Floor Statements

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Utah (Mr. Bennett).

Reserving the right to object, and I will simply make a couple of comments at this point because, as my colleague has said, it is her intention to make further unanimous-consent requests, and much of what I say will be linked to them as well. So with her indulgence, let me just make a couple of points.

I don't know whether there are, in fact, holds on all of the individuals for whom there will be a unanimous-consent request made or whether in some cases there was just a failure to clear on what we call around here a hotline; that is to say, a request made by the clerks on both the Republican and Democratic side.

I don't know who has holds on these individuals. If there are, I haven't looked it up. There are some, clearly, who are not objectionable who are on the Executive Calendar. I think, for example, of U.S. Marshals and, as far as I know, there will be no objection on our side. Those are simply to be worked out, in terms of when the votes will occur, between the two leaders. There is a process for that to occur. We just voted for a judge, and that process was done.

I understand there is an agreement for a Department of Justice Assistant Counsel who will be voted on tomorrow and two judges--I think both circuit court judges--which has been worked out by the leaders.

I only say, if my colleague from Missouri intends to ask unanimous- consent requests that each of the individuals she names be approved by unanimous consent, I will have to object to that because I think it is more appropriate for our leaders to determine a time for debate, if there needs to be debate, and a vote, if there needs to be a vote. Short of that, I will have to object to the unanimous-consent request. Therefore, with respect to the specific request just made, respectfully, I object.

If the Senator will yield, I appreciate my colleague's comments, which I consider well taken. It is my practice if I have a hold on someone, it is for a very specific purpose that I consider to be legitimate, and I will notify whoever may be involved in it. When I talked about clearing the so-called hotline, I meant this: Sometimes either a piece of legislation or a nominee will be hotlined--usually in the evening after all business has expired and most of us have gone home--and I have on occasion, because my staff will then be informed of that, and sometimes they will respond to that hotline by saying Senator Kyl does not approve of that bill or nominee because I know nothing about it. The next morning we will take a look at it, and 9 times out of 10 say: OK, no problem. Let it go.

Technically, I think that could be deemed a hold under the legislation to which we referred. I don't think any of us are getting to that objection. About 1 time out of 10, there is usually something you say: I don't like X in the bill. And frequently that gets cleared up. I think sometimes the practice of hotlining can be a good practice, but it means everybody needs to look at what is being hotlined and have an opportunity to register an objection or get it worked out or maybe the objection would stand.

To the point of my colleague about the so-called secret holds, I totally agree. The fact is, there are different reasons some people might be on the calendar my colleague is reading, but I don't know those reasons. I need to object on behalf of the minority tonight, and I will do that.

To the extent they are secret and being used for some of the purposes my colleague described, I agree those are improper, and that happens around here.

Madam President, I object.

I object.

I object.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, I might inquire of my colleague. I gather there will be several individual unanimous-consent requests made for the purpose of getting on the record the objection as to each name on the calendar. I believe we can accomplish that purpose by an en bloc request. If my colleague were to make such a request, it would be deemed that the request was made for each of the individual names, and perhaps my colleague would read the numbers on the calendar. I can then interpose an objection. If my colleague's purpose is beginning the clock, as it were, or requiring the person with the hold on the individual having to come forward, that could be achieved. I would be happy to spare the time of my colleague and the Senate from going through each individual name. I can object en bloc and that process can then commence, if that is acceptable.

I appreciate that concern, and I would think by a unanimous- consent agreement, which specifically stated the reason for it, as both of us have said, that it would be our intention that the process would be invoked by an en bloc request, if the Chair would rule on the matter, perhaps that would be sufficient to move forward on it, and we could know at that point that the process had been invoked for everybody.

Might I inquire whether the Chair would consider the process to be invoked for all of the names considered in the Senator's request?

I would be happy to have the Senator proceed whatever way she would prefer and for me to object appropriately for that purpose.

Madam President, for the reasons indicated, I object.

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Utah (Mr. Bennett), the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Chambliss), the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), and the Senator from Texas (Mrs. Hutchison).

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

Mr. President, there is a view that sometime next week--upon the disposition of the bill that is currently before us and perhaps some other matters--we might take up the issue of so-called financial regulatory reform. I wish to speak for a moment to one of the key issues I know is of concern to some of my colleagues, and certainly to me.

The American people have a pretty firm view on this whole thing after what they have seen with regard to TARP and the other bailouts. They are obviously not crazy about what has happened.

I think most Americans think there should be two basic goals: First, to prevent the kind of crisis that occurred from ever happening again; and, secondly, to make sure that taxpayers are not on the hook, especially if we are talking about the possibility of continued bailouts where Federal money would be involved in unwinding big Wall Street firms that get into trouble.

Unfortunately, this bill that came out of the Banking Committee, and could be brought to the floor next week--unless it is changed significantly--not only does not achieve the first goal, but it also carries forward that policy of ``too big to fail'' and taxpayer bailouts. That is why in its current form you have a lot of people on my side of the aisle saying it has to be changed. Let's get together, talk in a bipartisan way, and make sure we can both achieve the goal and, secondly, not carry forward current bad policies.

