Floor Statements

Mr. President, if I could just begin with a hearty ``amen'' to the great words of my senior Senator, it felt like old home week there for a moment, with the quote about the Nebraska sky. My kids--I have one of them with me almost every week in DC. We commute, and I bring somebody with me. Another two of them are almost surely going to be exploring along the Platte River later this afternoon, as happens almost every day. As for the comments about the 1986 campaign between Kay Orr and Helen Boosalis, it was the first time in America that two women had run for Governor of any State. I worked for Kay, the Republican Governor; it was the first campaign I had ever worked on as a 14-year-old. And then, most fundamentally, were her great words about the Homestead Act and the settling of America. I am a fifth generation Nebraskan and descended from homesteaders in the exact counties that the Senator was talking about engaged in Jefferson County.

Our State on its 150th anniversary, looks back on a history built by grit from homesteaders, as Senator Fischer mentioned, to a football team at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln. Today, we celebrate all of those things that make Nebraska special: hard work, resolve, and love and care for our neighbors.

Millions of men and women settled Nebraska when our State was still known as the Great American Desert. The Homestead Act made land ownership accessible to anyone--to widows, to former slaves, to immigrants. People of totally different backgrounds could legally own 160 acres of American land, and as long as they worked and lived on that land for 5 years, they would get the deed. Your care of the land is what mattered, not your background, not your status, not your family name, but your willingness to work and to contribute and to feed the world as our State still does today.

Today, Nebraska is the breadbasket of the world, exporting more than $6 billion a year of agricultural products. We have cared about the land for this last century and a half, but we care even more about our neighbors. Two towns tell that story well.

During World War II, North Platte launched a hospitality initiative that reached 6 million American troops as they would head for Pacific and European theaters in World War II. Folks in the town saw trains stop in North Platte every day and decided that they would cheer those servicemen who were on their way to the war to fight for our freedom.

On Christmas Day in 1941, a young woman named Rae Wilson, a 26-year- old saleswoman, founded the North Platte Canteen. For 4 years, volunteers would meet each train--full of troops and passing through North Platte--with candy, with fruit, with smiles, with hugs, and with encouragement, thanking those men for how they were going to fight to defend the freedoms that made places like Nebraska and the rest of this Nation great. Some soldiers would go on to become POWs, including the first train of men that went through North Platte on Christmas Day in 1941. They had been sent off by these women of North Platte with food and with encouragement for their fight. Some never returned home. Who knows how much the kindness of those women meant to people from all of the States as they passed through Nebraska on the way to their deployments.

In recent years, that same generosity has shown up in Pilger, NE. In June of 2014, twin tornadoes ripped through this small Nebraska town, killing two and leveling the entire town--destroying 78 buildings. Only in the two corners of the town were structures left standing. Some people might not consider a town of 352 people a top priority, but those folks are not from Nebraska. From all across our State, thousands of volunteers just began driving to this town where tornadoes had destroyed people's livelihoods and their homes, bringing meals and sorting through rubble with people who had been strangers until the volunteers arrived and became family.

Young and old, Nebraskans from all across our State pitched in 2\1/2\ summers ago. One retired teacher would drive 180 miles every day round trip to serve in this community, helping people dig out of the rubble. One little girl sent $70 in from her lemonade stand. Pilger became the town known as the town too tough to die.

When we are not coming together to help our neighbors, we are usually coming together to celebrate Husker football. Our team represents something much bigger than just a typical collegiate sports team. It is about toughness, and it is about community. The Bugeaters, as the Nebraska Cornhuskers were first known in the 1890s, started with a volunteer coach and now boast many Heisman Trophy winners, five national titles, and a sellout streak that dates to October of 1962.

For those of you who think there are football teams in your States-- and I say this with all due respect to the Presiding Officer, who comes from a State that has passable football--and for those of you who think you are from States where football is taken seriously, there has not been a seat available to a game in Nebraska since October of 1962. Nebraska has had, by far, the biggest winning streak--the winningest team--over the course of the last half century in American college football.

