Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when I conclude my remarks, Senator Murkowski of Alaska be recognized.

Mr. President, I have been honored to serve with Senator Levin on the Armed Services Committee. He does an excellent job. He has spent a lot of time and many hours working to try to help us be successful in Iraq and other areas of national defense.

I think Generals Dempsey and Austin were right to say we could not keep our troops there unless they had immunity from local prosecutions. But as I recall the net feeling about the President's decision to withdraw from continued negotiations on this contentious issue, the military felt this was not wise--at least many of them did--and they believed that had we continued to pursue negotiations, we may have been able to reach the kind of agreement which would allow us to help the Iraqi Government be stable and successful. Pulling out as we did always seemed to me to be too rapid, too precipitous, and created dangers which could place at risk that which our soldiers fought and died for. I do believe that is what happened. It is a tragic thing.

I was in Falluja, not long after that bitter battle. We had hundreds wounded and almost 100 killed. The Marines performed with such valor and courage. It was one of the great, courageous performances of the U.S. Marine Corps. It is sad, sad to me to see that today Al Qaeda is flying its flag in parts of that city. It is a tragedy. It did not maintain the faith that we ought to have maintained with those that we in Congress directed to go out and fight this war and to be successful. Maybe yet something can be done successfully to deal with this situation, which I feel deeply about.

unemployment insurance

I am here to share some thoughts about the remarks delivered today by President Obama on the growing problem of poverty and our chronic unemployment that has occurred during the 6 years of his Presidency, after he has declared that the recession is over and was over. Just this week the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said that ``the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer and the middle class is under siege.''

Wages are not doing well. Americans in large numbers are not doing well, and they are hurting. Washington Democrats, led by the President, are now proposing increased unemployment insurance and new wage-price controls, wage controls to mandate wages that have to be paid, to treat the consequences of a failed economy--a stagnant, slow-growth economy that is not creating jobs. These words and actions represent an admission that the

White House economic agenda has been a disaster for poor and middle class people. It has not worked.

I know he believed it would work. I know he has advocated these policies. I know he promised that they would work. But they are not working. Worst still, the President remains fully committed to the policy regime that he has been advocating, and that is not working. These policies have failed, not just for the last 5 years; they have failed for the last 50 years. They will never work. The President and Majority Leader Reid are correct, a nervous American business community is hoarding profits because they don't know what the future is going to be like. Those struggling to get by are feeling the results of corporate cost cutting and the policies that we are seeing executed by the government are impacting this situation negatively. They just are.

I know the people proposing these solutions think they are caring about people who are hurting today. But if we care about them, we will use our heads as well as our hearts, and we will think through as to how to make growth occur in our economy, how to help jobs be created, how to have wages rise instead of stagnating or declining.

Mr. President, $16 trillion has been spent fighting poverty since the war on poverty began 50 years ago, yet where do we stand today? Mr. President, 47 million Americans are on food stamps, 91.5 million are outside the labor force not working, and 46 million are living in poverty. In low-income communities the pain is especially severe. For example, in the city of Baltimore, 1 in 3 residents receives food stamps. In Chicago, 51 percent of the city's children live in a single- parent family. In Detroit, almost 1 in 3 households had not had a single person working at any time throughout the year--almost 1 in 3 households. The city's violent crime rate is among the worst in the country. More than half of all Detroit children live in poverty.

The welfare bureaucracy that the left is determined to defend and expand is failing our fellow Americans. It is just not working. We can do better. We have to do better. No longer can we define compassion by how much money we spend on poverty but by how many people we lift out of poverty.

The amount of money State and Federal governments spend on the welfare bureaucracy each year amounts to more than $1 trillion. That is a huge sum. It is twice the Defense Department budget. If all these funds were converted to cash and mailed to every household in poverty, it would equate to $60,000 per household. Yet as the President now admits, chronic poverty and a widening income gap is the new normal.

We have huge bureaucracies, huge multiple conflicting programs, and programs that are not working and are not helping the people we are supposed to help. They just are not.

Isn't it time that we broke from decades of policies that are proven not to work? Imagine how much better it would be if we combined dozens of overlapping welfare programs into a single credit with better oversight standards focused on the goal of helping people become financially self-sufficient. We need fresh approaches. We have to have fresh approaches. I believe it will happen. The sooner it happens the better off this country will be and the better off poor people will be.

But all we get from the White House are the stale policies of yesterday. What is the agenda the President persists in pushing? Consider the cornerstones of the President's economic agenda, the things he has been pushing in the Senate and the Congress and advocating unilaterally through the powers of the executive President-- some beyond all law, it seems to me. These are the things he has consistently advocated for. He wants a government health care takeover, and that is proven to be a job killer. It is killing jobs and two- thirds of the jobs this year that have been created were part-time and in large part that has been a reaction to the Affordable Care Act.

What else? He has a hostility, a consistent hostility to the production of American energy, which makes the country more wealthy, to produce our own energy rather than transferring our wealth abroad, to buy energy from abroad. It creates jobs in America, high-paying jobs.

We have proposals for more and more taxes and more and more regulations that make it more difficult for U.S. workers to compete in the global marketplace. It makes it harder for their companies to be able to export and therefore create more American jobs.

We have a lawless immigration policy that undermines American workers and their wages. It just does. They can say whatever they want to say, but the bill that passed the Senate, the comprehensive immigration bill, would have doubled the number of guest workers. Some say: Well, Jeff, they are just going to be agricultural workers. That is not so. Only a small number are going to be agricultural workers. They are going to be a million-plus workers traveling around the country taking jobs all over America--twice as many lawfully as would be the case under current law. This is supposed to be immigration reform? This is supposed to help American workers find a job or have a pay raise?

We have a weak trade policy. We have to stand up for the American workers on the world stage and make sure that our trading partners are accepting our products like we accept their products, and if they do not, we have to defend the interests of the American worker. That is the way to help them have more jobs and better pay.

We have a welfare bureaucracy that penalizes work. The President is proposing more massive spending, creating more debt. He has had the greatest debt increases in the history in our country. That is destroying and weakening growth in America. It places a cloud over the American economy, as experts have told us.

These policies have been the order of the day for 5 years. That is what we heard. We need to spend more, we need to invest more, and we need to tax more. We have had more regulations than we have ever had in American history. We have had trillion dollar deficits the likes of which we have never seen before, and people wonder why the economy is not doing well.

We blocked oil production in the gulf for an inordinate period of time and are only slowly allowing that to occur. We blocked a Canadian pipeline that would create thousands of American jobs. We blocked energy production on Federal lands. We make it harder for energy production on private lands to occur, and we wonder why we cannot create sufficient jobs and growth. We need lower-cost energy, cheaper energy. That is good for the economy. Falling natural gas prices have been a help because of new techniques in the production of natural gas.

These statist, leftist policies have been tried in America before, and they have been tried throughout the world for decades, and they will never work. Taxes, regulating, more government, and taking over the health care industry will not create prosperity and jobs in America. It just won't. If it would, we would be doing so much better.

Since the President has entered office we have added an incredible $7 trillion to the debt of the United States, and what do we have to show for that? Real wages are lower today than they were in 1999. Take-home pay has fallen for 5 consecutive years. Average household wealth is 60 percent lower today than it was in 2007; 1.3 million fewer people are working today than in 2007. Have we had a recovery? We have fewer people working today than we had 6 years ago, and every month we add 150,000 or more people, basically, to the age cohort of Americans that could be working, because the population is increasing that much. So you have to create real jobs to stay ahead of just normal population growth. There is 1.3 million fewer people working today, even though the population has grown by 14.5 million. There are 1.3 million fewer people who are working today than in 2007, even though the population has grown 14.5 million. That is not good.

So the President is right to be worried about the health of the American middle class and lower-income workers in America. It sure has not been going well. I know he thought his statist ideas would work, and he pushed them steadfastly. He had a Senate that rubber stamped for 2 years what he wanted, including a $800 billion stimulus bill that was supposed to create jobs and prosperity in America, every penny of that borrowed.

If we continue down this road, I fear we are going to sentence an entire generation of young Americans to poverty,

joblessness, and stagnant economic growth in our economy. Majority Leader Reid said this week that, ``We should realize that today there is only one job available for three people seeking a job. Think about it.''

I agree that we absolutely must think about that. We should think seriously about it. My first thought is this. Since three people are looking for every one job that is open, then why has the President embraced an immigration bill that would double the flow of guest workers into America? They will take jobs that would be available for American workers. Why? That is what I think about.

As David Cameron, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, said recently: Immigration cannot be a substitute for training our own workforce. Is there something wrong with him saying that? Isn't that an honest, correct statement, speaking for the interest of the average Briton?

We need to help struggling Americans get off welfare, off unemployment, and into good-paying jobs.

We have a loose labor market. We don't have a tight labor market. Byron York recently wrote an excellent column. He showed that the very same companies that signed letters to the President and the Congress demanding more guest workers are laying off American workers by the thousands. Big companies are signing letters that demand more workers, and they are laying off thousands of workers. It is a fact. He listed them. There were 10 or 15 companies. Some of them laid off thousands of people the very year they wrote to this Congress demanding more foreign workers. So now we have to extend unemployment benefits because people can't find jobs. We have to pass a law to set the wage so the wage can be higher because it is not going up through the natural free market as it should if we had a normal market for labor.

Whom do we work for? I know who I work for, and that is the hard- working people of Alabama and the United States. I don't work for the masters of the universe. They are demanding more workers from Congress when millions of Americans are unemployed.

America is not an oligarchy. House Republicans need to firmly tell this President that we work for the American people. We reject any immigration plan that puts special interests or corporate interests before working Americans. They need to say: We are going to defend the working people of this country. They are not being defended in the Senate by the Democratic majority, that is for sure, with regard to the immigration policy.

A small group of CEOs don't get to set immigration policy for the country, no matter how much money they have. How many ads do they buy? We are not going to enrich the political class at the expense of the middle class, and we will reject the immigration bill that passed the Senate.

That is one of the things we could do to help improve job prospects for Americans. It wouldn't cost us a dime. We wouldn't have to borrow money. It would actually get people off welfare and food stamps. It would put them back into the workforce, and put us on a better path.

If we want to reverse the middle-class decline, we need a new economic vision. We need concrete steps to restore opportunity to the American people without adding a penny to the national debt. We need policies that work to create prosperity without borrowing and creating more debt. We just have to do that.

What are some of the things that we can do? Produce more American energy. We can turn the welfare office into a job-training center. We can do this. We are going to have to do this. We are going to have to move people from dependence to independence. We need to streamline the Tax Code and make it more growth oriented, which will help us to be more competitive worldwide. We need to eliminate every Washington regulation that is not needed. These are regulations that kill jobs and kill competitiveness.

We need to enforce trade rules with our partners that defend the legitimate interest of U.S. workers. We need to enforce an immigration policy that serves the national interest--the people's interest--and protects jobs for Americans. We need to make our government leaner and more accountable. Our government needs to do more for less just like good businesses and good corporations and good companies are doing all over America. We need to do that with our government. That will help the economy.

We need to balance the Federal budget, restore the confidence of the American people, the world financial community, the vitality and the future of America, and spare our children from a lifetime of debt.

These are all positive steps that are true to our constitutional heritage and our legacy of freedom and opportunity. Those are the things we should be doing and we can do. They are all steps that will create more jobs and more growth without borrowing money, and these are all steps that will lift millions out of poverty, and help struggling Americans realize the dream of financial independence.

I don't know what the President was thinking when he talked about a few little promise zones--is that what he called them--around the country. This is somehow going to deal with the unemployment problem in America?

He announced this today. I haven't had a chance to study it yet, but these are just a few spots on the map of the country. This is not going to have any kind of systemic impact on our declining growth and the weak recovery we are seeing today. If the recovery doesn't exceed 2 percent GDP growth per year, it will not create jobs faster than the population grows.

I am afraid we are not in a good position there. We are not seeing the growth that we had, and experts are predicting slow growth in the years to come. We have to get off the path we are on and get on the path to growth, job creation, and prosperity. We have to make sure our American citizens are trained, skilled, and moved into good jobs so they can be independent and take care of their families without being dependent on the government of the United States.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Madam President, I want to share in some remarks Senator Ayotte had relative to the amendment she submitted that would pay for the unemployment insurance extension and veteran pensions benefits. I will just say her pay-for is an issue that I have had some experience with. I offered several years ago an amendment to fix the same problem, and I was disappointed when the majority leader, Senator Reid, objected to that amendment.

Senator Ayotte's amendment would pay for the jobless benefits of unemployed Americans and restore veterans' pensions by cutting off fraudulent tax payments to illegal aliens. This is a very simple concept. There is a clear abuse going on here that needs to be fixed, and it should have been fixed a long time ago.