This bill, at least in my view--and I will explain why--would set the conditions for firms to become overleveraged; that is to say, taking on too much debt relative to their value, and it would entrench in law forever this concept of taxpayer obligation to bail out these firms.

Well, how would it do this? Primarily, it creates a $50 billion so- called orderly liquidation fund established through assessments on the largest banks. So at least the first part of the fund would be paid by banks themselves. But even that, obviously, would not be big enough to cover the bailout, for example, of one of our larger banks, let alone some of the other kinds of institutions. But by creating this fund, we are, in effect, designating those entities as ``too big to fail,'' meaning the government will have to then pick up obligations beyond what is covered by the $50 billion.

So after the exhaustion of that fund, and some other steps, taxpayers have provided not just an implicit but an explicit guarantee. I have read the language in the bill, and it provides the FDIC shall be liable, in effect, for amounts that are necessary beyond that. The specific language is the FDIC ``will guarantee the obligations of banks'' in times of severe economic distress. That is the status quo. That is what people object to. Why should we be on the hook for those big banks when they fail?

There are some additional problems. This kind of guarantee increases the likelihood that those firms will take risky behavior and then become overleveraged, just as what happened with the real estate entities, so-called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Because there was an implicit guarantee the government would bail them out if they got into trouble, they took risks that were beyond what they should have taken, and the end result was, because they failed, we were on the hook, and for a lot more than would have been the case had they not taken those risks.

In addition to that, because there is an implicit guarantee, they are actually shielded from market forces and are given a competitive advantage over their competition. Private investors, as we saw in the cases of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are more likely to lend to these firms and to charge them a lower interest rate because they are pretty well guaranteed that if anything bad happens, they will get their money back. Meanwhile, other banks, such as Arizona community banks, don't have that kind of implicit guarantee. In fact, a lot of those banks are on the brink, frankly, of collapsing today. They are charged more money in order to borrow money than these very large, too-big-to-fail institutions. So this creates an anticompetitive barrier that will, in effect, make cartels out of the large institutions that would receive this guarantee.

The consequences would be severe. Peter Wallison is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and is very knowledgeable about these matters. He wrote this last year:

Financial institutions that are not large enough to be

designated significant will gradually lose out in the

marketplace to the larger companies that are perceived to

have government backing just as Fannie and Freddie were able

to drive banks and others from the secondary market for prime

middle-class mortgages. A small group of government-backed

financial institutions will thus come to dominate all sectors

of finance in the U.S.

Well, that is the formal way of saying what I said before, and that is one of the reasons we don't want to have this kind of implicit guarantee or, in the case of the legislation, explicit guarantee by the taxpayers. You will see the same kinds of distortions as were created by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the housing market prior to the collapse of the financial sector last year.

Back in 2003, I was chairman of the Senate Republican policy committee, and we began researching and writing about this. We wrote two specific papers sounding the alarm about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I was concerned back then that this explicit guarantee or backing of these institutions permitted them to operate without adequate capital and to assume more risk than their competitors and borrow at below market rates of interest, and that is exactly what happened. Smaller companies got crushed. Fannie and Freddie engaged in increasingly risky lending with the backing of the Federal Government. On a massive scale, they made mortgages available to people who could not afford them, like buying those risky mortgages, and that easy credit fueled very rapidly rising home prices. As prices rose, obviously, the demand for even larger mortgages rose, and Fannie and Freddie looked for ways to make even more mortgage credit available, notwithstanding a questionable ability to repay. It was a giant accident waiting to happen.

By 2008, these two GSEs--government-sponsored enterprises--held nearly $5 trillion in mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. They were overleveraged. They were too big to fail. The resulting collapse devastated our economy, and it left taxpayers with a tab of hundreds of billions of dollars. In fact, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have now transferred to you and me $6.3 trillion of their liabilities--just those two entities--and we are on the hook for it.

That is what we have to prevent from happening, but that is exactly what this legislation that passed out of the Banking Committee would permit. Why would we continue this kind of too-big-to-fail taxpayer liability in what we call a reform bill? We ought to stop that, make sure it never happens again.

I also wish to make this point, since there is a new regulator contemplated in this legislation. What happened to Fannie and Freddie happened despite the fact that they had their own dedicated regulator, and that is exactly what is proposed for institutions in this bill. In fact, the bill would use the very same regulators who failed to stop the financial crisis from happening.

I thought this was supposed to be reform. This isn't reform. I am reminded of a line from literature--I don't think it is from ``A Tale of Two Cities,'' but it could be--where the actor says, ``Reform, sir? Don't talk of reform. Things are bad enough already.'' That is kind of the way I look at this. We have problems, and the kind of reform that is being suggested here is not an improvement; it is a continuation of the same obligation of taxpayers to bail out those who are deemed too big to fail.

