[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 18019-18021]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




    VETERANS DAY AND LEGISLATION SUPPORTING OUR VETERANS AND TROOPS

  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am honored to represent nearly 500,000 
Missouri veterans in the Senate. Tomorrow, on Veterans Day, we pause to 
reflect on the countless contributions and sacrifices that the men and 
women who serve in uniform and have served in uniform have made to our 
country. I hope we will all use this opportunity to recommit ourselves 
not only to appreciate their service but to be sure that the 
commitments our government has made to them are commitments that we 
move forward on and that they are commitments that we look at the time, 
place, and the veterans being served and decide when they need to be 
changed. I think one of the things we have done in the last year to 
create more choices and more competition for veterans is an important 
step in that direction.
  When I introduced the Excellence in Mental Health Act with Senator 
Stabenow, one of our biggest support groups for that act, which not 
only would treat behavioral health care like all other health care but 
would also create more opportunities to access behavioral health care, 
were the younger veterans. The Iraq and Iran veterans and the veterans 
from Afghanistan wanted to have more choices and were big supporters of 
not just traditional VA services but other services as well.

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  I am pleased that the bill today steps forward in important ways and 
does things for veterans. The bill we just voted on, the Military 
Construction and Veterans Affairs appropriations bill, actually reached 
a record level of funding for veterans services. It increases veterans 
services by $7.9 billion over last year's levels, and it appropriates 
$1 billion more than the President asked for.
  It was also a bipartisan vote for lots of reasons. There should be no 
more of a bipartisan cause among all the funding bills than a bill that 
takes care of veterans and provides the facilities for those who are 
serving and for their families' needs. This is an important matter for 
us to address, and this is a great week for us to do it.
  This bill provides specific funding for women veterans. I was at a 
women's veterans clinic in St. Louis recently. This bill includes 
additional care for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. It provides 
treatment for the kinds of traumatic brain injuries that veterans often 
leave the military with today, which they did not have post-9/11 and 
post the cowardly devices that are used to attack our people in the 
service.
  It increases veterans funding in areas such as health care, benefit 
claims processing, medical research, and technology upgrades. It also 
includes funding for construction and renovation of projects that 
ensure military readiness and improve the quality of life for military 
families.
  As GEN Ray Odierno, the recently retired Chief of Staff of the Army, 
has said, our military families are the strength of the military. 
Senator Gillibrand and I recently introduced a bill--The Military 
Families Stability Act--that allows us to do new things. It allows 
families for educational or professional reasons to stay longer or 
leave earlier, depending on when the person serving gets transferred. 
If there is a month of school left or a professional matter that the 
spouse needs to be a part of and needs to finish a job quickly or go to 
a job early, why wouldn't we want to allow that to happen through 
legislation? This legislation looks at military families' needs, among 
the other things it looks at.
  Because of the dissatisfaction that many of our veterans 
appropriately have with the Veterans' Administration, this bill 
includes necessary reforms such as protection for whistleblowers, the 
kind of protection that construction oversight managers need, and it 
assesses some new measures for construction oversight so that we don't 
have these facilities costing more than they should cost.
  Frankly, if we look at competitive alternatives that veterans should 
have available to them, it is probably a good time to think about how 
we could make that program work better--rather than to continue to 
invest more money in facilities that they have to drive by--with better 
locations to get to that would give them that choice.
  This bill has been ready for months now. I was disappointed the 
Democrats blocked consideration of this bill earlier this year, but I 
am pleased that we finally got to a bill that everybody could vote for. 
It actually shows how shortsighted the lack of willingness was to let 
us do our work, to bring this bill to the floor, and to let Members 
offer amendments. Those amendments were either included in the bill or 
explained to Members: No, this is already in there. We have already 
taken care of this, and this is why this doesn't have to be done.
  We have a real obligation to take care of our veterans--those who 
have served for our country--and I hope we continue to build on the 
work we have done today.
  Earlier today we also passed the bipartisan Defense Authorization 
Act, another bill we could have gotten to earlier. In fact, the House 
passed it earlier. The President vetoed it, but now that same essential 
bill goes back to the President's desk because some other problem has 
been solved that should never have been tied to authorizing the defense 
of the country.
  Every year since 2011, the Congress has passed and the President has 
