Health Care Bureaucrats Elimination Act

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to speak about the PATRIOT Act. I think it is a shame we are not going to be debating or having any votes on this act, particularly since it was promised by our leadership.

I would like at this time to yield the floor to my good friend, the Senator from New Mexico, if he would like to make a few remarks.

I thank the Senator for his comments. I think what this shows is that it is a bipartisan effort that says we should protect our Constitution. Those on the left and those on the right who believe in the Constitution believe it should be protected. That brings together some of us who may not necessarily agree on all other issues, but when it comes to the Constitution, when it comes to the basic Bill of Rights, we are concerned both on the right and left, on the Democratic and the Republican side. The problem is that those of us who are concerned with the Constitution are in the minority of both sides, so we are being quieted down, we are being told to sit quietly in the back of the room and don't make waves. We want to have a debate over the PATRIOT Act because we are concerned about our liberties. We are all concerned about terrorism too, but we don't think you have to give up your liberties in order to combat terrorism.

On February 15, we extended the PATRIOT Act for 90 days. During that time and on the Senate floor on February 15, we were promised a week of debate, and we were promised an open amendment process. We are now amidst a process where we will have no debate and no amendments. Do we fear terrorism so much that we will not have debate? Do we fear terrorism so much that we throw out our Constitution and are unwilling and afraid to debate our Constitution? I think it is a sad day that we can't do that. Are Senators afraid to vote on the issues of the day, afraid to debate the Constitution, afraid to have an open forum and debate whether the PATRIOT Act is constitutional? I think this does a great disservice to the voters.

They talk about this being the world's most deliberative body. We are unwilling to deliberate. We are unwilling to have questions broached as to whether the PATRIOT Act is unconstitutional. We have had 99 days since we extended it, 43 days in session, and we have had 56 votes. What does that mean in the context of things? We are setting a record for the least amount of votes ever to occur in the Senate. There are some important questions we should be debating, but unless it is a forgone conclusion, unless they have counted the votes and decided the outcome before we have the debate, we are precluded from debating.

Wendell Phillips, the great abolitionist, wrote, ``Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.'' The PATRIOT Act is a perfect example of how a lack of vigilance leads to loss of liberty.

In the aftermath of 9/11, we amended the Constitution with the PATRIOT Act. You say: Whoa, we didn't have an amendment to the Constitution, did we? We did not do it the way we are supposed to, but we did in reality amend the Constitution with the PATRIOT Act. How did this happen? We were fearful. Mr. President, 9/11 had happened, and we wanted to stop terrorism. All of us want that, but do we have to give up our constitutional liberties in order to do that?

How did the PATRIOT Act change the Constitution? How did the PATRIOT Act change the fourth amendment? In the fourth amendment, it says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons,

houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches

and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall

issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or

affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be

searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The PATRIOT Act changed this. The PATRIOT Act changed the standard from probable cause, which is a longstanding position and standard within the courts which limits the police from coming into your house unless there is probable cause that you have either committed a crime or are in the act of committing a crime--we changed this to a standard we now call relevance. But that is changing the Constitution.

How do you change the Constitution by majority vote? It is supposed to be a supermajority in both bodies. Then it is to go back and be ratified by three-fourths of the States. It is supposed to be difficult to change the Constitution, difficult to amend the Constitution. Why? Because we thought some of these rights were so important that we should not allow a majority to change them. Those of us who own guns and believe in gun ownership think the second amendment is protected from a simple majority taking away the second amendment. Likewise, the first amendment--those of us who prize the ability of the press to print and to respond and to hold beliefs, however unpopular, those of us who wish to have a country in which religion is not hampered and we can say what we believe and not have it hampered by the government, we don't believe a majority should take away these rights.

But a majority did take away part of the fourth amendment because we changed the standard of the fourth amendment from probable cause to relevance. So if they want to look at your records, they just have to say it is relevant. They don't have to say you are a terrorist. They don't have to say you are a foreigner. They don't have to say you are conspiring with anyone. They just have to say they have some interest in your library records.

How often is this going on? There is something called suspicious activity reports. Some of this was started before the PATRIOT Act, some of it is separate from the PATRIOT Act, but much of it was emboldened by the PATRIOT Act. The suspicious activity reports are where your bank spies on you. You may not know this is happening, you may not even know if they have spied on you, and they probably won't tell you. But if you made a transaction that involved more than $5,000, you could well have been spied on by your bank and reported to the government.

Some people say: I am not doing anything wrong; I don't care if they look at my records. Here is the thing: If you look at my visa bill, you can tell what doctors I go to. If I see a psychiatrist and I don't want everybody to know it, that may be on my Visa bill these days. What magazines I read is on my Visa bill, what books I order from Amazon or another bookseller from the Internet, whether I drink alcohol, whether I gamble. There is a lot about your life that is involved in your financial records, and I think they do deserve protection and we do deserve a standard where we don't say, well, it might be relevant, or, we might just want to troll through all these records to see if anybody might be committing a crime.

This one is even worse than many of the other aspects because the suspicious activity reports do not begin with the government asking any questions. They tell your bank to watch you. Your bank is to watch you and to watch all of your transactions and to report to the government. So they have force.

You say: Maybe they are only reporting terrorists. Since 2001, since 9/11, 8

million suspicious activity reports--8 million--have been filed. Over 1 million of these are filed a year. The thing is, you could well ask for a Freedom of Information Act inquiry and ask whether you have been investigated by your government for your transactions.

My point is this is an invasion of your privacy. It does not have any judicial restraint upon it. And the other thing is, it may not even be good for finding terrorists. It may be they are getting so much information they cannot even read or listen to all the information. It is kind of like what they are doing at the airports. Because they insist everybody be searched and everybody be patted down, we are patting down 6-year-olds. A little girl in my town--her dad is a physician and practiced with me at my same practice--was patted down where they are putting their hands inside her pants. This is absurd--6- year-old girls.

The thing is, by doing that, they are wasting time on people who will not be attacking us and spending less time on people who will be attacking us. It is the same with banking records. If they are looking at your banking records, they do not have the time to spend looking at records of people who possibly would be attacking us. Eight million records have been looked at--no judge's order, no judicial review. This one is not even reviewed by anybody in government. They are giving this power carte blanche to banks, and they are telling the banks: If you do not spy on your customer, you will be fined. They estimate that $7 billion a year is spent by banks complying with this order to spy on their customers.

The thing is, we are having trouble in our economy. The banks are struggling. The economy is struggling. We are having trouble with jobs. And yet we are going to add $7 billion of costs onto the banks to spy on their customers.

Might there be an occasion where a bank transfer or bank activity could be a terrorist activity? Yes. If we are investigating those, let's ask for a warrant. You say: It will be too slow. We never get it. Warrants are almost never denied. There is a special court set up for the investigation of intelligence. It is called the FISA Court. It has been around since the 1970s. Before the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Court never turned down a warrant.

You say: These people are awful; we have to get them off the street. It doesn't matter, I don't want any restraint; I just want it done.

Unfortunately, that has been the attitude of the people up here and a majority of people after 9/11. The people were so frightened that they said: Do anything, I don't care.

The problem with that attitude is, even if you want to argue that has not been abused yet, what happens when people are elected to your government who decide they do not like your religion or you believe in a certain kind of marriage, and you want to say this and they want to investigate you? There is no step to stop that. There is no step to say: Your church believes in this unorthodox belief or this belief that we do not call politically correct or it is no longer acceptable, but we want to investigate the banking records of the church and see if we can take away their IRS number or tax exemption. If you do not have any restraint to these activities, someday we will get a government that has no restraint and then goes forward to say: We want to get that church shut down because that church is saying something we disagree with or these people are reading these books we do not like.

This goes across the party aisle. The Library Association is concerned with this also, that people's books are being looked at. Think about it. Do you want the government to know what books you read? Do you want to be on a watchlist because of the books you read?

They say: Oh, there are provisions. We have made provisions. That will not happen.

The only way you have a real provision or protection is if you have procedural steps that say someone must review this before it happens.