I wish to add that the bill even extends the scope of these potential future bailouts beyond banks. It would explicitly give the Federal Reserve authority to regulate any large company in America that it wanted to. Thus, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, FSOC, would have the power to designate nonbank financial institutions as a threat to financial stability--the code word for ``too big to fail.'' So a new government board based in Washington would decide which institutions get special treatment, giving unaccountable bureaucrats tremendous authority to pick winners and losers, and these favorite firms, too, would have a funding advantage over their competitors.

In addition to extending this to bigger companies, the legislation extends this same definition all the way through our financing sectors to smaller companies. For example, one of the auto dealers in your town that finances the automobiles you buy, if you have more than four payments, they are covered under here. It even would cover a dentist's office or an optometrist. If it takes more than four payments to take care of what he had to do, he would be covered by this. So this would extend to small and large and in all cases puts a government bureaucrat in charge of trying to find out why a firm is in trouble and ultimately requires, if they are needed, taxpayers to come to the rescue of these firms. As I said, we have to avoid making the mistakes of the past. A firm's cost of capital should be based on its ability to repay its commitments, not on the probability of future government assistance.

So given recent experience, I would suggest that we need a more competitive financial industry with many firms, not just a few large firms with implicit government guarantees dominating the market.

I started my comments by speaking about what the American people don't like and what they would like to see. I think they deserve a better approach than this legislation that passed out of the Banking Committee, one that promotes accountability and responsible oversight. This bill, as I said, is a risk the taxpayers don't need and, frankly, cannot afford.

So I urge my Democratic colleagues to reengage with Republicans to produce a bipartisan bill that can pass the Senate by a wide margin. Let's not have any more health care bills where it is done strictly on a partisan, party-line basis, with a consensus lacking, with the American people not liking what is being done. We can provide for the orderly bankruptcy of these failed institutions without keeping taxpayers on the hook for losses.

By the way, a lot of this reform has to deal with preventing the bankruptcy in the first place--in other words, regulating some of these new esoteric financial instruments so that there is greater transparency in the complicated trading of these financial instruments.

I think we can work this out and keep politics out of it. Everybody understands there are things which need to be done to prevent the kind of collapse we had in the past. It is my understanding that the hard- working members of the Banking Committee on both sides of the aisle had been working hard together and had been producing compromises. They were characterized to me as, it is not everything I would want, but then in a compromise you don't get everything you want. That is the spirit in which we can work together to produce a product that I think would be acceptable to our constituents, who don't want to be on the hook for any more of these bailouts, as well as provide the kind of transparency up front and procedures for unwinding businesses on the back end when they finally are unable to continue in business, a process which would not require the taxpayers to bear ultimate responsibility for their losses. If we are able to work together to do this, it will be a win-win situation for the American people, and just maybe we will demonstrate that Republicans and Democrats can actually sit down together, work something out, and pass a bill that is good for everybody.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Utah (Mr. Bennett).

Madam President, may I be advised when I have spoken for 7 minutes.

Madam President, I rise to talk about the judicial confirmation process, given the fact that President Obama will soon be nominating someone for the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice Stevens. There has been a lot written about this subject. It would be useful, at least from my standpoint, to clarify or elucidate how I view this and how I think a lot of my colleagues do on both sides of the aisle.

The question of a filibuster arises. The best way to put into context what folks mean when they talk about judicial activism as potentially bringing about a filibuster is to at least describe what I think about that. All of us in the Senate, whether we have supported a filibuster or not, would agree that all else being equal, it is not something we should do for judicial nominations, especially for a Supreme Court nomination. There has not been a successful filibuster of a Supreme Court nomination, thankfully, despite the fact that the last two nominees--especially the last nominee to the Court by President Bush, there was an attempt to filibuster, and even then-Senator Obama, now President Obama, participated in that attempt.

What would cause Senators to not just vote against a nominee but actually go so far as to try to prevent the nominee from receiving a vote up or down?

There is this concept of extraordinary circumstance that evolved about 4 years ago when the so-called Gang of 14, seven Republicans and seven Democrats, agreed that it would not be appropriate to filibuster a judicial nominee except in extraordinary circumstances. That is where that phrase ``extraordinary circumstance'' came about.

There are a lot of Members of the Senate who believe one of those extraordinary circumstances could be a situation where a nominee is particularly activist in the sense that it would appear that he or she goes on to the bench with preconceived notions about specific kinds of societal issues or questions that may come before the Court and a bias toward resolving those matters one way or the other, as opposed to simply taking the facts of each case and reading the law to see what the precedents of the Court are, what the statute is, if there is a law involved, and deciding the case on the merits of that specific case irrespective of the judge's views about the question from a political or philosophical standpoint.

There are a couple of recent examples I wanted to bring to the attention of my colleagues which illustrate the kind of activism to which I and some of my colleagues would object.

The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the Senator from Vermont, was quoted in Politico today as making a statement which I think illustrates the issue well. Senator Leahy is quoted as saying this, that he thinks one of the questions to the potential nominees is going to be this: ``Do you share our concern about the fact that the court

always seems to side with the big corporate interests against the average American?''