The amendment contains an offset of $20 billion--$20 billion--by closing this loophole and ending this abuse of American tax dollars. Remember, the veterans' retirement benefit reductions in their retirement plans that were voted on recently in this body--part of the Ryan-Murray budget agreement--only saved $6 billion over 10 years by altering the retirement benefits of veterans. So this amendment-- closing the tax loophole--would save $20 billion over 10 years.

In 2011--this is when the matter first came to my attention by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Each Department has an inspector general. The inspectors general are part of the Obama administration, but they take pride in their independence, and they are by and large a very valuable part of the American Government.

So this Treasury Inspector General made this statement in a report:

Millions of people are seeking this tax credit who, we

believe, are not entitled to it. We have made recommendations

to the IRS as to how they could address this, and they have

not taken sufficient action in our view to solve the problem.

A clear statement by the Inspector General of the U.S. Treasury Department that there were problems with this policy, and they could be fixed, and the Internal Revenue Service was failing to take steps to fix the problem.

One press report that highlighted the abuses occurring within this program reported that an illegal alien admitted that his address was used to file tax returns by four other illegal workers. All were in the country working illegally, and they filed tax returns. Did they file the tax returns to pay taxes? No. They filed the tax returns to get a tax credit back from the government, a check from the government. They claimed 20 dependents living inside their residence, and the Internal Revenue Service sent the illegal tax filers $30,000--direct checks from the U.S. Government, from the U.S. Department of Treasury, went to them. They filed a return, they said they had all these children, and they were given $30,000.

According to the report, none of those dependents lived in the United States or had even visited the United States. The illegal alien in the story justified the enormous tax fraud by saying: ``If the opportunity is there and they can give it to me, why not take advantage of it?''

Well, this is an interesting development. Let's go along a little further. As the Treasury Inspector General himself said: ``The payment of Federal funds through this tax benefit appears to provide an additional incentive for aliens to enter, reside, and work in the United States without authorization, which contradicts Federal law and policy to remove such incentives.''

So the inspector general took the obvious position that it is the government's position that people who enter the country illegally ought not to receive tax credit checks from Uncle Sam and that this policy not only encouraged that, it encouraged more people to come to America to claim benefits, as this person who entered the country illegally said: If they can give it to me, why not take advantage of it?

Now one of the things I have learned as I have traveled the world is, a lot of people have an exaggerated opinion of the wealth and power of the United States. You meet good people in underdeveloped countries, and they say: Why doesn't the United States do this, that, and the other--as if we had unlimited power, unlimited money, and unlimited ability to solve the problems they face at any given time.

So a lot of people, maybe, when they come to the country do not realize we are a nation of limited resources and we cannot be wasting money, we cannot be having people enter our country contrary to the law, undocumented, working, taking jobs that Americans need, and then sending them big checks--$30,000 for children who do not even exist or certainly have never been in the United States.

How do they do it? They use an ITIN, an individual tax identification number. They do not have Social Security numbers. They have a tax ID number. Why? That is a tax number that the Treasury Department came up with to

allow noncitizens who do not have Social Security numbers to pay taxes to Uncle Sam. That is what it was supposed to be used for. These clever individuals have figured out a way--they do not qualify for a Social Security number, so they get an ITIN number, and then they immediately start filing a tax return, claiming benefits, tax credits for children they may not even have or are not in the country, and they are not entitled to it. It is billions of dollars. According to the best estimates we have, if this loophole were closed--that the Treasury Department themselves has identified--it would save $20 billion over 10 years. Well, that is a lot of money.

In fact, in 2011, they claimed--and I do not know why it is not more--that illegal aliens received a staggering $4.2 billion in refundable tax credits in 2010. So in 2010, they received illegally $4.2 billion under this program. Can you imagine that? That is more than the budget of the State of Alabama--the general fund budget of the State. This was in 2010, and it has been growing substantially. It is probably more than that now.

So the legislation Senator Ayotte proposes would fix this problem, and it is time we fixed it. I cannot imagine why anyone would oppose it. The House has passed legislation already that would fix this problem and it died in the Senate. Senator Reid refused to bring it up. He obstructed its passage. It should have long since been passed.

So I pose a question to my colleagues: Which would you rather do? Would you cut the retirement benefits of men and women who served this country for 20 years or more in the U.S. military, being deployed in harm's way, placing their lives at risk--even those who are disabled as a result of service in the U.S. military in combat zones; they have their retirement cut too--would you choose to cut their pay to save $6 billion, when you could cut out a totally unjustified claim of tax credits of $20 billion? Is it political correctness run amok that we are dealing with here? Why can't we fix this? So I think this is something that needs to be fixed. It is past due to be fixed.

Senator Ayotte is correct to raise it as a legitimate pay-for for unemployment compensation and veterans' retirement, and I salute her for it. It is something I pushed for, and I offered a very similar amendment when the Murray-Ryan bill moved through the Senate. I think it is something we need to work on.

We are not talking about as much as we should now the chatter has receded a little bit--but our deficit situation is still very grim. We now have a current debt of $17 trillion. That is unprecedented in the history of the United States. It has doubled in recent years. They are the kind of deficits we have never seen before, and it is something we have to address.

Madam President, there is no doubt our employment situation in America is not good. Unemployment remains consistently high long after the administration has told us the recession is over. The growth that has been projected year after year has not been at the level the experts had projected. CBO has missed the growth levels. The Federal Reserve has missed the growth levels. We have come in below that consistently. Growth is not where we need it to be; there is no doubt about it. So we have a serious unemployment situation.

Perhaps the most grim concept we need to be well aware of is that workforce participation; that is, the percentage of Americans in the working age group who are actually working is lower today than at any time since the 1970s. That is a stunning statistic. Not since women entered the workforce in large numbers have we seen such low workforce participation numbers.

I believe, first and foremost, that an unemployment extension bill is treating the symptoms of the problem. It is an aspirin for a fever, but the fever has been raging for weeks now. Something is causing it, and we need to deal with the cause of it rather than continuing to treat the symptoms. I think that is so important for us to remember.

Also, this Nation is struggling economically for a number of reasons.

One of them clearly is the size of our debt. Our debt is so large-- $17-plus trillion--now that it is causing uncertainty in the economic markets. We have to get our spending under control. We have to do that. Every time we have a desire to do something good, we cannot continue to borrow the money to pay for it.

The unemployment bill that is before us today makes no attempt whatsoever to find spending reductions in other areas of this monstrosity of a government but borrows every penny of it. They say it is $6 billion. Well, it is $6 billion for 90 days--3 months. It is $26 billion over the full year. That is a huge sum of money.

We just had a big dispute over cutting retirement pay that our military people have earned, and it was a dispute over $4 billion. That was over 10 years--$4 billion over 10 years. This is $6 billion over 3 months. So this is a lot of money, and effort should have been made to try to find offsetting reductions in wasteful spending that occur throughout here before we go again to treat a symptom of a disease.

But the tragedy is--the tragedy is--that the policies of this administration are driving this poor growth record. It just is. First and foremost, the proposals have been to tax, tax, tax--tax more. Taxing the private sector will not create growth, no matter whom you tax. It will not be a growth-producing idea to tax the economy. Experts tell us that. The Congressional Budget Office tells us that.

So this is what we have been seeing every year. The budget that passed out of this Senate, the budget that was proposed by the President of the United States--the budget that passed the Senate with I think virtually every single Democratic Senator voting for it and all Republicans opposing it would have increased taxes $1 trillion and increased spending $1 trillion. The taxes were not used to reduce our deficit, as the balanced approach seems to suggest. ``We have a balanced approach to reduce our deficits. We are going to tax some and cut spending some.'' Oh, no, they did not cut spending at all. Their 10-year budget plan called for raising taxes $1 trillion and raising spending $1 trillion. Tax and spend--that is what it was. It was on the floor of the Senate. There is no dispute about that. No one argues about it. But we have agreed to a certain level of spending here to try to bring our economy under control--the Budget Control Act--and we have acknowledged on both sides of the aisle, as have independent experts, that we need to reduce spending and we need to contain the growth of spending and we need to reduce the deficits that are adding to the weakness of our economy and the uncertainty in our economy and creating risks in our economy.

So this bill borrows every penny of it--just a total violation of promised fiscal responsibility. It just is. I wish it were not so. I wish we could just do this and it would not cost anything. But it will cost, and it will hamper growth in our country.

There are other problems. We need more American energy. Energy produced in America creates jobs in America. It creates wealth in America. It keeps us from exporting large amounts--billions and billions of dollars--to Venezuela and the Middle East and other places around the globe. We could be producing that energy here, creating jobs here, keeping that wealth at home, strengthening our economy, and creating growth. That is what we should be doing.

The administration has blocked American energy. They have dragged their feet in every shape, form, and fashion, whether it is moratoriums in the gulf or blocking in Alaska, blocking the pipeline for our neighbors in Canada, or blocking production on public lands. This is not the way to create an economy.

We need a tax system that is not always going up but is more growth- oriented, simpler, more focused on creating growth. We need to eliminate every unnecessary regulation that burdens the American competitive marketplace and makes us less competitive globally instead of adding to them, and we have never seen anything like the plethora of new regulations being issued day after day, week after week, month after month, many of them challengeable constitutionally as being beyond the power of bureaucrats to issue because Congress did not pass the law to justify it. It is driving up the cost of energy, and it is driving up the cost of production in widgets in America, making us less able to compete with foreign competitors.

We need to stand up for American workers and American manufacturing on the world stage. It is time to tell our trading partners: We are willing to trade with you, big boy, but you have to play by the rules. This idea that you can violate the rules and we are still going to treat you as a great trading partner has to be over. We need to stand up for the American worker on the world stage. It has to be done.

Finally, at a time of high unemployment, should we not ask ourselves why the President of the United States and virtually every Democrat and a number of Republicans voted to double the number of workers who were coming to America under this comprehensive immigration bill? We admit a million a year legally. We believe in immigration, we support immigration, but at some point you are bringing in workers to take jobs from unemployed Americans. So now we are here trying to extend unemployment benefits to help unemployed Americans. Is there no common sense in this body? How can this possibly be? But that is the deal.

I know Senator Reid and Senator Leahy were on the floor earlier today, and they said we have to pass this comprehensive immigration bill. It would not end the illegality. It would reduce it only by about 40 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office, but it would double the number of guest workers coming in. Guest workers, by definition, are people coming to take jobs.

Why are wages down? One reason is--Professor Borjas at Harvard, who has studied this extensively; the Federal Reserve in Atlanta, which has examined this extensively; the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which has examined it--what do they find? They find

that for middle- and lower income workers, their wages are significantly adversely impacted by this unprecedented flow of immigrant labor into America.

I do not have anything against people who want to come to America and work. They are good people. They want to have a job. I understand that. But any nation has to ask itself: What is the right amount? How many people can you absorb without causing millions of Americans to lose their jobs? And we now have to come to the floor of the Senate to ask what we can do to help them in this period of pain they are going through.

So I just want to say a couple things. We can do something now for the unemployed, but we need to be paying for it. We need to be staying within the spending limits we have agreed to. We do not need to pass any more laws that increases the amount of money we borrow. We borrow enough. For heaven's sake, we borrow too much right now, and it threatens our financial future, as expert after expert has told us. They have told us we are running a high risk, and nothing could be worse--nothing could be worse--for working Americans than that we have some other new financial crisis to spring up in the months or years to come because we were irresponsible today. Wouldn't that be a disaster? It certainly would.

So I will urge our colleagues to begin to focus on the underlying disease here; that is, the policies of an administration that has produced the slowest postrecession recovery maybe the Nation has ever had, except for the Great Depression, because it is tax more, regulate more, borrow more. That is all it is, and it will not work systemically to put us on the right path.

I know this is a tough challenge for us, but I am convinced that if this Congress puts its mind to it, there are more than a few places we can find waste, fraud, and abuse to help pay for and to assist those who have been unemployed for a long time. I believe we can absolutely do better than we are today about that, and I hope we will do so. It is not right to just say the only people who care about American workers and care about those who are unemployed are those of us who are willing to forget our budget limitations, to forget our financial responsibilities, and just borrow more and spend more, and somehow this is going to fix the problem we are facing. It will not. It will not fix the problem. In fact, it is creating the very disease that is causing workers to be suffering today.

Madam President, I appreciate the opportunity to share these remarks. I will repeat again, we are seeing very tough times for the American worker. Particularly, the lower income workers are having a difficult time, and there are many causes for that. But just taxing more, spending more, and borrowing more is one of the big causes of the problems we have today, and we are not going to fix that problem by even more of the same policies that got us into the situation we are in today.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 10 minutes.

Madam President, there has been considerable controversy in recent days over a provision in the recently passed spending package that became known as the Bipartisan Budget Act which cuts pensions for military members, including wounded warriors.

