[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 465-467]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       REPUBLICANS READY TO WORK

  Mr. ALEXANDER. I, too, welcome Roger Wicker to the Senate. I have 
known him a long time. He has been a leader for the Tennessee Valley 
Authority. He is one of Congress's most knowledgeable Members, and he 
has been a leader in helping to put American history back in its 
rightful place in our classrooms so our children can grow up learning 
what it means to be an American. He was the lead sponsor in the House 
of Representatives on legislation that I introduced in the Senate that 
created summer academies for outstanding teachers and students of 
American history.
  I would also like to congratulate Marty Paone on his service here. We 
all admire him and will miss him.
  I thank the majority leader for his remarks at the beginning of the 
year, and I especially wanted to echo the remarks the Republican 
leader, Senator McConnell of Kentucky, made. He pointed out that we 
have had a Presidential election in this country every 4 years since 
1788. Senator McConnell pointed that out, and he said we would not use 
this year's election as an excuse to put off the people's business for 
another day. In other words, it is a Presidential year, and some around 
town are writing and saying: Well, they will not get much done in 
Congress this year. We are saying on the Republican side of the aisle, 
and I hope it is being said on both sides of the aisle, that there is 
no excuse for Congress to take a year off, given the serious issues 
facing our country.
  A number of politicians are campaigning for change, we have all 
heard. Republican Senators are ready to help, working with our 
colleagues, to give the Senate an opportunity to vote for real change. 
We wish to change the way Washington does business by going to work on 
big issues facing our country. And not just go to work on them but to 
get principled solutions this year. And because this is the Senate, 
where it often takes 60 votes to get a meaningful result, that means we 
invite the Democrats to work with us in a bipartisan way to get those 
results.
  Republicans didn't seek our offices to do bad things to Democrats. We 
are here to do good things for our country, and there is plenty to do. 
We see what is happening in the housing market, with oil prices, with 
rising health care costs. We know we need to move quickly with a 
bipartisan approach to help get the economy back on track. Our 
preference is to let businesses and people keep and spend more of their 
own money to boost the economy. We want to grow the economy, not the 
Government.
  We know we need, as Senator Kyl was saying, to intercept 
communications among terrorists to protect our country. We saw the 
Rockefeller-Bond bipartisan proposal passed by 13 to 2 in the 
Intelligence Committee. Our solution is to make sure companies aren't 
penalized for helping us protect ourselves, while at the same time 
securing individual rights. We want a strong national defense.
  We see there are 40 million or so Americans uninsured, and we want to 
change that. We don't want to take a year off in dealing with health 
insurance. We want to start this year. As the Republican leader said, 
our goal is that every American have health insurance, starting with 
small business health insurance plans, moving on to reforming the Tax 
Code so Americans can afford to buy private insurance. There are a 
number of Democratic and Republican proposals on reaching the goal we 
have in helping every American to have health insurance. We can start 
this year.
  There is no need to wait to deal with Medicaid and Medicare spending 
another year. We all know, at their present pace of growth, those two 
accounts will bankrupt our Government. It is irresponsible to wait. 
That is a bipartisan conclusion. There are a number of proposals from 
both sides of the aisle to begin to deal with that, from Senator Gregg 
and Senator Conrad, to Senator Feinstein and Senator Domenici and 
Senator Voinovich as well. We should get started. These are the 
principles of fiscal responsibility and limited Government.
  Last year, we took some important steps to keep jobs from going 
overseas by growing more jobs at home. We see the problem of 
competition with China and India. We worked together to pass a bill--
the American COMPETES Act--authorizing $34 billion to keep our 
brainpower advantage. Now let us implement it. Senator Hutchison of 
Texas, Senators Bingaman and Domenici of New Mexico, and many others 
have worked hard on this. So let us implement more advanced placement 
courses for low-income students, a million and a half more; more highly 
trained scientists and engineers coming in to help grow jobs in the 
United States; and 10,000 more math and science teachers. That we can 
do.
  We know we have to be bipartisan to get a result. Some things are 
bipartisan, and I have mentioned many of them, but some things should 
be bipartisan that aren't. For example, the Federal Government is 
saying the Salvation Army can't require its employees to speak English 
on the job. Well, Americans, by 80 to 17 percent, believe employers 
should be able to require their employees to speak America's common 
language on the job. We have legislation to make that clear. It is 
bipartisan to some degree, but not as bipartisan as it ought to be. The 
principle is right there above the Senate Presiding Officer's desk. It 
says: One from many--``e pluribus unum.''
  Another challenge that should be more bipartisan, because most 
Americans see the wisdom of it, is addressing a shortage of medical 
care in rural America caused by lawsuit abuse. OB-GYN doctors are 
abandoning rural areas across America and mothers are driving too far 
for prenatal health care and to have their babies. We should work 
across party lines to change that. The solution we have offered is to 
stop runaway lawsuits that make doctors pay $100,000 or more a year for 
malpractice insurance. That is why they leave the rural areas. This is 
the principle of equal opportunity.
  There is plenty of work to do. Thirty years ago, I began my service 
as the Governor of Tennessee. I was a young Republican Governor and the 
State was very Democratic, thank you. So the media ran up to the big 
Democratic speaker of the house, Ned McWherter, and said: Mr. Speaker, 
what are you going to do with this new young Republican Governor? And 
to their surprise,

