[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 81 (Thursday, May 17, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2736-S2748]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   CONCURRENT RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET, FISCAL YEAR 2019--MOTION TO 
                                PROCEED

  Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I move to proceed to the consideration of S. 
Con. Res. 36.
  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. Con. Res. 36, a 
     concurrent resolution setting forth the congressional budget 
     for the United States Government for fiscal year 2019 and 
     setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal 
     years 2020 through 2028.

  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, there 
will be 45 minutes under the control of Senator Paul or his designee 
and 45 minutes under the control of the Democratic leader or his 
designee.
  The Senator from Kentucky.
  Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, this year there will be no budget presented 
by the Republicans or the Democrats. I think that is a bad idea. I 
think the government should have a budget. There should be a document 
that says what we are for, what we are against, and how we are going to 
spend our money. I think it is particularly important because we are 
incurring so much debt.
  We may remember when Republicans campaigned against enormous spending 
by President Obama and $1 trillion annual deficits. Now we are faced 
with enormous spending and $1 trillion annual deficits from 
Republicans. I think it is important that we have a discussion about 
this.
  Do we have too much debt? Some will say: Well, I have debt for my 
house, and that is not bad. The country has a lot of debt that they 
borrow against capital expenditures--things that don't expire. I think 
there is some truth to that. You can have a manageable amount of debt, 
particularly if it is against something you are borrowing that doesn't 
go away. But if you are borrowing money for the grocery store or for 
your apartment, that might be a bad thing. It will not last very long. 
You will do it for a month or two, and pretty soon the bank will come 
calling. So there is a point at which debt is too cumbersome, and there 
is too much of it.
  Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of 
Harvard did a study linking debt to economic growth. They concluded 
that when a country exceeds 90 percent of their GDP, when their debt is 
almost

[[Page S2737]]

equal to their GDP, economic growth begins to slow, and you lose 
probably 1 to 2 points just because of the burden of the debt. This is 
all of the debt--what the government owes to the public at large and to 
themselves. They said that when it exceeds 90 percent, it is a problem. 
Currently, our debt is at 105 percent; our gross public debt is 105 
percent of our GDP.
  We now have a national debt of about $21 trillion. Historically, 
Congress had sort of a cover on this. Congress would try to rein in the 
debt. There would be a big debate every time we raised the debt 
ceiling. Congress would have to lift it each time, and there was some 
punishment out there for those who voted to raise the debt ceiling.
  Now we don't raise the debt ceiling by a certain amount because that 
became embarrassing and limiting, making them come back each time to 
try to raise the debt ceiling. Now what we do is raise it for a period 
of time.
  Currently, the debt ceiling has been raised, and you can spend as 
much as you want for a little over a year. We did it, I believe, back 
in December. For about 1\1/2\ years, the government can borrow as much 
as they can possibly borrow for that period of time. Basically, there 
is no limit. The debt ceiling vote has become a meaningless vote 
because we just raise it for a period of time.
  Is the debt a problem? How much interest do we pay on the debt? We 
pay $300 billion in interest. You say: Well, is that a problem? Paying 
on the interest crowds out other things that you want from the 
government. So when people come to my office and say ``I want this from 
my government,'' I say ``Well, part of the problem is we are paying 
$300 billion in interest, and part of the problem is we don't have 
anything to give you because we are borrowing about 25 percent of every 
dollar we spend.''
  Every time the government spends a dollar, 25 percent of that is 
borrowed. This is on current accounts of things people want. For 
example, if I were to ask you: Is it a good idea to borrow money to 
give to your church? People say: Well, my church is a good thing, and I 
want to give money to my church. But is it a good idea and will it last 
very long if you go to the bank to borrow 25 percent of every dollar 
you spend and tithe 25 percent to your church? You say: My church is a 
good thing. But is it a good thing to borrow that money, and will the 
bank keep loaning you that money, and are there repercussions to having 
so much debt?
  We have a $300 billion interest payment at about a 2-percent interest 
rate. The interest rate is manipulated by the Federal Reserve, and 
there are those who report that the main reason the interest rates are 
kept low by the Federal Reserve is not necessarily to stimulate 
economic growth; it is to finance this enormous burden of debt.
  What happens when interest rates normalize? Many are predicting they 
will. As economic growth begins to pick up, you are going to see an 
acceleration in interest rates. What happens at 5 percent? Can we even 
manage our debt at 5 percent?
  People have looked at what the interest will be, even saying interest 
rates stay stable, and they say that within about a decade, interest 
rates will exceed all other payments of the government. The estimate is 
that within 10 years, interest payments alone will be about $761 
billion--greater than national defense, greater than any other area of 
the budget. Even now, the second biggest item in the budget after 
defense is interest.
  So some say: But we have to finance the military, and the military 
needs more money. That is why you hear Republicans now no longer caring 
about the debt. They got more money for the military, but they had to 
make an unholy alliance with Democrats and give them more for social 
welfare. So we have guns and butter. Everybody gets what they want--
except for the taxpayer and those of us who care about the debt.

  So the debt has exploded now under Republican control. You say: Well, 
don't we need it for the military?
  Well, I think there are some arguments we should probably engage in 
before we decide that. We have doubled the amount in nominal terms that 
we spend on the military since 9/11. In real terms, there is about a 
36-percent increase in national defense. We spend more on the military 
than the next eight countries combined.
  There is an argument that it isn't necessarily that the budget has 
not grown enough, but it is that maybe the military mission is too 
large. Maybe it is not that the budget is too small but that our 
military mission is too large, that we are at war in too many places 
around the globe and that we should reassess that.
  Many Republicans will say: Well, that is all good and well, but 
really the culprit is entitlements.
  Entitlements are growing at 6 percent--Social Security, Medicare, 
food stamps. There is truth to that, but watch closely the people who 
tell you that the problem is entitlements and ask yourself if they are 
doing anything to fix entitlements. Ask them whether they have put 
forward a bill on the floor of the Senate to rein in spending and 
entitlements. Ask them whether they have even cosponsored a bill or 
whether they are agitating for a bill to rein in entitlements. No. They 
are petrified of looking at entitlements. So everybody complains about 
it, and nobody does anything about it.
  Everybody says they are for a balanced budget. Yet, when we have a 
vote in a few minutes on a budget that actually balances in 5 years, 
consistent with the balanced budget amendment, I think we will get a 
handful--maybe a dozen or maybe two dozen. But the majority of 
Republicans will say: Oh my goodness, we could never cut spending. So 
in the abstract, they are for a balanced budget. They are for a 
balanced budget amendment. They will all vote for it. They will all 
come down here. I think we had a unanimous vote a few years ago. 
Republicans all voted for the balanced budget amendment. Just a month 
ago in the House, all the people who voted to bust the budget caps, all 
the people who voted for the extra spending, all these Republicans then 
voted for the balanced budget amendment, which says you have to balance 
in 5 years. Typically, when they have brought forward a budget, they 
have tried to balance it in 10 years and struggled. So they vote for a 
balanced budget amendment that balances in 5 years, and yet they 
struggle to come up with a budget that is not fake to balance in 10 
years.
  We passed a budget last year. It was a Republican budget. I voted 
against it because I think it had fake cuts in it, and it had fake 
reporting, and they weren't serious about it. I will give an example. 
The budget last year that the Republicans passed had about $4 trillion 
in entitlement savings over 10 years. You say: Well, did they enact any 
of that? Zero. Do they have any bills to do any entitlement reform? 
Zero. Did we ever debate and vote on any bills that would have done 
anything to entitlement spending? No. In fact, in the first year of the 
Republican budget last year, there was $96 billion--that is a 
significant savings--all in entitlements, and yet nobody had a bill 
that even went to committee. There was never a committee vote. There 
was never a floor vote. No one lifted a finger to do anything about 
entitlement spending.
  So it is a canard for those who say: Well, the real problem is not 
military; the real problem is not nonmilitary discretionary; the real 
problem is entitlements. Sure, entitlements are growing faster, but 
unless we are doing something about it, it is simply saying: Oh, we 
have to keep spending over here because the real problem is over here, 
but we are not going to do anything over here, which runs into really 
the hypocrisy that we face today.
  I have often said that the Republican Party is an empty vessel unless 
we imbue it with value. We say we are against big spending. We say we 
are against big government. We say we are for devolving power, 
structure, and money back to the States. Yet the government grows under 
Democrats and it grows under Republicans.
  Democrats are sometimes more honest about wanting to grow government. 
They will go home and say they are going to make government big enough 
to put a ham on every table, a chicken in every pot. They are a little 
bit more honest about it. Republicans go home and say they believe in 
the free market. They go to the Rotary Club and say: Well, I voted for 
the balanced budget amendment. But the question is, Why won't they vote 
for an actual budget that balances? Why won't they

