[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Pages 11164-11165]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   UNANIMOUS-CONSENT REQUEST--S. 3421

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, it should be perfectly clear by now 
that Democrats here in Washington have no intention of being encumbered 
by the will of the American people. Whether it is health care, 
financial reform, creating private sector jobs, spending, debt, or even 
the oilspill, Americans say they want one thing and Democrats do 
another.
  And we are seeing the same thing in the ongoing debate over the 
deficit extenders bill that is on the floor. Americans are anxious in a 
way they have never been about our monstrous national debt. Yet for 
nearly 3 weeks now, Democrats in Congress have been arguing among 
themselves not about how much they should cut the debt down but about 
how much they should increase it.
  So we can add this to the list of crises Americans are begging 
Congress to address but which Democrats are either ignoring or 
exploiting to advance their agenda. The White House likes to talk about 
inflection points. Well, for most Americans, a $13 trillion debt should 
have marked an inflection point for Democrats on the issue of debt. But 
the debate over this extenders bill has shown Democrats to be oblivious 
to the gravity of this crisis.
  At a moment when certain European countries appear to be coming apart 
because of their own debt, Democrats in Washington still can't break 
the habit. Economists are warning us every day to get the debt under 
control. Just today, in fact, it was reported that Germany's Economy 
Minister is pleading with the Obama administration to cut spending and 
to restore fiscal balance or risk instability.
  Yet nearly 3 weeks into the debate over the extenders bill, Democrats 
still can't agree to pass it without borrowing more money to pay for 
it. Republicans offered a fully offset 30-day extension of this bill 
that didn't just cover its cost but actually reduced the deficit in the 
process. Democrats rejected it. We offered an amendment that would have 
provided a long term extension of the expired provisions and lowered 
the deficit by $55 billion over 10 years. Democrats rejected that too.
  This should be an easy one, but Democrats are making it difficult 
because they just can't seem to bring themselves to pay for 
legislation.
  But the American people aren't conflicted on this issue. And they 
want us to show we are serious, that we are willing to make the same 
kinds of tough choices they themselves have been forced to make in this 
recession. So I say to my friend from Nevada I am going to ask, now, a 
unanimous consent.
  I again ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the 
consideration of Calendar No. 411, S. 3421; further, that the bill be 
read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon 
the table. Before the chair rules, for clarity, this is a paid-for 30-
day extension of the extenders bill.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  The majority leader.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I realize 
very much the financial situation our country finds itself in today. 
Everyone on this side of the aisle recognizes that. We also recognize 
the fact that the problems dealing with the economy were not created by 
the Democrats or even President Obama. The problems were created by 
virtue of 8 years of wild spending by a prior administration, a war 
costing $1 trillion that was unpaid for, and tax cuts amounting to more 
than $1 trillion, unpaid for, that caused this huge recession.
  President Obama has been doing his best, working with us to get our 
way out of that financial situation in which we find ourselves. I am 
very amazed at the logic of my friends on the other side of the aisle 
suddenly seeing fiscal austerity as the way to go when the wild 
spending went on for 8 years without a word having been spoken.
  We are doing everything we can to make sure the country continues on 
an upward scale. It has now. We have a long ways to go. But as 
economists say, the hemorrhaging has stopped, and we are trying to work 
our way into a vibrant economy. We are a long ways from that, and I 
recognize that.
  In today's newspaper a number of columnists are talking about being 
very careful what we do. We are very aware of the pain people are 
feeling out there; for example, those people who are unemployed, long-
term unemployed. As I have said on this floor before, Mark Zandi--John 
McCain's financial adviser when he ran for President--has said the most 
important thing we can do is give those people unemployment benefits 
because it goes right back into the economy and helps the economy.
  A Nobel Prize-winning economist writes a column several times a week 
in the New York Times. Today he talks about the fact that we have to be 
very careful how we rein in spending. We know we have to do it, but we 
have to be very careful doing it.
  In 1937, after we had pulled our way out of the economic crisis we 
found ourselves in, spending was reined in too quickly and it caused 
the country to go back into, not a depression but a recession. World 
War II saved our country financially in that regard.
  I know my friend's heart is in the right place, but his logic is in 
the wrong place, and I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  The Republican leader.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, our good friends on the other side 
still do not seem to get it. They are twisting and turning, not in an 
effort to cut the debt but to borrow as much as they can with the 
minimum votes they need to pass this bill. And the best part of all is 
their justification. You guessed it. They want to blame President Bush 
for their own unwillingness to pay for this bill. They say that because 
the debt grew during his administration they are immune to any 
criticism for dramatically increasing it themselves.
  Well, I have some news for our friends on the other side: Nobody is 
buying that anymore, because there is not any comparison here. When 
President Obama took office, the deficits he inherited were projected 
to $4.3 trillion over the next 10 years. One year later, one year after 
President Bush left office, the Congressional Budget Office had to put 
out a revised estimate: After 1 year of Democrats controlling 
Washington, estimated deficits just over the next decade had nearly 
doubled to $8.1 trillion, in the middle of a recession; in other words, 
at a time when projected revenues coming in are actually decreasing.
  Or consider this: The largest annual deficit ever accumulated by the 
previous administration was $455 billion. The largest annual deficit 
ever accumulated by the previous administration was $455 billion. So 
what did President Obama do when he took office? He wrote a budget that 
guarantees average annual deficits of more than double that every year 
for the next 10 years. More than doubles the largest deficit we had 
during the Bush years and anticipates that for every year for the next 
decade.
  So the kind of spending and debt Democrats are engaged in and which 
they are committed to continue year after year is like nothing this 
country has ever seen. We have never seen anything like this. It 
threatens not only the livelihoods of our children, it threatens our 
national security and the very safety net Democrats claim they want to 
protect.
  The fact is, the longer we wait to address this debt in a serious 
manner, the more that safety net actually frays and the harder this 
crisis will be to address. At some point a choice has to be made, and 
that point is now.
  I noticed that the President's Chief of Staff had some ideas over the 
weekend about how to frame up the November elections. I cannot think of 
a better example of how detached the Democrats seem to be at this 
moment from the concerns of the American people. Americans want to know 
what is being done to fix a broken pipe at the bottom of the Gulf, not 
what is being done to fix the election. The White House might view the 
upcoming election as its biggest crisis at the moment, but the American 
people are focused on fixing this pipe and cleaning up this mess.