There was bipartisan agreement. People on both sides of the aisle believe that it ought to be fixed, that it was an error and should not go forward, and that there were better ways to find the money--if you have to have money to spend somewhere else--than taking it from military retirees.

But Majority Leader Reid and every single Member of his conference save one stood together to block an effort which I proposed to restore the pensions for the military and also find better offsets. They blocked us from making any alteration to this spending package that was before the Senate, including my amendment to close an egregious tax welfare loophole--a tax credit, a payment directly from the United States of America to illegal aliens--that could pay for these cuts itself. Indeed, the inspector general of President Obama's Treasury Department has said this loophole needs to be closed and would save a substantial sum of money. It is an open gate, allowing massive fraud and illegality.

So we simply wanted to close that loophole. We asked to pay for this new spending by closing this loophole that the Treasury Department asked us to close instead of reducing the retirement benefits by as much as $70,000 for a sergeant who served to age 42 in the U.S. military.

How can this blockade be defended? How did it happen? Why would we be in such a position? Is there any Member in the majority who would really defend the practice we are now undertaking where legislation that clearly needs an amendment to fix a problem in it is not allowed to have amendments, and the legislation is rammed through the Senate?

This has been the pattern around here for far too long. The majority leader is eroding the Senate's historic role as the great Chamber where the issues are debated and changes and amendments are voted on, and he is being enabled and supported by his conference.

Consistently, time and again, when objections are made to try to stop this practice and get amendments and votes on important bills, his conference has stood with him. In other words, his conference is saying: We choose to stand with Majority Leader Reid and his procedural actions which block other colleagues; we choose to stand against even our own Members having amendments and against the right of individual Americans to have their Senator be held accountable--to stand up and be able to offer amendments to legislation to improve it. And if you don't do that, you are accountable for voting for the final bill--which is imperfect and should be fixed.

That is the way the voters hold us accountable. They need to be able to see us vote and look at our voting records and decide whether we are serving their interests, some Wall Street interest, some special interest, or some political group instead of the national interest. That is what this whole system is about.

Now we have before us the Defense bill that is so important for America. I serve on the Armed Services Committee. I have been on that committee for nearly 17 years. We moved this bill out with a big majority. I voted for it

in committee, although I expressed great concern about its budgetary problems that needed to be fixed. Unfortunately these problems have not been fixed. But I wanted to see the bill move forward, and I tried to be cooperative.

The bill moved to the floor. The budget problem hasn't been fixed, and there are other problems with the legislation that need to be refined. The bill before us, the Defense bill, spends approximately $500 billion--for the largest single agency in the U.S. Government. Are we to accept that it should pass in this body without a single person having a single idea that ought to be made a part of that bill? Can it not be made better?

The majority admits it is not a perfect piece of legislation. We certainly know that. The American system is designed so that when an imperfect bill moves forward, a Senator can offer an amendment. Maybe it is not a good amendment. Maybe it will be voted down. Maybe it is a good amendment and will be accepted. But no more, not with what is happening here today.

What is happening here today is when Republicans want to offer an amendment, Senator Reid basically says no. He doesn't want any amendments. He then uses a device called ``filling the tree''--because he gets to be recognized first--filling it with a series of amendments, leaving no place, then, for any other Member of the Senate to call up an amendment. And the majority leader won't remove the amendments from the tree unless he decides he wants to.

On this Defense bill, we had two votes on amendments when the bill was up for an entire week. We could have easily had 30 or 40 votes that week had we chosen to do so. So only two votes were held, and none now, and we are moving to final passage. The tree is filled, and we have not been able to force even a single vote to fix matters.

Senator Cornyn offered an amendment this afternoon. He filed a motion to table some of the amendments Senator Reid had placed on the tree, and it was voted down by the supporters of Senator Reid on the other side of the aisle. We have been talking about this for a long time. This is contrary to the history of the Senate.

Senator Cornyn laid out how year after year for 51 years we moved a defense bill through the Senate, and there have been multiple amendments nearly every time but this one. It is unthinkable that the great Senate of the United States would not allow amendments to a bill as significant as a defense bill.

So what does the majority leader do after he fills the tree? Republicans said: Wait a minute, Senator Reid. There were no amendments allowed on the bill. We have amendments.

He said: Oh, you are being obstructionist. I am going to file for cloture. I am going to file a motion to shut off debate, and we are not going to have any amendments.

And then if the Republicans resist and say, we are not going to vote to end debate because we haven't had any amendments, he says, you are obstructionist.

This is the pattern that has been going on. He files cloture virtually immediately with the filing of the bill, and he claims that is a filibuster by the Republicans. So by filing cloture immediately, he contends that Republicans are filibustering a bill; he counts up these filibusters and says: There are too many filibusters in the Senate. You are obstructing the business of the Senate. In truth, Majority Leader Reid is the one who is obstructing the Senate. He is the one who is blocking debate and amendments.

If you ask a schoolchild somewhere in America, if you ask a senior citizen, a World War II veteran who loves this country and has studied the great principles of America, you say there is a piece of legislation on the floor of the Senate and there is something in it that is wrong--they want to cut benefits for wounded warriors, veterans who served and have been wounded in combat and disabled--and you do not want that to happen, what would you do?

Why, they would all answer, you would file an amendment to the bill to fix this problem.

But not in the Senate today. That is the classical understanding of the way this body ought to operate. That is what James Madison, I am sure, conceived and the way it has worked for so many years. But not any longer. This bipartisan Budget Act is just like the Defense bill-- no amendments. No matter how important the bill is, no matter how many problems there are in it, no amendments.

Oh, you want to go back to that old Senate where people could actually debate and have amendments and offer changes and improve it? No longer. That is obstructionist. That is delaying tactics. We won't have it anymore. You are slowing us down. It is unacceptable.

When I vote not to end debate on this Defense bill that is before us, I am not voting to not have a defense bill. That is so obviously wrong it is hard to believe you have to explain it. But we are not voting to do that. We are voting to maintain the classical principle of the Senate where individual Senators from whatever State there is can come to the floor and make a contribution to the country. They were elected by their people. There are almost 5 million Alabamians who elected me. Do I not get to offer an amendment to the Defense bill of the United States? It diminishes my role. It diminishes the role of every single Senator. So I am asking my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who have been lemming-like, I call it, defending this abuse of power, to begin to consider what this may mean to them and whether this is the right way the Senate should operate.

There will be some tough votes. We will all have to take tough votes. Probably most people can explain their votes if they know what they are doing. Maybe some cannot and they will be voted out and sent home. So be it. If you cannot defend your vote and you are not casting good votes on bills and you cannot respond effectively as to why you voted for or against a certain amendment, then you ought to be sent home. We are not entitled to these jobs. We have to be elected to them.

I am concerned about it. I believe it goes even beyond the significance of this important Defense bill. I think it goes beyond this grave error in which we are reducing the pay of military retirees when we are not reducing other retirees' pay.

This is not a belt-tightening across the board. It seems to me to be a targeting of one group of Americans, perhaps those who served more than any other group.

Majority Leader Reid continues to complain that the trains are not running on time, not running with enough ruthless efficiency to suit his ideas. So he then uses a filling-the-tree tactic. But that is not all. Although President Obama has had judge after judge after judge confirmed, and Cabinet people and sub-Cabinet people confirmed in large numbers, the Senate refused to approve one appointment recently and refused to fill three Federal judgeships at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit because they were not needed. The average caseload for those judges was 149. Of the 8 judges who are there now, there are authorized 11 judges. So the 8 judges there now have 149 cases per judge, whereas my circuit, the 11th Circuit, sitting in Atlanta, has over 700 cases per judge. The national average is around 350 cases per judge.

We do not need to fill three judgeships for which the caseload is not there. The caseload for the DC Circuit is almost half that of the next lowest circuit in the country. So we do not need these judges. The caseload continues to decline. So the Senate refused to give cloture, refused to confirm those judges. So in an act of pique or calculation or deliberateness, the majority leader altered the rule of the Senate about how we ought to conduct business here. He did so by breaking the rules of the Senate.

This is what happened. U.S. Senate rule XXII says in order to bring debate to a close, three-fifths of the Senators duly sworn would need to vote to end the debate. There were not sufficient votes to end the debate on the DC judges because they were not needed. This irritated the majority leader. So he petitioned to the Presiding Officer and the Parliamentarian and he asserted that it only takes 51 Senators to vote to end debate. But rule XXII explicitly says it takes three-fifths, 60 Senators, to end debate. It goes on to say, except when you change the rules of the Senate, and that takes two-thirds, 67. So it takes 67 votes to change the rules of the Senate and 60 votes to end debate.

What did Senator Reid do? He asked the Parliamentarian to say it only took 51. The Presiding Officer, the President pro tempore of the Senate, Senator Leahy, our longest serving Member, and the Parliamentarian said no, Senator Reid, the rule is it takes 60 votes to shut off debate.

So what did Senator Reid do? He used the ability to appeal the ruling of the Chair and he asked his colleagues to overrule the ruling of the Chair, which by any plain reading of the rules of the Senate would be without dispute requiring 60 votes to shut off debate, but he wanted it to be 51 and his colleagues supported him. His colleagues supported him, they supported him and he overruled the Chair, his own Parliamentarian whom he selected and the Presiding Officer that he put in the Chair. They voted to change the rules of the Senate. It is in plain language--with 51 votes, not 67.

This is dangerous, colleagues. This is the kind of thing you see in Third World republics or would-be republics. This is the kind of lawlessness that will endanger the American system of government at its most fundamental basis. It is endangering us. The President says whatever he wants to--you can keep your doctor, the President says your plan is going to save you $2,000 a year, the President says all these things and he gets his bill passed and none of it is true.

I don't see any Members on the floor who voted for this bill, ObamaCare, down here apologizing to the American people, saying I am sorry, the bill I voted for did not do any of the things I promised you it would do and I am willing to have an amendment process on the floor to fix it. No, we are not going to get a vote on ObamaCare. They are going to block that too. If any attempt is ever made, he will fill the tree and block that vote. So we are not able to bring it to the Senate floor and require Senators to vote on serious issues involving health care for millions of Americans because Senator Reid doesn't believe in it and he is backed by his colleagues.

I guess the President probably says, oh, don't let them vote on ObamaCare, they might change some of it. You know, they are finding out what is in it. We don't want them to actually think they have enough muscle to actually pass a law to fix it or change it or alter it. That would be terrible. Who do they think they are? Do they think this is a democracy or something?

That is where we are. This is huge and significant. We have to confront what is happening. It is very important that we cool down and we get some sort of work going on, but I am not confident at all on that. This effort should result in a retreat from this breaking the rules to change the rules, this nuclear option.

The reason a nuclear option was called that is because once you do that, it blows up the entire Senate. Senator Levin explained the problem very succinctly, one of two Democrats who voted against Senator Reid's attempt to execute the nuclear option and to change the rules of the Senate. He said if a majority can change the rules of the Senate, there are no rules. It is simply what the majority says. There are no standards, there are no rules, there are no procedures. If we can change them whenever we are frustrated by a majority vote in the Senate, there are no rules, there are no protections. That is so true.

That is why what has happened here is so significant. I believe this late-night work and this process to consider nominations is healthy, because it requires us to go through a painful period of introspection as to what is happening to us and how we ought to conduct this great Senate.

This afternoon we did not have the support for Senator Cornyn's resolution. Yesterday, when I made the motion to clear a place off of the tree so my amendment could be heard and voted on, my colleagues, a majority of them, voted no. Only one broke with Senator Reid, actually; one Democrat did. Every Republican voted to allow amendments to go forward, allow my amendment to be heard. The rights of all the Senators in this body to defend their State, to defend equal representation, was undermined.

The two Independents in our Senate, delightful individuals for sure who caucus with the Democrats and vote with the Democrats, maybe sometime they will be willing to prove that the letter ``I'', independent, means something and maybe they will help us stand and defend the heritage of the Senate. We need to make this thing change. We cannot continue to aggregate more and more power into the majority leader where no longer--where the right to demand 60 votes to shut off debate could be further eroded, where we will continue to see bill after bill brought up with no amendments being allowed.

They say oh, well, we are at the end of a year. We must do that. We do not have time. But the Defense bill has been on the floor since June. That is awful. There have been huge amounts of time for us to bring it to the floor. It has been out of committee since June and it should long ago have been brought up and, in fact, it could have been voted on last week with full amendments and we would already be through with that and be gone today.

The Armed Services bill, the Defense bill is an important bill. I am very disappointed we are at a period of impasse, very disappointed that I cannot support going forward with it to final passage because there is no ability to amend it and fix some of the obvious flaws that are in it. It is outside the budget spending limits we agreed to.

