[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Pages 6821-6822]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             OBAMA SCANDALS

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, like millions of Americans, the events of 
the last few days and the last few months have caused me to reflect on 
the nature of our Federal Government and our special system of 
federalism which delegates to the Federal Government certain powers but 
reserves to the States and the people those remaining powers. That is 
roughly what the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says.
  I have also reflected a little bit on what some wise people have said 
over our history, and even before America was founded, about the nature 
of power, government power: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts 
absolutely.
  Our Founders pointed out in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere that 
the concentration of power in the hands of the few is the very 
definition of tyranny. We have learned from hard experience over the 
course of our Nation's history that when government thinks it knows 
best, particularly here in Washington, in a country as big and diverse 
as ours, the natural tendency then in Washington is to try to suppress 
the voices of those who see things differently, those who want to 
exercise their constitutional rights, particularly to free speech, 
freedom of association, and, yes, even freedom of the press.
  It is not true to say we have not been warned about the dangers of 
concentration of power in the Federal Government, and big government, 
and the human frailties that follow. We have been warned time and time 
and time again. Now we have been reminded once again of the wisdom of 
our Founders and the wisdom of the structure of the U.S. Constitution.
  Over the last week a series of events has highlighted the 
administration's massive credibility gap. First, we learned more 
details about the coordinated attempt to misrepresent the September 
2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. You may recall immediately 
after that attack the President was at a press conference, and he said 
later: Well, I said it was a terrorist attack then. That was reviewed 
by the Fact Checker in the Washington Post--hardly an unsympathetic 
newspaper editorially to the administration's point of view--and the 
Fact Checker gave the President of the United States four Pinocchios. 
Some ask why four Pinocchios? I think the true answer is because they 
never give five Pinocchios--maybe they do--but you get the point.
  Of course we cannot escape the fact and we should not ignore the fact 
that this attack took four American lives.
  Then we learned this last week that a senior IRS official had 
acknowledged that her agency deliberately targeted certain political 
speech and activity for harassment, using the instruments of power 
given to the Internal Revenue Service. Perhaps the most awesome, 
pervasive, and potentially intrusive power the Federal Government has 
is in the hands of that agency. Interestingly, the White House counsel 
said she learned about it in April. The President said he did not learn 
about it until later. An investigation needs to be undertaken, and I am 
happy Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and 
Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking member of the Finance Committee, have 
committed themselves to doing an investigation of the IRS and how this 
could possibly happen.
  On top of all that, the top administrator of Health and Human 
Services, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, has been soliciting funds from 
the very industries she regulates to help implement ObamaCare. It does 
not take a rocket scientist to imagine the potential for coercion by 
the government of these private sector industries because of their fear 
of retribution if they do not contribute to this effort--a huge 
conflict of interest, and perhaps illegal. We need to get to the bottom 
of that as well.
  So whether the issue is terrorist attacks in Libya, political and 
partisan abuses by the IRS, or efforts by the Department of Health and 
Human Services to shake down the health insurance industry they 
regulate, it appears the birds the Founders warned us about have come 
home to roost.
  The concentration of government power invariably leads to abuse of 
that power, and it is the same old story of human frailties over and 
over. It is no respecter of political parties; it has happened to both 
political parties. We should have been more careful, and we should have 
listened. We should not have persistently engaged in this power grab in 
Washington, DC, at the expense of individual liberty on the part of the 
American people.
  What is the price to be paid by these scandals? The first price is a 
lack of credibility and public confidence in the most basic 
institutions that make up this government. The other damage is to the 
credibility of folks at the highest level of the administration. After 
all, if the administration is willing to prevaricate, mislead, and 
dissemble about an al-Qaida-linked attack in Benghazi that cost the 
lives of four Americans, what else are they willing to prevaricate, 
mislead, and dissemble about? Can the public trust this administration 
and its government to provide accurate information about the war on 
terror or anything else?
  Similarly, if IRS officials knew their agency was targeting certain 
political activity and failed then to hold anyone accountable, how can 
the American people ever trust the Internal Revenue Service or the 
Federal Government to be neutral and law abiding?
  I heard the junior Senator from Virginia, Senator Kaine, on the radio 
as I

