[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 163 (Tuesday, November 3, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7697-S7703]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2016--MOTION TO PROCEED

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I move to proceed to Calendar No. 118, 
H.R. 2685.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the motion.
  The bill clerk read as follows:

       Motion to proceed to Calendar No. 118, H.R. 2685, a bill 
     making appropriations for the Department of Defense for the 
     fiscal year ending September 30, 2016, and for other 
     purposes.


                             Cloture Motion

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I send a cloture motion to the desk.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The cloture motion having been presented under 
rule XXII, the Chair directs the clerk to read the motion.
  The bill clerk read as follows:

                             Cloture Motion

       We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the 
     provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, 
     do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the motion to 
     proceed to H.R. 2685, a bill making appropriations for the 
     Department of Defense for the fiscal year ending September 
     30, 2016, and for other purposes.
         Mitch McConnell, James M. Inhofe, John Hoeven, John 
           Thune, Lamar Alexander, Richard Burr, Jerry Moran, John 
           Cornyn, James E. Risch, Mike Crapo, Steve Daines, Jeff 
           Flake, Cory Gardner, John Boozman, Thad Cochran, Pat 
           Roberts, David Perdue.

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
mandatory quorum call be waived.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Nebraska is recognized for his inaugural address.


                             Senate Culture

  Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I rise to speak from the floor for the 
first time. I have never been in politics before, and I intentionally 
waited to speak here.
  I wish to talk about the historic purposes and uses of the Senate, 
about the decades-long decline of the legislature relative to the 
executive branch, and about what baby steps toward institutional 
recovery might look like.
  Before doing so, let me explain briefly why I chose to wait a year 
since election day before beginning to fully engage in floor debate. I 
have done two things in my adult work life. I am a historian by 
training and a strategy guy by vocation. Before becoming a college 
president, I helped over a dozen organizations through some very ugly 
strategic crises, and one important lesson I have learned again and 
again when you walk into any broken organization is that there is a 
very delicate balance between expressing human empathy on the one hand 
and not becoming willing to passively sweep hard

[[Page S7698]]

