[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Pages 14710-14712]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        REPUBLICAN DELAY TACTICS

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I think it is important to let all Senators 
know that we worked very hard, late into the night, with significant 
members of the Senate staff. We worked very hard. In fact, I got home a 
little bit after midnight this morning, as did others.
  We are going to have a couple of votes this evening. The first vote 
we are going to take is our housing bill, a bill that would help 
families struggling to keep their homes and families struggling with 
the foreclosure crisis--and it is a crisis. The second piece of 
legislation we are going to vote on is called PEPFAR, an initiative 
introduced by President Bush in 2003 to confront the crisis in Africa, 
the continent-wide problem we have dealing with HIV/AIDS, where 8,000 
people are dying from AIDS every day on that continent. That is a death 
toll that doesn't take vacations. They are dying today and they are 
dying tomorrow. It is a weekend, but that doesn't matter; holidays are 
not a day off. People continue to die. That is what this legislation is 
about, to try to stem the tide of this scourge which has swept that 
continent.
  Both these bills, the housing bill and the AIDS bill, rightfully have 
the support of virtually all Democrats and a significant number of 
Republicans. Both these bills could have long since been passed and 
sent to the President's desk and we could have been on other important 
priorities, such as the energy crisis. I say that with regard to 
housing. I say that with regard to the legislation I talked about 
dealing with PEPFAR. They both could have been passed a long time ago.
  We now have a situation--I am looking for a chart here. I don't know 
what happened to it. I would say there is a hunt going on in the 
cloakroom for our chart. We have a few stacked back there. Maybe one of 
the Republican staff stole it.
  I don't know what happened to it, but let's pretend I have a chart 
here that says ``82 Republican filibusters.'' Remember, this is our 
Velcro chart, and you can just peel off the numbers. Here is what we 
have. We have the Velcro pieces but no chart.
  Let's just pretend we have a great big white chart here and the 
Velcro. See my Velcro? Just pop it on here. It doesn't work. It won't 
work--well, it is working. It looked a lot better when we had our chart 
before. Somebody swiped it.
  We started in the 50s, and they keep adding up, and now it is 82. 
Every one of those filibusters has taken huge amounts of time from the 
Senate. After cloture is invoked, under the rules of the Senate you 
have 30 hours where basically you can do nothing except wait for the 30 
hours to go by with a few speeches. Think about it, 82 times 30--
sometimes the 30 hours wasn't used, but most of the time it was in an 
effort to obstruct and delay. That is what we have had in the housing 
bill, and that is what is happening now on this global AIDS piece of 
legislation.
  It is a small number of people holding up these matters, but it is 
still the Republicans holding them up. Because of the obstructionism we 
had on these two matters last night, we worked, as I indicated, until 
midnight. We thought

[[Page 14711]]