Nebraskans know and love this team, not just because of the prowess on the field but because Nebraska football is the undisputed champion of Academic All-Americans in the country, having a 43-award lead over the second closest team in the history of Academic All-American Awards and American life.

That is Penn State, not North Carolina, that is in second place, I say to the Presiding Officer.

We live, we breathe, and we love our football team. After each Husker win, church attendance goes up, and crime goes down. Literally, for generations, half of the boys in Nebraska grew up wanting to play quarterback for Tom Osborne in the option offense. Why only half, you ask? It is because the other half wanted to play Blackshirts defensive football to smack the snot out of whoever was going to line up against the Huskers on a given Saturday.

Success on the field is great, but the real reason Nebraskans are so proud of this team is that the Cornhuskers embody the hard work, resolve, teamwork, passion, and sportsmanship of the Nebraska people. While these are the trademarks and hallmarks of our football, they are really the hallmarks of our community associations--of Nebraska's pioneers, of our farmers, our ranchers, our teachers, our small business men and women, our churches, and our Rotary clubs.

Do you know what? We could not be any more proud of that heritage. On this 150th anniversary, I join my senior Senator in saying, please, come visit, and ``Go Big Red.''

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I would like to thank the Senator from Washington State and the Senator from Michigan for allowing me to sneak in here quickly.

I thank the Senator from Utah for his comments.

I yield to the chairman of the committee.

Mr. President, I say thank you to my colleague for yielding to me a little bit out of line.

I think one thing we don't do nearly a good enough job at around here--and not just in Washington, DC, but in schools across America--is reflect on the basic civics we have inherited and the constitutional structure of checks and balances and why we have a limited government. I think Judge Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court and, frankly, more narrowly, the media cycles of today, give us a special opportunity to pause and to do a little bit of civics again.

Judge Gorsuch is tough, smart, fairminded, independent, and he is a person who has taken an oath of office to a Constitution of limits. That is exactly the sort of thing we should be affirming and celebrating around here. I think that everyone on both sides of the aisle in this body should be celebrating Judge Gorsuch and what he believes about a constitutional system that has limits. And defending your own branch--the Founders envisioned a world where these three branches would be jealous of their own prerogatives--defending your own branch is not to attack another branch.

As I read the media reports this morning of who said what to whom and who shouted at whom and who argued about what, what if we just paused and reflected again on what it means to believe in a constitution that has three separate but equal branches that are supposed to check and balance one another?

After seeing some media reports this morning, I looked and I happened to have on my desk the breast-pocket card that was in my suit 2 days ago when I met with the judge, and I asked him about the comments coming from the White House criticizing a so-called judge. I wish to share with this body some of the comments the judge made to me when I asked him what he thought about the criticism of the so-called judge, because we don't have so-called judges, we don't have so-called Presidents, and we don't have so-called Senators; we have people from three branches who have taken an oath to a constitution.

So here is some of what the judge told me when I asked him what he thought about those comments. He got a little bit emotional, and he said that any attack or any criticism of his brothers and sisters of the robe is an attack or a criticism on everybody wearing the robe as a judge.

I think that is something this body should be pretty excited to hear someone who has been nominated to the High Court say.

He said that it is incredibly disheartening to hear things that might undermine the credibility and the independence of the judiciary. He said that it is completely legitimate for all of us to vigorously debate individual opinions. We should argue about opinions. We can argue as citizens about cases. We can argue in this legislative branch or the executive branch can argue about the merits of particular opinions and yet we want to affirm the three branches.

So he said it is disheartening for us to do anything that would undermine that.

He then pointed me back to his comments at the White House the night he was nominated, and so I went back and looked at his comments, and the very first people he thanked when he had been nominated to the Court were--he said: I want to celebrate the judges of America who are the ``unsung heroes of the rule of law'' in this country. He called the judges ``unsung heroes of the rule of law.''

