Floor Statements

Mr. President, I rise today to congratulate the Whayne Supply Company, a leader in Kentucky businesses and one of the Nation's oldest and largest Caterpillar dealerships, for reaching the milestone of 100 years in operation. That is a full century of serving the needs of Kentucky's construction, mining, agriculture, and industrial markets; a full century of employing Kentuckians; and a full century of expanding opportunity across the Commonwealth.

Whayne Supply Company was founded in 1913 by Mr. Roy C. Whayne, Sr. At the time of the firm's founding, he was its sole employee, and the business consisted of selling light engines, pumps, wheelbarrows, and bicycles. In 1925, the company began its long and continued association with Caterpillar, one of the world's largest manufacturers of construction and mining equipment. Today Whayne is also the dealer for Thomas Built Buses, Challenger, Lexion, Trail King, Mirenco, Sullair, Allmand, and other lines of construction, industrial, mining, paving, and agricultural equipment.

Today Whayne is consistently ranked as one of the country's top Caterpillar dealerships. It also provides customers with an extensive parts inventory and broad service capabilities. Whayne Supply Company is currently owned by Monty Boyd, who became president of Whayne Supply in 2005 after working for the company in various roles for 25 years. Under Mr. Boyd's leadership, Whayne has grown to employ over 1,300 people and operate 15 facilities across Kentucky and southern Indiana.

Whayne's home office is in Louisville, and it operates other branches in Ashland, Bowling Green, Corbin, Dry Ridge, Elizabethtown, Hazard, Hopkinsville, Lexington, Owensboro, Paducah, Pikeville, and Somerset, as well as in Evansville, Indiana, and Jeffersonville, IN.

The Whayne Supply Company intends to mark its 100th anniversary throughout 2013 by recognizing its employees and customers and holding a series of community service projects. With the company's ties to all regions of the State, I am sure many Kentuckians will have occasion to note this anniversary and reflect on Whayne Supply's century of service.

Mr. President, I know my colleagues in the Senate join me in commending the Whayne Supply Company for 100 years of operations and saluting them for their commitment to the people of Kentucky.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 982, introduced earlier today.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, it seems like, with each passing hour, the facts get more and more inconvenient for senior folks over at the

Mr. President, this week we mark National Police Week 2013 as a time to pay tribute to the service and sacrifice of the many men and women in Federal, State, and local law enforcement across America. It is an appropriate time for those of us who benefit from their efforts--and that is all of us--to express our gratitude.

The Nation's Capital welcomes thousands of police officers who are gathering to celebrate National Police Week. They will honor their fallen fellow officers and rededicate themselves to their duties of defending the property, dignity, and lives of those who would fall prey to criminals outside the law.

I want to especially recognize the many men and women who work to enforce the law in my home State of Kentucky. Many of them have traveled to Washington this week, and today I will have the pleasure of meeting with some of Kentucky's finest. I want to personally thank them for bravely risking their lives in service of people across the Commonwealth.

Earlier this month in Richmond, Kentucky, a solemn ceremony was held at the Kentucky Law Enforcement Memorial on the campus of Eastern Kentucky University. This memorial lists the names of every known fallen peace officer in Kentucky history. Along the bottom of it are the words, ``Blessed Be the Peacekeepers.''

The ceremony was held to add the names of two law-enforcement officers from Kentucky who were killed in the line of duty in 2012. Hodgenville Police Officer Mark A. Taulbee was killed in a vehicle pursuit on September 16. Marion County Sheriff's Deputy Anthony Rakes was shot during a traffic stop on November 14.

I extend my sympathies to the families of Officer Taulbee and Deputy Rakes for their tragic loss.

Their names will be added, along with 6 other Kentucky peace officers whose names had not previously been on the memorial. There will be a total of 509 brave Kentuckians on that wall.

I know my colleagues in the U.S. Senate join me in holding the deepest admiration and respect for the many brave law-enforcement officers across Kentucky and the Nation. Theirs is both an honorable profession, and a dangerous one. It is also a necessary one, as the maintenance of peace and order in a civil society that we take for granted could not exist without them.

