[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 19423-19425]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         FAREWELL TO THE SENATE

  Mr. BUNNING. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Missouri, a 
dear friend of mine and someone who has unusual wisdom in his remarks 
today. I listened to many of them. I just hope I have a few that are as 
well thought out as my good friend from Missouri.
  I wish to take a few moments to thank all my colleagues and other 
individuals who have come to the Chamber to hear me bid farewell. That 
doesn't mean I will not speak again. That just means I am bidding 
farewell and this is a farewell speech.
  I have had the great fortune of having three wonderful careers during 
my life: one as a husband and father of 9 children and a grandfather of 
40, one as a Major League baseball player for 27 years, and one in 
public service for 30 years. Many people often talk to me about how 
different my baseball and public service careers are, but they really 
are not so different.
  I have been booed by 60,000 fans in Yankee Stadium, standing alone on 
the mound, so I have never cared if I stood alone in the Congress, as 
long as I stood by my beliefs and my values. I have also thought that 
being able to throw a curve ball never was a bad skill for a politician 
to have.
  I came to Washington, DC, in 1987, when the people of the Fourth 
District in northern Kentucky gave me the distinct honor to serve them. 
I did not know then that the people of Kentucky had bestowed upon me 
the privilege of representing them for 24 years. I have the same 
conservative principles in 2010 that I had when I first was elected to 
Congress.
  Over the years, I have always done what I thought was right for 
Kentucky and my country. I did not run for public service for fame or 
public acclaim. When I cast my votes, I thought about how they would 
affect my grandchildren and the next generation of Kentuckians, not 
where the political winds at the time were blowing. Words cannot 
express my gratitude to the people of Kentucky for giving me the 
distinct honor of serving them for 12 years in the House of 
Representatives and 12 years in the Senate.
  Here I stand, though, in the Senate Chamber about to say goodbye 
after nearly a quarter of a century in Congress. I have reflected much 
about my time here. As I stand here at the desk of Henry Clay, the 
great Kentuckian, I am proud to have had the opportunity to serve in a 
place in history. I thought it fitting to discuss the legislative items 
of which I am most proud.
  I have three bills I am particularly proud I was able to accomplish 
signing into law. One of the things I am most proud of during my time 
in Congress is helping pass legislation that repealed the earnings 
limit on older Americans under the Social Security system. Social 
Security used to penalize many older Americans for working by reducing 
their Social Security benefits by $1 for every $3 they earned, if they 
made more than the earnings limit which was about $12,000 in 1995. This 
was an unfair tax on seniors and punished them for continuing to work. 
I worked hard for many years in both the House and Senate to get this 
unfair earnings limit eliminated.
  Finally, in 2000, after I had been elected to the Senate, it passed 
and was signed into law. This law has helped many hardworking seniors 
stay involved in their communities, remain independent, and contribute 
to society.
  Another bill I am proud of is the 2004 Flood Insurance Reformation 
Act. In 2004, I wrote the last reauthorization of the national flood 
insurance program. That law provided significant reforms to the program 
just in time for the 2004-2005 hurricane season, including Hurricane 
Katrina. Had the law not been in place, homeowners all over the gulf 
coast would not have had coverage for the flood damage to their homes. 
The 2004 law is still the framework for the program today. It was not a 
Republican accomplishment or a Democratic accomplishment. It was a 
bipartisan accomplishment.
  I worked very closely with Senator Sarbanes and Representatives 
Bereuter and Blumenthal to write and pass that law. While I believe 
that further changes are still needed to the program, the 2004 law made 
meaningful changes that put the program on a more sound financial 
footing.
  Unfortunately, passage of the bill was not the end of the story. What 
happened or, more accurately, what did not happen illustrates one 
reason people are fed up with Washington: because government does not 
do what it is supposed to do. Despite the fact the bill passed both the 
Senate and the House unanimously, FEMA refused to implement all of its 
provisions in a timely manner. The most glaring example was the appeals 
process created by the bill for property owners to appeal claims they 
thought were not settled fairly or correctly. The law gave FEMA 6 
months to write the rules. FEMA, instead, took almost 2 years from the 
day the bill passed to put even draft rules out. They probably would 
not have done it then, if it was not for the right of one Senator to 
object. I had to hold the nominee to head the agency to get the 
attention of the Bush administration and move the Secretary of Homeland 
Security to finally publish the rules. It should not have been that 
way.
  The third bill I am grateful was signed into law is the Emergency 
Employee Occupational Illness Compensation Program. The Paducah, KY, 
gaseous diffusion plant is the only operating uranium enrichment plant 
in the United States. When I came to the Senate, I held the first 
hearing to look at cleaning up the contamination the Department of 
Energy left at the site. After the hearing, I focused on cleaning up 
the site. A lot has been cleaned up since that first hearing 10 years 
ago. I also worked hard to provide compensation to workers who suffered 
serious illnesses as a result of their employment at the DOE nuclear 
weapons program plant.
  This energy employment compensation program was set up because many 
workers served our country's nuclear programs during the Cold War and 
their health was put at risk without their knowledge--the first 
compensation bill passed in 2000, with the help of a bipartisan group 
of Congressmen and Senators. I then became aware that DOE was slow-
walking claims processing and payment to many claimants and their 
portion of the compensation program. So in 2004, again, with the help 
of a bipartisan group of Senators and Congressmen, I spearheaded 
legislation that moved the entire program over to the Department of 
Labor which had sped up and streamlined compensation for the sick 
nuclear workers.
  Along with many of my achievements, I also had time to reflect on 
some of the disappointments I wish I had been able to fix during my 
time here. I am deeply concerned about the state of entitlement 
programs--Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. It is clear that our 
government cannot meet its future obligations and ultimately the 
American people will suffer, unfortunately. Too many Members of 
Congress are willing to look the other way and let the financial 
problems of these programs fester instead of making hard decisions. 
Congress just cannot get the courage together to address these issues 
head on.
  In fact, after President Bush's second election, Congress briefly 
focused on the problems of Social Security solvency. At the time, I was 
a strong supporter of private investment accounts but certainly 
realized that the whole system needed an overhaul and was open to many 
different options. Toward the end of the debate, I was willing to 
tackle Social Security reform even if we did not do investment 
accounts, as long as we did something. However, it quickly became 
apparent that many