[[Page S2738]]

vote for a budget that actually is consistent with the balanced budget 
amendment?
  So what I have done is put forward my own budget. It is something I 
have talked about for several years now. It wasn't originally my idea; 
others have talked about it. It is called the penny plan. It says that 
we would cut one penny out of every dollar the Federal Government 
spends--1 percent. Could we not get to a point where we could actually 
cut one penny out of every dollar? Isn't there enough waste going on in 
government that we could actually cut a penny out of every dollar?
  Like everything else, people argue the numbers. There is a lot of 
fake math that goes on around here. Those on the left will say, oh, but 
this will be cutting $13 trillion, when, in fact, it might not cut any. 
For example, if we were to freeze government spending for 10 years, the 
left would say: You have cut spending by $15 trillion because we were 
going to increase spending by $15 trillion. So it is sort of fake 
accounting. If we spend $3.2 trillion and next year we spend $32 
billion less, that is a 1-percent cut, but the left will say: Oh, no, 
we were going to increase spending by 6 percent, and so you are really 
cutting spending by 7 percent. This enormous number comes up, but in 
reality, we are taking last year's spending--3.2 trillion--and we are 
going to cut it by 1 percent, $30 billion. If we do that every year for 
5 years, the budget balances.
  You say: Well, some people might not get all their money. Yes, there 
would be some programs across government that would get less. I 
challenge any American to call up my office and present proof that 
there is not 1 percent waste and fraud in any program going on. I will 
give an example. The earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit 
are estimated to have 25 percent fraud. For years, you could get this 
credit without a Social Security number. You could simply say: My kids 
and I don't have one. The government would generate a taxpayer ID 
number for you and give you a refund. This is to the tune of billions 
of dollars. It is about $100 billion in the EITC, the earned-income tax 
credit, and the additional child credit--many of those going to people 
who were in our country illegally and had no Social Security number.
  There is waste from top to bottom in government. How would you ever 
find it? See, many people in this body on both sides of the aisle will 
say: I am for rooting out waste. Yet you never find waste if you keep 
giving them more money. If you reward government agencies with more 
money, you are never going to get less waste.
  The penny plan budget I am presenting would cut 1 percent. Does 
anybody in America think government couldn't do with 1 percent less? 
Many American families have had a bad year here and there and have to 
deal with more than 1 percent less. One percent of this enormous 
government, if it were cut each year, would go a long way toward making 
us a stronger nation.
  People say: Well, what about the military? I think that if the 
government ran a balanced budget, we would have a stronger and more 
secure nation. Admiral Mullen said he thought the No. 1 threat to our 
national security was actually our debt. So there are many realistic 
people, even high-ranking people in the military, who are saying: You 
know what, if we want to secure our Nation, we have to make sure that 
we have a sound economy and that we have a sound government that is not 
borrowing so much money.
  How rapidly do we borrow money? We borrow $1 million every minute--$1 
million a minute. In fact, it is a little bit higher than that now. It 
is about $1.5 million, and the curve over the next 10 years gets to 
about $2 million a minute. Imagine how fast the money is flying out of 
here. How big is $1 million? People have said that if you put hundred-
dollar bills in your hand, it is about 4 inches high to get to $1 
million. We are borrowing $1 million or more every minute.
  How would we get to $30 billion? How could we possibly cut $30 
billion from the budget? I will give examples of where some of the 
money is.
  Foreign aid is about $30 billion. You say: Well, I want to help the 
poor people in the world. I am all for you. If you want to give out of 
your savings to help poor people around the world, all the benefit and 
all the accolades for being generous, but if you want to borrow money, 
you won't be able to do it for very long.
  Should the U.S. Government borrow? We are going to borrow $1 trillion 
this year. Should we borrow money to send it to poor countries, or 
should we borrow money to send armaments to countries? I think it is a 
big mistake. That is about $30 billion. So if you were to cut 1 percent 
next year, you could actually cut 1 percent by simply eliminating 
foreign aid.
  How much do we spend in Afghanistan building their roads, building 
their bridges, building their schools before they blow them up again 
and then we rebuild them again? We have rebuilt some buildings in 
Afghanistan seven times. That is nearly $50 billion, which is about a 
year, year and a half, of the penny plan right there if we were to say: 
Guess what. We won the Afghan war, and we are not going to stay 
forever. We have some needs here at home that we are going to take care 
of and not send all that money to Afghanistan.
  Corporate welfare. Rich corporations in our country--I am all for 
them. If they freely sell something to you and they make money because 
you like their product and buy it, more power to them, but if they want 
money from the Federal Government, that is ridiculous. I don't think 
private business should be getting any money from the Federal 
Government. It is estimated that corporate welfare is over $100 
billion. I know for certain that we could find enough corporate welfare 
that we could actually, by eliminating corporate welfare, do 1 year of 
the penny plan.
  Waste. Our office alone has found $3 billion in waste.
  Interest. It is $300 billion, going up to $760 billion.
  There are a lot of areas in our government that we could actually 
look at and actually adhere to the penny plan and balance our budget. I 
would like to go through a few items.
  If there is anybody in America who believes their government is not 
wasting their money, I would like to show them a few areas where the 
government is wasting their money.
  My staff recently went to Afghanistan. This is a picture of a luxury 
hotel that your taxpayer dollars went to build. Your first question 
might be why your taxpayer dollars would be going to a luxury hotel in 
some Third World country. It is about 400 feet from our Embassy, and 
this is what it looks like. They have been building it for 11 years, 
and it is unfinished. Nothing was done to code, it is falling down, and 
at this point, the hotel is so dangerous that we have to send our 
soldiers to patrol it to make sure snipers aren't using the hotel to 
shoot at our Embassy. So it is not only a waste of $90 million, never 
having been completed, but it is now a danger to our troops. The talk 
now is on how they are going to fix the problem.
  Does anybody in Washington think we should spend less in Afghanistan? 
Virtually no one. Both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, 
can't spend money fast enough in Afghanistan. No one is making a stand 
and saying: Enough is enough. It is time to announce that we won, and 
it is time to come home. The money just keeps going, good money after 
bad--$90 million for a hotel that will never be built.
  To add insult to injury, do you know what they are going to do now? 
They are talking about selling the unfinished hotel. Do you know who 
they are going to sell it to? Another branch of government. So 
government built this--U.S. taxpayer dollars built this--and now they 
are going to sell it to the State Department. Do you know what the 
State Department is going to do with this luxury hotel in Kabul? They 
are going to tear it down. So that is $90 million flushed down the 
toilet.
  You can't tell me this waste isn't rotting in our government from top 
to bottom, and it is never rooted out. Why? Because we never give any 
agency less money; everybody gets more money. If you are running an 
agency or business and someone gives you more money, are you more 
likely to root out waste or less likely to root out waste? The only way 
they would ever root out waste is if they got a commandment--thou shalt 
do this--from Congress, from the Senate, to say: Enough is

[[Page S2739]]

enough. Let's declare victory and come home.
  This hotel--$90 million flushed down the toilet. It is now a danger 
to our troops, and they are going to tear it down. It was never 
completed.
  Also, in Afghanistan, there is brandnew equipment that we send over 
there that is shredded. They have big, huge industrial shredders. My 
staff saw them. They found boxes of new equipment--electrical outlet 
boxes, all kinds of things--being shoved into the shredder. So we buy 
brandnew equipment, and it is shoved into the shredder. There is $50 
million of brandnew, never-used equipment that has been destroyed. This 
doesn't even count the old stuff we are destroying. There are reports 
that $7 billion--7 with a ``b,'' billion dollars--of used equipment, 
such as tanks, humvees, et cetera, has been destroyed. Why? Our allies 
are so unreliable, we are afraid that if we leave a tank or a humvee 
there, it might be taken by the opposition and used against us. So we 
have destroyed $7 billion of it because it is cheaper to destroy it 
than to load it on planes and bring it over here. That is $7 billion.
  The Department of Defense loses $29 million of heavy equipment. What 
does that mean? They can't find it. It can't be accounted for. They 
don't know where the equipment is. There is $29 million unaccounted for 
in heavy equipment.
  They tried to establish an Afghan equivalent for the Army Corps of 
Engineers and lost $20 million of heavy equipment in the process.
  There is $28 million worth of uniforms that are missing. Someone got 
paid. We can't find the uniforms. We can't prove that anyone ever got 
the uniforms.
  Even more troubling than that, there was $700,000 worth of ammunition 
missing. You would think we could at least keep up with ammunition. Do 
you think that might be a danger and an insult to our young men and 
women we send to Afghanistan, that we can't account for where the 
ammunition is? I think if you can't account for it, there is a decent 
chance the enemy has your ammunition or rogue elements in the Afghan 
Government--which could be anyone--have sold it on the black market to 
make money.