Kentucky is grateful to our law-enforcement officers and their families. And we are grateful for the sacrifice of Officer Mark A. Taulbee and Sheriff's Deputy Anthony Rakes to preserve the rule of law.

I ask unanimous consent that the names of the Commonwealth of Kentucky law-enforcement officers added to the Kentucky Law Enforcement Memorial this year be printed in the Record following my remarks.

Reserving the right to object, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator modify his request that it not be in order for the Senate to consider a conference report that includes tax increases or reconciliation instructions to increase taxes or raise the debt limit.

Madam President, I have a parliamentary inquiry: Is that an objection?

I object.

Will my friend the majority leader yield?

As my friend indicated, we were talking about this before the session opened. This kid is one the most incredible competitors I have ever seen.

The game was on the west coast, and I don't know whether my friend stayed up that late, but I didn't stay up late enough to see the crash into the wall. So when my friend speaks to his mother, remind her that this is one thing on which leaders on both sides fully agree: We are hoping Harper has a speedy recovery and is back in the lineup.

Madam President, over the past few days we have heard many in the media talk about how this has been a ``rough week'' for the administration. That is because it has been a worse week for the First Amendment.

On Friday we learned that--just as we had been told by our constituents--the IRS deliberately targeted conservative groups across the country in the midst of a heated national election. Over the weekend we learned that the extent of it was even broader--even broader--than we originally thought. Then this morning we all learned the targeting wasn't limited to an IRS office out of Cincinnati, as the administration suggested last week, but that it reached all the way to the IRS headquarters right here in Washington.

What we don't know at this point is whether it jumped the fence from the IRS to the White House. But we do know this: We can't count on the administration to be forthcoming about the details of this scandal because so far they have been anything but. So this morning I am calling on the President to make available completely and without restriction everyone--everyone--who can answer the questions we have as to what has been going on at the IRS, who knew about it, and how high it went--no stonewalling, no more incomplete answers, no more misleading responses, no holding back witnesses no matter how senior their current or former positions. We need full transparency and we need full cooperation.

The American people deserve answers. The answers the IRS has now owned up to and that were uncovered by their own inspector general are an outrage--an absolute outrage. We now know the IRS targeted groups for using such terminology as--get this--``we the people'' and for educating folks about the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I mean, you can't make this stuff up.

What is also clear is that government officials repeatedly failed to own up to what they knew was going on--when it turns out they'd known about it since at least the middle of 2011.

So the IRS knew what was happening--yet they continued to give us

assurances that they were applying the tax rules in a fair and impartial way.

Despite repeated assurances from the Obama administration that it was not targeting its political enemies through the IRS during the last election cycle, we have now learned that the IRS was in fact singling out conservative groups--groups who dared to speak up and express their First Amendment rights.

Let's recap what happened.

Last March, after receiving multiple claims of unusual harassment by the IRS from constituents who wanted to form tax-exempt political organizations, I and several of my colleagues sent a letter to then-IRS Commissioner Shulman questioning selective enforcement on tax exempt organizations.

Now, we learn, according to the IRS' own Inspector General, that the IRS was well aware that this selective treatment was happening at the time our letter was sent, and in fact had already acted to correct what they later called ``inappropriate'' behavior.

But there was no mention of that in the IRS initial response.

Nor was there any mention of this behavior, which was by that time well-known within the agency, in a second letter sent back to us in September 2012.

We had to wait several more months--to wait for a special investigator's report that Republicans demanded--in order to find out the truth of what was actually happening at the IRS.

In the coming days we'll learn more, and we'll start getting answers to questions like: Was the IRS deliberately misleading Republican Senators, or was it betraying profound incompetence? But, as I said, the fact is, none of this would have come out if we'd relied on the administration's own word and Republicans had not demanded the truth.

Clearly, we've only started to scratch the surface of this scandal.