If we have someone who we think is terrible and they need to be off the streets, if they are accused of rape, accused of murder, accused of robbery, accused of the most heinous crimes we can think of, and it is 2 in the morning, we call a judge and we get a warrant. It is almost never turned down. But it is one step removed from the police breaking down every door of every person they suspect and not having any kind of discussion with someone who has a level head, who is not part of the investigation.

Many up here will say we are in grave danger. If the PATRIOT Act expires, all things could happen and terrorism could break loose. What they are arguing, though, is that there is a scenario where we would not get warrants to investigate terrorism. That never existed. Before the PATRIOT Act, we were not turning down these warrants.

Some have argued that Moussaoui, the 19th hijacker--he was captured a month in advance of 9/11--many have said that if we only had the PATRIOT Act, we could have gotten him. That is untrue. There is a provision called the lone wolf provision in the PATRIOT Act, but we did not get Moussaoui because we did not do our job. We did not communicate well. The superiors to the officers and the FBI agents in the field did not even ask for a warrant. They turned down a request for a warrant without even asking the FISA Court for it.

We have the 19th hijacker a month in advance. We have his computer. When we do look at his computer on 9/12, we link him very quickly, within a matter of hours, to all the other hijackers. It is easy in hindsight to say we could have stopped 9/11, but to tell you the truth, we have to look at the rules and say: Could we possibly have gotten that information? The answer is yes.

The FBI agent in Minnesota wrote 70 letters to his superiors. The FBI was told that Moussaoui was possibly an agent of terrorism. The French Government confirmed it. That was all we needed. With that information, had they gone to the FISA Court, they would have gotten a warrant. When the 9/11 Commission report came out, they acknowledged as much. Moussaoui's warrant, in all likelihood, would not have been turned down, and there is a possibility we would have stopped it.

The suspicious activity reports are particularly galling because they are businesses that are forced to spy on their citizens. There is another form of spying that goes on as well. These are called national security letters. These are like warrants. They go after your banking records, such as the suspicious activity reports, but they are a little more targeted in the sense that the government is asking for an NSL. But it is not a judge who asks for an NSL. The person who asks for an NSL is an FBI agent, essentially a police or law enforcement agent. The danger here is that we have removed the step where the police officer or the FBI agent would then ask for permission from a judge. That is my problem with these national security letters.

Some say: We are not doing that many of them. Initially, we were not. Now we have done over 200,000 national security letters. One of my reforms, if it were to take place, would be to ask judges to review these. I see no reason why they should not review them.

Some have said: You have no expectation of privacy. The courts have already ruled that you have no expectation of privacy in your papers or electronic records. This is the way it has been interpreted, but I think it has been misinterpreted. I think it has been interpreted that your banking records do not deserve privacy when they are not in your house, and I think it is an incorrect interpretation of the fourth amendment. The fourth amendment says that in your papers, you are to be protected. It does not specify those papers are in your possession or in someone else's.

At this time, I yield the floor to my good friend from South Carolina.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. President, not only are we not debating the PATRIOT Act, but does the Senator from South Carolina think we have given sufficient floor time to amendments and proposals as to how to deal with the debt problem?

Mr. President, one other question is, we will not all agree necessarily on the PATRIOT Act. The thing is, even for those who feel it is important it not expire, why would they not consent to some debate? I have asked for three amendments, three votes. We could do them in the next hour. We could debate and have this time and there would be no expiration of the PATRIOT Act for those who think it expiring is a problem.

Mr. President, I do not quite grasp why they are so fearful of debate and fearful of votes, that they are willing to let the PATRIOT Act expire to prevent debate and prevent votes. The sticking point turns out to be an amendment basically on preventing gun records from being sifted through under the PATRIOT Act. People say: Well, what if someone--a terrorist--is selling guns illegally? Couldn't we get them? Yes, we could get them the way we get everybody else: Ask the judge for a warrant. Judges routinely do not turn down warrants. It worked for us for 225 years, until the PATRIOT Act, when we had a process, the fourth amendment, protecting us from an overzealous government. But it also worked to catch criminals.

At this time I yield the floor temporarily to my good friend from Utah.

When we look at this debate and we talk about exactly where we should go from here and why it is important, it is important to look at the PATRIOT Act and say to ourselves: How do we protect our Constitution if we are not willing to protect all parts of it? So many conservatives are avid for the second amendment. I am one of them. I want to protect the second amendment. But I tell those who want to protect the second amendment that they can't protect the second amendment if they don't believe in the first amendment. If they don't believe in the first amendment, they can't have that voice that it will take. If they want to place limitations on groups that advocate gun ownership under the second amendment, that will limit the second amendment. But, likewise, they cannot protect the second amendment if they don't believe in the fourth amendment.

There is no reason we should allow a government to look at our gun records and to troll through all of them. If a government thinks someone is a terrorist, name that person, name the place, and show probable cause. Do we want to allow government to troll through our records? The government has looked at 28 million electronic records--28 million. They are just sifting through all of our records looking for what. I want them to catch terrorists, but I want them to look at the Constitution with some restraint to say this person is a terrorist or we suspect him to be so, for this reason. We need not be so frightened that we give up our liberty in exchange for security.

Some would say our government is full of good people who would say: I have not done anything wrong, and I don't have to worry about it. We are not worried about good government; we are worried about bad government. Jefferson said once upon a time if all men were angels, we would have no concern for constitutional restraint. But there have been times in our history and in the history of other countries where unsavory characters, where despotic characters have won election.

When Hitler was first elected in the 1920s and early 1930s, he was elected popularly. The thing is, they were so mad and upset over World War I that they basically traded. They said: We want a strong leader. Give us a strong leader. But if we have rules that allow that strong leader to grab and do things, that is the real danger. At a minimum now, the danger is--it is a great danger to us if we allow this to go on if we get a despotic government at some point in time.

We are not worried about good people in government. We are worried about people who might be elected who would abuse these powers. It has happened. Look at what happened during certain administrations where people looked at IRS records of enemies. Look at what is happening now where the executive branch is looking at donor records for those who do business with government. If you are a contractor and you do business with government, they want to know who you donate to.

There are dangers to allowing the government to snoop through our records. It doesn't mean we don't want to stop crime, we don't want to stop terrorism. It means we need to have a rule of law, and we need to pay attention to the rule of law.

We proposed several amendments. One of them went through the Judiciary Committee. It was deliberated. It was amended. It was passed with bipartisan support, but we won't get a vote on it. It disappoints me that they are afraid to debate this on the Senate floor, and we will get no vote on amendments that were offered seriously to try to reform the PATRIOT Act to take away some of the abuses of it.

We offered three amendments to the PATRIOT Act. One was on the gun records. That apparently unhinged people who are afraid of voting on any gun issues. Because of that, we are all going to be denied any debate or votes.

Some will say: Oh, you are going to keep your colleagues here until 1 in the morning. Well, I think when they are here tonight at 1 in the morning, maybe they will think a little bit about why they are here and why we had no debate and why we had the power to have the debate at any point in time. I have agreed and said we can have a vote on the PATRIOT Act in an hour or 2 hours. We could have had a vote on the PATRIOT Act yesterday. But I want debate, and I want amendments. I think that is the very least the American people demand and this body demands, that there be open and deliberate debate about the PATRIOT Act.

One of our other amendments has to do with destroying records. Some of these records they take from us through the bank spying on us, or the government spying on us, are not destroyed. I think these records should be destroyed at some point in time.

For goodness' sakes, if you are not a terrorist, why are they keeping these records? There ought to be rules on the destruction of these records if you are not a terrorist and they are not going to prosecute you.

The fourth amendment says we should name the place and the person. We have one wiretap called the John Doe. They don't name the place or the person, and they are not required to. I think we should. Now, are there times when it might be a terrorist when we say, well, we don't want to name the person? We don't have to name them in public. We could name them to the FISA commission. I do not object to them being named and the name being redacted, but the name should be presented to the judge who is making the decision. I want a judge to make a decision.

James Otis--part of our revolution--for the 20 years leading up to the American Revolution, there was a debate about warrants. They issued what were called writs of assistance. They are also called general warrants. They weren't specific. They didn't say what crime one was being accused of, and the soldiers came into our houses. They would lodge soldiers in our houses, and they would enter into our houses without warrants. The fourth amendment was a big deal. We had passed the fourth amendment, and it was one of the primary grievances of our Founding Fathers.

