[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 16689-16691]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        LEGISLATION IN CONGRESS

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, after years of hard work the Senate 
yesterday passed legislation that will help keep the personal 
information of people safer, whether that personal information is in 
the hands of your bank or your credit card holder or whomever.
  As we know, the threat of cyber attacks is all too real. Twenty-one 
million Americans lost their personal information and sensitive 
background information at the Office of Personnel Management just this 
last summer--21 million. As a matter of fact, the suggestion has been 
made that many of those people were individuals who filed extensive 
questionnaires--or responses to extensive questionnaires--in order to 
obtain a security clearance. So you can imagine the sensitivity of that 
information. That followed on a breach at the Internal Revenue Service 
in which the data of more than 100,000 taxpayers was stolen.
  It is a felony to divulge Federal income tax information of a 
taxpayer. It is a felony. Yet somehow, some way, this cyber attack at 
the IRS was able to get data on more than 100,000 taxpayers.
  The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is legislation that has 
been long overdue, and we are, frankly, behind the curve here. But this 
bill garnered wide bipartisan support in the Senate. Now we have the 
opportunity to work with our House colleagues, who have, I believe, a 
couple of cyber security bills, and to try to reconcile those 
differences in a conference committee, which is typically the way we 
reconcile those differences and competing ideas.
  But suffice it to say that this legislation, once enacted into law 
and signed by the President, will help deter future cyber attacks and 
equip the public and private sector with the tools they need to be more 
nimble. Specifically, what it will do is allow companies and 
individuals to share information with the government without concern 
about losing a competitive advantage. Right now, when you are attacked 
in your company, obviously it is not something you particularly want to 
brag about, but you do need to let the people whose information has 
been stolen know so they can protect themselves. But what there will be 
is more information sharing, along with some legal protections for 
people who cooperate on a voluntary basis.
  As Senator Burr, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee said time 
and again, there is nothing compulsory about this system. Nobody is 
forced to participate. But I think, over the long run, businesses and 
individuals will find it in their best interest to share this 
information and to receive information in a way that will help protect 
our personal data.
  The passage of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act was, 
rightly, a major priority for the Senate. As I said, I am hopeful--
along with our House colleagues--that we can get a bill to the 
President's desk for signature soon.
  But this is just one more example--the latest example, really--of the 
productivity of this new majority in Congress that was elected just 
last November. We have worked hard. Without sacrificing our principles, 
we have worked hard to find common ground, working on a bipartisan 
basis to move legislation across the floor and to get it enacted into 
law that serves the best interests of the American people, such as the 
passage of the bill to help victims of human trafficking, which passed 
99 to 0 in the Senate and now is the law of the land. It was the first 
major effort to help the victims of human trafficking we have 
undertaken here in 25 years.
  We have also passed out of the Senate--and we are working on 
differences with the House--the Every Child Achieves Act. As Chairman 
Alexander of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee 
points out, this is a fix to No Child Left Behind. This legislation 
will devolve power from Washington, DC, back to parents and local 
communities so they can have a greater say in their children's 
education.
  Once again we have learned the lesson, perhaps painfully, that a one-
size-fits-all solution does not work for everyone. We are a big, 
diverse country. A lot of communities are better equipped--certainly 
they are more nimble, more flexible, and more adaptive--to change 
circumstances than the Federal Government. Even though we had the best 
of intentions with No Child Left Behind, we needed to make this 
necessary fix and again devolve power back from the Federal Government 
down to parents and local communities for their children's education

[[Page 16690]]