The American people are looking for answers, and I am determined to help them get to the bottom of this.

Last June, I gave a very public speech in which I called out the Obama administration for serial abuses of government power in going after its political enemies in the middle of a heated national election. The left scoffed at the suggestion. The Washington Post said my speech was full of ``red herrings.'' The New York Times called my argument ``bogus''. Robert Reich called it ``bonkers.''

Well, you know what we learned last week: these abuses were even more widespread than we knew.

So it is good to see even some of my Democrat colleagues now criticizing the IRS for such blatant and thuggish abuse of power. It is preferable to the silence--or, worse, encouragement--they have demonstrated in the past.

The Chairman of the Finance Committee was correct in referring to the IRS' actions as an ``outrageous abuse of power and a breach of the public's trust.'' He's vowed to ``get to the bottom'' of what happened, and he's promised that his committee will hold hearings on all this. Those hearings should be tough, and they should aim to bring the truth to light. But our Democrat friends should also acknowledge their role in inculcating this culture of intimidation, due to repeated calls for increased IRS scrutiny of groups like the very ones that were targeted.

We owe it to all Americans to get to the bottom of this scandal, hold those responsible accountable, and put the proper safeguards in place for moving forward. Because, as the President was correct in noting yesterday, one day a Republican will inhabit the Oval Office. And when he or she does, the left will want to know that they will not be harassed for having the audacity to disagree. That an agency like the IRS will return to its proper role as a completely non-partisan and apolitical institution--not a tool for an administration of one stripe to bully and intimidate those who adhere to another.

But in order for Congress to effectively perform the oversight it needs to do, the administration will have to make everyone who can answer these questions available expeditiously.

We have even more questions today than we did last year, and we are not going to accept more half-baked responses. We want the full truth this time. And we intend to get it. I yield the floor.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, I ask consent the Senator modify his request so that it not be in order for the Senate to consider a conference report that includes tax increases or reconciliation instructions to increase taxes or raise the debt limit.

I object.

Madam President, I rise today to commemorate a sad and tragic event in Kentucky history that happened 25 years ago today: on May 14, 1988, a horrific bus crash occurred on I-71 near Carrollton, KY. Twenty-seven people were killed, 24 of them children, and 34 were injured when a drunk driver traveling in the wrong direction hit the bus. It remains the worst drunk-driving crash in American history.

On this day 25 years ago, the Radcliff First Assembly of God Church in Radcliff, KY, organized a youth trip to a nearby amusement park, and drove 170 miles to Cincinnati in the church bus. The bus was full with 67 passengers. After a fun day of roller coasters and ice cream, at 10:55 that night, on the return trip, a drunk driver in a pickup truck traveling north in the southbound lane of I-71 struck the church bus directly head-on.

The impact ruptured the bus's 60-gallon gasoline tank, starting a fire which reached 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit and filled the bus with smoke. With the front door blocked by collision damage, and no emergency exits in the windows or roof, most of the survivors exited through a single emergency exit at the rear of the bus. Of the 40 survivors, only 6 escaped uninjured. Many others suffered severe burns and other injuries. And 27 lives were lost in that crash.

I want to extend my gratitude to the Kentucky State Police, who not only provided rescue efforts at the scene and crash reconstruction analysis afterwards, but were also the lead investigative agency for this tragedy, following the case through to the prosecution phase. Current Kentucky State Police Commissioner Rodney Brewer was one of the investigators who worked on the challenging case.

Remembrances and observances in honor of the victims are happening in Kentucky today, where dozens of families remain grief stricken by the senseless loss of their beloved child. Those who survived the crash are still haunted by what happened. I wish to express my deepest sympathies for the victims' families, the survivors, first responders, and all those who were touched by this tragedy. The people of Kentucky stand with you today and share your sorrow.

If any good can be said to have come from this awful event, it is that it directed national attention on driving safety, the dangers of drunk driving, and safety requirements in buses. Kentucky took the lead in responding to this tragedy by requiring school buses to have more emergency exits than the Federal standard and instituting stricter drunken driving laws.

