Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up an amendment, No. 1207. Through the Chair, the Senator from…
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up an amendment, No. 1207.
Through the Chair, the Senator from Utah would like to speak.
The Farm Bill
Madam President, I certainly share the concern of my friend and colleague from Colorado, and I thank him for his remarks. We do, as an institution, have an alarmingly low approval rating. I have even said we are slightly less popular in America than the Castro brothers and slightly more popular than the influenza virus, but the virus is gaining on us rapidly.
There are many reasons for this. One thing is we are trying to gain too much control over too may aspects of the lives of the American people. There is so much of what the American people do that is governed, even micromanaged by the Federal Government and by what it does every single day. So much of their wealth has to go to pay their taxes to the Federal Government. So many of their communications are potentially susceptible to being monitored. So much of what they do is in one way or another restricted by the Federal Government.
I would like to discuss amendment No. 1207, which would address one of the many implications of the fact that we have a Federal Government that is simply too big. It deals specifically with the ownership of Federal land.
In my State, the State of Utah, the Federal Government owns about two-thirds of the land. That is two-thirds of the land that has to be managed by bureaucrats, bureaucrats ultimately working out of Washington, DC, who, for the most part, don't tend to share the same values or the same interests in land development as do people from my own State. That is land we cannot tax and land we therefore cannot access as a resource. It is land that, because it cannot be taxed, cannot provide tax revenue for local governments to fund fire departments, police services, and schools.
It has other implications too when the Federal Government owns this much land. It is significant that about 40 percent of the land along our border is owned by the Federal Government. It is significant that in a lot of that stretch of border, Federal agents from the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, are not allowed to do their job. Even our own Federal officers cannot do that which they need to do, that which they have sworn an oath to do, at least not very effectively, for the simple reason that this is Federal land and there are a whole host of environmental restrictions that often accompany the use of Federal land or traversing on Federal land of any kind.
This is foreign to many of my colleagues, many of whom come from States where there is very little Federal land. It is significant that in every State in the Rocky Mountains or west of the Rocky Mountains the Federal Government owns 15 percent or more of the land in those States, and in every State east of the Rocky Mountains the Federal Government owns less than 15 percent. In many cases it is much less than that--in some cases \1/2\ of 1 percent.
I don't expect all of my colleagues to sympathize with this immediately, but I hope, in time, when they come to understand what we face in these States where there is so much Federal land ownership, they would be sympathetic to this amendment.
The idea of this amendment is we have a problem. We have a problem when CBP agents cannot adequately enforce the law, cannot adequately enforce the border, protect it for national security purposes and immigration purposes and the like, simply because of the fact the land is federally owned and environmental restrictions get in their way and interfere with their ability to do that.
The net result of this is not environmental protection because, as we have seen, in many of these areas, because coyotes and others who bring people illegally across the border are well aware of these restrictions, they will make sure illegal immigrants come across these very same tracts of land in order to get into the United States illegally. They leave in their wake, in some cases, a trail of destruction or at least a trail of litter as they drop things along the way.
This also, by the way, creates very dangerous conditions for many of these immigrants who are trying to cross very remote sections of land. It makes it difficult, not just for the agents but also for the immigrants alike. It is not good for anyone.
This amendment tries to change that. This amendment would provide immediate access to land at the border for the purpose of maintaining or building roads, fences, also driving patrol vehicles, and for installing surveillance equipment. It is interesting. People are dying on the border as a result of the fact that immigrants very often will cross these very remote sections of land. They run out of water. They run out of food. They run out of other supplies. They get lost.
It is scary. This would happen less if we were adequately enforcing our border. Again, border lands are littered with the trash left behind by these illegally crossing illegal aliens.
This has not gone completely unnoticed in the past. In fact, this has been reported in the press. Just a few years ago, the Washington Post reported, November 16, 2009, the following:
In a remarkably candid letter to members of Congress,
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said her
department could have to delay pursuits of illegal immigrants
while waiting for horses to be brought in so agents don't
trample protected lands, and warns that illegal immigrants
will increasingly make use of remote, protected areas to
avoid being caught.
The documents also show the Interior Department has charged
the Homeland Security Department $10 million over the past
two years as a ``mitigation'' penalty to pay for damage to
public lands that agencies say has been caused by Border
Patrol agents chasing illegal immigrants.
Every one of us in this body whom I am aware of has been saying we need to secure the border and that we do. I am here to reiterate that very point. If we are serious about that, as we claim to be, then we have a certain obligation to make sure our CBP agents, officers have the ability to enforce the law; that they are not fighting this battle with one hand or perhaps both hands tied behind their back; that we are not ordering them to make bricks without straw. We have to give them the ability to do their job and certainly not interfere with it.
