Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for as much time as I may consume. Mr. President, I rise today for the final time representing the great people of Indiana here in the U.S. Senate. My 6 years representing Hoosiers in this…
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for as much time as I may consume.
Mr. President, I rise today for the final time representing the great people of Indiana here in the U.S. Senate. My 6 years representing Hoosiers in this body and the 6 years I spent as a Congressman for the Second District of Indiana before this have been among the great honors of my life.
I am the grandson of immigrants--immigrants who came here with nothing except the dream of America--a dream that says that any opportunity can come true, that if you work hard, you can accomplish anything.
My dad was in the CCC. For all of our young pages here who have no idea what the CCC is, it was the Civilian Conservation Corps. It was for teenagers your age, back in the Depression, who were asked to go and try to help raise money for their family so that the other family members could eat.
My dad was shipped to Idaho to build bridges. Today we call that infrastructure. Back then, we said it was building bridges. He built bridges all throughout the Pacific Northwest, having grown up in the Lower East Side of New York City and having never been west of the Hudson River in his life until that point. It was America that gave him that chance.
My brothers and sisters were the first generation to ever go to college. That is how America works. You work hard, and each generation builds on the next. We are so lucky to live in this country that is so blessed and that gives us this opportunity, but we have a responsibility here to meet the challenges that have been given to us.
I want to take this opportunity to discuss some of the things I have learned in my time in Congress and to share a few thoughts on how the work that happens here, and how it will happen in coming years, is going to be absolutely essential to how our Nation moves forward and succeeds.
In my 12 years here in the Capitol, I have prided myself on the relationships I have built and on the bipartisan nature of working together. I have been found to be one of the most bipartisan Members. My friend Heidi, who is down the aisle here, who gave a wonderful speech this morning, was my partner on so much of this. I would never have been able to achieve for Hoosiers so much of this without working together in a bipartisan fashion.
My friend Todd Young is across the way. He is the other Senator from Indiana. Our focus has been on how to make life better, whether it meant assisting constituents or resolving an issue with a Federal agency.
In one case, a pizza parlor owner came up to me. He was 90 years old. Now he is 93. He said: My streetlight is out. You are my Senator. It needs to be fixed before the big game this weekend.
I called the mayor, and it was fixed. He was asked that weekend, and he said: Of course, I got it fixed. I called my Senator. That is what I did.
We are multitasking in this job. It is to make lives better.
I was blessed to work with my friend Ron Johnson, the Senator from Wisconsin. We worked on legislation called the Right to Try Act. It means giving people who are sick the chance to get medication they need.
We were told: There is no shot. This can't get done.
We had zero votes at the time. When it was done, we had 100--100. A young man from my State, Jordan McLinn, has the chance to get the medication he needs now. People all over the Nation do. Other kids with Duchenne
muscular dystrophy can also get help, and other people with ALS can also get help. That is the purpose of this job--that we work for them.
I was able to get more than 50 provisions signed into law over the past 6 years. It was only possible because I worked together every day with every Senator. There are friends like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski who, when the government shut down, we worked to end it. It became like a regular group that we had. Every time it shut down, we would work to open it back up again.
You learn from other Members, like Roger Wicker, who I worked together with to end military suicide. We have not been able to end it yet, but we sure worked on it every day.
We learn from others Members in hearings about the difficulties people in their States are facing, and we work together to address common challenges. You can be from Idaho, you can be from North Dakota, you can be from New Hampshire, or you can be from Indiana, but we all have the same challenges.
All of us worked hard to get here. Our jobs should not be worrying about politics but worrying about making lives better. Partisanship gets us nothing. Division gets us nothing.
I was thinking: What is the best way to explain this? It is this. When a fire department goes to a house, they don't ask if the person living there is Democrat or Republican. They are just there to help their neighbor. No soldier has ever asked, when they are in a foxhole fighting their way out: Where do you come from? Which party are you? What is your religion? What is your ethnic background?