The Bipartisan Budget Act was also rammed through the Senate with no ability to offer amendments. This legislation will not allow us to prevent the cut of veterans retirement pay and disabled wounded warriors retirement and benefit pay.

It is a disappointment for me to be in this position. I have tried to be supportive of the Defense bill every year. I worked in committee to do so. I believe last year we got a unanimous vote, Republicans and Democrats, quite a number of times in the committee. A lot of that is due to Senator Levin and Senator Inhofe's leadership. This time we have a problem, and it is not going well, and I am deeply disappointed. I believe we can do better, we must do better, and I will not be able to vote to support this bill tonight.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that CDR Joe Carrigan, the defense legislative fellow assigned to my office, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the 113th Congress.

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

Mr. President, we all have various people from other departments and agencies in our government on occasion who help us in our offices. Being a member of the Armed Services Committee, I have had the pleasure to have a number of fine defense fellows serve in my office and help us prepare the Defense bill and deal with other issues of importance.

Commander Joe Carrigan is another one of these very fine fellows. He is one of the best we have ever had. He has a good strategic mind, he works extremely hard, he is always thoughtful, and he is a delight to have in the office.

We have been talking about our military personnel and their retirement benefits. Remember, unlike other government employees, they are on call anytime, any day, to be sent anyplace in the world at the very risk to their lives and physical well-being. In addition, they work long hours. They have no thought to object to being asked to work a weekend or a night or 24 hours without sleep to do some task they are called upon to do, and they get no overtime for it. It is just the way it is done in the military because when a challenge is out there, they act.

I know some point out the weaknesses in this large entity, the Defense Department, and some of the management problems that arise. But I have to say without any doubt whatsoever that the institution has quality people--people of integrity, men and women who love their country and serve their country and do whatever you ask them to do. I see that every day when we work with people such as Commander Carrigan. And he will be successful in whatever he does and in whatever his next assignment will be.

So as we wrap up this Defense bill, I would like to thank him for his service and to thank all of our men and women in uniform who do their work, and I hope that we in the Congress can be worthy of their trust.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, will the Senator from South Carolina yield?

I say to Senator Graham, he has served in the House. I know the powers that be would just like to see this bill rubber stamped, passed, done with, rah, rah, rah. But if this legislation were to be amended, and this problem were fixed, doesn't the Senator think the House would have ample time to pass it before the January 15 date for the CR, or, really, they could, as we have done many times, extend the CR a week or so, if needed? But I do not really think it would be needed. I think they would pass it promptly.

Mr. President, when I first came to Washington, considering running for the Senate, I went to a Republican luncheon, and they asked me to say just a thing or two, not that long, and I said: I could think of no greater honor than to represent the people of Alabama in the greatest deliberative body in the history of the world. This is a great deliberative body. That is our heritage, and it is being eroded. It is not disputable that it is being eroded. It is being eroded in a way that is faster and more significant than any of us seem to understand. Like the frog in the warming water, we do not realize we are being cooked and that the freedoms of Americans are being cooked.

This bill contains another provision that constricts the ability of a minority in the Senate--it could be Democrats or Republicans or just a bipartisan group who do not represent a majority but have a concern--to have those concerns heard and dealt with, and it is very significant. I wish it were not so.

I was shocked it was in the bill. I had no idea it would be in the bill. As Senator Graham just indicated, this started out as a bipartisan, bicameral conference, and Senator Ayotte and Senator Graham and Senator Wicker and I were members of the conference. We met and had a couple of public meetings where everybody talked, but no legislation, no language was laid out. The next thing we heard: The conference leaders are drafting a bill--I would say affectionately, a gang of two this time.

So this is the bill that was their product. I know they were trying to work out an important solution to America's financial problems. I know the differences between the parties are so great that it is difficult to bridge those disagreements, and we were not expecting a great solution to the long-term financial state of America--that needs to be dealt with, must be dealt with, and every year we wait makes it harder to fix that challenge we face.

But I did not expect some of the damage we have seen in the legislation. I

have to talk about a certain point because it changed the rules of the Senate. I am not sure the House Members understood how significant it was. But three times I have made objections to budget violations--three times--and we contended that the bill before the Senate was spending and would spend more money than the Budget Control Act allowed to be spent. If that is so--the Budget Control Act being in law, having certain limits on spending--then the Senate would have to recognize we were busting the budget and we would have to have 60 votes, a super majority, to approve busting the budget, a pretty good matter. It does not make any difference if there are taxes and fees used to pay for that. It still spends more than the amount of money we agreed to spend. It allowed us to contain spending.

There were three different votes in the last year or so in which the Senate was stopped from spending more than the Budget Control Act limit required because 60 Senators would not vote for it. There were not 60 who would support waiving the budget, breaking the budget, spending above the budget.

So that is the issue at stake. I am sure the spenders were deeply disappointed. They got over 50. Under this bill now, it only takes 50. They got over 50, but they did not get 60, so they were not able to continue that spending.

This agreement, this bill that is before us today, would significantly weaken the ability of Senators in this body to enforce the spending and revenue limits under our budget resolution and in future budgets.

The Ryan-Murray agreement that is before us today includes an egregious number of deficit-neutral reserve funds--57, to be exact. Operationally a reserve fund allows the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee to adjust the spending limits in a budget resolution prior to Senate consideration of a bill that busts the budget. This allows the proposed legislation to avoid most spending points of order.

A reserve fund can be a useful tool when used in the context of a true budget resolution, one that is properly negotiated in public by a conference committee rather than a backroom deal. Reserve funds can shepherd legislation with common policy goals through the House and Senate by accommodating minor differences between the budget plan and the final legislation. So that makes sense. Reserve funds are not a total fraud. Congress does not want legislation they agreed to in concept to get tripped by scoring differences. That is why reserve funds were originally created. But there is virtually nothing policywise in common between the House and Senate budget resolution that we are seeing today. They are quite different.

The House Ryan budget is a historic budget that alters the debt course of America and puts us on a sound path. The Senate budget that cleared this body, over my objection, would raise taxes $1 trillion, but instead of using those takes revenues to pay down the debt, it would have funded $1 trillion in more spending above the Budget Control Act limit we agreed to in August of 2011. So that is the situation. These are different budgets.

With 57 different reserve funds, the Murray-Ryan spending bill that is before us now will allow Senator Reid and Chairman Murray to bring to the floor a practically unlimited number of big tax-and-spend bills. It will not be subject to the 60-vote limit. Normally the minority party would be able to raise a point of order under section 302(f) of the Budget Act. The 302(f) is known as the tax-and-spend point of order, because it is the one we deploy when Congress tries to spend more money than it promised to spend, and offsets that new spending with some fee or tax increase. It is the point of order we deploy when Democrats, on these occasions I have mentioned, with some Republicans supporting it, want to grow the size of government. It takes 60 votes to get around a 302(f) point of order and it forces colleagues to go on record and say: Yes, I know my legislation will bust the budget, but we ask that we do it anyway.

What I found as we have looked at it, when you shine light on these votes, and votes on the floor of the Senate, and ask: Senator, do you really want to spend more than we agreed to spend? You just agreed in August of 2011 to the Budget Control Act. It said, we are not going to spend over this level. A bill hits the floor that spends over that level. They say: Do not worry about it, it is paid for by taxes. Do you really want to do that when it is raised as a budget point of order? Well, Senators kind of get shy and many of them back off what they might otherwise have agreed to if that issue were not raised.

As I said, there were three successive votes in which this Congress refused to bust the budget and spend more than was agreed to. It rankled some of our Members who like to spend. They did not like that. But the sheer number of reserve funds in the legislation before us, 57, would essentially take that point of order away. There are so many reserve funds in this bill that Senator Reid and Chairman Murray can bring an endless number of tax-and-spend bills to the floor, and my colleagues and I would be unable to shine light on that and be able to have a clean vote on one question--not whether we favored the idea they want to spend money on. That was not the question. The question, when you raise a budget point of order, is: Do you believe we should break the spending limits that we agreed to? If you can fund your bill and your cause that you believe in by finding savings elsewhere in the budget, then we might support that. But we are not going to support spending more than we agreed to. That is what this budget point of order has allowed us to do on a series of occasions.

I believe it is causing a lot of people to come to me and Chairman Murray when they offer legislation to make sure they are within the budget. They go back and try to draft it in a way that does not violate the budget. But eliminating this budget point of order will reduce the number of people who are concerned about that. We will see less discipline, in my opinion.

In summary, the reserve fund would allow the Senate majority or a number of Senators who have got legislation on the floor to avoid this tough vote in the light of day so people can see what has occurred. Moreover, there is a little-understood danger in this legislation that goes beyond spending. It really does. This bill can allow legislation that would carry measures that are disproportionately policy heavy with very little budgetary effect. We believe, as we have analyzed the bill, that it could allow reserve funds to be used to increase the minimum wage, to change voter registration laws, to extend unemployment insurance and offset it with some tax increase somewhere, regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and more.

There is little that can be done in the Congress to stop that which could have been done previously. This will allow this to go forward in a way heretofore not done. So I urge my colleagues not to sit idly by and watch the rights of the Senate get pounded into the dirt. It is better to have their individual authorities from whatever State and whatever party they come from to be able to highlight these problems. So I will ask unanimous consent today to offer an amendment that would strike the reserve funds from this legislation that is before us.

I encourage my colleagues to support that effort. If you care about this Senate as an institution, if you care about the right of free debate and the ability to actually amend legislation, if you care about the heritage of the Senate and the importance of constraining spending, then I would urge support of my unanimous consent request.

Mr. President, I would formally ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending motion so that I may offer a motion to concur with the amendment numbered 2573 which is filed at the desk which would accomplish what I have described.

Mr. President, these provisions that allow the objections to the abuse of reserve funds have been in law since 1985, 30 years almost. This has been the law that we have. I raised objections to the tax-and-spend point of order and it has been sustained on the floor of the Senate. The Senate budget resolution that Senator Murray referred to is the one that would increase spending $1 trillion over what was agreed to in 2011, August of 2011, and would add $1 trillion in taxes.

Then they changed this rule. This legislation alters that from the past. The budget resolution she referred to did pass the Senate with Democratic votes only. It was a simple majority. But this is legislation that changes the Budget Act. I feel strongly we have to absolutely understand what has happened here. The rule has been changed. Power that Senators had to block tax-and-spend legislation that breaks spending limits has been eroded significantly. It should not have been a part of any legislation that purports to be legislation that puts this Nation on a financial path of soundness. In fact, it does the opposite. It weakens the ability of Senators who want to hold this Congress to its own spending limits agreed to in law. It weakens their ability to stop breaking those spending limits. There is no doubt about that. I am really upset about it. I think it is historic.

I understand that the House maybe did not fully understand what was meant here. Maybe we can somehow revive this. But in truth we should do it now. We should not pass this bill that contains this legislation. Had we had a normal conference committee--and I had been a member of it and other Senators had been a member of that conference committee and had a chance to talk about it, it would not have been in there. Maybe that is why they chose not to have a public, open discussion of it, because they wanted to slip this through in the dead of night, up next to Christmas. Oh, you have got to pass this bill just as it is. There can be no amendments. The government will shut down. We will all have to stay here until Christmas Eve, as we had to, to try to stop ObamaCare that they passed on Christmas Eve. So this is the kind of thing that is not healthy for America. It is not healthy for the Senate.

Reserve funds are a function of policy. There is no common policy between the House and the Senate on budget resolutions. Budget resolutions are passed by each House, but we do not have common policies there about how it is processed. Never have we adopted the volume of reserve funds that will hereafter be longstanding parts of our law.

I believe we have a time to begin our wrapup now. Let me say Senator Murray is a good, strong advocate. She is effective in her leadership role. I respect her and enjoy working with her. We sometimes disagree.

I wish to say, as we move to conclude this legislation, that I respect the Senator, and we move forward.

Yes.

Ten minutes.

I would ask that the unanimous consent be equally divided.

What time is the vote?

How did it get to be at 4:27 p.m. instead of 4:30?

I ask unanimous consent the vote be held at 4:30, and I will wrap up in the time remaining.

I would object if it is counted against my time.

Mr. President, I thought we were voting at 4:30 and there would be 5 minutes left for me.

I will accept the kind and generous offer of the Senator.

I was concerned about Senator Leahy. If I would have 4 minutes, I would consent to the Senator----

If I would have 4 minutes--I would ask unanimous consent that the vote be delayed until I have 4 minutes and Senator Leahy has 1 minute.

The bill before us today is a perfect example of why it is dangerous to produce a deal in secret and rush it through on the floor of Congress in a panic, as we have done time and time again. This bill is a perfect example of why we need regular order, why the Senate is supposed to be a deliberative body that debates and amends legislation--there is no amendment being allowed to this legislation-- and why each Senator is supposed to have a chance to have their say and offer amendments to the bill. Each Senator in this Chamber, Republican and Democrat, is being diminished if they are not allowed to have an amendment on an important piece of legislation such as this.

