[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 2]
[Senate]
[Pages 2365-2367]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             SEQUESTRATION

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, we remember President Lyndon Johnson's 
courage and skill in passing the Civil Rights Act. We remember 
President Nixon going to China. We remember President Carter and the 
Panama Canal treaties. We remember President Reagan fixing Social 
Security and George H.W. Bush balancing the budget by raising taxes. We 
remember President Clinton and welfare reform. We remember President 
George W. Bush tackling immigration reform. If the history books were 
written today, we would remember President Obama for the sequester.
  This is unique in history. This is not the way our Presidents usually 
conduct themselves. Here we have a policy that was designed to be the 
worst possible policy, and that may be what our talented, intelligent 
current President is remembered for. He is remembered for it because it 
comes from a process he recommended, he signed into law, that he has 
known about for the last year, that he has done nothing about except to 
campaign around the country blaming others for it over the last month, 
and he seems determined to keep it in law.
  Now, for what reason could this be possible?
  Well, let's go back to why the President agreed to the sequester. He 
agreed to it in 2011 after suggesting the process from which it came in 
order to get $2.2 trillion in spending reductions so he could get a 
debt ceiling increase that lasted through the election. And he did it, 
for the second reason, because he did not want to go against his own 
party's constituency in tackling the biggest problem our country 
faces--the biggest problem according to the former Chairman of the 
Joint Chiefs of Staff, the biggest problem according to the President's 
own debt commission--the out-of-control automatic spending increases 
that are in the Federal budget.
  So we are left today with a sequester--automatic spending decreases 
which are the result of the automatic spending increases in 
entitlements the President is unwilling to confront. We are slashing 
the part of the budget that is basically under control. It is growing 
at about the rate of inflation. I am talking about national defense, 
national parks, National Laboratories, Pell grants, and cancer 
research. All that is growing at about the rate of inflation. We are 
slashing that part of the budget because the President does not want to 
challenge his own party on the part of the budget that is out of 
control, growing at two or three times the rate of inflation: Medicare, 
Medicaid, Social Security, and other entitlements.
  This is not how our Presidents usually have acted when confronted 
with a great crisis. When President Johnson dealt with civil rights, he 
knew he would be terribly unpopular in Texas and throughout the South. 
When President Nixon went to China, he knew Republican conservatives 
would be angry with him. President Carter enraged many Americans by his 
support for the Panama Canal Treaty. President Reagan made many seniors 
unhappy when he fixed Social Security. George H.W. Bush probably lost 
the 1992 election when he raised taxes to balance the budget. Bill 
Clinton was pilloried by his own party when he worked with Republicans 
to reform welfare. George W. Bush made many radio talk show hosts very 
unhappy when he tried to change our immigration laws.
  Why did they do it? They did it because they were the President of 
the United States, and that is what presidents do.
  Robert Merry, a biographer of President James K. Polk, told me 
recently that every great crisis in our country has been solved by 
presidential leadership or not at all. Every great crisis in American 
history has been solved by presidential leadership or not at all. Yet 
this president seems determined not to exercise that sort of 
presidential leadership. So his presidential leadership is a colossal 
failure, first, because he will not respect this Congress and work with 
it in a way to get results that all of the presidents I just mentioned 
did.
  The New York Times had a very interesting story this Sunday about how 
President Woodrow Wilson would come down to the President's Room right 
off the Senate and sit there three days a week with the door open, and 
he got almost everything he proposed passed, until he went over the 
heads of Congress around the country about the League of Nations and 
lost.
  Or Senator Howard Baker used to tell the story of how, when Senator 
Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader, would not go down to the White 
House and have a drink with President Johnson in 1967, President 
Johnson showed up with his beagles in the Republican leader's office 
and said: Everett, if you won't come have a drink with me, I am here to 
have a drink with you.
  I am not here to advocate having drinks, but I am here to suggest 
that when they disappeared into the back room together for 45 minutes, 
that played a big role in writing the Civil Rights Act of 1968 because 
it was written in Everett Dirksen's Republican leader office right down 
the hall, at the request of the Democratic President of the United 
States.
  And Senator Harkin--I do not think he will mind me telling the story 
about the afternoon 20 years ago when he was in his office and he got a 
telephone call from President George H.W. Bush's office. Would he come 
down with a few other Congressmen? The President was there for the 
afternoon. Mrs. Bush was in Texas. They spent an hour together, and the 
President showed them around. On the way out, Senator Harkin said to 
President Bush: Mr. President, I don't want to turn this into a 
business meeting, but one of your staff members is slowing down the 
Americans with Disabilities bill. That conversation, Senator Harkin 
says, changed things at the White House and helped that bill to pass.
  Or Tip O'Neill, going into the Democratic Caucus in the 1980s and 
being criticized by his fellow caucus members: Why are you spending so 
much time with Ronald Reagan? Why are you fixing Social Security? He 
said: Because I like him. Because I like him.
  Technology has changed a lot. But human nature has not. And 
relationships are essential in the Senate, in the White House, in 
politics, in church, in business, and all of our Presidents have known 
that you need to show respect to the people with whom you work if you 
are going to solve difficult problems. That is why I am disappointed by 
our talented President's unwillingness to work with Congress. There is 
no reaching out.
  It was 18 months before he had his first meeting with the Republican 
leader one on one. He has known for a year the sequester was coming, 
but there was no meeting with the Republican or Democratic leaders that 
I know about until the day it started. It is breaking news when the 
President makes a telephone call to a Senate leader. And then the 
President spends his time running around the country taunting and 
heckling the Members of Congress that he is supposed to work with to 
get a result. What kind of leadership is that?
  I started in 1969 working in congressional relations for a President 
of the

