[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 18362-18364]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




          WORKFORCE INVESTMENT ACT OF 2013--MOTION TO PROCEED

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I move to proceed to Calendar No. 243, S. 
1356.
  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will report the motion.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       Motion to proceed to Calendar No. 243, S. 1356, a bill to 
     amend the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 to strengthen the 
     United States workforce development system through innovation 
     in, and alignment and improvement of, employment, training, 
     and education programs in the United States, and to promote 
     individual and national economic growth, and for other 
     purposes.


                                Schedule

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, following my remarks and those of Senator 
McConnell, the Senate will proceed to executive session to consider the 
nomination of Patricia Millett to be U.S. circuit judge for the D.C. 
Circuit and immediately vote on confirmation of that nomination.
  Senators should expect additional votes this morning with respect to 
reconsideration of the cloture vote on the nomination of Mel Watt to be 
Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.


                      millett and watt nominations

  Mr. President, this morning the Senate will consider the nomination 
of Patricia Millett to serve on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, 
considered by many to be the second highest court in the land. We 
postponed this vote last night out of consideration for a number of 
Senators whose flights were delayed by bad weather. I thank my 
colleagues for their patience. And I am pleased that today Ms. Millett 
will finally get the fair, up-or-down vote she deserves.
  Ms. Millett is exceedingly qualified for this position. She graduated 
at the top of her class from the University of Illinois at Urbana and 
attended Harvard Law School. Ms. Millett has argued more than 32 cases 
before the Supreme Court, including one while her husband was deployed 
overseas with the U.S. Navy. She also served as Assistant Solicitor 
General under both President Bill Clinton and President George Bush.
  She enjoys bipartisan support from a variety of law enforcement 
officials, legal professionals, and military organizations. And it is 
my honor to help confirm a woman whom colleagues have called fair-
minded, principled, and exceptionally gifted.
  I will also move to reconsider the nomination of Congressman Mel Watt 
to serve as Administrator of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
  Congressman Watt graduated from the University of North Carolina at 
Chapel Hill and Yale Law School. He has represented North Carolina's 
12th Congressional District since 1993 and served as chairman of the 
Congressional Black Caucus. And as a senior member of the House 
Financial Services Committee, Mr. Watt understands the mistakes that 
led to the housing crisis.
  Yet last month Senate Republicans blocked Congressman Watt's 
nomination--the first time a sitting Member of Congress has been 
filibustered since 1843, since before the Civil War. They denied 
Congressman Watt even the courtesy of an up-or-down vote.
  Congressman Watt proposed legislation to crack down on the worst 
abuses in mortgage lending and helped pass the Dodd-Frank bill to 
prevent predatory lending. By any measure, Congressman Watt is 
qualified to help struggling homeowners recover from the worst economic 
downturn in generations.
  And at a moment when America still faces difficult economic times--
and as the housing market is finally beginning to recover--it is 
crucial the Senate confirm the most talented and dedicated individuals 
to serve in the executive branch of government.
  It is critical that the Senate confirm Congressman Watt to lead the 
Federal Housing Finance Agency.
  This week the Senate will also consider a number of other highly 
qualified judicial and executive branch nominees.
  The 13 district court nominees on the calendar have been waiting an 
average of 56 days for a confirmation vote--almost twice as long as the 
average at this point in President Bush's second term.
  One of these district court nominees, Elizabeth Wolford, has been 
waiting 130 days.
  There are also 75 executive branch nominees currently ready to be 
confirmed by the Senate who have waited an average of 140 days for 
confirmation.
  I want to remind my colleagues that, as always, there is an easy way 
and a hard way to process these nominations. And the more time the 
Senate wastes burning the hours and days between votes, the more likely 
the Senate will hold late-night and weekend votes this work period.


                   Recognition of the Minority Leader

  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Republican leader is recognized.