He said: An independent judiciary has got to be tough. It is not my job as a nominee to the Court and it is not the job of any other judge to comment on particular cases, and it is not the job of judges to play politics or to hold press conferences talking about politics, but we can recognize that historically the other two branches are often wary of times when the Court asserts its prerogatives.

He said: For instance, Thomas Jefferson didn't like Marbury v. Madison, and it was completely legitimate for President Jefferson to criticize and argue about the merits of the Marbury v. Madison decision even as we do the important civics work of reaffirming these three separate but equal branches.

Frankly, I think that everybody in this body ought to be celebrating the nomination of a guy who is out there affirming three separate but equal branches and the independence of the judiciary. We should want to see the executive branch checked, and, frankly, if we really love America, as I know people in this body do, we should want to see our own powers limited because it is fundamentally American to be skeptical of the consolidation of power.

Our Founders divided power and checked and balanced each of the other branches because they were skeptical of what people in power might ultimately do.

Sadly, there are some on the other side of the aisle today--and I think many are going to give him a fair shake, but there are some on the other side of the aisle who decided they want to reflexively attack Judge Gorsuch. So it is like the Keystone Kops trying to run around and figure out which story you want to label him with. I hear some people saying: Well, Gorsuch was nominated by this President and a bunch of people don't like this President; therefore, he couldn't possibly be independent, he would be a puppet. There are other people saying in these private meetings allegedly Gorsuch has rented a plane and taken out a skywriting script and he is out there saying ``I hate Donald Trump. I hate Donald Trump.'' That is nonsense. Neither of those things is true. He is not a puppet, and he is not out there attacking the President of the United States. He is meeting with us, trying to explain his view of an independent judiciary. He is trying to affirm the same constitutional oath of office that all of us in this body have taken.

I think it is high-time in this body that we get beyond reflexive partisanship of ``Republicans are for Republicans if they have the same label'' and ``Democrats are against Republicans''

and vice versa. Our job fundamentally in this body is an oath that we have taken to three separate but equal branches. I think what we are hearing in these private meetings with Judge Gorsuch and what I am sure he is going to say when he speaks for himself publicly before the Judiciary Committee--what we are hearing from him is a guy who believes in three separate but equal branches and is skeptical of the consolidation of power because he understands why America has limited government. That is the kind of person we should be celebrating having been nominated to the Court.

Mr. President, in just a few minutes we are going to vote on a bill that probably will not get a lot of attention in Washington. No cable news shows are going to give it breaking alerts, headlines. Roundtables of pundits will not be gathering to scream about it, and partisans are not going to score the bill.

It is a straightforward bill with a straightforward purpose--to ensure that the Government Accountability Office can tap into the data at the Department of Health and Human Services. But in this case, looks can be deceiving. The GAO Oversight and Access Act of 2017, which I introduced together with Senator Tester 1 year ago, represents a significant victory for taxpayers.

Its impact won't be felt tomorrow in Washington, but over many years to come, taxpayers from Nebraska and across the country will see how passing this legislation played a role in forcing Congress to address some of the biggest problems that our government faces. Let's step back for a moment and understand why. What is the problem?

The Federal Government has a very serious budget problem. This isn't news to anyone who has been paying attention. It is not even something about which Democrats and Republicans disagree. We may not often agree on solutions, but we can and should agree to clearly identify the problems that the government and, therefore, our people face. Some of the problems are very big--so big, in fact, that it is hard to even wrap our minds around how large the numbers are, like the fact that last year this government spent $587 billion more than all it collected in taxes. Consider how big $587 billion is.

National defense is the first and fundamental reason that the Federal Government exists. Last year we spent $595 billion on all of our national security or in the entire defense budget. When Ronald Reagan was sworn into office, the entire Federal budget was $590 billion. Now that is what we are borrowing annually.