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United States. I have worked with or for eight. I have never seen 
anything like it in my life.
  I have been a governor. That is small potatoes compared to being a 
president. I know that. But I worked with a Democratic legislature, and 
I guarantee you, if I had taunted them and heckled them and criticized 
them, I never would have gotten anything passed to improve roads or 
schools or get the auto industry into Tennessee. Instead, I would meet 
with them regularly. I would listen to them. I would change my 
proposals based on what they had to say. I would know they had to go 
back into their caucuses and still survive. I did not think about ever 
putting them in an awkward position when we were trying to get 
something done. I tried to put them in a position to make it easier to 
get something done. I changed my ideas and I could get a result. During 
elections we tried to beat each other. Between elections we sought to 
govern.
  This is all made worse by the Democratic leadership of the Senate 
deliberately bringing business to a halt we have a fiscal crisis, we 
have not had a budget in 4 years, we did not even pass any 
appropriations bills last year, there is little respect for committee 
work, and he has used the gag rule 70 times to cut off amendments from 
the Republican side of the aisle.
  For example, last week, we had several options on our side--I think 
there were some on the other side--to make the sequester go down a 
little bit easier, to make it make more common sense, and what did we 
end up doing? We were here all week, and we ended up voting on two 
proposals. They were procedural votes, and everybody knew they were 
political posturing not designed to pass. Why did we not just put it on 
the floor? There are 100 of us here.
  We are all grownups. We worked hard to get here. We have ideas. We 
might have improved the sequester. We had time to do it. But the 
Democratic leadership did not allow us to bring it up. So we end up 
with deliberately bad policy becoming law.
  It is not too late. There are things the President and we can still 
do. We could spread the pain across the whole budget. We could spread 
it across part of the budget. We could give the President more 
flexibility in making decisions. Or the President could come to us with 
his plan, this month, for dealing with the biggest problem facing our 
country: the out-of-control mandatory spending. He could do what 
Presidents Johnson and Nixon and Carter and Bush did before him. He 
could confront it, go against the grain of his party, work with Members 
of both sides, and get a result. It is not that hard to do. Senator 
Corker and I have a proposal to do it. There is the Domenici-Rivlin 
proposal to do it. There is the Ryan-Wyden proposal to do it.
  When part of the budget is growing at two to three times inflation 
and the rest is growing at about the rate of inflation, it is obvious 
which part we need to work on.
  It may be the President does not like some of us. Well, President 
Eisenhower had that same feeling about Members of Congress. Someone 
asked him: Then how do you get along with them? He said: I look first 
at the office. I respect the office. I do not think about the person 
who occupies the office.
  There are real victims here. In the short term with the sequester, 
there is cancer research, there are airline travelers, there are many 
people--the President has let us know about this--who are going to be 
hurt by this and be inconvenienced. In the long term, if we do not deal 
with this No. 1 fiscal problem we have, the real victims will be 
seniors who will not have all of their hospital bills paid in 11 years 
because the Medicare trustees have told us Medicare will not be able to 
pay all of them--the Medicare Trust Fund will be out of money--and 
young Americans will be forever destined to be the debt-paying 
generation because we and the President did not have the courage to 
face up to our responsibilities.
  So I would say, with respect, it is time for this President to show 
the kind of Presidential leadership that President Johnson did on civil 
rights, that President Nixon did on China, that President Carter did on 
the Panama Canal Treaty, that President Reagan did on Social Security, 
and that Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton and George W. Bush 
did. Respect the other branches of government. Confront your own party 
where necessary. Listen to what both have to say and fashion a 
consensus that most of us can support.
  We are one budget agreement away from reasserting our global 
preeminence and getting the economy moving again. As Robert Merry said: 
Every great crisis is solved by Presidential leadership or not at all.
  It is time, Mr. President, for Presidential leadership.
  I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the article in 
the New York Times, from Sunday, entitled ``Wilson to Obama: March 
Forth!''
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:
                                  ____