I don't think we should give up so easily. I don't think we should be cowed by fear and so fearful of attack that we give up our liberties. If we do, we become no different than the rest of the countries that have no liberties. Our liberties are what make us different from other countries. The fact that we protect the rights, even of those accused of a crime--people say, well, gosh, a murderer will get a trial. Yes, they will get a trial because we don't know they are a murderer until we convict them. We want procedural restraints.

People say: You would give procedural restraints for terrorists? I would say at the very least, a judge has to give permission before we get records. The main reason is because we are not asking for 10 records or 20 records or 40 records of people connected to terrorism. We are asking for millions of records.

There are people in this room today who have had their records looked at. It is difficult to find out because what happens--here is the real rub, and this is how fearful they were. When the PATRIOT Act was passed shortly after 9/11, they were so fearful that they said: If a letter, a demand letter, a national security letter asks for records, you are not allowed to tell your attorney. You were gagged. If you told your attorney, they could put you in jail for 5 years. It is still a crime punishable by 5 years in jail.

If I have Internet service and they want my records on somebody, they don't tell me or a judge. We have no idea. There is no probable cause. This person might be relevant, which could mean anything, however tangential. If I don't reveal those records, I go to jail. If I tell my wife they are asking for my records, I could go to jail.

This secrecy on millions of records, this trolling through millions of records is un-American. It is unconstitutional. They have modified the Constitution through statutory law. We have given up our rights. It should be two-thirds of this body voting to change the Constitution and three-fourths of the States. We did it by 50 percent with one bill. The bill was hot when it came here. There was one copy of it. No one read it.

I came from the tea party, and I said: We must read the bills. I propose that we wait 1 day for every 20 pages so we are ensured they are reading the bills. The PATRIOT Act was hundreds of pages long and nobody read it. Not one person read it because it wasn't even hardly printed. There were penciled edits in the margin, and it was passed because we were afraid.

But we can't be so afraid that we give up our liberties. I think it is more important than that. I think it is a sad day today in America that we are afraid to debate this. The great constitutional questions such as this, or great constitutional questions such as whether we can go to war with just the word of the President, these great constitutional questions are not being debated because we are so fearful of debate.

I urge the Senate to reconsider. I urge the Senate to consider debating the PATRIOT Act, to consider amendments, and to consider the Constitution.

Thank you. I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I appreciate the fine remarks of my friend from Missouri. Seeing the damage that was done by the tornadoes in Alabama, they have far exceeded anything I have seen before. I appreciate more than most the damage and difficulties the people of Missouri are going through. I know there will be emergency funding for that. There is a legitimate question as to whether we ought to not find that emergency spending someplace in our budget where it can be recovered that is not so important. But I know we will process that as we go forward.

Unsustainable Budget Path

I truly believe our Nation is facing an economic crisis, but it's not so much what I believe but what every expert we have heard from believes and has testified to. Mr. Erskine Bowles, who cochaired the debt commission, who was appointed by President Obama, said, along with Senator Alan Simpson, his cochair, in a written statement to the Budget Committee, that this Nation has never faced such a predictable economic crisis. In other words, the deficit levels we are operating with are so high and they create such danger to the economy that we have to get off this path. Every expert has said we are on an unsustainable path.

Many people have thought the problem we are dealing with today places a burden on our children and our grandchildren; therefore, it has removed to some degree the immediacy of the problem. But that is not what Mr. Bowles said. In his testimony before the Budget Committee just a month or two ago, he said that we could have a financial crisis. When asked by the chairman when, he said 2 years, maybe less, maybe more. Senator Simpson said it could be 1 year.

We are taking a risk with the American economy. This has been echoed by Moody's bond ratings, and it has been echoed by S&P, which warned that our debt rating for our government debt could be downgraded. Alan Greenspan has made similar comments. Alice Rivlin, former OMB Director under President Clinton, made those comments. Pete Domenici, who cochaired a debt commission with Alice Rivlin, former chairman of the Budget Committee in the Senate, said to us with real passion: I have never been so afraid for my country. That is what Pete Domenici said.

We know we have to take action, and now we are heading today to 756 days since the Senate has passed a budget. We have not passed a budget. I say with confidence that in terms of a real, long-term threat to the American future, this Nation has never had a greater danger financially and in terms of debt because the problems we face are more severe than even in the nineties when we turned our business around and in 3 years balanced the budget. It is going to be harder to do it now.

We went through World War II. We borrowed money. But we had a vibrant, growing economy and growing population, and we promptly moved our way through that, and growth took care of us. But we cannot expect that the level of growth that according to the experts we can reasonably predict will be sufficient to get our house in order.

When you do not have enough money and the course you are on is unsustainable, you need to develop a plan that puts you on a sustainable path. How simple is that? That is grownup talk. How do you do it? What is our mechanism in the Congress?

This is a budget. This is title II, section 271 through et seq, and it has the Budget Act. We passed a Budget Act. It is law. Clever Congress did not put any penalties on it, so we can violate it and not go to jail. We do not have to personally pay fines. But it represented a serious commitment by a previous Congress that we needed a budget. They

also made as part of that budget law that it could be passed with a simple majority so it could not be filibustered. That was one of the reasons budgets sometimes failed to be passed. At a time when they were thinking about the future, they said: Let's make the budget passable by a simple majority. It also has a timeline in it. It says the Congress must pass a budget by April 15. We are long past that date--long past it. Are we going on to a third year now without a budget?

Mr. President, 1,000 days without a budget while our country is on a debt path unsustainable to a degree that threatens the future of America economically--yes, that is where we are heading.

People say: Surely, Jeff, that is not so. Surely there is some plan.

There is not any plan--not a plan to pass a budget. What there is a plan to do is not pass a budget. It is irresponsible. It is unwise. It is dangerous for our future because we are on a certain path, a predictable path, as the debt commission told us, to financial ruin. Our debt-to-GDP ratio will reach 100 percent by September 30 of this year. That is above the level that economic experts tell us puts our country at risk. Indeed, when we passed a 90 percent debt-to-GDP ratio, economists Rhinehardt and Rogoff, who completed a massive study of national defaults of economies around the world by sovereign states, warned that at that level you reduce the growth in the economy by at least 1 percent of GDP. The average was higher than that. They said on a median level, it is 1 percent of GDP, and they used that number--1 percent growth that we don't get. Well, some think we may not get 2 percent growth this year. Would we have gotten 3? If we get 1, would we have gotten 2? One percent growth in GDP is a large thing in an economy the size of ours. It increases tax revenue significantly. It increases jobs. According to experts, 1 percent of GDP growth means 1 million more jobs. A decline of 1 percent in our economy represents a loss of 1 million jobs. This is not a little-bitty matter.

On Monday, I objected. I realized what is going on in the Senate, that there is no plan to deal with this situation, that there is a gimmicked-up scheme to bring up a series of budget votes that the majority leader knows will not pass. Indeed, he intends to bring up a vote on a budget that he and all his colleagues intend to vote against--the most responsible one out there, the House budget, passed by the Republican House. That is what they want to bring up for a vote and vote against. But the Budget Act does not say bring up a House budget. It says each House--the Senate and the House--should bring up its own budget and pass it on the floor. It should go to committee. None of the budgets we will be voting on have gone through committee. We have had no markups in committee. We never even had a markup on the budget. Why? What is this? What is going on?

Let me share with my colleagues why we are not having a legitimate process to produce a budget at the most critical financial time in our history. It is about politics. Does that surprise anyone? This is what Democratic staffers were quoted as saying in a Wall Street Journal article a few days ago. What did they say about it? Did they say: We have a plan to solve America's future. Did they say: We have a plan to reduce our debt and get us on a sound path. Did they say: We understand the future of the country is endangered by unsustainable debt growth. No, they did not say that. This is what they said:

As a political matter, Senate Democratic strategists say

there may be little benefit in producing a budget that would

inevitably include unpopular items.

