Floor Statements

Mr. President, I move to proceed to the consideration of S. Con. Res. 36.

Mr. President, this year there will be no budget presented by the Republicans or the Democrats. I think that is a bad idea. I think the government should have a budget. There should be a document that says what we are for, what we are against, and how we are going to spend our money. I think it is particularly important because we are incurring so much debt.

We may remember when Republicans campaigned against enormous spending by President Obama and $1 trillion annual deficits. Now we are faced with enormous spending and $1 trillion annual deficits from Republicans. I think it is important that we have a discussion about this.

Do we have too much debt? Some will say: Well, I have debt for my house, and that is not bad. The country has a lot of debt that they borrow against capital expenditures--things that don't expire. I think there is some truth to that. You can have a manageable amount of debt, particularly if it is against something you are borrowing that doesn't go away. But if you are borrowing money for the grocery store or for your apartment, that might be a bad thing. It will not last very long. You will do it for a month or two, and pretty soon the bank will come calling. So there is a point at which debt is too cumbersome, and there is too much of it.

Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard did a study linking debt to economic growth. They concluded that when a country exceeds 90 percent of their GDP, when their debt is almost

equal to their GDP, economic growth begins to slow, and you lose probably 1 to 2 points just because of the burden of the debt. This is all of the debt--what the government owes to the public at large and to themselves. They said that when it exceeds 90 percent, it is a problem. Currently, our debt is at 105 percent; our gross public debt is 105 percent of our GDP.

We now have a national debt of about $21 trillion. Historically, Congress had sort of a cover on this. Congress would try to rein in the debt. There would be a big debate every time we raised the debt ceiling. Congress would have to lift it each time, and there was some punishment out there for those who voted to raise the debt ceiling.

Now we don't raise the debt ceiling by a certain amount because that became embarrassing and limiting, making them come back each time to try to raise the debt ceiling. Now what we do is raise it for a period of time.

Currently, the debt ceiling has been raised, and you can spend as much as you want for a little over a year. We did it, I believe, back in December. For about 1\1/2\ years, the government can borrow as much as they can possibly borrow for that period of time. Basically, there is no limit. The debt ceiling vote has become a meaningless vote because we just raise it for a period of time.

Is the debt a problem? How much interest do we pay on the debt? We pay $300 billion in interest. You say: Well, is that a problem? Paying on the interest crowds out other things that you want from the government. So when people come to my office and say ``I want this from my government,'' I say ``Well, part of the problem is we are paying $300 billion in interest, and part of the problem is we don't have anything to give you because we are borrowing about 25 percent of every dollar we spend.''

Every time the government spends a dollar, 25 percent of that is borrowed. This is on current accounts of things people want. For example, if I were to ask you: Is it a good idea to borrow money to give to your church? People say: Well, my church is a good thing, and I want to give money to my church. But is it a good idea and will it last very long if you go to the bank to borrow 25 percent of every dollar you spend and tithe 25 percent to your church? You say: My church is a good thing. But is it a good thing to borrow that money, and will the bank keep loaning you that money, and are there repercussions to having so much debt?

We have a $300 billion interest payment at about a 2-percent interest rate. The interest rate is manipulated by the Federal Reserve, and there are those who report that the main reason the interest rates are kept low by the Federal Reserve is not necessarily to stimulate economic growth; it is to finance this enormous burden of debt.

What happens when interest rates normalize? Many are predicting they will. As economic growth begins to pick up, you are going to see an acceleration in interest rates. What happens at 5 percent? Can we even manage our debt at 5 percent?

People have looked at what the interest will be, even saying interest rates stay stable, and they say that within about a decade, interest rates will exceed all other payments of the government. The estimate is that within 10 years, interest payments alone will be about $761 billion--greater than national defense, greater than any other area of the budget. Even now, the second biggest item in the budget after defense is interest.

So some say: But we have to finance the military, and the military needs more money. That is why you hear Republicans now no longer caring about the debt. They got more money for the military, but they had to make an unholy alliance with Democrats and give them more for social welfare. So we have guns and butter. Everybody gets what they want-- except for the taxpayer and those of us who care about the debt.

So the debt has exploded now under Republican control. You say: Well, don't we need it for the military?

Well, I think there are some arguments we should probably engage in before we decide that. We have doubled the amount in nominal terms that we spend on the military since 9/11. In real terms, there is about a 36-percent increase in national defense. We spend more on the military than the next eight countries combined.

There is an argument that it isn't necessarily that the budget has not grown enough, but it is that maybe the military mission is too large. Maybe it is not that the budget is too small but that our military mission is too large, that we are at war in too many places around the globe and that we should reassess that.

Many Republicans will say: Well, that is all good and well, but really the culprit is entitlements.

Entitlements are growing at 6 percent--Social Security, Medicare, food stamps. There is truth to that, but watch closely the people who tell you that the problem is entitlements and ask yourself if they are doing anything to fix entitlements. Ask them whether they have put forward a bill on the floor of the Senate to rein in spending and entitlements. Ask them whether they have even cosponsored a bill or whether they are agitating for a bill to rein in entitlements. No. They are petrified of looking at entitlements. So everybody complains about it, and nobody does anything about it.

Everybody says they are for a balanced budget. Yet, when we have a vote in a few minutes on a budget that actually balances in 5 years, consistent with the balanced budget amendment, I think we will get a handful--maybe a dozen or maybe two dozen. But the majority of Republicans will say: Oh my goodness, we could never cut spending. So in the abstract, they are for a balanced budget. They are for a balanced budget amendment. They will all vote for it. They will all come down here. I think we had a unanimous vote a few years ago. Republicans all voted for the balanced budget amendment. Just a month ago in the House, all the people who voted to bust the budget caps, all the people who voted for the extra spending, all these Republicans then voted for the balanced budget amendment, which says you have to balance in 5 years. Typically, when they have brought forward a budget, they have tried to balance it in 10 years and struggled. So they vote for a balanced budget amendment that balances in 5 years, and yet they struggle to come up with a budget that is not fake to balance in 10 years.

We passed a budget last year. It was a Republican budget. I voted against it because I think it had fake cuts in it, and it had fake reporting, and they weren't serious about it. I will give an example. The budget last year that the Republicans passed had about $4 trillion in entitlement savings over 10 years. You say: Well, did they enact any of that? Zero. Do they have any bills to do any entitlement reform? Zero. Did we ever debate and vote on any bills that would have done anything to entitlement spending? No. In fact, in the first year of the Republican budget last year, there was $96 billion--that is a significant savings--all in entitlements, and yet nobody had a bill that even went to committee. There was never a committee vote. There was never a floor vote. No one lifted a finger to do anything about entitlement spending.

So it is a canard for those who say: Well, the real problem is not military; the real problem is not nonmilitary discretionary; the real problem is entitlements. Sure, entitlements are growing faster, but unless we are doing something about it, it is simply saying: Oh, we have to keep spending over here because the real problem is over here, but we are not going to do anything over here, which runs into really the hypocrisy that we face today.

I have often said that the Republican Party is an empty vessel unless we imbue it with value. We say we are against big spending. We say we are against big government. We say we are for devolving power, structure, and money back to the States. Yet the government grows under Democrats and it grows under Republicans.

Democrats are sometimes more honest about wanting to grow government. They will go home and say they are going to make government big enough to put a ham on every table, a chicken in every pot. They are a little bit more honest about it. Republicans go home and say they believe in the free market. They go to the Rotary Club and say: Well, I voted for the balanced budget amendment. But the question is, Why won't they vote for an actual budget that balances? Why won't they

vote for a budget that actually is consistent with the balanced budget amendment?

So what I have done is put forward my own budget. It is something I have talked about for several years now. It wasn't originally my idea; others have talked about it. It is called the penny plan. It says that we would cut one penny out of every dollar the Federal Government spends--1 percent. Could we not get to a point where we could actually cut one penny out of every dollar? Isn't there enough waste going on in government that we could actually cut a penny out of every dollar?

Like everything else, people argue the numbers. There is a lot of fake math that goes on around here. Those on the left will say, oh, but this will be cutting $13 trillion, when, in fact, it might not cut any. For example, if we were to freeze government spending for 10 years, the left would say: You have cut spending by $15 trillion because we were going to increase spending by $15 trillion. So it is sort of fake accounting. If we spend $3.2 trillion and next year we spend $32 billion less, that is a 1-percent cut, but the left will say: Oh, no, we were going to increase spending by 6 percent, and so you are really cutting spending by 7 percent. This enormous number comes up, but in reality, we are taking last year's spending--3.2 trillion--and we are going to cut it by 1 percent, $30 billion. If we do that every year for 5 years, the budget balances.

You say: Well, some people might not get all their money. Yes, there would be some programs across government that would get less. I challenge any American to call up my office and present proof that there is not 1 percent waste and fraud in any program going on. I will give an example. The earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit are estimated to have 25 percent fraud. For years, you could get this credit without a Social Security number. You could simply say: My kids and I don't have one. The government would generate a taxpayer ID number for you and give you a refund. This is to the tune of billions of dollars. It is about $100 billion in the EITC, the earned-income tax credit, and the additional child credit--many of those going to people who were in our country illegally and had no Social Security number.

There is waste from top to bottom in government. How would you ever find it? See, many people in this body on both sides of the aisle will say: I am for rooting out waste. Yet you never find waste if you keep giving them more money. If you reward government agencies with more money, you are never going to get less waste.

The penny plan budget I am presenting would cut 1 percent. Does anybody in America think government couldn't do with 1 percent less? Many American families have had a bad year here and there and have to deal with more than 1 percent less. One percent of this enormous government, if it were cut each year, would go a long way toward making us a stronger nation.

People say: Well, what about the military? I think that if the government ran a balanced budget, we would have a stronger and more secure nation. Admiral Mullen said he thought the No. 1 threat to our national security was actually our debt. So there are many realistic people, even high-ranking people in the military, who are saying: You know what, if we want to secure our Nation, we have to make sure that we have a sound economy and that we have a sound government that is not borrowing so much money.

How rapidly do we borrow money? We borrow $1 million every minute--$1 million a minute. In fact, it is a little bit higher than that now. It is about $1.5 million, and the curve over the next 10 years gets to about $2 million a minute. Imagine how fast the money is flying out of here. How big is $1 million? People have said that if you put hundred- dollar bills in your hand, it is about 4 inches high to get to $1 million. We are borrowing $1 million or more every minute.

How would we get to $30 billion? How could we possibly cut $30 billion from the budget? I will give examples of where some of the money is.

Foreign aid is about $30 billion. You say: Well, I want to help the poor people in the world. I am all for you. If you want to give out of your savings to help poor people around the world, all the benefit and all the accolades for being generous, but if you want to borrow money, you won't be able to do it for very long.

Should the U.S. Government borrow? We are going to borrow $1 trillion this year. Should we borrow money to send it to poor countries, or should we borrow money to send armaments to countries? I think it is a big mistake. That is about $30 billion. So if you were to cut 1 percent next year, you could actually cut 1 percent by simply eliminating foreign aid.

How much do we spend in Afghanistan building their roads, building their bridges, building their schools before they blow them up again and then we rebuild them again? We have rebuilt some buildings in Afghanistan seven times. That is nearly $50 billion, which is about a year, year and a half, of the penny plan right there if we were to say: Guess what. We won the Afghan war, and we are not going to stay forever. We have some needs here at home that we are going to take care of and not send all that money to Afghanistan.

Corporate welfare. Rich corporations in our country--I am all for them. If they freely sell something to you and they make money because you like their product and buy it, more power to them, but if they want money from the Federal Government, that is ridiculous. I don't think private business should be getting any money from the Federal Government. It is estimated that corporate welfare is over $100 billion. I know for certain that we could find enough corporate welfare that we could actually, by eliminating corporate welfare, do 1 year of the penny plan.

Waste. Our office alone has found $3 billion in waste.

Interest. It is $300 billion, going up to $760 billion.

There are a lot of areas in our government that we could actually look at and actually adhere to the penny plan and balance our budget. I would like to go through a few items.

If there is anybody in America who believes their government is not wasting their money, I would like to show them a few areas where the government is wasting their money.

My staff recently went to Afghanistan. This is a picture of a luxury hotel that your taxpayer dollars went to build. Your first question might be why your taxpayer dollars would be going to a luxury hotel in some Third World country. It is about 400 feet from our Embassy, and this is what it looks like. They have been building it for 11 years, and it is unfinished. Nothing was done to code, it is falling down, and at this point, the hotel is so dangerous that we have to send our soldiers to patrol it to make sure snipers aren't using the hotel to shoot at our Embassy. So it is not only a waste of $90 million, never having been completed, but it is now a danger to our troops. The talk now is on how they are going to fix the problem.

Does anybody in Washington think we should spend less in Afghanistan? Virtually no one. Both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, can't spend money fast enough in Afghanistan. No one is making a stand and saying: Enough is enough. It is time to announce that we won, and it is time to come home. The money just keeps going, good money after bad--$90 million for a hotel that will never be built.

To add insult to injury, do you know what they are going to do now? They are talking about selling the unfinished hotel. Do you know who they are going to sell it to? Another branch of government. So government built this--U.S. taxpayer dollars built this--and now they are going to sell it to the State Department. Do you know what the State Department is going to do with this luxury hotel in Kabul? They are going to tear it down. So that is $90 million flushed down the toilet.

You can't tell me this waste isn't rotting in our government from top to bottom, and it is never rooted out. Why? Because we never give any agency less money; everybody gets more money. If you are running an agency or business and someone gives you more money, are you more likely to root out waste or less likely to root out waste? The only way they would ever root out waste is if they got a commandment--thou shalt do this--from Congress, from the Senate, to say: Enough is

enough. Let's declare victory and come home.

This hotel--$90 million flushed down the toilet. It is now a danger to our troops, and they are going to tear it down. It was never completed.

Also, in Afghanistan, there is brandnew equipment that we send over there that is shredded. They have big, huge industrial shredders. My staff saw them. They found boxes of new equipment--electrical outlet boxes, all kinds of things--being shoved into the shredder. So we buy brandnew equipment, and it is shoved into the shredder. There is $50 million of brandnew, never-used equipment that has been destroyed. This doesn't even count the old stuff we are destroying. There are reports that $7 billion--7 with a ``b,'' billion dollars--of used equipment, such as tanks, humvees, et cetera, has been destroyed. Why? Our allies are so unreliable, we are afraid that if we leave a tank or a humvee there, it might be taken by the opposition and used against us. So we have destroyed $7 billion of it because it is cheaper to destroy it than to load it on planes and bring it over here. That is $7 billion.