[[Page 466]]

the speaker said: I am going to help him. Because if he succeeds, our 
State succeeds. And that is the way we worked for 8 years.
  Now, we are not naive about politics in Tennessee. We had, and have, 
our fights. We argued about our principles. If I had a better schools 
program, they had an even better schools program on the other side. But 
we kept our eye on the ball. In the end, we worked together. In the 
end, we got results. That is why we brought in the auto industry and 
created the best four-lane highway system and created chairs and 
centers of excellence at our universities that still exist, and we 
began to pay teachers more for teaching well.
  I would like nothing more than to move that kind of cooperation from 
Tennessee to DC. I sense that from Democrats and Republicans all 
through this body. Of course, we will argue. We were elected because we 
have differences. This is a debating society. But we don't stop with 
our disagreements, we should finish with our results. So we are here to 
change the way Washington does business, as the Republican leader said, 
and I look forward to a constructive year of helping our country move 
ahead with a steady stream of specific solutions to big problems that 
get results because they either are bipartisan or because they should 
be bipartisan.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I would like to join my distinguished 
colleague from Tennessee who recently was elected to the leadership on 
this side of the aisle. His responsibility and mine is to help try to 
find a way to work together, not by sacrificing our principles but to 
try to find that common ground rather than what divides us.
  But first let me also express my congratulations to our new colleague 
from Mississippi, Senator Wicker, who had a distinguished career in the 
House of Representatives and comes here, I know, with a lot of hopes 
and aspirations. I look forward to working with him as he represents 
his State and as I represent my State, the State of Texas, and as we 
all work together to represent the United States, hopefully, to provide 
for the aspirations and dreams of the American people to make it 
possible for them to live their dream. That is what the United States 
has always been; that is what it should remain.
  I cannot help but reflect, returning from our holiday recess, I had 
somebody this morning in the cafeteria say: Welcome back from your 
vacation.
  I said: Well, I prefer to call it the alternate work period because 
it was not entirely a vacation, although I did get some time off, as 
did my colleagues. But I trust that we all came back refreshed and 
rejuvenated and ready to take on the challenging work that lies ahead.
  I have to say, if I heard it once, I heard it a thousand times as I 
traveled the State of Texas, people are frustrated with Washington, DC. 
They think Washington is broken. They do not hear about those occasions 
when we work together to pass legislation on a bipartisan basis. They 
hear the conflict and the divisiveness and the partisanship, and they 
do not like it. I had to tell them, each of my constituents when they 
mentioned that: Well, I do not like it very much either. I did not run 
for the Senate and I do not serve in a position of public trust to come 
up and pick fights.
  Everybody knows in politics it is always possible to pick a fight, 
but it does not take any particular genius to do that. What we ought to 
be doing, and what it takes hard work to do, is trying to find common 
ground. There is plenty of common ground.
  Senator Alexander mentioned a number of tremendous bipartisan 
accomplishments--the America Competes Act. There have been a number of 
opportunities for us to work together in a bipartisan way. I am 
particularly proud of some legislation that Senator Pat Leahy, the 
chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and I were the cosponsors of that 
the President signed into law in December, the first reform of the 
Freedom of Information Act in perhaps as much as 25 years.
  I think perhaps the best anecdote to public skepticism about 
Washington is greater transparency because I believe giving the public 
information about how their Government works is a way to empower them 
to hold elected officials and Government accountable. When things 
happen in secret, behind closed doors, that does not happen. So I am 
delighted there are plenty of opportunities for us to work together. I 
think we should embrace them, not run away from them or look for 
opportunities for us to pick fights and to feed that skepticism and 
really the sense that I think many people expressed to me that they 
feel as though Washington is increasingly irrelevant when it comes to 
dealing with the challenges that affect our lives.
  The economy is one that has, of course, come roaring to the forefront 
as an issue on which we need to work together. I was pleased to hear 
Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid say they wanted to work with 
the President to come up with a stimulus package that is timely, 
targeted, and temporary, something that would hopefully get the economy 
moving again as it has been for roughly the last 4 years, where we have 
seen an unbroken record of growth of the economy, increased number of 
jobs, some 9 million new jobs created.
  Frankly, the way that happened is because we allowed the American 
taxpayer and small businesses to keep more of what they earned so they 
could invest it, they could spend it on the education for their 
children, they could do whatever they wanted to with it because it is 
theirs. Sometimes I think it is helpful to remind ourselves that the 
money that hard-working Americans earn is their money. It is not ours. 
It is not the Federal Government's money.
  Sometimes I think when people are in Washington too long they begin 
to think of this as revenue pay-fors, ways to raise funds so that 
Government can grow bigger and spend people's money. Well, the American 
people understand there are some things they cannot do for themselves 
and Government has to do, such as the common defense, and they are 
willing to pay their taxes for efficient Government that delivers a 
particular result that Government only can provide.
  But we ought not to use this stimulus package, the downturn in the 
economy, as a way to burden the American people with more taxes or find 
new ways to grow the size of the Federal Government. So I hope we can 
continue in a careful and judicious and thoughtful way to find common 
ground to work on a stimulus package that the President will sign and 
that will enjoy bipartisan support.
  Now, there is a lot of skepticism, as I said, about Washington. Part 
of it is that the Government does not spend the tax dollars well, 
efficiently. I have to tell you there is good evidence of that. There 
is a Web site associated with the Office of Management and Budget 
called expectmore.gov. I hope people will look at that.
  What I discovered when I looked at it is that the Office of 
Management and Budget has reviewed 1,000 different Federal Government 
programs and found 22 percent of them either ineffective or the Office 
of Management and Budget cannot tell whether they are serving their 
intended purpose.
  I am not sure which is worse. Either they are proven ineffective or 
else you cannot tell. Either way that is unacceptable and we need to 
find a way to deal with those wasteful Washington programs that need to 
be eliminated. I proposed a Federal sunset commission that is modeled 
after many of the States, such as my State, the State of Texas, where 
you have periodic reviews of those programs, and every once in a while 
the bureaucrats have to come in and justify the reason for the 
program's existence.
  If circumstances have changed, the program is no longer needed, it 
can be eliminated or the budget, rather than securing an inflationary 
or cost-of-living increase in the size of that program each year 
without any real scrutiny or oversight, they start out with a zero-
based budget and have to justify each dollar of that budget.
  So I think a national sunset commission would help us eliminate more 
wasteful Washington spending. As I

[[Page 467]]

said, I am proud of the work that Senator Leahy and I were able to do 
in a bipartisan way to reform the Freedom of Information Act to give 
people more information about their Government so they can hold 
Government and Government officials accountable. But I think there is 
more that we need to do. Recently, earlier this month, the Government 
launched a new Web site called www.usaspending.gov which allows 
Americans to search for Federal grants and contracts. I am going to 
propose legislation--I am eager to find colleagues on the other side of 
the aisle with whom I can work; I am sure there will be a number of 
them--to build on this Web site and allow taxpayers to see how the 
Government spends their tax dollars.
  Now, I wish I could say I thought of this on my own, but the fact is, 
our comptroller in the State of Texas--may I inquire how much time 
remains?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Five seconds.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I am proud of the work that is being done 
by the State comptroller of Texas, Susan Combs, who has created a Web 
site wherethemoneygoes.gov. We need to use greater transparency and the 
accountability that goes with it to restore public confidence in how 
Government works. I look forward to working with our colleagues across 
the aisle and hope to find common ground, not to pick fights and find 
out where we differ but to find where we can move this country forward 
and solve some of the problems that confront us.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The assistant majority leader.

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