                [From The New York Times, Mar. 1, 2013]

                     Wilson to Obama: March Forth!

                           (By A. Scott Berg)

       ``There has been a change of government,'' declared Woodrow 
     Wilson in his first sentence as president of the United 
     States, one hundred years ago this Monday. Until 1937, when 
     the 20th Amendment moved Inauguration Day to late January, 
     chief executives took their oaths of office on March Fourth, 
     a date that sounds like a command.
       Nobody heeded this implied imperative more than Wilson: the 
     28th president enjoyed the most meteoric rise in American 
     history, before or since. In 1910, Wilson was the president 
     of a small men's college in New Jersey--his alma mater, 
     Princeton. In 1912, he won the presidency. (He made a brief 
     stop in between as governor of New Jersey.) Over the next 
     eight years, Wilson advanced the most ambitious agenda of 
     progressive legislation the country had ever seen, what 
     became known as ``The New Freedom.'' To this day, any 
     president who wants to enact transformative proposals can 
     learn a few lessons from the nation's scholar-president.
       With his first important piece of legislation, Wilson 
     showed that he was offering a sharp change in governance. He 
     began his crusade with a thorough revision of the tariff 
     system, an issue that, for decades, had only been discussed. 
     Powerful legislators had long rigged tariffs to buttress 
     monopolies and to favor their own interests, if not their own 
     fortunes.
       Wilson, a Democrat, thought an economic overhaul this 
     audacious demanded an equally bold presentation. Not since 
     John Adams's final State of the Union speech, in 1800, had a 
     president addressed a joint session of Congress in person. 
     But Wilson, a former professor of constitutional law (and 
     still the nation's only president with a Ph.D.), knew that he 
     was empowered ``from time to time'' to ``give to the Congress 
     information of the state of the union, and recommend to their 
     consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and 
     expedient.'' And so, on April 8, 1913, five weeks after his 
     inauguration, he appeared before the lawmakers. Even members 
     of Wilson's own party decried the maneuver as an arrogant 
     throne speech.
       The man many considered an aloof intellectual explained to 
     Congress that the president of the United States is simply 
     ``a human being trying to cooperate with other human beings 
     in a common service.'' His presence alone, to say nothing of 
     his eloquent appeal, affixed overwhelming importance to 
     tariff reform. In less than 10 minutes, Wilson articulated 
     his argument and left the Capitol.
       The next day, Wilson did something even more stunning: he 
     returned. On the second floor of the Capitol--in the North 
     Wing, steps from the Senate chamber--is the most ornate room 
     within an already grand edifice. George Washington had 
     suggested this President's Room, where he and the Senate 
     could conduct their joint business, but it was not built 
     until the 1850s. Even then, the Italianate salon, with its 
     frescoed ceiling and richly colored tiled floor, was seldom 
     used beyond the third day of March every other year, when 
     Congressional sessions ended and the president arrived to 
     sign 11th-hour legislation. Only during Wilson's tenure has 
     the President's Room served the purpose for which it was 
     designed. He frequently worked there three times a week, 
     often with the door open.
       Almost every visit Wilson made to the Capitol proved 
     productive. (As president, he appeared before joint sessions 
     of Congress more than two dozen times.) During Wilson's first 
     term, when the president was blessed with majorities in both 
     the House and the Senate, the policies of the New Freedom led 
     to the creation of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade 
     Commission, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the eight-hour 
     workday, child labor laws and workers' compensation. Wilson 
     was also able to appoint the first Jew to the Supreme Court, 
     Louis D. Brandeis.
       Even when the president became besieged with troubles, both 
     personal and political--the death of his first wife; the 
     outbreak of