It is not just that we are placing a minor incidental burden on their ability to enforce the laws, we are talking about 40 percent of the land along the southern border that is federally owned. So we are dealing with an awful lot of land. Everyone knows if we enforce the border in some areas but make it impossible to enforce in others, we are going to drive the illegal immigration traffic toward those areas of the border where enforcement is not ongoing.
That is what my amendment does. This has been debated and discussed in
the House of Representatives. My understanding is that in prior legislation the House of Representatives has even adopted this provision.
I urge each and every one of my colleagues to take a close look at amendment No. 1207, which I hope to call up in the near future, and I hope we will pass this measure.
I yield the floor.
It does indeed. I was disappointed by the fact that in the Judiciary Committee, on which the Senator and I both serve, we had a lot of amendments. I do not remember exactly how many votes we had in the committee, but it was in the dozens, if not scores, and we had extensive discussion. Now, not all the votes turned out the way the Senator and I wanted them to, but the important thing is we had a lot of discussion, we had on-the-record debate, we had amendments proposed and discussed and debated, and that is not how it has happened this time.
To my understanding--I was not here, unlike my friend from Alabama, in 2007, the last time we had a comparable discussion of a bill like this one, but my understanding is that there were 50-something, perhaps 53 amendments that were debated, discussed, and received votes in 2007. To my understanding, this time around we have had nine votes and maybe two or three that were taken by voice vote. That is not enough, and it certainly is not enough when we are talking about a bill that is more than 1,000 pages long, a bill that is going to affect many millions of Americans, and it is going to do so for many generations to come.
The American people deserve more. They deserve more than just debate and discussion, rollcall votes that can be measured in the single digits. They call this the greatest deliberative legislative body in the world, and yet we make a mockery of that description when we do things like this, when we allow a 1,000-page bill to be rammed through in a matter of days with only a small handful of amendments debated, discussed, and amended.
So through the Chair I would like to ask my friend and my distinguished colleague from Alabama whether he has seen anything like this in his career, whether this is something I should anticipate moving forward. As I look forward to my years in the Senate, is this something I should expect on a regular basis with legislation such as this, of this complexity, of this level of importance? Is this something that is just par for the course?
Yes. In fact, I find it appalling. I find it repugnant to the system of government under which we are supposed to be operating. I find it even repugnant to article VI in the Constitution, which makes clear that there is one kind of constitutional amendment that is never appropriate. You cannot amend the Constitution to deny any State its equal representation in the Senate. If at any moment we end up with a situation in which we have second-class Senators, Senators who may submit and propose for debate and discussion and a vote an amendment-- if we have to go to the majority leader and say: Mother may I, then perhaps we have lost something, perhaps we have lost the environment in which each of the States was supposed to receive equal representation.
It also seems to me to take on a certain character, a certain banana republic quality that we are asked to vote on legislation in many circumstances just hours or even minutes after we have received it. We take on a certain rubberstamp quality when we do that.
I remember a few months ago, in connection with the fiscal cliff debate--as we approached the fiscal cliff on New Year's Eve, we were told by our respective leaders: Just wait. Something is coming. Go back to your offices. Watch your televisions. Play with your toys. Do whatever it is you do, but, you know, be good Senators, run along and stay out of trouble. We are taking care of this. We will send you legislation as soon as we are ready.
Well, at 1:36 a.m. we received an e-mail, and attached to that e-mail was a 153-page document. That was the bill on which we would be voting. That bill was one we would be called to vote on exactly 6 minutes later, at 1:42 a.m. So to my utter astonishment and dismay, Senators flocked into this room and with very, very little objection ended up passing that legislation overwhelmingly.
This is just one of many examples I can point to in the 2\1/2\ years since I have been here when Members have been asked to vote and did, in fact, vote enthusiastically, willingly, and hardly without a whimper of objection to legislation that they had never seen, to legislation that they were familiar with only to the extent it had been summarized for them.
That brings us back to this legislation. We have had this in front of us in one form or another for the last couple of months, but for a long time before we even had it, what we had was a summary of this. We had a series of bullet points. Those bullet points were very favorable, and for a long time the bullet points were all we had. The bullet points--I exaggerate slightly to prove a point, but they read something like this: Is this bill outstanding? Yes. Will this bill solve all of our immigration problems? Absolutely. Is there anything wrong with the bill? Heavens no. That is how the bullet points read.
It was on that basis that groups around the country supported and some Members even of our own body decided they would vote for S. 744, even before S. 744 even existed. We had groups across the country, some even in my home State, that came out strongly in favor of the yet-to- be-released Gang of 8 bill, saying: We are going to support it, and anyone who does not vote for it in the U.S. Senate is a backward fool. Well, they had not read it. They could not have read it because the bill did not yet exist.
Now, in some respects, what happened with this is very similar to what we are now facing with the yet-to-be-released Corker amendment. I have not seen it. But I will tell you what I have seen. I have seen a set of very brief bullet points about the Corker amendment.
The bullet point reads something like this. Is this amendment outstanding?
Yes.