                       Remembering Nelson Mandela

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, tens of thousands gathered today in 
Soweto to pay their last respects to a man who symbolized so much for 
so many, and it is not hard to see why. Politicians come and go, 
Presidents rise and fall, but Nelson Mandela was more than a 
politician, more than just a foreign leader. He was a symbol--a symbol 
of freedom and hope, not only for his own people but for all people. We 
also remember Nelson Mandela as a symbol of reconciliation, especially 
when he had every reason not to be. How many of us could spend so many 
years in confinement--away from people we love, with little to do but 
mull the circumstances of our incarceration--and emerge so forgiving 
toward our captors?
  To me it was telling to see that one of the many people paying 
respects to Nelson Mandela this week was an Afrikaner named Christo 
Brand. The two men struck up an improbable but lasting friendship 
during Mandela's time on Robben Island. I say ``improbable'' because 
Brand was his jailer.
  The story goes that years after his release from prison, President 
Mandela

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was attending a ceremony and greeting Members of Parliament when he 
spotted Brand out across the room. Mandela lifted his arms and 
announced to everyone that this man had been his warden but he was also 
his friend. Then he asked Brand to join him in a group photo. ``You 
must stand next to me,'' he insisted. ``We belong together.'' I think 
that says it all.
  Nelson Mandela could have followed the example of other leaders in 
the region; he could have led South Africa down the path of Zimbabwe, 
but he did not. He urged his country to embrace inclusion and freedom 
and democracy instead. He asked his countrymen to stand with him 
because he knew that, as he once said to Christo Brand, his people 
``belong together.'' So this morning the Senate joins the world in 
mourning the loss of Nelson Mandela. May his commitment to freedom and 
reconciliation continue to inspire.