The Department of Defense loses $29 million of heavy equipment. What does that mean? They can't find it. It can't be accounted for. They don't know where the equipment is. There is $29 million unaccounted for in heavy equipment.

They tried to establish an Afghan equivalent for the Army Corps of Engineers and lost $20 million of heavy equipment in the process.

There is $28 million worth of uniforms that are missing. Someone got paid. We can't find the uniforms. We can't prove that anyone ever got the uniforms.

Even more troubling than that, there was $700,000 worth of ammunition missing. You would think we could at least keep up with ammunition. Do you think that might be a danger and an insult to our young men and women we send to Afghanistan, that we can't account for where the ammunition is? I think if you can't account for it, there is a decent chance the enemy has your ammunition or rogue elements in the Afghan Government--which could be anyone--have sold it on the black market to make money.

Where does your money go? I want you to realize as Americans where your money is going. They spent $500,000 to study if selfies make you happier. You take selfies of yourself smiling, then you look at them to see if that makes you happier. Now, you may want to do this on your own time, but do you want to spend $500,000 of taxpayer money when we are a trillion dollars short?

This stuff has been going on with the National Science Foundation since the 1970s. William Proxmire was a Senator back in the 1970s--a conservative Democrat or a Democrat of some stripe. He used to do the Golden Fleece Award. Many of them went to the National Science Foundation around 1972. He complained about it for 10 years before he retired. I have been complaining about it for 6 years.

What do the Republicans and Democrats do? They say: Oh, it is science. You wouldn't know, sir, about science. We have to give them more money. You are not smart enough to know there is a lot of science in taking selfies. We could learn something really important, and it is so important for the future of mankind to learn whether selfies of people smiling will help the world in the end.

NIH. Everybody loves the NIH. They can do no wrong. NIH did a $2 million study to see whether, if you are following somebody in the cafeteria line and the guy or woman in front of you sneezes on the food, you are more or less likely to take the food. Really? I think we could have polled the audience on that. I mean, how ridiculous is that? Money like that--particularly when there are things the government needs to do. There is a trillion-dollar deficit, and we spend $2 million studying what your reaction is to people sneezing on the food?

Then $356,000 of your money was spent studying whether Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. These guys have some great studies. This is, once again, I believe, the National Science Foundation. Hurray for the National Science Foundation. I know I am going to get hate mail from them. They spent $356,000 to study whether Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. You can't make this stuff up.

The reform I have proposed is that we have a taxpayer advocate on the committee to determine who gets these grants. Do you know what they say? We can't have any nonscientists. They wouldn't understand the science. I want the scientist who did this to come forward and explain why we need this study. There is no point to us spending this money. There could have been something better.

I offered one thing to try to fix it. Put a taxpayer advocate on the committee approving grants, and I think we should have a scientist who isn't in that field. This is sort of behavioral science for Japanese quail, I guess. We need to have somebody who studies diabetes, heart disease, cancer, AIDS--some of the diseases that affect more people. They need to be on the committee because they need to be scratching their heads saying: We can spend it on Japanese quail and their sexual habits or we can spend it on diabetes. The taxpayer advocate could say: We can spend it on Japanese quail or maybe we can reduce the debt. Maybe both could happen. Maybe we could reduce the debt and try to do only better scientific projects.

This one looks like something you really want your government to spend money on. They spent $150,000 to investigate supernatural events in Alaska. They can look at unexplained lights, animals with transformative powers, all kinds of different mythological animals, landscape features that had special powers, and, of course, you wouldn't want to leave out sea monsters. People say: What is $150,000? That is the problem with government. Milton Friedman had it right when he said: ``Nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as he spends his own.'' Why does nobody care about the $150,000? Because it wasn't their money to spend. This is the problem with government at-large and why the government is never good at anything they do. They are terribly ineffective because they are spending somebody else's money.

Government should be so small that they have less room to make errors like this. We should devolve most of the power of this place back to the States. That is what our Founding Fathers intended, and we should try to say we are not going to tolerate this kind of stuff.

This $250,000 was spent to send 24 kids from Pakistan to Space Camp and Dollywood. My first question would be: Is there anybody in America who didn't get to go to Dollywood or Space Camp last year? I think when everybody in America has gone, we might consider sending some Pakistani kids. Frankly, there is nothing in the Constitution that says we should be sending Pakistani kids to Dollywood. There is nothing wrong if you want to send your kids from Pakistan to Dollywood--by all means. You should not take taxpayer money to do things like this.

May I ask the Presiding Officer how much time I have remaining of my 45 minutes?

Thank you.

This is here in Washington, about a mile from here. We call it a ``Streetcar Named Waste.'' Spending $1.6 million to study the expansion of the DC streetcar--and this is a streetcar that nobody is actually riding on. It is a ghost car. Nobody is riding on it. It goes nowhere. It goes about a mile, from nowhere to nowhere, and is much slower than walking. I walked, and I can outwalk it. We thought about filming me in a race with the streetcar to see who wins, me walking or it driving; once again, going back to some technology from hundreds of years ago that still requires wires to be running down the street, and it is really not a useful expense of government money. DC gets a lot of Federal money.

Where else do they spend your money? This is one of my favorites. I just can't even imagine who spent this money. When I tell you, you will say: Certainly, that person was fired. No way. He works for the Federal Government. Nobody is ever fired in the Federal Government. They spent $700,000 to study what Neil Armstrong said when he landed on the Moon. Did he say, ``One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,'' or did he say, ``One small step for a man''? They wanted to

study whether the preposition ``a'' was mentioned by Neil Armstrong or whether he said: ``One small step for man.'' Where did the money come from? The grant was originally supposed to be for autism. We can debate whether the Federal Government should be involved in that. It sounds like a much more just study if it had something to do with autism than studying Neil Armstrong's statement on the Moon.

You can't make this stuff up. This is incredibly ridiculous, but it should be insulting. There should not be a taxpayer at home in America who says: All right. Today they are going to vote on a budget to cut one penny out of every dollar. We spent $700,000 on what Neil Armstrong did or did not say on the Moon. You know what their conclusion at the end was? They don't know. It is inconclusive. They listened to the tape over and over again. Someone should be fired.

It also should be a message to our body that we should cut some spending. Instead, we have done the opposite. Under Republican control of the Senate and the House, we busted the budget caps by $300 billion just 2 months ago. Part of what my plan would do would be to restore the caps. They are put in place for a reason, to try to control our proclivity to spend too much money. We put the budget caps in place, then we cut 1 percent a year--about $30 billion every year for 5 years, and then the government would begin to grow again at about 1 percent.

I know we could live within our means. What would happen is this guy would be fired, and that kind of study would not happen when they have 1 percent less. Maybe a program like the National Science Foundation would get 50 percent less or 75 percent less to really put them on notice that we are tired, after 30 years of crazy research, of them continuing without reform.

This was also spent in Afghanistan. This is your money. They used $850,000 to set up a televised cricket league. The first problem is, most people don't have TVs in Afghanistan. Really, a televised cricket league? They don't even have TVs to watch it on. This is $850,000 to make them feel better about their National Cricket League. Boondoggle. It has nothing to do with national defense. It makes us weaker by putting us further into debt.

Will this get better if we continue to increase money? No, it only gets worse. If you give them more money, they will spend it. In fact, we have studied spending at the end of the year. When you get to the end of the year, the government spends money four to five times faster than any other month in the year. The last 30 days of the fiscal year spending increases every day. In fact, on the last day of the fiscal year, you can watch spending accelerate as the Sun sets in the West. As offices begin to close in the East, the spending shifts to the Midwest. As the Sun sets farther in the western sky and the offices are still open in California, they are spending money as fast as they can. If they don't spend it, they will not get it next year--use it or lose it.

It is a phenomenon of government that has been going on forever. This kind of stuff happens. As long as you give them more money, they will do it. As long as they are rewarded for doing the spending, we should study which agencies do it. We should study which agencies go to Las Vegas and have their conference there for a million dollars, sipping champagne in a hot tub. That agency should get less money. I think those people actually did get fired--one of the few people ever fired.

We could have a debate on another occasion about climate change, but we probably agree that a $450,000 app for your phone so you can play a climate change game that will, I guess, attempt to convince you and ensure that you are convinced that we are having climate change-- $450,000 for an app on a phone. Apps are everywhere. People are developing them all the time. Government doesn't need to be spending $450,000 for what somebody probably spends $1,000 in their garage to develop.

Remember ObamaCare, when they tried to set up the website with millions of dollars, and then it failed? Remember the IRS just 3 weeks ago failing? We need to be very careful about giving government more money.

The budget I am introducing is called the penny plan budget. It cuts one penny out of every dollar. This is important for the country to see we are having this vote. They are not that excited to have this vote. We are only having this vote because the Senate rules basically mandate it. It can't be avoided because Republicans didn't create a budget. Democrats didn't create a budget. So I decided, what the heck, I will create my own budget.

The penny plan budget has come forward. If we were to pass this, there are many good things. Through a simple majority, we could do many good things that conservative Republicans have wanted, like make the tax cuts permanent, and get rid of more regulations. We could do the REINS Act, which would say, new regulations that are very expensive have to be voted on by Congress. We should cut out more waste. There are all kinds of things we could do.

What we have chosen to do in our budget is actually give instructions to expand health savings accounts. One of the big problems we have in healthcare is rising costs. Costs are going up about 25 percent a year. The answer around here has been, I think, lame, uneducated, ill- informed, and counterproductive. Other than that, they are right on target. What they are trying to say is: Oh, your individual rates are going up 25 percent a year. Here is some money so you can pay for it. It does nothing to bring the curve down. It may accelerate the curve. If you subsidize something, it will become more expensive. You are subsidizing the demand for it. We ought to expand health savings accounts where people pay for their healthcare. People say: I don't want to pay for my healthcare. When you pay--when you have skin in the game--you ask the price of things. When the government pays or somebody else pays, you don't ask the price of things, and the price rises.

Competition is the fundamental aspect of capitalism, but you have to have freely fluctuating prices, which we don't in Medicare, Medicaid, and actually mostly private insurance. We have never really adjusted the fundamental problem of healthcare, which is that we don't have capitalism in healthcare.

What do we do? Because we don't have enough capitalism, we take more capitalism away and add more government, and it is more broken since we have done Obamacare. One of the answers--since many Republicans will not vote to repeal ObamaCare--is let us try to start expanding the marketplace.

My budget today could pass if every Republican voted for it. If it passes, we could move on to doing something like expanding the health savings accounts. This gets to an argument that is an inside baseball argument that happens in Washington. They will tell you: Young man, you must vote for our budget because the budget is simply a vehicle to do other good things. I look back at him and say: If it is a vehicle, and you don't care what is in it, why not put something good in it? We always put something crappy in it that never works, never balances, and does not represent who we are as a party. They shove it down our throat and say: Vote for it. You have to do it because that is the only way to get to a tax cut. That is the only way we get to repeal ObamaCare, although they are not really for that anymore. But the thing is, they can do it by voting for something they actually are for. Everyone in our caucus is for the balanced budget amendment. If we put it forward on the floor, they will all vote for it, but there will not be enough votes for it to be law, so it is a free vote. This would be the actual platform, the actual symbol of what we run on and what we do next year. Yet we will not have a chance to do that unless they are willing to do it.

They want the budget to be meaningless. They want it to be a vehicle, but then they want it to be their meaningless symbol, and I can't do that. I think there has to be someone left in the Republican Party who says enough is enough. We are not going to not tolerate the waste, spending, and debt, and we are going to say the same things we said to President Obama: Big government spending and debt are wrong.

I don't think we should change this because we are in power. When the Republican Party is out of power, they are the conservative party. But the

problem is, when the Republican Party is in power, there is no conservative party. What I am arguing for today is that we should be who we say we are. I urge a ``yes'' vote on the penny plan budget.

Madam President, I will reserve the remainder of my time if I can get an update of what I have left.

Perfect. Thank you.

I will reserve the bulk of my time that is remaining and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, shortly, we will be voting on the penny plan budget. This is a budget that cuts one penny out of every dollar.

As we have gone through time and again, we have seen that there is so much waste in government, from $700,000 spent studying Neil Armstrong's statement on the Moon--did he say ``one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind,'' or did he say ``one small step for a man''? We spent $700,000 trying to discover whether Neil Armstrong said ``a man'' or just ``man.'' It is a complete boondoggle, a complete waste of money. But does it get better? No, because we keep giving people more money.

Some have come to the floor and said: Well, this is just an end- around attempt to cut military spending. We can't cut any military spending.

That is simply not true. The penny plan budget says nothing about cutting military spending. The penny plan budget says this: We cut 1 percent of the budgetary spending. Where it is cut in the budget is left up to the appropriations committees. It could be cut equally, or it could be cut more in some areas and less in other areas. We could cut some from military; we could cut zero from military. It is left up to the appropriators.

Some would argue: Well, it doesn't define where it would come from.

Well, that is the job of the appropriators and the job of the Senate to vote up or down on it.

To those who argue that unlimited spending for the military is good for our national security, they might want to think about whether there is a possible problem in that China has $1 trillion worth of our debt.

Let's say for some reason there was a conflict in the South China Sea and we were somehow involved militarily there. What if China were to say: We are going to dump your dollars. We are going to dump your Treasury bills.

Could they wreak havoc, dumping $1 trillion? Yes. Would it hurt their assets? Yes, but it could be used as a weapon against the United States.

Our insecurity is our enormous debt--$21 trillion.

In some ways, the budget vote is symbolism, but the question is whether that symbolism will be who we are as a Republican Party or whether that symbolism will be that we are simply the same as the Democrats, that we simply don't care about the debt, we don't care that interest on the debt is the second biggest item.

After the Defense Department--about $700 billion--the next biggest item is $300 billion in interest. What happens when interest rates rise? The Federal Reserve has artificially kept interest rates low. What about when interest rates go to 5 percent? Could that happen? Yes. Could it be precipitated by a foreign nation no longer buying our debt? Yes.

If interest rates were to go to 5 percent currently, I don't know that we would be able to manage our debt. That would probably be a doubling of our interest payment, or more--$600 billion. If we do nothing and the Federal Reserve is able to keep our interest rates in the 2 percent range, interest rates will still be about the same as the Department of Defense within 10 years. The Department of Defense is about $700 billion, and it will grow probably to $800-and-some-odd billion, but interest rates will be $761 billion within a decade. If that is not a threat to our national security, I don't know what is.