truths under the rug on the other. It is essential to listen first, to 
ask questions first, and to learn how a broken institution got to where 
it is because there are reasons. People very rarely try to break 
special institutions that they inherit. Things fray and break for 
reasons.
  Still, empathy cannot change the reality that a bankrupt company is 
costing more to produce its products than customers are willing to pay 
for them, that a college that has too few students is out not only of 
money but out of spirit. This is the two-part posture I have tried to 
adopt during my rookie year here. Because of this goal of empathetic 
listening first and interviewing first and because of a pledge I made 
to Nebraskans--in deference to an old Senate decision--last year I have 
waited.
  Please do not misunderstand. Do not confuse a deliberate approach 
with passivity. I ran because I think the public is right that we are 
not confronting the generational challenges we face. We do not have a 
foreign policy strategy for the age of jihad and cyber war, and our 
entitlement budgeting is entirely fake. We are entering an age where 
work and jobs will be more fundamentally disrupted than at any point in 
human history since hunter-gatherers first settled in agrarian 
villages, and yet we do not have many plans. I think the public is 
right that the Congress is not adequately shepherding our Nation into 
the serious debates we should be having about the future of this great 
Nation.
  I will outline the key observations from my interviews with many of 
my Senate colleagues in summary form on another day, but for now let me 
flag just the painful top-line takeaway. I don't think anyone in this 
body truly believes we are laser-focused on the greatest challenges our 
Nation faces--no one. Some of us lament this fact, some of us are 
angered by this fact, some of us are resigned to it, some try to 
dispassionately explain how we got to the place where we are, but I 
don't think anyone actually disputes it.
  If I can be brutally honest for a moment, I am home basically every 
weekend, and what I hear every weekend, I think, are most of the same 
things most all of my colleagues hear every weekend, which is some 
version of this: a pox on both parties and all of your houses. We don't 
believe that the politicians are even trying to solve the great 
problems we face--the generational problems.
  To the Republicans, those of us who would claim that the new majority 
is leading the way, few people believe it. To the grandstanders who 
would try to use this institution chiefly just as a platform for 
outside pursuits, few believe that the country's needs are as important 
to you as your own ambitions.
  To the Democrats who did this body great harm through nuclear 
tactics, few believe that bare-knuckled politics are a substitute for 
principled governing.
  Who among us doubts that many--both on the right and on the left--are 
now salivating for more of these radical tactics? The people despise us 
all.
  Why is this? Because we are not doing our job. We are not doing the 
primary things that the people sent us here to do. We are not tackling 
the great national problems that worry our bosses at home. I therefore 
propose a thought experiment. If the Senate isn't going to be the venue 
for addressing our biggest national problems, where should we tell 
people that venue is? Where should they look for long-term national 
prioritization if it doesn't happen on this floor? To ask it more 
directly of ourselves, Would anything really be lost if the Senate 
didn't exist?
  To be clear, this is a thought experiment, and I think that many 
great things would be lost if the Senate didn't exist, if our Federal 
Government didn't have the benefit of this body, but game out with me 
the question of why. What precisely would be lost if we only had a 
House of Representatives, a simple majoritarian body instead of both 
bodies? The growth of the administrative state, the fourth branch of 
government, is increasingly hollowing out the Senate and the entire 
article I branch, the legislature. Oddly, many in the Congress have 
been complicit in this hollowing out of our own powers. Would anything 
really be lost if we doubled down on Woodrow Wilson's obsession and 
inclination toward greater efficiency in government, his desire to 
remove more of the clunkiness of the legislative process? What would be 
lost? We could approach this thought experiment from the inside out and 
ask: What is unique about the Senate? What can this body do 
particularly well? What are the essential characteristics of just this 
place, which has often been called the gem of the Founders' structure. 
What was the Senate built for? Let's consider its attributes.
  We have 6-year terms, not 2-year terms, and the Founders actually 
deliberated about whether Senators should have lifetime appointments. 
We have proportional representation of States, not of census counts, 
reflecting a Federalist concern that we would always maintain a 
distinction between perhaps agreeing that government has a 
responsibility to address certain problems and yet guarding against a 
routinized assumption that only a centralized, nationalized, one-size-
fits-all government could tackle X or Y.
  Third, we have rules designed to empower individual Senators, not to 
the end of obstruction but for the purpose of ensuring full debate and 
engagement with dissenting points of views, for the Founders didn't 
share Wilson's concern with governmental efficiency, they were 
preoccupied with protecting minority rights and culturally unpopular 
views in this big and diverse Nation.
  Fourth, we didn't even have any rules in this body that recognized 
political parties until the 1970s. There was merely an early 20th 
century convention that gave right of first recognition in floor debate 
to the leaders of the two largest voting blocks. We have explicit 
constitutional duties related to providing the Executive with advice--
it is a pretty nebulous thing--about building his or her human capital 
team and about the long-term foreign policy trajectory of this Nation. 
Six-year terms, representation of States, not census counts, nearly 
limitless debate to protect dissenting views, almost no formal rules 
for political parties, what does all this add up to? What is the best 
answer to the question, What is the Senate for?
  Probably the best shorthand is this: to shield lawmakers from 
obsession with short-term popularity so we can focus on the biggest 
long-term challenges we face.
  Why does the Senate's character matter? Precisely because the Senate 
is built to insulate us from ``short-termism.'' That is the point of 
the Senate. This is a place built to insulate us from opinion fads and 
from the bickering of 24-hour news cycles. That is the point of the 
Senate. The Senate is a place to focus on the biggest stuff. The Senate 
was built to be the antidote to sound bites.
  I have asked many of you what you think is wrong with the Senate. 
What is wrong with us? As in most struggling organizations, in private 
it is amazing how much common agreement there actually is. There is so 
much common agreement about what around here incentivizes short-term 
thinking and behavior over long-term thinking, behaving, and planning.
  The incessant fundraising, the ubiquity of cameras everywhere that we 
talk, the normalization over the last decade of using many Senate rules 
as just shirts-and-skins exercises, the constant travel--again, 
fundraising--meaning, sadly, many families around here get ripped up. 
That is one of the things we hear about most in private in this body. 
This is not to suggest that there is unanimity among you in these 
private conversations. The divergence is actually most pronounced at 
the question of what comes next and whether permanent institutional 
decline is inevitable in this body. Some of you are hopeful for a 
recovery of a vibrant institutional culture, but I think the majority 
of you, from my conversations, are pessimistic. The most common framing 
of this question or this worry is this: OK. So maybe this isn't the 
high moment in the history of the Senate, but isn't the dysfunction in 
here merely an echo of the broader political polarization out there? It 
is an important question. Isn't the Senate broken merely because of a 
larger shattered consensus of shared belief across 320 million people 
in this land? Surely that is part of the story, but there is much more 
to say.

