Farewell to the Senate (Executive Calendar)
Madam President, it has been the honor of my lifetime to represent Hoosiers here in the U.S. Senate. When I said I was going to do this back in 2017--I didn't have much of a political legacy--to leave my business that I had spent 37 years…
Madam President, it has been the honor of my lifetime to represent Hoosiers here in the U.S. Senate.
When I said I was going to do this back in 2017--I didn't have much of a political legacy--to leave my business that I had spent 37 years running and that I wanted to run for the U.S. Senate, everybody said: a fool's errand--it couldn't be done.
But there were a lot of Hoosiers wanting the system to be shaken up a little bit. When I interpreted, I think, what politics was doing back in 2015 and 2016, I crafted that unusual idea that it could be done even when you have made most of your life in the trenches in the real world.
I was told when I got here: Freshman Senators are not to be heard, may be seen. Sit back; learn the ropes.
Well, that wasn't going to work for me because I had already put myself into a corner because I said I wouldn't do it more than two terms. That is unusual. Everyone says it, they get amnesia, and then you know the rest of the story.
I have been so proud of what we have done here in these 6 years, what we have done for Hoosiers. And when I tell you about some of the things that can be done, I think you are going to be amazed.
I put together a staff that came here mostly from Indiana, and their goal was to get things done, to get it across the finish line. And, sure, I was proud to have been named the most effective first-term Republican Senator and the sixth most effective in our caucus, generally, in the last Congress, and probably close to that again in this one. But all of us here know that we get the credit for it and it is your staff that does all the heavy lifting.
This 2021 freshman Senate office got more bills across the finish line than any other--it is amazing--and 37 in the span of 6 years. Again, that is why the Center for Effective Lawmaking singled out our office as being most impactful in areas like healthcare, education, and agriculture--all the stuff I bumped into in so many ways in the real world before I got here.
I want to tell you about a few of those wins. Incoming Senators will hopefully get inspired by it.
Imagine, as a Republican, when one of your biggest pieces of legislation has the word ``climate'' in it. So I will get to how that happened in the first place, but, being a conservationist, one who knows that is an issue that we, as Republicans and conservatives, have to be involved with, we actually crafted a bill called the Growing Climate Solutions Act, which was a landmark bill for farmers that matched up their good stewardship with offset markets that were already there but government was making it too difficult for them to take access of it, especially small farmers. Imagine it passing in the U.S. Senate 92 to 8. That is darn near a miracle.
How did that happen in the first place? I was here maybe 6 or 7 months, and Senator Chris Coons from Delaware had been trying to find one Republican to engage in the discussion, which we know how big a discussion that has been. Of course, we are always going to disagree on policy, but he had probably asked so many others over the last 2 years that he was going after a rookie Senator.
He didn't realize that he ran into somebody that had to think on his feet a lot in the real world and made decisions fairly quickly based on what you really know. And I said: I will do it.
I think the rest of the conversation was: Will it be more than a committee of two of us?
Give me a month.
I got six other Republicans. And it is still an issue of contention in terms of what it is about, where it is going. Some are absolutely certain about it; some have put no credence to it. Obviously, it is somewhere in between.
That, to me, was the first moment, being here after just 6 months, that said: If you do certain things and think out of the box, you can get a lot done.
And that has probably put me in front of more discussions now that energy is the biggest issue at the State level. Demand for it was flat up until 2 years ago. And now, in Indiana, one of the best places to have a business, all the data centers want to come there. And we only produce 20 gigawatts of electricity. Each one of them needs one gigawatt. And what is going to be the right mix between baseload, intermittent, green, traditional? I intend to have Indiana at the leading front of that discussion.
Veterans--that is an issue in many different ways. Those who serve our country still have trouble getting basic benefits, especially as it relates here in the Federal Government, where most of them come from. They told us back home in Indiana that to get claims information through the mail or driving to a regional location was clumsy, even through the mail, and logistically impossible when you had to travel sometimes 2 hours to get a basic checkup. That was a real burden for disabled veterans.
