[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.