You are Americans. You are in this together. You have each other's backs.
As an institution, the Senate must be a place that we are all proud of, that promotes that ideal, and that sets the example that we want our children and grandchildren to follow. It means getting to know one another. It means listening to other perspectives and to other experiences.
One of the things that amazed me the most--and when I was out campaigning and going to town halls, I never failed to be astounded-- was when folks came and said: You didn't do the one thing I wanted; so I am really mad at you, and I will never support you again.
I said: But we did 19 other things.
They said: But I didn't get that one.
I said: Apparently, you are not from a family of five children, like I am.
There were five children and two dogs. So when there were seven pork chops, I was the last to wind up with one.
So if you are someone who wants 100 percent of what you want every time, this is not the place. This is a place where we can get 70 percent to build America, to make it a better place.
The rhetoric--the divisive rhetoric--and the political campaigns, increasingly funded by tens of millions of dollars of anonymous, dark money interests, are really doing damage to this country.
I have always been for campaign finance reform. The reason I wasn't very good at raising money--which I wasn't very good at--was because people ought to have a right to know who is talking to them, who is standing up for what they have to say. I have always believed that if you have something to say, you should be willing to put your name on it.
I am concerned by our inability here to tackle serious, long-term issues. My friend Heidi touched on it. Our obligation, as public servants, is to leave a country for our children and grandchildren that is in better shape than we got it. It is the most basic promise that we make.
My wife Jill's dad was a Guadalcanal marine. He was wounded in the South Pacific. I told him: You are our hero.
He said: No, I was born at the wrong time.
I said: But you are still our hero.
He said: Look, I did my job, which is to leave for the next generation a better country than was given to me.
That is what we are supposed to do. My friend Michael Bennet has talked about this a lot, but we have a deficit right now of $21.8 trillion. I had to look because it was, I think, $21.7 trillion yesterday. This deficit is going to destroy everything we are trying to do in this country, and we have done next to nothing to address it.
My friend Chuck Schumer can probably relate to this the best, but there is an old cartoon. It was Popeye. Popeye had a friend named Wimpy. Wimpy loved hamburgers, but Wimpy never had any money. So Wimpy's saying was this: ``I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.'' That is the American government today. We do things, and we don't pay for any of them--but someday we will. That someday is now.
My friends Jordan and Peter Hanscom just had a baby boy about 5 months ago. You know what he was born into? $67,000 of debt. It is because we didn't have the responsibility to pay for our bills.
At the end of next year, 2019, the deficit is going to $23 trillion. Unless we do something here, it is on an unstoppable course to be at $30 trillion.
So what did we do here?
We passed a tax cut, because what is another $1.5 trillion? It is a tax cut at a time when we have a full-employment economy, a strong economy. We passed a tax cut, and we are now running, in a great economy, over $1 trillion in deficits every year.
If we can't balance our books now, when are we ever, ever going to do this? Right now we are on a course that, within 10 years, the interest payment will be almost $1 trillion a year, which is unsustainable.
Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was asked in 2010, when the deficit was $14 trillion: What is the most dangerous thing to our national security? China? Russia? He said: The debt, because we can't pay for anything, and if we can't pay for anything, how am I going to protect the men and women who serve this Nation?
We have serious, serious work to do.
At my church back home, St. Anthony's Church in South Bend, IN--I know, an Irish kid going to St. Anthony; you have to question it sometimes--we were running up a debt, and we were solving it by adding more debt to fix the debt we had. A new pastor came in. He came to the pulpit one Sunday, and he said: Here is the deal. We are not spending anything we don't have anymore. We need to have the revenue to match what we want to do, and the things we want to do and can't pay for, well, we will continue to want to do them, but we will not do them.
Magic occurred. We balanced our books. The parish went on. It got stronger, and all of a sudden, we were in the black.
As a body here, we do not have the right to tell CJ, that little boy, and children being born today--we don't have the right to financially cripple the country they will be inheriting.
