[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 184 (Wednesday, December 11, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6947-S6950]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Farewell to the Senate
Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, it has been the honor of my lifetime to
represent Hoosiers here in the U.S. Senate.
When I said I was going to do this back in 2017--I didn't have much
of a political legacy--to leave my business that I had spent 37 years
running and that I wanted to run for the U.S. Senate, everybody said: a
fool's errand--it couldn't be done.
But there were a lot of Hoosiers wanting the system to be shaken up a
little bit. When I interpreted, I think, what politics was doing back
in 2015 and 2016, I crafted that unusual idea that it could be done
even when you have made most of your life in the trenches in the real
world.
I was told when I got here: Freshman Senators are not to be heard,
may be seen. Sit back; learn the ropes.
Well, that wasn't going to work for me because I had already put
myself into a corner because I said I wouldn't do it more than two
terms. That is unusual. Everyone says it, they get amnesia, and then
you know the rest of the story.
I have been so proud of what we have done here in these 6 years, what
we have done for Hoosiers. And when I tell you about some of the things
that can be done, I think you are going to be amazed.
I put together a staff that came here mostly from Indiana, and their
goal was to get things done, to get it across the finish line. And,
sure, I was proud to have been named the most effective first-term
Republican Senator and the sixth most effective in our caucus,
generally, in the last Congress, and probably close to that again in
this one. But all of us here know that we get the credit for it and it
is your staff that does all the heavy lifting.
This 2021 freshman Senate office got more bills across the finish
line than any other--it is amazing--and 37 in the span of 6 years.
Again, that is why the Center for Effective Lawmaking singled out our
office as being most impactful in areas like healthcare, education, and
agriculture--all the stuff I bumped into in so many ways in the real
world before I got here.
I want to tell you about a few of those wins. Incoming Senators will
hopefully get inspired by it.
Imagine, as a Republican, when one of your biggest pieces of
legislation has the word ``climate'' in it. So I will get to how that
happened in the first place, but, being a conservationist, one who
knows that is an issue that we, as Republicans and conservatives, have
to be involved with, we actually crafted a bill called the Growing
Climate Solutions Act, which was a landmark bill for farmers that
matched up their good stewardship with offset markets that were already
there but government was making it too difficult for them to take
access of it, especially small farmers. Imagine it passing in the U.S.
Senate 92 to 8. That is darn near a miracle.
How did that happen in the first place? I was here maybe 6 or 7
months, and Senator Chris Coons from Delaware had been trying to find
one Republican to engage in the discussion, which we know how big a
discussion that has been. Of course, we are always going to disagree on
policy, but he had probably asked so many others over the last 2 years
that he was going after a rookie Senator.
He didn't realize that he ran into somebody that had to think on his
feet a lot in the real world and made decisions fairly quickly based on
what you really know. And I said: I will do it.
I think the rest of the conversation was: Will it be more than a
committee of two of us?
Give me a month.
I got six other Republicans. And it is still an issue of contention
in terms of what it is about, where it is going. Some are absolutely
certain about it; some have put no credence to it. Obviously, it is
somewhere in between.
That, to me, was the first moment, being here after just 6 months,
that said: If you do certain things and think out of the box, you can
get a lot done.
And that has probably put me in front of more discussions now that
energy is the biggest issue at the State level. Demand for it was flat
up until 2 years ago. And now, in Indiana, one of the best places to
have a business, all the data centers want to come there. And we only
produce 20 gigawatts of electricity. Each one of them needs one
gigawatt. And what is going to be the right mix between baseload,
intermittent, green, traditional? I intend to have Indiana at the
leading front of that discussion.
Veterans--that is an issue in many different ways. Those who serve
our country still have trouble getting basic benefits, especially as it
relates here in the Federal Government, where most of them come from.
They told us back home in Indiana that to get claims information
through the mail or driving to a regional location was clumsy, even
through the mail, and logistically impossible when you had to travel
sometimes 2 hours to get a basic checkup. That was a real burden for
disabled veterans.
