[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 206 (Monday, December 18, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8056-S8058]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                               Deadlines

  Mr. KING. Madam President, I rise today to talk not about legislation 
or about the tax bill--well, I may talk about the tax bill a little--
but I do wish to talk about deadlines and how we all do our work, 
whether it is in the Senate, in our businesses, or in our personal 
lives. I wish to talk about deadlines missed and deadlines that don't 
exist.
  One of the realities of this place that I think is very unfortunate 
is that we rarely make our deadlines. These are self-imposed deadlines. 
These are deadlines that we create. We pass a law that says something 
has to happen by September 30. We set the deadline, and then we don't 
make it.
  Most notoriously, it happens with budgets. I don't know the last time 
we had a budget on time. I think it is about 17 years ago. I suspect 
there are probably less than a dozen Senators in this Chamber who were 
here when we last passed a budget on time. There is

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no excuse for that. The problem is that when we put it off, we don't 
know anything more than we did at the time of the deadline. We could 
have done it, and yet, because we are able to, we put it off. That is 
human nature, unfortunately. Who among us would not have put off the 
deadline for a book report if we could have said to the teacher: Gee, I 
don't think I can make that Monday morning deadline. I will just do my 
book report on Tuesday.
  Life doesn't work that way. In the real world, there are deadlines. 
There are consequences if you don't get your work done on time. Things 
happen, and if you don't get your work done on time, usually, those 
things that happen are bad. I don't know where else, other than in this 
body, where deadlines, which have enormous implications and enormous 
importance, are simply ignored.
  I just sat down in the last day or so and put together real deadlines 
that we have in the law right now. What are they? Well, the Children's 
Health Insurance Program's deadline is September 30, 2017. That is 
gone. That has passed. I can give you 23,000 reasons that we should 
have met that deadline. That is the number of young people in Maine who 
are covered by the Children's Health Insurance Program, and there are 9 
million nationwide. But we missed the deadline. Why? I can't find any 
reason. We don't know anything now that we didn't know in the middle of 
September or in August when we could have passed this program, but we 
just blew right by it. Maybe it is because none of our kids are in this 
program. I venture to say that if the children of the Members of the 
Senate were in the CHIP program, we would have met that deadline, but 
we didn't.