Really what we have is a threat to our honor as public servants who make promises to voters. We came to power in Washington because we said President Obama spent too much and borrowed too much. We said it over and over and over again until voters chose us. But what if, when we come into power, we forget who we are? When Republicans are in the minority, they are the conservative party. The problem is that when the Republicans become the majority, there is no conservative party.

What I am arguing for today is to cut one penny out of every dollar. There is waste from top to bottom in every department of government, including the military.

Defense Logistics--they build stuff. They have $800 million they say is missing.

Defense spending or military spending in Afghanistan--$700 million of ammunition missing. Do we think that might be a little bit worrisome given all the different characters in the Afghan civil war? There is $700 million in ammunition that cannot be accounted for and $28 million in uniforms that cannot be accounted for.

They built a $45 million gas station in Afghanistan, but it is for natural gas. The first problem is that they don't have cars in Afghanistan. The second problem is that none of them run on natural gas. So how did we fix that problem? We bought them cars. We bought them cars that run on natural gas, and they still couldn't afford the gas, so we gave them credit cards. How moronic are we as a people to keep flushing money down a rat hole in Afghanistan--nearly $50 billion.

What I am asking is that we cut 1 percent--1 penny out of every dollar.

Could we save some in the military? Absolutely. Is this done to punish the military? No. It is to make us stronger as a country. Could the military suffer a 1-percent cut and actually become more efficient? Absolutely. It is not a question of whether our military budget is too big or too small; it is a question of whether our military mission is

too large. We are at war in half a dozen countries or more. We have 6,000 troops in Africa, and I would suspect that there is not one person in 1,000 in America who knows whom we are fighting or why we are fighting in Africa.

But that is not really what this is about. It is about spending in every department of government. It is about whether one penny out of every dollar is being wasted.

People say: I am against the waste. I am against all the waste. I am against the study on Japanese quail to see if they are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. I am against the Neal Armstrong study on whether he said one man on the Moon or just man on the Moon.

The thing is, we can't get rid of waste unless we actually reduce top-line spending because nobody has any incentive to do it.

When the sequester first came into place, even though people didn't like it, people throughout government began finding savings. You cannot get rid of waste in government if you keep giving people more money.

The National Science Foundation has wasted millions and millions of dollars over a 30-year history. William Proxmire first reported in the early 1970s, and he said that one of the first studies was $50,000-- back then, that was more money than it is now--to study why men like women. Really? That is a good use of taxpayer funds?

This year, we will spend $1 trillion we don't have. There will be nearly a $1 trillion deficit this year. That is what we complained about under President Obama, was big, annual $1 trillion deficits. Are we going to be the party that is actually true to what we say we are for, that we are fiscally conservative? Can we not cut one penny out of every dollar?

So I implore my colleagues to think long and hard about this vote. Think about how the people at home would want you to vote. You have gone home and said you were for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. The balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, which virtually all of my Republican colleagues voted for, says we will balance the budget in 5 years. Well, we are either honest and serious or we are not. So if you can vote for a balanced budget amendment that balances the budget, why would you not vote for a budget that balances in 5 years?

I will finish in a few minutes.

It is a canard to say that the cut is coming from the military. The cut is a 1-percent cut. It is $3.2 trillion spent, and it is $32 billion that would be cut. Every year, we send $30 billion to foreign countries that hate us. We spend nearly $50 billion in Afghanistan every year. If we were simply looking at the Department of Commerce-- $14 billion--and the Department of Education--$70 billion--I think we could find $30 billion that we would never know was gone.

The bottom line is whether the debt is threatening our national security, whether it is threatening the security of the economic foundation of our country, and I think without question it is.

This vote is a litmus test for conservatives. Are you a conservative? Do you think we could cut one penny out of every dollar? I think it is a conservative notion that we have long said we are for. Now it is time to step up to the plate and actually vote what you say you stand for.

With that, I yield back my time and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I first visited America's Finest Filters in 2015, after hearing about the incredible work this small business was doing in serving the members of Louisville's community. Founded by Michael White and now run by his daughter TaHondra Johnson, America's Finest Filters believes in the power of second chances and makes a conscious effort to employ ex-offenders, who currently make up over half of their employees.

What America's Finest Filters understands is that breaking the cycle of poverty, incarceration, and addiction can be done through providing opportunities for meaningful work and taking responsibility. When I visited with their employees, I listened to many stories of those who turned their lives around because America's Finest Filters gave them the tools to succeed.

April is also Second Chance Month, which is why I am proud to recognize this business for giving second chances to those who so truly deserve them. I am also recognizing this business in honor of late founder Michael White, who sadly lost his battle with cancer in 2016. He set a true example of what it means to be a role model and leader, and his philanthropic achievements and impact on the community will never be forgotten.

Mr. President, what we have experienced today is a long debate about how we should spend our money, and I have said repeatedly that this is a terrible, rotten, no-good way to spend your money. It is a terrible way to budget your money.

It is a terrible thing to sort of lurch from deadline to deadline. Basically, Congress lurches all the way to a deadline. We approach midnight, and we are either up or down on some bill that is decided by a few people but not by the vast majority. So Congress basically lurches from deadline to deadline, and then Congress waits until the last minute and then gloms all of the spending together in one enormous bill. When that bill comes forward, though, at the very last minute, we are told that we don't have enough time to debate and amend the bill, so no one really is allowed to participate in the process other than a few folks behind closed doors. The consequences of this have not been good, I think, for the country.

All day long, what we have been requesting and what I have been asking for is simply 15 minutes to have one amendment, and my amendment would have said that we should live within our means, that we should live within the budgetary caps we have set and try not to add too much debt. We were denied this amendment even though we have had plenty of time. We probably had time for 40 or 50 amendments today had we actually allowed this to happen.

But make no mistake--the result of this bill today is a bipartisan looting of the Treasury. We are going to now have a bill that will expand spending across the board and will lead to trillion-dollar annual deficits. But it doesn't have to be that way. I think the Senate, if it actually tried harder, could do the right thing. If we were passing individual appropriations bills, no one Senator would ever stop anything, would ever be able to shut down anything. If we had done our job, the appropriations bills would have already been passed or be in the process of passing for the following year, and I think it just takes willpower to do it. Everybody you talk to says: Oh yeah, we should do it that way. Everybody sort of quietly says: This is the last time I am voting for a CR or for one of these enormous spending bills. Yet we are on our fourth one this year.

Even though I have great complaints about how much debt is going to be added with this, I think we also are finding that we will have another one of these in a month. So really I think that is what is disconcerting to a lot of us, is that we don't go through the process of actually looking for waste in government, going through the committee process, and spending the money more wisely.

Earlier today, I went through a series of wasteful projects that are out there. Many of them are very similar to wasteful projects that William Proxmire had started noticing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet we still have many of that same waste that goes on and on and on.

Only four times in the last 42 years has Congress actually passed all the appropriations bills, but it is not impossible even in our modern era. This year, the House actually passed all 12 appropriations bills. Yet we didn't have time, somehow, to take up any of that or do any of the work on our side. But there are real consequences to what happens, and one of the consequences here is that we are accumulating new debt at about $1 million a minute. We have for some time. The new estimates actually are closer to $2 million a minute. It is going to be about $1 trillion a year.

When you look at the debt that was accumulated for the last 17 years or so, George W. Bush doubled the debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. President Obama doubled the debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. And now we are on course to exceed $30 trillion in the next 7 years or so. So there really are signs that the budget process is broken in the sense that we are always doing these short continuing resolutions, but there is also evidence that we are not being very good stewards of the money in putting all the spending together in one bill at one time.

I think the vote tonight is a vote about many things. It is about whether you favor a government accumulating so much debt. It is about whether you can reckon that with your conscience when you--many of us-- complain for years and years about the trillion-dollar annual deficits of President Obama. And it really is also a litmus test of conservatism, because some of us have maintained for years that we are fiscally conservative, and we go home to our States and say we are holding the line. Yet it only appears sometimes that we are conservative when we are in the minority, and that is really a good question. Are we to be conservative all of the time or only when we are in the minority?

Some will say we must govern, and my question about governing is, Does governing mean abandoning one's principles? Does governing mean that we are just going to be senseless and spend and throw money at every problem?

Some said this is a great deal because it is bipartisan, but really, in some ways, it is a bipartisan compromise in the wrong direction. Both sides have come together and said: We will spend more money on the sacred cow that each side wants. But in reality, the person who gets shafted is the taxpayer and the next generation that is going to be burdened by this debt.

There are some procedural ways we could try to avoid this. We could all just do the right thing, but that hasn't seemed to work for decade after decade.

There are ideas, such as the Government Shutdown Prevention Act, and what it would do is it would say that if the appropriations committees don't do their job--if they have 12 months to actually come up with an appropriations bill and then the deadline comes and in 12 months they haven't done their job--what would happen is, the government wouldn't shut down; the government would continue spending money, but it would be at 1 percent less than they have been spending money.

I think you have to have that hammer. You have to have some kind of punishment for not doing your job, and the punishment here would be that we would slow the rate of growth of government--slow it down, 1 percent cut. It doesn't sound enormous, but if you actually had a 1- percent cut annually in the balance, you actually would balance your budget within about 5 years. So a 1-percent cut would actually be pretty dramatic and actually going in the right direction.

For those who don't want to cut spending, the 1-percent cut would be an incentive to do their job, to actually process the appropriations bills and have them come out.

Even if we only did 6 out of the 12 appropriations bills, only one- half of the government would cut down. So every appropriations bill that is actually brought through committee and brought to the floor is one step in the right direction. It makes it less likely that we would have a complete shutdown.

I think that drawing attention to how much debt we are accumulating is important. Some will say that it was a mistake to have this debate today. This debate could have been shortened and could have been finished by noon today had we been granted 15 minutes to have one amendment.

So I think part of the process is, even if we were going to do the appropriations bills the way many of us would like, I think they should come to the floor and we should have a week or two of amendments. It is the most important thing we are supposed to be doing. Why couldn't we have amendments? We do sort of the opposite now, and we wait until the very last minute. So we have waited all week long to put this at the end of the week and let it expire toward the end as people get tired, and then everybody says: Well, you don't want to shut down the government, do you? And I really don't. My intention has never been to shut down the government, but my intention is also not to keep it open and borrowing $1 million a minute. My intention is not to vote for bills that are always just keeping it open, bills that actually spend so much money that I think they endanger our security.

There have been those who say that the greatest threat to our national security is actually our debt. I think that is true. And I think if we don't rectify this, if we don't fix our broken system, if we don't show the American public that we can function in a way better than lurching from deadline to deadline, I think eventually the American people are going to catch on that maybe they need some new people if we can't do it in an appropriate fashion.

I see no reason, on the first day of the legislature, that our leadership couldn't sit in the chair and say to everyone: We are going to do all 12 appropriations bills individually. We will spend 3 months in the committee on all of them, we will bring them to the floor, and we will do a week or two on every bill.

That would be the primary thing we did during the entire year, but we would review all the spending to make sure we are not wasting the money, to make sure there are not programs in there that are wasteful.

Right now, we are going through a Pentagon audit. Instead of actually enforcing things on the Pentagon to spend better, we are actually just giving the Pentagon a pile of more money. So the recent audit had $800 million that was missing or lost. That is a large amount of money. The recent audit also says that there is over $100 billion that actually was spent in a

wasteful manner. I would think we would want to take something like that, go through the appropriations process, and try to fix the spending.

But you will never get less waste if you give people more money. So really the bottom line is, you have to give people less money. If you give people more money, they will continue to waste it at the same rate. You can say we are rooting out waste, but if you are always increasing the amount of money you give people, there will be more waste. There are some Departments of government that should be completely cut out, eliminated.

I think there is a lot that can be done, but none of this is happening now. When we glom all the spending together in one enormous bill, there is not enough time to read it, and if there are no amendments, there is no way or no process to go through and try to reform government.

I think this has been a very useful debate, and my hope is that those who mutter and say ``Gosh, why are we having to do this so late at night?'' will say ``Why do we do it at all this way? Why can't we do it in a better way next year? Why can't we begin to do the process of actually sending bills through committee and debating them in a normal fashion?''

So I, for one, think that this is an important debate and that the future of our country hinges on how much debt we are accumulating. I hope those who look at this bill who actually truly do believe that debt is a problem will consider saying: Enough is enough, and I am not voting for more debt.

Thank you.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, I ran for office because I was very critical of President Obama's trillion-dollar deficits. Now we have Republicans, hand in hand with Democrats, who are offering us trillion-dollar deficits. I cannot, in all good honesty and all good faith, just look the other way because my party is now complicit in the deficits. But, really, who is to blame? Both parties.

We have a 700-page bill that no one has read and that was printed at midnight. No one will read this bill. Nothing will be reformed. The waste will continue, and government will keep taking your money irresponsibly and adding to the $20 trillion debt.

There are no amendments being allowed. This is the most important debate we will have in the year over spending, and no amendments are allowed. We should have a full amendment process. We have been open for business for 10 hours today. You can do four amendments an hour. We could have done 40 amendments. So it is a canard to say that we cannot have one amendment and cannot spend 15 minutes debating whether or not it is good for the country to add $1 trillion of debt.

Madam President, I object.

Madam President, the Senate will vote today on a bill that will add $1.5 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. This is a large amount of money and something that we should be very wary of. This is in addition to what we were already running a debt of, that of nearly $1 trillion. So we are adding a couple hundred extra billion dollars a year to a budget and a country and a Congress that had already recklessly let spending get out of control.

The bill is nearly 700 pages. It was given to us at midnight last night, and I would venture to say that no one has read the bill. No one can thoroughly digest a 700-page bill overnight, and I do think that it does things that we really, really ought to talk about and how we should pay for them.

One of the things this bill does is add $500 billion in spending over a 2-year period. This bill increases spending 21 percent. Does that sound like a large amount? Is anybody at home getting a bonus or an increase in his paycheck of 21 percent? Yet your government is going to spend 21 percent more without really having a full debate and without having amendments.

The exchange you just watched was my asking to have a 15-minute vote. I have been asking all day for it. I have been asking all week for it. We could have, literally, had dozens of votes today, but we squabble because people don't want to be put on the spot.