They do not want to produce an honest budget, a budget that would make a difference, because it would have some unpopular items in it. I ask, is that responsible leadership? I suggest it is not.

It goes on:

Many Democrats believe a recent House GOP proposal to

overhaul Medicare is proving to be unpopular and has given

Democrats a political advantage. They are loath to give that

up by proposing higher taxes . . .

What does that mean? It means their budget, if they produce one, would call for higher taxes, and they do not want to do it. They do not want to propose a budget that reduces spending. They do not want to produce a budget that has higher taxes. Why? Because they are playing politics rather than serving a national interest. That is just plain as day. I wish it were not so, but there is no other explanation for why this Senate preparing to go into recess Friday for Memorial Day without having even commenced hearings on a budget.

This is what they decided to do. I am quoting from the article:

Senate Democrats plan to hold a vote on the Ryan plan--

The House budget--

hoping to force GOP senators to cast a vote on the Medicare

overhaul that could prove politically difficult.

Give me a break. Is that what it is all about? Is that what we are here for? It is not what many of my Democratic colleagues tell me. They tell me they know we are on an unsustainable path and we have to do something. But why are we going through this charade, to bring up one, two, three budgets and vote them all down and then say: Well, we tried. Maybe we will have some secret talks over here and we will plop something down right before some emergency date and demand everybody vote for it, not having a chance to read it. Is that what the process is going to be instead of an open process where the Budget Committee has open hearings, amendments are offered, a budget is voted out of committee, it comes to the floor, and there is a guaranteed 50 hours of debate? But the process comes to an end. The Budget Act states that we cannot filibuster it. There is only limited time of debate, but there is an opportunity to debate, an opportunity to offer amendments.

We are told Senator Reid does not want his members to have to take tough votes. None of us like to take tough votes. None of us likes to take tough votes. Isn't that what we are paid for here? Isn't that why they send us--to vote on important, tough issues that impact the future of our Nation? I am telling you, we are so far off path it is stunning to me.

I quoted his staffer earlier, but what about Senator Reid himself, the Democratic leader of the Senate? Anybody who has worked with Senator Reid likes him, and I enjoy working with him. I respect him. I know he has a difficult job, but at some point one has to stand and lead. He is not leading and neither is President Obama. But this is what Senator Reid said just a few days ago--I think Friday.

There is no need to have a Democratic budget, in my

opinion.

Well, there is a need, a statutory legal requirement that we send a budget out of the Senate.

Then, he said:

It would be foolish for us to do a budget at this stage.

Why does he say it would be foolish? I think my good friend, Senator Reid, has taken his eye off the national interest. He has taken his eye off the crisis our country faces, and he has his eye on politics. He means it would be foolish politically. He has a scheme, and this is what his scheme is. He is going to bring up the House budget--the Ryan plan. In all honesty, it is the only plan I have seen in my time in the Senate that comes close to providing a long-term alteration of the unsustainable fiscal path we are on. It deals with it. It makes some tough choices, but they are not unbearable and I think most of them will actually work.

It is not perfect. I don't promise that I would vote for everything in it. But it is a historic plan to put America on a sustainable financial course. I thought they could have reduced spending more in some areas, frankly. But it puts us on a sustainable course. It was produced by the House Budget Committee. They had public hearings, the committee voted on it, they brought it to the floor, and it passed in the House of Representatives, in the way the Congress of the United States is supposed to operate.

What does our leader in the Senate and his colleagues who support him do? They make a decision to do something political, not responsible. They are not putting forth the vision they have for the future, but they are going to bring up the Ryan budget so they can all vote against it. I don't think that is responsible. I don't think it is responsible at all.

I am not going to participate in this scheme to have a series of votes. Count me out. I am not supporting it. I am not going to give my consent to it.

That is the way I see it and I don't think that it makes sense. If I did, I would change my mind. But as I see it, it makes no sense for me to, in any way, consent to a process that is designed to fail. The whole process is designed to fail. With a simple majority in the Senate, our Democratic colleagues can pass any piece of legislation. They have 53 Members. They can win the vote. If they put up a good budget, they might have some Republicans--maybe all the Republicans, if we reached a bipartisan agreement. But there is nothing close to that. We have not approached this in any realistic way, and I am concerned that we are off track.

Senator Schumer, who once headed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee--he designed all that--is a Senator who is considered to be a guru of politics around here. He is good, and there is nothing wrong with being a smart politician. But at some point politics goes too far. This is what he said on May 23 regarding the Ryan budget.

We will exhibit this issue as an example of why we need to

keep the Senate Democratic in order to counter House

Republicans. We will point to this week and say the

Republicans tried to end Medicare but a Democratic majority

stopped it in the Senate. It is that simple.

That is an open statement of raw politics. Where is the national interest? Where is the response to Mr. Bowles, a leading Democrat, to Alice Rivlin, a leading Democrat, and their principled cries that we do something about the debt crisis we now find ourselves in? Nowhere.

My colleagues want to go home, and they intend to go home--go home Friday. Our soldiers are out there, and they are not getting to come home from Iraq and Afghanistan. They are going down roads where bombs might be planted and they are putting their lives at risk. They do not get to come home. Their business isn't finished yet. But we plan to go home, apparently, not having done anything but having gone through a political exercise that is an embarrassment to the Senate at a critical time in our Nation's financial history--a very critical time.

President Obama utterly ignored, in his completely irresponsible budget, the fiscal commission that he himself created to seek a national consensus on funding. I have to say the President's budget is nowhere close to what is necessary to avoid our fiscal nightmare. That is not a Jeff Sessions quote. That is a quote from Erskine Bowles, who cochaired the Commission, when he saw the President's budget plan that was submitted a couple months ago. He said it is nowhere close to where the Administration will have to go to avoid our Nation's fiscal nightmare.

So that is what the President has done, and the Senate has done nothing. They will not even hold a markup and propose a plan. Why? They think it is politically unwise. They think they can gain more politically by refusing to produce a budget, by attacking the House Members who produced a budget--as they are required to by law--that is honest and would make a huge long-term difference in America. It would put us on a sustainable path, not leave us on an unsustainable path.

I will conclude with a quote from the preamble to the fiscal commission's debt report. This is what they wrote to us. Remember now, Senator Reid's plan is to bring up the House budget and have all his Members vote it down so they can attack Republicans for having the audacity to propose any changes in Medicare--and not even in the 10 years of the budget. It is the outyears they are complaining about, and it is not law. Any change will not become law until it passes both Houses of Congress. But it is a vision that could work to make Medicare sound and actually save it.

They think they can scare people by saying we are going to end Medicare, so they are going to vote on it. That vote, in the minds of our Democratic politicians, shows that they are defending Medicare and that all the Republicans oppose Medicare. But the American people are getting too smart for that. I don't believe they are going to buy that story any longer. They know Medicare is on an unsustainable path and that it cannot continue.

The Medicare actuaries and trustees have reported today that it is going to go bankrupt a number of years sooner than was originally expected. But this is what the debt commission said about the need to have a plan to fix our future:

In the weeks and months to come, countless advocacy groups

and special interests will try mightily through expensive,

dramatic, and heart-wrenching media assaults to exempt

themselves from the shared sacrifice and common purpose. The

national interest, not the special interests, must prevail.

We urge leaders and citizens with principled concerns about

any of our recommendations to follow what we call the Becerra

Rule: Don't shoot down an idea without offering a better idea

in its place.

Isn't that a reasonable request--don't shoot down an idea unless you are prepared to present a better one in its place? That is exactly the opposite of what our Democratic leadership is proposing. They are proposing to bring up a budget they say they do not like. They are going to vote it down without producing anything in its place. That is not responsible leadership, it is not respectful of the budget process, which is required by law, and it is not in the national interest. It is not in the national interest.

Yes, we are going to have to deal with tough issues. We find ourselves in a fix, a deeper hole than we should ever have been in, and the American people punished Congressmen and Senators last year because they were unhappy, and they were right to be. There is no way any Member of this Congress can stand before their constituents and justify a deficit this year of $1.6 trillion and defend or justify a spending program in which 40 percent of every $1 we spend this year is borrowed. How can that possibly be called sanity? It is insanity. That is why every one of these people is telling us we have to change and why PIMCO, the largest bond company in the world, has said they are not buying any more American debt. They believe we need to get serious and make some serious changes.