Madam President, I know my colleagues in the Senate join me today in paying tribute to the 27 people who were killed in this bus crash, to their families who grieve today, to the surviving passengers who must still live with the nightmare of what happened, to their families, to the law enforcement officers and first responders who assisted in rescuing the passengers, and to every Kentuckian whose life was altered by the events of that fateful day.

Even today, 27 people are killed every day in America as a result of drunken driving. In 2011, drunk driving killed 9,878 on America's roads and injured over 300,000. I believe one way we can honor the memories of the victims of this terrible accident is to continue to speak out against the dangers of drunk driving and work towards its elimination. No family should have to endure the suffering that so many Kentucky families did on this day 25 years ago.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the names of the 27 crash victims be included in the Record following my remarks. I yield the floor.

Today the President plans to travel to Austin, TX. I understand his trip includes a visit to a technical high school and a chat with workers. The idea, I presume, is to show folks that the White House has once again pivoted to jobs. If you are someone who is all about the visual, then, of course, putting on a pair of goggles or showing up at a factory is a great way to at least look as though you are doing something about the situation.

Whether that means you are actually getting the job done is a different story. Unfortunately, robust job creation has been talked about a lot in this administration, even as millions remain out of work or stuck in part-time jobs.

Take a look at last month's jobs report. It was touted by the White House as proof of an economy on the mend, and surely we on this side hope that will soon be the case. We are not there yet. We only have to drill down below the top line to find a lot to be concerned about. For instance, the unemployment rate technically edged down to 7.5 percent, but it actually moved up to 8 percent in my home State of Kentucky. While the Federal rate is still pretty high, even those numbers don't tell the full story. Because so many Americans have stopped looking for work altogether, we now have the lowest labor force participation rate since Jimmy Carter.

Our actual Federal unemployment rate is nearly 11 percent. That is quite a ways off from the 5 percent or so the administration boldly predicted we would have by now if only Congress would pass the stimulus.

Consider this. If all we did was match the average of recoveries since World War II, we would have about 4 million more private sector jobs than we do today. That is how much worse this recovery is than other recoveries since the war.

Unfortunately, that is the Obama economy. I hope the President is traveling to Austin today because he is finally serious about turning that around, about changing course and implementing policies that might actually work to get the economy moving again. Given that he will be in Texas, he might want to think about developing more jobs in the energy sector. It is a huge industry--huge--not just in Texas but all across our country. His administration has the power, if it chooses, to spur more job-creating energy resource exploration and development.

There is a lot more Texas is doing right too. That is why it has been touted as a national leader in job creation. One study showed Texas, with less than 10 percent of the population, accounted for almost one- third of private sector jobs created in high-paying sectors in recent years. If the President is interested in duplicating that success at the Federal level, he might take note of the fact that policymakers in Austin have taken a very different approach from Washington when it comes to how they tax and spend.

Basically, they do less of it with no income tax, for instance, and a low ratio of spending per capita. They don't ram through laws such as ObamaCare.

I hear the President plans to hold another event tomorrow where he will claim that ObamaCare is helping women. Let me tell a story of how ObamaCare is affecting one woman, and I am sure there are many more just like her.

The Wall Street Journal recently profiled a businesswoman named Elizabeth. She is in the clothing business, and she had been hoping to hire more employees. But thanks to ObamaCare, Elizabeth is now being forced to turn to independent contractors because if she brings on just a few more people and exceeds 50 employees, the government could punish her business.

There are many other small businesswomen who will see their dreams crushed under the weight of ObamaCare's nearly 20,000 pages of regulations. There are many women in their twenties and thirties who will be unable to afford the law's massive premium increases. There are many mothers who will not be able to get by if their employers cut their hours due to ObamaCare or if they lose their jobs because of it.