The reason I am here tonight is to put people on the spot. I want people to feel uncomfortable. I want them to have to answer people at home who ask: How come you were against President Obama's deficits, and then how come you are for Republican deficits? Isn't that the very definition of intellectual dishonesty? If you were against President Obama's deficits and now you are for the Republican deficits, isn't that the very definition of hypocrisy? People need to be made aware. Your Senators need to answer the people from home, and they need to answer for this debate. We should have a full-throated debate.

My amendment says simply this: We should obey the budget caps.

What are budget caps? These are limits we placed on spending for both military and nonmilitary. We placed them in 2011, and guess what. For 1 or 2 years, the government actually shrunk, but now the government is taking off, and this new stimulus of deficit spending will be as big as President Obama's stimulus. Don't you remember when Republicans howled to high heaven that President Obama was spending us into the gutter, spending us into oblivion? Now the Republicans are doing the same thing.

So I ask the question: Whose fault is it? The Republicans'? Yes. Whose fault is it? The Democrats'? Yes. It is the fault of both parties.

You realize that this is the secret of Washington. The dirty little secret is that the Republicans are loudly clamoring for more military spending, but they cannot get it unless they give the Democrats welfare spending, so they raise all of the spending. It is a compromise in the wrong direction. We should be compromising in the direction of going toward spending only what comes in. Yet this goes on and on and on.

You will hear people say: Well, the military is hollowed out. We have not enough money for our military. Yet we have doubled the amount of money we have spent on the military since 9/11 of 2001.

Look, I have family members in the military, and I have retired members of the military in my family, and I care very deeply about our soldiers. In fact, do you know what I would do? I would bring them all home from Afghanistan. The war is won. People are talking about having a parade. Declare victory in Afghanistan; bring them home; have a parade; and give them all a raise. Yet we go on and on and on, finding new wars to fight that make no sense, where we have no idea who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. The wars are so murky that halfway through the war we sometimes change sides or the people we support change sides.

We are at war in Afghanistan after 16 years. It costs $50 billion a year. So they need more money for the military because we are in too many places for too long. We have no exact mission of why we are there, but it is not a militarily winnable situation in Afghanistan. There will never be a victory in Afghanistan. There may be a negotiated settlement, and they may flee when we come, but as soon as we leave, they come back. Are we to be there forever?

For the umpteenth time, Congress is going to exceed its budget caps. We had something passed back in 2010 that was called the PAYGO Act. It was supposed to say: If you are going to pay new money, you have to go find an offset somewhere else. You can only pay as you go. It was sort of like a family would think about it. If you spend some more money, you have to raise your income or you have to save some money.

Do you know how many times we have evaded the issue since 2010? Thirty-some-odd times. When I try to get them to pay attention to their own rules, three or four people will vote to pay attention to the rules.

We are in a terrible state, and $20 trillion in debt is bigger than our entire economy.

Do you wonder why the stock market is jittery? One of the reasons is that we do not have the capacity to continue to fund the government like this. We have been funding it with phony interest rates that are concocted and given to us by the Federal Reserve, but they aren't real.

What if interest rates become real again?

Does anybody remember when interest rates were 5, 10, or 15 percent? I remember them as a teenager being 19 or 20 percent. But historically, they have often been at least 5 percent. Do you know what happens to the Government when the interest rates go to 5 and they have to borrow for Social Security and Medicare and all the other stuff we have to do? There will be a catastrophe in this country.

Already the rates are ticking up. The stock market is jittery. If you ask the question why, maybe it has something to do with the irresponsibility of Congress spending money that we don't have.

So the bill's going to exceed the budget caps by $296 billion. That is not counting the money they don't count. So these people are really, really clever. Imagine them running their fingers together and saying: How can we hide stuff from the American people? How can we evade the spending caps so we can be even more irresponsible than we appear? So $296 billion is the official number. That is about $300 billion over 2 years that will be in excess of the budget caps.

But there is another $160 billion that is stuck into something called an overseas contingency fund. The budget caps don't apply there. So we are $300 billion for 2 years over the budget caps, and then another $160 billion over the caps that they just don't count. They act as if it doesn't matter: We are just not going to count it.

Then we come to catastrophes. You might say to yourself: Well, I have great sympathy for the people's houses who were flooded in Texas and Florida. I do. My sister's house was flooded near Houston. So I have great compassion. But even for my family, I can't take the money from you and borrow it from the next generation and say: Here is a pot of money. Go rebuild your house.

We should do it in a responsible fashion. We have already spent $30- some-odd billion on emergency relief for the hurricanes. There is another $90 billion.

Do you know what I have said? Instead of just plunking $90 billion down or, actually, printing it over at the Federal Reserve or borrowing it--instead of just doing that--why don't we take the $90 billion from somewhere in the budget that it shouldn't be?

People come to me all the time and say they want something from the Government, and I say: Well, if you want something from Government, tell me where to take it from, because I am not going to borrow any more.

Where do you get the $90 billion from? I have some suggestions. Do you know how many votes they get? About 10 or 15 people vote with me.

Let's not send it to Pakistan this year. They burn our flag. They put Christians in jail. They put in jail Dr. Afridi, the guy who helped us to find bin Laden. We finally got bin Laden, who had been living high on the hog a mile or two from a military academy. Everybody in the Pakistani Government probably knew he was there, and he lived uninterrupted. We finally got him when Dr. Shakil Afridi gave us information.

Do you know what Pakistan did to this doctor? He is in jail.

Do you know what they did with a Christian by the name of Asia Bibi? Pakistan has her on death row. She went to the well in a small village to draw water. As she was drawing water, the women in the village began stoning her and beating her with sticks. As she lay on the ground bleeding, everybody watched and gawked. She was crying out for help, and the police finally arrived, and she thought she had been saved-- only to be arrested for being a Christian.

Yet we have given $33 billion to Pakistan over the last decade--good money after bad. Almost everybody up here loves it. They just want more of your money to go to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China--you name it. They will send your money anywhere, and we have a country that needs it here.

Instead of nation-building abroad, why don't we build our country here at home? Why don't we do some nation-building here at home?

We have $90 billion that we need for emergency relief. Even as conservative as I am, I would say that we could probably find that. We are a great, rich country. We could probably rebuild, and the government can be a part of that. But you know what; why don't we quit sending it to Pakistan? Why don't we quit sending it to countries that burn our flag and chant ``Death to America''? Why don't we keep that money at home? Why don't we say to the government, writ large, that they have to spend a little bit less?

Does anybody ever have less money this year than they had last year? Has anybody had a 1-percent pay cut? You deal with it.

That is what government needs--a 1-percent pay cut. If you take a 1- percent pay cut across the board, you have more than enough money to actually pay for the disaster relief, but nobody is going to do that because they are fiscally irresponsible.

Who are they? Republicans. Who are they? Democrats. Who are they? Virtually the whole body is careless and reckless with your money.

So the money will not be offset by cuts anywhere. The money will be added to the debt, and there will be a day of reckoning.

What is the day of reckoning? The day of reckoning may well be the collapse of the stock market. The day of reckoning may be the collapse of the dollar.

When it comes I can't tell you exactly, but I can tell you that it has happened repeatedly in history when countries ruin their currency, when countries become profligate spenders, when countries begin to believe that debt does not matter.

That is what this bill is about. But here is the confusion. Some at home would say: We just want them to cooperate. If they would just hold hands and sing ``Kumbaya,'' everything would be fine.

Guess what. That is what you have.

You saw the leadership of both sides opposing me because they are now clasped hand in hand. Everybody is getting what they want. Everybody is getting more spending. The military, the right is getting more military spending, and the left is getting more welfare spending, and you are getting stuck with the bill--not even technically you. It is the next generation that is being stuck with the bill. Your grandkids are being stuck with the bill.

But mark my words: The stock market is jittery. The bond market is jittery. There is an undercurrent of unease amidst this euphoria you have seen in the stock market. A country cannot go on forever spending money this way, and what you are seeing is recklessness trying to be passed off as bipartisanship.

So we have gotten together. They are all holding hands, and there is only one bad guy standing in the way. One guy is going to keep us here until 3 in the morning.

You know what? I think the country is worth a debate until 3 in the morning, frankly. I think it is worth a debate on whether or not we should borrow $1 million a minute. I have been saying that for a few years: We borrow $1 million a minute. I think that really brings it home. When we were talking about it with my staff today, they said: You know, it is almost $2 million a minute now--$2 million a minute.

Can you imagine that? This is exploding. This deficit is exploding. There isn't the alarm you should see.

Guess what. Every one of these people, you will see them come home to your State. You will see them come home, and they will tell you how earnest they are and how the deficit is bad, and Big Government spending is bad and we have to reduce waste.

It is dishonest. They are not doing anything about the waste. The waste has been out there for probably a half-century or more. Nothing has been done in the last 40 years for one precise reason: There is no oversight.

Do you realize that what they are passing is all of the money glommed together in one bill? No one will read the bill. No one knows what is in it. And there is no reform in the bill. That I can say with absolute certitude. No one will read it. There is no reform, and nothing gets better. The debt will grow.

When the Democrats are in power, Republicans appear to be the conservative party, but when Republicans are in power, it seems that there is no conservative party. You see, opposition seems to bring people together, and they know what they are not for. But, then, they get in power, and they decide: Hmm, we are just going to spend that money too. We are going to send that money to our friends this time.

The hypocrisy hangs in the air and chokes anyone with a sense of decency or intellectual honesty.

The right cries out: Our military is hollowed out--even though military spending has more than doubled since 2001.

The left is no better. Democrats don't oppose the military money as long as they can get some for themselves--as long as they can get some for their pet causes. The dirty little secret is that, by and large, both parties don't care about the debt.

The spending bill is 700 pages, and there will be no amendments. The debate, although it is somewhat inside baseball, is over my having a 15-minute debate, and they say: Woe is me; if you get one, everybody will want an amendment.

That would be called debate. That would be called an open process. That would be called concern for your country--enough to take a few minutes. They are like: But it is Thursday, and we like to be on vacation on Fridays.

So they clamor, but we have been sitting around all day. It is not like we

have had 100 amendments today and we are all worn out and we can't do one more. We are going to have zero amendments--zero, goose egg, no amendments.

So it is a binary choice. They love that word. It is a binary choice; take it or leave it.

You know what. I am going to leave it. I didn't come up here for this. I didn't leave my family throughout the week and travel up here to be a part of something that is so much inertia and so much status quo that they are not leading the country. They are just following along, and it is a big ball rolling down the hill, grabbing up your dollars as the boulder rolls down the hill, and it is going to crush us. But nobody has got the guts to stand up and say no.

Over the past 40 years, only 4 times have we actually done 12 individual department-of-government appropriations bills.

Have you heard of the Appropriations Committee? This is where the spending is. You have the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Health and Human Services. We are supposed to pass each individual bill. What would happen when we pass the bills is that they would go through committee and each committee would look and see: Well, this spending seems to be working. We are getting a great result, and we want some more next year. This spending appears to have been put in a closet and lit on fire. So next year we are not giving that to the person who put the $10 million in the closet and lit it on fire. We are not going to give them any more money.

But guess what. That doesn't happen. So people keep putting your money in the closet and lighting it on fire.

You heard about FEMA, this emergency organization. You have heard about people without food. So there were 350 million meals they needed, I believe, for Puerto Rico--350 million meals. Do you know who got the contract? A person who had no employees.

Now, raise your hand--you are not allowed to, actually; but let's say, raise your hand in a figurative way--if you think it is a good idea to give a contract for 350 million meals to someone who has no employees and who is not already in this business. They just know how to fill out the forms in the Federal Government to trick us into giving them the contract.

They were woefully short, and there are still people waiting in line for meals. It is not compassion or no compassion. It is idiocy versus more idiocy. We gave the money to someone who doesn't even do this--350 million meals.

Over the past 40 years, 4 times have we actually done the right thing--passed 12 individual appropriations bills, bundled them together, had a budget, and done the right thing. There is no guarantee that everybody will be wise in their spending, but it has to be better. It can't be worse.

What do we do instead? It is called a continuing resolution. We glom all the bills together in one bill, like we have done tonight-- Republicans and Democrats clasping hands--and nobody is going to look at it. Nobody is going to reform the spending. As a consequence, wasteful spending is riddled throughout your government. Only four times in 40 years have we done the appropriations process the way we are supposed to.

Recently, they did a Pentagon study--the beginning of an audit--and they audited part of the Pentagon. This partial audit showed that $800 million was misplaced or lost--just $800 million. I don't think they actually put it in the closet and burned it, but they can't find it.

A while back they looked at some of the military expenditures, and they had $29 billion worth of stuff they couldn't find. Overall, the audit found that over $100 billion in waste was found at the Pentagon-- $100 billion. Well, their budget is like $700 billion. So we are talking about a significant portion, over a 10-percent problem with figuring out our waste. It doesn't get any better because we don't vote on all these things individually, and we don't parse out the difference.

I will give you another example. In the Department of Defense--last year we found this out--spent $45 million on a natural gas station in Afghanistan--$45 million. It was projected to cost $500,000--86-some- odd cost overruns to $45 million.

So you are scratching your head and saying: Natural gas station, what is that? We don't have one in my town.

We don't have any in my town, either. They didn't have any in Afghanistan, but do you know what? They decided they needed to reduce the carbon footprint of Afghanistan. They would reduce the carbon footprint of Afghanistan. I thought the military's job was to kill the enemy. So is the military's job now to reduce their carbon footprint?

So they bought a $45 million gas station that served up natural gas, and guess what they discovered. They kept waiting. There was a guy sitting next to the pump. He was sitting on a stool, and he was waiting for customers. No one ever came.

Someone said: Oh, my goodness, they don't have any cars that run on natural gas.

That would probably be the same if you came to my town in Kentucky. Almost no one has a natural gas car in America. They live in a primitive state in Afghanistan, and you are expecting them to have natural gas cars?

So they said: Well, gosh, we already built this $45 million gas station, maybe we should buy them some cars. So they bought them some cars with your money. They paid for the gas station with your money, and now they bought them some cars with your money, but then the people still wouldn't come in because they said: We don't have any money.

They said: OK. Well, we got the gas station, and we have gotten you cars. You need a credit card, so we gave them credit cards. So they have a U.S. credit card that you pay for, to take their natural gas car that you paid for, to go to a natural gas station because we are reducing the carbon footprint in Afghanistan. When did that become the job of the military? Why does that go on year after year after year, the waste?

(Mr. KENNEDY assumed the Chair.)

For 17 years, we have been trying to get the Pentagon to be audited. Do you know what their response has been? We are too big to be audited. How is that for your government? Your government is telling you they are too big to be audited and that scrutiny is just not your business.

