[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 121 (Monday, July 12, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4813-S4815]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Biden Administration

  Madam President, meanwhile, we are 6 months into a new era in 
American politics. The Biden administration is still treating 
government like a graduate seminar, and the American people are still 
wondering when their President is going to stop catering to the radical 
left and start doing his job.
  As I was back home in Tennessee, I found out many Tennesseans are 
absolutely disgusted. They have decided that our Democratic colleagues 
are not serious about doing serious work. Their priorities and the 
President's priorities have never been further apart.
  They are looking at those line items the administration is checking 
off, and all they can see is what the administration refuses to 
acknowledge; that there are very real consequences to this out-of-
control agenda.
  When President Biden killed the Keystone XL Pipeline, Tennesseans did 
not cheer. All they saw on the horizon were higher gas prices and a 
vulnerable fuel supply chain.
  Not 4 months after Biden signed the Executive order, the Colonial 
Pipeline hack showed us what can happen when something interrupts the 
supply chain.
  When President Biden opened the border, they knew better than to 
believe all the hype about this so-called solution to our immigration 
crisis, and their instincts were spot on. Now the chaos tearing apart 
communities in the American Southwest is bleeding into communities in 
Tennessee.
  For Democrats here in DC, all of those line items came with zero 
consequences. Instead of focusing on reality, they are making policy 
based on a perfect world scenario where consequences are simply 
collateral damage.
  Of course, here in the real world, when you talk about collateral 
damage, you are really referring to the people who pay the price for 
all of these absurd policies.
  You know, we read a lot in the news these days about what a struggle 
it is for the Senate majority to get their bills to the President's 
desk.
  No struggle over legislation or pay-fors will ever compare to what 
you are putting the average American through. If we want to talk about 
pay-fors, let's talk about how Americans are supposed to pay for gas to 
get to and from work. What happens when they just can't afford it 
anymore?
  Inflation is already taking a toll on the average family's ability to 
pay for their weekly groceries. Supply chain problems have made 
concerns over paying for raw materials like lumber obsolete. There is 
nothing to pay for.
  The American people have lost so many simple things that used to be 
not easy but manageable. But now, when they ask Washington to shape up 
and give them a break, all they get in return is the assurance that 
struggle and loss is all part of the plan.
  It is July, and we still haven't seen a reasonable infrastructure 
proposal. No, instead, what we have is a truly insulting two-bill 
scheme that Senate Democrats concocted in lieu of a mandate for their 
radical environmental agenda.
  What will the American people get from this scheme? Well, just a 
fraction of what could be the largest spending initiative in history 
will go toward the roads, bridges, and broadband connections that 
people actually need and are willing to pay for.
  If Democrats want the more radical line items, they will have to 
force it through by abusing the reconciliation process. In a sane 
world, this wouldn't even be a choice. They wouldn't do it because 
Democrats know that the kind of spending they are talking about will 
exacerbate inflation and increase the deficit.
  Meanwhile, Senate Democrats have all but ignored their duty to keep 
the country secure. In May, Customs and Border Protection caught more 
than 180,000 people trying to cross our southern border. Drug seizures 
were up 18 percent across the Nation. As of the end of June this year, 
CBP has arrested more than 1 million migrants trying to come into this 
country. That is right. By the end of June, CBP has arrested more than 
1 million migrants trying to come into the country.
  This is a vulnerability, and I would ask my Democratic colleagues and 
President Biden why they are not more concerned about it.
  I would also ask why they are not more concerned about the impending 
collapse in Afghanistan. The dominos are falling. Iran wasted no time 
stepping in to negotiate a deal between the Afghan Government and the 
Taliban.

[[Page S4814]]