  Where does your money go? I want you to realize as Americans where 
your money is going. They spent $500,000 to study if selfies make you 
happier. You take selfies of yourself smiling, then you look at them to 
see if that makes you happier. Now, you may want to do this on your own 
time, but do you want to spend $500,000 of taxpayer money when we are a 
trillion dollars short?
  This stuff has been going on with the National Science Foundation 
since the 1970s. William Proxmire was a Senator back in the 1970s--a 
conservative Democrat or a Democrat of some stripe. He used to do the 
Golden Fleece Award. Many of them went to the National Science 
Foundation around 1972. He complained about it for 10 years before he 
retired. I have been complaining about it for 6 years.
  What do the Republicans and Democrats do? They say: Oh, it is 
science. You wouldn't know, sir, about science. We have to give them 
more money. You are not smart enough to know there is a lot of science 
in taking selfies. We could learn something really important, and it is 
so important for the future of mankind to learn whether selfies of 
people smiling will help the world in the end.
  NIH. Everybody loves the NIH. They can do no wrong. NIH did a $2 
million study to see whether, if you are following somebody in the 
cafeteria line and the guy or woman in front of you sneezes on the 
food, you are more or less likely to take the food. Really? I think we 
could have polled the audience on that. I mean, how ridiculous is that? 
Money like that--particularly when there are things the government 
needs to do. There is a trillion-dollar deficit, and we spend $2 
million studying what your reaction is to people sneezing on the food?
  Then $356,000 of your money was spent studying whether Japanese quail 
are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. These guys have some great 
studies. This is, once again, I believe, the National Science 
Foundation. Hurray for the National Science Foundation. I know I am 
going to get hate mail from them. They spent $356,000 to study whether 
Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. You can't make 
this stuff up.
  The reform I have proposed is that we have a taxpayer advocate on the 
committee to determine who gets these grants. Do you know what they 
say? We can't have any nonscientists. They wouldn't understand the 
science. I want the scientist who did this to come forward and explain 
why we need this study. There is no point to us spending this money. 
There could have been something better.
  I offered one thing to try to fix it. Put a taxpayer advocate on the 
committee approving grants, and I think we should have a scientist who 
isn't in that field. This is sort of behavioral science for Japanese 
quail, I guess. We need to have somebody who studies diabetes, heart 
disease, cancer, AIDS--some of the diseases that affect more people. 
They need to be on the committee because they need to be scratching 
their heads saying: We can spend it on Japanese quail and their sexual 
habits or we can spend it on diabetes. The taxpayer advocate could say: 
We can spend it on Japanese quail or maybe we can reduce the debt. 
Maybe both could happen. Maybe we could reduce the debt and try to do 
only better scientific projects.
  This one looks like something you really want your government to 
spend money on. They spent $150,000 to investigate supernatural events 
in Alaska. They can look at unexplained lights, animals with 
transformative powers, all kinds of different mythological animals, 
landscape features that had special powers, and, of course, you 
wouldn't want to leave out sea monsters. People say: What is $150,000? 
That is the problem with government. Milton Friedman had it right when 
he said: ``Nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as he spends 
his own.'' Why does nobody care about the $150,000? Because it wasn't 
their money to spend. This is the problem with government at-large and 
why the government is never good at anything they do. They are terribly 
ineffective because they are spending somebody else's money.
  Government should be so small that they have less room to make errors 
like this. We should devolve most of the power of this place back to 
the States. That is what our Founding Fathers intended, and we should 
try to say we are not going to tolerate this kind of stuff.
  This $250,000 was spent to send 24 kids from Pakistan to Space Camp 
and Dollywood. My first question would be: Is there anybody in America 
who didn't get to go to Dollywood or Space Camp last year? I think when 
everybody in America has gone, we might consider sending some Pakistani 
kids. Frankly, there is nothing in the Constitution that says we should 
be sending Pakistani kids to Dollywood. There is nothing wrong if you 
want to send your kids from Pakistan to Dollywood--by all means. You 
should not take taxpayer money to do things like this.
  May I ask the Presiding Officer how much time I have remaining of my 
45 minutes?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Hyde-Smith). There is 19 minutes.
  Mr. PAUL. Thank you.
  This is here in Washington, about a mile from here. We call it a 
``Streetcar Named Waste.'' Spending $1.6 million to study the expansion 
of the DC streetcar--and this is a streetcar that nobody is actually 
riding on. It is a ghost car. Nobody is riding on it. It goes nowhere. 
It goes about a mile, from nowhere to nowhere, and is much slower than 
walking. I walked, and I can outwalk it. We thought about filming me in 
a race with the streetcar to see who wins, me walking or it driving; 
once again, going back to some technology from hundreds of years ago 
that still requires wires to be running down the street, and it is 
really not a useful expense of government money. DC gets a lot of 
Federal money.
  Where else do they spend your money? This is one of my favorites. I 
just can't even imagine who spent this money. When I tell you, you will 
say: Certainly, that person was fired. No way. He works for the Federal 
Government. Nobody is ever fired in the Federal Government. They spent 
$700,000 to study what Neil Armstrong said when he landed on the Moon. 
Did he say, ``One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,'' or 
did he say, ``One small step for a man''? They wanted to

[[Page S2740]]

study whether the preposition ``a'' was mentioned by Neil Armstrong or 
whether he said: ``One small step for man.'' Where did the money come 
from? The grant was originally supposed to be for autism. We can debate 
whether the Federal Government should be involved in that. It sounds 
like a much more just study if it had something to do with autism than 
studying Neil Armstrong's statement on the Moon.
  You can't make this stuff up. This is incredibly ridiculous, but it 
should be insulting. There should not be a taxpayer at home in America 
who says: All right. Today they are going to vote on a budget to cut 
one penny out of every dollar. We spent $700,000 on what Neil Armstrong 
did or did not say on the Moon. You know what their conclusion at the 
end was? They don't know. It is inconclusive. They listened to the tape 
over and over again. Someone should be fired.
  It also should be a message to our body that we should cut some 
spending. Instead, we have done the opposite. Under Republican control 
of the Senate and the House, we busted the budget caps by $300 billion 
just 2 months ago. Part of what my plan would do would be to restore 
the caps. They are put in place for a reason, to try to control our 
proclivity to spend too much money. We put the budget caps in place, 
then we cut 1 percent a year--about $30 billion every year for 5 years, 
and then the government would begin to grow again at about 1 percent.
  I know we could live within our means. What would happen is this guy 
would be fired, and that kind of study would not happen when they have 
1 percent less. Maybe a program like the National Science Foundation 
would get 50 percent less or 75 percent less to really put them on 
notice that we are tired, after 30 years of crazy research, of them 
continuing without reform.
  This was also spent in Afghanistan. This is your money. They used 
$850,000 to set up a televised cricket league. The first problem is, 
most people don't have TVs in Afghanistan. Really, a televised cricket 
league? They don't even have TVs to watch it on. This is $850,000 to 
make them feel better about their National Cricket League. Boondoggle. 
It has nothing to do with national defense. It makes us weaker by 
putting us further into debt.
  Will this get better if we continue to increase money? No, it only 
gets worse. If you give them more money, they will spend it. In fact, 
we have studied spending at the end of the year. When you get to the 
end of the year, the government spends money four to five times faster 
than any other month in the year. The last 30 days of the fiscal year 
spending increases every day. In fact, on the last day of the fiscal 
year, you can watch spending accelerate as the Sun sets in the West. As 
offices begin to close in the East, the spending shifts to the Midwest. 
As the Sun sets farther in the western sky and the offices are still 
open in California, they are spending money as fast as they can. If 
they don't spend it, they will not get it next year--use it or lose it.
  It is a phenomenon of government that has been going on forever. This 
kind of stuff happens. As long as you give them more money, they will 
do it. As long as they are rewarded for doing the spending, we should 
study which agencies do it. We should study which agencies go to Las 
Vegas and have their conference there for a million dollars, sipping 
champagne in a hot tub. That agency should get less money. I think 
those people actually did get fired--one of the few people ever fired.
  We could have a debate on another occasion about climate change, but 
we probably agree that a $450,000 app for your phone so you can play a 
climate change game that will, I guess, attempt to convince you and 
ensure that you are convinced that we are having climate change--
$450,000 for an app on a phone. Apps are everywhere. People are 
developing them all the time. Government doesn't need to be spending 
$450,000 for what somebody probably spends $1,000 in their garage to 
develop.
  Remember ObamaCare, when they tried to set up the website with 
millions of dollars, and then it failed? Remember the IRS just 3 weeks 
ago failing? We need to be very careful about giving government more 
money.
  The budget I am introducing is called the penny plan budget. It cuts 
one penny out of every dollar. This is important for the country to see 
we are having this vote. They are not that excited to have this vote. 
We are only having this vote because the Senate rules basically mandate 
it. It can't be avoided because Republicans didn't create a budget. 
Democrats didn't create a budget. So I decided, what the heck, I will 
create my own budget.
  The penny plan budget has come forward. If we were to pass this, 
there are many good things. Through a simple majority, we could do many 
good things that conservative Republicans have wanted, like make the 
tax cuts permanent, and get rid of more regulations. We could do the 
REINS Act, which would say, new regulations that are very expensive 
have to be voted on by Congress. We should cut out more waste. There 
are all kinds of things we could do.
  What we have chosen to do in our budget is actually give instructions 
to expand health savings accounts. One of the big problems we have in 
healthcare is rising costs. Costs are going up about 25 percent a year. 
The answer around here has been, I think, lame, uneducated, ill-
informed, and counterproductive. Other than that, they are right on 
target. What they are trying to say is: Oh, your individual rates are 
going up 25 percent a year. Here is some money so you can pay for it. 
It does nothing to bring the curve down. It may accelerate the curve. 
If you subsidize something, it will become more expensive. You are 
subsidizing the demand for it. We ought to expand health savings 
accounts where people pay for their healthcare. People say: I don't 
want to pay for my healthcare. When you pay--when you have skin in the 
game--you ask the price of things. When the government pays or somebody 
else pays, you don't ask the price of things, and the price rises.
  Competition is the fundamental aspect of capitalism, but you have to 
have freely fluctuating prices, which we don't in Medicare, Medicaid, 
and actually mostly private insurance. We have never really adjusted 
the fundamental problem of healthcare, which is that we don't have 
capitalism in healthcare.
  What do we do? Because we don't have enough capitalism, we take more 
capitalism away and add more government, and it is more broken since we 
have done Obamacare. One of the answers--since many Republicans will 
not vote to repeal ObamaCare--is let us try to start expanding the 
marketplace.
  My budget today could pass if every Republican voted for it. If it 
passes, we could move on to doing something like expanding the health 
savings accounts. This gets to an argument that is an inside baseball 
argument that happens in Washington. They will tell you: Young man, you 
must vote for our budget because the budget is simply a vehicle to do 
other good things. I look back at him and say: If it is a vehicle, and 
you don't care what is in it, why not put something good in it? We 
always put something crappy in it that never works, never balances, and 
does not represent who we are as a party. They shove it down our throat 
and say: Vote for it. You have to do it because that is the only way to 
get to a tax cut. That is the only way we get to repeal ObamaCare, 
although they are not really for that anymore. But the thing is, they 
can do it by voting for something they actually are for. Everyone in 
our caucus is for the balanced budget amendment. If we put it forward 
on the floor, they will all vote for it, but there will not be enough 
votes for it to be law, so it is a free vote. This would be the actual 
platform, the actual symbol of what we run on and what we do next year. 
Yet we will not have a chance to do that unless they are willing to do 
it.