Is it any wonder, really, that our debt is a $20 trillion debt? Fifty years ago, William Proxmire was a Senator. He was a Democratic Senator--a conservative Democrat, in some ways. He began handing out something called the Golden Fleece Award, and we will talk about a few of them.

This is 50 years ago. The reason I want to point this out is, as you look at this and listen, you will find that some of the stuff we are doing today is just as bad as 50 years ago. Some of it is the same agencies. So you scratch your head and you ask: Fifty years? We have been through a couple of generations of politicians, and they are still not learning anything from finding this waste? Some of it is the budget process--the process that we pass these enormous bills that no one reads, that no one scrutinizes, and that do not reform the spending.

William Proxmire used to do his Golden Fleece Award, and I remember this as a kid in the early seventies. Here are a couple of things he pointed out, and this is sort of some of his best.

The National Science Foundation spent $84,000 trying to find out why people fall in love. Now, there is something that sounds like a really worthwhile science project with a real specific answer. I think the conclusion was, they are not exactly sure.

The National Science Foundation, which you will see is a recurring theme in bad and wasteful spending, also spent about $500,000 to try to determine why rats, monkeys, and humans bite and why they clench their jaws. Well, now, you could say that is really important. Maybe we will discover something from that or you could say, when we are running a deficit, and we are borrowing the money, maybe some of these things, it may not be the most worthwhile to borrow the money for them.

This is a good one. This is from the early seventies. The Federal Aviation Administration spent $57,000 studying the body measurements of what they called in those days airline stewardesses. These were trainees, and it was for the purpose of purchasing their safety equipment. Someone got $50,000 to measure the body measurements of airline stewardesses.

The Administrator of the Federal Energy Administration--this is still from William Proxmire 50 years ago--spent millions of dollars to find out if drunk fish are more aggressive than sober fish. I am not going to tell you the answer. I am going to let you ponder that one. Do you think drunk fish are more aggressive than sober fish?

This is your government, this is your money, and this is the debt you are handing down to your kids and grandkids--and this was 50 years ago. So now we will get into some of the things we have been doing more recently.

We do a waste report where we point out some of these things, and every week we have a new one. I will say, if you want to look at our waste report, we have that, I believe, on our Facebook and on our website.

This is one of my favorites. Do you remember when Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon? He said: ``[O]ne small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'' Some people think he said: ``One small step for a man, one giant leap. . . . `' So there has been some very heated discussion over whether he said ``one step for man'' or ``one step for a man''-- the preposition ``a.'' Did he or did he not use the preposition ``a''?

So your government, in their infinite wisdom, took $700,000, which, by the way, was supposed to go to autism research, and they decided to study Neil Armstrong's statement. So somebody at some university decided to play the tape over and over to see what he said, and $700,000 later, they couldn't decide. You know, inquiring minds want to know, but we still don't know. Did he say ``a man'' or did he say ``man''?

This is the same kind of stuff you were seeing with William Proxmire 50 years ago, but this is last year. I think it is the same group--the National Science Foundation. I think I am probably going to get some hate mail from them.

This is $850,000, and we call this one the Game of Waste. You think, when we are spending money in Afghanistan, well, surely it is to kill the enemy. Sometimes it is building bridges, and sometimes it is building roads--stuff we don't do in our country anymore. This one was $850,000 for the development of a televised cricket league. Since self- esteem is important, we want the Afghanis to feel good about themselves, and we want them to be able to watch the national sport on TV. So we spent $850,000 to get it televised, but the only thing we didn't reckon is, it was kind of like the natural gas car--they didn't have TVs. I don't know if we are in the process now of buying them TVs, but we did spend $850,000 of your money to get a televised cricket league for those people in Afghanistan.

This is a good one. Everybody likes to take a selfie, right? If you don't do them, your kids will do them, your grandkids will do them. This was a study of $500,000 to see if taking selfies makes you happy. Whether you are smiling or you are frowning and you look at yourself in the picture, does it make you happy? Now, inquiring minds want to know. If you want to study that, good for you. Go get somebody to voluntarily give you some money to study that. All right? I really would like to watch you going around the neighborhood knocking on doors asking for money to study whether selfies make you happy.

This stuff has been going on for 40 years. Why don't we root this out and stop it? Well, one, they will come to you all high and mighty, and they will say: But, sir, it is science, and you are just a layperson and don't understand how important selfies could be, and you aren't qualified to talk about selfies because you don't know about happiness. We have experts in happiness that can tell that we could make the world happy again. We could all be happy if we had more selfies. So it goes on. They give us this scientific mumbo jumbo that somehow we are not smart enough to have common sense enough to know what we should be spending money on, but this goes on decade after decade.

School lunch program. You might say: Well, we need to help those who can't buy a school lunch, so we have a school lunch program, except for what we discovered was $158 million of Federal money was given to the Los Angeles School District, and it turns out they were buying things other than lunches because nobody was watching them. Nobody was auditing the program. Nobody was doing the individual appropriations bills. They were passing--clasp hands together--continuing resolutions, where nobody looks at it: 700 pages and nobody reads it. When nobody reads it, they buy sprinklers and buy things for themselves like new televisions for the faculty to watch. It is $158 million that was not spent on school lunches but was wasted and spent on other items.

Everybody has heard about climate change. There are some undertones and overtones of politics in climate change. In case you haven't heard of climate change, the people who want you to hear about climate change want to spend some of your money to make sure you are listening to them about climate change, so they spent $450,000 on a video game. This is also the National Science Foundation. So a whole new generation will be able to play this video game on climate change, complete with great graphics. We have this game that your kids can play on climate change. It is just one thing after another.

All right. You may have been on this one if you are in Washington. This one we call a Streetcar Named Waste. There is a streetcar over here a few blocks on H Street, and they spent $1.6 million on it. I think they had already spent more on it before that, but they spent an additional--it goes a mile. It goes from nowhere to nowhere. You get on, and there is nobody on it, and it just cost a fortune. You could walk from one end to the other in about the same time it takes you to go on the subway or on this tramway.

You have to ask yourself, when you see this government spending, would you give money to this? I ask this question often when I am home. I ask people: If you had $100 you were going to give because you wanted to help people, would you give it to the Salvation Army or the Federal Government that spends $1.6 million on a streetcar that goes from nowhere to nowhere and no one rides?

So I talked about whether we should be spending the money somewhere else or here. This is $250,000 that was spent on bringing 24 kids from Pakistan to Space Camp and to Dollywood. You can say: Well, that is good relations. Now we are going to have good relations with Pakistan. They are no longer going to kill Christians and put them in jail or burn our flag--maybe. I am not against interaction. In fact, if this were some kind of privately funded group that wanted to have some money to have interaction between us and Pakistan, I would probably be all for it. First, the pricetag is a little scary to me--$250,000 for 24 kids. I represent a lot of people in Kentucky who don't have the money to drive down to Huntsville and go to Space Camp with their kids, so really should we not sort of readjust our priorities and start thinking, do we need to take care of ours at home here before we start shipping our money overseas or do we really need to think about can we afford to just keep borrowing money for projects like this?

This is the Department of Defense, and this I think we referred to earlier. This was $29 million worth of heavy equipment that they lost-- can't find it in Afghanistan. It is even worse than that. See, they lost that, but we also made the decision, as we were downgrading the war in Afghanistan after the last surge we did in Afghanistan, that we didn't want the other side to have our stuff so we blew up a lot of our own stuff. We blew up billions of dollars' worth of humvees, tanks, you name it. When they were looking and counting it up, they found $29 million worth that they couldn't find. If you really think about it, and you are thinking, how could we have more money for both our national defense, and how could we have more money for infrastructure-- you hear people talk about infrastructure. People want to build roads. Republicans and Democrats want to build roads, but guess what. There is no money. We are a trillion dollars short this year because we passed these--clasp hands--spend whatever the hell you can find, whatever is not tied down, spend it and give it away. Both sides spend it like there is no tomorrow.

If you ask: How could we change our government? Where would there be some money that we could actually

save? Well, really, some of it is in our foreign policy. We do not have enough probably for our military to be involved in seven wars. We might have enough to be involved in maybe three or two or one or maybe we should not be involved in any of the ones we are involved in at this point.

The thing is, we said after 9/11 that we are going to go after those who attacked us, those who aided the attackers and those who abetted them or supported them. They are all dead. We killed them all. That is good. We should declare victory and come home from Afghanistan.

Right now, we are over there nation-building. Why do we have trouble with nation-building? I will give you a story from a Navy SEAL I met a couple of years ago. He had been in 19 years. He was a tough guy, like they all are, and he said: Do you know what? We can go anywhere. We can kill any of our enemies. We can do whatever you ask us to do, but, he said, the mistake is when the politicians tell us to plant the flag and create a country. We are just not very good at it.

Most of our military don't want to be policemen. They don't want to create countries. They would just as soon kill the enemy and come back home to their family, but we kill the enemy, and then we stay and we stay and we stay, and we build them schools, we build them roads. There are some schools that have been built four or five times and blown up four or five times by the Taliban. It is terrible that the Taliban doesn't want girls to go to school. It is terrible that the Taliban would do this, but don't the people who live there have some responsibility, after we have given them a trillion dollars, to do something for themselves? Will people do something for themselves if you keep doing it for them? So really there has to come a time when we come home. We spend $50 billion a year in Afghanistan. Our mission is over, and we should come home.

It is $50 billion a year that could be spent on infrastructure, if you wanted to do that, or in maybe not having a trillion-dollar debt next year or deficit next year.

We are in a bunch of different places though. When the soldiers were killed in Niger not too long ago, a country in Africa, many people didn't even know where the country was, much less that we had 800 troops there. You say: Well, it is only 800; it is not that many. Well, the problem is, 800 sometimes becomes 8,000, and it sometimes then becomes 80,000 because when we get in the middle of a civil war and some of our guys get killed, we are like, well, gosh, we have to do more, not less. Nobody wants to come home after people have been killed. They want to go in and punish the enemy. I don't know who the good people are in Niger or who the bad people are and what they are fighting about. So I think sometimes it is very unclear who the good guys and bad guys are.

We have been involved in the Syrian civil war for a long time, and we aided a group of people who many up here call the moderate Syrian rebels. Well, it turns out the moderate Syrian rebels were jihadists often. They hated Israel. The only people they hated about as much as Israel was us. We gave anti-tank weapons to one group, and the leader of the group, within a week of getting our anti-tank weapons, said--we wanted them to fight ISIS--they said: The hell with ISIS. We want to attack Assad. When we are done with Assad, we want to attack Israel and get the Golan Heights back.

These are the people we gave weapons to. We poured hundreds of tons of weapons in there. There are a lot of weapons running through Qatar, running through the United Arab Emirates, running through Saudi Arabia--we just poured it in there. A lot of them wound up in the wrong hands. We kept supporting these moderate fighters who didn't fight. We spent $250 million training 10 of them. We trained 10 fighters for $250 million. We sent them into battle, and they were captured in the first 30 minutes.

Guess what happened recently. I will give President Trump some credit for this. They decided to ally with whoever was fighting the best over there. It turned out the Kurds were, both the Syrian Kurds and the Kurds who live in Iraq, and they did fight. Now the question is--Turkey is unhappy with that, so we will throw the Kurds under the bus in favor of Turkey, which has a leader who has no use for us at this point either. It is very confusing who the enemy is and who our friends are. It is also very expensive. We have to defend ourselves, and we may occasionally have to attack the enemy overseas.

The thing is, if we go and stay for decade after decade--in Iraq, we didn't stay long enough. How long is long enough? Is it 100 years, 200 years--forever? They don't see us as we said they were going to treat us--as liberators. They see us as occupiers.

Afghanistan has hated every country that has come in there. They didn't like the Russians occupying them. They didn't like the British occupying them. They don't like us there.

There was a movie not too long ago with a depiction in a scene where they were in a village and freed the village. The general was telling them: You are free. You are free. The elders of the village gathered and said: Will you leave now?

They realized that wasn't the end. Eventually, the Americans would leave, and when they left, the Taliban would come back.

We have to rethink: Are we going to be at war forever? Can we afford it?

Maybe we have to think about whether or not we should do nation building here at home and not always abroad. We have to think about the unintended consequences of what we do as well. I will give you an example of that. We recently signed a deal to give Saudi Arabia $350 billion worth of military equipment. Currently, Saudi Arabia is using that equipment to encircle and blockade Yemen, the country next to them. Yemen is a very poor country. They import about 80 percent of their food. This is one of the poorest countries on the planet, and currently 17 million people live on the edge of starvation. But people convinced themselves that, well, there are some Shia who are supported by Iran, and we don't want Iran there, so we have to support the Sunnis.

Does anyone remember who attacked us on 9/11? It wasn't the Shia; it was the Sunnis. Most of the radical jihadists, the ones who have been trying to get into our country--in fact, I don't know of any Shia terrorists who have been here, to tell you the truth. We have had plenty of Sunni terrorists. All 16 of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. We just released documents last year, the missing pages of the Saudi Arabia investigation with the 9/11 Commission, which show there is a possibility they were complicit in those things. They are not exactly a free country. They are a monarchy that could actually have power to consume and concentrate, in one person's hands, more and more.

We have to decide what wars we need to be involved in. Our Founders were very clear about this. Our Founders didn't like war, by the way. Our Founders had seen virtually perpetual war in Europe. Everybody was always fighting somebody, and it went on even after founding our country--cousins fighting cousins, fathers fighting brothers, brothers fighting brothers; everybody was related. All the royal families of Europe were related and always fighting with each other. They didn't do the fighting. They sent the common man to do the fighting.

So when we got to our country, we said: We have these oceans; enough of that. We want less war. One of the things they included in the Constitution was a very specific provision that said: When we go to war, we have to declare war. It has to be passed by Congress.

There was a debate over whether that power should be in Congress or should be in the hands of the President. Madison said that the executive, the President, is the branch most prone to war; therefore, with steady care, we gave that power to the legislature. War is supposed to be determined by us--ultimately, by us as representatives of you.

It doesn't happen that way. It hasn't happened that way in a long time. Why are we at war in seven different places? We don't vote on it. We haven't voted on anything, really, since the proclamation of the Iraq war, which I think was a mistake, but we at least voted on it in 2002.

We voted in 2001 to go into Afghanistan for those who attacked us. We haven't voted on anything since. They

said that the 2001 proclamation gives us the power to go anywhere. Most people fighting weren't even born and have nothing to do with 9/11 or Afghanistan. Yet we are in a perpetual war, and we haven't voted on it.