We wrote the Wounded Warrior Access Act to streamline the claims
process with an online tool. It was signed into law last year.
I came here most proud of fixing healthcare back in my own business
in
[[Page S6948]]
2008--a small business for half of the time I was there, over 37 years,
20 employees or so. By 2008, we had grown to 300 employees. You can't
imagine how sick and tired I was of hearing how lucky I was it is only
going up 5 to 10 percent this year.
Well, after hearing that for about 9 years, I got involved in the HR
meeting back in 2008. Here was the first question I asked of the
insurance company, since we had hardly any claims: What profit margin
did you make on our plan?
I was thinking 10, 15 percent. They were honest: 25 percent.
I turned to the agent: What was your commission?
Seven percent.
We were stroking a million-dollar check back then. Do the math. That
wasn't going to work for me.
I said: What can we do to fix it?
They said: Well, you could maybe self-insure.
I said: You didn't tell us that last year.
And I did that and self-insured and made it a cost center. But then
the critical question was--and we need to all start asking these kinds
of questions: How do you really lower costs and make Hoosiers and
Americans healthier?
They said: We have got a broken system. It is built upon expensive
remediation.
It sounded a little abstract. So I said: Let's flesh that out a
little bit.
Well, you have got your deductible. I had to raise that each year to
moderate the increases, change underwriters every 3 years. That was a
pain in the rear.
So they said: If you really push wellness and prevention, it will be
the start of how you lower healthcare costs.
And then they said something that really surprised me: Healthcare
consumers are nonexistent because they aren't involved in actually
shopping around for healthcare. You depend on the insurance company in
your company or the government to do it. That is the driver in most
markets.
I ended up, after that meeting, throwing every wellness tool and the
kitchen sink at it, turned my employees into healthcare consumers, cut
costs by over 50 percent, and haven't had an increase in 16 years.
I always ask the question: Raise your hand if that has been the case.
No one does. Those are the kinds of things we are going to have to do
here and back home in the States.
Here, being on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, I told the
chair of that committee, Senator Sanders: If you want to lower
healthcare costs, start incentivizing the industry to be competitive
and transparent.
Well, that ended up creating what would be the most transformational
bill, called the Health Care PRICE Transparency Act. And when you are
getting someone like Senator Bernie Sanders and Mike Braun, the two
loudest voices in the Senate, on healthcare reform, that is a modern
miracle. And that bill is there as a template, already strongly
bipartisan. Some of the features of it could be dropped into reforms
that we do even this year.
During the pandemic, Josh Hawley and I passed through a bill that
would declassify all intelligence about the Wuhan lab and also prompted
the President to direct the intelligence community to investigate the
lab leak. As a result of that investigation, the FBI confirmed that
they found a lab leak to be the most likely theory of origin.
And when the current administration announced the vaccine mandate for
businesses that would have vaccinated every employee in all businesses
if you had 100 or more employees, after it was in the rearview mirror,
we dusted off an old law called the Congressional Review Act that
hadn't been used in years, and we used that and got bipartisan support
on it. And then, lo and behold, when the Supreme Court struck down the
vaccine mandate, they cited our challenge as the most significant
action in Congress that had weighed in on the mandate. You can get
results if you stick your neck out, take a little risk.
Before I go to the other side of being a Senator--what you do back
home called ``constituent services''--I want to talk about a few of the
lighter moments of being in the U.S. Senate.
I will never forget when I got here--and we have great lunches; kudos
to the staff that prepares them. And it said lunchtime starts at 12:30;
it is over at 2. Well, that seemed like a lot of time. I show up at
12:30. Even the staff wasn't fully--had the meal there ready to go. I
said: What is going on? They said: Well, 12:30 is the official time. No
one shows up until after 1. So there is Senate time and real time. You
have to get adjusted to that.
The pace is maybe a little different when you come from the field of
being a scrappy entrepreneur. The only other Senator that did the same
thing was, of course, a guy named Rick Scott who ran a business, ran
the State of Florida. We didn't make that mistake another time.