[[Page 6822]]

came in this morning. I thought he asked a pretty good question. He 
said: What does it take to get fired in this town? What does it take to 
get fired in this administration for coverups and for misleading the 
American people?
  If Secretary Sebelius is willing to strong-arm the very industry she 
regulates to fund the implementation of ObamaCare, can the American 
people trust her agency to be objective, evenhanded, and fair-minded as 
a regulator?
  All this boils down to a very sad statistic that demonstrates that 
the public's confidence in the Federal Government--and particularly in 
Congress--is at an all-time low.
  This is not the end of the story, and it should not be the end of the 
story. That ought to be the beginning of a bipartisan effort to get to 
the bottom of these abuses and also to restore ourselves to the 
constitutional framework our Founding Fathers envisioned when this 
great experiment of democracy was created more than 200 years ago. It 
wasn't a national government that dictated to the rest of the country 
how we should run our lives and what choices we should make; it was a 
Federal system of separated powers with checks and balances, with 
authority given to the Federal Government to do things that individuals 
and the States could not do by themselves, such as national defense. We 
have gotten far afield from the Framers' vision of how our country 
should operate or from the constitutional system they created and which 
we celebrate.
  Now, more than ever, Washington needs credibility. If we don't have 
the public's trust, how in the world will we gain their confidence that 
we are going to address the many challenges our country faces? I am not 
pessimistic about our future, I am optimistic about our future, but it 
will take a change of attitude.
  We will need a change of behavior so we can, in some sense, return to 
the Founders' philosophy on the framework and the structure in which 
our government operates. The Federal Government has said for too long: 
We know best; if you don't like it, it is because we have not given you 
enough information to convince you to like it. We take policies that 
are unpopular and merely shove them down the throat of the American 
people and think we are doing our job.
  We know we have huge challenges which call on us to work together on 
a bipartisan basis to regain the public's confidence. I know we can do 
it. It is a matter of whether we have the political courage and the 
will to do it.
  Here are some of those challenges: The longest period of high 
unemployment since the Great Depression. We have the largest percentage 
of the American workforce that simply has given up and quit looking for 
jobs because the economy is so weak.
  The second challenge is a woefully unpopular health care law that 
even some of the architects of that law now say they see a train wreck 
occurring in its implementation.
  We know our world continues to be dangerous, as Benghazi reminds us, 
and as we see from murderers, such as Bashar al-Asad in Syria, and 
people who threaten the innocent. There are people who have chemical 
weapons. There are people who are fighting for their very lives in 
places like Syria. Iran is on the pathway to develop a nuclear weapon 
which will completely disrupt the balance of power in the Middle East 
and create an arms race, while other countries seek their own nuclear 
weapons.
  Let's not forget Iran was the primary state sponsor of international 
terrorism with its support for Hezbollah, among others. We have seen in 
North Africa and elsewhere the proliferation of al-Qaida affiliates and 
allies. We also need to fix our broken immigration system.
  None of these individually are easy things to do. All of them are 
hard, but they are not impossible if we will try to work hard to regain 
the public's credibility. We simply need to do our work and respect the 
wisdom of the ages when it comes to concentration of power and its 
impact on individual liberty.
  We have to be aware of temptations. When power is absolute, we need 
to see that power is corrupt and be aware of the abuse of that power 
when it comes to dealing with the American people.
  Unfortunately, so far, the Obama administration has valued its agenda 
more than its credibility. Without regaining credibility, we will never 
regain the public's trust, and without that trust it will be much 
harder to solve America's biggest problems. That is the biggest single 
challenge to President Obama's second-term agenda and to our ability as 
Americans to show that this 200-plus-year experiment in self-government 
actually works.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Oregon.
  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as if in 
morning business.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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