[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 2 (Tuesday, January 4, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11-S12]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                         Remembering Harry Reid

  Mr. President, I also want to mention the loss of former Senate 
Democratic leader Harry Reid, who also passed away this Christmas, and 
also extend my thoughts and prayers to his wife Landra and his family.


                                  2021

  Mr. President, the end of 2021 marks the end of a year of Democratic 
governance, and the picture is sobering. If we were issuing a report 
card for 2021, I am afraid Democrats would earn a ``D'' for 
``dreadful'' or ``disaster'' or an ``F'' for ``failure'' because 2021 
was filled with one Democratic-led crisis after another.
  Take our current inflation crisis. When Democrats took office last 
January, inflation was well within an acceptable range or what is known 
as the target inflation rate. It might have stayed there had Democrats 
not decided they needed to pass a massive government spending spree 
under the guise of COVID relief mere weeks after Congress had already 
passed a major COVID bill.
  That is right. In December of 2020, Congress passed its fifth 
bipartisan COVID relief bill, a nearly $1 trillion piece of legislation 
that met essentially all current, pressing COVID needs. But the ink was 
barely dry on the page before Democrats decided that they needed to 
take advantage of the COVID situation to pass another bill--this time, 
a hyperpartisan $1.9 trillion piece of legislation packed with 
unnecessary government spending and payoffs to Democratic interest 
groups. That unnecessary government spending, of course, had serious 
consequences.
  The definition of ``inflation'' is too many dollars chasing too few 
goods and

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services, and that is exactly the situation Democrats created. They 
sent too many Federal dollars into the economy, and the economy 
overheated as a result.
  Since Democrats passed their so-called American Rescue Plan, 
inflation has gone up and up again. In November, inflation hit its 
highest level in nearly 40 years--40 years--and American families are 
dealing with the consequences: spikes in food prices, rent prices, 
utility prices, used car and truck prices, propane, kerosene, and 
firewood prices, and the list goes on. Inflation is so bad that despite 
wage growth in 2021, Americans saw a de facto pay cut.
  You would think that the economic pain Americans are experiencing 
would be giving Democrats pause, but in fact, despite massive 
inflation, Democrats have been trying to double down on the reckless 
spending strategy that helped cause so much inflation in the first 
place. Fortunately, they have so far been unable to summon a majority 
in the Senate to support their latest reckless spending plan, but their 
unconcern with the dangerous economic consequences of their proposed 
new spending spree is deeply troubling.
  I wish I could say that our inflation crisis was the only Democratic 
disaster to come out of 2021, but that wouldn't be true. Democrats have 
also presided over a massive crisis at our southern border--a crisis 
that Democrats are apparently completely content to ignore. The illegal 
migration across our southern border picked up in the wake of the 
President's inauguration and reached stratospheric levels in 2021.
  The crisis shows no signs of abating. In November, the latest month 
for which we have statistics, Customs and Border Protection encountered 
173,620 people attempting to cross our southern border illegally. That 
is well over double the number who tried to cross illegally in November 
of 2020 and more than four times the number who attempted to cross in 
November of 2019. But you would never know it from listening to the 
President or congressional Democrats. It has become very clear that the 
President doesn't care about what is happening at our southern border 
despite the very real security and humanitarian crisis that this 
massive wave of illegal immigration represents.
  But our ongoing inflation and border disasters still don't represent 
the total of Democrats' 2021 failures. There was also the President's 
disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
  The President's arbitrary, chaotic withdrawal was a real low point 
for our country. Thirteen of our military men and women died in a 
terrorist attack during the evacuation of Kabul. We abandoned thousands 
of individuals who had worked with us in Afghanistan and whom we had 
promised to protect. They are bracing for life under the brutal control 
of the Taliban, if they haven't been forced into hiding or met an even 
more grim fate. The President also left behind hundreds of American 
citizens, and the latest report suggests that some of them may still be 
trying to find a way out of the country.
  Meanwhile, the President, who was supposed to restore our standing on 
the world stage, left our allies wondering if our word could be relied 
on.
  Most of all, the President's disastrous withdrawal has left our 
country in a more precarious national security position. Afghanistan is 
well on its way to once again becoming a terrorist haven. But, as with 
our border crisis, the dangers of our current Afghanistan situation 
barely seem to register on the President's radar.
  I could go on and talk about how the President, who promised to be a 
President for all Americans, has instead been a President for the far-
left wing of the Democratic Party. I could talk about how congressional 
Democrats, despite holding a razor-thin majority in Congress, have 
governed in a relentlessly partisan and extreme manner, attempting to 
force through far-left legislation, including a Federal takeover of 
election law and perhaps the most radical abortion legislation ever 
considered in Congress. I could talk about how Democrats are even now 
plotting to overturn a decades-old Senate rule in an attempt to force 
their partisan priorities through the Senate. But I will stop this 
discussion here.
  Thanks to Democrats' disasters, 2021 was a very rough year for the 
country. I would love to think that Democratic governance in 2022 would 
be better, that Democrats would get serious about inflation, abandon 
their plans for another reckless spending spree, address our border 
crisis, and commit to bipartisanship, but given the way things have 
been going, I am not getting my hopes up.