I was able to host a lunch. I am in the logistics business. You have
to come up with something that is unique to your community. We are
probably the most German Catholic community in the State of Indiana, so
we wanted to have schnitzel and brats. Well, the plan was to drive them
from Indiana to DC. I actually had a volunteer do that because, believe
it or not, that was the only way that was practical and least expensive
to host a lunch.
Here is one of the most unusual moments. We all get involved in
media--probably far too much of it. But part of this job is having the
pulpit to say what you believe, what you want to weigh in on.
I was actually doing an interview in the middle of COVID. I can't
remember which network. But all of a sudden, a minute into about a 7-
minute interview, the cameraman goes down, literally. I thought the
camera or the light stand was coming at me. The interview continued. My
wife was watching it at home and thought we had a mini earthquake here.
So I remember one of the other cameramen said: I have never seen
anything like that in the U.S. Senate.
The story wasn't over. About a minute before the interview was over,
he starts to dust himself off. He had been out for 4 minutes. He grabs
the camera stand or light, and I thought, This time, it is coming at
me. I didn't know what I was going to do; although, he went down again,
and we completed the interview. Of course, I was worried about what
happened. An ambulance came. We were lucky in that case. It was
dehydration.
Imagine being in a pickle like that. We got through it.
Other memories, after the first State of the Union Address, I was
walking back. I live right east of the Supreme Court building. It was a
starlit evening. The moon silhouetted the Capitol. I said to myself:
How can you be so lucky?
Now, the other side of being a Senator is constituent services.
Customer service was always my priority in my business. Believe me, you
don't have to pay consultants for them to tell you what is wrong with
your business. Just listen to your employees and to your customers--
free advice. It doesn't cost a penny. If you get it fixed, you actually
corrected an issue you have with your company.
So I told them I wanted to run constituent services back home, just
like customer service in my business. We put together a team just as
good there--when you listen to these stats--as the one that enabled me
to do so much here on the legislative side--they closed 13,775
constituent cases in 6 years, assisting Hoosiers with problems that
were really impacting their lives. There are many ways you can get
entangled with the Federal Government.
My team returned $21.6 million that were owed to Hoosiers back to
them, mostly from the IRS. That money had an immediate impact. One
woman in Columbus was at risk of losing her home, and we were able to
recover $10,000 that, again, was owed to her by the IRS.
My team handled 2,381,813 emails, phone calls. Believe me, there are
a lot of ways, if people just do it, to get a hold of who represents
you here in DC. But then what do you do with it? We put a metric in
that if those weren't handled within a certain number of days, it set
off an alarm. Unbelievable constituent services--1,500 hours of mobile
office hours. When they reached out, we found the solutions.
One Hoosier's family reached out because their mother's ashes were
lost at
[[Page S6949]]
a post office facility, couldn't be located. We secured an inspector
general audit of the post office to make sure that never happens again.
A family of an Indiana soldier killed in Vietnam didn't get the
Silver Star. It had been a long time. We recovered that for them. My
team cut through the redtape and delivered that medal to his family. It
had been 50 years they were trying.
As proud as I am of the legislation passed and the constituent
services that we gave, I am also proud of sounding the alarm for what I
think is our biggest issue impacting our country. To be honest, it has
been like talking to the side of my barn back home. I learned what it
was about to make ends meet because your tail was on the line running a
small business.
I am optimistic since we do so many great things in this country. But
the incentives have been so strong to go the opposite way that,
hopefully, we can change the direction that, in my mind, will bankrupt
the country, and it has been from both sides of the aisle. It has been
where we just expected too much out of this place. We need to focus on
doing a few things better.
To show you the magnitude, 6 years ago, we were $18 trillion in debt.
In 6 years, we have doubled it. We borrow $1 trillion every 6 months,
and that is the interest that we pay on our debt now every 6 months, as
well. We actually borrow $2 trillion a year.