We had ancestors who fought for this Nation. I think of my Uncle Tom, who fought with Patton in North Africa and who gave everything he had. His Purple Heart is in my office. It has been there every day while I have been there. They sacrificed everything. The least we can do is to pay our bills, not to give out crazy tax cuts that we can't pay for, and to make sure that we balance our budgets.
We are better than this. Sometimes we just have to have the ability to say no--to say no to things that, by common sense, you would never do with your own checkbook, or if you did, the end would not be very, very pleasant on that kind of thing.
If we continue doing these things, this amazing and wonderful place that I have been a part of, with the most amazing colleagues--that is the part that has been so great. It is every colleague, and one is better than the next. But this is a long-term threat to our democracy and to our country's success. We can do better, and every one of you can lead on this.
Too often, what we watch in our politics doesn't reflect the spirit or the values or the diverse coalitions of Americans that have made this country so successful. It is not the type of example we want to be leaving for our kids.
I will tell you the kind of example we want to leave. It is when we do great, great things when we have looked up and have seen our country in trouble. I had the privilege to represent Kokomo, IN, back in 2008, 2009 when the economy collapsed, and we had a transmission plant. We built all of the transmissions for all of the Jeeps in the country there. That is why I drive a Jeep. But those wonderful people--we went from over 5,000 to less than 100. They counted on us. We came together, and we
said: We can do big things. We can get this done.
President Obama--I told him: Chrysler is going to make it.
He said: How do you know?
I said: I lit a candle at Mass. Does that work?
He laughed. He said: Well maybe not, but I will give it a shot.
You have to have faith in the people of this country, that if you give them a fair shot, they can get it done.
As an institution, we came together, Democrats and Republicans, including my friend Fred Upton from Michigan, who is right across the line, and together we got it done. That plant, which had over 5,000 people working there and then less than 100 when we crashed, has over 9,000 there today because we looked at each other and said: It is not about Democrats or Republicans; it is about making sure that mortgages can be paid, that these people will not lose their houses, that we can continue to make great products here in this country.
I think of healthcare, and I often think maybe this is why I wound up here. A friend of mine, Al Gutierrez, who is the CEO of St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Mishawaka, called me after we had so many problems getting it started a couple of months later, and he said: I just want to fill you in on something that happened. We had a big meeting of all of the brain trust. It is because we have had so many terrible heart cases come in, so many people who were sick who had come in, and we are trying to figure out what has gone wrong that so many people have had bad heart cases recently. So we had the CFO, the surgeons, the this, the that, and one person raised their hand 5 minutes in and said: This is the first time they have ever had insurance. They could never afford it before.
These are our working families. Moms and dads, who would be really sick, had this amount of money, and it either went for the tuition for their daughter at Ball State or to get well, and parents always take care of their kids first. They looked at each other and said ``Well, that is the end of the meeting'' because they could get healthcare for the first time.
Every townhall I have gone to--and it is not unique to me; it is to everybody; it is to all our Members, Republican and Democrat--I have people come up and say: The healthcare bill saved my life. I wouldn't be here otherwise. I have one family, triplet girls. They were born at 6 months, came out of the hospital at the 10th month. Their hospital bill, when they came out, was $5 million. The mom and dad said: We would have lost everything, and we don't know if our kids could have made it, but the healthcare bill saved us. The healthcare we had saved us.
It is big stuff that we do right, and it is not perfect. That is where we have to come together, not to attack things but to fix things, to make things better. Almost nothing in this world started out perfect. You fix it a little bit here, you fix it a little bit there, and you can get there.
So when I saw those families, I thought of all of you because you gave them healthcare; you gave them a chance.
I think of my friend John McCain, who is not with us anymore, who stood up and said: I am not going to worry about party. It is country first. When he did that, he made sure those people could still get healthcare.