  They want the budget to be meaningless. They want it to be a vehicle, 
but then they want it to be their meaningless symbol, and I can't do 
that. I think there has to be someone left in the Republican Party who 
says enough is enough. We are not going to not tolerate the waste, 
spending, and debt, and we are going to say the same things we said to 
President Obama: Big government spending and debt are wrong.
  I don't think we should change this because we are in power. When the 
Republican Party is out of power, they are the conservative party. But 
the

[[Page S2741]]

problem is, when the Republican Party is in power, there is no 
conservative party. What I am arguing for today is that we should be 
who we say we are. I urge a ``yes'' vote on the penny plan budget.
  Madam President, I will reserve the remainder of my time if I can get 
an update of what I have left.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. There is 9 minutes.
  Mr. PAUL. Perfect. Thank you.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
  Mr. PAUL. I will reserve the bulk of my time that is remaining and 
suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                   Recognition of the Minority Leader

  The Democratic leader is recognized.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to use leader 
time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Thank you, Madam President.
  Before I get into the substance of my remarks, I always listen 
diligently to my friend from Kentucky. There is a number that is 
missing in his charts; it is 1.5 trillion. The reason we don't like 
government spending is--he thinks--a lot of it is wasteful, but, 
ultimately, the reason is also that there is a huge deficit.
  Our side scratches our heads not only with our friend from Kentucky, 
but with everyone on the other side who rails about too much government 
spending and creation of the deficit when they created the deepest hole 
they could have with the tax break that could have been paid for by 
closing loopholes. A group--a bipartisan group--had put something 
together that would have reduced the corporate rate to 25 percent, 
brought the money from overseas at 8, 9 percent, increased the child 
tax credit, left the individual side alone, and would have barely 
increased the deficit. So our side, at least, rankles when we hear 
these budgets that relate to deficit spending when, on the tax side, 
that doesn't seem to apply at all.
  I say that with due respect to my good friend, who I know is sincere 
in his beliefs. He will argue with me that cutting taxes increases the 
economy. I would say that spending money on education and 
infrastructure also increases the economy. It is a slippery slope once 
you say: We can cut all the taxes we want; the deficit doesn't matter. 
It would be like our side saying: You can spend all the money you want; 
the deficit doesn't matter. We don't quite say that.
  I thank my friend.


                             Net Neutrality

  Madam President, yesterday was a good day for the future of the 
internet. Democrats forced the Senate to take an important step closer 
to restoring net neutrality. It is another step closer to ensuring that 
large internet service providers don't get to hold all the cards, 
another step closer to protecting equality of access to the internet. 
In doing so, Senate Democrats stood with the 86 percent of Americans 
who oppose the repeal of net neutrality.
  I am proud to say that Senator Markey's Congressional Review Act 
resolution passed yesterday afternoon with the votes of every single 
Democrat, as well as three of our Republican colleagues. I thank 
Senators Collins, Murkowski, and Kennedy for supporting this fine 
legislation.
  Here is what my friend the Republican Senator from Louisiana had to 
say after the vote:

       If you trust your cable company, you won't like my vote. If 
     you don't trust your cable company, you will like my vote.

  He is right. It is that simple. So you have to wonder why 47 
Republicans voted no yesterday. Do they trust the cable companies and 
the large ISPs to do what is level best for the average American 
family? Do they believe that cable companies are really popular with 
the American people? I don't think so.
  Now Republicans in the House have to take up this bipartisan 
resolution. We hope they will.
  This isn't some partisan stunt. Absolutely not. It is a real, 
bipartisan effort to right the FCC's wrong and protect the free and 
open internet. It is very crucial to the future of the country.
  House Republicans don't have to choose the same path that the vast 
majority of Republicans in the Senate decided to follow. Speaker Ryan 
should bring this up for a vote immediately. The American people have 
spoken. The Senate has spoken. Speaker Ryan should listen and bring the 
net neutrality CRA to the floor of the House.


                          Russia Investigation

  Madam President, 1 year ago, former FBI Director Robert Mueller was 
appointed to lead the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in 
the 2016 election. Of course, the investigation began long before that. 
According to the New York Times, it began in the middle of 2016 as a 
result of information we received from the Australian Ambassador, who 
told the FBI that Russian intelligence was working to share information 
with the Trump campaign.
  At that time, we heard a lot about the FBI's investigation of Hillary 
Clinton's emails, but remarkably, we heard nothing about this other 
investigation. Now we know that one of those two investigations is much 
more serious than the other one was. We also know that if it were a 
witch hunt--as the President seems to think it is--if they were out to 
get him, they certainly would have leaked information about that during 
the election campaign. They didn't.
  The probe led by Special Counsel Mueller, a Republican and decorated 
marine veteran, concerns the campaign of a hostile foreign power to 
interfere in and influence the outcome of an American election. There 
is nothing--nothing--more serious to the integrity of a democracy than 
the guarantee of free and fair elections.
  The Founding Fathers warned about foreign interference. When I used 
to read that clause in high school, I said: What do they mean? That is 
not going to happen. Well, they were a lot smarter than we are--as 
always. They knew this danger. Here it is, 2018, and we see how real it 
is. It is the core of the special counsel's investigation.
  The investigation has already yielded multiple indictments and guilty 
pleas. Yesterday the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a bipartisan 
manner, confirmed that Russia sought to interfere with our elections, 
sow discord, and tip the scales toward Donald Trump and against 
Secretary Clinton. The Trump administration itself has even taken 
punitive action against Russia's actors named in Mueller's 
investigation.
  I salute the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, the Republican 
Senator from North Carolina, for being straightforward about this. Not 
so many on the other side of the aisle are.
  Yet, again this morning, President Trump called the investigation a 
``disgusting, illegal, and unwarranted witch hunt . . . the greatest 
witch hunt in American history.'' The rhetoric this man uses is 
amazing.
  I say to the President: It is not a witch hunt when 17 Russians have 
been indicted. It is not a witch hunt when some of the most senior 
members of the Trump campaign have been indicted. It is not a witch 
hunt when Democrats and Republicans agree with the intelligence 
community that Russia interfered in our election to aid President 
Trump.
  Any fair-minded citizen, even the most ardent partisan, should be 
able to look at the facts and say that this investigation is not a 
witch hunt. The FBI Director, Christopher Wray, appointed by President 
Trump, a Republican, said as much yesterday.
  Truly, we should all be aghast, on this 1-year anniversary of 
Mueller's appointment, at the smear campaign by the President and his 
allies. We should all be aghast at the relentless parade of 
conspiracies manufactured by the most extreme elements of the 
Republican Party and conservative media to distract from the special 
counsel's investigation. From ``deep state'' leaks to unmasking 
requests, phone taps at Trump Tower, Uranium One, Nunes's midnight run 
to the White House, and the Nunes memo--these are all attempts to 
derail a legitimate and important investigation.

[[Page S2742]]

  Now House conservatives are badgering DOJ officials for classified 
documents, hunting desperately for any scrap of information that would 
help them sully the investigation. By the way, for all of their ranting 
and raving and interfering, they don't have a scintilla of evidence to 
support that this is a witch hunt, that this is unfair, or that this is 
politically motivated.
  The President and his allies don't quit with all these conspiracy 
theories, with all these ridiculous fomentations. Frankly, it is 
because they are afraid of what Mueller's investigation will reveal.
  Every American who looks at the President's actions says that he is 
afraid of what the Mueller investigation will reveal. Yet the volume of 
mistruth, the weight of all the distortion and fabrication is hurting 
our democracy.
  The double standard is enormous. The Times article shows no leaks 
when Trump was under investigation during the campaign; obviously, it 
was made public when Hillary Clinton was. Again, if this were a witch 
hunt, why didn't the FBI, which the President seems to feel is 
politically motivated with no scintilla of proof--why wouldn't they 
leak it?
  One more point before I leave the floor--yesterday, the words of 
former Secretary Tillerson were these: ``If our leaders seek to conceal 
the truth or we as a people become accepting of alternative realities 
that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are 
on the pathway to relinquishing our freedom.''
  He is exactly right. When distortion, lies, and intimidation come 
repeatedly from the other side and some conservative news media, and 
that becomes the accepted way, when it is just he said, she said, where 
one side is blatantly lying, and that becomes accepted, our democracy 
is at risk.
  We are a beautiful thing here--founded on facts, real facts. What we 
have seen from the President and some of his allies, the way they are 
behaving, makes you worry about the future of this democracy.
  Ultimately, I have a firm belief that they will not succeed. The 
Founding Fathers were geniuses--geniuses--when they set up a system of 
checks and balances that we read about in our classes and we study, but 
it is almost mystical. It always rises to the occasion. It will again, 
despite the efforts of the President, despite the efforts of some of 
his allies who have gone way overboard; I might mention Chairman Nunes 
on the other side. I believe the checks and balances of this country 
will hold, and we will eventually find out the truth, no matter where 
it leads.
  Today is a good day to remember that the special counsel's 
investigation is serious, it is nonpartisan, and it is critical to the 
integrity of our democracy. We must allow it to proceed without 
political interference, without intimidation, to follow all the facts 
in pursuit of the unvarnished truth on such an important issue.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.


                  Measure Read the First Time--S. 2872

  Mrs. GILLIBRAND. Madam President, I understand there is a bill at the 
desk, and I ask for its first reading.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will read the bill by title for the 
first time.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       A bill (S. 2872) to amend the Congressional Accountability 
     Act of 1995 to reform the procedures provided under such Act 
     for the initiation, investigation, and resolution of claims 
     alleging that employing offices of the legislative branch 
     have violated the rights and protections provided to their 
     employees under such Act, including protections against 
     sexual harassment and discrimination, and for other purposes.

