[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 18 (Thursday, January 25, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S512-S514]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Senate Priorities

  Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, now that the government is up and 
running again, we need to look ahead at what our legislative priorities 
should be. I can't speak for everybody, but I can speak for myself. My 
priorities are threefold.
  First, we need to expedite disaster relief. In December, the House 
passed an $81 billion disaster relief bill designed to address the 
natural disasters caused by Hurricane Irma, Hurricane Harvey, as well 
as the wildfires out West. That has been sitting in the Senate since 
December. We need to act and act with dispatch.
  Everybody remembers Hurricane Harvey--we certainly do in Texas--which 
pummeled us last August. It was last August; this is February. Most of 
the media attention in the months since has focused on the city of 
Houston, which quite literally was torn apart. This was the most 
intense rain event in American history--more than 50 inches of rain 
fell in 5 days.
  Other areas beyond Houston fared worse--I am thinking of cities like 
Rockport and Port Author on the Texas coast. I am thinking of cities 
like Victoria and Beaumont. More than 28,000 square miles were flooded. 
Crops rotted, livestock died, and almost 6 months later people are 
still piecing together their lives.
  In addition to Hurricane Harvey, as I said, there was Hurricane Irma 
and Hurricane Maria, and there were the wildfires that burned across 
California that later resulted in mudslides after the rains fell. I 
know the Federal Government is not the only entity charged with 
ensuring help gets to these places, but it certainly has an important 
part to play.
  This morning, I attended the U.S. Conference of Mayors and saw a 
number of my mayors from Texas who were part of the success or at least 
the management of this natural disaster in

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Texas. They have done their part. The State has done its part. It is 
time for the Federal Government to step up, and it is time for the 
Senate to pass this supplemental bill that was passed by the House in 
December.
  The second priority I have, personally, is lifting the spending caps 
that impair our national defense, particularly our men and women in 
uniform. In my remarks yesterday, I said this is a problem set in 
motion by the Budget Control Act of 2011. While well-intentioned--for a 
while it did hold down discretionary spending and reduced our deficits 
and our debt--its implementation has not stemmed our national debt, but 
it has tied the hands of our military. This is an important lesson. It 
is not defense spending, it is not tax cuts, it is not discretionary 
spending; it is the mandatory spending in our entitlement programs 
which continue to run up deficits and debt and which threaten us and 
our financial future, to be sure.
  In the meantime, our military faces readiness challenges across the 
globe. We simply must listen to people like Defense Secretary Jim 
Mattis. We should lift the caps, end sequester so our military no 
longer suffers and so our national security is on safer ground.
  The third on my immediate to-do list is working with a bipartisan 
group of legislators as well as President Trump on the issue of the 
DACA recipients. As everybody who has been paying much attention in 
recent days knows, this is a group of about 690,000 young adults who 
came into the country as children because their parents brought them in 
illegally, in noncompliance with our immigration laws.
  In the United States, we don't hold children responsible for the 
mistakes of their parents, nor should we punish these young adults who 
have now grown up because their parents broke our immigration laws. We 
know they face an uncertain future, and much of the responsibility for 
our porous borders should be borne by Congress--not only the present 
Congress, but past Congresses--for basically turning our heads the 
other way while people continued to immigrate illegally into the United 
States.

