, and 
we need to borrow a lot more money, frankly, under any of the rules 
that this Congress has passed in the last several years, the banker 
could not loan you money, and if they could loan you money, they would 
not loan you money without saying: Tell us again, what are you trying 
to do to get your spending under control so you are not back here in a 
few days or a few months asking for more credit.
  The thing we know is, under almost any imaginable circumstance, this 
is not the last debt ceiling increase we will ever make. So if we are 
going to be back in a few weeks, a few months, a year--however long 
this debt ceiling extends to--asking for more money, we ought to be 
talking about how we are spending the money we have.
  October 17 will not be as far away as it might seem. It is very close 
to us now. The Secretary of the Treasury says that the country will 
have only approximately $30 billion to meet our country's commitments. 
But on October 17, money does not stop coming in. On October 18, you 
might be able to arrange the books in a way where you do not have quite 
enough money to pay all the bills coming in, but this is not a 
government shutdown scenario.
  We need to solve the problem of this weekend and early next week and 
then get to the debt ceiling. Whether the President wants to debate it 
or not, it is going to be debated. I think it is going to be 
negotiated. The idea that this is going to be a so-called clean debt 
limit increase that will not be negotiated because it impacts the full 
faith and credit of the United States of America--we are going to pay 
our bills. I think we all know that. We have paid our bills since the 
founding of this government. But we are not going to pay our bills, we 
are not going to get another advance on our allowance, without somebody 
saying: Exactly how are you spending this money as fast as you are 
spending it? And why are you back again saying you need more of it?
  The American people have overwhelmingly rejected the idea that this 
should not be negotiated. According to a new Bloomberg poll out this 
week, Americans by a 2-to-1 ratio disagree with the President's 
contention that the Congress should raise the debt ceiling without 
conditions. Instead, 61 percent said that it is ``right to require 
spending cuts when the debt ceiling is raised,'' and they said ``even 
if it risks default.''
  The American people want us to fight--as we have this week and we 
will continue to--to try to defund a health care system that will not 
work. But they also want us to fight, to be sure that the money we are 
spending that we get from taxpayers--the money that we obligate future 
generations to, the bills that we are building up for somebody else to 
pay--to have the kind of debate, the kind of negotiation, the kind of 
important view of the future that they deserve to have.
  I would urge the President and the majority leader of the Senate to 
sit down with leaders of the House and others and try to work this out 
as soon as we can. Understand, frankly, that whether you want to 
negotiate or not does not matter. There is nowhere in the Constitution 
that says when we owe more money than we pay, the President can decide 
whether there is going to be a discussion or not. That is not how this 
system works. It is not how it is going to work over the next 2 weeks 
or the next month or whatever it takes to resolve the debt limit. 
Hopefully, we will all be working hard over the next 2 days to do 
whatever it takes to keep the government of the United States working 
on October 1. Just because we have failed for the entire year to do the 
work the Senate is supposed to do does not mean we can continue to fail 
in a way that punishes the American people by not having a government 
that is functioning on the first day of the spending year.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record as follows:

               [From the Washington Post, Sept. 19, 2013]

Obama's Claim That Non-Budget Items Have ``Never'' Been Attached to the 
                              Debt Ceiling

                           (By Glenn Kessler)

       ``You have never seen in the history of the United States 
     the debt ceiling or the threat of not raising the debt being 
     used to extort a president or a governing party and trying to 
     force issues that have nothing to do with the budget and 
     nothing to do with the debt.''
       --President Obama, remarks to the Business Roundtable, 
     Sept. 18, 2013
       When a president makes a lawyerly comment, it's time to 
     start looking for the trap door. At first President Obama 
     uses a sweeping ``never in the history of the United States'' 
     but then he concludes with a caveat: ``nothing to do with the 
     budget and nothing to do with the debt.''
       The issue at hand is the Affordable Care Act, aka 
     Obamacare, which many congressional Republicans would like to 
     repeal or delay as part of a vote to extend the debt 
     ceiling--even though establishment Republicans, such as 
     former Bush aide Karl Rove, regard the effort as a kamikaze 
     mission with little hope of success.
       Generally, raising the debt ceiling has been routine and 
     not especially controversial. But, as we have noted before, 
     starting in 1953 during the Dwight Eisenhower administration, 
     fiscal conservatives in Congress at times have used the debt 
     limit as a way to force concessions by the executive branch 
     on spending. Eisenhower, a Republican, had particular trouble 
     with a Democrat, Sen. Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, over the 
     debt ceiling because Byrd was skeptical of Eisenhower's plans 
     to build the national highway system.
       That dispute was about a budget issue, which the president 
     seemed to exclude in his comment. But unfortunately for the 
     president's claim, there are other, compelling examples that 
     contradict it.