[[Page S7699]]

  First, the political polarization beyond Washington is so often 
overstated. We could talk about the election of 1800, the runup to the 
Civil War, the response to Catholic immigration waves at the beginning 
of the last century, the bloodiest summers of the Civil Rights 
movement, the experience of troops returning from Vietnam, if you want 
to mark some really high-water marks of political polarization in 
American life.
  Second, civic disengagement is arguably a much larger problem than 
political polarization. It isn't so much that most regular folks we run 
into back home are really locked into predictably Republican and 
predictably Democratic positions on every issue, it is that they tuned 
us out altogether. Despite the echo chambers of those of us who have 
these jobs, are we aware that according to the Pew Research Center, the 
24-hour viewership of CNN, FOX, and MSNBC is about 2 million. That is 
it.
  Third, one of our jobs is to flesh out competing views with such 
seriousness and respect that we, the 100 of us, should be mitigating, 
not exacerbating, the polarization that does exist. This is one of the 
reasons we have a representative rather than a direct democracy.
  Fourth, surveys reveal that the public is actually much more 
dissatisfied with us than they are even scared about the intractability 
of the big problems we face. Consider the contrast. Somewhere between 
two-thirds and three-quarters of the country think the Nation is on a 
bad track; that the experiences of their kids and grandkids will be 
less than the experience of their parents and grandparents. That is 
bad. Consider this: Only 1-in-10 of them is comforted that we are here 
doing these jobs.
  Let's be very clear what this means. If the American people were 
actually given a choice to decide whether to fire all 100 of us and all 
535 people in the Congress, do any of us doubt at all what they would 
do?
  There are good and bad reasons to be unpopular. A good reason would 
be to suffer for waging an honorable fight for the long term that has 
near-term political downsides, like telling seniors the truth that the 
amount they have paid in for Social Security and Medicare is far less 
than they think and far less than they are currently receiving. That 
would be a good reason to be unpopular, but deep down we all know the 
real reason the political class is unpopular is not because of our 
relentless truth-telling but because of politicians' habit of 
regularized pandering to those who most easily already agree with us.
  The sound-bite culture, whether in our standups for 90-second TV in 
the Russell rotunda or our press releases or what we all experienced on 
our campaigns--both for and against--the sound-bite culture is 
everywhere around us. We understand that, but do we also understand and 
affirm in this body that this place was built expressly to combat that 
kind of reductionism, that short-termism?
  The Senate is a word with two meanings. It is the 100 of us as a 
community, as a group, as a body--that is an important metaphor--and it 
is this room. This is the Chamber where we assemble supposedly to 
debate the really big things. What happens in this Chamber now is what 
is most disheartening to a newbie like me. As our constituents know, 
something is awry here. We, in recent decades--again, this is a body 
and not just us but what we have inherited--have allowed short-termism 
and the sound-bite culture to invade this Chamber and to reduce so many 
of our debates to fact-free zones.
  I mentioned that I have done two kinds of work before coming here. I 
was a historian/college president and crisis turnaround guy. Although 
they sound very different, they actually have a lot of similarities 
because they are both driven by a kind of deliberation, a Socratic 
speech.
  Good history is good storytelling, and good storytelling demands 
empathy. It requires understanding different actors, differing 
motivations, and competing goals. Reducing everything immediately to 
good versus evil is bad history--not only because it isn't true and 
because it is unpersuasive but because it is really boring. Good 
history, on the other hand, demands that one be able to talk 
Socratically so you can present alternate viewpoints, not straw-man 
arguments, and explain how people got to where they are.