I was astonished to hear earlier that we have no choice but to pass this bill exactly as it is, that there is no other alternative. What about letting the Senate work its will, I suggest. Could we not find 51 Senators who could have agreed on a better way to save money than to cut retired military personnel, a cut that was used to increase spending in other areas, some of which is clearly not more significant than the cuts falling on military retired personnel?

We learn after the House has passed the bill, that also includes a cut to the pensions of wounded warriors and--I suspect most House Members didn't realize that, as my friend from Mississippi has pointed out.

We were blocked yesterday from having a vote, and it looks as if we will continue to be blocked. We will move to final passage, and there will be no opportunity to amend this bill and the big $500 billion Defense authorization bill that will be on the floor next immediately. Thereafter, it will be voted on tomorrow, and there will be no amendments to it.

This is unprecedented to have the Defense bill on the floor when we often have 30 or more amendments. Zero. We don't have time, we have wasted our time on all kinds of things. We had a whole week in which there were two measly votes conducted when 30 or more could have been conducted easily that week, and there wouldn't have been that many votes on the Senate bill.

I would say that I do not believe this legislation is sound legislation. I believe it does damage to the ability of this Senate to protect the Treasury of the United States of America. I think it takes us down the road to eroding the power of individual Senators to constrain spending and stay within the limits we agreed to, that we put in law. I am not happy about it. I wish I had more time to talk about it. I don't.

I appreciate the opportunity to work with Senator Murray. I greatly respect Congressman Ryan. But there are some problems with this legislation. We should not pass it, and there is plenty of time for the House of Representatives to respond to any changes we were to make.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Reserving the right to object, I would note this is the way the process--the train that runs through this body and denies amendments to be allowed--occurs. At this point, there will be a move, in effect, to clear the tree so this can be passed. It is an unhealthy tree we are in, and I am disappointed that we are heading in this direction, but it points out the actual legislative steps that are required to get to final passage after the leader has filled the tree.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to waive the quorum.

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

Mr. President, the budget conference didn't meet. We didn't produce a budget in conference. Our conferees did not vote. The two leaders of the conference, Senator Murray and Congressman Ryan, prepared the legislation now before us which has a number of problems, in my opinion. To skip the conference and create this legislation instead is not the right way to have conducted this process.

But the question is, Should we advance with this legislation or does it need to be improved? I believe it can be improved, I believe it should be improved, and I believe legislation of this size and scope should be carefully considered. Since this bill actually amends the Budget Control Act of the United States, which has successfully contained the growth and spending for a couple of years the Budget Control Act ought not to be altered without more care and thought.

I suggest the right vote today would be to vote against cloture and say to the leadership and Senator Reid that we want to have amendments on this legislation.

If this legislation goes forward, we are about to have a significant reduction in the retirement benefits of disabled military personnel, people who have served 20 years in the U.S. military. The pay is going to be cut as much as $70,000 for a staff sergeant over their lifetime. We need to think about that.

This legislation, amazingly and disappointingly, has altered the ability of this Senate to block increases in spending. We have a budget point of order today which allows an objection to be raised to require 60 votes in order to spend more than we agreed to spend. This legislation takes that away. Perhaps the House didn't understand the significance of it, but it is very significant. We have used it three separate times successfully to block tax-and-spend legislation within the last year or so and help us stay with the commitment we made to the American people to keep spending at an agreed-upon level.

So, colleagues, there are a lot of problems with this bill. But the only way to fix it would be to say to Senator Reid and the Democratic leadership in the Senate: Let's slow down, let's give Senators a chance to have actual amendments, and let's fix some of the problems. There is plenty of time to fix those problems, send the bill back to the House, and be able to pass it before the deadline of January 15.

I yield the floor.

I thank Senator Enzi for his leadership on the Budget Committee. He is a long-time member, a senior member, and he has worked hard on these issues for years.

He is an accountant. He is able to add and subtract. He can see a debt crisis when one is there, and I appreciate the comments he has made. I believe he is exactly correct on so many of those points.

The Senator suggested that something is awry on the pension benefit commission in which we, in effect, tax employers more supposedly to help the guarantee fund be able to honor people's pensions if a company goes bankrupt. But it seems to me in simple dollars and cents if we do that we can't then spend it on other items unrelated to pension guarantees.

Is that the concern the Senator has raised, essentially?

I thank my colleague. And I was referring to the fact that Senator Enzi is the one who has explained to us in a very clear way, from his accounting background, the problems we have had with the pension guarantee fund, and it is a very real situation. It is actuarially unsound in the long run. It needs to be put on a better basis, but we can't put it on a better basis if we tax the employers. That may even reduce, as the Senator from Wyoming says, the number of employers who provide a pension. That would be a terrible policy error, if we keep driving up the cost to supposedly fix the fund but then spend the money on something else and we therefore disincentivize the businesses from even having retirement plans for their employees. So I thank my colleague for raising that very important issue.

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

Mr. President, I wish we had an agreement that is grand and great and would do what a lot of people have been dreaming of for some time and would put us on a sound financial path for decades to come. It is within our grasp. But it seems we are unable to make those choices or bring that forward.

I believe if the President has led and given a commitment to fixing our financial problems in America, we could have done it in the last few years. But he has not. So it has put us in a bad position, and we end up with the agreement we have today, which essentially would save some of the risk of a government shutdown and reduce some of the tension, which a lot of people think is great and I do too. It would be good for the country to have more predictability. It would be good for the Defense Department to have more predictability. It would be good for the financial community to have more predictability about what is happening in Washington. But what occurred is not sufficient in any way, and it has been postured to look a good bit better than it is.

Essentially, we remain on an unsustainable financial path in America. The numbers are real clear. We are seeing a reduction in our deficit in the near term, but the Congressional Budget Office tells us in the next several years we will begin to see the relentless increase in deficits every year, reaching almost $1 trillion again by the end of this 10- year window. That is not a good path to be on.

We pay interest on the debt which we accrue each and every year, plus all the money we have borrowed previously. The amount is notable. We have exceedingly low interest rates, so it is not impacting us as much as it is likely to impact us in the future, as they will return to the mean and we will see rates go up.

But just to point out that this agreement--the legislation before us--spends $63 billion to $70 billion in the next 2 years. Where does that money come from? Essentially, it adds to the debt. But we are told not to worry because we have other cuts in spending, other fees that will come in, which will eventually pay for it. But over half of the pay-fors occur outside the 8 years left on the Budget Control Act window and in the last 2 years of the 10-year budget window for this legislation. But the Congressional Budget Office has scored that, because we are spending more money sooner--money which has to be borrowed--it would add $10.5 billion to the interest payment of the United States over this 10 year period.

So the claim it is going to reduce the debt over time if every bit of this is adhered to--which our pattern is not to adhere to what we promise. But if we were to adhere to it over the 10 years, the savings wouldn't be $23 billion as claimed, it would be $12.5 billion because the legislation supporters haven't discussed the interest cost of this gimmicked-up bill, where we spend more now and save later. It is a very serious matter.

They say the sequester is hard. The sequester is so bad that it cannot be sustained, America will collapse, and we will not be able to act in a compassionate way and be supportive of people in need or meet the basic needs of the government.

The former Speaker Pelosi, now leader of the Democrats in the House, said the cupboard is bare. There are no more cuts to make. She said on September 21 of this year: There are no more cuts to make.

There are plenty more cuts to make. There are ways to save money. For example, the majority in the Senate changed the rules of the Senate using the nuclear option to ram through the appointment of three new Federal judges. Each one of those, with their staff, costs the taxpayers $1 million a year, and it was for the DC Circuit, which absolutely does not need these judges. They are not needed. The DC Circuit has by far the lowest caseload per judge in America, even with the vacancies on the court.

So what we should have done, and I worked toward previously, is not filled those judges and move them to other circuits which need judges that we are going to have to fill. That would have saved $3 million a year. That is just one example of the waste of money. It is the equivalent of burning $1 million to $3 million a year on the mall out here because those judges were not needed.

So to say there are no cuts to make and we can't reduce spending any more is not accurate. It is all through the system. As Senator Enzi said, his State was prepared to take an 8-percent cut. But under the Budget Control Act, which includes the sequester, we are not cutting spending over 10 years; we are increasing spending over 10 years. We are just increasing it $2 trillion less than before. We were on the path to increase spending, at the time the Budget Control Act was passed, by $10 trillion--from $37 trillion to $47 trillion over 10 years. We passed the Budget Control Act and said it would increase to $45 trillion instead of $47 trillion.

So we go from $37 trillion to $45 trillion. That was essentially what the agreement was. It passed both Houses of Congress. It had no tax increases in it. It was simply a commitment to contain the growth of spending, and it sharply reduced spending. It reduced spending in the near term. But after this year, spending is allowed to continue for the last 7 years or 8 years of the Budget Control Act agreement, a 2.5- percent-a-year annual increase every year after this year.

So the cuts began to bite this year. They were being felt this year. What did Congress do? It folded up like a house of cards. Congress couldn't sustain the heat and couldn't honor the promise we made in August of 2011 to reduce the growth of spending just a little bit. That was the promise. To raise the debt ceiling $2.1 trillion, we agreed to reduce the growth of spending by $2.1 trillion over 10 years.

Now we have already hit the debt ceiling. We have already borrowed another $2.1 trillion. So now we hit the debt ceiling again, but we are not honoring the promise to reduce spending.

What happened? The sequester said we had to have more cuts this year, more reductions this year, and Congress couldn't sustain it--just couldn't--would not take the heat, and we came up with this new plan that is before us to avoid a shutdown. I guess we can say we avoided a shutdown, but we can also say we did not do the right thing about spending in America. We have not faced the challenge we have because we remain on an unsustainable financial path. In a couple years we will be back on a deficit growth pattern which is going to be very serious and will threaten the financial future of America. As President Obama's Simpson-Bowles Debt Commission has told us, nothing fundamentally has changed in that.

So we have our colleagues who are anxious to have more taxes--more revenue they call it. What they are talking about are more taxes.

House Minority Leader Pelosi says that there are no more cuts to make,

American people. We have cut all we can cut. There is no more we can cut. So now we have decided the problem is you, American people. You haven't sent us enough money. We demand, we insist, we require you to send us more money so we don't have to make any tough decisions anymore. We don't have to make the financial choices they made in Wisconsin or Alabama or Wyoming, that every State and city has had to face during this financial crisis, and they are leaner and more productive and more efficient as a result of having to make those choices. But we don't have to because we want to have more revenue.

So after this August of 2011 Budget Control Act passed, which reduced spending over 10 years by $2.1 trillion, the President signed and agreed to, had no tax increases in it, it was just a commitment that we would contain spending--that is what the agreement was, a spending containment bill. In January, President Obama submitted a budget that wiped it out, busted it wide open. It would have added $1 trillion in new taxes and $1 trillion in new spending.

Wow. What kind of commitment was that to the American people; you sign a bill, you say you are going to do something, and before the ink is dry you are proposing a different idea that goes back on the very promise that was made.

Eventually, this year, the Senate Democrats passed a budget increasing spending $1 trillion and increasing taxes $1 trillion. It is a tax-and-spend budget, the same budget the President submitted each year.

They said we are going to have a balanced approach. What they wanted the American people to hear when they said a ``balanced approach'' is: We have a plan to reduce the deficit, and the plan is we are going to cut some spending and increase revenues. That is what they wanted the American people to hear. It was a subtly and carefully crafted message, but it was not the truth. The truth was that they wanted to spend more and tax more. Taxes were not used in a balanced approach to bring down the deficit from the unsustainable path on which we remain. The taxes were used to fund additional spending above the amount we agreed to in the Budget Control Act of August 2011, which is still in effect--unless this legislation passes, and that is going to amend it.

The fundamental fact is that my colleagues want to tax and spend. They say they have cut all they can cut and they want more revenue and more money from the American people. Just send it to us, and we will spread it around and we will do all the good things we can dream of with your money. We don't have enough of it; we want more.

I don't think that is good for America. I don't think that is good for the economy. We need a vibrant private sector with growth possibilities and the opportunity to have innovation and creativity and the efficiencies that occur in the private sector that are not present in the government sector. We can't run this government. We have never managed the government effectively. It is so massive. We spend so much money. We need to be leaner and more productive. We need to decide which areas in our country we don't need the government to undertake. We need to let the private sector handle that wherever possible. If we do that, we can manage a smaller and more efficient government. We need to extract less money from the American people.