Once again, it is the process that is broken, like the budget. We have extraordinary waste, and your money gets burned and put in a closet and thrown down a waste hole. We don't do the right process of following your money.

War is somewhat the same way. We get involved in war in too many places because we don't have a vigorous debate.

When we go to war, I tell people that should be the most important decision we ever make--the most important decision a legislator ever makes. It should be a profound, moral, and personal decision, as if your kids were going or as if you were going. It should be a heartfelt debate, and everybody should speak out, and we should try to figure out whether it is right to go to war.

Interestingly, when we have been attacked, we have been nearly unanimous. When we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, they voted. One person opposed it, and everybody else voted for it. When we were attacked on 9/11, it was the same thing. I would have voted for that response. We should have responded. That was the right thing. We voted and did the right thing.

Since then, we are now at war everywhere, in countries most of us haven't heard of, fighting on one side or the other, and we don't even know what we are fighting for. It costs an extraordinary amount of money, but we are not voting on it. Maybe if we did the right thing-- maybe if we passed the appropriations bills, maybe if we voted on war-- we wouldn't be in so many places. They are all interconnected because they are intersected to the shortness we have in money.

The last thing I will get to is something called the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is something that has been a limitation on how much we spend, and we have to vote on it. It is an unpleasant vote. They try to do it for a long period of time or try to stretch it beyond elections. So this 700-page bill, which no one read, which will continue all spending and will not reform your government and is irresponsible, and which we will pass later tonight--that 700-page bill also allows the debt ceiling to go up. Historically, we would let the debt ceiling--our borrowing limit--go up a dollar amount. We would say: We have to borrow money, and it looks as if we will need a trillion dollars. Do you know how they do it now? Like everything else, we break the rules, and somehow there is a little bit of deviousness to it. The debt ceiling will go up in an unspecified amount. As much as you can borrow between now and November, go for it. So there is no limitation; the debt ceiling becomes not a limitation at all. They are still taking the vote--although maybe they don't want to vote on it anymore; they want it just to happen.

They say: Well, you voted for the spending. I personally think the more obstacles we have in place to spending money we don't have, the better we would be.

The debt ceiling will go up in an unspecified amount that will be a credit card that has no limits, issued to the United States. This is a problem. Everything about this process stinks, to tell you the truth.

The media doesn't get it. The media does you such a disservice. They can't understand what is going on sometimes. They say: Bipartisanship has broken out. Hallelujah. Republicans and Democrats are getting along.

In reality, they should be telling you: Look for your wallet. Check your pants to make sure they haven't taken your wallet.

When both parties are happy and both parties are getting together and doing stuff, guess what. They are usually looting the Treasury. That is what this bill does. It is going to loot the Treasury. It spends money we don't have. We will have a trillion-dollar deficit this year.

What I would say to my Republican colleagues--you don't see them here; I am not sure where they are. What I would say to my Republican colleagues is: I know every one of you. I have seen your speeches. I saw every one of you go after President Obama. Was that all empty partisanship? Do you not really believe it? I promise you, every one of them went home--and probably will go home next week and say how they are fiscally conservative and against the debt, and almost all will vote for this new debt. Almost all will vote for a trillion-dollar debt in 1 year, and every Republican, at least, was against President Obama's debt.

At least the Democrats are honest. They are not too concerned about the debt. They are sometimes concerned about the debt when it comes to taxes because they don't want people to keep more of their own money. They are afraid somehow of the imbalance of that.

The thing is, we do have to watch the balance of money--how much comes in and goes out. Some have said: How can you be a deficit hawk if you voted for the tax cut? One, because I think you own your labor. You own the fruits of your labor. You own all of it. You give up some of your labor to live in a civilized world. My question to you is-- everything you make, everything you own, everything that comes from the sweat of your brow and work of your hands is yours. If you give up some, you are giving up your liberty. You give up a little bit of your liberty, you give up a little bit of your wages to live in a civilized world, to have law and order and have some government. I am OK with that.

I ask you: Do you want to give up more or less? Do you want to give up 100 percent of your paycheck or give up 10 percent of your paycheck?

We should always be about minimizing government. Taxes really are about how much of your liberty you get to keep--how much of your liberty to continue spending your own money.

The other side of the ledger is spending. Are we going to have some government spending? Yes. The Constitution laid out very specific requirements for what was allowed. Article I, section 8 says what Congress can do. They are very few and limited. Yet what happened over time is that we began doing a lot of things that aren't there.

What they said in the Bill of Rights was pretty important, though, in the Ninth and Tenth Amendment. The Ninth Amendment says that those rights not listed are still yours and not to be disparaged. So the Bill of Rights was not a complete listing of your rights. You have many other rights--such as the right to privacy and the right to property-- that aren't exactly spelled out in the first eight amendments.

The Tenth Amendment said something important too. It said that if the Constitution didn't explicitly give that power to the Federal Government, it is left to the States and people respectively. This is the other reason for our debt. There are checks and balances within the process. We are supposed to do appropriations bills and all of that. That might or might not work. It can't be any worse than what we are doing now.

The real check and balance is the Constitution. The Constitution has these limits on how big government can get and what government can do. If we obeyed the Constitution, we would have a balanced budget every year. If we had a balanced budget every year, would there still be things the government does? Sure.

We have to assess as a people and we have to decide--and really, this is the ultimate decision the American people have to make. Are you going to cheer for the Republicans and Democrats holding hands and having a trillion-dollar deficit or are you going to say to yourself: I am suspicious that the Republicans and Democrats are clasping hands and giving us a trillion-dollar deficit. Is it a good thing? Are we so excited about civility that we don't care what the result of civility is? Or are we really sort of misguided in thinking that people aren't yelling at each other and they have bridged their differences, but the compromise means we are all going to spend more money, we are going to ignore the Constitution, the waste is going to continue, and nothing will be fixed. Are we so sold on civility that we are willing to give up on it and say: Well, at least we are getting along together. As long as we are getting along, that is all we want.

I think we are smarter than that. I think the American people are more perceptive. I think, in the end, the American people will see through this.

I think they are going to see it as the future unfolds and as the stock market continues to be jittery. I think they are going to see it as we move forward and the ramifications of having so much debt come home.

There could be higher interest rates. Those affect not only you personally but also the massive government programs we have--Social Security and Medicare. The borrowing we do for our interest is one of the larger items. I think it is the third largest item we spend right now. As interest payments grow, they crowd out other things. Right now, we are still paying government interest in the low 2 percent or a little bit more. Imagine what happens when it is 5 percent. Even if interest stays at 2 percent, because government is growing and we have a bigger debt, we will have an $800 billion interest payment. It will be the No. 1 one item. It will crowd out everything else.

There are ramifications. There are people who say that when you are at a 100 percent of your GDP--when your whole economy equals your debt, you are at the precipice, at the point where you may reach a point of no return.

There are ways we can fix this. Later this year, I will offer a budget that freezes spending. You say: Well, how bad could that be? We will give government the same amount they had last year. If we freeze all spending--I mean everything we spend money on--we would balance the budget within about 5 or 6 years, and we would get things back in balance if we did it.

If you talked to people up here, they would freak out. I promise you, we will get 10 or 15 votes for freezing spending to try to get it back in order.

This is what we have to ask as American people: Are you happy with your government? Are you happy with a trillion-dollar deficit? Are you happy with people who just don't seem to care? Somehow they care more about this clasping of hands and everybody getting everything, and then they get to go home for the weekend.

I think the ramifications for our country are severe and significant.

What I would ask my colleagues, as well as those across the country, is basically this: What do you want from government? Do you want some physical item? Is government here so someone can get you something and give you some physical item, such as a cell phone or a car? Is that what government is for, or is government here to preserve your liberty?

Most of us--or I would say some of us--believe that your rights are from God, that they preexist government, and that government's job is not to get you stuff; government's job is not to get somebody else's stuff for you; government's job is to preserve your liberty, to preserve our natural, God-given rights. In doing that, through your liberty or through your hard work, you may acquire stuff, and the government helps to prevent your neighbor from stealing it, but your government shouldn't be the one stealing it from your neighbor and giving it to you.

Besides, we look at the ramifications of a society where we do think that we are going to take from one and give it to another, and we are going to do it through this government transfer program, and we look at that and ask: Is that good for a person?

A good friend of mine talks a lot about self-esteem, and I like the way he puts it. He says that self-esteem cannot be given to you. People say: Well, we need to have--everybody gets a trophy, everybody gets first place, and whether or not Johnny can read, we need to pat him on the back and make sure he feels good about whether he can read or not read. In reality, the only self-esteem you can get is from achievement.

Some people say: Oh, that is easy to say if you have achieved or done something. But you can have achievement at anything. It is a little bit akin to this talk we have had about the merits of immigration. There is merit to hard work, like picking tomatoes. There is merit to being a doctor, a lawyer, or a professor. There is merit to so many jobs, and that is also where your self-esteem comes from.

One of the things we are doing in our country is we are destroying the self-esteem and motivation of the country. What goes along with that? When we have destroyed your self-esteem, you no longer leave your house, weight problems, drug problems, and all of the things that ensue from that. People say: Oh, you are simplifying addiction; it doesn't all come from Big Government. Maybe. Maybe not. But I think there is a correlation to not working and the disease that comes from nonwork.

You say: You are heartless. You are just saying that everybody should work, and there are not jobs. There is virtually full employment now. We have less than 4 percent unemployment. Yet, the way we measure it, we still have communities that have 30 percent nonworkers because they are no longer counted. This is where a lot of the problem exists in our society. A lot of the drug problem is coming from nonworkers.

So I think we have to reflect on what we want from government. Do you want something material from government? Do you want government to give you something that your neighbor has that you don't have, or do you want government to protect your God-given liberty?

I think that if we realize that the abstraction of liberty is something amazing and incredible and that is what our government is about, maybe we would bicker less and we would become more unified as a people, knowing that what you are trying to get is not something--they talk about whether coveting something is a bad thing. When you covet or you really want something of somebody else's, some of it is because it is somebody else's, but some of it is because it is a material thing you want instead of sort of the freedom to search and seek out, through work and through life and through art and through literature, your own bit of self-esteem.

I think that if we knew what government was about and we recognized the true function of government, we wouldn't be in this state. I can tell you that I am very, very saddened by where we are. I am saddened mostly by the debate on my side. I have disagreements with the other side, but I know where they are as far as these issues are concerned. I am saddened that on my side, many people who give lipservice to believing and saying they are fiscal conservatives will vote for a bill that adds $1 trillion to the debt. I think that if we were really honest with ourselves, we would say no.

They say: The government will shut down.

I don't want the government to shut down. I think it is a dumb idea. In fact, I proposed legislation called the Government Shutdown Protection Act. What my legislation would do is this: You have a year to do your appropriations bills. There are 12 different units of government, and that is your job. How do we make these people do their job if they won't do their job? What we say is that over this 12-month period, if you don't do your job, government will continue spending, but government will continue spending 1 percent less. So government would go on spending 99 percent of what they spent the last year, but every 90 days, we would take 1 more percent from government until the people in government decide to do their job.

I see some Members of the House did their job last year; they passed all 12 appropriations bills. Yet the Senate I think finally, in the end, passed one, 4 or 5 months into the fiscal year.

So I think if we look at it that way and say ``How can we convince Congress to do its job?'' that is part of the answer: passing the individual appropriations bills but also evaluating them for waste and being concerned with waste.

Probably equally important is understanding that the function of government, the powers of government are few, defined, and limited. That was a big thing that Madison talked about. When you read the Federalist Papers, he is talking about how there are very specific functions of government. Government wasn't supposed to do everything. There is nothing in the Constitution about education. You say: Oh my God, he would get the Federal Government out of the education system? Absolutely. Get them completely out. The Constitution said nothing about them being in it, and we don't have the money for it, and the State governments are better at it. I am not saying the State government can't be involved, but the Federal Government

shouldn't be involved at all in education. As a consequence of government, it gets bigger and bigger.

We take on new functions of government that really were never spelled out in the Constitution. The Department of Commerce--it could be gone, and you would never know it, probably. It could be gone and we would save $35 million. And most of its functions are not in the Constitution.

We have to have some of that debate over what is the proper role, what is the constitutional role. How will we have that debate if we are not allowed to amend the bill? If we are given a 700-page bill the night before, nobody reads it, and they say it is done, it is a binary choice--their favorite word--binary choice, take it or leave it. I am leaving it. I could not go home and look my wife in the face; I could not go home and look my friends in the face; I could not go home and look in the faces of anybody who voted for me and say: Oh yeah, you know, President Obama, he was terrible. He had trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. But the Republican deficits are not quite as bad because they are just $1 trillion.

That is what we are doing here. The Republican side is telling America that trillion-dollar deficits are bad when they are Democrats, but they are OK when they are Republicans. So they are telling you that deficits are bad when the other guys do it but not so bad when we do it. This is the height of hypocrisy.

This is sort of maybe the uncomfortableness that this debate engenders. If having this debate is uncomfortable, this is maybe why we don't have amendments. It is sort of backfiring because I am going to talk about this for quite a while, and we are going to vote at three in the morning because they wouldn't let me have a vote during the day, and I probably won't get a vote. I think it is misguided. We should have had 20 votes. There are votes Democrats wanted that I probably would disagree with, that I would have voted no on, but I would have voted to let them have amendments.

This is a big deal. This is our spending. This is what the Congress is supposed to do, assess our spending and how much we spend. Yet we are not going to have amendments to it. It is predecided by some secret cabal of leadership from both sides who have now clasped hands to say: We have won. The country has won. We now have a $1 trillion deficit this year.

The American people are losing by this, so I think we have to figure out a better way. We have to figure out a way where we do our job, which is that for each of the individual appropriations bills, we look at them and we scrutinize waste.

I showed you some of the William Proxmire Golden Fleece Awards from 1968, and the same agency that has been wasting that money is still here. We haven't limited their budget. Their budget is probably tenfold bigger than it was in 1968, and we are still doing the crazy stuff.

Actually, let's do the one I can't resist. Here is a good one from the same group of people who brought you Neil Armstrong and $700,000 to study. What did he say? One small step for man, one large step for mankind. These people--they one-up even Neil Armstrong. They wanted to know whether Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. Inquiring minds want to know.