  Similarly, can you imagine a business strategist who presents just 
one idea and immediately announces that it is the only right idea, the 
only plausible idea, and every other idea is both stupid and wicked? 
How would companies respond to such a strategist? They would fire him. 
A good strategist, by contrast, puts the best construction on a whole 
range of scenarios, outlines the best criticisms of each option, 
especially including the option you plan to argue for most 
passionately, and then you assume that your competitors will upgrade 
their game in response to your opening moves. This is a kind of 
Socratic speech. But bizarrely, we don't do that very much around here. 
We don't have many actual debates.
  This is a place that would be difficult today to describe as the 
greatest deliberative body in the world, something that was true 
through much of our history. Socrates said it is dishonorable to make 
the lesser argument appear the greater or to take someone else's 
argument and distort it so that you don't have to engage their 
strongest points. Yet here, on this floor, we regularly devolve into a 
bizarre politician speech. We hear the robotic recitation of talking 
points.
  Well, guess what. Normal people don't talk like this. They don't like 
that we do, and more important than whether or not they like us, they 
don't trust our government because we do.
  It is weird, because one-on-one, when the cameras are off, hardly 
anyone around here really thinks the Senators from the other party are 
evil or stupid or bribed. There is actually a great deal of human 
affection around here, but again, it is private, when the cameras 
aren't on.
  Perhaps I should pause and acknowledge that I am really uncomfortable 
with this as an opening speech. It is awkward, and I recognize that 
talking honestly about the recovery of more honest Socratic debate runs 
the risk of being written off as being overly romantic and naively 
idealistic. To add to the discomfort, I am brand new to politics, 99th 
in seniority, and occasionally mistaken for a page. But talking bluntly 
about what is not working in the Senate in recent decades--not just 
this year or last year--but talking bluntly about what is not working 
around here is not naive idealism; it is aspirational realism. Here is 
why. I think that a cultural recovery inside this body is a partial 
prerequisite for a national recovery.
  I don't think that generational problems such as the absence of a 
long-term strategy for combatting jihad and cyber war, such as telling 
the truth about entitlement overpromising, and such as developing new 
human capital and job retraining strategies for an era of much more 
rapid job change than our Nation has ever known--I don't think that 
long-term problems such as these are solvable without a functioning 
Senate. And a functioning Senate is a place that rejects short-termism, 
both in substance and in tone.
  The Senate has always had problems. This is a body made up of sinful 
human beings, but we haven't always had today's problems. There have 
been glorious high points in the Senate. There have been times when 
this place has flourished, and I believe a healthier Senate is possible 
again. But it will require models and guides.
  To that end, I have been reflecting on three towering figures over 
the last half-century who used this floor quite differently than we 
usually use it today, and who thereby have much to teach us. Before 
naming them, let me clarify my purpose. I don't think there is a magic 
bullet to the restoration of the Senate. My purpose in speaking today 
is really just to move into public conversations I have been having 
with lots of you in private as I try to define a personal strategy for 
how to use the floor. I want advice, and I am opening a conversation on 
how to contribute to the broader theme. There are many of you here who 
want an upgrading of our debate, of the culture, of the prioritization, 
and of our seriousness of what are truly the biggest long-term 
challenges we face.
  Two weeks ago, in a discussion with one of you about these problems, 
I was asked: So you are going to admit our institutional brokenness and 
issue a call for more civility? No. While I am in favor of more 
civility, my actual call here is for more substance. This is