We wrote the Wounded Warrior Access Act to streamline the claims process with an online tool. It was signed into law last year.
I came here most proud of fixing healthcare back in my own business in
2008--a small business for half of the time I was there, over 37 years, 20 employees or so. By 2008, we had grown to 300 employees. You can't imagine how sick and tired I was of hearing how lucky I was it is only going up 5 to 10 percent this year.
Well, after hearing that for about 9 years, I got involved in the HR meeting back in 2008. Here was the first question I asked of the insurance company, since we had hardly any claims: What profit margin did you make on our plan?
I was thinking 10, 15 percent. They were honest: 25 percent.
I turned to the agent: What was your commission?
Seven percent.
We were stroking a million-dollar check back then. Do the math. That wasn't going to work for me.
I said: What can we do to fix it?
They said: Well, you could maybe self-insure.
I said: You didn't tell us that last year.
And I did that and self-insured and made it a cost center. But then the critical question was--and we need to all start asking these kinds of questions: How do you really lower costs and make Hoosiers and Americans healthier?
They said: We have got a broken system. It is built upon expensive remediation.
It sounded a little abstract. So I said: Let's flesh that out a little bit.
Well, you have got your deductible. I had to raise that each year to moderate the increases, change underwriters every 3 years. That was a pain in the rear.
So they said: If you really push wellness and prevention, it will be the start of how you lower healthcare costs.
And then they said something that really surprised me: Healthcare consumers are nonexistent because they aren't involved in actually shopping around for healthcare. You depend on the insurance company in your company or the government to do it. That is the driver in most markets.
I ended up, after that meeting, throwing every wellness tool and the kitchen sink at it, turned my employees into healthcare consumers, cut costs by over 50 percent, and haven't had an increase in 16 years.
I always ask the question: Raise your hand if that has been the case.
No one does. Those are the kinds of things we are going to have to do here and back home in the States.
Here, being on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, I told the chair of that committee, Senator Sanders: If you want to lower healthcare costs, start incentivizing the industry to be competitive and transparent.
Well, that ended up creating what would be the most transformational bill, called the Health Care PRICE Transparency Act. And when you are getting someone like Senator Bernie Sanders and Mike Braun, the two loudest voices in the Senate, on healthcare reform, that is a modern miracle. And that bill is there as a template, already strongly bipartisan. Some of the features of it could be dropped into reforms that we do even this year.
During the pandemic, Josh Hawley and I passed through a bill that would declassify all intelligence about the Wuhan lab and also prompted the President to direct the intelligence community to investigate the lab leak. As a result of that investigation, the FBI confirmed that they found a lab leak to be the most likely theory of origin.
And when the current administration announced the vaccine mandate for businesses that would have vaccinated every employee in all businesses if you had 100 or more employees, after it was in the rearview mirror, we dusted off an old law called the Congressional Review Act that hadn't been used in years, and we used that and got bipartisan support on it. And then, lo and behold, when the Supreme Court struck down the vaccine mandate, they cited our challenge as the most significant action in Congress that had weighed in on the mandate. You can get results if you stick your neck out, take a little risk.
Before I go to the other side of being a Senator--what you do back home called ``constituent services''--I want to talk about a few of the lighter moments of being in the U.S. Senate.
I will never forget when I got here--and we have great lunches; kudos to the staff that prepares them. And it said lunchtime starts at 12:30; it is over at 2. Well, that seemed like a lot of time. I show up at 12:30. Even the staff wasn't fully--had the meal there ready to go. I said: What is going on? They said: Well, 12:30 is the official time. No one shows up until after 1. So there is Senate time and real time. You have to get adjusted to that.
The pace is maybe a little different when you come from the field of being a scrappy entrepreneur. The only other Senator that did the same thing was, of course, a guy named Rick Scott who ran a business, ran the State of Florida. We didn't make that mistake another time.