Aside from the fact that I think that is not a fact, that the Court always sides with big corporate interests against the average American--that is, obviously, a very politically charged statement--the question is, Is it really appropriate to ask a potential judicial nominee whether that nominee is going to side with big corporate interests or whether the nominee would want to side with some other kind of interest in the litigation? Well, I think it is appropriate to ask whether the nominee has biases one way or the other that would preclude him or her from deciding a specific case on the merits of that case as opposed to whether, from a general philosophical standpoint, that nominee would be on the side of big corporate interests or always against the big corporate interests.

When Chief Justice Roberts was before our committee, he was asked a question like this, a question about whether he thinks it would be appropriate to rule for the big guy or the little guy, and I think he said it correctly. He said: If the law supports the big guy, then the big guy should win the case. If the law supports the little guy, then the little guy should win the case. You do not go on the bench with an idea that: I am always going to rule against the big guy or--commenting on Senator Leahy's statement here--I am going to rule against big corporate interests. That presents a dilemma, by the way, where you have corporation A suing corporation B. I do not know how you are going to resolve that if you are always going to rule against big corporate interests.

But the point is, to go on the bench with that attitude would be wrong. The big corporation might have the right law and facts in a particular case. In another case, the person suing or being sued by the big corporate interest might have the law and the facts on their side. That should be the determination of how the case comes out, not your preconceived notions--for example, your intention to always rule against ``big corporate interests.''

Here is another example: One of my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee on a television program said he wanted to see a nominee who would be hard on Executive power. We have three branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. The Constitution sets up a delicate balance among those three branches of government, and there is a constant tension between the powers exerted by the branches and against the branches. Those tensions result in litigation sometimes.

Sometimes there is a claim that the Executive is taking too much power unto himself. That charge was made against virtually every President who, in my memory, has ever served. It certainly is being made against the President today. But you do not go on the bench with the notion that: If a case ever comes before me involving a contest of whether the Executive has the power to do something versus the legislature, for example, I am going to rule against the Executive, I am going to be hard on Executive power. That would be wrong. You do not even know what the facts of the case are and what the precedents might be relating to those particular facts.

Thank you, Madam President. I appreciate it.

I will conclude with this particular example: You want a judge who is going to be on the Court to say: I understand the balance of power. I have read the law, and I understand the precedents that relate to this particular kind of fact pattern. And based on the law and based on these facts in this particular case, I believe that either the Executive should have the power or not. But I do not come to that conclusion based upon a preconceived political, ideological notion that we need to rein in Executive power any more than I believe we should rein in legislative power or judicial power.

This is what a lot of us mean when we talk about judicial activism. It is the difference between someone who comes to the Court with firmly held philosophical beliefs that would cause that individual to be more predisposed to rule on the basis of those beliefs than on the facts of the case or the law in any particular situation. So when my colleagues on the Democratic side say they are looking for a nominee who will have a penchant for ruling in a particular way in particular cases, you will see objections from people like me who will say: No, that is wrong. That is activism. That is basing decisions on ideology rather than on what the law is.

I will conclude by saying this: The President has it fully within his power to nominate a candidate for Supreme Court Justice who generally has been seen as deciding cases based on their merits rather than from an ideological perspective. But to the extent the President chooses someone who has been very active politically and has expressed strong political views or who from the bench has seemingly made decisions based upon a preconceived ideological notion rather than on the basis of the facts and law to come before him or her, in that situation, then, you would tempt opposition and potentially even a filibuster depending upon how serious the situation was or how extraordinary it was, to cite the particular phrase.

So I hope that sort of sets the groundwork here for our evaluation of the President's nominee and for a public understanding of the circumstances under which some of us would oppose a nominee and under which perhaps even, in an extraordinary situation, a filibuster would result. I certainly hope that is not the case, that that does not happen.

I am sure the President realizes that if he nominates someone who does come clearly to the attention of the Senate from a perspective of evenhanded justice, that nominee will be treated fairly, that the process could move much more quickly, and that the outcome can be much more favorable.

Mr. President, last week I traveled around my State of Arizona to large towns and small, and I heard from many of my constituents. Arizonians have very serious concerns about what is happening here in Washington. They are worried about the direction in which our country has moved and about the kind of Nation their kids and their grandkids will inherit. They are unhappy about the tremendous levels of spending and debt and about how new taxes and regulations threaten jobs and our economy. It is not an overstatement to say that people are outraged about what they perceive as irresponsible behavior in Washington. Many are frustrated because they feel as if they have lost control of their government. Today, I wish to focus on three specific concerns I heard, and they all relate to how taxes and regulations are impacting jobs in my home State.

First is the health spending bill. If anyone thinks the American people will have forgotten about this in a few months, I can assure you they will not have. They are overwhelmingly opposed to this law, and they are frustrated that it was passed despite widespread opposition. They are upset about the high cost, the new taxes, the massive regulations, and the manner in which it was passed.