It is every Senator's job to work toward those goals until they are reality. I know it sounds naive--constantly working together--but we can, and we must, and we know from recent experience there are a lot of things we can work together on, to be more functional, to be more productive.
One of them is the chance I have had to work with our men and women in uniform. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, serving with Chairman Levin, Chairman McCain, a wonderful ranking member, Jack Reed, who is here with us today--chairman ad hoc--being able to advocate for those servicemembers is one of the most amazing responsibilities we could have, ensuring that they have everything they need. They are mostly in their twenties. They are defending freedom in every corner of the globe. They give us the ability to be safe, to live in our houses.
I remember going to Coast Province in Afghanistan, right by the Pakistan border. The Indiana National Guard was there. I said: What message do you want me to take home to your families?
They said: Tell them we got this. We know how to do this. And tell them we are going to make sure they are safe.
That is what these men and women were about.
I had the privilege of going to Iraq with Kirsten. We got the same message from amazing people who gave everything they had--everything.
I think of my first 8 months in Congress. It was in 2007, and things were in flames, and in our district in Indiana, as in many of our other States, we have a lot of people who serve. Per capita, we are about first in National Guard people, and in 8 months, I lost eight young men. We were losing one every month.
Last year was 10 years later. If you want to know the awesome responsibility we have, all of those young men we lost--those children who were 2 and 3 and 4 and 5--they were 13 and 14 and 15. I saw their folks; I saw their moms, and their moms would say: They want to know what their dad was like because he is not here anymore. I would tell them what a hero their dad was, what an amazing person he was.
We have tried to work to not only keep them safe, but to stop military suicides.
I worked with the dad and mom of a young man, Jake Sexton, who took his life on his second tour when he came home for R & R. His home is near Muncie, IN, and he just couldn't go back and took his own life. His dad called me and said: Can we do something? I want Jake's death to mean something.
So all of you helped me, and we all worked together, and we made it so that every servicemember would get an annual mental health assessment, and they wouldn't be punished for doing it. What I mean by that is they wouldn't worry that they wouldn't get the next promotion, that they wouldn't get the next step up.
I remember four-star GEN Joe Votel, who came before our committee and said: I want everybody to know that I have sought mental health. I am a four-star general, and we are in this together.
So in every branch of every service, every member can now get an annual mental health assessment. You helped me give them the chance to do this. We have to also make sure that as we do this, we help them transition back to civilian life.
One of the other things the Indiana National Guard told me in Afghanistan--as I was leaving, I said: What do you need? Trucks? Vests? Better MREs?
They said: No, we just need a job when we go home.
We need to make sure they have that chance, that we stand up for our veterans.
We have been able to get new veterans centers in a number of places around our States because we promised them we would be there for them, and we have an obligation to keep our word. I know that Johnny Isakson and Jon Tester work every day to make sure they can get it done.
The work that has been done by all of these people takes your breath away. They don't get paid much. They are in the most difficult places in the world. And when they come home, all they ask for is a decent job, decent healthcare, and a chance to see their family survive and do well.
As I said, I think of those young men and women every day. When you want to know what progress you have helped us make--when Kirsten and I first came in together in the House, we were losing almost one every month. Now, it is not perfect; the world isn't perfect. But most of our young men and women are home. We do the best we can to keep those countries safe, to keep our country safe, and together we can continue to improve on it.
One other thing I want to mention is--and Heidi talked about it today--this past year we have lost 70,000 young people to drug addiction--70,000. It has become more than car crashes. It has become more than anything else you can think of--70,000 people to opioids, meth, fentanyl; it is the whole batch. We can try nonstop to help them, to provide hope and purpose and dignity where they may not be feeling it--one kind word, one bit of assistance, one bit of encouragement.
I went to an event in Indianapolis, and it was an event for families who had lost someone and families who have someone in rehab. A young man came up to me from one of the wealthiest families you could think of--doing really well, the whole family. I saw him there, and I said: Mike, who are you here for?