  Mrs. GILLIBRAND. I now ask for a second reading and, in order to 
place the bill on the calendar under the provisions of rule XIV, I 
object to my own request.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection having been heard, the bill will be 
read for the second time on the next legislative day.
  Mrs. GILLIBRAND. Madam President, 100 days ago, the House of 
Representatives voted unanimously to pass the Congressional 
Accountability Act of 1995 Reform Act, the bill that would fix the way 
we deal with sexual harassment and discrimination here in Congress.
  The current system is broken. It makes no sense that a staffer who is 
sexually harassed or discriminated against has to possibly wait months 
for mediation, for counseling, or for a cooling off before she or he is 
able to even file a claim.
  This bill would also make sure that when a Member of Congress has 
sexually harassed or discriminated against someone on their staff, the 
taxpayers are not left holding the bag. That is what the bill does. 
There is no reasonable excuse for anyone to stand in the way.
  Our constituents do not deserve to have their hard-earned dollars 
paying for these settlements. What they deserve is a vote on this 
reform now. But what have we seen since the House acted? Nothing but 
politics as usual, despite having significant bipartisan support on 
this issue.
  I thank my colleagues--Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator 
Klobuchar, and Senator Murray--for their strong leadership on this 
issue and all of their efforts to pass this bill in the Senate. They 
have been great partners in trying to move this forward.
  It is long since time that we should be acting on this issue. We need 
to pass this bill and send it to the President's desk so he can sign it 
into law, because what we have seen so clearly, after the several 
months and years that we have been talking about this, is that sexual 
harassment and discrimination in the workplace is far more pervasive 
and egregious than we previously might have recognized.
  We have all witnessed harassment and discrimination. We all see what 
it actually does to society--whether it is happening in factories, in 
restaurants, in Hollywood, in the Halls of Congress, or right here in 
this building. But the difference is that while practically every other 
industry in the country seems to be taking this issue far more 
seriously and at least trying to make an effort to change their 
workplaces, Congress is dragging its feet.
  Once again, a problem is staring us right in the face, and we are 
looking the other way. Enough is enough. We should do better. We have 
waited 100 days, and we should not have to wait any longer.
  So I urge my colleagues to do the right thing now, to support this 
bill. Fix this system here in Congress that is failing our staffers on 
this issue of sexual harassment. This one is as easy as it gets. So 
let's have a vote and let's pass it.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Madam President, I appreciate being recognized. I am 
going to talk about a budget proposal by my colleague from Kentucky, 
Senator Paul.
  To those who want to balance our budget and get us out of debt, count 
me in. How do we do that? I would like to do it without destroying the 
military. I would like not to open up the wound when it comes to the 
effects of sequestration.
  Unfortunately, Senator Paul's approach is devastating to the 
military. It creates unpredictability at a time when we need 
predictability. It throws us back into the old system where nobody 
knows what is going to happen.
  Let me tell you about how you balance the budget and get us out of 
debt.
  In 2008, this blue line represents discretionary spending. This is 
about 30 percent of overall Federal spending. You can see that from 
2008 to 2028 it has been relatively flat. In the budget agreement we 
entered into just a few weeks ago, we are spending less on nondefense 
discretionary spending by $2 billion than we did in 2010. This red line 
represents about the 65 to 70 percent of Federal spending called 
entitlements, and it is going through the roof. So if you want to 
balance the budget, you have to deal with the red line. You can't take 
it all out of the blue line.
  Sequestration has taken about $1 trillion out of the military. I 
compliment President Trump for entering into a budget agreement that 
will restore funding to the military at a time when we need it the 
most.
  What did sequestration do to the military? According to Secretary 
Mattis, ``no enemy in the field has done more to harm the combat 
readiness of

[[Page S2743]]

our military than sequestration.'' What a stunning statement that is. 
In other words, Congress has sunk more ships, shot down more planes, 
and taken more soldiers off the battlefield than any enemy.
  Under sequestration, we are at the smallest level for the Navy since 
1915, the smallest Army since 1940, and the smallest Air Force in 
modern history. That is about to change with the budget agreement--$700 
billion for the military to retool, to buy new equipment, to have more 
people so that our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines can spend a 
little bit of time with their families instead of being deployed all 
the time. So I applaud Senator Paul's zeal to balance the budget.
  What I want to do is to expose what this budget actually does. If you 
are a defense hawk, you should be against this approach because it does 
the one thing we can't afford to do. It creates unpredictability when 
it comes to our national defense strategy.
  At times like this, I miss Senator McCain because I know he would be 
here with me.
  Under this proposal, we are going to cut $404.8 billion next year. 
How much comes out of defense? Well, we will figure that out later. We 
know $6 billion has to come out of it, but it effectively sets aside 
the budget agreement that plussed up defense. Over the next decade, 
$13.358 trillion will be cut. Of that, how much comes out of defense? 
Well, we will figure that out later.
  Let me tell you what that means to the military: devastation. Here is 
what Secretary Mattis said on April 26 about predictability: We need 
predictability so that we can actually put a strategy into effect. If 
you do not have a budget that reflects the strategy, it does not work.
  Under the budget agreement, we have predictability for the next 
couple of years. We are restoring the cuts, and we have to build on 
what we have done in the next 2 years through the next 10 years.
  What does this budget proposal do? It destroys predictability. It 
requires $404.8 billion, and it doesn't tell the Department of Defense 
how much they are going to have to pay. We know $6 billion.
  Here is what I would suggest. If the past is any indication of the 
future, our friends on the other side are not going to let us exempt 
defense. Sequestration was half out of defense, half out of nondefense, 
and left entitlements pretty much alone.
  Senator Paul says we are not going to deal with Social Security. 
Social Security is going broke. Somebody needs to deal with it. Ronald 
Reagan and Tip O'Neill dealt with it by adjusting the age of retirement 
to save Social Security benefits. So when you take Social Security off 
the table--and let's say, magically, that everybody agreed with me that 
we should not undercut the defense budget, that we should actually add 
to it and give predictability--how do you get $13 trillion if you take 
Social Security and defense off the table? Well, we won't because you 
can't.
  So to those who claim to be defense hawks--which I proudly claim to 
be--this is a symbolic vote. Yes, the symbolism here is that we don't 
care about predictability when it comes to defense spending, that we 
are undercutting the agreement we achieved just a month ago to give the 
military the funds they need to defend this Nation.
  Now, if you live in a world where the military is small and we don't 
have any troops deployed anywhere, this might work. On September 10, 
2001, we didn't have one soldier in Afghanistan. We didn't have an 
embassy, and not one dime in foreign aid went to Afghanistan. The next 
day, we got attacked, coming from Afghanistan, because radical Islam 
will not leave you alone just because you want to leave them alone.
  President Trump is right to rebuild the military. He campaigned on 
setting aside sequestration. It was dumb. It hollowed out our force. It 
has been a nightmare for our military. Planes have been falling out of 
the sky.
  What does this budget do? It puts us back into a level of 
unpredictability. It requires $404 billion out of the 2019 budget. It 
says that $6 billion has to come from defense. After that, we don't 
know.
  Here is what I know. It is going to undercut everything we have done 
to provide predictability. At the end of the day, this budget puts 
everything every defense person has been hoping for in jeopardy. It 
takes the efforts of President Trump to rebuild the military and throws 
it in a ditch, because if you take Social Security off the table, if 
you took defense off the table, then you can't get there from here. Do 
you want to destroy the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice, the 
NIH?

  This is a symbolic statement. These budgets usually don't get many 
votes. I am tired of symbolism at the expense of our fighting men and 
women.
  Here is my message. I will engage in entitlement reform. Senator Paul 
had an entitlement reform bill for Medicare. I joined with him. As for 
Social Security, to my friends on the other side, let's do something 
like Simpson-Bowles. Let's go ahead and find a way to do entitlement 
reform and deal with the discretionary budget, not in a haphazard 
guessing kind of way.
  Count me in for wanting to balance the budget, but you have to go 
where the money is. You have to do what Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill 
did. We have to do things for Medicare like the Gang of Six, Simpson-
Bowles. What I will not symbolically lend my vote to is an approach to 
balance the budget that doesn't give you a clue about how much money we 
are going to spend on the military for the next decade. That, by its 
very nature, undercuts all of the gains we have achieved to rebuild the 
military, to throw the military budget to the wolves.
  I can tell you this: $404.8 billion is coming out of the fiscal year 
2019 budget. If you believe we can do that without affecting the 
military, then the last 7 or 8 years seems not to have meant anything, 
because for the last 6 or 7 years we have been cutting the military a 
lot because of a budget agreement that everybody thought would never 
happen. Nobody believed that sequestration would actually hit, that we 
would do $1 trillion over a decade. The sequestration clause was a 
penalty clause to urge people to get it right by putting the Defense 
Department at risk, with 50 percent of sequestration cuts coming out of 
defense. The reason they put it on the table is because they thought 
Congress wouldn't be dumb enough to actually get into sequestration. 
Guess what. We were that dumb. According to General Mattis, we have 
done more damage to the military than any enemy in the field since 9/
11--what a title to claim as a Congress.
  This budget throws us back into that situation on steroids. So, 
symbolically, I stand for balancing the budget, doing it in a 
responsible way that has entitlement reform as the heart of the effort 
in a bipartisan fashion.
  Symbolically, I will not vote for a budget that does not give the 
Department of Defense the resources they need and the predictability 
they need to protect this country. That is what this budget does.
  So to those of us on the Armed Services Committee, you should know 
better. You should know that of the $13.5 trillion being cut over the 
next decade, a lot of it is going to come out of defense if it actually 
was a reality. If you take defense and Social Security off the table, 
it is a joke. Now is not the time to be funny. Now is the time to be 
serious. I am deadly serious about voting against any budget that 
doesn't give the military the predictability they need to defend this 
Nation. This budget throws our military in a ditch, and I am tired of 
doing that.
  I am going to vote no. I urge everyone who cares about Defense 
Department funding and predictability to vote no. Balance the budget, 
yes. Throw the military to the wolves, no.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.