Arizona's employers and the unemployed workers are both affected by the new taxes and mandates in the bill that will prevent hiring. How? Well, many small business owners in Arizona are wondering how they are supposed to hire new employees when they are about to be slapped with a new payroll tax. Of course, a payroll tax is a direct tax on hiring.

Arizona employers with more than 50 workers face a second problem: they will face steep fines if they do not comply with the new mandate that they provide health insurance to all of their employees. It is another disincentive to create a job or even to retain current employees.

The refrain I heard from employers and other Arizonians over and over again is: You have to repeal this bill. And I agree.

The second concern I heard a lot about was unemployment insurance and its impact on jobs. I will discuss in just a moment the concern the employers have about their share of the expense of unemployment insurance. But first of all, let me address comments just made by my colleague from Illinois, who suggested that Republicans wanted to leave people who are unemployed out in the lurch, that we did not support extending unemployment benefits. That, of course, is not true. I voted for every extension of benefits, as have the majority of my colleagues. The question is, Who should pay for the extension? My colleague suggests that it is not a question of who but whether it should be paid for. It is said over and over again: The question is whether it should be paid for. Well, it is not a matter of whether. It will have to be paid for. That is to say, we are borrowing the money. We have to pay that money back. It is a question of whether we pay for it or we simply say: Put it on the tab for our kids and our grandkids to pay for it.

So the question is, to extend unemployment benefits again to folks alongside us, who have the misfortune of having lost their job, until they can get another job, who is going to pay to extend their unemployment benefits? It seems to me that is an obligation of this generation.

My kids and grandkids are going to have plenty to worry about in their generations. They will probably face the prospect of some unemployment, too, and they are probably going to have to extend unemployment benefits, and somebody will have to pay for that. The question is, Who? Are we going to make them pay not only for what happens on their watch but also what happened on our watch that we were not able to pay for?

That is the question: Are we able to? To extend these benefits for the period of time we were taking about just before the recess was $9.5 billion. And I don't think one could contend that somewhere in the Federal budget we can't find $9.5 billion over the course of the year which could be used to pay for these benefits. If they are a top priority, then that is what should be used to pay for the benefits. It is a 30-day period of time.

Interestingly, during the debate before the Easter recess, we actually had an agreement for about 45 minutes in this Chamber where Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that to ensure there would not be a hiatus where benefits would not be extended--and by the way, the physicians would be reimbursed for the care they provide to Medicare patients--we agreed on a set of revenue measures that would pay for a week of these benefits so that there would be no period of time that there would be a hiatus, that they would not be paid for. But someone from the other side had to call the Speaker of the House to make sure that was OK with the House of Representatives.

I am told it was the Speaker who said: No, we will not pay for the extension of benefits. We will not do that.

It is not a question of whether we are for extending unemployment benefits. It is not a question of whether they have to be paid for. It is a question of who pays for them. For my money, if we can't find $9.5 billion somewhere in this government and say it is a higher priority to extend unemployment benefits and pay for it than whatever that money is used for, then we are not doing our jobs.

My colleague from Illinois suggested that Republicans were responsible for taking us to war and not paying for it. That needs to be responded to. This body voted to go to war. This body supports the troops who are fighting. I assume this body wants to pay them and to buy them the appropriate equipment and that is a top priority of our government. Under the Constitution, the first obligation of government is to protect its citizens. That is the No. 1 priority. We have to spend that money. There are other priorities, but there comes a point when we have to begin setting priorities and say to go to war, we have to do that. That has to be paid for. To do this and this and this, that has to be paid for. But at a certain point in time, we are entitled to ask: Now that we have run out of money, do we want to keep spending or do we find a way for this generation to pay for that spending? That is what we are talking about with the extension of unemployment benefits.

Of course, they need to be extended. We will support that. The question will be, will my colleagues on the other side of the aisle support finding the funds to offset the cost.

This is not without cost. The Coalition of Arizona Business Organizations reinforced the point in a recent letter to my office. They pointed out: The Arizona Department of Economic Security estimates that my State will have to borrow $300 to $400 million from the U.S. Department of Labor between 2010 and 2013 to keep the unemployment fund solvent so they can continue to make payments to beneficiaries.

To make matters more difficult, Arizona employers have already been hit with an average increase of 50 percent in unemployment insurance taxes. This increase has occurred at the very time that businesses are trying to recover. Of course, it can delay economic recovery, and more hiring for businesses the more they have to pay. The message I got from small businesses was, if you want them to start hiring, Congress needs to waive the Federal Unemployment Tax Act penalties, also known as

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Utah (Mr. Bennett), the Senator from New Hampshire (Mr. Gregg), and the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Bond).

It is easier just to say the ``other'' Senator from Arizona, given who my colleague is. First of all, I want to say that my colleague, John McCain, has been a leader in this battle for fiscal responsibility for as long as I have been in the Senate. So as long as we are talking about the senior Senator from Arizona, let me get in that plug.