[[Page S7700]]

not a call for less fighting. This is a call for more meaningful 
fighting. This is a call for bringing our A game to the biggest debates 
about the biggest issues facing our people and with much less regard 
for 24-month election cycles and 24-hour news cycles. This is a call to 
be for things that are big enough that you might risk your reelection 
over.

  So let's name the three folks who have something on which to instruct 
us because they brought a larger approach to the floor.
  First, I sit quite intentionally at Daniel Patrick Moynihan's desk. 
The New Yorker who cast a big shadow around here for a quarter century 
famously cautioned that each of us is entitled to our own opinions, but 
we are most certainly not entitled to our own set of facts. He read 
social science prolifically and sought constantly to bring data to bear 
on the debates in this Chamber. Like any genuinely curious person, he 
asked a lot of questions. So you couldn't automatically know what 
policy he might ultimately advocate for because he asked hard questions 
of everyone. He had the capacity to surprise people. We should do that.
  Second, in a time when circling partisan wagons and castigating the 
opposing party feels reflexively easy, we can all benefit from reading 
again Margaret Chase Smith's heroic ``Declaration of Conscience'' 
speech on this floor in June of 1950. The junior Senator from Maine was 
a committed anti-Communist. She was also called the first female cold 
warrior in the Nation. For her, that meant not knee-jerk opposition to 
competing views but rather the full-throated defense of what she called 
``Americanism.'' She defined it as ``the right to criticize; the right 
to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; and the right of 
independent thought.'' Senator Smith was rightly worried about Alger 
Hiss and the infiltration of the State Department by actual Communist 
spies. This was actually happening. So for her, grandstanding and lazy 
character smearing were not only dishonest, they were distracting and 
therefore inherently dangerous. Thus, the freshman Senator--at this 
point she was the only woman in the body--came to the floor to demand 
publicly what she repeatedly sought unsuccessfully in private from Joe 
McCarthy. Was there any evidence for all of these scandalous claims? 
Think of that. As a committed truth-teller, she was willing to 
challenge someone not just in her own party but someone with whom she 
had lots of ideological alignment. She wanted to reject straw-man 
arguments and disingenuous attacks. Because of that moment, 4 years 
later the Senate would censure McCarthy and banish McCarthyist tactics 
from this floor.
  Finally, and for my purposes today most importantly, I would like us 
to recall Robert Byrd, one of the larger figures in the two-and-a-half-
century history of this body. As a historian, I have long been a 
student of the West Virginian, troubled though he was.
  We sometimes conceive of our role today here as merely policy 
advocates--as those who argue for our respective party's position on 
short-term policy fights, and that is sometimes important, but that is 
only one of our roles, for we don't have a parliamentary system and we 
don't have one on purpose. With Moynihan and Margaret Chase Smith, we 
also need to contextualize our debates about our largest national 
challenges with facts and data. We need to agree on what problems we 
are trying to solve before we bicker about which programs would be more 
or less effective toward those ends. We need to challenge those in our 
own party not to construct straw-men arguments with those we are 
debating. But there is something else we need as well.
  Beyond policy advocating and policy clarifying, we need an 
overarching shared narrative of what America means. We need to pause to 
regularly recall the larger American principles that bind us together--
our constitutional creed, our shared stories, and our exceptional 
American commitment to a dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness for all 320 million of our country men and women.
  We all know in our marriages that sometimes the only way around a 
small disagreement is to pause to embrace again our larger shared 
commitments and our history. We need more of that here. We need to be 
able to more often agree on some big things before we get to the work 
of honorably disagreeing about smaller things.
  One of the important legacies of Senator Byrd--and again this is no 
commentary on other aspects of his messy past--but one of the important 
legacies of Senator Byrd is that he forced this Senate to grapple with 
our history, with the 100 of our specific duties, and with the unique 
place in the architecture of Madisonian separation of powers that this 
body and this body alone sets.
  To return to our thought experiment, do we think the Founders would 
have regarded a 9-percent congressional approval rating--a stunning 
level of distrust in representative government--do we think they would 
have regarded that as an existential crisis? Is it conceivable we can 
get away with just drifting along like this or must we fix it? Count me 
emphatically among those who think we need to fix it. We should not be 
OK with this.
  If we are going to restore this place, part of it will center on 
recovering the executive-legislative distinction. The American people 
should be demanding more of us as legislators, and they should be 
demanding more of the next President as a competent administrator of 
the laws that we pass. This is possible only if we again recover a 
sense of our identity that has some connection not just to Republican 
and Democrat but to the Constitution's article I legislative duties and 
some tension on purpose with the duties of the article II executive 
branch. Everything cannot be simply Republican versus Democrat. We need 
Democrats who will stand up to a Democratic President who exceeds his 
or her power, and I promise you that I plan to speak up the next time a 
President of my party seeks to exceed his or her legitimate 
constitutional powers.
  Despite all of his other failings, Robert Byrd labored hard to mark 
these nonpartisan lines, and we should too. To that end, in the coming 
months I plan a series of floor speeches on the historic growth of the 
administrative state. This will not be a partisan effort. It will not 
be a Republican Senator criticizing the current administration because 
it is Democratic. Rather, it will be a constructive attempt to try to 
understand how we got to the place where so much legislating now 
happens inside the executive branch. Our Founders wouldn't be able to 
make sense of the system we are living right now.
  This kind of executive overreach came about partly because of a 
symbiotic legislative underreach. Republicans and Democrats are both to 
blame for grabbing more power when they have the Presidency. 
Republicans and Democrats are both to blame in this legislature for not 
wanting to take on hard issues and to lead through hard votes but 
rather to sit back and let successive Presidents gobble up more and 
more power. We can and we must do better than this.
  A century-long look at the growth of executive branch legislating 
over the next many months will be an attempt to contribute to the 
efforts of all here, both Republicans and Democrats, who want to see 
the Senate recover some of its authorities and to recover some of its 
trustworthiness in the eyes of the people for whom we work.
  Each of us has an obligation to be able to answer this question: Why 
doesn't Congress work and what is your plan for fixing the Senate? If 
your only answer to this question is to blame the other party, then you 
don't get it, and the American people think you are part of the 
problem, not part of the solution.
  This institution wasn't built for the two political parties, and this 
institution wasn't built just to advocate policy X versus new policy Y 
for next month. We must serve as a forum for helping our Nation 
understand and navigate the hardest generational debates before us. Our 
ways of speaking should mitigate, not exacerbate, the polarization that 
does exist. As was well said around here last week:

       We will not always agree--not all of us, not all of the 
     time. But we should not hide our disagreements. We should 
     embrace them. We have nothing to fear from honest differences 
     honestly stated . . . [for] I believe a greater clarity 
     between us can lead to greater charity among us.