signed a bill just like the bill we passed today that would make it 
clear to the President that the Congress doesn't want the President to 
go forward with his proposed changes for Guantanamo. Unfortunately, the 
media reports suggest that the President once again is considering 
acting unilaterally to bring terrorists to the United States. Both of 
these bills today said no terrorist can be brought to the United States 
from Guantanamo.
  It is another example of the President ignoring the law, deciding 
instead: I am going to enforce the law I want to enforce, and I am 
going to ignore the law I want to ignore. He did that a few months ago 
with Executive amnesty. The President decided there are some laws that 
relate to people who are in the country and who are here without 
documents that he doesn't intend to enforce. Unfortunately for the 
President and fortunately for the law, the U.S. Court of Appeals for 
the Fifth Circuit ruled last night that the President can't do what the 
President said he was going to do. An earlier court had immediately 
said the President can't do what he said he was going to do.
  This morning, I heard one of the spokesmen for the White House say: 
Well, every legal expert we have talked to believes the President has 
the authority to do this. Well, apparently none of the legal experts 
they have talked to are Federal judges, because Federal judges now, at 
the two levels below the Supreme Court, have decided that the President 
doesn't have, in all likelihood, the authority he says he has.
  The courts, along with a bipartisan majority of the Congress, have 
taken the President to task on a sweeping new rule on waters of the 
United States--an issue we debated here last week. The law says the EPA 
has the authority to regulate navigable waters in the country. For 170 
years everybody understood what that meant, and I think everybody still 
probably understands what that means, even the people at the EPA, who 
want it to mean something much broader than it clearly means. The 
Federal courts, again, at both the first level and the appeals level--
the appeal of the appeal court and the appeal court have said: No, you 
don't have the authority to do that. We are not going to let that rule 
go into effect.
  That rule, by the way, in my State would put more than 99 percent of 
all of the geography of Missouri under the control of the EPA for 
anything that is related to water, including any water that runs off a 
roof, any water that runs off a parking lot, any water that runs down a 
roadside ditch. If the EPA wants that authority, they need to come to 
the Congress and say: Change the law. Give us the authority over all of 
the landmass, 99.3 percent of Missouri and similar amounts in many 
other States. Give us that authority.
  Of course, the Congress wouldn't do that. The Congress knew what they 
were doing when they said ``navigable waters,'' and the EPA has never 
suggested to the Congress that the Congress change the law. The EPA 
would like to change it on their own, but the Sixth Circuit Court of 
Appeals said: No, you don't have the authority to do that.
  Here is another issue that has to go to the Supreme Court. 
Apparently, the President doesn't mind going to the Supreme Court and 
doesn't mind being reversed by the Supreme Court. The President 
particularly, it appears, doesn't mind being reversed by the Supreme 
Court if somehow the rules got by the other two levels of Federal 
court, as the mercury rule did 2 years ago. Twenty-two months later, 
when the Supreme Court finally ruled, they said: No, the EPA doesn't 
have the authority to regulate that item in that way. But even people 
at the EPA said: Well, even though we didn't have the authority, 1,500 
powerplants had to close down permanently because of the rule. And they 
seemed to take great pleasure in the fact that the rule accomplished 
its goal even though the law was not served and the EPA, according to 
the Supreme Court, didn't have the authority for that rule.
  On the President's overreach, I reintroduced a law again this year--
the Executive Needs to Faithfully Observe and Respect Congressional 
Enactments of the Law Act--the ENFORCE Act--

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which simply says something one would never think the Congress would 
have to say to the President, which is: Mr. President, you have to 
enforce the law. Mr. President, you have taken an oath to uphold the 
Constitution. There is a way to do this job in a constitutional way, 
and there is a way to do the job in the way you are doing it now.
  We shouldn't need this bill. The President swore to uphold the law. 
With the action we took today, we see another place where the Congress 
has clearly spoken over and over and over again, and the President 
says: If the Congress won't do this, I am going to do it on my own.
  Apparently, the President has discovered some authority as Commander 
in Chief to close military bases. Does that mean the President on his 
own can close any military base in the country? I don't think that is a 
precedent we want to set. There is a way to do this. The Congress has 
to be involved. The laws of the Constitution have to be respected.
  Over and over again, even on the eve of Veterans Day--a celebration 
of those who did more than anybody else to defend our freedoms--even on 
the eve of Veterans Day, we need to remind ourselves what the 
Constitution is all about, what the country stands for, and the 
freedoms those veterans were willing to serve to defend.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.

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