[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 1 (Thursday, January 3, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11-S13]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           GOVERNMENT FUNDING

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I appreciate the comments of the 
distinguished senior Senator from Texas. I am glad to know that at 
least one person read my article in the Washington Post this morning, 
and I appreciate his mentioning it.
  I think we should be blunt about this. There is never an excuse for a 
shutdown of the federal government. There

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is never an excuse for even a partial shutdown of the federal 
government. Government shutdowns should be as off limits in bargaining 
over the budget, for example, as chemical weapons are in warfare.
  Shutting down the government is not a demonstration of skill or 
courage; it is a demonstration of incompetence, of a failure by 
negotiators. It is embarrassing. And the American people ought to hold 
us accountable for that because we are sent here to get a result. It 
takes no particular skill or courage to take a position on an issue. If 
all one wants to do is take a position, you don't have to go through 
all the trouble of being elected to the U.S. Senate; you could just 
stay home and get a soap box, or you could get a radio show or a TV 
show. There are plenty of ways to take a position in this country. The 
real skill or courage belongs to those who first take their principled 
positions and then work together to get a result. That is what we do 
here day in and day out.
  The senior Senator from Texas gave some examples of that. One of my 
favorite examples is what happened this past fall. There we were--if 
you watch television--in the midst of the Kavanaugh nomination hearing, 
about which there were enormous differences of opinion--producing, I 
might add, a historic speech by the Senator from Maine toward the end 
of it.
  One might have thought, well, all they are doing in Washington, DC, 
is just throwing mud at each other or at Judge Kavanaugh. Well, that 
was one side of the Capitol. I suggest you look at what happens here as 
a split-screen television. That was on one side of the Capitol in the 
fall, but look at what was happening on the other side.
  Seventy-two U.S. Senators--about half of them Democrat, half of them 
Republican--were working together on a bill to address, as the senior 
Senator from Texas mentioned, the single biggest public health crisis 
in this country, the opioid problem. We passed that, and it became law. 
That was done in October on one side of the screen.
  We also passed a bill--Senator Hatch was a leader in that, and I 
worked on it as well--a once-in-a-generation change in the copyright 
laws, which helps make sure songwriters are paid fairly. Maybe that is 
not important to you; it is to thousands of songwriters in Nashville 
and Memphis and maybe in Los Angeles and New York and around the 
country. That happened in October.
  Also in the fall, the Senate passed Appropriations bills--75 percent 
of the money for funding the federal government, which included record 
funding for the fourth consecutive year for biomedical research, record 
funding for the fourth consecutive year for our National Laboratories, 
and record funding for the fourth consecutive year for supercomputing.
  A lot of other things were done this fall. That is the split-screen 
television.
  So we are not defined, really, by the fights we have or by the 
positions we take; we are defined and admired or not admired by whether 
we have the courage and the skill to come to a result.
  Let me tell my colleagues a story that I told in that piece that was 
printed in the Washington Post today. It comes from the summer of 2015 
and might offer a suggestion for how to resolve this government 
shutdown. There is no excuse for having it, but we are stuck in one, 
and we need to get out of it.
  In the summer of 2015, President Obama invited Senator Patty Murray, 
the Democratic Senator from Washington State, and me down to the White 
House for a meeting with him in the Oval Office. I am chairman of the 
Senate's Education Committee, and Senator Murray is the ranking 
Democratic member. What the President wanted to talk about was our work 
in Congress on trying to fix the law called No Child Left Behind.
  If you think resolving an impasse on border security is difficult, 
try dealing with K-12 education policy. Try setting Federal policy for 
100,000 public schools in this country. It is like 100,000 spectators 
at a University of Tennessee football game, all of whom are sure they 
are expert coaches and know exactly what to call on the next play. They 
all had a little football when they were kids, and so they know what 
play to call. All of us have a little education, and so we know how to 
fix the schools. Add to that the opinion of Governors, the opinion of 
teachers unions, the issues of federalism, of civil rights, of 
overtesting, and common core. And we had a divided government in 2015--
a Democratic President, Barack Obama, and a Republican-majority 
Congress. It was in that environment that we were trying to fix No 
Child Left Behind.
  The President asked Senator Murray and me to come meet with him 
privately in the Oval Office. On that day, the President said to me and 
to Senator Murray that there were three things he wanted in the 
legislation before he could sign it. I told the President that if he 
would not oppose the bill as it made its way through the Congress, 
those three things would be in the final bill or I wouldn't bring it to 
him.
  On December 10, 2015, President Obama signed that bill. It is called 
the Every Student Succeeds Act. He called it a Christmas miracle even 
though there were plenty of provisions in it he didn't agree with. The 
three things he mentioned were included--I promised him that--but there 
were plenty of other things he did not agree with. ``You kept your 
word,'' he told me. ``You did too,'' I said to the President.
  That is how you get a result when you have divided government and 
strongly held opinions.
  Why, as a Republican, did I agree to a Democratic President's 
requests with which I did not concur? Because I have read the U.S. 
Constitution. That is why. And I understand that if the President does 
not sign a bill, it does not become a law. On the other hand, I knew 
that the entire law was historic in what it was doing. The Wall Street 
Journal said that it was the greatest devolution of power from 
Washington, DC, to the States in a quarter of a century. It repealed 
the common core mandate, dismantled the national school board, and 
restored local control of schools.
  We worked on it for a long time. We listened to each other. We made a 
lot of changes. We came up with a result that 85 Members of the U.S. 
Senate eventually were able to vote for and that the National Governors 
Association and both of the major teachers unions could support. The 
result will be that Federal education policy on K-12 will be stable for 
years to come for the teachers in those 100,000 public schools and the 
school superintendents and the parents. Nobody even suggested in all of 
those negotiations shutting down the government to get his or her way. 
We all knew we were elected to get a result if we could.
  Let me tell you another short story. The next year, we were working 
on something called 21st Century Cures. Same President--Obama. Same 
Congress--Republican. Very complicated issues. How do you get 
biomedical research funded and through the Food and Drug Administration 
in a way that people approve of and would agree to? That is much more 
complicated than you would expect. I worked with President Obama, who 
wanted precision medicine. That was in there. Vice President Biden 
wanted a cancer moonshot. His son had died from cancer the previous 
year. That was in there. Senator McConnell, the majority leader, said 
he wanted something on regenerative medicine. That was in there. 
Speaker Ryan said he wouldn't approve it unless it had funding in a 
particular way, so we did it that way. Still we were having a hard time 
with it. I remember calling Vice President Biden at one point late in 
the year of 2016 and saying: Joe, I am standing here, and I have this 
all tied up with a ribbon around it. It had all of what I just 
described in there--precision medicine, cancer moonshot, funding for 
biomedical research, and regenerative medicine. I said: I feel like the 
butler standing outside the door of the Oval Office with an order on a 
silver platter, and no one will open the door. The Vice President said: 
If you want to feel like a butler, try being the Vice President.