He said: Me.
He had gotten hurt, had received an opioid in treatment. He was in a spiral that was nonstop.
His mom was there with him. She said: I don't think I have slept a night since.
So we can do this together. One of the things we just did, we just passed a law that would allow the FDA to give early approval to nonaddictive painkillers so that when somebody is hurt, they don't wind up getting addicted.
I am telling you that this is a five-alarm fire. In my State, well over 1,000 died last year from this in all parts of the State, all towns, all areas, Bridgeport--it doesn't matter, your religion, your race, anything. This is the great danger that parents need to be worried about, that we can stop. We can provide hope and purpose and dignity; that is what we have to do. These are moms and dads and brothers and sisters and sons and daughters, and when you lose one, your family is never, ever the same again.
I have seen the faces, I have met the families, and I spend time with them. The Senate can be a place in which we work together as a team-- Pat has seen it in Kansas; Johnny has seen it in Georgia. When we work together as a team, when we leave name calling out, there is no division, and there is no agenda, other than making it so that every kid can come home safe every night.
Before I finish, I would also like to thank so many wonderful people. I have met so many friends and had so many opportunities. I have traveled to places I could never imagine. You know, we used to have a saying in Indiana: The only places you could go to in a CODEL are places where you could get killed. I was able to go to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to South Korea. I say the first part as a joke. The second part is, it is because our young men and women were there, and they were there keeping us safe. All they ever wanted was a chance to represent this Nation that they love so much--those wonderful people.
I want to thank the folks who work here in the Senate, who have done so much for all of us--the ones who, when you talk too loud, will lean over and tell you ``The whole country is hearing what you are saying right now,'' and then quickly move away to the back--for their hard work and dedication. I want to say thank you to the committee staffs who help shape policy and ensure we can have robust debate and oversight on the big issues of our time; to the Capitol Police, our friends, who have been so amazing to all of us, who protect us and keep us safe; to the cooks and the cleaning teams and the building maintenance folks. I think my office was painted every month for the last 6 years. To the whole gang, you make this place work. You make this Nation work.
I also thank my staff, who are here on the floor with me--no, Heidi, you were wrong; this is the best staff in the Senate--who have done amazing work and who have every day made me look better and smarter than I am. I am incredibly grateful to them. They have resolved thousands of cases. In 2016, we received about 350,000 faxes, emails, letters, and combinations. We had an election. In 2017, we received 1.5 million--five times more--with the same amount of people, who sent out every letter, who followed up on every call, who repeatedly were there for the people of our State so that they knew their government cared about them and loved them and wanted their lives to be better. I couldn't do this job without them.
I also want to thank my family, who are in the Gallery--my children: Molly, her husband Mike, my son Joe, and my wife Jill--who have been through all of this.
I remember we had a family dinner, one of those summits you have around the table. This was back when I decided to run for Congress.
I told my family: What do you think? I have been asked to run for Congress.
My son said: That is the worst idea I have ever heard.
He was close. But they have been on this journey with me for 12 years, and it has been an amazing journey.
I want to thank everyone from my State. What an amazing privilege to represent them.
I remain optimistic about the future of our country. We have to take these issues seriously. Our country is filled with hard-working, decent people who just want us to do commonsense things. I have been privileged to travel all 92 counties all over my State, all corners of the State, and I think Indiana's best days are ahead and our country's best days are ahead.
May God bless all of my colleagues here in the Senate with the wisdom and courage you will need, because we don't just lead the Nation; we lead the world.
May God bless and protect this institution, Indiana, and our country that we all cherish and love so much.
This has been the privilege of a lifetime for a person whose family came off the boat at Ellis Island. My grandmother's passage documents said she had $10, and her occupation was ``maid.'' But she believed in America. She believed in this amazing country. We have been privileged to help lead it, and it has been one of the greatest privileges of my lifetime.
I yield the floor.
Good deal. Thank you.