Will this amendment solve our border security problems?
Absolutely.
Is there any problem presented by this amendment?
Absolutely not.
So I say to my friend from Alabama, if this is what I can expect in my career in the Senate, I am a little bit troubled. But I would ask my friend from Alabama if there is anything we can do about this, if there is any way we can right this ship, if there is any way we can turn this around, this disturbing trend? Separate and apart from the policies underlying this bill, is there anything we can do to make this a real legislative body and not a rubber stamp, the kind of legislative body that actually does debate and discuss things?
We do not really have a true deliberative legislative body unless have we enough time to debate things before we vote on them, to where the Members can actually read them before they come up?
One of the distinguishing characteristics of a democracy is that you have choices, you have options. I am not intimately familiar with the inner workings of the Soviet government. But I have it on good authority that they had elections in the Soviet Union. But the big difference was the government decided who was on the ballot. They decided that very carefully. Only those candidates who had
been very carefully screened by the Communist Party officials could appear on the ballot.
So people had choices. It was just the choices were very limited. They were limited so as to guarantee a certain foreordained outcome.
Now, if you will forgive the analogy, what we have here makes sense. It makes sense that all of the 50 States are represented but only if, in fact, we are presented with actual legitimate choices, with actual legitimate options.
One of the reasons we have seen legislation pushed through at the very last minute, and our colleagues in this body vote for that legislation overwhelmingly, is they are told at the moment they have no other option: You have a binary choice. You can vote yes or you can vote no, but you do not really have the option of making any changes. So a lot of times people vote for something, even if it is a bill they otherwise did not like, or if it had a lot of problems with it, they will vote for it because they conclude that on balance, voting yes is better than voting no. The problem is, we are supposed to have more options than that. In this body, we are supposed to have the opportunity to propose amendments and in theory to have unlimited debate and discussion.
Unlimited debate and discussion necessarily entails more or less unlimited opportunities to amend, to make it better. That is what real compromise is. Real compromise involves allowing all of the stakeholders to come together and explain what is important to each member of the group, to each stakeholder. We do not have that here. We are supposed to have that in the Senate. Historically, it has existed.
I know that not from my service here, but I know it from reading books and from talking to colleagues who have been here a little bit longer than I have. But it is time to restore that. It is time we restore what once existed but has since been lost so that our democratic system of government actually functions as it was designed.
That is exactly right. The movement described is a spontaneous grass roots movement that started in 2009 in response to an observation that swept across the country that the Federal Government has become too big and too expensive, in part because it is doing too many things it was never designed to do, in part because it has lost sight of the fact that it was always created at the outset to be a limited-purpose government, one in charge of just a few basic things: national defense, establishing a uniform system of weights and measures, declaring war; otherwise providing for our national defense, protecting trademarks, copyrights, and patents granting letters of mark and reprisal, which are fascinating instruments. Basically, you get a hall pass issued by Congress in the name of the United States that entitles the bearer to engage in state-sponsored acts of piracy on the high seas.
So regardless of how long I might serve in the Senate, I do want to get a letter of mark and reprisal someday. I am going to be a pirate. I hope my friend from Alabama and my friend from Colorado will join me.
Among those other powers was a power to establish uniform laws governing naturalization, what today we would perhaps more broadly call immigration. That is one of our jobs. So it was appropriate at this gathering today, where we were joined by a lot of supporters of this grass roots movement--we had some immigrants to this country, people who came here legally, people who sacrificed much, put a lot at risk in order to come to this country.
They explained that one of the things that attracted them to this country, one of the unifying reasons all of them came to the United States, despite the sacrifices they had to make to get here and the risks they undertook in coming here, was the fact that they loved the rule of law. They see the difference, as all of us do anytime we travel to a country where the rule of law is absent, that the rule of law makes all the difference. You can tell almost immediately after you step off the plane whether you are in a country where the rule of law is respected, where it is honored. There are relatively few countries in the world where it is. Fortunately, this is one of them. It is our job to make sure it continues to be that way.
Many of these immigrants commented on the fact that they find it distressing that while they expended the time and effort and resources to make sure they immigrated legally, they are disturbed about the fact that under this legislation, well-intentioned as it may have been, under this legislation 11 million people who came here illegally, for whatever reason, will eventually find themselves in a position of not only being able to stay here, not only being able to keep their current jobs, maintain their current circle of friends, they will actually become citizens.
This reminds me of a letter that I received not too long ago from a schoolteacher in Utah, a schoolteacher who explained that she had come here on a visa, a visa that will expire in 2017. She explained to me that she has every expectation that she will be unable to renew and extend that visa. So, she said: I expect effectively to be deported in 2017 because I do not intend to break the law of the country whose laws I promised to uphold if they would grant me this visa. She said: It is very distressing to me that meanwhile people who broke your laws, people who did not respect the rule of law, as I did, people who did not expend a lot of time and money and resources and took a lot of risk in applying for and obtaining the necessary visa to come here, a lot of people who broke all of those same laws will get to stay here, they will get to become citizens. That is not fair.