we had an agreement worked out which would have allowed us to proceed, 
but one Senator prevented us from doing this. Because of that, our 
bipartisan negotiations late into the night were all for nothing.
  Today, we must hold an unnecessary set of votes that could have been 
agreed to by unanimous consent. No Senator is complaining because we 
have to be here on Friday. We work when we have to work. But it is just 
a question of what we should be doing while we are here. We could have 
been doing other things, but we are here today. We are going to vote on 
a couple of votes that are unnecessary. We could have been doing other 
things. We could have spent the time constructively, as I indicated, on 
other matters.
  It is interesting to note that the Senator who has held this up and 
other Republican Senators--they have been coming to the floor all week 
criticizing the Senate for not moving to address the energy crisis. But 
one reason we are not moving forward on a lot of other things, 
including the energy crisis facing this country, is because we have 
been held up on so many different bills.
  Everyone should know that this is a record that has broken any other 
time in the history of our country. This is filibuster on steroids. 
This is the Flo-Jo of filibusters--the great runner. She broke all 
records. We are breaking all records. If the American people wonder why 
Congress has not passed yet another piece of legislation to help ease 
the energy crisis, the housing crisis, and the many other problems 
facing this country, they need look no further than this number 82, 
right here. If anyone wonders why the American people are frustrated 
with Congress, all they need to do is look at the number 82.
  Despite these setbacks, this has been a productive week in the 
Senate. Since the filibusters--plural--have started on the housing 
legislation, there have been about 130,000 new foreclosures filed. 
Every legal workday, usually Monday through Friday when the courthouses 
are open, people are filing 8,500 new foreclosures on homes around the 
country. That is a lot of foreclosures. We should have worked on this 
housing bill long ago, and we tried to, but we were held up by the 
Republican filibusters. We have legislation we are going to vote on 
this afternoon at 5:20 that will help struggling homeowners and prevent 
conditions that led to the foreclosure crisis happening in the first 
place. So we have done that.
  Here, Wednesday afternoon, a vote started at 4 o'clock, one of the 
most historic times in the history of this institution, one of the most 
historic times in the 230 years-plus of our country being in existence. 
What was that? We, America, have a lot of wonderful programs. The most 
successful social program in the history of the world is Social 
Security, a program that helps those in their golden years with an old-
age pension check. Social Security helps the disabled, it helps widows, 
it helps orphans. It is a wonderful program--that President Bush wanted 
to privatize. Think about that. Had we been unsuccessful in stopping 
his privatization, how do you think Social Security recipients would 
feel today with the stock market going down, down, down? It would have 
been a terrible decision for the American people.
  The other program the President doesn't like is Medicare. Medicare is 
not a program as successful as Social Security. It is an imperfect 
program, but it is a good program. It is a program I have seen in my 
political life. My first elected political job was chairman of the 
board of trustees of Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital. When I took 
that job, 40 percent of the seniors who were admitted to that hospital 
had no way of paying their bill. When I left, Medicare had come into 
being, and 100 percent of the people who were old, coming to that 
hospital, had their health insurance taken care of through Medicare. It 
is an imperfect but good program. President Bush does not like the 
program. He has tried to privatize it.
  What happened Wednesday afternoon at 4 o'clock? The program was 
saved. The program was saved by virtue of a courageous man named Ted 
Kennedy who got out of his sickbed, literally, to come here and cast 
the deciding vote. His was the 60th vote that allowed us to move 
forward and, I repeat, save Social Security.
  Senator Kennedy was a Senator when Medicare came into existence. He 
said that he would not let it fail, even though we all know it was very 
dangerous to him, from a health perspective, to fly from Boston down 
here and then have to fly back after the vote was cast.
  But it was a productive week, because not only did he cast the vote 
that made passage of the bill, but as a result of that, courageous 
Republicans, realizing he had done what had not been done, stepped 
forward and said, you know, the President has done enough. We have 
backed him long enough. We are going to vote the right way.
  So we had the original nine, plus nine more. We had 18 Republicans, 
far more than enough to override a Presidential veto. I hope the 
President does not veto this bill. I hope he does not. But I am 
grateful to Senator Kennedy, as are all the American people. We have 
rules. It is against Senate rules for the people in Galleries to clap. 
No one could stop them. No one could stop Senators from clapping, 
cheering, and crying for the act Senator Kennedy performed.
  So we did that. We are going to, this afternoon, pass the housing 
bill and send it back to the House. We also completed FISA legislation. 
I did not agree with the result, but it was an accomplishment for this 
body to finally work its way through all the problems we had 
procedurally to get that complete.
  Now, I would hope with the Medicare bill being saved by Senator 
Kennedy, President Bush does not veto that. Every day that goes by that 
he does not sign that bill, people in America are suffering. They are 
suffering because doctors are going to drop out of the system. As we 
know, patients will not be taken care of, veterans, whose funding and 
reimbursement is based upon Medicare, who are part of the TRICARE 
system, about 8 million servicemen and their families, are being denied 
those benefits.
  So the President should not do this simply because he wants to 
privatize Medicare. He is not going to win; he is going to lose that 
battle. So why does he want to do that? We had 355 votes in the House, 
69 in the Senate, enough to override the veto. So I call upon the 
President to not veto this bill; sign it so we can get this worked out, 
and we will end this situation once and for all.
  We have talked about the global AIDS bill. We are moving ahead with 
this legislation. It continues the support for America's efforts to 
join the world community in fighting against this disaster we have on 
that continent, global HIV/AIDS, which is so pronounced in that 
continent.
  President Bush has worked with Democrats and Republicans to help get 
this legislation passed, over the objections last night of one person, 
perhaps a small handful urging this one man on. Despite that, I am 
confidant we are going to pass this legislation.
  I should mention how glad my fellow Democrats and I were to have our 
nominee for President here to cast a vote on these important bills. 
Senator Obama understood the importance of the Medicare legislation, 
and he stepped down here and voted. But for him we would not have had 
the necessary votes to pass this. He was also here when the GI bill of 
rights came up, landmark legislation, repaying our valiant troops who 
fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and deserve the same rights to be 
educated as those World War II veterans.
  Senator Barack Obama was here to vote on that. On the FISA 
legislation, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legislation, 
Barack Obama cast his vote on that legislation. John McCain did not.
  The American people should also know that despite the delay tactics 
we have seen this week that have kept us from a debate on energy, 
Democrats and most all Senators, Democrats and Republicans, are 
committed to addressing the energy crisis with both long- and short-
term solutions.