We have commitments. We are committed to Social Security, Medicare, and other funding we need to make sure we are honoring. We can't take money from Medicare, our seniors' health care program, and then spend it and say we have strengthened Medicare and made it better because we reduced its costs. The money that is saved in Medicare needs to be used to strengthen the long-term viability of Medicare, which is in great doubt. It is not on a sound path.

I know we can do better. We are going to have to face up to this. It is not going to be easy. It has challenges for all of us. But reductions in Federal spending can work.

For example, they say we need more revenue. Well, have we gotten more revenue? Yes, we have already. This Budget Control Act did not include more taxes. The Budget Control Act represented a $2.1 trillion reduction in the growth of spending, but in January of this year we passed a $650 billion tax on the rich, upper income people, and the ObamaCare legislation included a $1 trillion tax increase on top of that. This bill has $34 billion in fees and taxes. Is there not revenue around here? Revenue is being increased, but the problem is that it is not being used to reduce our deficits and it is not being used to put us on a sound financial path. It is being used to advance more spending, and that is the danger we are in, that is the danger we have to watch, and that is the danger that threatens us all.

I know how seductive it is for us to think we just can't reduce spending; the cupboard is bare. Minority Leader Pelosi says that we can't cut any more. Well, we can. There is a lot we can do to make this government leaner and more productive, and we are required to do so.

I yield the floor

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

Madam President, I would like to continue to raise a simple point but a point of profound financial significance to America. One of the things that has happened in the bill that is before us is there has been an extension in the 10-year BCA plan--which was enacted 2 years ago; there are only 8 years left--an extension of a 2-percent reduction in payments to hospitals and doctors who provide services through Medicare, treat patients, and get paid by the U.S. Government. So they were reduced 2 percent.

This is scored as a savings for the country. In effect, it is perceived as a savings that allows us to spend more money somewhere else. That savings, as was done in this legislation, involved the last 2 years--years 9 and 10--of the 10-year window from today. It creates some money, they say, because we reduced Medicare costs and we can spend that money in this year and next year on nondefense and defense discretionary spending, and we are going to promise to use the money we save in Medicare in years 9 and 10, outside the promised BCA 10-year window which is already moving along.

What I want to raise is a deep and fundamental point. Medicare is already in deficit. Medicare is already spending more money to provide care for seniors than is being taken in off people's paychecks every week. But Medicare does have a trust fund. Medicare Part A does; it's called the Hospital Insurance trust fund. Social Security also has a trust fund. People have that money come off their paychecks every week when they go to work, and they believe, correctly in my opinion, they have a right to receive those benefits in the future.

They are not happy. They believe America is going on the wrong track when we take that money and spend it, therefore, jeopardizing the confidence they should have in retirement that their Medicare and Social Security are going to be in place.

We know there are some deep problems with Medicare and Social Security actuarially because people are living longer and there are more people retiring and we have to deal with some problems there. But what I want to say is, the worst thing you can do is to do the things necessary to make Medicare sound--tighten up payments to providers, perhaps; although there is a limit at some point as to how much you can do there--and do other things that make Medicare more financially stable, but you should not see that savings as something you can spend on a new program. The entitlement programs that went into ObamaCare, the Affordable Care Act, $500 billion of that money that supposedly was used to fund it was from Medicare and some from Social Security too-- saving money in those accounts.

But those programs have trust funds. They have trustees. When they ran a surplus, as they had done for many decades--but not now--when they were running a surplus, the money was loaned to the Federal Treasury and they spent it. But the Federal Treasury owes it back to them. Now that both of those programs are heading into steep fiscal decline, they are calling the notes, they are calling back the money they loaned. The trustees of those programs know whom they represent. They represent Social Security recipients. They represent Medicare beneficiaries. They are demanding their money, they are going to get it, and we are going to honor it.

So what I am saying is we cannot count that money twice. That is what Mr. Elmendorf, the Director of the CBO, told us on December 23, the night before the ObamaCare bill was passed on the floor of the Senate in 2009. He said: You cannot count the money twice, and to suggest you are strengthening Medicare and simultaneously

providing a source of money to spend on the new ObamaCare program is double counting. He used the words ``double counting.''

How simple is this? My question to him, when he gave the letter--and I asked him to put it in writing. I insisted he do that. He works for us, and he did what he is supposed to do. He said: Even though the conventions of accounting might suggest otherwise, you cannot simultaneously use the same money to strengthen Medicare and fund ObamaCare. That is what he said.

So under our conventions of accounting, we have what we call a unified budget. The CBO does it both ways, but the one we talk mostly about, the one everybody focuses on, is the unified budget. So if Social Security is a little better off, it is assumed it is in the same pot. Everything is in one pot. So anything that cuts the expenses of Medicare and Social Security to make them strong is utilized and considered to put more money in the pot to be spent somewhere else.

What is happening to us now is the unfunded liabilities in pension funds, retirement funds, Medicare, Social Security, and other accounts are reaching unprecedented levels, some say nearly $100 trillion, and it is growing considerably. This is the long-term threat to America. This is the thing that several attempts have been made in recent years to fix, to confront, to put us on a sound path financially, but it has always failed. People can blame everybody, and everybody is subject to blame, I assure you. However, I do believe it is quite plain it will not happen unless the President of the United States leads and participates and says: I want to fix it. He is basically saying: We do not have a problem. We are doing fine. He is not willing to call on the American people and use his bully pulpit to lay out the challenges we face in how we could put ourselves on a financially sound path without destroying the country.

We can do that. We really can do that. But it will take belt- tightening in every aspect of our government, and everybody should share equally in the belt-tightening, not just a few, not just veterans, military people who have served 20 years, and disabled veterans having their retirement cut, as this legislation does. It needs to be something where everybody participates in tightening the belt. We could get the country on a sound path.

But I want to register again--and I am going to continue to talk about this because I think it leads to a false impression. It leads to the impression we have more money than we have. You cannot use Social Security's money, Medicare's money to fund ObamaCare, the Defense Department or nondefense discretionary spending. It is not possible to use that money twice.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank my colleagues for their heartfelt remarks about the cuts in this bill that will immediately impact the retirements of American military. They are subject to recall, to Active Duty. They are expecting these payments. Other

departments and agencies and government employees are not going to get their retirement reduced; only people who served in the military. It is not correct, and it should not happen.

What I want to emphasize to all of my colleagues and highlight for us here today is that the legislation before us now was brought forth in a way that will not allow any amendments. If people have an idea about a problem with this legislation that was agreed to in secret by a couple of Senators--I suppose maybe some staff involved, so they agreed to this language. It is the first time we have seen it. It is the first time it has been before the light of day in the Senate, and we find problems with it, real problems.

If people ask schoolchildren, if people ask senior citizens in America, if a bill hits the floor of the Senate and it has bad provisions in it, what can Senators do, well, they will say that Senators offer an amendment and they fix it. Isn't that what we were taught? Isn't that what the history of the Senate is all about? It is a place where people can debate and amend and improve legislation. But we are in an odd and unusual circumstance--not so odd in recent years.

The majority leader of the Senate has sought recognition, as he is able to do, and he has filled the amendment tree, and nobody can get an amendment. Nobody can get a vote on this amendment to fix this part of the legislation that plainly needs fixing. It is not available to us. That is awfully hard to believe. It is awfully hard to believe that in the great Senate--as Senator Robert Byrd said, there are two great Senates: the Roman Senate and the American Senate; and he defended it and its rights and priorities. But we have one leader of the Senate, supported by his colleagues, who says: We don't want amendments because we might have to take tough votes, and all we want to do is rubberstamp this agreement, this bill written in secret, and we want to pass it without any amendments.

How did that become the policy of America? How did that become the policy in the Senate? What justification can be given to the concept that duly-elected Senators can't stand up on the floor of this body and defend the rights of their constituents and their States by offering amendments to improve legislation?

Tomorrow we are going to have the Defense spending bill, authorizing the expenditure of over $500 billion--$500 billion-plus--to fund our military. A lot of people have ideas about how to improve that bill. We are not going to get a single amendment because the majority leader has filled the tree and he is going to deny the Members of this body, who represent millions of people in their States--and really we represent everybody--the right to offer amendments to improve that bill. It is contrary to our tradition. It is contrary to our heritage. It is contrary particularly to the heritage of the U.S. Senate, where open debate and discussion is so important.

I thank Senator Wicker. He spoke this morning. I thank Senators Ayotte, Graham, and Inhofe, who shared their thoughts about the lack of wisdom in this legislation.

I am going to offer a tabling motion, and the purpose of it will be to remove the parliamentary maneuver of Majority Leader Reid and allow us to have a vote. So what is this motion about? This motion will remove the filling of the tree, and it will allow the Senate to vote on this amendment to strike the military retiree pay cut--and other amendments, perhaps, but this amendment in particular. I believe that is in the tradition of the Senate. I believe it is extremely important.

So, Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending motion so that I may offer a motion to concur with amendment No. 2572 which is filed at the desk.

Madam President, I still have the floor, I believe.

I yield to the Senator for a question.

Madam President, I would be pleased to yield to the Senator without yielding the floor to answer that question.

I yield to the Senator without yielding the floor.

Well, I thank the Senator.

I would note that Senator Ayotte, who has spoken, Senator Graham, and Senator Wicker, along with myself, were conferees on the budget conference committee and that this was supposed to be the kind of thing we would discuss. But we were not called to the final discussion, and now this legislation is brought to the floor that we did not have time to approve in advance.

I say to Senator Graham from South Carolina, I am pleased to yield for a question.

I do not, I say to Senator Graham.

I say to Senator Graham, you are a full colonel in the Air Force, still serving in the Reserve.

Bless your heart. But it is a fact that this retirement pay is really more than retirement pay, is it not? It is really an income, a source of payment that ensures that the person can be recalled. So it is part of the right to recall you, a compensation for that.

Madam President, I thank Senator Graham. I think he made the defining point there, that this is a one-sided reduction of retirement benefits to people who served in the military, not impacting lots of others.

I want to return to the central point. This bill that will be voted on tomorrow--final passage--cuts military retirement by $6 billion. That $6 billion is counted in the numbers of the proponents of the legislation toward their justification for spending more money the next 2 years. They say they are paying for it by reducing this $6 billion over time. It is mandated. It is not an option in the bill. We should not pass legislation that does that.

So what I would propose is that we not go along with Majority Leader Reid's determination to run the train over the men and women of our military, that we slow down and we follow the regular process of the Senate, not fill the tree, and allow amendments to be voted on on this substantive matter.

So parliamentary inquiry, Madam President.

Is it correct that while the majority leader's motion to concur in the House amendment with an amendment to which the majority leader has also offered a second-degree amendment is pending-- while it is pending, no Senator is permitted to offer an amendment to the House-passed spending package?

So let me repeat to be sure my colleagues and I understand the situation. The Chair has just told the Senate that I cannot offer an amendment to the House-passed spending bill that would strike the military retiree pay cut because the majority leader has filled the tree with his own amendments. I have read the majority leader's amendments, and I see they merely change the date of enactment by a few days.

Further, parliamentary inquiry, Madam President: If a motion to table the majority leader's motion to concur with an amendment is successful, would there be an opportunity for me to offer a motion to concur with amendment No. 2572?

Again, summarizing for my colleagues, the Presiding Officer is telling this Senate that if there can be 51 votes to table the current amendment tree to the House-passed spending bill, then there will be an opportunity for me or other Senators to offer by motion a motion to concur with the amendment that strikes the military pay cut.

So, Madam President, in order to make a motion to concur with amendment No. 2572, I move to table the pending motion to concur with an amendment offered by the majority leader, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, there is no debate on a motion to table.

On the last vote, I wish to mention to my colleagues what happened and what has happened. A major bill dealing with the debt of the United States was supposed to come out of a budget conference committee and come here.

The budget conference committee failed to complete its meetings and a piece of legislation was sent to the Senate. That legislation has not been subject to amendment.

The majority leader decided there would be no amendments, and he would simply tell us that if we have amendments that will kill the bill or if we have amendments that will make us delay, we can't do it and we will not do it and we will not get an amendment.

A number of good amendments have been filed. The one we just voted on was one of the more egregious. That amendment reduces the retirement pay of the U.S. military without reducing the retirement pay of anyone else who served in government, only the military. So I moved to table the filled tree that Majority Leader Reid has been using to block anybody from having amendments in the Senate on serious legislation.

I mean, this is serious legislation we didn't get to vote on. So the choice for our colleagues, when they cast their vote, was would they vote to allow an amendment to be voted on that would protect veterans, military retirees, from having their pensions reduced; or would they support the majority leader in his determination to block any amendments to the legislation? So a majority has voted. They voted to block the classical rights of Senators to have amendments and therefore to protect the leadership and the domination of this Senate in an unprecedented way by the majority leader.