I thank the Chair.

I will just wrap up by saying that is why I think the process planned for this week is unacceptable and I do not intend to support it.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I reserve the right to object and I will object at this time and would like to review that unanimous consent request.

Mr. President, under the unanimous consent request propounded by the Senator from Oregon, I will remove my objection. I will not object.

Mr. President, I want to address two things but start with health care. I recall that during the debate over health care--and we celebrated the 1-year anniversary of the signing of the health care legislation a little over a week ago. But I recall then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi saying: We will have to pass the bill in order to find out what is in it. I do not think she realized how true her statement really was.

I just read something over the weekend from a March 31 edition of the Washington Examiner. I ask unanimous consent to have this article by Byron York printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

I will read the first sentence and then a couple of other items from it. The headline is ``Uncovered: New $2 billion bailout in Obamacare.''

Here is the first sentence in the story:

Investigators for the House Energy and Commerce Committee

have discovered that a little-known provision in the national

health

care law has allowed the Federal Government to pay nearly $2

billion to unions, state public employee systems, and big

corporations to subsidize health coverage costs for early

retirees.

Then the article goes on to point out that they discovered this in oversight hearings of an obscure agency known as the CCIO, or the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. The idea under the law apparently was to subsidize unions and States and companies that had made commitments to provide health insurance for workers who retired early.

They point out that there was a $5 billion appropriation in the bill, and at the rate of spending by this agency they will burn through the entire $5 billion as early as 2012. And where is the money being sent to? Well, by far and away, the biggest single recipient is the United Auto Workers Labor Union, which so far had received well over $200 million.

Other recipients include AT&T, Verizon, General Electric, General Motors Corporation, and a few State public employees retirement systems. But, by far and away, the contribution to the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters and United Food and Commercial Workers was more than the amount of money sent to the State pension funds--the point being that we learn something new almost every week about Obamacare.

As I said, it was just a little over a week ago that it celebrated its first anniversary, and we are only now discovering some of the things that were hidden away in it, which I think had we been able to debate the bill in a more appropriate fashion--remember, it passed on Christmas Eve day of the year before last--we probably would have been able to discover these things. Had the bill been read, had we had time to read all of the fine print, these are the kinds of things that we would have discovered; and I suspect the proponents of the bill, those who voted for it, might not have been so quick to vote for it.

Maybe we will have a chance to repeal this particular provision of the bill if there is any money left that has not been spent by the time we get around to doing that. I will propose to my colleagues that we try to accomplish that.

The second point with respect to Obamacare that continues to trouble me is something called the Independent Payment Advisory Board. This is troublesome for three reasons, two of which have to do with process and the third the substance. The Independent Payment Advisory Board goes by the acronym of IPAP, and it was created in order to try to find savings in the Medicare Program.

Now, obviously, we have read a lot about the billions, tens of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare. The problem is, this board is not likely to get at that waste, fraud, and abuse because its primary mission--and, in fact, it is restricted to finding cost savings only as a result of reducing the payments to providers. In fact, James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has done some very good writing on this subject, and he notes that the board is strictly limited to what it can recommend and implement and that the board can only ``cut Medicare payment rates for those providing services to beneficiaries.''

Well, that is a problem because it does not get to the real heart of a lot of the waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare. Secondly--and I will conclude my remarks with this main point--when we cut the payment rates for the doctors, for example, who are taking care of Medicare patients, what happens? We get fewer doctors willing to take care of Medicare patients.

We are all familiar with the stories in our own States of more and more physicians either not taking any Medicare patients or at least not taking any new Medicare patients. As a result, there are far fewer doctors available to treat folks, which means there is a much longer waiting time for people to get the care they need. The end result of that is, of course, care delayed is frequently care denied. That is the problem that exists in other countries such as Great Britain, our neighbor to the north, Canada, and it is coming to your own community pretty soon as a result of the fact that we are not paying the physicians and other providers enough as it is. That is the only thing that IPAP can do to further reduce the costs.

But I mentioned two procedural problems. The first is that this board is comprised of 15 unelected bureaucrats. The President makes the appointments. He does not have to balance them politically, so they can all be members of one political party. He can make recess appointments so the Senate may not even have an opportunity to pass on these individuals.

The second procedural problem is, when they make their recommendations it comes to the Congress in a take-it-or-leave-it procedural posture; that is to say, either Congress adopts the recommendations of the board or at a number equal to that, with what we decide ourselves is the appropriate way to achieve that amount, or the Department of Health and Human Services must implement the board's original recommendations, period. That is it.

So we are ceding authority to an unelected board of people whose political views could reflect, for example, only those of the President of the United States, and whose recommendations almost automatically become law. Only if the Congress, within a specified period of time, is able to recommend an alternative that can get the votes, and it would have to be a 60-vote majority, would the recommendations of the board be overridden.

So for procedural reasons this was not the right way to tackle the problem of costs of the Medicare Program that we do need to get a handle on. It is a very undemocratic approach. But as I said, the procedure is part of the problem. The real question is, how are we going to address costs in Medicare?

Now, we are going to see some very innovative ideas from the House of Representatives, from the Budget chairman, Paul Ryan, this week when the House budget is released. He will tackle the tough problem of helping to constrain the costs of Medicare. One of the ways I find very unappealing to control Medicare costs is putting a cap on how much we can spend and reimbursing the providers, in particular physicians, with that particular cap in mind.

As I said, the reason is because it is going to cost physicians a certain amount of money to take care of each patient. If they cannot be reimbursed in an amount sufficient to cover their expenses and a little bit more, they are simply going to turn to other kinds of patients.

They have already turned away from Medicaid patients because Medicaid does not reimburse at a level that meets their requirements. As a result, it is a dirty little secret in the medical profession that Medicaid is rationed health care. That is not right. These are the poorest in our society. They need support. They need help. But they have to wait a long time. A lot of times, there just aren't the people to take care of them. Now we are going to convert the system that takes care of senior citizens into the same kind of whatever-we-have- available kind of service because when we begin reducing payments to providers, we will get fewer providers, with the result that we will get less care. It is a simple matter of economics.

This is being recommended not by physicians, not by the patients groups, and so on, but by people who are unelected bureaucrats appointed to this board. According to Mr. Capretta, under the law this is all the board can do. This is what it is restricted to doing. By cutting Medicare patients, the board will only delay and deny care. That is the critical point.

I am painting this picture of physicians not being paid enough. The reality is that today Medicare already pays physicians 20 percent less than private insurance companies do. Part of that is because private insurance companies are cost shifters. When a physician can't make enough money serving government-paid-for patients--Medicare--then they charge more to private sector-paid patients. We therefore are paying more in the private sector for our insurance than it really would cost, but that is in order to subsidize the payment of physicians who don't make enough under Medicare today. What the IPAB would do is reduce those payments even more. This, in turn, will lead to reduced access to care for seniors, and reduced access to care means rationed care.

I quoted James Capretta before. He says:

In a very real sense, seniors will be the ones holding the

bag from these cuts when they can't access care due to a lack

of willing suppliers.

I will close this point by noting that there is another government health care program I am very familiar with because of the large number of Native Americans in Arizona who have access to health care from the Federal Government under the Indian Health Service. In Indian Country, they have a saying that is not really facetious. They say it with a bit of a wry smile on their face, but they are not at all happy. They say: Just get sick before July. The reason is, there is a definite limit on how much the program will pay out. They set a cap at the beginning of the year, and when enough people have gotten sick enough to a certain point in the year, that is the end of the coverage. So they wait until money is available the next year.

That is an oversimplification, but it is what a total single-payer government system does. When we need to cut costs, we reduce the amount of money available. And who suffers? The people to whom we promised care. We see it in the Indian Health Service. We are seeing it now in Medicaid. We are going to see it in Medicare if we are not careful.