There certainly are some similarities. I will point out at the outset there are some differences, one of them being we have, fortunately, actually had the text of this for a little bit longer than I think Congress had the text of the Affordable Care Act when it passed. We have had some opportunity to amend it in committee. That has been nice. But, yes, there are a lot of similarities.
Both bills are very lengthy. Both bills involve excessive--remarkably excessive--delegation of authority to decisionmakers in another branch of government, within the executive branch.
There are, by one count, something like 490 instances of delegated discretionary decisionmaking authority. You know, this is a problem because for centuries, great thinkers, including our Founding Fathers but really going
back even before them, have warned that legislative power involves the power to make laws, not the power to make lawmakers.
To a very significant degree, the lawmaking power is not subject to delegation. It should not be delegated to someone else. Obviously, we have to delegate a lot of tasks to the executive branch. It is the executive branch's job to implement, to enforce, to apply the laws that we pass. But on some level there is a difference that we can tell between giving someone the task of implementing and enforcing a law and giving someone else the task of coming up with policy, either policy as embodied in the Code of Federal Regulations or policy as embodied in the exercise of pure discretion that will evolve and over time become its own form of laws.
This law, much like the Affordable Care Act, involves hundreds and hundreds of instances of delegated policymaking authority.
One of the problems with that is when you delegate the policymaking authority to the executive branch, to the executive branch regulatory state, so to speak, you give it to people, however well-intentioned, however well-educated, however wise, who are not themselves elected by the people. They themselves don't stand accountable to the people at regular intervals. They themselves can act in much the same way as despots might have centuries ago.
Sure, their actions could be subject to challenge in court under the Administrative Procedures Act, challenge them in court under a standard that is very deferential and not to the challenger, to the government. One thing that is certain, we can't go to them and say: Look, if you don't change this law, I am not going to vote for you again. They will laugh at us if you tell them that because they don't work for us. They don't ever have to stand for election. That is one of the problems I have with it.
One of the problems it shares in common with ObamaCare is this excessive delegation of authority. It also shares in common with ObamaCare the fact that it is long. It is not quite as long as ObamaCare, but it is still long. Very often we find that long bills go hand in hand with bills that have an excessive delegation of power to the executive branch of government. This is what we have here.
I find it significant that James Madison warned us in Federalist No. 62, it will be of little benefit to the American people that their laws may be written by men and women of their own choosing if those laws are so voluminous and complex that they can't be easily read and understood by those governed by the same laws.
Madison was right to point that out. It is true it is difficult to pick up a law like that, or twice its size, in the case of ObamaCare. It is difficult for the American people to pick that up, read through it and say: Yes, I get it, I understand what my obligations are. I understand what the obligations of government officials are. I can understand it.
It is 10 times worse than that when this is just the tip of the iceberg, when this will be a tiny fraction of the paperwork that will be entailed and the laws that actually implement laws such as this one and laws such as ObamaCare. To put it in Madison's words, it is bad enough when the laws are so voluminous and complex they can't reasonably be read and understood and read by those governed by them. It is that much worse when most of the actual law isn't even made or chosen by the voters.
The Senator mentioned a few moments ago that in some circumstances there has been some indication that perhaps the Secretary of Homeland Security believes she is above the law. In some respects, when reading through this bill, we can conclude that if it passes she will become the law. She will be the law. With hundreds and hundreds of instances in which she will be given vast discretion to make all kinds of determinations about who stays and who doesn't, what happens under what circumstance and what program, she actually sort of becomes the law. This becomes an active administrative discretion, rather than an act that helps bolster the rule of law. That certainly is a concern we have over time.
We do wonder at times also why it is we have legislation that remains secret for so long. In other words, we have commented on the fact that we have been waiting for this mysterious amendment. We have wondered why we haven't seen it. I wonder if the reason why we haven't seen it is because they are still negotiating in secret trying to sweeten the pot so they can ram it through. It makes me wonder whether we can anticipate another ``cornhusker kickback,'' another ``Louisiana purchase,'' yet another parallel between the Affordable Care Act and this legislation we have before us today. It is another concern I have.
I am also concerned about the same talking points to which I alluded earlier, the same talking points we have had since before we even had this bill--the talking points I alluded to earlier that I described as being to the effect of saying: Is there anything wrong with this bill? No. Is this bill excellent? Yes, absolutely it is. Those are the same talking points that convinced a lot of people to come out and support the bill before the bill even existed.
I guess it wasn't tough enough and they are trying to make it even tougher. Yes, that is an interesting point. A lot of people got caught up in that kind of mindset even before the bill was released.
The Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce, an institution in my own home State, came out overwhelmingly in support of this bill. But the problem was the bill didn't even exist. They were going off the talking points. And here is the problem: The talking points were wrong. The talking points proved to be grossly misleading.