  Again, saying that we should be reducing polarization doesn't mean we

[[Page S7701]]

should be watering down our convictions. I mean quite the contrary. We 
do not need fewer conviction politicians around here; we need more. We 
don't need more compromising of principles; we need a clearer 
articulation and understanding of the competing principles so that we 
can actually make things work better and not merely paper over the 
deficits of vision that everyone in the country knows exist.
  We should be bored by lazy politician speech. We should be bored by 
knee-jerk certainties on every small issue. We should primarily be 
doing the harder work of trying to understand competing positions on 
the larger issues.
  Good teachers don't shut down debate; they try to model Socratic 
seriousness by putting the best construction on their arguments, even 
and especially to those on which they don't agree. Our goal should not 
be to attack straw men but rather to strengthen and clarify meaningful 
contests of ideas for the American people.
  Representative government will require civic reengagement. Our people 
need to know that we in this body are up to the task of leading during 
a time of nearly universal angst about whether this Nation is on a path 
of decline.
  A 6-year term is a terrible thing to waste. A 2-year term requires 
hamster-wheel frenzy; our jobs do not. I think we can do better, and I 
pledge to work with all of those who want to figure out how.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  (Applause, Senators rising.)
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lankford). The majority leader.


                      Congratulating Senator Sasse

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I would like to congratulate our new 
colleague, Senator Sasse. There was a good deal of suspense attached to 
wondering what the junior Senator from Nebraska would have to say, as 
he chose to wait until the end of the year and to listen and begin to 
study the institution. I expect most people would not have predicted 
that the best lesson we were to hear about what is wrong with the 
Senate and what needs to change would come from somebody who just got 
here.
  I think the fact that there were so many Senators on the floor to 
listen was a tribute to the great work the Senator has done here and 
the study he has put into this institution and what needs to be done on 
all of our parts to make it work better.
  On behalf of all of the Senate, I congratulate the junior Senator 
from Nebraska on an extraordinary maiden speech.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, that was a wise speech. It was a speech 
that made me think of the comment someone once said--that the Senate 
was the one authentic piece of genius in the American political system. 
What Senator Sasse has done is put fresh eyes on a subject, and 
sometimes fresh eyes are the best eyes.
  What he has reminded us is to remember what a privilege it is to 
serve here and that if we are temporarily entrusted with the 
responsibility and opportunity to give real meaning to the idea that 
this is the one authentic piece of genius in the American political 
system, we have some work to do.
  I am delighted he is here. I am delighted he took the time to wait, 
study, listen, and make his comments. I listened very carefully. I hope 
every single Member of the Senate did. I pledge to work with him toward 
the goal he set out. I look forward to serving with him for a long 
time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, for the information of all Senators, we 
should expect a rollcall vote around 4 o'clock on the motion to proceed 
to S.J. Res. 22, which is the Congressional Review Act on the waters of 
the United States.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mrs. ERNST. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                    Waters of the United States Rule

  Mrs. ERNST. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about this ill-
conceived and harmful waters of the United States rule--better known as 
WOTUS--and how its implementation threatens the livelihoods of many of 
my fellow Iowans.
  As the Presiding Officer knows, recent court decisions have forced 
this rule--EPA's latest power grab--to come to a screeching halt across 
the country because of the likelihood that EPA has overstepped its 
authority. To be clear, it is not just me saying that; it is the court.
  As my colleague and friend, the senior Senator from Iowa, Chuck 
Grassley, often says, Washington is an island surrounded by reality. 
There is not a more perfect phrase to describe how the events and 
processes have unfolded surrounding this confusing rule. Only in 
Washington do unelected bureaucrats take 300 pages to simplify and 
provide clarity. This rule is so complex and so ambiguous that folks in 
my State are concerned that any low spot on a farmer's field or a ditch 
or a puddle after a rainstorm may now fall under the EPA's watch.
  We all want clean water and clean air. That is not disputable. Time 
and again, I have emphasized that the air we breathe and the water we 
drink need to be clean and safe. Statements suggesting otherwise cannot 
be further from the truth. It is unfortunate that the EPA continues to 
fuel that line of false attack through their election-style tactics and 
controversial lobbying efforts on social media.
  This rule and this debate are not about clean water. The heart of 
this debate is about how much authority the Federal Government and 
unelected bureaucrats should have to regulate what is done on private 
land.
  You can see the map behind me. Look at my State of Iowa. This rule 
would give the EPA extensive power to regulate water on 97 percent of 
the land in the State of Iowa--97 percent. If you compare that to 
Iowa's Federal land percentage in acreage of 0.3 percent, it is quite a 
shift in the current makeup of Federal authority over the land in Iowa.
  I spent the weekend going back through letters my fellow Iowans have 
sent me on this issue. So many of them are frustrated with the lack of 
common sense coming out of Washington. They are taking this issue 
personally because their livelihood depends on it. Many of the letters 
I get are from farmers who spend their days working land that has been 
in their families for generations, some going back over 100 years. They 
have an incentive to take care of their land and conserve it for future 
generations. Caring for the land and conserving is a way of life in the 
heartland. It is as if the EPA turns a blind eye to that fact.
  One Iowan wrote:

       This proposed rule is so vague, long, and very unclear, 
     that I feel they are wanting farmers to fail so a large fine 
     can be assessed. Why am I taking this so personal? Because 
     for me and my family, we live off this land. If we don't take 
     care of it, it will not take care of us. So I will do 
     whatever I can to protect this land and water for my 
     children. My family lives on well water. My cattle drink from 
     the same wells. I don't want either to get sick.

  That is what one Iowan wrote. I believe the same exactly.
  This rule would give EPA the authority to expand its power over 
family farms, small businesses, ranches, and other landowners in our 
rural community. Iowans are so concerned about this rule because they 
know it will actually create a negative impact on conservation and it 
is contradictory to the commonsense and voluntary work that is taking 
place in communities across Iowa today.
  In Iowa, we have had a State-level clean water initiative in place 
for several years now. It is a partnership between the State 
legislature, the Department of Natural Resources, the Iowa Department 
of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, Iowa State University, and a 
myriad of stakeholders across the State.
  The voluntary Nutrient Reduction Strategy is based on extensive 
research and provides a path forward for conservation efforts that 
individual farmers can pursue with matching funds from the State. This 
science-based approach provides incentives for farmers and other 
landowners to make sustainable decisions on their own land rather than 
be forced to adhere to a one-size-fits-all regulation that would do far 
more harm than good. A farm in Iowa is not the same as one in Montana, 
and the rolling plains of Texas are very different from the hills and 
valleys of

[[Page S7702]]

Pennsylvania. This is simply one more reason this WOTUS rule is the 
wrong approach. A one-size-fits-all solution from inside the beltway 
could have disastrous effects nationwide.
  As I mentioned, I have heard from constituents across the State of 
Iowa who have grave concerns with the ambiguity of this rule. They are 
holding off on making conservation improvements to their land for fear 
of being later found out of compliance with this WOTUS rule and facing 
significant fines. Maybe it is because we are so ``Iowa nice'' that we 
are inclined to work together collaboratively rather than simply 
issuing more onerous regulations.
  Take the Middle Cedar Partnership, for example. This project in 
Eastern Iowa uses local dollars and State funding, coupled with Federal 
grants from the USDA, to organize and advocate for land practices that 
improve water quality downstream. The coalition is made up of city, 
county, and State officials, businesspeople, farmers, 
environmentalists, and other concerned citizens. Together they are 
making meaningful progress on multiple watershed projects within the 
Cedar River basin and sharing what they have learned. This approach is 
now being adopted by other municipalities within the State.
  Contrary to what some claim, Iowa has done all of this on its own, 
not at the behest of the EPA. In fact, the EPA has asked the leaders of 
Iowa's efforts to come to DC and explain how they are able to get such 
grassroots buy-in on voluntary conservation projects and programs. The 
other States in the Mississippi River Basin look to Iowa as a leader on 
water quality and are modeling their own State-level efforts after ours 
in the State of Iowa. While there are clear indications that this WOTUS 
rule is illegal and likely to be scrapped by the courts, that process 
could take years to play out--and all at the expense of the average 
American.