That is why we need to repeal the IPAB, the Independent Payment Advisory Board established under ObamaCare. There is legislation introduced to do this. Senator Cornyn and I cosponsored the Health Care Bureaucrats Elimination Act, S. 668, which would eliminate the IPAB. I hope we will have an opportunity to bring that legislation to the floor so that my colleagues can join us in excising this piece of ObamaCare so that our seniors don't suffer from rationed health care. There is a long group of organizations which joins us in our opposition to IPAB, groups such as the American Health Care Association, the American College of Radiology, National Senior Citizens Law Center, National Association of Social Workers, Volunteers of America, and others.

I hope that when the time comes, we will have an opportunity to have a debate about this aspect of ObamaCare. I know the supporters of the health care reform act did not intend this negative result. I am not suggesting that colleagues who supported ObamaCare love seniors any less than I love my mother, and they love their parents and others. That is not the point. Laws have unintended consequences. When we create a mechanism to save money such as this one and constrain it the way we have, I know what we will get, and we will not like it. We will hear from seniors. And before I hear from my mother, I would just as soon get this problem fixed.

Exhibit 1

[From the Examiner, Mar. 31, 2011]

Uncovered: New $2 Billion Bailout in Obamacare

(By Byron York)

Investigators for the House Energy and Commerce Committee

have discovered that a little-known provision in the national

health care law has allowed the federal government to pay

nearly $2 billion to unions, state public employee systems,

and big corporations to subsidize health coverage costs for

early retirees. At the current rate of payment, the $5

billion appropriated for the program could be exhausted well

before it is set to expire.

The discovery came on the eve of an oversight hearing

focused on the workings of an obscure agency known as CCIO--

the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.

CCIO, which is part of the Department of Health and Human

Services, oversees the implementation of Section 1102 of the

Affordable Care Act, which created something called the Early

Retiree Reinsurance Program. The legislation called for the

program to spend a total of $5 billion, beginning in June

2010--shortly after Obamacare was passed--and ending on

January 1, 2014, as the system of national health care

exchanges was scheduled to go into effect.

The idea was to subsidize unions, states, and companies

that had made commitments to provide health insurance for

workers who retired early--between the ages of 55 and 64,

before they were eligible for Medicare. According to a new

report prepared by the Department of Health and Human

Services, ``People in the early retiree age group . . . often

face difficulties obtaining insurance in the individual

market because of age or chronic conditions that make

coverage unaffordable or inaccessible.'' As a result, fewer

and fewer organizations have been offering coverage to early

retirees; the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program was designed

to subsidize such coverage until the creation of Obamacare's

health-care exchanges.

The program began making payouts on June 1, 2010. Between

that date and the end of 2010, it paid out about $535 million

dollars. But according to the new report, the rate of

spending has since increased dramatically, to about $1.3

billion just for the first two and a half months of this

year. At that rate, it could burn through the entire $5

billion appropriation as early as 2012.

Where is the money going? According to the new report, the

biggest single recipient of an early-retiree bailout is the

United Auto Workers, which has so far received $206,798,086.

Other big recipients include AT&T, which received

$140,022,949, and Verizon, which received $91,702,538.

General Electric, in the news recently for not paying any

U.S. taxes last year, received $36,607,818. General Motors,

recipient of a massive government bailout, received

$19,002,669.

The program also paid large sums of money to state

governments. The Public Employees Retirement System of Ohio

received $70,557,764; the Teacher Retirement System of Texas

received $68,074,118; the California Public Employees

Retirement System, or CalPERS, received $57,834,267; the

Georgia Department of Community Health received $57,936,127;

and the state of New York received $47,869,044. Other states

received lesser but still substantial sums.

But payments to individual states were dwarfed by the

payout to the auto workers union, which received more than

the states of New York, California, and Texas combined. Other

unions also received government funds, including the United

Food and Commercial Workers, the United Mine Workers, and the

Teamsters.

Republican investigators count the early-retiree program

among those that would never have become law had Democrats

allowed more scrutiny of Obamacare at the time it was pushed

through the House and Senate. Since then, Republicans have

kept an eye on the program but were not able to pry any

information out of the administration until after the GOP won

control of the House last November. Now, finally, they are

learning what's going on.

Mr. President, I am glad I was on the floor to hear the distinguished Senator from Wyoming's comments about the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which is Washington, DC, gobbledegook, which translates into a rationing board which is going to limit seniors' access to care, as he so ably described. I appreciate him talking about that. It is a topic I will raise in a moment as part of my remarks. But I wish to express my appreciation to him for his remarks.

My larger concern is about our budget, the Federal budget. As one of our colleagues across the aisle told the media this week, he said he looks forward to voting on the Republican budget. That may seem a little odd because this is the Senate and, actually, the Senate does not have a budget. The Budget Committee on which I serve has not met to consider a proposal by the chairman of the Budget Committee and we have not had a chance to offer amendments to vote on it and then for it to come to the Senate floor so we would have a Senate budget to vote on.

Of course, what he was talking about is, he is looking forward to voting on the House budget. But I would say the Senate has not considered a budget for 750-plus days. No family, no business, no one in America, certainly no State can operate in this sort of fiscally irresponsible manner, only the Federal Government.

Now where are we? We are spending 43 cents out of every $1 in borrowed money--borrowed from our kids and grandkids. The fact is, a newborn baby, born into this world today, inherits $46,000 in debt because we have not had the courage to meet this challenge as we must.

My colleague also said that is going to be one of the defining issues of 2012, which, by the way, is an election year. I guess what he means is, this is going to be an election issue. I think he is right but not for the reasons he suggested.

First, I wish to refresh everyone's memory. It was just in December of last year that the President's own bipartisan fiscal debt commission gave us a report, and truly a blueprint, for what I think would be a responsible start to dealing with this debt crisis we find ourselves confronted with.

That report--again a bipartisan report--proposed $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. The report said: Federal health care spending represents our single largest fiscal challenge over the long run. As the baby boomers--people such as me and the Presiding Officer-- retire and get older, health care costs will grow faster than the economy. Federal health care spending threatens to balloon.

As if on cue, the Medicare trustees issued a report just this last month with even a starker warning. Medicare's trust fund will be insolvent in 2024--about 13 years from now--and the gap between the promises Medicare has made to seniors and its funding--or ability to fund or pay for those services--is about $24 trillion. That is the so- called unfunded liability of Medicare.

Those estimates are, according to the Chief Actuary, an optimistic scenario, although it is hard to be optimistic about a $24 trillion unfunded liability. But we also know there have been other ominous warnings both here at home and around the world. The International Monetary Fund, in a working paper last month, noted our potential debt crisis.

The S&P rating agency downgraded its outlook for American debt--in other words, our ability to repay those bills--from stable to negative. PIMCO, the world's largest bondholder, no longer is purchasing American bonds, choosing to purchase other types of investment. That ought to be a warning to us.

If we needed any reminder, even the Chinese Communist Party has given an earful to visiting Senators about our debt, of which they happen to own about $1 trillion. But they are worried about the value of their own investment and, hence, as Admiral Mullen said, we ought to realize that because of that situation, debt is the single largest national security issue facing America today.

Despite these ominous warnings and even reports from the President's own fiscal commission and a bipartisan one at that, the majority-- Senator Reid--our friends across the aisle, simply are not taking the fiscal situation seriously. In fact, the majority leader was quoted recently saying: It would be foolish, foolish for the leadership of the other party that controls the agenda on the floor and in committees, it would be foolish for them to propose a budget.

The White House has shown twice this year so far that it is not truly serious about fiscal discipline. In February, the President proposed a budget that completely ignored his own deficit commission. It had $8.7 trillion in new spending, $1.6 trillion in new taxes, and an additional $13 trillion in debt.

At the time the President released his proposed budget, there were a number of my colleagues who were very impressed by it. Some called it responsible, others credible, others said it was a balanced approach, a good blueprint, a step forward, a careful evaluation, a solid starting point, and many other compliments as well. President Obama was so pleased with his budget proposal that he called it ``our Sputnik moment.'' But, of course, we know his Sputnik failed to launch. None of my colleagues who heaped praise on the President's proposal were willing to pass a budget resolution or even take up one and have it be considered and voted on.