  Let's be clear what the Biden administration has done here. By 
turning their backs on 20 years of hard work and sacrifice in 
Afghanistan, they created a power vacuum in a strategically important 
region, knowing that the world's most belligerent state sponsor of 
terror was waiting to fill the gap.
  It is time for President Biden to start listening to the people 
paying the price for his radical agenda. They feel like they are losing 
their country. They are talking to us about their fear of losing their 
country and their freedom. They are out of time, and I will tell you 
what, they are about to be out of patience.
  If you bothered to ask them what they want, they would tell you get 
the spending under control; keep this country and our allies safe; and 
stop distracting yourself with wish list projects that serve no one but 
the most radical elements of the Democratic Party. They are not willing 
to pay for that wish list.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, ahead of the last work period, Senator 
Schumer, the majority leader, outlined his designed-to-fail agenda. He 
forecasted a series of votes on legislation that stood zero chance of 
actually passing--legislation to exploit the cause of pay fairness to 
line the pockets of trial lawyers, to erode Americans' Second Amendment 
rights, to force schools and hospitals to comply with ``woke'' social 
norms, and, of course, the marquee bill, a partisan takeover of our 
elections.
  It was obvious from the outset that this agenda wasn't designed to 
achieve results. It takes bipartisanship. It takes rolling up your 
sleeves and working to build bipartisan consensus to get things done in 
the Senate--especially so in an equally divided Senate as we have now.
  Rather than put forward a number of bills that would earn that sort 
of bipartisan support and actually pass, Senator Schumer chose to spend 
most of the Senate's time last month putting on a show for the so-
called progressive base of his party, and I expect even more political 
theater this month.
  So in the next few weeks, we are told, our Democratic colleagues will 
put their dual-track legislative approach to the test. One of those 
tracks will include a heavy dose of bipartisanship, and that is 
something I applaud.
  Contrary to public opinion, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate 
spend a lot of time working together. So far this year, we have worked 
together to counter threats from China, support small businesses 
impacted by the pandemic, and combat the increase in hate crimes 
against Asian Americans. We have done all of that together in a 
bipartisan way. Bipartisan solutions are also being crafted to address 
other major issues, from the border crisis, to drug pricing, to police 
reform.
  In the coming weeks, the Senate is expected to vote on one of those 
bipartisan agreements; that is, to rebuild and maintain our Nation's 
infrastructure. The process that brought us to this point certainly has 
been a roller coaster. After weeks of back-and-forth negotiations, a 
group of more than 20 Senators reached an agreement with the White 
House just last month. But here is when things got very strange. Within 
minutes of the announcement, the President himself put the fate of that 
agreement into question. He said he wouldn't sign the bill unless 
Democrats paired it with a multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill 
that would include a smorgasbord of leftist spending priorities and 
trillions in higher taxes and more debt for Americans. Talk about 
whiplash. Both Republicans and Democrats were caught off guard. That 
hadn't been part of the discussions or negotiation. That isn't what 
they said they agreed to.
  Well, the reversal and unexpected announcement from the President 
that, even though they were announcing a deal, they didn't have a deal, 
prompted a weekend press cleanup, and the President issued a lengthy 
statement clarifying that it was not a veto threat. But we have no 
reason to suspect that the larger sentiment has changed.
  In a letter to his Democratic colleagues last Friday, the majority 
leader, Senator Schumer, said the Senate will consider both the 
bipartisan deal on infrastructure and the partisan budget resolution 
with reconciliation instructions. The bipartisan deal is very much tied 
to the fate of a completely partisan reconciliation bill, 
notwithstanding President Biden's cleanup after his unexpected 
announcement at the White House.
  Our Democratic colleagues don't have to listen to me, but I do 
believe they would be wise to avoid this path. They already went on a 
nearly $2 trillion spending binge earlier this year and sidelined every 
single Republican in the Congress during the process.
  They tried to bill this ultrapartisan legislation as COVID-19 relief, 
but we all know that only about 10 percent of the bill was directly 
related to the pandemic and only 1 percent was tied to vaccinating the 
American people. The rest, 90 percent, was exactly the type of thing 
you would expect to see in a bill that has only the support of our 
Democratic colleagues--funding for climate justice, backdoor money for 
Planned Parenthood, and more funding for State and local governments 
than they know what to do with. Blue States are using that money to pay 
down old debts with the funding. Our Democratic colleagues claim that 
money was necessary for pandemic relief, but that is not what it is 
being used for.
  So how are we faring after Democrats passed this bill? Did the 
American Rescue Plan truly rescue America? Well, when it comes to the 
virus, the answer is clearly no. As I said, only a small portion of 
this massive spending supported our fight against COVID-19.
  When this bill was signed into law, the majority of frontline workers 
had already been vaccinated, and vaccine makers were working as quickly 
as possible to supply the rest of the American people who wanted them 
with shots. Today, two-thirds of adults in America have received at 
least one dose of the vaccine--two-thirds. That progress came because 
of the bipartisan work that happened last year, not this year.