This spending spree has had a real effect on the American people. We
have inflation, rising interest rates, and a projected debt that is
going to be $56 trillion in 10 years. If you are good at math, that
gets geometrically more difficult to get out of that hole being dug
that deep.
I had a business, the first 17 years where the office was in a mobile
home. I got introduced out here: Had his office in a double-wide. I
said, it was a used single-wide. That was my first and only opportunity
of doing what I wanted to do.
Well, the overhead was so low, you almost had to stoop to get in the
door, figuratively speaking, but I learned a lot of valuable lessons.
In the real world, you have to live within your means. Borrowing money
from our kids and grandkids is not a business plan that is going to
work.
How do we turn things around? The best thing, we are not flying blind
here. There is an instruction manual called the Constitution,
especially the 10th Amendment. As the Federal Government has struggled,
the States have been a laboratory for how you fix things. That is where
the innovation is going to come from in the next decade.
I am so excited to lead that charge back home in Indiana. It was so
hard to get here in the first place. The question I get asked most: Why
wouldn't you stay? I kind of explained that a little bit earlier that I
believe in term limits. It was an either-or choice--either run for
Governor or serve another term here. I am not going to lose sight of
what I have been a part of, but I do feel I made the right choice.
On this entire journey, I couldn't have done it without my life
partner Maureen, married 48 years ago. I never get that number wrong,
even if it is off by a year. On our wedding, I will never forget
everyone as they passed me and got to her. I was trying to listen if
anyone said that she was lucky because I was first and everyone,
without exception, said how lucky I was. Well, I just couldn't resist;
after we got out of the line there at the church--maybe later that
evening--I said, ``Dear, were there any people that told you, you were
lucky?'' And in a very diplomatic way, she said: ``There were a few.''
I have been blessed beyond all measure there. I have a family that
has been great. Three of the four kids work and run the business I ran
for 37 years. Three of my seven grandkids are right up there--Michael,
Kate, and Julia; and Jason, one of my four kids. I have been blessed
beyond measure when you look at all of that.
And then the thing I talk most often about is faith, family, and
community--in that broader scope, how we were so lucky to be dropped
into the place called Jasper, IN. That, to me, is something I will
never figure out.
I am just thankful that when I ended up having one of the best MBAs
in the country and was headed to Wall Street, we talked about, do we
want to do it when we wanted to raise a family? I took the first
entrepreneur's course there. She already wanted her own business. It
didn't seem like Wall Street was going to work out.
Well, we moved back home. Best job I could find was over an 80-
percent pay cut. If we hadn't done that, it is almost certain I
wouldn't be here this afternoon doing a farewell speech in the U.S.
Senate.
I tour all 92 counties each year. I have offered open office hours,
scheduling into it on Fridays. Hoosiers, I will be doing that as your
next Governor as well.
Hoosiers are some of the most good-hearted, hard-working people in
the world. It has been my honor to serve you here.
To all my colleagues here in the Senate, thank you for your
friendship and the honor of serving alongside you in this esteemed
body, not to mention all the precious memories I will take back to
Indiana.
I will part on this, because I spent so much time sitting in that
seat as the Presiding Officer at the most inconvenient time each week,
Thursday afternoon from 3 to 6. Well, you are pretty well the lone
soldier by then. You are going to get in the wrap-up. Rick Scott was
the only one who had poorer seniority than me. I will never forget. We
were all interested in wrapping it up.
Well, the first thing I did was figured out a way to where I only had
to do it every other week. It took a little risk. It paid off, so I
didn't have to do it every week. Then I found there were some Senators
who liked to linger around a little later on Thursdays than maybe what
they needed to. And there was one who did it every Thursday and had
flexibility--my friend, Senator Dan Sullivan. You need to tune in
because he does the Alaskan of the Week.
All I said was: Dan, could you move it up about an hour and a half?
And he did, and that enabled me to get home late on a Thursday instead
of a Friday. I was even doing some entrepreneurial work right there.
You can ask anybody in the well now, we were all wanting to see that
happen together.