So President Obama tried again in another big speech in April, when he was finally brought, unwillingly, to the debate on our budget and on our debt crisis. In that speech at Georgetown in April, he called for higher taxes as well as automatic tax increases that would kick in if certain conditions were met. He called for deeper cuts in defense spending. He invented a new 12-year budget window to disguise the large deficits that would otherwise appear if it were the traditional 10-year budget window.

Then the President, I think beneath the dignity of his office, verbally abused the very people who had the courage to propose an alternative. Then, of course, we have heard the attacks he started, which have continued, the false attacks that Republicans want to ``end Medicare as we know it.'' Well, I will say Republicans do not want to end Medicare as we know it. That is an intentional falsehood. That is a lie. Republicans do not want to end Medicare as we know it. We are simply trying to inject some cold, hard reality, as observed by the President's own debt commission, by the Medicare trustees, and everyone else who has taken a responsible look at the problem.

What is that reality? Well, the reality is that Medicare as we know it will end unless we do something to fix it and to save it. My colleagues want to talk about ending Medicare as we know it. They have short memories because it was these very same colleagues who took $\1/ 2\ trillion out of Medicare to fund ObamaCare. They injected the rationing commission that my colleague from Wyoming just got through talking about and which I will mention again in a moment.

Many seniors found out, as a result of the health care bill that passed only along a party-line vote--only Democratic votes in the Senate--that many seniors have already lost their access to Medicare Advantage.

Other retirees are seeing that their former employers have canceled their health care plans and found themselves dropped into the Medicare system. It has never been explained to me how we can possibly cut $\1/ 2\ trillion out of Medicare which, as I said earlier, already has $24 trillion in unfunded liabilities. So we are exacerbating--we are making those liabilities worse, not better--to fund a new entitlement program.

I would ask: Who has changed Medicare? Who has made it impossible for us to continue, under the present course, to keep that promise to our seniors? Why is it so important that we work together to try to come up with a solution to fix it? Just when we think the debate could not stoop any lower and people could not act any more irresponsibly, we are confronted with political ads already about Republicans rolling a senior off a cliff in a wheelchair.

I know the American people are smart enough to figure that out. They realize this is just an attack ad, and they are smart enough to look at the substance. But what we need is a real debate and a discussion and try to work together to try to solve our problems, not just sort of ``gotcha'' politics, the sort of thing people have come to loathe about Congress and Washington, DC--not people working together to solve problems but people playing ``gotcha'' and focusing only on the next election, not on the next generation.

My colleague from Wyoming talked about the Independent Payment Advisory Board, and I realize that is a mouthful. But it is bureaucratese, Washington speak, for an unelected, unaccountable group of bureaucrats--15 of them--appointed who will actually have the job of cutting payments to doctors and hospitals, which will have the practical impact of limiting seniors' access to Medicare benefits. What good is providing coverage to our seniors if they can't find a doctor or hospital to treat them?

Well, this is good old-fashioned--I should say bad old-fashioned-- price controls, and they don't work. We have seen that already in Medicare. In my State of Texas alone, about a third of the doctors already limit their new Medicare patients, according to the Texas Medical Association. So if you live in the rural parts of the State, it is hard to find a doctor. We know the price controls of this rationing board will make this trend worse and accelerate it, leading to longer wait times and harder-to-access treatment.

If the board forces our seniors to wait longer for the life-saving treatments they need, does that change Medicare as we know it? Well, it surely changes Medicare as people have come to expect it and deserve it. Yet the President has done nothing but double down on this rationing board. You heard in the speech he made in April--the one I referred to a moment ago--at Georgetown. He said we are going to extract, in the first 10 years another $\1/2\ trillion in savings from Medicare, and in the second 10 years, another $1 trillion--$1.5 trillion sucked out of Medicare. I have to ask, what do you think that is going to do to people's access to a doctor and a hospital?

That is the President's framework. It is not a budget. It is not the numbers we are accustomed to considering and voting on, but that is his proposal. If the President's proposal to cut $1.5 trillion out of Medicare in the next 2 decades doesn't change Medicare as we know it, then I don't know what does.

We know the House of Representatives has labored mightily to produce a budget--the so-called Ryan plan. Many colleagues on the other side relish the fact that they have stood back and waited for House Republicans to act responsibly to try to wrestle with these problems and confront them, to tell the truth to the American people about the problem, and then they tried their dead level best to meet those challenges and deal with them like responsible adults. What did they get? A kick in the teeth--attack ads on TV.

Well, this will allow us, under the House proposal, to fix Medicare and to save it. Right now, it is on the road to bankruptcy and oblivion and, for the reasons I have observed, and others, it will not work. There are some on our side of the aisle who may have some problems with the details of the proposed House budget. But the responsible answer to that is, let's take up and pass a budget in the Senate and give Senators on the Budget Committee an opportunity to offer amendments that would improve it, if they can, and then bring it to the Senate floor and do what we get paid for--take on these hard problems, confront them, debate them, and then make the best decisions we can on behalf of the people we work for in our States and across the country.

I think some elements of the House budget have an awful lot of appeal. In fact, we have seen, based on the experience with Medicare Part D, the prescription drug plan we passed earlier in the last decade, by injecting some market forces and competition and transparency, we can bring down prices and increase the quality of services. In fact, the Medicare prescription drug plan has come in 46 percent below what it was originally expected to cost. That is an example we can learn from and can begin to implement in trying to bring down costs and yet not ration access to care.

Indeed, the premium support model is advocated by many Democrats and Republicans and is similar to how the Federal Government provides health insurance for Federal employees, including Members of Congress. If it is good enough for Congress, why isn't it good enough to consider for American seniors? Do Republicans want to ``change Medicare as we know it''? We want to save it, we want to fix it, and we want it to be there as a promise that we can keep, as opposed to one we cannot keep, because it is on a path to bankruptcy and oblivion.

Our friends across the aisle say: No, trust us, we are from the government, we will fix it. The way they want to do it is with Draconian cuts to doctors and hospitals that will limit people's access to health care. We believe the

transparency and choice and competition that has worked in Medicare Advantage and the prescription drug program can work here as well. If people disagree with me, I respect their right to do that. But why aren't we having a responsible debate on the floor and voting on a budget, as opposed to the irresponsible rhetoric, attack ads, and the campaign already begun for 2012? I am talking about from the White House to the Congress.

I think some of my colleagues firmly believe in their heart of hearts--they have been listening to political consultants, and they say the way to win the next election is to scare the living daylights out of our seniors. I think that is irresponsible. People should resist the temptation to do that to win an election and keep their job. Indeed, I find myself in agreement with some of the comments made by President Obama himself last summer. He said:

We're not going to be able to do anything about any of

these entitlements if what we do is characterized--whatever

proposals are put out there--as the other party is being

irresponsible; the other party is trying to hurt our seniors;

or the other party is doing X, Y, Z.

I agree with that, but that is not what we are hearing across the aisle and on the airwaves of America. That was the President's message in 2010. It obviously has changed since 2012, since he began his own personal attack on the only responsible budget proposal that has been made in April.

Unfortunately, I think it is a prematurely begun election campaign for 2012. It is an abdication of our responsibility to engage in this sort of ``gotcha'' politics, without trying to take on and confront the problem. I don't think it is responsible to try to scare seniors for political points. But also I don't think Republicans should allow ourselves to be merely punching bags and let the other side negatively characterize our motives or the seriousness of the problem our country faces.

What we need is to resist the temptation to engage in this sort of gamesmanship and to try to do our dead level best to fulfill our oath and do our job as representatives of the American people. I think they would welcome that. But all we have seen so far is the attacks and the ``gotcha'' politics, which I think will do nothing but earn their contempt, and deservedly so. We can do better and we need to try.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this is a place that runs on words. The Senate is a place where there is always a great deal of speeches given and words spoken. Every once in a while, something comes along in life when words are completely inadequate. What happened in my State in the last few days is very difficult to express in words. I did want to take a few moments to recognize an incredible occurrence in the southwest portion of my State.

Having been there all day yesterday and arriving very early in the morning and spending time with the people of Joplin--with Missourians who have come to Joplin from every corner of our State, with Federal officials, I do want to take a short amount of time to recognize the tragedy and to rejoice in the response.