He has already filled the tree more times than the previous four majority leaders combined--more than twice as often. On every bill now, it seems, he fills the tree. To get an amendment, he has to approve it or you don't get it. If he decides there are no amendments, there are no amendments. So this is contrary to the tradition of the Senate, and we have to change this. This highlights the danger of supporting that kind of process because it keeps us from fixing bad legislation and improving it.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I wish to share some thoughts about the bipartisan Budget Control Act which passed through the House and is now here, and we are going to have a cloture vote on it in the morning.

I appreciate the hard work which Chairman Ryan and Chairman Murray put into that. It is a complicated and important task. But I am not going to be able to support it.

I am the ranking member on the Budget Committee. I have dealt with these issues, and Chairman Ryan and Chairman Murray and I have all talked about them for a number of years. There are a lot of things which are important as we work through this. The proposal before us would increase spending, increase taxes and fees, and it would violate the core promise Congress made when passing the debt ceiling in 2011.

In August of 2011, we told the American people that if they allow us to raise the debt ceiling $2.1 trillion, we would cut $2.1 trillion in discretionary spending, essentially over the next 10 years. We would try to reach a bigger agreement. But if we didn't, we would cut money through the discretionary accounts: Defense and nondefense. No agreement was reached. The automatic cuts went into place.

I think we could modify those reductions in spending in a way which makes them less harmful and gives the agencies and departments-- particularly Defense--much better ability to meet the reductions in spending we asked them to meet, without doing unwise damage as I think we probably are today. We could make it a lot better, but not to spend more than we agreed over the now 8 years remaining in the Budget Control Act's time.

I am willing to give and take on some of this, but I am a bit frustrated that we are now going to spend from $63 billion to $65 billion more mostly in the next 2 years over the Budget Control Act's limits, which include the sequester that we agreed to. I am worried about that. It is going to be spent, and we are going to try to cut somewhere else to fund it. Over half the cuts that are going to fund this $65 billion occur outside the 8 years remaining on the Budget Control Act, in the last 2 years. That is not good.

We promised in 2011 we would reduce spending $65 billion more this year, or contain its growth, more than this legislation says. We promised that. Now this legislation is going to cost from $63 billion to $65 billion more this year and next year in spending which we promised just 2 years ago. So I am a little uneasy that we are going to say we are going to pay for that extra spending in years 8 and 10 over the next 10-year budget.

Forgive me if that causes me concern, but it does. I am worried about it, and I hope that our colleagues will study this.

There are a couple of big issues that are out there. One is a real hit to retired military. People who served 20 years are going to have their military retirement pay until they are 62 reduced significantly.

In addition, we have a problem which I think is even more serious and important to me. As a member of the Budget Committee who has made and raised budget points of order on the floor of the Senate, I wish to make this point clear:

There is a budget point of order under current law that--if this Congress attempts to spend more money than was agreed to in the Budget Control Act and the sequester--that any Member can raise, and I have raised it on at least three occasions, and we prevailed on each one of those three occasions.

What it says is: Even though you may say you have more money--you raised taxes or fees--we agreed not to spend over this level. This is our spending limit. It shows growth over 10 years in spending. It is not a real cut, although it cuts in the short term this year. But after this year, defense and nondefense discretionary spending will grow 2.5 percent each year. So this is not a permanent savaging of the Federal budget.

The point is, it was an agreement to limit spending. Somehow, in this agreement reached by Chairman Murray, the Democratic Senate budget leader, and Chairman Ryan, the House Republican budget leader--who is not familiar with Senate rules, but Senator Murray is--the Democrats obviously insisted that we change that budget point of order. That means if somebody proposes to spend more than the Budget Control Act says and proposes to pay for it with taxes and fees, it is no longer subject to a 60-vote point of order. That will undermine in a real way our ability to be successful, because it will pit unpopular taxes on some business against some needy cause, and it will say that you didn't vote to help people in need; whereas, in truth we agreed to spending limits, and we should adhere to those limits.

In the past we have had votes, and the vote was simply: This amendment, this bill that is before the Senate, spent more money than we agreed to spend. Go back and find some other way to fund this good cause you want to fund, not by more taxes and more spending. So this has been eroded significantly, and I am worried about it.

There are a number of other problems with the legislation, and I know people will complain about it. But nothing is perfect. I know that, and I know we would like to have an agreement, and hopefully somehow we can.

But what should happen is the Senate should not agree to reduce military retirees' benefits, at least not before we know there is no other alternative, and that other employees of the Federal Government at least have the same kind of reductions. It doesn't appear to be so here, and we ought not to have changed the internal budgetary enforcement powers included in this point of order. That should not be eliminated, and, unfortunately, that is what has happened today.

Johnson Nomination

In a bit we will be voting on the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. This is a very, very important position, one of the most important positions in our entire government. It is a massive agency. It was cobbled together under President Bush's tenure after pushing from Congress.

What happened was President Bush, after 2001 and the attack of 9/11, was pressured to have a new agency for homeland security. He didn't go for that at first, but the pressure built, and he decided to do it. He submitted legislation to do so. I supported it, but being a Federal prosecutor, having worked with virtually all of these Federal agencies, I probably knew better. It was a big deal, and it is very, very hard to cobble these agencies together--with their own history, their own administrations, their own policies, their own rules and regulations-- into one. I am not sure it is a totally win-win. But we did it, and I voted for it eventually. Now it is the law of the land. The problem is it has not yet been brought under control. It has not yet been unified in an effective way.

There are over 240,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security, and we need a strong leader to make this happen. We need a strong leader

who can blend these agencies into one harmonious whole. I don't know why Coach Nick Saban came to mind. But you need somebody who is strong enough to drive the special interests, the old historical biases, the old ideas of doing things, into one focused whole to make this the best agency in the U.S. Government. That is what we need.

The nominee, Mr. Jeh Johnson, doesn't come close to that. He is not a good choice for this position. I am not saying he is not a good man. I am saying he is not a good choice.

Let's go over some of these things here. With over 240,000 employees, the Department of Homeland Security is the third largest cabinet-level department, behind only the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs, and it is less cohesive than those two by far. When it was established, it subsumed 22 government agencies which all came together.

Some of the many DHS components which still exist today as part of Homeland Security include the U.S. Customs and Border Protection service, which itself has 25 component parts; the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, which itself has 21 parts. They are an unhappy group. Their officers association has complained to this administration about the lack of support and lack of commitment to law. The U.S. Coast Guard is part of Homeland Security; FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has 37 component parts; and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. The ICE Office of Principal Legal Advisor alone has 41 component parts.

ICE is an important agency. It has been decimated under this administration. They have voted ``no confidence'' unanimously in their Director John Morton, who finally retired. All of these report directly to the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Before the Judiciary Committee 2\1/2\ years ago, I asked Secretary Napolitano if she was aware of the ICE officers association morale, which according to government surveys was virtually the lowest in the entire U.S. Government, and would she meet with them, and she didn't make a commitment to do so. So a year later she came back before the Judiciary Committee and I said: Have you met with them yet? No. She didn't meet with them. So this is a big problem.

The U.S. Secret Service, the group which protects the President and provides security throughout the country, is a very important agency. The TSA, Transportation Security Administration, airport security people, has 21 component parts in that entity. The Domestic Nuclear Detection Office; the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center; the Director for National Protection and Programs, which includes the Office of Emergency Communications; the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, the Stakeholder Engagement and Cyber Infrastructure Resilience Division, the Federal Network Resilience Division, and the Network Security Deployment Division.

I was a U.S. attorney. I worked with many of these Federal agencies for years, but I never heard of those. But they are out there, and they are important. The Directorate for Science and technology, which has 37 component parts; the Office of Infrastructure Protection, which has 5 divisions; the Office of Operations Coordination and Planning; the Office of Intelligence and Analysis--and that doesn't include 10 other offices.

On December 12, 2013, the Government Accountability Office--our independent agency that investigates departments and provides information to Congress--published a report stating that since its inception in 2003, the Department of Homeland Security ``has faced challenges in implementing its human capital functions and Federal surveys have consistently found that DHS employees are less satisfied with their jobs than the government-wide average of Federal employees.''

Some of those agencies are at the very bottom of satisfaction and so forth.

DHS has ranked 36 out of 37 agencies that participated in the Office of Personnel Management Employee Viewpoint Survey. They surveyed the employees. How do you view your agency? They are at the bottom. We need a leader who can turn that around. This program is down. We need a coach who can build a winner.

This survey includes questions such as whether leaders generate high levels of motivation and commitment in the workforce and whether employees have a high level of respect for their organization's senior leaders. That is what they ask when they do this survey. From the years 2006 through 2013, DHS scored lower than the governmentwide average each year. While the governmentwide scores for this index have declined 3 percentage points since 2011, DHS's scores have decreased by even more--by 5 percentage points from their previous level.

My point is that this is a massively important agency on which we spend billions of dollars, and it needs a top-flight manager, a proven leader, somebody who understands law enforcement. It could be a Governor, it could be a State attorney general, but in my opinion we really need somebody who is a Federal law enforcement officer who has been a leader or deputy leader at the very top of some of these agencies--the FBI, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard--somebody who understands these issues and is committed to turning this agency around.

I have to tell you that the secret is that there is no real intent to turn this agency around because the immigration system--U.S. Customs, ICE, the Border Patrol, the Customs and Immigration Service, which evaluates requests for admission to the United States--is in disarray. This administration's goal is to further undermine their ability to be effective because they do not really want vigorous enforcement in these agencies. That is one reason their morale is so bad.

The ICE officers of the United States of America filed a lawsuit in court in Texas. They said their supervisors were instructing them not to fulfill their sworn duty, which was to enforce the laws of the United States. The lawsuit went on for some time. It eventually got dismissed on technical grounds, but the judge found that the supervisors of these agencies, the top people in these agencies, could not direct people not to enforce the law--which is what they are doing. We can go into that in some depth, and I am going to do that if I have the time. I am going to document, for the last 4 or 5 years, the systematic action by the President of the United States and his homeland security officers and Secretary and sub-Secretaries to undermine law enforcement, not to help our officers do better but to block them from doing their job. It is breathtaking. We have had too little discussion of it.

Jonathan Turley, legal scholar, supporter of President Obama, has said this goes beyond--this crosses the line. This goes beyond what is an Executive power that the President has. It goes beyond his power to basically tell his agencies to implement a DREAM Act law that Congress three times refused to pass. Congress wouldn't pass it, so he directed his agencies to do it anyway.

Professor Turley said this is a breathtaking violation of the Madisonian concept of three branches of government. It crosses the line. He was crystal clear. If I have time, I am going to talk about what he said about that.

Mr. Johnson, who is a nice individual and capable, is a lawyer. He came by to see me. We talked some about this. I expressed, frankly, my concerns to him.

The administration has pointed to Mr. Johnson's position as General Counsel for the Department of Defense as proof of his management ability. That position is actually substantially equivalent to being an Assistant Secretary of Defense. There are 15 of those. But one thing that counsel for the Department of Defense does not do is manage the Department and deal with all the conflicts about the agencies and departments and so forth.

An Assistant Secretary of Defense is the fifth highest ranking official within the Department's organizational hierarchy. First, there is the Secretary of Defense, then the Deputy Secretary of Defense, then the Executive Secretary, Under Secretaries, and Deputy Chief Management Officer. You have to go that low, and then he is the counsel--not a manager, a lawyer.

He was previously a litigator at some big New York law firm and an assistant

U.S. attorney for 2 years. I was U.S. attorney. I managed an office--a relatively small office--of 12. He was for 2 years an assistant U.S. attorney. He is now supposed to be able to manage this entire monstrosity of an agency.

The first Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, had served as Governor of Pennsylvania for 6 years. That is a big State. That requires some management skills. And he was President Bush's Homeland Security Advisor from 2001 to 2003 and was a part of the post-9/11 response, and President Bush appointed him and he was the first leader in the Department of Homeland Security.

His successor, Mike Chertoff, had been a judge on the U.S. court of appeals, but, more significantly to me, he had a long term in the Department of Justice and as U.S. attorney in one of the big offices in America, the District of New Jersey. He worked with every one of those agencies for a long period of time, spent decades of prosecuting cases, and he understood the culture of the agencies that came together to form Homeland Security.

Even Secretary Napolitano had been Governor of Arizona for 6 years and had been State attorney general, both of which were management positions.

In an interview with the blog abovethelaw.com, nominee Mr. Johnson was asked why he left a lucrative private practice to join the Department of Justice, and he replied: ``Loyalty to this President, commitment to public service, and safety for our country.'' The first thing he mentioned was loyalty to this President.