Or look at it this way. Historically, the amount we borrowed last year was bigger than every Federal budget for the first 160 years of the Nation--combined. That is, if you added up every dollar that the government spent from 1789 through 1950, it would still be less than the $587 billion that we overspent and therefore borrowed just last year. The former number got us through the Civil War, two world wars, and the Great Depression.

Some of our problems are actually relatively small, but they ultimately add up to something big. Just look at some of the stuff Senator Flake dug up in this year's ``Wastebook'' report or what Senator Lankford put in his report this year entitled ``Federal Fumbles.'' The Commerce Department gave $1.7 million to the National Comedy Museum to resurrect dead comedians using holograms. Also, $70,000 of our taxpayers' money went to a Minnesota theater to put together an opera of Steven King's ``The Shining.'' And $17,000 was spent for people to wear fat suits to learn sensitivity to those with weight problems. These things are tiny individually, but when you put them together, they add up to a lot of our budget.

Expert after expert testifies before our committees that this is unsustainable. We all know this cannot go on forever. At some point, the government's borrowing and overspending ways will catch up with us and we will have a Greek-style debt crisis.

Congress needs to begin acting now to fix the government's structural problems--chiefly in the entitlement programs, for those are the spending categories whose trajectories dwarf all others.

All of this gets to the central problem that the bill we are considering this afternoon was designed to solve--namely, that Congress is flying blind when it comes to overseeing huge portions of our budget, and therefore we don't have the information we need to fix these problems.

The portion in particular I have in mind is the means-tested entitlement programs and the tax credits program. These include Medicaid; the earned-income tax credit, or EITC; the Supplemental Security Income--or disability--Program; food stamps; and Pell grants. All of these were designed to assist our low-income friends and neighbors. All of them together absorb a significant part of today's Federal budget.

As of right now, $1 in every $6 we spend is on only 10 means-tested programs and tax credits like the ones just listed, according to the CBO, but because of an anomaly in the law, Congress has been blocked from getting the best information that is available about how these programs are actually working or not working. What do I mean by that? For years, the Government Accountability Office--the GAO, the agency that is supposed to be the taxpayers' watchdog because it is supposed to hunt down waste and expose

abuses--has been trying to gain access to a database at the Department of Health and Human Services called the National Directory of New Hires. The new hires database was created in 1996 to help enforce child support payments, and in order to do that, it collected some basic information--basically, who has a job, where they work, whom they work for, and how much they make.

The GAO's interest in this data should be pretty obvious. If it could compare the information in the database to the information in the means-tested programs, it could easily spot fraud, waste, and mismanagement. For instance, if a program's rules say that to qualify for benefits, a person needs to earn less than a certain amount of income annually, GAO would be able to use the database to see if the program is actually operating as designed and then issue reports to Congress. This is exactly the kind of thing that the GAO does across all other Federal programs and that Congress routinely uses the GAO for--to take their recommendations to figure out how we should reform programs that are failing. Only in this case, HHS has blocked the GAO from accessing the database.

Again, these are the biggest categories of Federal spending. The place the GAO has not been able to do its work is in the places where we are spending the most money. It is classic Washington--bureaucracy blocking oversight for taxpayers. It is not always malicious, but this is definitely wrong.

HHS has argued that when Congress created the new hires database, it didn't expressly give the GAO permission to look at this data, and so its hands are tied. GAO countered that Congress had previously given blanket permission to the GAO to access all Federal records many years prior.

Many in Congress believed that the law was clear and that GAO is entitled to this entitlement data under the law, but HHS has refused to budge, and the argument stalemated. The result has been the status quo, with GAO repeatedly requesting data and HHS steadfastly refusing to grant them access to the data, which means they have refused to grant us access to the data.

The GAO Access and Oversight Act of 2017 was introduced to settle this legal dispute between GAO and HHS once and for all in GAO's favor or, better, in the taxpayers' favor. In short, today's bill ensures that the GAO will have full access to the data in the national directory. By doing so, it will ensure for the first time that GAO has a key tool it needs to oversee some of the government's largest spending categories.