[[Page 11165]]

Two months of delays and bureaucratic redtape have done nothing to 
solve the crisis, but they have done a lot to discredit the kind of 
big-government solutions that Democrats continue to promote. Every day 
the oil continues to flow is a day Americans' faith in government ends.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, my friend says he has never seen anything 
like this. Well, I have never seen anything like this reasoning. 
Everyone knows that President Obama did not cause the oil gushing into 
the ocean, and he has done his utmost to try to alleviate the pain and 
suffering of the people in the gulf. He had the good fortune of getting 
the company responsible for this oil gushing out of the ocean to come 
up with a $20 billion trust fund to pay the people who suffered. There 
were some Republicans last week who said they thought it was wrong for 
the President to do that. But that was a very small minority who 
believed that. I have never seen anything like this. So President Obama 
is not responsible for the oil gushing out of the Earth into the ocean, 
and President Obama is not responsible for the severe recession that 
hit this country in the last few months of the Bush administration.
  I cannot imagine anyone thinking we should not have taken the 
measures we did to help bolster the economy. The economic recovery 
package created millions of jobs. There is still money in the pipeline 
to create more jobs. And as it says in this one op-ed piece in the New 
York Times today:

       And some of the most vocal deficit scolds in Congress are 
     working hard to reduce taxes for the handful of lucky 
     Americans who are heirs to multimillion-dollar estates. This 
     would do nothing for the economy now, but it will reduce 
     revenue by billions of dollars a year, permanently.

  It will be interesting to see in the next few weeks how these same 
budget hawks feel about the estate taxes that we have to address. I 
would hope we can all be calm and deliberate here. We have a few weeks 
left. We have 2 weeks in this week period, 4 or 5 the next work period 
to get some things done here.
  We have appropriations bills we have to do. We have these tax 
extenders we have been working on, as I indicated, for 8 weeks. We have 
the unemployment benefits we need to extend. People are now desperate 
for that money. We have also something to help States called FMAP, 
which helps for Medicaid, which has been such a drain on the States 
because of the tremendous problems we have had with people being out of 
work and needing to go on Medicaid because there is no place else for 
them to go for health care.
  I would hope we can move forward on the legislation that we tried try 
to finish last week. I am grateful we were able to finally get the 
short-term fix on the patients who are Medicare recipients. Now if we 
can get something done in the House there, doctors will be able to be 
reimbursed not at the fat and sassy rate, but at least it will be 
better than the 21-percent cut that was going to go into effect today 
or tomorrow.

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