[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 104 (Monday, July 7, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4197-S4199]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         BIPARTISAN SPORTSMEN'S ACT OF 2014--MOTION TO PROCEED

  Mr. REID. I move to proceed to Calendar No. 384, S. 2363, the Hagan 
sportsmen's bill.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will report the motion.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       Motion to proceed to Calendar No. 384, S. 2363, a bill to 
     protect and enhance opportunities for recreational hunting, 
     fishing, and shooting, and for other purposes.


                                Schedule

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, following leader remarks, the Senate will be 
in a period of morning business until 5:30. Senators during that period 
of time will be permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.
  At 5:30 we have two rollcall votes, the first on the confirmation of 
the Krause circuit court judge and the next will be on the motion to 
invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to S. 2363, the Hagan 
sportsmen's bill.


                Measure Placed on the Calendar--S. 2562

  I am told S. 2562 is due for its second reading.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will read the title of 
the bill for the second time.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       A bill (S. 2562) to provide an incentive for businesses to 
     bring back jobs to America.

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I object to any further proceedings with 
respect to this bill.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Objection having been heard, the 
bill will be placed on the calendar.


                              Wasting Time

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, a lot of people within the sound of my voice 
will not understand what I speak about, which is having an emergency 
brake or a parking brake on a car. It used to be standard procedure. 
People would pull out the emergency brake, and 99 percent of the time 
people would remember to release it before they took off, but sometimes 
people would forget and that car would still go forward, but it didn't 
go forward very well. In fact, it would start smoking--``Oh, I forgot 
to turn that off.''
  So emergency brakes, what do they have to do with us in the Senate? 
What it has to do with us is that it appears the Republicans in the 
Senate have intentionally left on the emergency brake. For everything 
we try to do, it is similar to when we used to drive a car and have the 
emergency brake on. It doesn't move right. It moves very slowly.
  Throughout President Obama's time in office, the Republican 
leadership in the Senate has done its best to keep the brakes engaged, 
slowing any effort to legislate on even the most bipartisan bills. We 
should be passing legislation that strengthens our economy and protects 
working families instead of wasting hundreds of hours--hundreds of 
hours--as we struggle to perform one of our most basic duties, 
confirming Presidential nominees.
  Last year, in response to unprecedented--I repeat, unprecedented--
Republican obstruction, the Senate was forced to change its rules to 
ensure that some of the President's nominees received the up-or-down 
vote they deserve. I am so happy that change was made. It has allowed 
the Senate to make substantial progress on one of its primary 
functions. Positions that were once vacant for months--even years--are 
now staffed with qualified and competent public servants.
  In spite of our having changed the rules, the Republicans are still 
continuing to try to slow everything down.

[[Page S4198]]

Again, the brakes are on, and they only have one reason I can come up 
with for doing this. It is not that they dislike the President's 
nominees; it is that they want to do everything they can to slow down 
his administration, to make him look bad and to make Senate Democrats 
look bad, because they believe that even though they are the cause of 
the obstruction everybody will say: The Democrats control the Senate, 
why aren't they doing more?
  We can't do more because they have put on the brakes, even though we 
changed the rules and are moving through judges especially very 
quickly.
  For the viewing audience, on a judge they can only stall for 1 hour, 
and they usually do. On circuit court judges they get 30 hours, and 
they take up all of those 30 hours, even though they wind up voting for 
the judge. On Cabinet nominations they get 30 hours. On subcabinet 
officers they get 8 hours. That is in the rules. We changed some of the 
rules, but we didn't change that. In hindsight--we will have to wait 
and see. If they are going to continue this, we will have to take 
another look at that. It is outrageous what they have done.
  We have made substantial progress, as I have said, on one of our 
primary functions. The Senate is continuing its progress confirming 
these nominees in spite of the Republicans putting up roadblock after 
roadblock. Instead of seeing how their needless obstruction has hurt 
our country and working with us to confirm these vital nominations, the 
Republican leadership has responded with what can only be described as 
a temper tantrum, I guess. I don't know what else to call it. We have 
already established that they are trying to do it to make us look bad 
and the President look bad, but think what it is doing and what it has 
done to our country.
  They are mad about a lot of things, I guess. The No. 1 thing they are 
mad about is Obama was reelected. Remember, Frank Luntz called a 
meeting here 3 days after Obama was first elected. He said: We have two 
things we are going to do--and all the Republican big shots were here--
No. 1, we are going to make sure Obama isn't reelected. That was a 
flop. No. 2, we are going to oppose everything the President wants, and 
that is what they have done and continue to do.