According to one article, Johnson was described as ``a loyal political operative of the President who often referred to himself as `the President's man' at the Department of Defense.'' So the President had his man, the lawyer, at the Department of Defense. I suppose that is OK, to have a friend at the Department of Defense, but is he capable of running the Department of Homeland Security?

On October 18 of this year, at the press conference announcing his nomination, Mr. Johnson said, ``I love this country, I care about the safety of our people, I believe in public service, and I remain loyal to you, Mr. President.''

While at the Department of Defense, Mr. Johnson is credited with spearheading the President's effort to repeal the don't ask, don't tell law or policy despite the fact that a poll of the combat units showed they didn't favor that. A report he produced dismissed these attitudes as laden with emotion and misperception. He was hailed as ``a hero of don't ask, don't tell repeal'' by the Washington Post. I think that is what he has been given the most credit for, being active in that issue. I am not saying that is disqualifying; I am saying that is what he spent his time doing at the Department of Defense. He wasn't dealing with how much aircraft carriers are going to cost. He wasn't dealing with the kind of weapons we need to be providing or building today to be used by our military down the road and doing so in a constrained budget.

According to Senator McCain, recently the White House instructed Mr. Johnson not to be responsive to Senators' requests for information in relation to his nomination, and he has complied with that instruction. I think it was a concern of Senator McCain's that Cabinet members have a duty to be responsive to the U.S. Congress and that when you ask a nominee or Cabinet member a question, they need to respond. If they are going to be loyal to the President to the extent they do not respond to legitimate questions from Congress, then maybe they do not need to be confirmed to the job. Are they not going to respond? And who at the White House told him to do that? It was probably not the President; it was probably some staffer, maybe in his thirties, never done any of this stuff before, and they decided politically they didn't want him to answer questions, so they told him not to, and he didn't do it.

We are having a problem today with this. Getting responses is an important matter for any Cabinet head. But, of course, he had some other matters. I am not attacking Mr. Johnson's integrity. I am not attacking him in any way personally. But according to the Federal Election Commission, he has donated over $130,000 to various Democratic candidates since 1998, including the President's 2008 campaign. According to the Web site opensecrets.org, Mr. Johnson was a bundler for President Obama's 2008 campaign to the tune of $65,000. He also served on President Obama's fundraising committee. He donated to many other groups, and he was counsel to Senator Kerry's 2004 campaign.

He is an insider. He is close to the President. They are close personally. He is, perhaps, a good lawyer. Maybe he has some good political skills, but we have a department that is in disarray, a department that is hurting perhaps more than any other department in Washington. It is a massive department that needs real leadership. They need a new coach. They need somebody to whip them into shape, break down these barriers, and eliminate the petty turf fights that are still going on in that agency.

We need strength, integrity, and a commitment there, and I don't believe Mr. Johnson has ever had the opportunity to demonstrate that. He has not been trained in those kinds of issues, and he has had no example of it.

My colleagues remember the execution of the nuclear option in this very Chamber in which the majority leader broke the rules of the Senate to change the rules of the Senate, to eliminate the ability of the Senate to have 60 votes to confirm nominees, although most of the President's nominees were being confirmed and have overwhelmingly been confirmed.

They got irritable about a few judges so they changed the rules of the Senate. It has been a devastating change for a lot of reasons. One of the ramifications is--with loyal Democratic senatorial support--that Mr. Johnson doesn't have to respond to my letter or to the inquiries of Senator McCain. He has to respond to some staffer in the White House who said: Don't give them any information. Just give them some general junk. He will still be confirmed because we have 55 Senators, and they only have to have 51. The ability to put pressure on these nominees is important.

I know my friend Senator Reid made a huge error. He has a tough job, but he did not need to go along with this. I know he had radical and progressive groups pushing him to do this nuclear option, pull the trigger, stick it to them, do it, and he eventually ended up doing it.

It has been reported that when Senator Reid left the Senate Chamber and went to the Mansfield room, there was raucous applause and cheering from the ACLU and many leftwing groups that were over there that wanted this thing to happen.

I know the hard left wanted that. They have been pushing for elimination of the classic Senate prerogatives that make us different from the House of Representatives. I guess this was the first big step they feel they achieved. It has certainly undermined our ability to ask this nominee, before we confirm him to this hugely important agency, to get some commitments from him about how he is going to manage this agency.

Ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Grassley, along with myself, as ranking member of the Budget Committee, Senator Hatch, as the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, Senator Cornyn, who is second in command and the whip in the Senate for the Republicans, and Senators Lee and Cruz, sent a letter to Mr. Johnson on November 15 regarding several issues. Most of the issues focused on the outright refusal of this administration to enforce immigration law as written.

On Friday we received a letter that can only be described as insufficient. He refused to give a straight answer to a single question. He said he would provide his ``more general views as they exist at this stage.''

What kind of commitment is that? I am going to give you some of my ``more general views as they exist at this stage.'' Is that the kind of response the Congress should expect from a man about to head this agency? I am sure it is the kind of response the White House staff told him to give.

Mr. Johnson's answers are critical to the ability of Senators in this body to properly judge him. It goes to the essence of his qualifications for the post and one of the central areas of responsibility under his direction.

According to Senator McCain, Mr. Johnson said the White House prevented him from giving more complete answers.

Now that President Obama, Majority Leader Reid, and the leftwing interest groups have decided and successfully nullified the Senate's constitutional right of advice and consent, why should any nominee be responsive to questions on any topic, let alone controversial ones such as: Will you enforce the immigration laws of America? Isn't that something we ought to be able to ask him? Or will you continue to direct your officers to violate their oath and not enforce the law faithfully? That is what is being done right now, as I will document, if we have time do so.

This Department has been at the epicenter of this administration's refusal to enforce our laws. The administration's political appointees have amounted to little more than rubberstamps, and they abdicated their sworn duty to enforce the law.

The White House has summarily suspended entire portions of Federal immigration law, granting unilateral reprieves to people based on everything from family connections, age of entry, and criminal record. These policies, I fear, are only the tip of the iceberg.

The one thing Mr. Johnson was clear about in his letter is that he supports the Senate's immigration bill, one that passed the Senate, but the House has said it was dead on arrival. This bill provides amnesty without ever securing the border, that further erodes what interior law enforcement is left, is even weaker than current law, and provides the Secretary of Homeland Security unprecedented discretion and waiver authority. One of the big problems--and one of the reasons the law is not being enforced--is the Secretary says that I am waiving all of these portions of the law, and that is why you don't enforce the law, officers.

Under the bill that cleared the Senate, it gave even broader power to the Secretary to not enforce plain law.

I think there is no doubt that if Mr. Johnson is confirmed, he will use the additional powers he has to even further undermine enforcement.

Speaker Boehner of the House has said they will not take up the Senate bill but will take up several immigration bills in a step-by- step approach. Does anyone believe this administration will actually enforce anything they pass? They are not enforcing current law.

Before the House gets into passing laws and conferring on any kind of comprehensive bill, I urge that they start insisting--and help us insist--that this administration enforce the law they have. If they just refuse to do it, why should we assume that passing the bill has any ability to change the path we are on?

The first responsibility of Congress must be to restore the rule of law, secure the border, and bring the administration into compliance with the laws of the United States. Until that happens, there is no reason or basis to offer any legalization plans considered in the Congress.

Congress cannot capitulate into this overreach. The first place we ought to start is Mr. Jeh Johnson, the nominee of Homeland Security. He would control the Customs officers, the Border Patrol officers, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Those are all under his direct control, and they need to be strengthened and not further undermined.

The record of lawlessness is what we sought to explore in our policy- oriented inquiry to Mr. Johnson, but we got no response to it.

In September 2011, the President said:

We live in a democracy. You have to pass bills through the

legislature and then I can sign it.

Yet less than 1 year after he personally disputed the notion that the executive branch could not act on its own, he decided to grant legal status to a class of individuals. He instituted an action called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a directive to all the agency department heads--all the way down to the officers at the lowest level--which would grant legal status to a mass population of individuals who are in the country illegally.

The directive, combined with the so-called Morton memo, ordered law enforcement agencies in the field to stop apprehending and removing people in the country illegally and instead allow them an opportunity to apply for legal status.

There is no law that allows them to apply for legal status. The law came up three times in Congress and three times Congress rejected the law.

As Professor Turley said, this is a big deal. Three times Congress rejects the law and then the President directed his officers to execute a law that was never passed; in fact, it was rejected.

The President told an audience in November of this year that he did not have the power to halt deportations, stating:

If, in fact, I could solve all these problems without

passing this through Congress, then I would do so. We're a

Nation of laws . . . the easy way out is to try to yell and

pretend like I can do something by violating our laws.

He said that, but he is doing just the opposite. His statement is accurate.

Every Member of Congress should be alarmed by this.

I asked my Democratic friends who have been awfully quiet on this issue: What would you do if a President refused to enforce welfare laws or minimum wage laws or fair housing laws? What would you do if a President circumvented Congress to implement a policy you disagreed with and Congress had explicitly rejected? Would your reaction be the same silence we are seeing today?

Once the rule of law begins to be undermined, this whole Republic is in danger. The American people get it. They talk to me about it all the time. They use different phrases. They say: What is a Constitution? The people don't tell the truth. The law is not being enforced. How can he amend ObamaCare--the Affordable Care Act?

I was taught in elementary school and high school that the President executes the laws; he doesn't make law. How can he change the law you guys just passed? I get asked that all the time. I have to say it is not a frivolous question because we have an abuse--as Professor Turley and others have said--that is very significant. It has to end. No one is above the law. That is what the judge in Texas said and that is what the judge said to President Nixon when he didn't want to do some things. He said: You are not above the law. They said it to President Clinton too.

Failure to uphold our laws violates our legal and moral responsibilities to our own citizens and those who came to this country legally and creates the preconditions necessary for a repressive and capricious government.

When the majority leader can stand before this Senate--and the rules of the Senate say that to change the rules of the Senate, you must have a two-thirds vote. In order to shut off debate, you must have 60 percent of the people vote for it. When you make a parliamentary inquiry and overrule the Parliamentarian and Presiding Officer who rule exactly that and say we can shut off debate on Presidential nominees with 51 votes, something bad has happened. That is a very clear problem we have.

I spoke to Mr. Johnson, and we had, by chance, an opportunity to have a few minutes in my office, and he said he supported the law. So I asked him why he wanted this job because he was not going to be allowed to enforce the law because this President's policies were contrary to that. He had his own ideas about immigration, inconsistent with the law of the land, and he was executing his ideas about immigration laws, not what is the law of the land.

So I am going to detail--if I don't finish, I will offer the information for the record and maybe speak on it later--a long, continuous trail of violations of law and improper policies designed to block the enforcement of law in America concerning immigration. It is stunning, and we should be talking about that with Mr. Johnson, but he doesn't have to answer our questions. He just says he will give us some general ideas about what his views are and the views he has at this time. Of course, they may change.

Most Americans probably don't know that a law enforcement officer who apprehends someone for speeding and discovers the person is illegally in the country does nothing. The Federal people will not come to pick them up; it is against the policy. They just release them on the spot. They could have caught him for other lesser offenses. They are released because people won't

come and get them. It is actually being applied to people in prison who are supposed to be deported.

In early 2009 there was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid-- and this story explains how we got into this--initiated and planned while President Bush was in office. And he had been weak on enforcement of the laws too, but he was actually getting a little better. He called out the National Guard, and momentum was moving in the right direction. So they executed an enforcement action at an engine machine shop in Washington State, where ICE agents detained illegal immigrants without authorization. In a statement about the operation, ICE said they were investigating criminal activity. They discovered hiring records revealing a significant number of people who were using bogus Social Security numbers and counterfeit documents. They found 26 illegal immigrants working at this company. It was a completely legitimate and justified law enforcement action, but President Obama had just taken office and he had clearly promised this kind of thing wouldn't happen. Shortly thereafter, certain pro-amnesty groups criticized him. As a result, Secretary Napolitano vowed she would ``get to the bottom of it.'' An article in the Washington Times quoted a Homeland Security official as saying, ``The Secretary is not happy about it.'' And instead of enforcing the law, the Secretary investigated the law enforcement officers for simply doing their duty--apparently in response to some secret demand made or promises made to advocacy groups during the campaign.

I appreciate the opportunity to share these thoughts. As I said, that was the first event, and we have had a series of those since--a long list of them--that got us then to a point where we need to know where the Secretary of Homeland Security stands on these issues. We should not confirm somebody who is not crystal clear about what their policy would be for this great office and we shouldn't confirm somebody who has no apparent training or background or capacity to be the kind of strong leader we need at this point in time in history.

I see Senator McConnell is on the floor. I appreciate his leadership in trying to make sure we adhere to our spending agreements and do the right thing on our spending. I thank Senator McConnell for his steadfast and solid good judgment as we wrestle with some very tough issues.

I yield the floor.