[[Page 14712]]

  This is not a Democratic or Republican issue. We all acknowledge much 
needs to be done. Last night I held a meeting a few feet out of this 
Senate Chamber. I had a productive meeting--We had former Senator Jim 
Sasser, who was conducting the meeting--Senator Sasser of Tennessee, 
chairman of the Budget Committee, subcommittee chairman of 
Appropriations, subcommittee chair on Banking, one of America's great 
Senators. He was an Ambassador to China when his Senate career came to 
an end.
  He was there as a moderator. We had the director of Global Oil 
Group--the Yergin Group. He has written books on the situation with 
petroleum around the world. We had the chief executive officer of 
United Airlines. Keep in mind, this man has been president of Texaco, 
the vice chairman of Chevron, and now the chief executive officer of 
United. If anyone should have an understanding of what is going on with 
our energy markets, our business community, he should. He was 
tremendous in outlining this information for us.
  We had the head of global commodities at JPMorgan, the portfolio 
manager of Masters Capital Management, the CEO of NYMEX, and a 
professor at the University of Maryland School of Law. His expertise is 
in this area. It was a very good meeting. It lasted a long time.
  The group strongly agreed we must take steps to stem speculation in 
energy prices. Is speculation the only problem? Of course not. But is 
speculation a problem? Of course it is. This group agreed that 
speculators drive up prices for their own gain, while the American 
people are left feeling the pain.
  It was agreed that now is the appropriate time for President Bush to 
draw oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, as his father did. It 
was also agreed we must increase domestic oil production in the 68 
million acres of land that oil companies currently lease but are not 
using.
  The group agreed that any oil drilled in America should be sold to 
the America marketplace, not to China, Japan, India, as is currently 
happening. By the way, when there was a vote on this, Senator McCain 
voted that it was not necessary, that American oil produced be used by 
Americans. He, by his vote, indicated it could be used in other 
countries. We disagree. The group disagreed last night.
  So we need to take steps curtailing energy speculation, we need to 
tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, we need to increase the supply in 
the 68 million leased but unused acres in America, and earmarking 
domestic oil for American consumers.
  We also agreed last night that combined with increased and sustained 
investment in clean alternative fuel sources, the wind, the Sun and 
geothermal, we will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, will 
strengthen the economy and improve our environment.
  If we do all of these, will we solve all the energy problems? Of 
course not. But we will have a significantly strong step in that 
direction. That is our roadmap for going forward. We hope both the 
Republican leader and his caucus will work with us to reject 
obstruction and embrace the progress that the American people deserve.
  I yield the floor.

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