  This legislation certainly didn't rescue our already sluggish 
economy. In fact, it has created more hurdles for our economy. 
Democrats created an incentive for workers to remain on the sidelines 
of the labor market through the end of September by offering enhanced 
Federal bonuses to State unemployment.
  In Texas, for example, businesses of all types have struggled to find 
willing workers. For every industry, from hospitality, to retail, to 
manufacturing, to energy, ``Help Wanted'' signs can be found everywhere 
across my State, and we are not alone. One restaurant owner said the 
government has been its biggest competitor when it comes to finding 
workers.
  The labor squeeze has become so tight that half of the States, 
including Texas, ended the supplemental unemployment benefits early 
because they were not compensating people who couldn't work or couldn't 
find work but paying people more than they would earn if they did work 
when jobs were readily available.
  Those are just the problems that have been created with the labor 
market. Families across the country have felt the sting of inflation as 
they have paid higher prices on everything from gasoline to groceries. 
This is exactly the scenario outlined by economists across the country, 
including those who call themselves Democrats, people like Larry 
Summers, who served as Treasury Secretary under President Clinton and 
Director of the National Economic Council under President Obama. He was 
among the first to warn about inflation or rising costs for consumers, 
and, boy, you must have thought he was a skunk at the garden party.
  You would think this might serve as a lesson to our Democratic 
colleagues about shoveling money out the door as fast as they can, even 
when it creates massive debt and the threat of more inflation, but here 
we are once again. Our Democratic colleagues are preparing to spend 
trillions more dollars on top of the trillions of dollars we have 
already spent on a bipartisan basis to combat the virus but then 
afterwards to spend

[[Page S4815]]

more money on their chosen political priorities and not on the 
pandemic. They want to now add additional trillions of dollars to that 
debt and to that spending, risking even more dangerous and volatile 
inflation.
  The details of what this round of spending might look like are still 
coming together, but we know that if the chairman of the Budget 
Committee, Bernie Sanders, has his wish, the price tag could come out 
as high as $6 trillion more. Six trillion dollars is a quarter of our 
gross domestic product. If you convert our country's World War II 
spending to today's dollars, it only comes out to $4.4 trillion. So the 
Democratic chairman of the Budget Committee wants to spend more money 
than we spent to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World 
War II.
  But I want to be clear about another thing. This so-called human 
infrastructure plan, which is just made-up words indicating that they 
are trying to mask the reality of what they want to spend money on--it 
is not about bridges and roads. It is not about broadband, things that 
we all understand are truly infrastructure. It is about a long list of 
political spending preferences, and it certainly can't be compared to 
spending the money we needed in order to win World War II.
  For example, they want to spend trillions and trillions of dollars 
more on Medicare expansion, electric vehicle chargers, home-based care, 
free college, and a long list of liberal priorities. We are happy to 
debate those but not to jam them in a $6 trillion spending package.
  All of this spending would be in addition to the more than $1 
trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that apparently is currently 
being drafted. I know we have been talking for weeks about a bipartisan 
infrastructure bill, but I have learned as recently as today that there 
is no bill text, and the Congressional Budget Office that scores these 
bills has not done so yet so we can determine whether the so-called 
pay-fors are, indeed, legitimate and stand up to scrutiny.
  Our national debt is at the highest level since World War II. This is 
not the time to spend and spend and spend until our grandkids are left 
sitting in a pile of debt so deep that they will have no hope of 
climbing out of it. And we certainly can't tax and spend our way to 
prosperity. We need to take a hard look at our spending habits and make 
some tough choices, like most American families. They have to decide: 
What are my priorities, and what are the resources I have to spend to 
fund those priorities? And that is exactly what we need to do here in 
Congress.

  Folks on both sides of the aisle want to rebuild our Nation's 
infrastructure. Rebuilding resilient roads, bridges, and broadband are 
top of mind for Republicans and Democrats. I know our colleagues are 
still working on text, as I said, for the bipartisan infrastructure 
deal, and I am eager to see the details on how this massive investment 
is paid for. But, again, this is only one-half of the so-called dual-
track process announced by Senator Schumer.
  The exorbitant pricetags being floated for the second track have 
raised serious concerns not just among folks on this side of the aisle 
but on both sides of the aisle.
  I sincerely hope that some of our colleagues on the other side will 
stand up against irresponsible spending. As we know, it takes just one 
Democratic Senator to stand in the way of this abuse of the 
reconciliation process, and I hope one or more of them will have the 
courage to do so.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
  (The remarks of Mr. Leahy pertaining to the introduction of S. 2311 
are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills 
and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mr. LEAHY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that Senators 
Scott of Florida, Menendez, Tuberville, and Schumer be allowed to 
complete their remarks prior to the vote.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Alabama.