[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Pages 11277-11278]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            SENATE PROCEDURE

  Mr. NELSON. Madam President, I want to speak about a subject that is 
on the hearts of most of us now as we approach not what is a coming 
constitutional crisis, but what is already a

[[Page 11278]]

constitutional crisis because this body is not functioning as the 
Constitution intended. The minority, under the rules of the Senate, is 
protected and has been.
  In the early days of the Senate, there was no cutting off of debate. 
In the early 1900s, a level, a threshold of 67 was established in order 
to cut off debate. Then, after the abuses of that filibuster 
requirement to cut off debate in the abuses in the civil rights era, 
indeed, the threshold was lowered to what we have in the Senate rules 
today--60. But we are seeing that it is being abused.
  Under the Constitution we have the checks and balances of the 
separate branches. But when a President is elected, the President is 
entitled to have the people he wants to advise him to be a part of his 
team to be confirmed. It has always been the practice under the 
Constitution to have, not a supermajority vote, as is required for 
treaties, but a simple majority vote in the approval of the 
nominations.
  The issue in front of us is whether the President will be entitled to 
have approved by the Senate the people he has put forth to head the 
agencies and the Departments of his administration. That is what has 
brought us to the constitutional crisis where we are now finding 
ourselves ready to act.
  Congress has failed to put aside political differences to find 
commonsense solutions not only on the issue of the approval of the 
President's appointments, but on so many of our Nation's pressing 
problems.
  Let's start out with the charade that we call the sequester. The 
sequester is a meat cleaver approach to budgeting. I daresay in the 
minds of most of the Senators it was never intended to go into effect. 
It was the meat cleaver hanging over the head, a year and a half ago, 
of the appointed supercommittee that--after the initial $1 trillion of 
spending cuts were made on the budget over a 10-year period, which was 
done--the supercommittee was to come along and work out deficit 
reduction with a target somewhere around $4 trillion in total.
  What was to encourage the supercommittee was this meat cleaver 
hanging over their heads, or guillotine hanging over all the heads that 
nobody wanted, which was cuts across the board without regard to 
programs--across the board in discretionary programs, defense and 
nondefense discretionary programs.
  Such across-the-board budget cuts, is that the way to go about making 
proper appropriations decisions? Those kinds of meat cleaver approaches 
do real damage to people's everyday lives. In the long run, the 
sequester is certainly going to hurt our national defense, our national 
security, and our Nation's ability to compete economically with other 
countries. If we see these kinds of cuts continue in this ideological 
fashion without regard to programs, then we are going to be in serious 
trouble.
  We can continue to have both sides of the aisle point fingers at each 
other, but isn't it about time we get rid of this approach to the 
budget--the sequester--and start talking about how we can get the job 
done?
  Well, the ranking member of the Finance Committee is here. He is one 
of my dear personal friends. I believe he is very sincere, along with 
the chairman of the Finance Committee, to really take on tax reform. 
Are we happy with the Tax Code we have? Do we think it has much too 
much complication? And couldn't its streamlining--particularly with tax 
expenditures, which are tax deductions and tax credits, and almost 
every special interest in the world has their own special tax 
expenditure--could we not clear out a lot of them, which produces 
revenue, and use that revenue in order to lower tax rates and also use 
some of it to lower the deficit?
  Well, we need to close some of those loopholes, and I am hopeful, 
with the leadership of Senator Baucus and Senator Hatch, we are going 
to be able to do that. But there are a lot of other things in there.
  It is no surprise that I have been speaking of subsidies that go to 
companies, such as oil companies, that have outlived their usefulness 
that were given a century ago in the Tax Code as incentives to drill 
for oil. Do we think oil companies need those financial incentives now? 
What about the offshore tax dodges?
  I think it is also obvious that when you look at the Medicare drug 
program, you know the taxpayers of this country, through their 
government, got a break on the cost of prescription drugs that we 
supply to Medicaid and to the Department of Defense and to the 
Veterans' Administration. But when it comes to if you have been getting 
that price break on your drugs through Medicaid, but you now turn 65, 
and you get your drugs through Medicare, the U.S. Government does not 
get the break, the discount on the drugs through Medicare. The very 
same people who were getting them under Medicaid now are getting them 
by Medicare because they passed the threshold of age 65--same drug, 
same people; the government is paying it--but the government is paying 
a much higher price. That could be worth a savings of $150 billion to 
the U.S. taxpayer over the course of a decade.
  You do the math on just these few examples I have given in this short 
little speech, and it adds up to well over $1 trillion. And that is 
just a starter. There are hundreds of billions of dollars more that 
might be saved by closing some of these tax loopholes.
  I think we need to keep in mind that not all tax deductions are bad. 
Some serve very legitimate purposes. But here we are, and we come back 
to the gridlock we are experiencing. We passed a budget resolution in 
the Budget Committee. It passed out here on the floor of the Senate. 
The House of Representatives has passed a budget resolution, albeit 
much different than ours. The normal process around here is to try to 
work out our differences and to do it as ladies and gentlemen with 
comity. But we cannot even get a motion approved in order to go to a 
conference committee to work out the differences between the House and 
the Senate budget resolutions.
  So I would continue to plead with our colleagues to allow this to 
move forward. No less than one of the most stellar Members of this 
body, Senator McCain, has called for the naming of the conference 
committee. My Republican colleague who helps me lead the Aging 
Committee, Senator Collins, has called for the naming of the conference 
committee.
  So let's do it. Let's end the gridlock on this one little thing. 
Let's compromise. And let's start using some common sense. If we do, 
you will see a chorus of amens from our fellow countrymen.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.

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