The thing is, I think we--I wish that there were a button and that we could ask people to just sort of dial in and push a button. Do you think Japanese quail are more promiscuous on cocaine? We spent $356,000 studying this. This is the craziness.

Why do we do this every year? Why isn't it getting better? We don't look at it. So if you have a 700-page bill and nobody ever looks at it, how are we going to find this? Even in an appropriations bill--if we did an appropriations bill that included this, it would still be 500 pages long and you would have to hunt long and hard to find this. Why do we have conditions on how you spend your money? Because we don't look at it. Nobody reads any of these bills. We don't do individual bills.

People come to my office and say: I am for legal aid, and I think people should be able to have a lawyer, and poor people should get help. I listen to them, and I say: Well, you know, I have never voted on that, and I probably won't ever vote on that. I won't even vote on the department of government that oversees legal aid because I am given a 700-page bill that has all of the government spending.

What is ironic about this is that we have dozens and dozens of people who come to our office every day saying: We like this part of government. I say: Well, I never get to vote on it, so I don't know if I can help you or hurt you because I never get to vote on that part of government. They make me vote on all of government, so it is either all or none. The binary choice is shut it down or keep it open, but don't reform it. I think that is a terrible choice.

I did a hearing this week and I called it ``The Terrible, Rotten, No- Good Way to Run Your Government.'' That is what I believe. It is a terrible, rotten, no-good way to run your government, and we shouldn't do it.

I will tell you this. This is a secret. So don't tell anyone. I have talked to probably 50 Senators in the last 3 weeks, and most of them say: I kind of agree with you. It is a really crummy way. This is the last time I am voting for it.

Didn't you tell me that last year and the year before, that this is your last CR, that you were never going to vote for another one?

Do you know what would happen? Let's say that this speech was so persuasive that all of my colleagues came in here and got a conscience and voted down the spending and said: Hooey with all of you; we are not going to spend all that money. The government would shut down over the weekend. We would come back on Monday and do our job. We would start looking at each thing individually, and we would say that these are things we shouldn't spend it on and these are things we should, and we would begin that process.

The other thing is, if you pass one appropriations bill, then you don't have to worry about that part. That is more than one-twelfth of government; it is probably about a third of the government. You passed that, so then you don't have to worry about shutting down. Each time you pass an appropriations bill, you move on to another. We have to do that.

I think the thing that is disappointing to probably everybody in here, Republican and Democrat--they will tell you: Oh, it is a terrible way to run the government. Yet we are doing it. We did it a week ago, we did it 3 weeks ago, and we did it a month ago. This is the fourth time we have done it this year. Since I have been here, we have never passed all of the appropriations bills. We have never had extended debate in committees.

I was thinking about this the other day. I was thinking, what if the first day you got sworn in, the leadership sat in the chair, and all 100 people were required to be here or requested strongly to be here, and we had a frank discussion, and we said to both sides: This is the year we are not doing any continuing resolutions. Guess what--it will just shut down if we don't, but we are going to do our job. In the first 3 months of the fiscal year, we are going to have hearings, and the main job will be to authorize and appropriate the money--3 months for each committee. That is a pretty long time, actually. Then maybe spend a whole week or 2 weeks in the committee with amendments for specific things like, we have decided this year not to study what cocaine does for Japanese quail, so this would be the year we finally stop doing that. You would have that debate, 3 months on committees, and 9 months left to do the spending bills.

Then, if you were sitting in the chair, you would say: This is the way we are going to do it. And each appropriations bill--we are going to take 3 weeks on the floor to do it--3 weeks. We are not going to putter around, obfuscate, and not have any amendments.

One reason we are going to send this over to the House at midnight is that we are hoping they are too tired to vote no. So we are going to send it over late tonight or at 3 in the morning, but it is purposefully done. We don't do amendments. We don't do anything in a timely fashion. We wait around until the very end, and at the very end, we are trying to wear people out so there isn't sufficient energy to really scrutinize your government and its spending.

We have had all week; we could have done all this.

But let's say we did committee hearings for 3 months, and then for 9 months--the rest of the fiscal year--we did the appropriations bills, and then we spent 3 weeks on the floor and let people bring amendments. My first amendment would be that the National Science Foundation would no longer be able to do most of the stuff they do. The only way you do this is by giving them less money--maybe half as much; I don't know, 25 percent of what they get--a lot less, because they are spending a lot of it on things they shouldn't be doing.

This goes on throughout government. We have the same debate all the time. We had this debate with the post office. They are losing $1 billion a quarter. That is quite a bit of money. They came before our committee and said we need to pay them sufficiently. You can't have good-quality people unless you pay them. They pay the top guy like $1 million, $1.5 million to keep talent? How much talent does it take to lose $1 billion a quarter? I can lose half a billion for $500,000 a year. So it is the ridiculous notion of government.

Sometimes I wonder, are people in government--is government inherently stupid or populated by people who are inherently stupid? I don't think so. I think there are well-meaning people in government, so they are not inherently stupid, but they don't give the right or proper incentives.

Think about it in your life. If I were to ask you for $10,000 each and say ``I have this business proposition; will you give me $10,000?'' you are going to think long and hard about what you had to do to get the $10,000. And if you give it to me, you are probably going to have a little pang inside, hoping that I pay dividends to you and that you get your money back. But it is really a heartfelt decision. It doesn't make it always the right decision, but it is a heartfelt decision, and you really struggle with every fiber of your being to make sure you made the right choice, even though it is not always going to be right.

In government, imagine your city council person, $10,000--it is not their money. Then imagine that you go to the State legislature, and it is not $10,000, it is $2 million. Then imagine you get up here, and it is now $2 billion or maybe $200 billion. It is not their money.

So when we look at government and ask why government is so bad, Milton Friedman hit the nail on the head. Milton Friedman said: ``Nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as he spends his own.'' That is the truth of it, and that is the way government is. Government will never be efficient because of the very nature of government. It is not an argument for no government, but it is an argument for minimizing how big government is.

Government should never be involved in something that somebody else is already doing, that the private sector can do, because government will never be as efficient because nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as they spend their own. This actually goes hand in hand with what the Founders thought. The Founders thought people ought to be left free to do most things themselves, so they very significantly limited what the Federal Government is supposed to do.

So as we move forward in this debate and as we look at what can be done to bring back the greatness of this country, I think we do have to be worried about the debt we are accumulating. My hope is that both sides of the aisle will look long and hard and say that this isn't the way we should run our government--not just say this and say ``next time'' but maybe say ``this time.''

I promise you, both sides of the aisle have told me this week: It is a terrible way to run government; you are exactly right. Continuing resolutions, putting all the spending in one bill, not reading it, having no analysis, and not getting rid of the waste, is a terrible way to run the government. But almost everybody who told me that this week is going to vote for this.

So the only way this ever gets fixed is to call these people and convince them they need to do their job, which is do the individual appropriations bills. They need to pay attention to the Constitution, or, frankly, you need new people. That is what the American people have to decide: Do you need new people, or are you happy with them borrowing $1 trillion?

I think it is completely and utterly irresponsible and something no American family would do. I don't care whether you are a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent, no American family lives the way your government does. It is completely and utterly irresponsible.

As we look at this debate, my hope is that both sides will come together and say: Enough is enough. This is the time--tonight--I say no.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I think no one in this body more than I wants to continue funding the military. I have three nephews serving in the military. My father-in-law is a career Air Force man, and my dad served in the military. However, I think it is also important when we talk about how we have a strong country that we have to talk about solvency. There comes a point in time when you borrow so much money that it actually becomes a threat to your national security.

It was Admiral Milliken, the former Chief of Staff, who said that the biggest threat to our national security currently is our national debt.

I think there is an irony that those who criticized President Obama for trillion-dollar deficits are now in the body saying: Oh, we must pass this trillion-dollar deficit.

Yes, I do think it is important that we have this debate. What I have been arguing for tonight is not a delay, not any kind of permanent delay. What I have been arguing for is an open debate.

So if we are having all the spending, every last bit of spending has been glommed together in one bill, 700 pages. No one has read it. Nobody has any idea what is in it, and there is no reform. I think if we are going to do that, I think we ought to at least have amendments and have an open debate.

If we are not going to have an open debate, if it is going to be ``take it or leave it,'' frankly, I will leave it because I think my duty. What I told the American people was that I care. I care about how much debt we are accumulating in this country, and I think it is a danger to our national security to accumulate so much debt.

Therefore, I object.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I think there are some interesting points when we look at our debt, in trying to figure out how best to fix it.

What we have been dealing with today is a spending bill of about 700 pages, but it does deal only with what is called discretionary spending. This is military and nonmilitary spending, and it is about one-third of what we spend over all. The other two-thirds is called entitlement spending or mandatory spending.

So often people will say: Well, we can't cut the discretionary spending because we are not doing anything to the two-thirds of the spending that is mandatory; this is Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, and some welfare programs. It is true that they are growing at a rapid rate. They are growing at about 6 percent and the military and nonmilitary are growing at about 2 percent.

So there is more of a problem on the entitlement side, but often you will hear people come to the floor and say: Well, we can't. We have cut all this discretionary spending, and what we really need to do is entitlements.

Yet this is a bit of a canard, because I have been here 6 years, and I have tried to push entitlement reform and tried to push cost savings, but we have never had a bill come to the floor.

So people say: Well, I am not going to cut this, but if the other were to come to the floor with mandatory spending cuts--how come nobody brings it to the floor? It never comes to the floor. So two-thirds of the budget or spending is never being cut, and it is growing at 6 percent. It is a problem. Entitlements have to be contained.

Some of the problem is not the Republicans' or the Democrats' fault. It is basically a function that we are living longer. When Social Security was created, the average life expectancy was 65 years or less. Now the average life expectancy is about 80. So you can see how the costs have risen dramatically. We are living a lot longer.

The other thing that happened is that somewhere along the way, when we were victorious in World War II, we came home and had a lot of babies, for one reason or another. They are the baby boomers--60 to 70 million of them. There is an enormous cost of retiring baby boomers and we are living longer.

These things have added to entitlement costs. There are things we could do. I recommended that we gradually raise the age of eligibility. People say: Oh, you don't want people to get their Social Security at 65? Well, it is already 67, actually.

On Medicare, the problem is that if we leave things as is, Medicare is $35 trillion short, and Social Security is about $7 trillion short. So we are $7 trillion short in Social Security and $35 trillion short in Medicare. You have to do something about the entitlements.

However, the same grievance I have with the process here is the same grievance I have with entitlement reform. I have been pushing for it for 6 years. I have produced bills that never get here. So the leadership on both sides--and in fact, I have heard this before--will say: You can talk about it, but don't put it on paper.

So many people are for entitlement reform until it comes to the specifics. You saw this in the debate over ObamaCare. Try getting rid of any kind of entitlement or lessening it or making it less effective, and people freak out at that.

It is true that we have to look at entitlements. If we were to look at entitlements, it would take some pressure off of the military spending, but it is also important to put military spending in perspective. We have doubled military spending since 2001. We have put a lot of money into the military.

Then there is the question of what is national defense. Is defense having weapons to defend ourselves against attack, having troops and armaments and being able to defend and occasionally go to where the attackers are, or is it the job of the military to be involved in every civil war around the world?

Currently, we are involved in at least seven different wars. None of them have been voted on. Our Founding Fathers said that the executive branch was the most prone to war, and, therefore, they gave that power to Congress. Yet we haven't voted on any of the seven wars we are involved with. There are seven different wars around, at least.

There have been people talking about authorizing war, and they want us to be involved legally somehow in 34-some-odd countries. So we should have a more robust debate. We haven't been able to force a debate on whether or not we are at war for the last 7 years. I have been trying to get a vote on whether or not we are at war. We certainly appear to be at war. We are in Yemen. We are in Somalia. We are in Ethiopia, Djibouti, Niger, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. We are in a lot of different places. Yet the Senate has never voted on going to war. And you say: Well, we are going after those people who attacked us on 9/11. Well, we killed those people. The people whom we are now embattled with are sons and daughters of other people who might have the same ideology, but they are spread all across the world.

We had a manned raid in Yemen not too long ago where we have not declared war. When we had the manned raid, sadly, a Navy SEAL died, and a bunch of people in the village died. We were told we had information to get the enemy, but we also have to look from the perspective of the people who live there. You say: Oh, you would look from the perspective of our enemies? Well, no. You have to understand your adversaries, you have to understand your enemy, and you have to understand their response if you ever want to figure out a final solution or some kind of ending of a war.

You have to think about when the manned raid came at night with night

vision goggles to a small village. Let's say the people were bad people. Let's say they were terrorists and someday might have come here. Well, we killed them, but we also killed their wives and their children too. I don't fault our soldiers. Our soldiers go in in the middle of the night, and they are given a command. It is not the soldiers' fault; it is ours for having an unclear mission or for sending them into an impossible mission.

There is no clear-cut war. There are three or four different factions fighting in Yemen, and here is the point I have been making. The neoconservatives are histrionic about, oh, Iran is supporting the Houthi rebels. Well, on the other side are Sunni extremists who are supported by Saudi Arabia, which also supports Sunni extremism across the world. There is also a third party in Yemen that is al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula. My fear is that when you go in and you say ``Oh, the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels--we must kill them, and we are going to support the Sunnis from Saudi Arabia,'' you have to ask yourself ``Well, what about al-Qaida? Do they get stronger or weaker?''

Here is my fear. We go into a civil war that nobody in America knows about, and nobody can know up from down on, and we decide to get involved. What if the end result is chaos? What if out of that chaos arises al-Qaida? What if the end result of our getting involved in the civil war is that they all kill each other and we end up with a civil war in which al-Qaida becomes stronger?

The interesting thing about it is that as you look at the war in Yemen, it is----

Yes, I object.

So as you look at the war in Yemen and you go back and forth and you say ``What are the results of getting involved in this civil war?'' it may well be that al-Qaida gets stronger.

If you look at what happened in Syria, the neoconservatives went crazy and said: We should support the moderates in Syria who are fighting against Assad. Well, it turns out the moderates in Syria were al-Qaida-linked, ISIS-linked jihadists. In fact, with one group the neocons said that we must give weapons to, it turned out that as soon as they got anti-tank weapons from us, they said--and this is a quote from one of the leaders days after they got anti-tank weapons from us: When we are done fighting Assad--not ISIS, Assad--we are going to attack Israel to take back the Golan Heights.

We did this, and we pumped millions of dollars and hundreds of tons of weapons into Syria, and it didn't work. When we finally quit doing the funding and sending of weapons, that is when the Kurds rose up, with our help, and actually did a much better job.

