[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 5224-5225]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET FOR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT FOR FISCAL YEARS 
                      2001-2011--MOTION TO PROCEED

  Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I now move to proceed to H. Con. Res. 83, 
the House budget resolution, and my motion to proceed be limited to 10 
minutes--5 minutes under the control of Senator Conrad and 5 minutes 
under the control of Senator Domenici--and, following that debate, the 
Senate proceed to the adoption of the motion and that the motion to 
reconsider then be laid upon the table.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. LOTT. In light of this agreement, then, Mr. President, there will 
be no further votes today. However, votes will occur throughout the day 
and into the evening tomorrow and probably Wednesday and Thursday also.
  I thank my colleagues for helping work out this agreement.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I note the presence of the ranking 
member of the Budget Committee, Senator Kent Conrad. What we have 
agreed to in the unanimous consent is that he and I will each speak for 
5 minutes, after which we will adopt the House-passed budget 
resolution, after which the Senator from New Mexico will send a 
substitute to the desk which will be the Bush-Domenici amendment. We 
will get that much done tonight.
  For Senators who might want to speak, we should be there rather 
quickly, do what I have just described, and we will be here if Senators 
want to come down and speak. I understand there is at least one Senator 
on our side who would like to make a speech tonight, and we have talked 
with Senator Conrad, if there are any on his side who would like to 
speak.
  It looks as though the magic hour tonight is certainly somewhere 
around 9 o'clock because it seems like it would be very uncomfortable 
after 9 o'clock for Senators to be around here, and we will not be 
doing any voting until tomorrow. So that looks like a nice time to 
shoot for, as far as how much time we will use. I will certainly save 
for tomorrow a more detailed analysis of why we are here.
  I will say tonight that it is very important to most Republicans--I 
think I speak for almost every Republican Senator; I am not overstating 
the case, almost every Republican Senator--that this President, George 
W. Bush, deserves to have his budget and his tax plan considered by the 
Senate. That is what the arguments have been about thus far. Should he 
have a chance? What I am saying tonight is, yes, he should and, yes, I 
am grateful now that, after a lot of back and forth, the other side of 
the aisle has agreed that we can call up the budget that we heretofore 
talked about, the Bush-Domenici budget.
  Everyone should know that budget has a couple of things different 
than the one I proposed maybe a week ago. Those things are that the 
reconciliation instruction on the taxes is not in the budget 
resolution. The reason for that is simple and does not require much 
finger pointing or much time.
  Essentially, it was determined, parliamentary-wise, that would not 
work, putting the reconciliation instruction on a budget resolution at 
this time. We intend to offer it at a later time in an up-or-down vote 
on the floor of the Senate, and I am certain that while some might want 
to delay that--I haven't heard that from my friend, Senator Kent 
Conrad--we will have that vote. We are hopeful by then we will have 51 
votes for that, and we will be back where we were originally. It will 
be in our budget resolution as it goes on its way to the House for 
conference.
  Having said that, in the few minutes I have, I will say that the 
President of the United States and a very brand new staff, who did not 
have very much time, put together a rather good budget, which the 
Senator from New Mexico has looked at--at least the profile of it, the 
plan for it. I have looked at that, and I have modeled the budget after 
that.
  Let me tick off what our new President wanted us to do that we are 
going to try to do in the next few days: One, save Social Security; 
two, save Medicare; three, provide, in the opinion of the President, 
adequate defense until and unless he gets his top-down review; and to 
provide new and increased spending for education. And he did that, and 
we proposed that within the discretionary funding in this budget 
resolution.
  In addition, the President of the United States proposed that we 
should have a major tax bill. Frankly, in due course, the tax-writing 
committee will work their will. This is not a Senator putting something 
off; it is just stating the facts and the law. In a budget resolution, 
you just use dollar numbers. So you tell the Finance Committee where 
they have latitude to cut taxes. They will determine how, what kind, 
and we will be saying in this budget resolution