[[Page 19424]]

Members of Congress--even some in my own party--were not willing to get 
serious about this. Six years later, Congress still has not touched 
Social Security reform, and the program is even in worse financial 
shape.
  Medicare and Medicaid are in the same position. In 2006, Congress 
finally got serious about spending in these programs and passed the 
Deficit Reduction Act. This bill slowed the rate of growth--the rate of 
growth--in Medicare by $6 billion and in Medicaid by $5 billion over 5 
years. Let me be clear about this. We were not cutting spending in 
these programs. We were just slowing the growth.
  Well, you would have thought the sky was falling when we did this. 
The longer Congress takes to honestly tackle these fiscal challenges, 
the harder it will be to fix these programs. This means bigger cuts, 
bigger deficits, and bigger tax increases.
  Health care is another area where Congress should have done better. 
The other side of the aisle's stubborn refusal to compromise and, more 
importantly, listen to the desires of the American people on health 
care reform led to the passage of a bill that is one of the worst 
pieces of legislation I have seen in Congress in 24 years.
  The health care bill is clearly unconstitutional, will force millions 
of Americans to lose the health insurance they currently enjoy, give 
the IRS--that is the Internal Revenue Service--the power to police and 
tax Americans who do not have health insurance, and takes over $500 
billion out of Medicare programs to pay for new spending.
  Despite all the rhetoric from the administration and Democratic 
leaders about being transparent and open and willing to compromise, it 
quickly became clear that they only wanted Republican support if we 
agreed to everything they wanted to do. Well, compromise does not work 
like that. A compromise means you actually have to take ideas from 
other people instead of just giving lip service.
  One of the other recent disappointments was the financial regulation 
bill passed earlier this year. Before my first election, I spent 31 
years working in the security business. That was back when baseball 
players did not make millions of dollars a year and had to have jobs in 
the off-season to pay the bills. I spent nearly all of my time in 
Congress on either the old House Banking Committee or the Senate 
Banking Committee, so this is something I know a great deal about and 
care about.
  There were, and are, real problems in our financial system. But that 
bill is not going to fix them and almost certainly sows the seeds for 
the next banking and financial crisis while, at the same time, adding 
more burdens on the economies struggling to recover.
  That bill did not replace bailouts with bankruptcy. It made bailouts 
a permanent part of the financial system. The bill did not force the 
too-big-to-fail banks to get smaller. It gave them special status. The 
bill ignored the role of housing finance and left Fannie Mae and 
Freddie Mac alone. The housing crisis could not have happened without 
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
  The Senate failed to act on a bill to reform Fannie and Freddie 
passed by the Banking Committee in 2006, and that failure is going to 
end up costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Congress has 
to do something soon to get them off the taxpayers' life support they 
have been on since 2008. But, unfortunately, that did not happen in the 
financial reform bill.
  The bill also ignores the Federal Reserve's failures as a regulator 
and, instead, gave them more power. And, worst of all, the bill did 
nothing to rein in the largest single cause of the current financial 
crisis and most other financial crises in the past: flawed monetary 
policy by the Federal Reserve.
  Nothing Congress has done will stop the next bubble or collapse if 
the Fed continues with its easy money policies. Cheap money will always 
distort prices and lead to dangerous behavior. No amount of regulation 
can contain it.
  For many years, I was a lone critic of the Federal Reserve. 
Particularly, no one questioned Alan Greenspan, despite his policies 
causing two recessions and two asset bubbles. I was the lone vote 