while maintaining high standards at the same time.
  We have also passed a multiyear highway bill. I think there were more 
than 30 different temporary patches of our highway bill because of the 
inadequacy of the highway trust fund. When you buy a gallon of 
gasoline, I think about 18 cents goes into the highway trust fund out 
of that gallon of gasoline. Unfortunately, though, our demands have 
exceeded the amount of money in that fund.
  For States such as mine, we are a donor State. So we send a buck to 
Washington, DC, and we get 92 cents back. A friend of mine in the Texas 
Legislature called that Federal money laundering, and I think he is 
right.
  But we have stepped up--the voters in Texas last year, actually--by 
passing a supplemental appropriations for highway and infrastructure 
out of our rainy-day fund. Actually, on November 7, we will have 
another referendum in Texas to try to fill that gap between what the 
Federal Government is doing and what the State government can and must 
do in order to meet our transportation needs.
  By passing a multiyear highway bill, the Senate has now prompted our 
House colleagues to, in turn, pass their own multiyear highway bill, 
and now, perhaps later today, we will pass another short extension to 
November 20 and then work to reconcile those two differences and then 
get that to the President's desk.
  That is not particularly sexy work, but it is very important. It is 
sort of what we are supposed to do in the Congress, which is to perform 
the task of governing and helping to address the issues that confront 
everyday working American families.
  Then just last week the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 15 to 5 to 
pass, on a broad bipartisan basis, the first criminal justice reform 
that we have done since the 1990s. I have cosponsored that legislation 
and was proud to do so. A lot of what this bill contains--particularly 
something called the CORRECTIONS Act--was based on a successful 
experiment in Texas and other States where they realized that you could 
lock people up for committing crimes but someday they are going to get 
out. When they do, we have an interest in making sure, for those who 
are willing, that they are prepared for life on the outside or 
otherwise they end up becoming what a young man in Houston just last 
week or so told me. He called himself a ``frequent flier'' in the 
criminal justice system. We know what that means. That means the 
turnstile just kept turning. He would get out and go right back in 
because he was woefully unprepared for life outside. So whether it is 
education, whether it is mental illness issues, drug and alcohol issues 
or just employable skills, it is in our interest to provide incentives 
to people in prison so they are better prepared when they get out.
  I am not suggesting that this is some sort of panacea and that all of 
a sudden our prisons will be emptied and people won't commit crimes 
anymore. That is not true. But for those who can be saved, for people 
who want a helping hand and are willing to take responsibility for 
their own rehabilitation, I think this legislation is very important.
  So while we still have a lot to do, I think we can take some 
satisfaction in the productivity that we have had--notwithstanding the 
very challenging political environment and the polarization of our 
politics in America today.
  This week Members from both parties, as well as the White House, have 
been talking about legislation to deal with our budget and ensure our 
country meets its financial responsibilities. Indeed, there has been an 
announced deal, negotiated by the leadership in the House, the Senate, 
and the White House, which the House of Representatives will be voting 
on at about 5 p.m. today.
  I think it is worth reminding everybody how we got to this point. 
Starting in June, our colleagues from across the aisle started what 
they advertised as a filibuster summer--in other words, a strategy to 
block any and all of the appropriations bills that come across the 
Senate floor. There are 12 of those appropriations bills. If we were 
doing things the way we should be, we would take them up individually. 
The American people could read them, understand them, and we could 
debate them, hopefully improve them, and then pass them into law to 
fund some of the basic functions of our government, such as the Defense 
Department, for example. It is ironic that many of these appropriations 
bills sailed through the Appropriations Committee on a bipartisan 
basis.
  Well, for the first time in 6 years, the Committee on Appropriations 
had voted out all 12 of those bills. The reason they were able to do so 
is because under this new majority, we were able to actually pass a new 
budget, which gave the top capped spending lines to the Appropriations 
Committee so they could do their job to consider those spending bills, 
to rearrange priorities, and hopefully gain greater efficiency and 
economize on the spending.
  So even though many of our Democratic friends voted for those bills 
in the Appropriations Committee, they came to the floor and voted 
against them to create this huge cliff that we knew was coming on 
November 3 and, indeed, on December 11.
  Senate Democrats carried this strategy of filibuster summer into the 
fall and continued to block appropriations bills, turning 
noncontroversial funding priorities, such as our Nation's military and 
support for our veterans, into partisan games. That is what created 
this so-called shutdown narrative and drama.
  It wasn't an accident; it was a premeditated plan by our Democratic 
friends in the minority. So, as a result, Congress was once again 
staring down several major deadlines with little time to waste.
  I have to say that if your attitude in Congress is ``I want 100 
percent of what I want or I am not going to settle for anything,'' you 
are not going to get anything. It is just that simple. It is just a 
simple fact of life that the only kind of negotiated outcomes we have 
here are imperfect; they are flawed.
  While this budget agreement isn't perfect--it is flawed--it does 
contain several important priorities. First of all, the Budget Act of 
2015 doesn't raise taxes. That is important to me and certainly 
important to my constituents. They think this administration has raised 
their taxes more than enough already. This agreement lays the 
foundation to fund the government through 2017 without a tax increase.
  Importantly, the legislation repeals a section of ObamaCare. We will 
have more to say about that in this coming weeks, but it repeals a 
major section of ObamaCare that required large employers to 
automatically enroll their employees in the ObamaCare health plans. 
That is a pretty big deal for a law that has been on the books since 
2010. Rolling back ObamaCare, I believe, is essential to helping the 
American people meet their basic needs--to get the health care they 
want at a price they can afford, and not based on some sort of mandate 
from the Federal Government. It is also necessary for the health of our 
Nation's economy.
  Perhaps from my standpoint, and I suspect the Presiding Officer's 
standpoint, the single most important part of this legislation is it 
will fund our military and make sure our military has the resources it 
needs to protect us here at home and our allies around the world.
  As part of the artificial drama that was created over this deal, the 
President of the United States vetoed the National Defense 
Authorization Act. This is the fundamental law by which Congress says 
to our men and women in uniform: We are going to make sure you have the 
resources you need in order to do the job you volunteered to do. And 
oh, by the way, we are also going to take care of our families because 
in the military today, with an all-volunteer military, our military 
families are vitally important too. But in an incredibly cynical move, 
the President vetoed the Defense authorization bill in order to gain 
leverage in this negotiated budget deal. It truly is shameful. It is 
inexcusable for the Commander in Chief to hold our men and women in 
uniform hostage by doing something like that.

[[Page 16691]]

  We all know we are living in a world marked by insecurity at every 
corner, from rampant instability in the Middle East to a newly 
aggressive Russia in Eastern Europe and in the Arctic, and a rising 
China that continues to--Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 2 
more minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. CORNYN. In addition to instability in the Middle East and an 
aggressive Russia in Eastern Europe and in the Arctic, a rising China 
is trying to expand its own territory at the expense of our allies and 
friends in the Pacific.
  I am glad to see the U.S. Navy challenge the phony claims of China in 
the South China Sea that jeopardize those important sea lanes that are 
so critical to our security and to our commerce.
  So this deal, as flawed as it is, finally provides the military and 
our military families with the resources they need in order to do the 
incredibly important job we ask them to do. If you think about all the 
areas that the Federal Government is involved in, this is the No. 1 
priority. There is no ``Yellow Pages'' where you can look to outsource 
national security. It is the Federal Government's responsibility, and 
it is about time we provided our men and women in uniform with the 
resources they need in order to get the job done.
  In conclusion, this bill actually takes significant steps in 
reforming, in a fiscally responsible manner, our Social Security 
disability system. It will provide long-term savings from changes to 
Social Security. In fact, this will represent the first bipartisan 
reform we have had since the early 1980s.
  I look forward to continuing to discuss this legislation with our 
colleagues and finding a way to move forward as we face the big 
challenges still ahead of us in the Senate. The only alternative to 
this negotiated deal would be a clean debt ceiling increase and a 
continuing resolution at current spending levels, which would have a 
devastating impact on our military and our national security.

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