The talking points told us--and the proponents of the bill have continued to tell us for months, even after the bill text came out and even after we had reason to know better--quite a few things. They told us, No. 1, illegal aliens who would be legalized and who would be put on the path to citizenship under this bill would have to pay back taxes as a condition of their legalization. Did that turn out to be true? Absolutely not.
When we read the fine print, one thing is very clear. They have to pay only those back taxes that have previously been assessed by the Internal Revenue Service. What does that mean? Well, they have to be found due and owing. They have to have been assessed by the IRS. An individual doesn't have taxes assessed by the IRS if, as is often the case for someone who has been working here illegally, they are working off the books.
This is what we call an illusory promise. They offered us the sleeves off their vest. They offered us something that didn't exist in the first place.
We were also told a number of other things about this bill. We were told there would be a lot of people who would be excluded. Yet we discovered there are a lot of people who, even after having committed crimes in this country, even after having illegally reentered the country following a previous deportation, which, by the way, is a felony, many of those people will still be able to get legalized and not just remain in this country and continue working but also continue on the path to citizenship and eventually become voting citizens of this country.
We were told those people who are illegal aliens currently, who would be eligible for legalization and eventual citizenship, would not be eligible during their provisional status, during their interim status, or RPI status, as we call it under the bill, wouldn't be eligible for means-tested welfare benefits.
Did that turn out to be true? No. They are still eligible, for example, for the earned-income tax credit, which some have described as the most generous and largest, in some respects, means-tested program we have.
So these things turned out not to be true. Yet a lot of people are still asking their Members of Congress to support this very same legislation, and not because they have read it, not because any of those promises are true, but because they are still believing the promises contained in the original set of talking points, which most people think are the bill. That is disturbing.
Yes. Yes.
One of the most galling aspects of this entire debate and what has occurred today, as this amendment is being crafted behind closed doors in secret, we have had dozens and dozens of amendments that are written, that have been filed, that have been prepared, some of which are now pending before the Senate. Have we had a chance to have a vote on those? No. We are told we have to wait for the Corker amendment, which isn't even written.
So those who have been working on this for months and months and months, who have written our own amendments and have aired them publicly, allowed our constituents and people throughout the country to view our amendments, we are shut out. We are shut out and we are shut down and we are told we don't get a vote on them because we have to wait for the Corker amendment. That doesn't seem fair or just to me.
Now, let's look around the room. It is not as though this place is jam-packed with people. It looks like we have kind of been abandoned. A few hours ago we had all of us here and we were ready to vote on those amendments. We could have had a lot of votes. We were told to expect votes. I was hoping to have votes. I had a very important amendment on which I wanted to get a vote. It was a vote on an amendment to make sure the 40 percent of the border owned by the Federal Government could be accessed by our own Border Patrol agents so they can do their jobs.
The Senator referred earlier to a problem we have had with our law enforcement personnel being told they can't do their jobs. This is one of those many instances where they can't. Forty percent of our border is owned by the Federal Government. I am sympathetic to this because two-thirds of the land in my State is owned by the Federal Government, and it is terrible because we can't access most of that land. We can't even walk on that land without saying ``Mother, may I.'' And most of the time, to walk on it, it is like a sand trap on a golf course. You have to walk in with a rake behind you. You rake your way in, rake your way out, and ask permission for everything you do. The border is kind of the same way. There are federally owned areas of the border. We have huge stretches of border--40 percent of it--where they can't enforce the law because it is owned by the Federal Government and there are environmental laws that prohibit these agents from doing their jobs.
It would be one thing if that actually protected the environment, but it doesn't because what happens is those same areas--those same environmentally sensitive, federally owned areas--are the ones illegal immigrants most prefer when they choose to cross into this country. So what do we have? We have a long trail of litter and environmental destruction in the areas where they cross through illegally.
This is just one of many amendments that have been filed, that are already written, that we could have and should have been voting on and we haven't been.
I have a dire prediction to make. I suspect when we come back next week, we might be told, even though the place doesn't seem to be in any hurry right now, all of a sudden we will be in a hurry next week. So much so I fear we will be told we have to pass this bill now. It all has to be passed now. We don't have time for any more of these pesky amendments from these pesky Senators from all over this great country of the United States of America. We have to pass this now.
Well, we have had time to vote on other amendments, and we have squandered that opportunity or we have had it squandered for us. The Senator from Alabama and I, and a number of others, have been ready to vote on our amendments--amendments that have been prepared for a long time, that have been aired for the public to view for a long time--and we haven't been allowed a vote. I have a problem with that.
It certainly would have been the case that had we started voting earlier today, I think we could have gotten through the list.
I was surprised by what our friend from Vermont said a few minutes ago, suggesting that Republicans have held up all this.