  Let's not wait around for the inevitable and force our small farmers 
and businesses to operate in the dark while they wait. Let's fix this 
now and give American families the certainty they deserve. We can do 
that by passing the legislation before us.
  I have led the charge in the Senate on this joint resolution of 
disapproval which would scrap the rule entirely. My legislation is the 
necessary next step in pushing back against this blatant power grab by 
the EPA. We will send this to the President, and he will be forced to 
decide between the livelihood of our rural communities nationwide and 
his unchecked Federal agency.
  I also voted for S. 1140, which provides the EPA with clear 
principles and directions on how best to craft a waters of the United 
States rule. It spells out steps they should have taken prior to 
finalizing this rule to guarantee they can take into consideration the 
thoughtful comments from folks such as farmers, ranchers, small 
businesses, and manufacturers. Congress is acting because it is evident 
that the EPA did not seriously consider the comments and perspective 
from those whom this rule will directly impact, and it is clear they 
are far outside the bounds of the congressional intent of the Clean 
Water Act.
  Iowa is bounded by rivers. The very shape of our State is dictated by 
the mighty Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Take one look at commerce 
and recreation happening on them, and it is easy to see why these are 
considered navigable waters. When Congress passed the Clean Water Act, 
this was the type of water it intended to protect, not a grass waterway 
running across a farmer's field or a ditch bordering it. This rule 
ignores congressional intent and is nothing more than a power grab by 
the EPA.
  The EPA continues to run roughshod over Iowans, acting as if they are 
a legislative body--something they have no business doing. It is no 
wonder they have lost the trust of the American people and many in 
Congress. Every community wants clean water and to protect our Nation's 
waterways, but we simply cannot allow mounting, unnecessary regulations 
to overwhelm the commonsense voice of hard-working Americans, 
especially when they are not based on sound science. Again, it is not 
just me saying that, the courts and the Army Corps have both called the 
EPA on their shaky data, or lack thereof. Yet unelected bureaucrats 
remained committed to making a political decision instead of the right 
decision.
  As Iowa's U.S. Senator, it is my responsibility to speak for the 
folks I represent and hold the Federal Government accountable when it 
is clear they have gone too far. And make no mistake--they have here.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I rise in strong support of this effort to 
turn back this rule. The rule has been well explained by the Senator 
from Iowa. Her efforts are about all that Congress can currently do. 
Frankly, I would hope that we can figure out how to go further so that 
the Congress has to approve every rule that is issued by every agency 
of government that has significant economic impact.
  It is, frankly, hard to imagine a rule that has a more wide-ranging 
impact or more economic impact than this one does. As has been well 
pointed out, the authority given to the EPA under the Clean Water Act 
was very consistent with Federal discussions and debates for 170 years. 
I think 1846 was the first time the term ``navigable waters'' was used 
in Federal law, in a bill that James Knox Polk--President Polk actually 
vetoed the bill, but the term was understood, and it quickly came back 
into Federal law, and it meant exactly what it said: navigable waters 
of the United States.
  Why would that be a Federal responsibility? Because ``navigable'' 
means you can move something on it. ``Moving something on it'' means 
commerce, and one of the principal reasons for the Constitution was to 
regulate interstate commerce. So this is a long-established principle. 
Yes, there is some Federal responsibility for those avenues of commerce 
in the country--areas, rivers, waterways you can navigate. But, of 
course, that is not good enough for the EPA--170 years of Federal law, 
total and complete understanding around the country and, it appears, 
even on the part of Federal judges of what ``navigable'' means.
  There is a way to get expanded jurisdiction if the EPA wanted 
expanded jurisdiction, and that is to come to Congress and say: Give us 
not just responsibility over navigable waters but all the water that 
can run into all of the water that can run into any water that can run 
into any water that can run into navigable waters.
  If the EPA got this jurisdiction, you wouldn't be able to come up 
with enough Federal bureaucrats to oversee this level of jurisdiction. 
In a map that is not nearly as large as the map we have on the poster 
but a map that the Missouri Farm Bureau put out in our State, this is 
how much of the State of Missouri would be under the jurisdiction of 
the EPA under this law.
  Even if you are standing very close to this map, you can't see the 
non-red areas. The red area is the new Federal jurisdiction. The non-
red area is three-tenths of 1 percent of the State. So anything that 
goes on in 99.7 percent of our State is really founded on the basis of 
the rivers that cut through the middle of it, that bind it on the east, 
and would be, obviously, waters that are in most cases navigable and 
inarguably navigable, but all the water that runs into any water that 
could ever run into any water that runs into that water is clearly not 
navigable.
  That is why county commissioners all over our State are calling and 
saying: If this passes, what does it mean? Can we mow the right-of-way 
without a Federal permit?
  There is no question that if this passes, every roadside ditch in the 
entire State of Missouri would be navigable waters. There is nowhere 
outside the offices of the EPA and the most extreme among us where 
anybody would want to argue that every ditch along every road and 
highway is navigable waters. The EPA wants jurisdiction they couldn't 
exercise.
  This is a moment when Congress can stand and say: We do not want this 
rule to go into effect. We are going to pass a resolution that puts 
this on the President's desk, and if the President is going to be for 
this no matter what the courts say, no matter what the Corps of 
Engineers says, no matter what the Congress says, the President has to 
take a position on this rule. It is his EPA; it is out of control on 
this rule.

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  I hope my colleagues join the Senator from Iowa and me and many 
others in saying we don't want this rule to go into effect.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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