        Congressional Accountability and Harassment Reform Bill

  Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I am pleased to be here on the floor in 
support of my colleague Senator Gillibrand's bill, the Congressional 
Accountability and Harassment Reform Act. I am pleased that so many 
Members of the Senate have supported the earlier version of the bill 
and are signing up to support this version as well.
  It has been 100 days since the House acted on a significant and 
substantive reform of the process here in Congress on how we address 
sexual harassment. There have been plenty of stories about how 
unacceptable the current system is.

[[Page S2744]]

  In spite of how far women's rights and equality have come in America, 
too many women continue to face inequality, discrimination, and 
harassment day in and day out. Our congressional workplace is not 
immune to that.
  The world is changing, and the world is changing quickly, and 
movements like the ``me too.'' campaign are finally giving women the 
voice they need to stand up and say no more.
  Yet, in spite of this tide of change, the Senate refuses to act on 
our unacceptably obscure, complex, and difficult system for staff 
members to address sexual harassment and discrimination--a system that 
is difficult to navigate and void of transparency. It needs to change. 
It must change. One hundred days ago, the House said absolutely it must 
change, and we have seen no bill allowed to come to the floor to 
address it in the Senate.
  The House did its duty. They put forward a vision of updating and 
strengthening procedures to protect women from sexual harassment and to 
address it, should it occur. Now it is time for the Senate to act, to 
hold ourselves to a much higher standard, to lead by example on Capitol 
Hill and for the rest of the Nation, to give those who work on our team 
who have been victimized by sexual harassment or discrimination a fair 
and transparent process to tell their stories, to pursue justice, to be 
free from the fear of professional or political retribution. That is 
exactly what the Congressional Accountability and Harassment Reform Act 
does. It requires sexual harassment awareness training. It simplifies a 
process for staffers to file complaints. It eliminates a mandatory, 
laborious process of required counseling and mediation. It protects a 
victim's option to publicly discuss their claims. It prohibits members 
found responsible for such behavior from using government funds--their 
office funds--to settle the claims, and it requires all settlements to 
be disclosed publicly unless the victim prefers otherwise. No longer 
would we be able to silence the victims or hide the misdeeds of the 
perpetrators from the American people.
  I understand Members on the floor of the Senate may say: I want to 
hide from my actions; I want to pay off any settlement with my 
government funds, but being able to hide from your actions is 
unacceptable, and using government funds to pay off the situation is 
completely unacceptable.
  Action is way past due. I am glad to join with my colleagues Senator 
Gillibrand, Senator Warren, Senator Harris, and Senator Murray--so many 
who have come into this battle of equality, fairness, and fighting for 
those who have been victimized. That is what this act is about, and it 
is not acceptable that for 100 days the leadership of this body has sat 
on this bill, blocking it from being considered.
  Let us recognize that we have a responsibility to our team members 
for fairness, for transparency, and for accountability and to bring 
this bill to the floor immediately.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sullivan). The Senator from Massachusetts.


                       Nomination of Gina Haspel

  Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I am here to express my strong opposition 
to President Trump's nomination of Gina Haspel to be the next Director 
of the Central Intelligence Agency. There are two reasons I oppose this 
nomination: Ms. Haspel's support for torture and her willingness to 
destroy evidence of the CIA's use of torture.
  For years, apologists for the CIA's program have tried to redescribe 
this inhumane practice to make it seem less appalling to the American 
people. They have even renamed it. Torture has been rebranded as 
``enhanced interrogation.''
  There is no way to hide the basic facts. The techniques used by the 
CIA were torture: waterboarding so the person had the repeated 
sensation of drowning, confining people to small boxes for hours on 
end, depriving people of sleep for days, forcing people to hold painful 
stress positions.
  The CIA did not invent these tactics. Listen to an American war hero 
describe what he endured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

       I was being forced to stand up continuously--sometimes 
     they'd make you stand up or sit on a stool for a long period 
     of time. I'd stood up for a couple of days, with a respite 
     only because one of the guards--the only real human being 
     that I ever met over there--let me lie down for a couple of 
     hours while he was on watch in the middle of one night.

  Speaking about his captors, this former American POW said:

       They bounced me from pillar to post, kicking and laughing 
     and scratching. After a few hours of that, ropes were put on 
     me and I sat that night bound with ropes.
       They beat me around a little bit. I was in such bad shape 
     that when they hit me it would knock me unconscious. They 
     kept saying, ``You will not receive any medical treatment 
     until you talk.''
       I was getting about three or four spoonfuls of food twice a 
     day. Sometimes I'd go for a day or so without eating.
       I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has 
     his breaking point. I had reached mine. . . . I had been 
     reduced to an animal during this period of beating and 
     torture.

  These are the words of Senator John McCain--our distinguished 
colleague, the senior Senator from Arizona, a decorated Naval aviator 
who was beaten, broken, and tortured for 2 years after being captured 
in North Vietnam.
  No matter how you dress it up, torture is torture, and it is wrong. 
It is inhumane, it is infective, and it is un-American.
  That was the conclusion of the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee 
report on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program during the Bush 
administration. The committee drew a definitive conclusion: Torture did 
not work. In fact, not only does torture not work, it makes it more 
difficult for other agencies in our government to protect our national 
security.
  Surely a person who is seeking to be the Director of the CIA in 2018 
should agree with this assessment or be able to give a really good 
explanation of why not. Someone seeking to be the Director of the CIA 
should be able to state clearly that torture is wrong, but when 
repeatedly asked a yes-or-no question by my colleague Senator Kamala 
Harris: Were the CIA's actions immoral, Ms. Haspel danced around the 
answer. These are not the answers of a person who can be trusted to 
administer the powerful CIA.
  That question of trust goes to my second objection: The Director of 
the CIA will make many decisions that will be held in secret and never 
reviewed by the American people. It is critical we trust her judgment 
and that we have complete confidence in her honesty and willingness to 
submit to congressional oversight. I do not have that confidence in Ms. 
Haspel, and here is why. As we now know from the public reports, 
between October and December of 2002, Ms. Haspel oversaw a CIA prison 
in Thailand. Under her leadership, at least one detainee was 
waterboarded and subjected to other torture methods. As far as we know, 
Ms. Haspel raised no objections.
  According to news reports, in 2005, Ms. Haspel recommended that the 
CIA destroy 92 videotapes of interrogations of detainees. CIA officials 
remember, at the time, Ms. Haspel was one of ``the staunchest advocates 
inside the building for destroying the tapes''--``the staunchest 
advocates inside the building for destroying the tapes.'' She went so 
far as to draft the order for her boss, the Director of the National 
Clandestine Service, to sign, urging them to use ``an industrial 
strength shredder,'' just to make sure they were completely destroyed.
  Ms. Haspel destroyed these tapes despite Federal court orders 
requiring the preservation of the CIA's records, despite the objections 
of Members of Congress, and against the order of the Director of 
National Intelligence, the CIA Director, two White House Counsels, and 
senior Department of Justice officials. In a convenient coincidence for 
Ms. Haspel, the tapes she ordered destroyed reportedly documented the 
interrogation of detainees at the very same CIA prison in Thailand that 
Ms. Haspel previously supervised. Even more conveniently, some of the 
tapes reportedly documented the interrogation of the very detainee who 
was waterboarded under Ms. Haspel's leadership.
  When Senator Angus King asked about her destruction of the tapes, Ms. 
Haspel could come up with no credible explanation. How can we trust her 
to be fully forthright with Congress in the future if she cannot 
acknowledge missteps of the past?
  Ms. Haspel had numerous opportunities to question the directives she 
was given during this era. According to the

[[Page S2745]]

Senate Intelligence Committee report, other CIA officers regularly 
called into question the effectiveness and safety of the techniques 
being used but not Gina Haspel. It was happening right before her eyes, 
and she did nothing to stop it. While her colleagues questioned the 
legitimacy of the CIA's program, according to public reports, Ms. 
Haspel vigorously defended it. According to those same reports, the 
Trump White House reviewed CIA message logs that ``made it clear just 
how accepting she had been of since disavowed interrogation 
techniques.''
  The fact is, so far as the record indicates, the only action Ms. 
Haspel has taken with regard to U.S. torture practices has been to do 
her best to cover it up.
  Why relitigate the choices that were made during those dark days 
after 9/11? Because this matters, especially with a President like 
Donald Trump. As a candidate, Donald Trump said he would ``bring back a 
hell of a lot worse than waterboarding'' because even ``if it doesn't 
work, they deserve it anyway.'' As President, Donald Trump pulled back 
from his plan to reinstate the use of secret CIA prisons overseas only 
after overwhelming bipartisan outrage.
  The stakes are high. The use of torture is one of the darkest 
chapters in our Nation's modern history. We cannot give this President 
any reason to drag this country back. We cannot allow any room for that 
mistake to occur again.
  Gina Haspel has spent 33 years at the CIA. She has a decorated career 
and has sacrificed for this country in many ways Americans will never 
know. I have no doubt her current and former colleagues who praise her 
as a patriot are sincere, but patriotism and judgment are not the same 
thing. Someone who puts protecting the Agency above following the law 
cannot be trusted.
  When announcing his opposition to Gina Haspel's nomination, Senator 
McCain recently said that ``the methods we employ to keep our nation 
safe must be as right and just as the values we aspire to live up to 
and promote in the world.'' I agree with Senator McCain, and I urge my 
colleagues to reject her nomination.