I was able to host a lunch. I am in the logistics business. You have to come up with something that is unique to your community. We are probably the most German Catholic community in the State of Indiana, so we wanted to have schnitzel and brats. Well, the plan was to drive them from Indiana to DC. I actually had a volunteer do that because, believe it or not, that was the only way that was practical and least expensive to host a lunch.
Here is one of the most unusual moments. We all get involved in media--probably far too much of it. But part of this job is having the pulpit to say what you believe, what you want to weigh in on.
I was actually doing an interview in the middle of COVID. I can't remember which network. But all of a sudden, a minute into about a 7- minute interview, the cameraman goes down, literally. I thought the camera or the light stand was coming at me. The interview continued. My wife was watching it at home and thought we had a mini earthquake here. So I remember one of the other cameramen said: I have never seen anything like that in the U.S. Senate.
The story wasn't over. About a minute before the interview was over, he starts to dust himself off. He had been out for 4 minutes. He grabs the camera stand or light, and I thought, This time, it is coming at me. I didn't know what I was going to do; although, he went down again, and we completed the interview. Of course, I was worried about what happened. An ambulance came. We were lucky in that case. It was dehydration.
Imagine being in a pickle like that. We got through it.
Other memories, after the first State of the Union Address, I was walking back. I live right east of the Supreme Court building. It was a starlit evening. The moon silhouetted the Capitol. I said to myself: How can you be so lucky?
Now, the other side of being a Senator is constituent services. Customer service was always my priority in my business. Believe me, you don't have to pay consultants for them to tell you what is wrong with your business. Just listen to your employees and to your customers-- free advice. It doesn't cost a penny. If you get it fixed, you actually corrected an issue you have with your company.
So I told them I wanted to run constituent services back home, just like customer service in my business. We put together a team just as good there--when you listen to these stats--as the one that enabled me to do so much here on the legislative side--they closed 13,775 constituent cases in 6 years, assisting Hoosiers with problems that were really impacting their lives. There are many ways you can get entangled with the Federal Government.
My team returned $21.6 million that were owed to Hoosiers back to them, mostly from the IRS. That money had an immediate impact. One woman in Columbus was at risk of losing her home, and we were able to recover $10,000 that, again, was owed to her by the IRS.
My team handled 2,381,813 emails, phone calls. Believe me, there are a lot of ways, if people just do it, to get a hold of who represents you here in DC. But then what do you do with it? We put a metric in that if those weren't handled within a certain number of days, it set off an alarm. Unbelievable constituent services--1,500 hours of mobile office hours. When they reached out, we found the solutions.
One Hoosier's family reached out because their mother's ashes were lost at
a post office facility, couldn't be located. We secured an inspector general audit of the post office to make sure that never happens again.
A family of an Indiana soldier killed in Vietnam didn't get the Silver Star. It had been a long time. We recovered that for them. My team cut through the redtape and delivered that medal to his family. It had been 50 years they were trying.
As proud as I am of the legislation passed and the constituent services that we gave, I am also proud of sounding the alarm for what I think is our biggest issue impacting our country. To be honest, it has been like talking to the side of my barn back home. I learned what it was about to make ends meet because your tail was on the line running a small business.
I am optimistic since we do so many great things in this country. But the incentives have been so strong to go the opposite way that, hopefully, we can change the direction that, in my mind, will bankrupt the country, and it has been from both sides of the aisle. It has been where we just expected too much out of this place. We need to focus on doing a few things better.
To show you the magnitude, 6 years ago, we were $18 trillion in debt. In 6 years, we have doubled it. We borrow $1 trillion every 6 months, and that is the interest that we pay on our debt now every 6 months, as well. We actually borrow $2 trillion a year.
This spending spree has had a real effect on the American people. We have inflation, rising interest rates, and a projected debt that is going to be $56 trillion in 10 years. If you are good at math, that gets geometrically more difficult to get out of that hole being dug that deep.
I had a business, the first 17 years where the office was in a mobile home. I got introduced out here: Had his office in a double-wide. I said, it was a used single-wide. That was my first and only opportunity of doing what I wanted to do.