Here is something else to consider. This morning, Speaker Boehner and I informed the President we will not be recommending individuals to serve on the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, as some call it, is a commission set up by ObamaCare that is charged with reducing Medicare payments to health care providers and determining what services should be available to seniors. Of course, we know that will lead to access problems, waiting lists, and denied care for seniors-- what most people would call rationing. It threatens to disproportionately affect women too.

According to the Department of Labor, women make approximately 80 percent of health care decisions for their families and are more likely to be the caregivers when a family member falls ill. That family member could be a child, could be a spouse, or, more often these days, a parent who relies on Medicare. We want to know Medicare will be there to take care of them, and we want to know those decisions will be made between patients, their families, and their physicians, not an unaccountable board of bureaucrats such as the IPAB--one that even has the power to overrule payment decisions made by Congress and signed into law by the President. That is how powerful IPAB is.

So the President should rethink the purpose of this event. I hope he will use it instead as a platform to prepare women for the actual consequences many of them will soon face under ObamaCare.

More broadly, the President needs to get out in front of this train wreck before Americans--men and women alike--are completely blindsided by it. Polling suggests that almost half of Americans are unsure how ObamaCare will affect their families. So he really needs to get out there and prepare them for what is coming.

If the President is truly concerned about jobs, then it is time for him to admit ObamaCare was a mistake and work with Congress to repeal it because we need reforms that lower the cost of care. What we don't need is a 2,700-page law and a resulting tower of redtape that will continue to kill jobs and hurt our economy.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Reserving the right to object, I ask consent that the Senator modify her request so it not be in order for the Senate to consider a conference report that includes tax increases or reconciliation instructions to increase taxes or raise the debt limit.

I object.

Later today we will welcome the President of the South Korea to address both Houses of Congress. President Park is a truly extraordinary woman, the first female chief executive of her country and, I might add, a conservative.

She is a strong leader too. I suppose that is because she endured so much in her own life; the assassination of her mother when she was only 22, the assassination of her father a few years after that, and the violent attack she herself endured in 2006.

Yet beyond a scar on her face, you would not know. She didn't recoil in fear. She threw herself right back into the rough and tumble of public life. So she is tough. I know this tenacious leader is committed to the United States-South Korea alliance which is so important to both of our countries. The transition from her predecessor, President Lee, could not have been smoother. Both his administration and hers have been true partners, especially at a time of high contention.

We welcome President Park and look forward to hearing what she has to say later today.

Mr. President, this morning I would like to say a few words about the nomination of Thomas Perez as Labor Secretary.

The Perez nomination has generated a fair amount of controversy. For those who haven't tuned in yet to the debate surrounding his nomination, I would like to take a few minutes this morning to explain why.

The first thing to say about this nomination is that neither I nor anyone else on this side of the aisle has anything against Mr. Perez personally. As a graduate of Harvard Law School, there are a lot of things he could have done other than advocate for those struggling on the fringes of our society.

Yet when it comes to a vote such as this, we have to weigh a lot more than a nominee's intentions. We have to look at how those intentions square with the higher obligation that any nominee, but especially a Cabinet nominee, has to the rule of law. It is on this point where this nomination becomes so controversial and where the deference that Senators of both parties generally grant Presidents when it comes to picking Cabinet nominees begins to break down.

By all accounts, Tom Perez is not just a man with a heart for the poor, he is a committed ideologue who appears willing, quite frankly, to say or do anything to achieve his ideological end.

His willingness, time and again, to bend or ignore the law and misstate the facts in order to advance his far-left ideology leads me and others to conclude he would continue to do so if he were confirmed to another and much more consequential position of public trust.

Take, for instance, his efforts while on the Montgomery County Council to get Canadian drugs imported to the United States. According to the Washington Post, Perez tried to get the county to import these drugs even after--even after--a top FDA official said doing so would be, in his words, ``undeniably illegal.''

What was Perez's response? ``Federal law is muddled,'' he said at the time. ``Sometimes you have to push the envelope.''

Think about that statement. ``Sometimes you have to push the envelope.'' Is that the kind of approach to Federal law we want in those we confirm to run Federal agencies? Folks who think if a Federal law is inconvenient to their ends they can simply characterize it as

unclear and use that as an excuse to do whatever they want?