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     World War I; an increasingly Republican legislative branch; 
     agonizing depression until he married a widow named Edith 
     Bolling Galt--Wilson hammered away at his progressive 
     program. In 1916, he won re-election because, as his campaign 
     slogan put it, ``He kept us out of war!'' A month after his 
     second inauguration, he appeared yet again before Congress, 
     this time, however, to convince the nation that ``the world 
     must be made safe for democracy.'' This credo became the 
     foundation for the next century of American foreign policy: 
     an obligation to assist all peoples in pursuit of freedom and 
     self-determination.
       Suddenly, the United States needed to transform itself from 
     an isolationist nation into a war machine, and Wilson 
     persuaded Congress that dozens of crucial issues (including 
     repressive espionage and sedition acts) required that 
     politics be ``adjourned.'' Wilson returned again and again to 
     the President's Room, eventually convincing Congress to pass 
     the 19th Amendment: if women could keep the home fires 
     burning amid wartime privation, the president argued, they 
     should be entitled to vote. The journalist Frank I. Cobb 
     called Wilson's control of Congress ``the most impressive 
     triumph of mind over matter known to American politics.''
       In the 1918 Congressional election--held days before the 
     armistice--Wilson largely abstained from politics, but he did 
     issue a written plea for a Democratic majority. Those who had 
     followed his earlier advice and adjourned politics felt he 
     was pulling a fast one. Republicans captured both houses. 
     With the war over, Wilson left for Paris to broker a peace 
     treaty, one he hoped would include the formation of a League 
     of Nations, where countries could settle disputes peaceably 
     and preemptively. The treaty required Senate approval, and 
     Wilson, who had been away from Washington for more than six 
     months, returned to discover that Republicans had actively, 
     sometimes secretly, built opposition to it--without even 
     knowing what the treaty stipulated.
       Recognizing insurmountable resistance on Capitol Hill, even 
     after hosting an unprecedented working meeting of the Senate 
     Foreign Relations Committee at the White House, Wilson 
     attempted an end run around the Senate: he took his case 
     directly to the people. During a 29-city tour, he slowly 
     captured public support. But then he collapsed on a train 
     between Pueblo, Colo., and Wichita, Kan., and had to be 
     rushed back to the White House. Days later he suffered a 
     stroke, which his wife, his physician and a handful of co-
     conspirators concealed from the world, leaving Mrs. Wilson to 
     decide, in her words, ``what was important and what was 
     not.''
       In March 1920, having recovered enough to wage a final 
     battle against the Republicans, Wilson could have garnered 
     support for a League of Nations by surrendering minor 
     concessions. But he refused. The treaty failed the Senate by 
     seven votes, and in 1921, the president hobbled out of the 
     White House as the lamest duck in American history, with his 
     ideals intact but his grandest ambition in tatters.
       Two months ago, our current president, facing financial 
     cliffs and sequestration and toting an ambitious agenda 
     filled with such incendiary issues as immigration reform and 
     gun control, spoke of the need to break ``the habit of 
     negotiating through crisis.'' Wilson knew how to sidestep 
     that problem. He understood that conversation often holds the 
     power to convert, that sustained dialogue is the best means 
     of finding common ground.
       Today, President Obama and Congress agree that the national 
     debt poses lethal threats to future generations, and so they 
     should declare war on that enemy and adjourn politics, at 
     least until it has been subdued. The two sides should convene 
     in the President's Room, at the table beneath the frescoes 
     named ``Legislation'' and ``Executive Authority,'' each 
     prepared to leave something on it. And then they should 
     return the next day, and maybe the day after that. Perhaps 
     the senior senator from Kentucky could offer a bottle of his 
     state's smoothest bourbon, and the president could provide 
     the branch water. All sides should remember Wilson and the 
     single factor that determines the country's glorious 
     successes or crushing failures: cooperation.
       March forth!

  Mr. ALEXANDER. I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Republican whip.

                          ____________________