  We are going to need to improve our infrastructure, personnel, and 
technology to make sure we don't experience that sort of rush of 
illegal immigration in the future, which is why some of our Democratic 
colleagues like to say that we need to protect DACA recipients, which 
we are willing to do. But we want to make sure there is not a 
repetition of this in 3 years or 5 years hence. So there are important 
measures we need to combine with that, and the President has told us 
that he is going to insist upon--and he is correct in doing so--a 
robust border security component, as well as ending chain migration and 
the diversity lottery visas. From the news I saw this morning, it 
sounds like the President made some statement about the first piece of 
that puzzle last night. We are expecting to hear more from the White 
House on how they expect Congress to respond and what the President 
would find acceptable here in the next few days.
  This bill can't become law without the President's signature. So the 
President's views are not irrelevant, but we are the ones who have the 
primary responsibility to resolve these complicated issues. Getting 60 
votes is not the only thing we are aiming for. Certainly, that is the 
hurdle we have in the Senate, but it would be a futile act if the 
President wouldn't sign it or if it wouldn't pass the House of 
Representatives. So we have our work cut out for us, and I know the 
American people will not support it unless it is a serious and well-
thought-out proposal. The blowback will be strong, and we will face a 
harsh reprisal if we don't take into account the opinions and the views 
of our constituents back home, which I intend to do.
  Beyond these short-term actions, which we need to move on as soon as 
possible, there are other priorities I would like to mention as well. 
Infrastructure is something everybody likes to talk about, until you 
ask the question: How are we going to pay for it?
  Recently, I introduced a bipartisan bill with Senator Warner from 
Virginia that would expand an infrastructure financing authority 
already in use by many States and local governments across the United 
States. This legislation is called the BUILD Act, which would raise the 
caps on a specific category of what are known as private activity 
bonds, giving additional access to tax-exempt bond authority for the 
purpose of constructing highway projects.
  I was with a number of Texas mayors earlier this morning, and they 
told me they see that as a positive development, something they can use 
in their cities. They appreciate that during the tax reform debate we 
maintained the tax-exempt status of municipal bonds used for those 
kinds of purposes.
  In the near future, I intend to introduce a few other legislative 
initiatives to help rehabilitate our Nation's infrastructure. I come 
from a State that is growing because we are creating so many jobs, and 
that is putting a strain on our existing infrastructure. So for the 
interest of public safety and the environment, as well as our economy, 
we need to repair and build out our infrastructure. I know the White 
House has some plans in this area as well, and we look forward to 
hearing more about them and working with the administration when it 
comes to infrastructure.
  Thinking about other areas that we could work on in a bipartisan 
fashion, I firmly believe it is important for us to look at success 
stories in the States, and then, once these laboratories of democracy 
have done things that actually result in positive things, we can then 
learn from them and scale them up at the Federal level.
  That is one reason I am very interested in taking the lessons we 
learned in Texas and other States on prison reform and offering a 
better, more enlightened, and sensible path to reentry for people who 
made mistakes and ended up in our jails and prisons. Not everybody is 
going to take advantage of it. In my visits in Texas prisons, I know 
illiteracy is rampant. Some people have drug or alcohol problems that 
need to be addressed. Some people just need to learn basic job skills 
if we expect for them to succeed once they get out of prison. We have 
used various incentives for low-risk offenders in Texas to provide them 
opportunities to address each of those concerns, and it has been quite 
successful. Not only have fewer people recommitted crimes and ended up 
back in prison, but our communities have become safer as a result, and 
taxpayers have had to build fewer prisons in the process.
  I have been working in the Senate on a bipartisan way with my 
colleague from Rhode Island, Senator Whitehouse, and my colleague from 
Utah, Senator Lee. I know this issue has gotten some real traction 
thanks to President Trump and the roundtable he hosted at the White 
House earlier this month.
  More than 11 million people go to jail each year in the United 
States, and there are currently 2.3 million people under confinement. 
This is a matter of great public concern, but to me the No. 1 concern 
is public safety. If we can keep the public safer, if we can save 
taxpayer dollars, and if we can help people who are willing to accept 
the opportunity to turn their lives around and become productive 
members of our society, it seems to me that we ought to be doing that.
  I look forward to hearing more--perhaps even from the President 
during the State of the Union Address on Tuesday night, if he chooses 
to mention his interest in that topic, which I know he is interested 
in.
  Finally, we have to keep filling our judicial vacancies. Last year, 
we were able to put two Texans on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, 
but more district judges have come through the pipeline this year. One 
of the judges we confirmed earlier this month is David Counts from 
Midland, TX. He will be serving in the Western District of Texas. Just 
this week, the President announced his intention to nominate another 
judge for the Western District of Texas, Alan Albright, as well as Cam 
Barker, Jeremy Kernodle, and Michael Truncale for the Eastern District 
of Texas.
  We are a big State. So we have a lot of judicial vacancies, and 
Senator Cruz and I are working hard, together with the White House, to 
make recommendations to President Trump for nomination. They go through 
a very extensive vetting process. Senator Cruz and I have created 
something we call the Federal Judicial Evaluation Committee, which is a 
group of our

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most experienced practitioners in the State, on a bipartisan basis, to 
evaluate the people who apply for these important life-tenured 
positions.
  I want to compliment the President for his sterling picks for the 
judiciary, certainly so far, starting with the Supreme Court of the 
United States. But at the intermediate appellate courts, like the Fifth 
Circuit and these district courts, these are the people who do the day-
in and day-out work of the judiciary to make sure that all Americans 
have access to justice and the opportunity for a fair hearing before an 
impartial judge. That is one of the most important things the Federal 
Government provides through our judicial branch: ``Equal justice under 
law,'' as the words above the Supreme Court building say.