But the Senator from Oklahoma, who just yielded the time to me, has been the leader in the fight here to ensure that we pay for the things on which we spend money. I would like to get back to that critical point because I heard both the Senator from Oklahoma and the Senator from Alabama, who is on the Senate floor, and was last night, make this very point.

Let's be clear about what this debate is about and what it is not about. There are a lot of things the government must do. National defense is No. 1. We have to do it. Then we figure out what we have enough money for with regard to everything else.

There are other very important obligations or responsibilities of the Federal Government. We finally get down the list of priorities of the things that it would sure be nice to do, if we could, because of various needs of the American people. But a lot of times this gets into conflict with what families can do to help each other, what communities can do, what churches and religious institutions can do. So it is not just a responsibility of government, let alone the United States Government in Washington.

The reason I make that point is that for every dollar that is sent back to Washington, the amount of money that gets sent back to help people is usually measured in cents rather than dollars. So it is not the best way for us to take care of our fellow citizens. But one of the programs we have decided we want to have some Federal assistance in is to support our States when they provide unemployment compensation to people who have been out of work for a long time and just can't find work.

If we have relatively low unemployment, in the 5- or 6-percent range--5 percent is relatively low; 6 percent is beginning to be something where we begin to pay attention to it--we can let that go for a little while. But before long, we have citizens out there who can't find work and, therefore, are having a hard time supplying what they need for their families. Again, for a while, their families and communities and churches and so on can help them, but there comes a point when government has said: We need to help them, and it is best done at the State level. But in the last many decades the Federal Government has provided support for that unemployment compensation as well.

What we are talking about is a situation where we are now close to 10 percent unemployment, and it has been that way now for a couple of years. So we keep extending the Federal Government's support for people who can't find jobs. That is a legitimate thing for the Federal Government to do. It is not the most important thing, but I will tell you, for everybody who needs the help, it is important.

So we have tried to do that, and I have voted for every one of these temporary extensions of unemployment benefits. But there also comes a point in time, because this has gone on now for a couple of years and we keep voting time after time for these extensions, that you have to ask the question: OK, compared to what? Who is paying for this or who is going to have to pay for it?

As between someone who is looking for a job and needs some help for their family right now, and my grandchild--and I don't know the circumstances of my grandchild. My grandchild may be smart and get a good job and never have to worry about things in life or, as happens to every family, my grandchild might have a tough time--so I am asking myself--and I heard Senator Coburn on the floor last night make this point--as between what we are spending money on today and my grandchild and your grandchild, should we maybe be thinking about the burden we are placing on them to pay for this money we are spending today? It is easy for us to say we feel sorry for people who cannot find a job right now, let's help them out. It is harder when you say, who is paying the bill? If it is my grandkids, and I am not sure what their circumstances will be, I have to think that through.

What Senator Coburn has led is an effort to say, since we cannot say what kind of a burden they will have, although we know it is huge based upon what we have already spent and deferred for them to pay for, we ought to be making the tougher decision right now: If this is a worthwhile goal, if we want to extend this unemployment compensation, then let's find a way to pay for it now rather than putting more of that burden on our children and on our grandchildren. That is what is at issue, not whether we want to do it, not whether it is a good idea to do

it, not whether there are people suffering. All of that is conceded. The question is, Should we put that burden on our children and grandchildren continuously, without even bothering to ask whether we can pay for it now? Maybe there is something else we could give up now or delay in order to pay for this so we are not adding to the burden of our kids and our grandkids.

Last night, we came to a very important conclusion in the Senate, informally, and that conclusion was, since there is a 1-week period of time between the time April 5 that these benefits run out and the time April 12 that we come back into session from the Easter recess, that these, the unemployment benefits, are not paid for here, that we do not have the money to extend the benefits, that what we should do is extend those benefits for that week period of time and pay for it. That is to say, Democratic Senators and Republican Senators agreed, let's extend it for that week and let's make sure we are paying for it right now. So at least that week's benefits are not going to be an added burden on our kids and grandkids--a very important agreement and precedent that we established, for about 45 minutes.

When our colleagues on the Democratic side who had agreed with us that this should be done ran that up the flag pole with our Democratic leadership colleagues in the House of Representatives, apparently the Democratic leadership said: No, we do not want this paid for. In other words, we want that put off in the future so somebody else will pay for it, our kids and grandkids. So our Democratic friends in the Senate came back to us and said we thought we had an agreement to extend this for a week and to pay for it, but our leadership in the House would not agree and, therefore, we have to go back to what we did before, which is we are not going to have those benefits available for the week between April 5 and April 12.

That is too bad because I think what it showed is, first of all, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate can work in a bipartisan way. We established a good principle. We can both lead with our heart and help people who need help today but also act with our heads and make sure we pay for it rather than just sending the bill to our kids. That was a good precedent, that was a good agreement.

But when people out in America say: Why can't they ever work together, why can't they put politics aside, you have to ask the leadership in the House of Representatives because I think we had a pretty good agreement last night.