Well, the overhead was so low, you almost had to stoop to get in the door, figuratively speaking, but I learned a lot of valuable lessons. In the real world, you have to live within your means. Borrowing money from our kids and grandkids is not a business plan that is going to work.
How do we turn things around? The best thing, we are not flying blind here. There is an instruction manual called the Constitution, especially the 10th Amendment. As the Federal Government has struggled, the States have been a laboratory for how you fix things. That is where the innovation is going to come from in the next decade.
I am so excited to lead that charge back home in Indiana. It was so hard to get here in the first place. The question I get asked most: Why wouldn't you stay? I kind of explained that a little bit earlier that I believe in term limits. It was an either-or choice--either run for Governor or serve another term here. I am not going to lose sight of what I have been a part of, but I do feel I made the right choice.
On this entire journey, I couldn't have done it without my life partner Maureen, married 48 years ago. I never get that number wrong, even if it is off by a year. On our wedding, I will never forget everyone as they passed me and got to her. I was trying to listen if anyone said that she was lucky because I was first and everyone, without exception, said how lucky I was. Well, I just couldn't resist; after we got out of the line there at the church--maybe later that evening--I said, ``Dear, were there any people that told you, you were lucky?'' And in a very diplomatic way, she said: ``There were a few.''
I have been blessed beyond all measure there. I have a family that has been great. Three of the four kids work and run the business I ran for 37 years. Three of my seven grandkids are right up there--Michael, Kate, and Julia; and Jason, one of my four kids. I have been blessed beyond measure when you look at all of that.
And then the thing I talk most often about is faith, family, and community--in that broader scope, how we were so lucky to be dropped into the place called Jasper, IN. That, to me, is something I will never figure out.
I am just thankful that when I ended up having one of the best MBAs in the country and was headed to Wall Street, we talked about, do we want to do it when we wanted to raise a family? I took the first entrepreneur's course there. She already wanted her own business. It didn't seem like Wall Street was going to work out.
Well, we moved back home. Best job I could find was over an 80- percent pay cut. If we hadn't done that, it is almost certain I wouldn't be here this afternoon doing a farewell speech in the U.S. Senate.
I tour all 92 counties each year. I have offered open office hours, scheduling into it on Fridays. Hoosiers, I will be doing that as your next Governor as well.
Hoosiers are some of the most good-hearted, hard-working people in the world. It has been my honor to serve you here.
To all my colleagues here in the Senate, thank you for your friendship and the honor of serving alongside you in this esteemed body, not to mention all the precious memories I will take back to Indiana.
I will part on this, because I spent so much time sitting in that seat as the Presiding Officer at the most inconvenient time each week, Thursday afternoon from 3 to 6. Well, you are pretty well the lone soldier by then. You are going to get in the wrap-up. Rick Scott was the only one who had poorer seniority than me. I will never forget. We were all interested in wrapping it up.
Well, the first thing I did was figured out a way to where I only had to do it every other week. It took a little risk. It paid off, so I didn't have to do it every week. Then I found there were some Senators who liked to linger around a little later on Thursdays than maybe what they needed to. And there was one who did it every Thursday and had flexibility--my friend, Senator Dan Sullivan. You need to tune in because he does the Alaskan of the Week.
All I said was: Dan, could you move it up about an hour and a half? And he did, and that enabled me to get home late on a Thursday instead of a Friday. I was even doing some entrepreneurial work right there. You can ask anybody in the well now, we were all wanting to see that happen together.
Finally, I tried to bust the dress code here by not wearing a tie. There was a time or two where I barged in here without one and almost got tackled by Senator Lankford once, but I got in and out. But that is one thing I am not going to change. I keep a tie in the Cloakroom. Thank you, again, for keeping me dressed correctly when I need to be on the floor on occasions like this.
It has been quite a run; it will be bittersweet to leave the place; and thank you all for the enjoyment I have had here.
I yield the floor.
(Applause, Senators rising.)