[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 15449-15450]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




  NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2013--MOTION TO 
                           PROCEED--Continued

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SCHUMER. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum 
call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                            The Fiscal Cliff

  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I rise to discuss the state of the 
ongoing negotiations to avert the fiscal cliff.
  So far there has been little progress reported at the negotiating 
table. Since the President's very productive meeting with the 
bipartisan leaders from the House and Senate on November 16, the 
subsequent staff talks have

[[Page 15450]]

produced no breakthroughs. Republicans in the room are not yet 
acknowledging the need to let tax breaks for the very wealthiest 
Americans expire, nor are they offering the kind of reasonable reforms 
to entitlement programs that Democrats can be expected to support.
  But despite this impasse, as Leader McConnell described it on the 
floor yesterday, I am optimistic we can still get a deal by Christmas. 
I detect a great deal of progress being made beneath the surface. You 
only need to turn on television these past couple of days to observe 
the signs of this progress.
  For nearly three decades, a rightwing Washington lobbyist has exerted 
a stranglehold on mainstream Republicans over the issue of taxes, 
threatening political retaliation against any lawmaker who dared to 
vote for any fiscal solution that asked the wealthy to pay their fair 
share. But in the 3 weeks since the election, one Republican after 
another has been rebuking this lobbyist for his uncompromising stance 
on taxes. Republicans in both the House and Senate are deciding they no 
longer want to be married to this pledge. Republicans are saying they 
want a divorce from Grover Norquist. That alone is a leading indicator 
that a fiscal deal is within reach. Both sides are still far apart and 
discussions over the next few weeks will be difficult. But with each 
new Republican disavowing Grover Norquist, the chance of a deal rises 
sharply.
  First there was Saxby Chambliss, an honorable Member of this body and 
a charter member of the Gang of Six, who has spent the last 2 years 
trying to negotiate a bipartisan compromise in the best of faith. 
Senator Chambliss is a signer of the Norquist pledge, but he went on 
TV--not somewhere else but down in Georgia--last week and bravely said:

       I care about my country more than I do about a 20-year-old 
     pledge.

  Then on ABC this past Sunday, Lindsey Graham said:

       The only pledge we should be making is to each other to 
     avoid becoming Greece.

  On the very same program, my friend from New York, Congressman Pete 
King, said the pledge no longer applied because, ``the world has 
changed. And the economic situation is different.''
  These were just two interviews with George Stephanopoulos. But 
sometimes progress on the Sunday news shows can foreshadow progress in 
the negotiating room. In fact, these comments by Senators Chambliss, 
Graham, and Congressman King appear to have started a trend.
  Yesterday, Senator Corker echoed their sentiments. He released his 
own fiscal plan, which contains $1 trillion in new revenues. Asked 
whether his inclusion of revenues puts him at cross purposes with 
Grover Norquist, Senator Corker said:

       I'm not obligated on the pledge. The only thing I'm 
     honoring is the oath I take when I serve, when I'm sworn in 
     this January.

  Senator Murkowski said similar things yesterday. Even Senator 
Sessions showed hints of compromise when he said, about the pledge:

       We've got to deal with the crisis we face. We've got to 
     deal with the political reality of the President's victory.

  And then this morning, the vaunted Wall Street Journal editorial page 
even seemed to distance itself from Mr. Norquist. Of the need to 
compromise with President Obama, the Journal counseled:

       This is where Mr. Norquist can give some ground. If taxes 
     are going up anyway because the Bush rates expire, and 
     Republicans can stop them from going up as much as they 
     otherwise would, then pledge-takers deserve some credit for 
     that.

  We disagree with the forms of revenues that most of these Republicans 
have in mind. Many of the Republicans expressing openness to revenues 
want to pursue them only through tax reform next year. And even then, 
they are only willing to consider limits of deductions as opposed to 
rate increases on the very wealthy.
  Democrats, on the other hand, believe that even if Republicans want 
to kick tax reform into 2013, a significant downpayment on revenues 
must be enacted before January 1. And we further believe that the 
fairest, most straightforward way to make that downpayment on revenues 
is by decoupling the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Limiting deductions 
is a necessary revenue-raising component of a grand bargain, but it 
does not and cannot replace the need for restoring the Clinton-era 
rates for the top two tax brackets. Republicans are not quite there yet 
in terms of acknowledging this, but they are moving slowly in the right 
direction.
  As the Washington Post reported this weekend, for the first time in 
decades there is a bipartisan consensus in favor of asking the wealthy 
to pay a little more to reduce the deficit. The question is how to do 
it. This is an encouraging development. It suggests that Republicans 
are slowly absorbing one of the lessons of the 2012 election which is 
that elections continue to be won in the middle, and victories will 
remain elusive for any party that caters to special-interest groups 
that occupy either the far left or the far right.
  Over the years the Democratic Party has wrestled with the same issues 
Republicans are facing. When I was elected to Congress in 1981, crime 
was ripping apart my district. I came to Washington with the goal of 
working to pass new laws to crack down on crime. Lo and behold, I found 
that the Democratic Congress at the time was literally outsourcing the 
drafting of crime legislation to the ACLU. I have great respect for the 
views of civil libertarians. But at that time, the activists' motto 
was, Let 100 guilty people go free lest you convict 1 innocent person. 
That view was far outside the mainstream, but it dominated our party's 
thinking on crime for better than a decade. Our party suffered for it. 
We didn't snap out of it until President Clinton passed the crime bill 
in the 1990s. After that, we won back the trust of moderate, middle-
class voters.
  I know the echo chambers some of our Republican colleagues are in and 
I know how difficult it is. But if history shows anything, after 
suffering some bad losses at the polls earlier this month many 
Republicans are now realizing the need to snap out of it on taxes.
  Grover Norquist has had a good run. It has lasted far longer than 15 
minutes. But his stringent views make him an outlier now. It is not 
unlike what happened to his longtime friend Ralph Reed, who steered the 
Republican Party too far right on social issues in the 1990s and is 
hardly heard from anymore.
  Mr. Norquist will likely not be departing the scene anytime soon, but 
perhaps he could switch his focus to immigration. He makes a lot of 
sense on the need for a comprehensive immigration reform bill, and I 
would be first to work with him on that. But as the events of the last 
weeks show, on taxes, Grover Norquist is out on an island.
  In conclusion, I salute my colleagues on the other side of the aisle 
who have disavowed his group's pledge. I will encourage others to do 
the same. The more who do, the closer we will come to a bipartisan 
agreement on our fiscal problems.
  Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.

                          ____________________