But what I think we also have established is, over time, more and more of our colleagues are coming to realize it is not a choice between doing something we want to do to help people who need help right now and doing nothing, it is a choice between our paying for it or asking our kids to pay for it. I think most of us are beginning to come to the realization that from now on, as much as we have gone into debt accumulating this huge amount of debt in the past, thinking it would be OK for our kids and grandkids to pay for it, we now realize we have put entirely too much debt on their shoulders. Their standard of living is not going to be as good as ours.

Do you know--I will close with this--public opinion surveys going all the way back to just after World War II asked Americans: Do you think the next generation will be better off than our generation? Do you think we will leave it better for our kids than it was left for us?

Every generation has been able to say: Yes, our kids will have a better standard of living and better future than we did--except now. If you look at the surveys, they all say we believe we have it better than our kids will; that we have put too much of the burden of what we have spent onto our kids and grandkids. For the first time in history, Americans believe their kids, our kids, will not be as well off as we were. Why? Because we wanted to spend, we wanted to help people by spending a lot of money in Washington, but we were not willing to make the tough decisions to figure out how to pay for it.

That is a real shocking testament because we have always said we are the land of opportunity, and the American dream is every generation that succeeds will be better off than the generation before. To think about the fact that Americans do not believe that is true anymore is bothersome. But we have an ability to do something about it, and it started last night right here in the Senate. It started with Senator Coburn saying: No, we need to pay for this, and everybody else finally saying you are right and coming together in a bipartisan way, Democrats and Republicans saying we can at least start with 1 week where we do something we all want to do, help people who are unemployed, and pay for it ourselves rather than sending the bill to our kids.

That is a start and we ought to build on that. Even though that fell apart, I think it represents the beginning. If we can continue to seek the advice of our constituents, ask the American people: What do you think about this, do you think we are right about this, I think they will tell us that is exactly what they want us to do, and I think they will thank us this week for beginning to take the small steps to get to that point. Rather than casting aspersions or making political arguments or getting into partisan politics, I am going to assume we have kind of turned a corner and all of us can agree this is what we aspire to do. We may stumble along the way a little bit. But if we can now take two steps forward and only one step back rather than one step forward and two steps back, digging the debt hole deeper and deeper, then maybe in a few years we will be able to answer those public opinion questions and say: I think we have turned it around. I think our kids will have a better future than we did. That is the best legacy of all that we could leave for them.

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson) and the Senator from Utah (Mr. Bennett).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Kentucky (Mr. Bunning), the Senator from Texas (Mrs. Hutchison), the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson), and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Wicker).

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Alexander), the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski), the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson), the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Wicker), the Senator from Texas (Mrs. Hutchison), and the Senator from Idaho (Mr. Crapo).

Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Alexander) would have voted ``nay.''

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I would say, we are fortunate to have a real doctor, a physician, Dr. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, as one of our colleagues in the Senate to talk about the real impact of legislation like this as he sees it when he treats his patients. I think his words deserve a lot of attention.

I just want to briefly address this morning a couple of the claims my Democratic colleagues are making about this new legislation, claims that are simply false.

The first one: There is a big tax cut. One of my colleagues said this is the biggest tax cut we have ever had. There is no tax cut for taxpayers in this bill. What they are touting as a tax cut is, rather, a direct payment to insurance companies. I find it very odd that is called a tax cut. When I think of a tax cut, I think of money remaining in the pockets of taxpayers so they do not have to pay taxes they have been paying in the past. That is not what is in this bill.

What the bill does is to provide a subsidy to insurance companies to dispense government-mandated insurance. It is not a tax cut for taxpayers. Instead, most of the so-called tax relief goes directly to the insurance companies. It never touches--you never touch the money-- it never touches an American family's pocket.

These premium subsidies are delivered straight from the U.S. Treasury to help insurance companies, as I said, to purchase this government- mandated, government-approved insurance. They are not extra dollars in people's pockets, as the chairman of the Finance Committee argued. They are, rather, advanceable, refundable tax credits, which is code for a new tax entitlement. In fact, that is exactly the way it is recorded in the Federal budget. It is recorded as a spending program, the reason being that the people receiving these so-called refundable credits paid very little if any taxes. These are folks who do not pay taxes, so they get what is called a refundable tax credit. But even then the money goes directly to the insurance company, not to them. I always thought you had to pay taxes to get a tax cut, but not in the rubric of this legislation.

According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, only about 8 percent of all taxpayers making under $200,000 a year would actually benefit from this government subsidy for health insurance. The remaining 92 percent would receive no tax benefit under the bill.

I have to say, when we are talking about tax cuts, we have to at least put in a little word about the tax increases in the bill because that is where the bill focuses, on taxes. It taxes many of those who have health insurance and taxes people if they do not have health insurance.

The taxes in the bill hit families. They hit seniors and the chronically ill, small businesses, those who have flexible spending accounts, and those who use medical devices. All of those things create a tax people pay. The vast majority of the people who pay these taxes are not high earners. As the Congressional Budget Office has said, whenever there is a tax on some other entity that delivers health services, that tax flows directly through to the taxpayers in virtually the same amount of money.