                          National Police Week

  Mr. President, I rise to honor the lives of six Massachusetts police 
officers who lost their lives in the line of duty. On April 12, our 
Commonwealth suffered a terrible loss when Sergeant Sean Gannon of the 
Yarmouth Police Department was killed while serving an arrest warrant. 
He was only 32 years old.
  A native of New Bedford, MA, Sergeant Gannon graduated from Bishop 
Stang High School in North Dartmouth and then earned a bachelor's 
degree in criminal justice from Westfield State University and a 
master's in emergency management from the Massachusetts Maritime 
Academy.
  After college, Sergeant Gannon jumped headfirst into public service, 
first serving as a public safety officer and later becoming a police 
officer with the Yarmouth Police Department, where he served for 8 
years. Sergeant Gannon loved working with police dogs, and he was the 
first full-time 
K-9 narcotics officer at the Yarmouth PD. His loyal patrol dog, Near-
Oh, was seriously injured in the incident that claimed Sergeant 
Gannon's life, but he is expected to recover and return to the Gannon 
family.
  Sergeant Gannon had a huge heart and spent his free time volunteering 
with Big Brothers, Big Sisters, traveling, enjoying the outdoors, and 
working with his hands.
  Thousands of mourners, including law enforcement officials from 
across the country, gathered to pay their respects at Sergeant Gannon's 
wake--a testament to the high esteem with which his community held him 
and to the power of his sacrifice.
  Yarmouth police chief Frank Frederickson calls Sergeant Gannon the 
``Tom Brady of our department'' and posthumously promoted him to the 
rank of sergeant.
  Last month, I spoke with Sergeant Gannon's wife, Dara, and his 
parents, Patrick and Denise, to offer my condolences, my thoughts, and 
my prayers, and I continue to hold them in my heart.
  Next year, Sergeant Gannon's name will be added to the National Law 
Enforcement Officers Memorial, recognizing law enforcement officers who 
have made the ultimate sacrifice in service to their communities. We 
owe Sergeant Gannon and all of them a deep debt of gratitude. They died 
as heroes.
  I would also like to recognize the five Massachusetts officers whose 
names were added to the memorial this year. Patrolman Seth A. Noyes, of 
the Boston Police Department, died on October 18, 1870, from injuries 
sustained in the line of duty. He was 41 years old. Sergeant John J. 
Shanahan, of the Revere Police Department, died on November 19, 1928, 
when he was hit by a truck while directing traffic around the scene of 
a car accident. He was 54 years old. Patrolman Jeremiah J. O'Connor, of 
the Lawrence Police Department, died on November 14, 1950, when he had 
a heart attack after pursuing a subject. He was 61 years old. Patrolman 
Frederick A. Bell, of the Newton Police Department, died on September 
5, 1954, 4 months after he suffered severe injuries in a car crash. He 
was 39 years old. Sergeant Raymond P. Cimino, of the Chelsea Police 
Department, died on February 28, 1985, after suffering a heart attack. 
He was 44 years old.
  We honor their service, we honor their sacrifice, and most 
importantly, we honor the lives they led and the legacies they leave 
behind.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, this morning we will be voting on a 
budget resolution written by my Republican colleague Senator Rand Paul 
from Kentucky.
  This is a budget that would lead to devastating cuts to Medicare, 
Medicaid, Social Security, and education, while paving the way for even 
more tax breaks to the top 1 percent and large, profitable 
corporations.
  Make no mistake about it: Senator Paul's budget is an immoral budget. 
It is bad economic policy. While I am confident that this resolution 
will be defeated in the Senate, let me be very clear.
  Senator Paul's vision of America--balancing the budget on the backs 
of working families, the elderly, the sick, the children, and the poor 
in order to make the richest people in America even richer--is the 
exact same vision of the Republican Party in the House and the 
Republican Party in Washington, DC.
  So let me commend Senator Paul for being honest with the American 
people in terms of what he believes and for putting down on paper what 
a majority of Republicans in the House and billionaire campaign 
contributors like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson believe.
  And this is what they want.
  At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, Senator Paul and 
the Republicans in the House do not believe that it was good enough to 
provide over $1 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest people and 
most profitable corporations. The budget that we are debating today 
would give the wealthy and the powerful an even bigger tax break.
  Last year, the congressional leadership came up with a bill to throw 
32 million Americans off of health insurance. Senator Paul and many 
Republicans in the House do not believe that bill went far enough. The 
budget we are debating today would throw up to 45 million Americans off 
of Medicaid.
  A few months ago, President Trump proposed a budget calling for 
Medicare to be cut by nearly $500 billion. Senator Paul and a majority 
of Republicans do not believe those cuts went far enough. The budget we 
are debating today would cut Medicare by up to $3.3 trillion over the 
next decade.
  At a time when 10,000 people die each and every year waiting for 
their Social Security disability benefits to be processed, Donald 
Trump's budget proposed making a bad situation even worse by cutting 
the Social Security Disability Insurance Program.
  Senator Paul and a majority of Republicans do not believe that those 
cuts went far enough. The Paul budget would not only cut Social 
Security for the disabled, his budget would cut the entire Social 
Security program by $442 billion over the next decade compared to 
current law.
  Overall, Senator Paul's resolution calls for slashing the budget by 
more than 51 percent by the end of the decade.
  Not too long ago, if someone proposed ending Social Security, 
Medicare, and Medicaid as we know it so

[[Page S2746]]

that billionaires could get a huge tax break, that would have been 
considered a radical and extreme agenda. Today it is the mainstream 
position of the Republican Party in Washington.
  The reality is that Republicans in Washington have never believed in 
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Federal assistance in education, 
or providing any direct government assistance to those in need. They 
have always believed that tax breaks for the wealthy and the powerful 
would somehow miraculously trickle down to every American, despite all 
history and evidence to the contrary.
  Needless to say, and I am only speaking for myself, I have a very 
different vision of America.
  In my view, we need to create a government and an economy that works 
for all of us, not just a handful of billionaires.
  What does that mean?
  It means that instead of giving over a trillion dollars in tax breaks 
to the top 1 percent and large profitable corporations, we must demand 
that Wall Street, the billionaire class and large, profitable 
corporations start paying their fair share in taxes.
  Instead of trying to abolish the estate tax, which impacts less than 
two-tenths of 1 percent, we must substantially increase the inheritance 
tax not only to bring in needed revenue, but to dismantle the oligarchs 
that now control so much of our economic and political lives.
  Instead of making it easier for corporations to avoid paying U.S. 
taxes by stashing their cash in the Cayman Islands, we need to crack 
down on offshore tax haven abuse and use this revenue to create 15 
million good-paying American jobs rebuilding our crumbling 
infrastructure.
  Instead of cutting Social Security, we need to expand Social Security 
so that every American can retire with the dignity and the respect they 
deserve. We pay for that by making sure everyone who makes over 
$250,000 a year pays the same percentage of their income into Social 
Security as the middle class.
  Instead of cutting Medicare, we need to guarantee healthcare as a 
right to every man, woman, and child in America through a Medicare for 
all, single-payer healthcare program.
  Instead of slashing Federal aid to education, we must make every 
public college and university in America tuition free, and we pay for 
that by imposing a tax on Wall Street speculation. If we could bail out 
Wall Street 10 years ago, we can tax Wall Street so that every American 
who has the desire and the ability can get a higher education 
regardless of their income.
  Instead of listening to the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and other 
multibillionaire campaign contributors, it is time to start listening 
to the overwhelming majority of Americans who want a government and an 
economy that works for the many, not just the few.
  Let us not only defeat the Paul resolution, but let us have the guts 
to take on the greed of Wall Street, the greed of the pharmaceutical 
and healthcare industry, the greed of Big Oil, and the greed of 
corporate America and break up the oligarchy that is destroying the 
social fabric of our society.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky.
  Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, shortly, we will be voting on the penny plan 
budget. This is a budget that cuts one penny out of every dollar.
  As we have gone through time and again, we have seen that there is so 
much waste in government, from $700,000 spent studying Neil Armstrong's 
statement on the Moon--did he say ``one small step for man and one 
giant leap for mankind,'' or did he say ``one small step for a man''? 
We spent $700,000 trying to discover whether Neil Armstrong said ``a 
man'' or just ``man.'' It is a complete boondoggle, a complete waste of 
money. But does it get better? No, because we keep giving people more 
money.
  Some have come to the floor and said: Well, this is just an end-
around attempt to cut military spending. We can't cut any military 
spending.
  That is simply not true. The penny plan budget says nothing about 
cutting military spending. The penny plan budget says this: We cut 1 
percent of the budgetary spending. Where it is cut in the budget is 
left up to the appropriations committees. It could be cut equally, or 
it could be cut more in some areas and less in other areas. We could 
cut some from military; we could cut zero from military. It is left up 
to the appropriators.
  Some would argue: Well, it doesn't define where it would come from.
  Well, that is the job of the appropriators and the job of the Senate 
to vote up or down on it.
  To those who argue that unlimited spending for the military is good 
for our national security, they might want to think about whether there 
is a possible problem in that China has $1 trillion worth of our debt.
  Let's say for some reason there was a conflict in the South China Sea 
and we were somehow involved militarily there. What if China were to 
say: We are going to dump your dollars. We are going to dump your 
Treasury bills.
  Could they wreak havoc, dumping $1 trillion? Yes. Would it hurt their 
assets? Yes, but it could be used as a weapon against the United 
States.
  Our insecurity is our enormous debt--$21 trillion.
  In some ways, the budget vote is symbolism, but the question is 
whether that symbolism will be who we are as a Republican Party or 
whether that symbolism will be that we are simply the same as the 
Democrats, that we simply don't care about the debt, we don't care that 
interest on the debt is the second biggest item.
  After the Defense Department--about $700 billion--the next biggest 
item is $300 billion in interest. What happens when interest rates 
rise? The Federal Reserve has artificially kept interest rates low. 
What about when interest rates go to 5 percent? Could that happen? Yes. 
Could it be precipitated by a foreign nation no longer buying our debt? 
Yes.
  If interest rates were to go to 5 percent currently, I don't know 
that we would be able to manage our debt. That would probably be a 
doubling of our interest payment, or more--$600 billion. If we do 
nothing and the Federal Reserve is able to keep our interest rates in 
the 2 percent range, interest rates will still be about the same as the 
Department of Defense within 10 years. The Department of Defense is 
about $700 billion, and it will grow probably to $800-and-some-odd 
billion, but interest rates will be $761 billion within a decade. If 
that is not a threat to our national security, I don't know what is.
  Really what we have is a threat to our honor as public servants who 
make promises to voters. We came to power in Washington because we said 
President Obama spent too much and borrowed too much. We said it over 
and over and over again until voters chose us. But what if, when we 
come into power, we forget who we are? When Republicans are in the 
minority, they are the conservative party. The problem is that when the 
Republicans become the majority, there is no conservative party.
  What I am arguing for today is to cut one penny out of every dollar. 
There is waste from top to bottom in every department of government, 
including the military.
  Defense Logistics--they build stuff. They have $800 million they say 
is missing.
  Defense spending or military spending in Afghanistan--$700 million of 
ammunition missing. Do we think that might be a little bit worrisome 
given all the different characters in the Afghan civil war? There is 
$700 million in ammunition that cannot be accounted for and $28 million 
in uniforms that cannot be accounted for.
  They built a $45 million gas station in Afghanistan, but it is for 
natural gas. The first problem is that they don't have cars in 
Afghanistan. The second problem is that none of them run on natural 
gas. So how did we fix that problem? We bought them cars. We bought 
them cars that run on natural gas, and they still couldn't afford the 
gas, so we gave them credit cards. How moronic are we as a people to 
keep flushing money down a rat hole in Afghanistan--nearly $50 billion.
  What I am asking is that we cut 1 percent--1 penny out of every 
dollar.
  Could we save some in the military? Absolutely. Is this done to 
punish the military? No. It is to make us stronger as a country. Could 
the military suffer a 1-percent cut and actually become more efficient? 
Absolutely. It is not a question of whether our military budget is too 
big or too small; it is a question of whether our military mission is