Finally, I tried to bust the dress code here by not wearing a tie.
There was a time or two where I barged in here without one and almost
got tackled by Senator Lankford once, but I got in and out. But that is
one thing I am not going to change. I keep a tie in the Cloakroom.
Thank you, again, for keeping me dressed correctly when I need to be on
the floor on occasions like this.
It has been quite a run; it will be bittersweet to leave the place;
and thank you all for the enjoyment I have had here.
I yield the floor.
(Applause, Senators rising.)
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.
Mr. YOUNG. Madam President, I wanted to address Senator Braun's
family, members of his staff, and others who may be watching these
proceedings today. Congratulations to Senator Braun for a great run
here. To his family, just wonderful people, I see Maureen in the
Gallery and other members of the family. I know they are incredibly
proud of Mike at this moment, and they are looking forward to the next
step in his professional journey and, therefore, their journey, so
thank you for your service.
I know that this is every bit as much of a sacrifice and a period of
service for members of one's family as it is for us. Sometimes, it is
more challenging for family members because we lose all control over
what people are saying and whatnot but great to visit with you, and I
am looking forward to this next step.
And then members of the team, I think it was right and appropriate
that Senator Braun spent so much time talking about your great work on
behalf of the people of Indiana.
The bills that he has shown leadership on, multiple bills, and
successes would not have happened, as he said, but for your work, the
phone calls received, and the emails responded to, all the meetings. I
mean, it is really important. Many people call their U.S. Senator only
once. Most people don't call, but they will talk to someone who has
talked to a U.S. Senator, and those interactions are just so essential.
They shape people's views of what government can be, and they help
people be reassured during times like these that they are represented.
And so
[[Page S6950]]
I appreciate you very much. For many of you, I know you will return to
the great Hoosier State and keep working in some sort of service
capacity, and I will look forward to working together.
Mike, I have to say, the Senate's loss is Indiana's gain. You have
certainly served with distinction here, but I know you have always
prided yourself, appropriately so, on your executive responsibilities
and achievements over the years. Now, the people of Indiana will
benefit from a different type of service, and we are all very much
looking forward to seeing what is next. It has already started, I know.
I have to say, the hunting is better. The hunting is a heck of a lot
better, whether you are a hunter hunting things with faces or
mushrooms, and there is no better place to do that kind of thing than
southern Indiana, Dubois County, preferably.
You know, this is Indiana's win, this moment right here--remembering
the great service and achievements--but when you reflect on the
experience you bring to this next step, building and running a large
organization, and yet you still have exposure to and experience in
government between the local school board levels, State legislature for
a brief period of time, and then the U.S. Senate, what better
perspective could an incoming chief executive of a State have?
So I am really excited about this step. Your commitment, I know, will
be enduring to fiscal responsibility and economic freedom. Those have
been hallmarks of your service here. They are, frankly, expectations
that people have of you and of our State. Carrying on that tradition of
fiscal responsibility and effective management is, I think, one of the
reasons you were elected, despite some strong and talented opponents
you faced in that recent election.
So here we are. Here we are parting ways in the U.S. Senate. But as
we leave this Chamber, I will have an opportunity to call you Governor-
elect, and then we can keep working together on veterans' issues, on
budgetary issues, on expanding healthcare access to more people, on
ensuring that Hoosiers and others across the country have access to
affordable, quality housing near where the jobs are. All of these
issues that make normal life possible in this country. Government can
be maddening; government can be inefficient; government can be
unresponsive; but government is necessary. And if it is necessary,
let's make it good government. Let's do what we can to instill some
measure of confidence in this system, as imperfect as it may be.
I think that this is something in this new capacity that you can help
deliver at a time when so many people are pessimistic about the state
of affairs. Again, you are the guy to make this happen.
So Godspeed, Senator Braun. Godspeed to members of your team and to
your beautiful family. I am looking forward to helping make you
successful in this next step because if you are successful, Senator,
then the State of Indiana is successful.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.