against Ben Bernanke in 2006. I was the lone vote because I thought he 
would continue the Greenspan monetary and regulatory policies. Well, he 
did. He kept it up--a flawed monetary policy--and was slow to regulate. 
Then, in 2008, he took the Federal Reserve into fiscal policy by 
bailing out Bear Stearns and, later, AIG, and just about every other 
major financial institution in the country. As we saw, even last week 
around the world, Chairman Bernanke compromised the independence of the 
Fed and turned it into an arm of the U.S. Treasury.
  Things have not gotten better since then either. Chairman Bernanke is 
continuing with the easy monetary policy, and a month ago started the 
printing presses again to buy up more Treasury debt. While the Fed may 
be propping up the banks with plenty of cheap money, he is undermining 
our currency.
  Other central banks are moving away from the dollar and gold is 
continuing to climb. Just like the soaring national debt and 
entitlement costs, the destruction of the dollar is not sustainable. 
Congress must act to rein in the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and 
the Fed before they destroy our currency and permanently damage our 
economy and financial system.
  Public awareness of what the Fed is doing is increasing, while public 
opinion of the Fed is falling. Chairman Bernanke had nearly twice as 
many votes cast against him in the Senate earlier this year than any 
other Fed Chairman in history. It is just not outside the Fed that 
opposition is growing. Regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents are 
speaking up and voting against Fed policy. Even some members of the Fed 
Board are recognizing the dangers of Chairman Bernanke's policies. I am 
more hopeful now than ever that Chairman Bernanke and the Fed will not 
be allowed to continue the flawed policies and act as an arm of the 
Treasury and the major banks.
  As I stand here and reflect upon my time in Congress, I can honestly 
say I am gratified, despite the ups and downs, to have had the 
opportunity to serve my country and serve the people of the 
Commonwealth of Kentucky.
  Twenty-four years is a very large portion of my life and my family's 
life. I thank my nine children: Barb, Jim, Joan, Cat, Bill, Bridget, 
Mark, Amy, and David, and my 40 grandchildren, who inspired me to try 
to make this country better and better for the next generation to live.
  I also want to give a special thanks to my wife Mary, the mother of 
my nine children and my childhood sweetheart from the fourth grade. I 
thank her for being at my side through all of the road trips, the late 
nights I spent in the House and the Senate. She is my better half, who 
supported and stood by me. She is my lighthouse that always shone in 
the dark during the good and the bad times of public service. She 
prayed me to my wins in public service and in baseball, and I never 
could have done any of these achievements without her.
  As this chapter in my life comes to an end and I flip the page into a 
new chapter, I thank very much all the other people in my life who have 
stood by me. Without the friendship and support of so many over the 
years, I never would have been able and had the privilege to represent 
Kentucky in the House and the Senate.
  As I leave here today, I offer a little prayer for the next Congress. 
Pope John Paul II once said:

       Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having 
     the right to do what we ought.

  This is the motto I have tried to live by during my time in Congress. 
I pray that the Members of the next Congress do what is right for the 
country, not what is right for their fame and their future aspirations. 
My hope is that Congress will focus on the astronomical debt instead of 
continuing down the path of spending our future generations into higher 
taxes and a lower standard of living than we have now.
  Godspeed and God bless.
  With a sense of pride and gratitude, I will say for the last time, 
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I note the absence of a quorum.

[[Page 19425]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Manchin). The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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