  Well, he went to work, and that bill was signed in December of 2016. 
Senator McConnell said that it was the most important legislation of 
the Congress. That wasn't because I took a position, and President 
Obama took a position, and the Vice President took a position. It was 
because we worked together, understanding that we had to agree to get a 
result.
  So what is the lesson for today? First, Democrats should recognize, 
as I

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did with President Obama in 2015 on fixing No Child Left Behind and in 
2016 on 21st Century Cures and on other issues, that when a President 
elected by the people of the United States--whatever you may think of 
him--has a legitimate objective, you should bend over backward to try 
to meet that objective if you want a result.
  As for the President, in this case President Trump, I would suggest 
that he should be as specific and reliable as President Obama was in 
2015 when he told me he needed three things in order to sign a bill. 
When Congress passed a bill with those three things in it, even though 
it included some other things the President didn't like, he signed the 
law.
  Since President Trump has made it clear that he will not sign any 
legislation to reopen the Federal Government without some increase in 
funding for border security, here are three options for where we could 
go from here to get out of this hole we have dug for ourselves.
  No. 1, go small. Give the President the $1.6 billion he asked for in 
this year's budget request, which the bipartisan Senate Appropriations 
Committee, which the Senator from Maine and I serve, approved. Throw in 
another $1 billion to improve border security at ports of entry, which 
everyone agrees we need.
  Even better, go bigger. Pass the bill that 54 Senators--I believe we 
are talking about the Collins-King bill--voted on last February, which 
combined a solution for children brought to the United States 
illegally, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA. The 
President said he was for that. Then add $25 billion in appropriated 
funding for border security over 10 years. That is not $5 billion or 
$1.6 billion or $3 billion; that is $25 billion appropriated for border 
security, which 46 Democrats voted for last February. The bill failed 
only because of last-minute White House opposition.
  Even better, go really big. Begin this new Congress by creating a 
legal immigration system that secures our borders and defines the 
status of those already here. In 2013, 68 U.S. Senators, including all 
54 Democrats, voted for such a bill, but the House refused to take it 
up. That bill, which all 54 Democrats voted for, included over $40 
billion and many other provisions to secure our borders.
  So there are three ways to turn this lemon into lemonade, so to 
speak--three ways to dig out of this hole we have dug for ourselves. 
Instead of saying that once we dig ourselves a hole, we should keep 
digging forever, climb out of it in a graceful way by solving a big 
problem.
  Someone asked me in the hall recently: Well, why would President 
Trump agree to such a thing?
  Why would he not agree to such a thing? I have said to the President 
on more than one occasion that when touring the White House, you can 
look at the portraits of the Presidents. You see President Nixon, and 
what do you think? Nixon and China. You see President Reagan, and what 
do you think? Reagan and the Soviet Union. But Nixon was not always for 
a relationship with Communist China; he was opposed to it. Reagan was 
the biggest critic of the Soviet Union in our country. Yet the two of 
them took those credentials, and they tackled a big problem, and they 
made a historic contribution to this country.
  I believe President Trump could and should do the same thing. We 
could go small or we could go a little bigger, and pass the Collins-
King bill--or something close to it--that we voted for. I would like to 
see the President say: OK, we have a new Congress; we have divided 
government. I am the President who can actually make this happen. I 
believe the American people would trust me if I said that we were 
creating a comprehensive legal immigration system.
  Get us unstuck from this partial government shutdown, and go real big 
on immigration. That could be President Trump's Nixon-to-China, Reagan-
to-the-Berlin-Wall moment in history.
  I thank the Presiding Officer.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Portman). The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lankford). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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