[[Page 5225]]

you have permission to do up to $1.6 trillion over a decade.
  Before we are finished--since some of my friends have gone on 
television and talked about how big this $1.6 trillion is--I want to 
use a whole series of numbers as to what that looks like over 10 years 
to eventually convince people that it is not a very big number--whether 
you consider the total gross domestic product, total tax take--whatever 
you want to look at--it is a pretty modest number. The President would 
like us to consider that. We want to give him the right to consider 
that in this budget resolution.
  My last comments have to do with what else is in this budget of a 
high priority and a big substance; that is, we reduce the national debt 
by $2 trillion over the decade. We think that is the right amount. We 
think that is a fair amount. We also think, considering the size of the 
surpluses, that probably is what we ought to do. We prescribe that in 
this budget resolution.
  I have given a summary tonight, as brief as it was. We will 
ultimately talk about more detail. We have done this budget with this 
kind of spending in it. The President has a 4-percent increase, year 
upon year, over the last year's budget for discretionary spending. In 
my opinion, that is a pretty good amount.
  Mr. President, we won't adopt the House measure. We will make it 
pending, after which we will offer a substitute. I note that the 
Parliamentarian was nodding his head.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from North Dakota is 
recognized.
  Mr. CONRAD. I thank the Chair and I thank the Senator from New 
Mexico. I thank all of my colleagues who have worked hard to bring us 
to this position today.
  However, we don't believe we ought to be on the budget resolution 
tonight. We don't believe we ought to be on the budget resolution 
because we don't have a budget from the President. Not only do we not 
have a budget from the President, because he has not even provided 
sufficient detail for the Joint Committee on Taxation or the 
Congressional Budget Office to give us an independent review of what 
his tax proposal costs, but we believe we should have waited until that 
analysis was available.
  Third, there has been no markup in the Budget Committee. Always 
before, with one exception, we have had a markup in the Budget 
Committee. And always we have at least tried in the Budget Committee to 
mark up a budget resolution for our colleagues on the floor. This year, 
there was not even an attempt.
  Fourth, there will be an attempt in the budget resolution to use 
reconciliation for a $1.6 trillion tax cut, which we believe threatens 
the constitutional role of the Senate.
  Now ``reconciliation'' is a word that I am certain many of our 
listeners really have no idea of its meaning. I must confess I didn't 
fully understand reconciliation until a detailed review of that 
process. What it provides is that the typical operation of the Senate 
was to provide a ``cooling saucer'' in our constitutional construct, so 
that the House of Representatives reacted immediately and responded to 
the will of the people at the moment. The Senate was designed to be the 
cooling saucer, where calmer and cooler reflection could permit a 
further analysis, unlimited debate, with every Senator having the right 
to amend. Those are the fundamental constructs of this institution. All 
of that is short-circuited under reconciliation. All of that is out the 
window, and the Senate becomes a second House of Representatives.
  We believe the Bush budget puts this country in the hole because if 
you start with the projected surplus of $5.6 trillion and subtract out 
the trust funds of Medicare and Social Security, that leaves you with 
an available surplus of $2.5 trillion. When we look at the cost of the 
Bush tax cut as partially reestimated, and the alternative minimum tax 
that will have to be reformed because of the Bush tax cut, which costs 
another $300 billion, and the associated interest costs of $500 
billion, and the spending proposals in this budget of $200 billion, you 
have a total cost of the Bush plan at $2.7 trillion. That tells us this 
President's plan puts us right into the trust fund and puts us in the 
hole by $200 billion.
  On our side, we will offer an alternative that does the following:
  We will protect the Social Security and Medicare trust funds in every 
year. We will pay down the maximum amount of the publicly held debt. We 
will provide for an immediate fiscal stimulus of $60 billion.
  I might add, that is what we think we should be doing this week. We 
think we should be passing on the floor of the Senate an immediate 
fiscal stimulus. That is what we think should be done.
  Fourth, we will provide significant tax relief for all Americans, 
including rate reduction, marriage penalty relief, and estate tax 
reform.
  Finally, we will reserve resources for the high priority domestic 
needs, including improving education, a prescription drug benefit, 
strengthening our national defense, and funding agriculture.
  Finally, we will provide $750 billion to strengthen Social Security 
and address our long-term debt.
  So this is a fundamental debate about the economic future of our 
country. We look forward to it on our side. We look forward to a 
healthy and vigorous and polite debate.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the 
motion to proceed is agreed to.

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