                               The Facts

       In 1973, when Richard Nixon was president, Democrats in the 
     Senate, including Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. 
     Walter Mondale (D-Minn.), sought to attach a campaign finance 
     reform bill to the debt ceiling after the Watergate-era 
     revelations about Nixon's fundraising during the 1972 
     election. Their efforts were defeated by a filibuster, but it 
     took days of debate and the lawmakers were criticized by 
     commentators (and fellow lawmakers) for using ``shotgun'' 
     tactics to try to hitch their pet cause to emergency must-
     pass legislation.
       President Obama said that GOP lawmakers now are trying to 
     ``extort'' repeal of the health care law via the debt limit, 
     but that's also what Democrats wanted to do with President 
     Nixon, who opposed the campaign-finance reforms.
       Indeed, Linda K. Kowalcky and Lance T. LeLoup wrote in a 
     comprehensive 1993 study of the politics of the debt limit, 
     for Public Administration Review, that ``during this period, 
     the genesis of a pattern developed that would eventually 
     become full blown in the mid-1970s and 1980s: the use of the 
     debt ceiling vote as a vehicle for other legislative 
     matters.''
       Previously, they noted, the debt limit bill had been linked 
     to the mechanics of debt management, but now anything was 
     fair game. Major changes in Social Security were attached to 
     the debt bill; another controversial amendment sought to end 
     the bombing in Cambodia. Kowalcky and LeLoup list 25 
     nongermane amendments that were attached to debt-limit bills 
     between 1978 and 1987, including allowing voluntary school 
     prayer, banning busing to achieve integration and proposing a 
     nuclear freeze.
       In 1982, Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker unleashed a 
     free-for-all by allowing 1,400 nongermane amendments to the 
     debt ceiling legislation, which resulted in five weeks of 
     raucous debate that mostly focused on limiting federal court 
     jurisdiction over school prayer and busing. The debt limit 
     only passed after lawmakers decided to strip all of the 
     amendments from the bill.
       One of the most striking examples of a president being 
     forced to accept unrelated legislation on a debt-ceiling bill 
     took place in 1980. The House and Senate repealed a central 
     part of President Jimmy Carter's energy policy--an oil import 
     fee that was expected to raise the cost of gasoline by 10 
     cents a gallon. Carter vetoed the bill, even though the 
     United States was close to default, and then the House and 
     Senate overrode his veto by overwhelming numbers (335-34 in 
     the House; 68-10 in the Senate).
       ``Foes of the fee succeeded in linking the two measures to 
     gain added leverage for killing the fee,'' The Washington 
     Post reported on Carter's stunning defeat. ``The Treasury 
     Department immediately announced it was resuming the sale of 
     bonds, which it suspended Thursday night when the debt 
     ceiling expired.''
       To be sure, the success rate of attaching nongermane 
     amendments to a debt-limit bill is relatively low. Anita S. 
     Krishnakumar, in a 2007 paper for the Harvard Journal on 
     Legislation, said that less than 10 percent of the

[[Page S7005]]

     debt limit bills passed between 1978 and 2002 contained 
     amendments not related to the debt or budget. Only twice--in 
     1980 and in 1995--did Congress successfully pass amendments 
     opposed by the president. But as Carter's defeat shows, 
     Congress has used the debt limit to repeal a key legislative 
     priority of a president.
       In response, the Obama White House provided us with 
     information on the negative impact on the economy during the 
     2011 debt-ceiling impasse, but did not comment on the 
     examples listed above.


                           The Pinocchio Test

       Clealy, Obama's sweeping statement does not stand up to 
     scrutiny, even with his caveat. Time and again, lawmakers 
     have used the ``must-pass'' nature of the debt limit to force 
     changes in unrelated laws. Often, the effort fails--as the 
     GOP drive to repeal ObamaCare almost certainly will. But 
     Kowalcky and LeLoup speculate that one reason why Congress 
     has not eliminated the debt limit, despite the political 
     problems it poses, is because lawmakers enjoy the leverage it 
     provides against the executive branch.
       There's an old reporter's rule that you want to avoid using 
     the word ``unprecedented.'' Otherwise, a professor might call 
     or e-mail the next day to dispute it.
       Let's add this rule for politicians: Never say ``never.''

  Mr. BLUNT. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. REID. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call 
be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

                          ____________________