My understanding is that last night we were close to a unanimous consent on a proposal to bring some 16 amendments to the floor for a vote. We were getting closer and closer to that.
It was at that point when the senior Senator from Louisiana came to the floor and demanded that all of this cease, unless or until such time as 27 amendments that she was pushing for not only would be brought to the floor for a vote but be passed by unanimous consent.
It was a rather unusual request, from what I can tell. I am still a new Senator. I have only been here 2\1/2\ years, but it seems to me to be something that doesn't happen very often. But it certainly was a different sequence of events than what was described by our friend from Vermont a few minutes ago.
Look, we wanted amendments. Some of us have been working on this bill for many months, and we have prepared amendments. We have had those amendments. We have made them available to members of the public for a long time so they can be reviewed. We just want to debate them, discuss them, vote on them, and move on.
I suppose it is important that we proceed, with a matter of legislation as important as this one--this very significant bill that will affect many millions of Americans and will do so for many generations to come. It is important that we proceed with all deliberate speed, meaning we proceed just quickly enough but not so quickly as to blow past important opportunities to consider every option, every possible amendment that needs to be brought forward.
So perhaps it is with that in mind that we have suspended things a little bit, we have slowed things down a little to wait for this one amendment. I still don't understand why we couldn't have been voting on other amendments--amendments that are already written.
But still, just the same, if this is what we need to do--and the place doesn't appear to be in any hurry--we can do it that way. I hope I can take that with some encouragement, as an encouraging indication that this is how we are going to proceed on this bill because it is so important and that is perhaps some indication that next week we will still be able to vote on other amendments, amendments that preceded the Corker amendment in time and in preparation--that we will still get votes on those. Because if we are willing to wait this long for one amendment that is just being written now, we ought to have those other votes on other amendments that are ahead of it in time, that were filed previously, that were made public much earlier.
I suppose in that respect all Senators are equal, but some are simply more equal than others. It is disturbing that happens from time to time, when we discover that the equality that is supposed to serve as the hallmark of this institution, that is supposed to separate it from the House just down the hall from us and from other legislative bodies throughout the country and throughout the world is, perhaps, faded a little bit in our public consciousness. Perhaps that is faded a little bit in the way it operates, but it should not be and we ought to be able to restore it. We ought to be able to focus on the real, pressing needs of this country.
Immigration reform is something I think every one of us can agree needs to happen. There is not one Member of this body--at least not one of whom I am aware--who does not want real, robust immigration reform, nor do I believe there is one Member of this body who would dispute that there is a real opportunity for broad-based bipartisan consensus when it comes to immigration reform. I think the best way we could achieve that is to start in those areas in which there is the most broad-based bipartisan consensus.
I have yet to meet a single Senator or single Representative from either political party who is willing to say, for example, that we don't need to bolster border security. Maybe such a Senator or maybe such a Representative exists. If that is the case, I have yet to meet that Senator or that Representative. I have yet to meet a single Senator or Representative from either political party, by the same token, who has said we don't need to update and modernize our legal immigration system, we don't need to review our visa programs--which, as I have said before, are sort of stuck in the Buddy Holly era. These are things we need to do, and I think we could pass bills dealing with each of those. I think we could pass both of them with overwhelming bipartisan consensus.
So that begs the question: Why, then, would you want to wrap those up and tie them up with the single most controversial element of immigration reform, which deals with the pathway to legalization and citizenship? Why do you suppose it is so important that we move directly to that?
Perhaps it is for that reason that for many people the pathway to citizenship component of this bill is perhaps the single most contentious issue. I don't think there is any issue that even comes close to the pathway to citizenship in terms of its ability to divide Americans along partisan lines or along other ideological lines. It makes me wonder why it is so important for us to pack this all in one bill. Why do we need a single thousand-page bill? Why can't we pass this in steps, especially when we come to an understanding of the fact that if we do it in the proper sequence, much of the problem will be easier to resolve? Much of the problem will be more amenable to a more clear solution.
Many of those among us who are undocumented are here in an undocumented state not necessarily because they want to become citizens, not necessarily because they want to live here in perpetuity. In many instances I am told a lot of these people are here year in and year out because they are afraid that if they leave and go home, they will not be able to get back in.
But if we had updated and modernized our legal immigration system--if we could do that, if we could get those laws implemented, I suspect a lot of those people would choose to be able to go back home to their home countries, be with families and loved ones, knowing that the next time they wanted to come back to the United States to work, they would have a fair shot at doing it, that there would be a clear pathway for them to apply for some kind of legal status coming into this country to work for a time. If they had greater certainty that they would actually be able to get back in, perhaps they would not choose to remain here year in and year out. At that point, we might have a different circumstance on our hands. Rather than 11 million people, perhaps the number would be different than that. I am not sure.