So many parts of this response, in fact, are the kinds of things we should celebrate. But the loss of life is staggering. An F-5 tornado, we now know, is the strongest tornado classification--in fact, this is the most devastating tornado we have had in this country in almost 60 years. The loss of life is staggering--122 lives. It is, unfortunately, a reality that that toll will probably continue to rise--I hope only slightly--in the coming days. But yesterday, there were another five or six confirmed deaths.

The loss of property--over 8,000 buildings were damaged; 2,000 homes are gone. When I say gone, I mean gone. I have responded to many natural disasters in Missouri during my time as a public official--a lot of tornadoes and flooding. I have never observed a scene that even comes close to what I observed yesterday. Walking among the rubble, you realize that what you are walking through is people's lives that have been spread far and wide, and that, in many ways, cannot be recovered, cannot be made exactly as they were before. From the air, the swathe of damage was incredible. We were able to get up there--because the weather finally cooperated--to look at the damage from the air. Governor Nixon and Mr. Fugate, the Administrator of FEMA, and I, with other officials, went up in helicopters yesterday morning. As you look down upon Joplin, from the air it looks like a stave mill. Through the middle of Joplin, miles and miles long and wide, surrounded by green, it looks like a massive amount of toothpicks. The trees are all gone. Many hundred-year-old trees are lying on their sides. The trees--what is left standing of them--have most of the bark ripped off by the force of the wind that swept through Joplin shortly before 6 p.m. on Sunday evening.

The emotional toll of this devastation is one you can't calculate. But you see it on people's faces. What I observed yesterday was friends and neighbors who were standing by hoping for a miracle, and firefighters dug under the rubble at the Walmart hoping they would find someone there who was alive. I witnessed other people going through the rubble of their homes. In talking to them, I think the initial reaction for the people of Joplin was intense gratitude that they were alive. Now it is being replaced with the reality of their loss and what they have lost--from schools, to churches, to a hospital that employs over 2,000 people in a community of just 50,000. This is an incredible loss. But the pain is palpable on these people's faces, and that is why it is so important that we don't lose sight of what they are going to need over the coming weeks, months and, yes, even years.

The response I witnessed, in terms of what was on the ground, was remarkable--from Federal, State, first responders in local communities, and obviously the officials of Joplin, Missouri, all working together seamlessly as a team. The Federal Government--unlike many disasters where they wait several weeks to declare a disaster--obviously understood that the flexibility and the immediacy of the response was incredibly important in this instance, and they declared a disaster within 18 hours. FEMA had people on the ground. Within 12 hours, the National Guard deployed. They had National Guardsmen there before midnight. Since that moment on, more and more people have been responding with more and more assets to help the people of Joplin and the recovery effort.

I want to call out particularly the fire chief in Joplin and the city manager there who have done remarkable work. The fire chief lost his home. As I walked through the firehouse going to the command center, I heard barking in one of the rooms. I said, ``Is that a K-9 unit?'' They said, ``No, the fire chief is living here with his family because his home is gone. That is his dog.'' So as he lost his home, he obviously had to turn to the important job of initially fighting fires, and then, obviously, participating in an unprecedented effort of search and rescue over the following 48 hours.

I am very proud of our National Guard. We have over 200 guardsmen there as we speak. They have done, as always, remarkable work. I talked to one man who had just finished duty in Poplar Bluff, with the flooding, and immediately came over to help in Joplin with the tornado response and recovery.

The State of Missouri Governor Nixon has been on the ground for much of the last 72 hours, along with his team. He is bringing his cabinet heads to Joplin to work on various parts of this over the next 48 hours, along with subcabinet members from the Federal Government, housing, HHS, to be of assistance.

Let me take a minute to talk about the first responders. I am so proud of the police and firefighters I encountered yesterday. I am so proud of these men and women. As I looked around, I realized there were search and rescue teams from every corner of our State. Task Force 1 from central Missouri and almost 100 Kansas City firefighters were there. I had an opportunity to visit with many of them as they were attempting a rescue on the scene yesterday afternoon. At 3 o'clock in the morning--yesterday morning--a caravan from St. Louis of over 100 firefighters and all of their equipment and assets rolled down I-44 to get to Joplin to help their brothers and sisters, in terms of this effort. St. Francis County, Camden County--you name it--from all over the State, police and firefighters and public safety officials responded to Joplin.

Frankly, people need to realize that the assets spread all over Joplin today, the emergency vehicles, K-9 units, HAZMAT teams, mobile rescue units that allow people to do very difficult rescues in very difficult circumstances--the vast majority of those assets were bought with Federal dollars. The vast majority of that equipment that came to these Missouri departments came from Federal grants. A lot of these guys worked without sleep for days. As I talked to them and

thanked them, it was almost as though they resented being thanked because, to them, this is what they do.

I tell you, one thing yesterday gave me was an incredible passion to fight for these folks' pensions and salaries. These are not the people who are causing economic chaos in this country. These are not the people who deserve to be diminished in public discussions about what they receive for their work. These are the best we have, and they deserve every dime of pension they have bargained and fought for.

I am so proud of Joplin for its response. This is a community of great faith. This is a community that will come together, as a lot of Midwest communities do in circumstances when their neighbors are in trouble. Everywhere I have gone--in fact, our phones are ringing off the hook--people are saying: What do we need to do to help Missourians?

The most important thing people can do right now is give blood, donate to the Salvation Army and Red Cross, and wait to hear from the officials from Joplin about when volunteers are needed. Right now, too many volunteers swarming into Joplin could cause more problems than it could solve. People need to check with the local Red Cross in Ozarks, and they need to check in with the city Web site. When there is a call for volunteers, it will go out, and those volunteers will be needed. But for now, the most important thing people can do is give money and blood.

The other thing I think we can do for all of the people who lost their lives in this tragedy is to have a plan when there is a tornado warning. Many families--and I think we are guilty of it in the Midwest maybe more so than other places in the country because we hear sirens and tornado warnings a lot. I grew up with that in Missouri. I will be honest, I probably have never taken it seriously enough. But that will not happen again in my life. My family will have a plan. My family will know where to go and what to do if, in fact, there is a tornado warning. Don't ever assume a tornado warning is not serious. These sirens rang at approximately 5:17 in the afternoon, and the tornado touched ground at approximately 5:41. So there was 20 minutes there.

By the way, the weather people here deserve a great deal of credit. Nobody visually sighted this tornado. It was all done through radar. The fact that they were able to identify this tornado and make that warning 20 minutes ahead of time was very important. I cannot imagine the loss of life we would have had if it hadn't been for that 20-minute warning. Having said that, there were people who were not taking it seriously. There were people who didn't know exactly where to go or what to do. So, please, have a plan for your families as a tribute to all those who lost loved ones in Joplin on Sunday night.

We will survive this, with God's grace and determination. Joplin will roar back because of the values that are held so dearly in that part of our State--in fact, in our entire country.

We will come together, and we will do this. But make no mistake about it, the satellite cameras are going to pack up sometime in the next 48 hours. All those satellite trucks are going to go back from where they came. This will fade from the front pages. Just like the junior Member from Minnesota who is presiding right now, at the point in time the bridge collapsed, there was a great deal of attention, and then the attention goes away.

In this instance, we are going to need to sustain the support to this community far beyond the headlines, far beyond the satellite trucks going home. We have to get these schools open in September. We have to get this hospital rebuilt. We have to make sure this community is not left stranded without the assistance it needs.

There is no question that we have to be careful about the way we spend Federal money. But with all due respect to Congressman Cantor, I have a hard time believing that if this were in his congressional district, he would be talking about how additional disaster relief would not be available unless we found some other program from which to take it. It must be available. This cannot be a political football. We must provide the assistance. That is what Federal tax dollars are for, to provide assistance when there is no assistance available for communities and for States because of the wrath of Mother Nature. We must be there for them. We all must stand with Joplin. All of America must stand with Joplin. And we will.

My heart goes out to the families for their losses. I congratulate the people of Joplin for their response. I say ``bless you'' to all those first responders. Through the greatest tragedy sometimes comes the greatest strength.

I yield the floor.