  What is another one? Community health centers had another deadline of 
September 30, which was missed. I will give you 200,000 reasons that we 
should have met that deadline. That is the number of people in my State 
of Maine who are served by federally qualified health centers. I was at 
one just on Friday. They serve people who otherwise wouldn't get care. 
They fill an enormous gap, particularly in a rural State, to provide 
healthcare to people who need it, but we didn't make the deadline. 
There was no particular reason not to make this deadline. We just blew 
right by it. It was not all that important. I venture to say that if 
our families were covered under this program, we would have gotten it 
done. No Senators' families are covered by federally qualified health 
centers. If they had been, we would have gotten it done.
  Of course, the granddaddy of all of deadlines mentioned is the 
budget: October 1, 2017. We missed it--no deadline. We just went right 
by it. Nothing happened. Well, what we did was to pass a continuing 
resolution. A continuing resolution really should be called a ``cop-out 
resolution.'' It is basically saying that we are not going to make the 
hard decisions in a budget. We are just going to push them forward for 
a month or two. But the problem is that the month or two comes. In 
fact, it is coming this Friday, and now we are talking about another 
continuing resolution to go into January or February. No business would 
do this. Families can't even do this.
  Some time ago, I was the Governor of Maine. I remember vividly. I can 
practically tell you where I was standing in my office. We have a 
deadline in Maine of July 1 for our budget. We always make it. Members 
of the legislature of one of the parties came to me. They were having a 
hard time getting a budget. It was very contentious, as it is every 
year. He said: Governor, let's just do a continuing resolution like 
they do in Washington, and we can solve this problem in the next 2 
weeks. I said: Not on your life, because if we do, once we open the 
Pandora's box of continuing resolutions in Maine or in Iowa or in 
Mississippi or Florida, then we are stuck. We will never get a budget 
on time again because it is too easy to put off the hard decisions. 
What do we know now about the budget that we didn't know in August? 
What will we know in January that we don't know now?
  By the way, a continuing resolution for the entire budget is bad for 
the government and disastrous for national security. I serve on the 
Armed Services Committee. We have hearings both from our civilian 
leadership and our military leadership, and they have told us 
repeatedly: Please get us a budget. The continuing resolution doesn't 
allow us to plan. It locks us into last year's priorities. It doesn't 
allow us to look forward and make commitments that will save the 
taxpayers money if we have the authority. It is a disaster for national 
security, but a deadline was missed on September 30. It looks like we 
are going to miss another deadline on December 22, and we will be here 
talking about funding the government, doing the budget, sometime in 
January or maybe in February. There is no reason for it. There is no 
reason for it except that we are simply avoiding making difficult 
decisions.
  The next one is DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The 
real deadline started on October 6. That is when people started to lose 
the ability to re-up their qualifications for DACA. Over 100 people a 
day are losing their DACA status. In the last week it has been, I 
think, something like 1,700--in the last week or 10 days. These are 
people who are going to go into the holidays unsure about whether they 
are going to be able to continue to live in this country. These are 
young people, as we all know. This is the only country they know. They 
were brought here as little kids. They weren't illegal immigrants. They 
were brought here as children, and they are contributing to our 
society, and they are working and paying taxes. But we missed the 
deadline starting in October.
  Now, even the President said we should fix this program, and he gave 
us 6 months. He said: I am going to disallow the program, but not until 
March 5, 2018. I don't know whether it is legal to bet in the District 
of Columbia, but I would be willing to bet that we are still struggling 
with this question on March 4, 2018. I deeply hope not because lives 
are being toyed with here unnecessarily. We could make the decisions 
now. We could decide to reach a compromise agreement on this program, 
which Members of both sides of the aisle think needs to be done, 
including the President. Let's get it done. But it is one more missed 
deadline.
  Next is the National Flood Insurance Program, with a deadline of 
December 22, which is 4 days from now. I don't think we are going to 
make it. If ever there was a time of importance for the National Flood 
Insurance Program, it is now. We have had enormous flooding issues with 
the hurricanes in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. 
Yet the flood insurance program expires on December 22. Why don't we 
get it done? Because it is not our houses. It is not our houses that 
are at risk to get the flood insurance. I suspect if we had the houses 
that were part of this problem, it would be solved.
  Medicare extenders expire on December 31 of this year. Are we going 
to get those done? I deeply hope so, but I am not so sure.
  FISA section 702, one of the most important national intelligence 
provisions that we have, also expires at the end of the year. Are we 
going to get that done? I deeply hope so, but I am not optimistic.
  Next, we have the wildfires and FEMA disaster aid for Harvey, Irma, 
Maria, and the wildfires. These are huge disasters. We have partially 
funded them, but certainly not to the point that is going to be 
required. Those deadlines were all this fall.
  At the bottom of my chart of priorities is tax reform. Boy, are we 
going to make that deadline. The only problem is that it doesn't exist. 
There is no deadline for that. There was no deadline. It is not 
December 22. It is not Christmas. It is not New Year's. It is a self-
imposed deadline that is not in law anywhere.
  I agree that we need to do tax reform, but we have been doing it on 
an unprecedented scale and speed that is unnecessary. We have missed 
and ignored all these real deadlines in exchange for focusing all of 
our attention on a fake deadline. Sure, it would be nice to get it 
done, and we could have gotten it done. It could have been done on a 
bipartisan basis. We could have started last summer, and we would have 
had a bill just like the bill that emerged from the HELP Committee with 
regard to healthcare, on a bipartisan basis. But instead it was a 
closed process, done with unprecedented speed, with virtually no 
hearings--well,

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no hearings, no real hearings on the bill, no serious outside experts, 
no analysis of what is in it. We have been given a 500-page bill that 
we are going to vote on in probably a day or so. Yet we are racing to 
meet a deadline that didn't exist.

  It is boring to talk about process, but that is what I am really 
talking about today. I just don't understand an institution that 
doesn't make its real deadlines and yet races and throws everything 
aside to try to make a deadline that just came out of the air. It is 
not in any law, any rule, any expectation--let's do it by Christmas or 
by the end of the year. It is no way to run a business, and it is 
certainly no way to run the government on behalf of the American 
people.
  I have never been in an institution or in a group of people who are 
as capable as the people who are here, and I find it genuinely puzzling 
as to why we perform so poorly and why the public opinion of us is so 
low. These are good people on both sides of the aisle. Yet something 
about the way this institution works keeps us from meeting the rules 
and expectations that the rest of society takes for granted, such as 
making deadlines, doing your job, doing what you are paid to do.
  One of the most fundamental responsibilities is to pass a budget. We 
have members of our Appropriations Committee who have been working for 
a year to put the budget together. It is done, and we could do this, 
but instead we are putting it off and putting it off and putting it 
off. I wouldn't be surprised if, come January or February--assuming we 
don't make it by this Friday--there are going to be people who say: 
Let's just do a continuing resolution for the rest of the year--a cop-
out resolution, a nonresolution, a nondecision on behalf of the people 
of this country.
  I think we can do better. I think we can begin to regain the trust of 
the American people by going back and doing things the way we are 
supposed to according to the old norms, with hearings and 
considerations and making deadlines and meeting our obligations to our 
citizens and to our country.
  I deeply hope that as the year turns, we also make a turn and that we 
make a turn to do this place better, to do our work that the American 
people hired us to do, to do it on a timely basis, and to meet our 
responsibilities. I believe we can do it. I believe we can do it 
better, and I deeply hope that we do so.
  Thank you, Madam President.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.