[[Page S2747]]

too large. We are at war in half a dozen countries or more. We have 
6,000 troops in Africa, and I would suspect that there is not one 
person in 1,000 in America who knows whom we are fighting or why we are 
fighting in Africa.
  But that is not really what this is about. It is about spending in 
every department of government. It is about whether one penny out of 
every dollar is being wasted.
  People say: I am against the waste. I am against all the waste. I am 
against the study on Japanese quail to see if they are more sexually 
promiscuous on cocaine. I am against the Neal Armstrong study on 
whether he said one man on the Moon or just man on the Moon.
  The thing is, we can't get rid of waste unless we actually reduce 
top-line spending because nobody has any incentive to do it.
  When the sequester first came into place, even though people didn't 
like it, people throughout government began finding savings. You cannot 
get rid of waste in government if you keep giving people more money.
  The National Science Foundation has wasted millions and millions of 
dollars over a 30-year history. William Proxmire first reported in the 
early 1970s, and he said that one of the first studies was $50,000--
back then, that was more money than it is now--to study why men like 
women. Really? That is a good use of taxpayer funds?
  This year, we will spend $1 trillion we don't have. There will be 
nearly a $1 trillion deficit this year. That is what we complained 
about under President Obama, was big, annual $1 trillion deficits. Are 
we going to be the party that is actually true to what we say we are 
for, that we are fiscally conservative? Can we not cut one penny out of 
every dollar?
  So I implore my colleagues to think long and hard about this vote. 
Think about how the people at home would want you to vote. You have 
gone home and said you were for a balanced budget amendment to the 
Constitution. The balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, which 
virtually all of my Republican colleagues voted for, says we will 
balance the budget in 5 years. Well, we are either honest and serious 
or we are not. So if you can vote for a balanced budget amendment that 
balances the budget, why would you not vote for a budget that balances 
in 5 years?
  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a unanimous 
consent request?
  Mr. PAUL. I will finish in a few minutes.
  It is a canard to say that the cut is coming from the military. The 
cut is a 1-percent cut. It is $3.2 trillion spent, and it is $32 
billion that would be cut. Every year, we send $30 billion to foreign 
countries that hate us. We spend nearly $50 billion in Afghanistan 
every year. If we were simply looking at the Department of Commerce--
$14 billion--and the Department of Education--$70 billion--I think we 
could find $30 billion that we would never know was gone.
  The bottom line is whether the debt is threatening our national 
security, whether it is threatening the security of the economic 
foundation of our country, and I think without question it is.
  This vote is a litmus test for conservatives. Are you a conservative? 
Do you think we could cut one penny out of every dollar? I think it is 
a conservative notion that we have long said we are for. Now it is time 
to step up to the plate and actually vote what you say you stand for.
  With that, I yield back my time and ask for the yeas and nays.
  Mr. INHOFE. Will the Senator yield for a moment for a unanimous 
consent request?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. There does not appear to be a sufficient 
second at this time.
  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask to propound a unanimous consent 
request.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.
  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask that I be recognized for 1 minute. 
No, I don't. I ask that I be recognized at the conclusion of this vote 
to explain why the Paul amendment would be damaging to our national 
security. That is my unanimous consent request.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient question.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.
  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, would it be appropriate at this time for 
me to ask for 1 minute prior to the vote?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, the Senator from Oklahoma is recognized for 1 
minute.
  Mr. INHOFE. Thank you very much.
  I know the intentions are good; we have voted on the same thing for 
the last 5 years. I can tell you right now what the vote result is 
going to be because it has been the same for the last 5 years.
  No one has had a more consistently conservative record than I have, 
but I would have to say that this would undo a lot of what we have 
accomplished with the last vote to allow us to start rebuilding our 
systems. We got in a position where we didn't have brigade combat teams 
that were adequately prepared to go to battle. Sixty percent of our F-
18s were not flying. We are trying to recover from all of these things. 
We have now started that recovery.
  My concern is--and I think Senator Graham said it very well--in the 
event that we pass this--if it did pass; it won't, but if it did--that 
is going to be a problem and a problem that we can't overcome.
  Right now, our No. 1 concern should be defending this Nation. This is 
the opportunity to at least let people know that there is a legitimate 
vote for conservatives to vote for a strong national defense.
  I don't want to send a signal to our kids overseas--our kids in 
battles and in harm's way--that we are not going to take care of their 
needs, as we just started just a year ago to do. We have to continue 
that.
  For the sake of our national security, I suggest that we vote against 
the Paul proposal.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion to 
proceed to S. Con. Res. 36.
  The yeas and nays were previously ordered.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk called the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator 
from Arizona (Mr. McCain).
  Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from New Jersey (Mr. Booker), 
and the Senator from Illinois (Ms. Duckworth) are necessarily absent.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Fischer). Are there any other Senators in 
the Chamber desiring to vote?
  The result was announced--yeas 21, nays 76, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 99 Leg.]

                                YEAS--21

     Barrasso
     Cornyn
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Enzi
     Ernst
     Fischer
     Flake
     Grassley
     Johnson
     Kennedy
     Lankford
     Lee
     Moran
     Paul
     Risch
     Rubio
     Sasse
     Scott
     Toomey

                                NAYS--76

     Alexander
     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Blunt
     Boozman
     Brown
     Burr
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Cassidy
     Collins
     Coons
     Corker
     Cortez Masto
     Cotton
     Donnelly
     Durbin
     Feinstein
     Gardner
     Gillibrand
     Graham
     Harris
     Hassan
     Hatch
     Heinrich
     Heitkamp
     Heller
     Hirono
     Hoeven
     Hyde-Smith
     Inhofe
     Isakson
     Jones
     Kaine
     King
     Klobuchar
     Leahy
     Manchin
     Markey
     McCaskill
     McConnell
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Murkowski
     Murphy
     Murray
     Nelson
     Perdue
     Peters
     Portman
     Reed
     Roberts
     Rounds
     Sanders
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Shelby
     Smith
     Stabenow
     Sullivan
     Tester
     Thune
     Tillis
     Udall
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wicker
     Wyden
     Young

                             NOT VOTING--3

     Booker
     Duckworth
     McCain
  The motion was rejected.
  Mr. WARNER addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.
  Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, will the Senator yield?

[[Page S2748]]

  

  Mr. WARNER. The Senator will yield.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.
  Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I thank the Senator, and I appreciate 
that very much.
  I just want to make a brief statement about the vote that just took 
place. I tried to communicate this, and there wasn't time before the 
vote. Right now, we have more threats than we have ever had in the 
history of this country. I think we all realize that.
  General Dunford said that we are losing our qualitative and 
quantitative advantage over our adversaries. He was talking about 
Russia and China, in this case. We have adversaries out there that are 
actually ahead of us in terms of their capabilities in artillery and 
other areas.
  Here we are, and, quite frankly, we knew how this vote was going to 
come out. I have a list of the same vote that has taken place for the 
last 5 years, and it came out the same way it did before. The point 
here is that even though it wasn't going to pass, the problem is, it is 
sending a message to our kids who are out there in harm's way.
  We look and we see that we have started our road to recovery, and it 
has been an exciting thing because we came so close to being in a 
position where one-third of our brigade combat teams didn't work. The 
F-35s in the field--the Marines could use less than half of them. All 
of these things were going on because of what has happened to our 
military.
  Finally, we turned the corner. We turned the corner on the last 
vote--not the one we took today but the one we took a few months ago--
and we now are rebuilding our military.
  I had breakfast this morning with the Secretary of the Army and with 
the Chief of the Army, and really good things are happening. I can't 
think of anything worse than to send a message to our kids in the field 
that we are going to go back and undo the positive things that have 
pulled us up into a competitive position.
  For the sake of our military, for the sake of defending America, the 
vote there was to vote against sending the wrong message to our kids in 
harm's way.
  I thank Senator Warner for yielding.

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