But one thing I do know is that if there is one way to make it more difficult to enact immigration reform, if there is one way to make it less likely that we will have broad-based bipartisan consensus for immigration reform, the one way to do that, the one way to ensure that it is going to be as contentious, as partisan, as difficult as possible is to fold it all into one, put it in a thousand-page bill and say: You have to take all of it. You have to take every bit of it, all of it, or you get none of it.
We are told in this town all the time that we have to compromise. It is interesting. I get a lot of phone calls in my office from constituents. Some of those phone calls say: You need to compromise; make sure you compromise. Other phone calls say: Never, ever, ever compromise. Those in the first group are inclined to say: Compromise in a box with a fox in the rain on a train--all kinds of things. Anytime you get a chance to compromise, do it. But both sets of callers making one point or the other are sort of missing the point. Compromise is not an end destination, it is not a substantive end in itself, it is a process.
In the case of a legislative body consisting of more than one person, it is an inevitability. The question is not where to compromise or whether; the point of compromise is under what circumstance are you willing to and, more importantly, under what circumstance are you not willing to compromise.
If the objective is to find those areas where there is the greatest possibility of compromise, what we ought to be doing is passing a series of bills in a proper sequence: one bill dealing with border security; another perhaps dealing with an entry-exit system; another dealing with an update to our existing visa programs. In time, once those things are passed and they have been implemented, I think we will be in a much better position to achieve broad-based bipartisan consensus.
On the vexing, difficult question of how best to treat the 11 million undocumented workers in this country in a manner that is both compassionate and just, I think we can get there. I know we can. And I am equally certain that this bill--this bill that tries to lump everything into one, tries to ram the entire issue right through this body--is not the answer. This is not how we are going to get immigration reform.
If what you want to do is to stall out true immigration reform, then by all means put all your eggs in this basket right here. But if you want real immigration reform, proceed with the step-by-step path. That is where you are going to get bipartisanship. That is where you are going to get compromise. In fact, that is where compromise is to be found because that is where more people will get more of what they want out of government.
Would the Senator tend to agree with that analysis, that we would be better off with a step-by-step approach?
It is interesting. When I have individuals and groups come through my office telling me they would like me to support this bill, I ask them, of course, why. Inevitably they will point to usually just one or two of the countless provisions in this thousand-page bill. It is almost always because of one very discrete component within the bill that they like. Perhaps they like the high-skilled visa reform. Perhaps they like the low-skilled visa reform. Perhaps they like some piece here or there. But it is always one or two very discrete provisions. That is what caused them to say: I want you to vote for this thousand- page bill.
Inevitably I will ask them: Have you read the whole bill? If you haven't read the whole bill, have you at least studied the whole bill? Have you studied each of the constituent parts? Have you studied the implications of all the other provisions for which you would be asking me to vote?
Inevitably the answer is no. It is an unqualified, unapologetic no, and in many cases it is a no that is uttered in a way that makes me realize they have not considered the question. I don't fault them for that. Their job is not to legislate, their job is to advocate. In many instances, they are advocates. In other instances, they are citizen groups who are just expressing their opinions, and they have every right to do so. But my job is to legislate. Before I am asked to vote for a bill, before I am going to vote yes on something to make it law, I have to read it. I have to understand it. And I have to like not just one or two provisions, I have to be convinced that on balance this bill makes sense for the American people and it will do considerably more good than harm. At a minimum, it won't do more harm than good. I can't answer that question that way with this bill. I just cannot get there.
So I invite all of the American people, anyone who might be hearing my voice, to join me in this dialog, to join in this discussion. If you want to be part of the immigration solution, read the bill. If you don't want to read the whole bill, just study the whole bill. At least read a robust summary--not the cheerleading talking points put out by the bill's principal advocates, but read a really robust synopsis that tells you how all the pieces connect together, and then tell me whether you think I should vote for it.
Most of the time, if people do it that way, they are going to come at this with a very different conclusion.
That is one of the reasons why I think if we were to break it up into its constituent parts and debate and vote on each one as a separate bill, I think the American people would be better served. I think more of the American people would get more of what they want out of immigration reform if we were to do it that way.
So in many ways the people who come into my office and tell me: I want you to support this bill, and I want you to support it because I like section 345, or whatever section they are talking about, in a lot of ways they are making my point for me. We ought to address this one piece at a time, just as they are addressing it with me.
They are not really saying: I want you to vote for S. 744. I mean, technically, they are saying that; but in reality what they are saying is, I want you to vote for the section I like. That
is exactly what we ought to be doing. We ought to vote for the section they like, and we ought to vote for it one section at a time, one piece at a time. We will be in a much better position if we do it that way.
I want to commend our chairman who is with us in the Chamber right now. I commend him for the manner in which he conducted the markup within the Judiciary Committee.
After being in the Senate now for just 2\1/2\ years, I have been disappointed at the number of instances in which we have debated, discussed, and ultimately voted on the bills on the floor without a lot of opportunities for amendments. Our chairman did a good job in the way he ran the markup. We had countless opportunities to introduce amendments, which our chairman allowed, and I appreciated that. I think he did the right thing by opening that up and saying: Look, if you have an amendment, I, as the chairman of this committee, want to be sure you have the chance to air your amendment. I think that is the way we ought to work here.