                          Advancing an Agenda

  Now, Mr. President, on to the business at hand.
  I want to start out by saying that I think it was important for all 
of us to get back home and hear from our constituents over the past 
couple weeks. I talked with a lot of Kentuckians, and I can tell you 
there is a lot of anxiety and a lot of frustration out there. Folks are 
frustrated and upset by what is happening with their health care under 
ObamaCare, and they are outraged at the tactics and the outright 
deception--deception--that led to its passage.
  It is now clear that the President knew perfectly well that a lot of 
folks would not be able to keep the plans they had and liked, despite 
the endless assurances to the contrary they heard from the President 
himself. Many are also starting to realize that the talking points they 
heard about their premiums and keeping their doctors were not worth the 
paper they were written on either.
  The response they have gotten from the White House in the face of all 
this is just as bad. In the face of all the hardship and disruption 
this law is causing for literally millions of Americans, the White 
House is defiant. In the face of all of this, the President is trying 
to convince people that somehow we are the problem. According to the 
President, the problem is not the law. The problem is the people who 
are unhappy with it. The people who are unhappy with it, the President 
says, are the problem. This is exactly what folks are frustrated with--
the idea that Washington knows best.
  So we are going to keep fighting this fight. If anybody needed any 
proof that Big Government liberalism does not work, they have gotten a 
clinic over the past 2 months. It is clearer now than ever that we need 
to replace this law with commonsense, patient-centered reforms that 
will actually drive down costs and increase innovation.
  The idea that making our health care system more like the Department 
of Motor Vehicles will somehow improve the final product has now been 
thoroughly discredited, and a thousand Presidential speeches are not 
going to change that.
  But here is the larger story: ObamaCare is not an isolated case. It 
may be the most obvious example of this administration's determination 
to advance its agenda by any means possible, but it is one example of 
many.
  The latest example was the administration's complicity in the power 
grab we saw last month in the Senate. News reports suggest that the 
President, who denounced this tactic when Republicans thought about it 
back in 2005, was actively lobbying for it ahead of the majority 
leader's fateful decision to pull the trigger.
  So the President and the majority leader were for the protection of 
minority rights in the Senate until they were no longer in the 
minority. At that point, minority rights, the rules of the Senate, and 
the principle of a meaningful check on the Executive became an 
inconvenience--an inconvenience--that stood in the way of their desire 
for more power.
  As I indicated last month, this was a pure power grab, plain and 
simple. If the majority party cannot be expected to follow the rules, 
then there are not any rules.
  So this was a grave mistake, and it was a grave betrayal of trust, 
since some of the main players had previously vowed they would never do 
it, and then they did--just as the President had vowed that if you like 
your health care you could keep it. For the President and his enablers 
in Congress, the ends now clearly justify the means, and that is a very 
dangerous place for us to be.
  So Republicans will continue to speak out against these offenses 
against our institutions and against the American people, who have a 
right to expect elected leaders to keep their commitments and respect 
the rules and our laws. The American people have a right to that.
  The American people have given us divided government. The 
administration needs to accept that fact. They need to work with the 
government that the people have given them, not the one they wish they 
had. They need to stop viewing the rules that govern the rest of us as 
mere suggestions to follow as they wish, while the American people are 
left to suffer the consequences.
  As I have indicated, we see the results of this mindset most 
powerfully with ObamaCare--a law that this administration was 
determined to force through--determined to force through--by hook or by 
crook, regardless of what half-truths it had to repeat to get there, 
regardless of which Senators it had to coax and cajole.
  But the pattern did not end with the law's passage. The 
administration has repeatedly--repeatedly--invoked executive power to 
change whatever parts of the law prove inconvenient. Its friends begged 
for relief from the law, so they carved out special loopholes. 
Statutory deadlines became an irritation, so they waived them. 
``Incorrect promises'' made to sell the law became an embarrassment, so 
they changed entire sections on the fly.
  To many Washington Democrats, this is all fine--not because they 
necessarily want to circumvent the law, perhaps, but because they feel 
justified in doing so if that is what it takes to enact their agenda.
  We have seen Democrats use this same approach with immigration 
policy, with welfare reform, with recess appointments. We have seen 
them use it to justify government-sanctioned harassment of entire 
groups of people over at the IRS.
  Two weeks ago, we saw Washington Democrats take this ends-justifies-
the-means approach to a whole new level entirely, by eliminating--
eliminating--the right of the minority party to be heard in the 
Senate--something they themselves had warned against for years when 
they were in the minority, something the Vice President called ``a 
naked power grab'' when he was in the Senate.
  Washington Democrats changed our democracy irrevocably--irrevocably. 
They did something they basically promised they would never do. And to 
what end? To what end? To pack the courts with judges they expect will 
rubberstamp the President's partisan agenda, to eliminate one of the 
last remaining obstacles standing between the President and the 
enactment of his agenda through executive fiat. In short, because they 
wanted power that the voters have denied them at the ballot box, they 
tried to get it another way.
  So before we all vote this morning, I just want to make sure 
everybody understands what this vote is all about. Two weeks ago the 
President and his Democratic allies defied two centuries of tradition, 
their own prior statements, and--in the case of some Democratic 
leaders--their own public commitments about following the rules of the 
Senate.
  They did this for one reason: to advance an agenda the American 
people do not want. It is an agenda that runs straight through the D.C. 
Circuit. So now they are putting their people in place, to quote one 
member of their leadership, ``one way or another.''
  This vote is not about any one nominee. It is not about Patricia 
Millett. It is about an attitude on the left that says the ends justify 
the means--whatever it takes. They will do whatever it takes to get 
what they want. That is why we are here today, and that is why I will 
be opposing this nomination.

[[Page 18364]]

  Washington Democrats, unfortunately, are focusing their energy on 
saying and doing anything--anything it takes--to circumvent the 
representatives of the people. But, ultimately--ultimately--they will 
be accountable to the American people, and the American people will 
have their say again very soon--sooner than many of our colleagues 
might hope.


                       Reservation of Leader Time

  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Booker). Under the previous order, the 
leadership time is reserved.

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