If that is not a red flag for those of us who have to review a Presidential nominee, I don't know what is.

Now, again, someone might say everybody in politics has to make judgments about how a given law is to be interpreted. Those who disagree with those judgments call it pushing the envelope. Mr. Perez, however, does not merely push the envelope. All too often he circumvents or ignores a law with which he disagrees.

Here are a few examples: As a member of the Montgomery County Council, Mr. Perez pushed through a county policy that encouraged the circumvention of Federal immigration law. Later, as head of the Federal Government's top voting rights watchdog, he refused to protect the right to vote for Americans of all races, in violation of the very law he was charged to enforce.

In the same post at the Department of Justice, Perez directed the Federal Government to sue, against the advice of career attorneys in his own office. In another case involving a Florida woman who was lawfully exercising her First Amendment right to protest in front of an abortion clinic, the Federal judge who threw out Mr. Perez's lawsuit said he was ``at a loss as to why the government chose to prosecute this particular case'' in the first place.

This is what pushing the envelope means in the case of Mr. Perez--a flippant and dismissive attitude about the boundaries everyone else has to follow for the sake of the liberal causes in which he believes. In short, it means a lack of respect for the rule of law and a lack of respect for the need of those in positions of power to follow it.

Just as troubling, however, is the fact that Mr. Perez has been called to account for his failures to follow the law, and he has been less than forthright about his actions when called to account. When he testified that politics played no role in his office's decision not to pursue charges against members of a far-left group who may have tried to prevent others from voting, for instance, the Department's own watchdog said ``Perez's testimony did not reflect the entire story.'' And a Federal judge said the evidence before him ``appear[ed] to contradict . . . Perez's testimony.''

Perez has also made misleading statements about this case under oath--under oath--to Congress and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

Mr. Perez's involvement in an alleged quid pro quo deal with the city of St. Paul, MN, also fits the pattern. Here was a case where Perez was allegedly so concerned about a potential Supreme Court challenge to the legality of a theory he championed in housing discrimination suits known as ``disparate impact,'' he quietly worked out a deal with St. Paul officials whereby they would withdraw their appeal to the Supreme Court of a disparate impact case if he arranged for the Federal Government to throw out two whistleblower complaints against St. Paul that could have recovered millions of dollars for the taxpayers that had been falsely obtained. The two whistleblowers' complaints were dropped, and the Supreme Court never heard the disparate impact case.

Perez told investigators he hadn't even heard of the disparate impact case until the Court initially decided to hear it. But that has been contradicted by HUD Deputy Assistant Secretary Sara Pratt, who told investigators she and Mr. Perez discussed the case well before that.

Taken together, all of this paints the picture, for me at least, not of a passionate liberal who sees himself as patiently operating within the system and through the democratic process to advance a particular set of strongly held beliefs but a crusading ideologue whose conviction about his own rightness on the issues leads him to believe the law does not apply to him. Unbound by the rules that apply to everyone else, Perez seems to view himself as free to employ whatever means--whatever means--at his disposal, legal or otherwise, to achieve his ideological goals.

To say this is problematic would be an understatement. As Secretary of Labor, Perez could be handling numerous contentious issues and implementing many politically sensitive laws, including laws enforcing the disclosure of political activity by labor unions. Perez's devotion to the cause of involuntary universal voter registration is also deeply concerning to me personally, and I would imagine many of my colleagues in the Senate also believe in the absolute centrality of maintaining the integrity of the vote.

Americans of all political persuasions have the right to expect the head of such a sensitive department, whether appointed by a Republican or Democrat, will implement and follow the law in a fair and reasonable way. I do not believe they could expect as much from Mr. Perez.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Reserving the right to object, I ask the Senator to modify his request so it not be in order for the Senate to consider a conference report that includes tax increases or reconciliation instructions to increase taxes or raise the debt limit.

I object.