It is not the way things have been working here. Perhaps we can take some hope in the fact that since things have slowed down for about 12 hours now with this one single amendment--perhaps that is an indication that our friends in the majority are willing to slow down and give this the time it needs to make sure we all have adequate time for our amendments. Perhaps not to give this much time to all other amendments someone wants to write on the fly, but at a minimum it ought to mean we get enough time to vote on all of those amendments that were prepared before the Corker amendment came to be an issue.
Yet I fear and I worry a little bit that it might not mean that. I worry a little bit, based on what I have seen over the last 2\1/2\ years, that come next week, we might all of a sudden transform from a very sleepy Chamber, which we are now--practically vacant and moving very slowly, if at all--to a Chamber that is being told we have to run as fast as we possibly can, that we have to pass this 1,000-page bill in haste, that there simply is not time to consider amendments that have been prepared and aired publicly for weeks because we have to pass it right now.
We will not be given specific reasons as to why we have to pass it right now, but I fear we could be told we have to pass it this week, and it cannot wait a single additional week, it cannot wait a single additional day. At that moment I hope we will remind our friends in the majority--particularly our friend the majority leader--that on days like today, the Senate was moving really slowly, and most of the time the Senate was moving not at all.
I hope he will give us time to air the amendments that the American people deserve to have considered fully.
We will see, indeed. There have been just a couple of occasions when I have seen the Senate work as I think it should work and casting a lot of votes. That is how it is supposed to function. That is the kind of body we all thought we were joining when we were elected to the Senate--a body that debates, discusses, and most importantly, votes.
The legislative process doesn't mean a whole heck of a lot if all that happens is we wait for just a few people to emerge from a back room with a document that no one has read, and people are told to vote up or down on this, and this is the only vote we are going to get on this issue, or this is one of only a small handful of votes we are going to get on this issue. It doesn't mean a whole lot.
When it means a whole lot is when we have an opportunity to cast a lot of votes and every Senator is given an opportunity to have an input on a piece of legislation, every Senator is given an opportunity to express his or her mind, and to express the views, the concerns, the needs, of his or her respective constituents from around the country.
Remember a few weeks ago when we were discussing the budget resolution, we stayed here all night. We stayed here until about 5:30 in the morning, as I recall, casting vote after vote after vote. It was exhilarating. It was refreshing. It was necessary. I thought: This is how a republic is supposed to operate.
I think that is an important observation my friend has made. In so many ways, this practice that the Senator has described--a practice that results in minimizing rather than maximizing the number of votes we cast--has as its ultimate objective, not the enhancement of the finished legislative product, but instead the perpetual protection of incumbency.
We were not chosen by our constituents just to come here and stay here for as long as we possibly could. We were chosen by our constituents to come here and to make law, and to make the law as good as we could possibly make it. We were brought here to
improve it to the greatest extent of our ability regardless of the consequences to us personally.
It is interesting what the Senator said just a few minutes ago. We are paid to vote. In a very real sense I think that is right. Wouldn't it be interesting if we were literally paid according to how many votes we cast?
As a lawyer, the Senator is probably familiar with what may well be anecdotal, but some have suggested that one of the reasons why certain types of contracts in olden times were so long is that sometimes lawyers were paid not by the hour but by the word in a contract. Sometimes, as a result, the vestigial remains persist to this very day. They were so long because lawyers were trying to maximize their fee for the contract they were writing up. I am sure that wasn't helpful to clients back then and it wasn't necessarily good for the practice of law, but it did result in a lot of words. I am sure if we were paid according to each vote, if we got paid more for each vote we cast, we would be casting thousands and thousands of votes every single year.
Don't get me wrong, I am not necessarily suggesting that is how it ought to work. I am not necessarily suggesting that is a good way to run things here. But at least in that circumstance, we would have an incentive to do what we were sent here to do, which is to vote. At least in that respect, there would be something to offset what has apparently become an instinct that is inherent in serving in this place, an instinct which at least perhaps the majority shares or the majority leader believes in, which is we should in some cases cast as few votes as possible.
Look, we have known this was a problem for a long time. We have known we have needed to fix our immigration system for a long time. We could have been casting votes this entire week. We haven't. We could have been casting votes throughout much or all of last week and we didn't. So I hope in the coming week we will cast a lot of votes and we will more closely resemble the productive markup we had in the Judiciary Committee thanks to our chairman who has now joined us on the floor.
With that, I yield the floor.
Mr. President, if I may ask my friend from Vermont, we would love to see us move forward. Why don't we both propose three of our respective side's top amendments, come up with a unanimous consent agreement right now, and there would be six amendments we could take up for a vote.