This bill does two additional things as well. No. 1, it clarifies that GAO does have standing in court to fight for Federal records the next time a Federal agency tries to deny the GAO--and therefore us-- access to that data; and No. 2, it requires the GAO to let all relevant congressional committees know when it issues reports in their jurisdiction.

We are now on the doorstep of hopefully passing this legislation today, which has rightly gotten a lot of support in Congress. When it passes the Senate tonight, it will head straight to the President's desk for figure. Last year, it passed the House by a vote of 403 to 0, and the only reason it failed to pass the Senate was because of an anonymous hold.

In response, the House of Representatives took up this legislation as one of its first pieces of business and sent it over to the Senate 2 weeks ago, on January 4, moving just as quickly. It is a pleasure that the Presiding Officer today happens to be the chairman of the relevant committee that moved so quickly. Chairman Johnson and his new ranking member, Claire McCaskill, immediately took up this legislation and moved it through the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, for both the chairman--the Presiding Officer today--and Senator McCaskill, the champions of oversight of the GAO. I thank the Presiding Officer, the chairman of the committee, for his leadership.

I urge all of my colleagues to support this bill tonight. It is appropriate that one of the first bills of this new Congress will be one to strengthen the authority of the GAO because by strengthening the powers of the GAO, what we are really doing is strengthening the Congress.

There has been lots of talk around here on both sides of the aisle about the needs to reclaim Congress's article I power. Across the 240 years of this Nation--or 226 years since the Constitution; 227 as I do the math here in my head--the Congress is at a fairly weak point in history, and we should be strengthening the article I branch of the Constitution.

One obvious important way to strengthen the powers of the Congress and therefore the accountability that we all have to the American people is by doing better oversight. Conducting hard-hitting but fair oversight of the executive branch agencies is how we protect the separation of powers, and it is how we guard the taxpayers' funds, how we guard the wallet of the people. It is the Congress's job to write the laws and to control the purse strings, and it is the President's job to faithfully execute the laws. Good oversight gives the Congress the information we need to do our job and to ensure that the executive agencies are doing theirs. There is no better friend of the Congress in this regard than the Government Accountability Office. GAO is not simply another agency of a big government; the GAO is a part of the legislative branch, and it works hard to give Congress world-class insights into the operations of the other two branches. GAO is thorough, independent, and respected for its judgments by people of either party and no party at all.

I am deeply proud to see that Senator Tester has joined us on the floor, for he and I were the original sponsors of this bill. It is a pleasure that tonight we will be giving the GAO the tools it needs for oversight and therefore for our oversight.

It would only be natural, at the start of a new administration and a change of party in the executive branch, for Democrats to become more interested in oversight and Republicans to become less so. May that not be the case. I am hopeful that oversight will remain a top priority for Members on both sides of the aisle. None of us came here to be partisan cheerleaders. We came here to exercise the functions of this office on behalf of the people in our States and across this Nation. It is therefore encouraging tonight, even as a new administration is about to begin in 3 days, that Congress will be asserting its constitutional right to oversight with a big bipartisan vote.

I want to thank my partner on the bill, Jon Tester of Montana, who will speak next. When we first heard about this issue together during briefings and committee hearings, we immediately realized that something was wrong, that the GAO had been handcuffed and not able to access this data, and we committed to each other to make sure something was done about it.

I would also like to name the other original cosponsors of this bill, including Ron Johnson, Claire McCaskill, Tom Carper, Mike Enzi, Brian Schatz, Mike Lee, Tammy Baldwin, David Perdue, Joni Ernst, Jim Risch, Steve Daines, Tammy Duckworth, John McCain, Thom Tillis, Todd Young, Rob Portman, and James Lankford.

Finally, I wish to thank our House partners, including Representative Buddy Carter, Chairman Jason Chaffetz, and Ranking Member Elijah Cummings.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all remaining debate time on H.R. 72 be yielded back.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.