  I have said this before and I will say it again. The first Congress 
we had a lot of Democrats--58, 59, and for a short period of time we 
had 60--and we had some moderate Republicans with whom we could work, 
but they are gone except Susan Collins. They are gone. So even though 
that first Congress was extremely productive, the next two have been 
thwarted by the obstructionism we have encountered for everything we 
have tried to do.
  The Republican leader is obviously now resorting to a tactic that I 
guess they decided to do in the Frank Luntz meeting; that is, just 
trying to run out the clock. As in a football game, if there is only 1 
minute left to go, they say let's just run out the clock or a 
basketball game or, as we saw over the last few weeks, a soccer game. 
Stall it. We are ahead. It is tied. That is where we need to stay.
  They are just trying to run out the clock. Instead of killing time on 
the scoreboard, the Republican leader is using the cloture clock to 
kill the remaining 6 months of this Congress. They want just to go 
away, preventing nominees from getting confirmed and thwarting 
Democrats from passing legislation that is good for the middle class.
  Would it be good for the middle class to raise the minimum wage? Of 
course. It would be great. Would it be good for the American public to 
have it so my daughter, for instance, if she does the same job your son 
does, that they get paid the same amount of money? They filibustered 
that. They stopped that. How about student loans? Student loans are the 
highest debt in America today--almost $1.3 trillion--and we tried to 
remedy that, make it better for students and of course their families 
who are paying and have paid over the years for these large loans. 
Filibuster; extended unemployment benefits, filibuster.
  So they are doing this to make the President look bad, make us look 
bad, but they are still running out the clock. That is what they are 
trying to do.
  Again, so people understand, we get cloture with a simple majority. 
They can stall for many hours. As I said, circuit court judges get 30 
hours, nominees for Cabinet posts get 30 hours, 8 hours for subcabinet, 
and only an hour on other judges. If we take a close look at how they 
have utilized the time we have wasted--let's say the last 2 months the 
Senate has been in session--Senate Republicans have forced us to waste 
almost 10 days, more than half the time we have been in session. They 
have wasted 236 hours in order to slow the confirmation of President 
Obama's nominations--236 hours. Of those 236 hours, Senate Republicans 
have used 5 hours to actually come to the Senate floor and debate the 
qualifications of these nominees. The rest of the time we sit, as the 
viewing public sees, in these quorum calls, where we do nothing. For 
every hour they have debated these nominations, the Senate Republicans 
have wasted 46 hours just killing time. Mr. President, 5 hours out of 
236 hours is the time they have actually used.
  To further highlight the absurdity of their obstruction, the 
Republicans have voted overwhelmingly to confirm most all of these same 
nominees they have obstructed and filibustered. So far this year 
Republicans have blocked immediate confirmation of 22 nominations they 
later voted unanimously to confirm.
  Why are they blocking these nominations they all support? They just 
want to slow things down. They want everybody to look bad. They know 
they are not in control--that is what the American public feels--even 
though they have all of these rules they force procedural gimmicks we 
have to work our way through. There is no other way to look at what 
Republicans are doing. This is obstruction for obstruction's sake. The 
Republican leader is desperate to keep this emergency brake on, hoping 
that by slowing down every Senate process imaginable, he can run out 
the remaining 6 months and damage Obama. The harm it does to our 
country, I guess, is not in their calculation. He is playing a very 
dangerous political game at the expense of this great country and of 
course the American taxpayer.
  The Senate currently has a backlog of 131 nominees who have been 
languishing on the Senate calendar for an average of 281 days--281 
days. It is particularly outrageous that they are stopping us from 
confirming noncontroversial career Foreign Service officers and 
ambassadors.
  What does this mean, a career Foreign Service officer? The Presiding 
Officer has been in government a number of years. He has been Governor 
of one of the larger populated States in the country. He has been in 
the U.S. Senate. The Presiding Officer has seen--I am convinced of 
this--young men and women who decide they want to go into the Foreign 
Service. They are the brightest of the brightest. They do extremely 
well in school. They have these tests they have to pass, written and 
oral. They speak and learn many different languages. They have been 
waiting their whole career to be named an ambassador. It is a huge 
thing. It is like being selected to go to the Super Bowl or to be on 
the Pro Bowl team. But when it comes time to get this position they 
have worked for for their whole career, they are being held up.

  These are ambassadors to places that need American diplomats. You 
need a boss. Twenty, 25 percent of the ambassadorial spots in Africa 
they have blocked. These are not political nominees. Most of them are 
career nominees. They are Republicans and Democrats. When these 
ambassadors are chosen, they are not chosen based on their political 
party. They are chosen on merit. We have places such as Honduras, 
Qatar, Vietnam where we do not have ambassadors.
  They are even blocking the Department of Defense, the Navy, the Air 
Force. They are at the mercy of the Republican leader's clock-killing 
obstruction. American interests abroad and the defense of our Nation 
are forced to take a back seat while Republican leadership hopes to 
make political gains by running out this clock.
  So after having returned from the Fourth of July--this country's 
birthday--I urge Republicans to stop this needless obstruction. What is 
to be gained by needlessly grinding the Senate to a halt? The only 
thing I can see

[[Page S4199]]

is they think they are going to hurt President Obama, who they are so 
upset because he got reelected and reelected very easily.
  I say to them, if you oppose a nominee, let's have a debate on the 
nomination and then vote. Do not delay a vote on a career Foreign 
Service officer who has worked his or her entire life to become an 
ambassador. Do not delay national security personnel who are needed to 
protect our Nation. Do not delay key staff people at the Cabinet level 
from doing their work for the American people.
  I do not expect Republicans to give their unanimous consent to every 
nominee on the calendar. Rather, Senate Democrats are asking that 
Republicans legislate in good faith. Let's look at these. If there is 
something wrong with them, let's debate them. If nominees are deserving 
of their unanimous support--and most of them come out of the committees 
unanimously--why waste the Senate's time by blocking confirmation of 
these individuals? There is no reason for doing that.
  We have so much to address over the coming weeks. We are going to 
vote on the sportsmen's bill tonight. We have the highway bill, the 
emergency supplemental, manufacturing legislation. We are going to do 
something about the Hobby Lobby legislation we need to correct. There 
is so much we have to do. We have terrorism insurance. We have to do 
that. The Export-Import Bank, we have to do that. But we are being 
stopped from doing all of that.
  We have more than enough to keep us busy. That is an understatement. 
So what we are doing, instead of doing the things necessary for the 
American people, is we are being forced, because of the obstruction of 
the Republicans, to sit here and struggle through a few nominations 
that we can work out by spending 8 hours on this one, 4 hours on that 
one, 30 hours on this one. It is really unfair to the American people.


                       Reservation of Leader Time

  Mr. President, would the Chair announce the business of the day.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the 
leadership time is reserved.

                          ____________________