In fact, in order to collect all of these taxes, and especially the tax that is imposed on people if they do not buy this insurance, the Internal Revenue Service estimates it is going to have to have between $5 billion and $10 billion more just in order to collect the taxes. It has been estimated this would require 16,500 new IRS agents. Welcome to your friendly new health care bill.

The second aspect my colleagues have been talking a lot about in the last 48 hours: The elimination of the problem of preexisting conditions in acquiring health insurance. The implication is that Republicans have not supported help for people who have preexisting conditions. That is not true. We have made that point clear. We made that point clear in the meeting we had with the President at Blair House. The argument is about the best way to do it.

As you will see in just a moment, it turns out this bill has not done it very well. Republicans have suggested there are a lot of different ways to get to this problem--State reforms, risk pools, more competition, some subsidization. All of these things can help us with this problem. But for all of the Democrats' central planning in this bill, it looks as though the problems are already arising as a result of their specific provision to deal with this problem.

According to a brand new Associated Press story of March 24, President Obama's claims about preexisting coverage for children are not what they seem. The article notes that ``the letter of the law''-- which Democrats took upon themselves to write behind closed doors-- ``provided a less-than-complete guarantee that kids with health problems would not be shut out of coverage.''

In your rush to do these things--behind closed doors, without proper vetting, always voting no on any attempts to correct it--you end up with problems like this, and they are going to have to somehow go back and try to fix this. If this blunder is discovered on the first day this law takes effect, how many more errors will be discovered in the next days and weeks, as people pour over the 2,733 pages of this new health care law, and the 150 pages of the reconciliation bill that is on the floor right now?

If you cannot draft a bill properly to protect children with preexisting conditions--which is a centerpiece of the bill's so-called immediate deliverables--then how are you going to be able to successfully make one-sixth of the economy work through this new government-operated system?

Finally, I have talked about two things our Democratic friends are crowing about, neither one of which, it turns out, I think are worth crowing about. How about the things they are not talking about, the things Americans are very concerned about?

Democrats love to talk about people who are allegedly helped by the legislation. How about those who are hurt by the bill? How about talking about seniors whose care is going to be jeopardized as a result of this bill? Seniors in my State of Arizona are very worried about the Medicare cuts. There are over $\1/2\ trillion in Medicare cuts in this bill.

Well, our Democratic friends do not like to talk about that. But it is a reality. It is in the bill. The reconciliation bill slashes more than $\1/2\ trillion from Medicare and contains a whopping $202 billion reduction in Medicare Advantage. That is more than in the bill the Senate passed last December. But you do not hear about that. Medicare Advantage beneficiaries in my State like the health care they have right now, and it is simply not true if they like their health care they get to keep it. It is false. This bill takes health care benefits away from seniors who are on Medicare Advantage. That is the truth. It may be an inconvenient truth for our colleagues who like to stress what they think is good about the bill but conveniently ignore things that are going to hurt their constituents and certainly going to hurt my constituents.

My senior citizens in Arizona do not want the government taking away their health care, and they are very concerned as a result. A constituent from Tucson--I will just close with this--wrote me a very short, a very direct letter, but it summarizes the point a lot of people feel.

I am a senior citizen, age 83. If I lose my Medicare

Advantage coverage, I'll also lose my primary care physician

of 18 years because he does not accept Medicare Direct.

Senator Kyl, do not let them take away my Medicare Advantage.

Well, all of us know physicians who are no longer taking new Medicare patients. They cannot afford to because we do not pay them enough. Mayo Clinic in Arizona has already said it is not going to accept any more Medicare patients at several of its facilities in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

This health care bill is asking a lot of the American people, a lot in terms of tax collection, and a lot in terms of future debt that our children and grandchildren are going to have to pay.

But just one group that ought to be very concerned--and is--are our senior citizens who face nearly $\1/2\ trillion in Medicare cuts. Taxes and premiums are going to be increased on all Americans. Small businesses will be hit with a litany of onerous new taxes and mandates and regulations. Probably worst of all from my perspective, just as these costs inevitably escalate, as time goes on, just as in the European countries that have had to deal with these same kind of health care issues, this legislation will ultimately lead to the rationing of health care. That is the cruelest result of all.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at this point an op-ed piece by Mr. Bob Robb who writes for the Arizona Republic. It is dated March 24. The last two sentences of this op-ed I think summarize the point I made very well. He says:

But it is impossible to treat health care as a public good

without rate regulation and rationing. And those are the

inevitable next steps down the health care road the Democrats

have taken the country.

Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson) and the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Bond).

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Missouri ( Mr. Bond) and the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Bond) and the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Bond) and the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Bond) and the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson).

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Bond), the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson), and the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Voinovich).

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Bond), the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson), and the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Voinovich).

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Bond), the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson), and the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Voinovich).

The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Bond), the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson), and the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Voinovich).