The thing is, there is a perpetual war crowd that ignores the Constitution, and they will say that we should be at war everywhere, and we don't need to vote on it. One, that is a terrible insult to our forefathers and a terrible insult to the Founding Fathers, but as you look at this and you look at the debate, it is also incredibly draining to the Treasury and often has unintended consequences.

As we got involved in the Syrian civil war, the so-called moderates-- many of them jihadists, many of them al-Qaida; the fiercest fighters actually were more al-Qaida linked, al-Nusra--began pushing back on Assad, and there was chaos. Guess who arose in the chaos there: ISIS. So really ISIS became a result of or at least was accentuated by our intervention in Syria, and then we had to go back in and fight ISIS.

Here is a scenario that could happen in Yemen. We decide we are going to go into Yemen and we are going to support the Sunni extremists, whom the Saudis are for, against the Houthi extremists, whom Iran is for. But in the chaos, perhaps al-Qaida rises again, and we have to get more heavily involved. I think there is no end to the idea that we are going to kill a terrorist group in the middle of the desert in Yemen and, somehow, there will not be more.

I will give you an example of how sometimes what we get involved with actually backfires and causes more terrorists to arise. We have been feeding the Saudi planes bombs. We probably have sold them the bombers as well. But we have been feeding them bombs, we have been helping them with targeting, and it turns out they have been targeting civilians. They targeted a funeral procession. The Saudi bombs that we gave them-- we paid for and we gave them; they may have paid for them indirectly, but with the Saudi bombs that are U.S. bombs, they ended up bombing in Yemen a funeral procession and killing about 150 people who were unarmed and wounding 500.

You say: Oh, well, I don't care what they think. I don't care what their response is. Well, think about what their response might be and then decide whether you care, and I am not saying I am sympathetic to the people. I don't know the people enough to be sympathetic or not, but I am aware of their response to being bombed in a funeral procession.

My guess is that 1,000 years from now, the people and their families will, through oral tradition, remember the bombing of the funeral procession. I am not kidding you. These people have a long memory. The Sunnis and the Shia have been fighting for 1,000 years. They remember the massacre at Karbala. I promise you they still celebrate when one side massacred the other, and that was at least 500 to 600 years ago-- maybe more. So there is a long memory going on in this, and we have to decide whether it is more beneficial to kill one of them than to have the result of 10 new terrorists created by that. The thing is, they are everywhere. There is a branch of Islam that is radical and that does wish our demise and wish us harm, but we have to decide what the best way of containing this is. What is the best way of defending our country?

If you look at it, what I think you will find is that there have been a great deal of unintended consequences. One is an enormous drain on the Treasury, but two is a lot of unintended consequences as far as sometimes actually making it worse. I think our intervention in Syria actually exacerbated the rise of ISIS. I think our intervention in Yemen could well exacerbate or cause or allow the rise of al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula again.

It is confusing when you ask: What do the soldiers want? The only soldiers who are allowed to speak are the ones at the very top or those who are retired. Even at the very top, most generals who are still active can't give a full opinion. They may give it to the administration but typically not on television or to the public. But the average soldier really is never asked for his or her opinion. I understand that, and I understand the role of the order of the military--that you have to take orders.

The interesting thing is, as you meet the average soldier--I promise you this is true. If people were able to do this and we were able to actually take a poll of thousands and thousands of ordinary soldiers, I think you could ask them: Do we still have a purpose in Afghanistan? Are you ready for another deployment? You have been on six deployments to Afghanistan. Are you excited about the next deployment? Freedom is going to ring out in Afghanistan. They are going to be a great, self- sufficient country, and we will have won the war.

I think most of the soldiers who have been there will actually tell you the opposite. I have met dozens and dozens and dozens of these soldiers who have come home and actually are unclear now as to what our motives are. They are unclear as to what our goal is, and they are unclear as to what the end result is.

We had two Under Secretaries recently in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. One was Under Secretary of Defense and another was Under Secretary of State. One of the Senators asked them: How many Taliban are there? How many people are we fighting? They seem like pretty honest questions. He said: You don't have to tell me the exact number. Tell me about how many we are fighting.

Neither one of them knew. They said: We have to wait until fighting season, and then we will find out. Well, any time you are in a situation where there is a fighting season--and every year

there is a fighting season--maybe that indicates this is a perpetual war that is not going to end. But neither of these guys knows whether there are 100,000 Taliban or there are 10,000 Taliban.

Interestingly, for the neocons who think this is going to end like Hiroshima and Nagasaki and there will be unconditional surrender, it will never end that way. Even Secretary Mattis--when I have asked him ``Will there ultimately be negotiation with the Taliban?''--says that actually there will be. The Under Secretary of the Department of Defense, in our meeting, said that the goal was to push them toward negotiation.

Here is the interesting thing about Afghanistan. We have had as many as 100,000 troops--President Obama, who ran on a message of having less war and less involvement and was mercilessly criticized by the Republican side, actually escalated the war in Afghanistan to a great degree. So President Obama put 100,000 troops into Afghanistan, and what happened? The enemy melted away. I am sure we killed some. We won some battles, but they sort of melted away into our good ally Pakistan, for the most part. But then they come back, and people say: We left too early. Well, how long are we going to stay? Are we going to stay forever?

We put in 100,000 troops, and it temporarily pacified Afghanistan. After we brought the troops down, now the Taliban control maybe one- third--some say maybe half--of the territory. You say: Well, if we leave, the Taliban will take over. Well, how long is it going to take until the Afghans step up and fight for themselves?

One of the biggest problems we have had is infiltration of the Afghan Army and their actually shooting us on the base. It is ostensibly not the soldiers; it is people from the enemy who have infiltrated.

At the same time, there has been such enormous corruption there. When Karzai ruled Afghanistan, his brother was accused of being in the drug trade. My good friend, Thomas Massie from the House of Representatives, often says that we spent $8 billion eradicating their poppy crop. Poppy is the plant they use to make heroin. They had their best crop last year, so something is not working. He often comments that for $8 billion he could buy a lot of Roundup and probably do a better job. But the thing is, we are aren't doing a very good job. The mission doesn't seem to have the purpose that it once had.

Look, if I had been here, I would have voted to go there after 9/11. We needed to disrupt the terrorist networks, we needed to punish them, and we needed to make sure they couldn't attack us again. It was a noble endeavor, but there has to be an end. I think part of our problem is that we are unsure how to define victory, so we never can have it.

There was a proposal to have a big military parade, and many of my friends who have served in the military were a little bit worried about that because the image has been somewhat an image we have seen more in totalitarian governments than in our own. We really haven't had a habit of it, but I was looking at a story, and it said that we did have a big parade after we had won the first Iraq war, and the troops did parade through. I am not completely against having a parade necessarily, but my suggestion is this: Why don't we bring the 14,000 troops home from Afghanistan, declare victory, and have a parade because then there really would be something to celebrate--bringing those 14,000 troops home.

I think if we were involved in less war, we could pay our troops better. We have an enormous number of veterans retiring after 15, 16 years. We have never been at war constantly for 16 years. We have a lot of veterans who have been wounded, and to take care of them, it is going to take enormous resources. All of us want to provide those resources, but the thing is, if we continue in this perpetual war mode, are we eventually going to run out of money so that we can't even take care of our own veterans?

What we are really looking at tonight is a trillion-dollar deficit, and I do think that deficit really does threaten our national security. I think our foreign policy threatens our national security in the sense that there are things that we need to upgrade. We need to take care of our nuclear arsenal. We need to take care of our bombers. We need to have the most modern planes and technology, but we often can't have them because we are involved in so many wars.

People talk about the Romans getting overextended. We are everywhere, and we always think somehow it is our responsibility to take care of everything. I think that in many parts of the world, particularly in Afghanistan, they see--since Genghis Khan, people have been going across Afghanistan, conquering it, going back across it, and then somebody new comes. But each time the indigenous people have been strong enough to ward off and eventually get rid of their attackers. Their attackers wear out.

It is the same way now. Some of the people like our being there. Some of them have been honest, upright, good people. Some have been crooks. Karzai and his family were involved in the drug trade.

The other problem is this--and this is a real problem that the other side fails to acknowledge. Afghanistan is not really a country. Afghanistan is an area of Central Asia that Westerners drew a line around in the late teens or twenties; it may have been 1922.

We draw this line around Afghanistan, and we call it a country, but it is not really a country. The far western part speaks Farsi or is related, in many ways, to the Iranian people and has more in common with them. The northern tribes have more in common with the Uzbeks, the Kazakhs, and different nationalities to the north. The Pashtuns are on both sides of the Pakistan border. If you ask any of these disparate people whom their allegiance is to, they will tell you, primarily, their allegiance is to their local warlords, the local elders, or local council, but they don't have much allegiance to Kabul. They have never really seen themselves as subservient to the capital. So when we go there and say we are going to create a nation, it isn't a nation that can be created because they are people who may not want be to part of a nation.

Iraq has a little of the same thing. You have the Sunni-Shia split that is 1,000 years old. You have people who aren't necessarily that comfortable under the yoke of one country. So as we try to force them in together and try to have them dominate, what you find in a lot of these areas is that you end up having a strongman, and the strongman rules with an iron fist. This was Saddam Hussein.

The interesting thing about world politics and balance of power is, when we went in and toppled Saddam Hussein--let freedom ring--we actually made it more difficult for us in the world, and we made the Middle East more unstable because Iran and Iraq fought a fierce 8-year bloody war. They had come to somewhat of a standstill. Saddam Hussein, for all his warts, was somewhat of a counterbalance to Iran. So when Iraq was toppled and Saddam Hussein was gone, you once again have a power vacuum. In a power vacuum, al-Qaida will fill it and did. You upset the balance of power between Iran and Iraq, and now Iran seems to be more threatening throughout the region.

As we look at our spending, without question, there is part of the spending that isn't in this bill--the mandatory spending. For those who say: Oh, we are not going to do anything for the part of the bill we are actually voting on, and we are OK with the trillion-dollar deficit, I think there is sort of a litmus test. It is a litmus test of hypocrisy. If they were against trillion-dollar deficits for President Obama, why is it OK to have a Republican deficit of a trillion dollars? There is no escaping the hypocrisy of that.

I think there is also no escaping the dire warnings we heard. Almost all of the Republicans--I venture to say every Republican in the Senate--has made dire warnings about the debt, which was critical of President Obama. I was one of them, but we need to be honest enough to look in the mirror at ourselves when we are in charge of all three branches of government.

When the Republicans took over the House, they said: Well, don't have too high expectations. We only control one-half of one-third of the government. Then we took over the Senate, and they said: Well, we still can't do anything because President Obama is there. Now, we have a Republican

President. I don't know what the excuse is going to be. Some say: Well, we must govern. If by govern, they mean act like the other side and run up huge deficits, I guess it is not what I am interested in as far as governing.

Governing is about making tough choices. I think what has happened in our country--because we basically have a printing press, a Federal Reserve that replenishes and pays our debt, buys our debt simply by creating money and buying Treasury bills with it or Treasury bonds--is that we have sort of a limitless notion of debt. That is what has been going on. We keep adding to it.

To a large extent, we haven't had a catastrophe. I think we were close in 2008. Some of that is related to accumulation of debt. I think you also will see some of that in the near future. There is an unsettling notion out there--the stock market, having risen so far, so fast, you are seeing this jittery notion out there.

There is the worry about interest rates. There is the worry that historically we funded this massive debt at about 2 percent interest. What happens if we get back to more normalized rates of interest? I think this is an important debate. It is important to get also back to the crux of the debate.

What I have been arguing for tonight is that we have amendments. The most important job the Congress does is to pass spending bills. It is the most important thing we do, and the most important oversight we have. If we are to do that oversight, we should have a debate. We should have amendments.

What we are looking at is a bill that was decided in secret--700 pages that were printed last night at midnight--and, for the most part, it has not been read. It is very easy not to have a full understanding of a bill that is nearly 700 pages that comes forward, but within the midst of this, we know a couple of things.

We have gotten rid of fiscal responsibility. There were spending caps put in place to try to control spending. For a couple of years--2011, 2012, 2013--we were actually seeing a slowdown on the rate of growth of spending. You heard everybody squawking about this sequester. The sequester is so bad. The interesting thing about sequester is it wasn't a cut in spending. It was a slowdown of the rate of spending, a slowdown of the rate of growth of spending. If you look at curves over a long period of time--actually the rate of growth--you still had government growing, but we slowed down the rate of growth. As revenue was picking up, we actually were whittling away, at least a little bit, at the annual deficit.

Then the cries came that were, actually, mostly from my side. They said the military is being hollowed out. We have to have more military money. The dirty little secret around here is you can only get more military money if you give the other side more welfare money. We have warfare and welfare. That is guns and butter. It has been going on a long time. We spent a lot of money, and both sides have now agreed to do this. The leadership has agreed to do this.

In this spending bill, what you are going to have is a looting of the Treasury, basically. Both sides are really culpable. Both sides are somewhat equally responsible for this bill and for the debt that will ensue.

The real question has to be--I think most importantly for my side--if you were against President Obama's trillion-dollar deficits, why are you for trillion-dollar deficits when you put a Republican name on it? I think people are going to see through this. You are already seeing some of the clips in the media putting forward the comments from 2010 and 2011 about President Obama's debt. These are comments coming from Republicans who are now for this bill. As they say in some parts of the country, you have some explaining to do.

That is the question. Are people going to look at this and say: My goodness, is everybody out there just a partisan politician and all they care about is party; and that the debt is bad when it is a Democratic debt and not bad when it is a Republican debt? That is sort of what we are facing.

My recommendation is that we really look long and hard at this. Most of the Senators will say: This is the last one. I am never voting for this again. These are terrible. This is a rotten way to run your government. I object to doing it this way. I will vote for this one because I don't want the government to shut down.

I don't want the government to shut down. I also don't want to keep it open if we are not going to reform it. It is damned if you do; damned if you don't. We could have done better. We could have moved forward with a responsible spending package that had amendments that we could all offer on the floor--an open amendment process and debate. We chose not to go that way. That is why we are here.

Some will say: You are responsible for this. It is all your fault. If I am responsible for drawing attention to the debt, so be it. Somebody has to do it. I didn't come up here to be part of somebody's club. I didn't come up here to be liked. I didn't come up here to just say: Hey, guys, I want to be part of the club so I am going to always vote with whatever you tell me to do. I have often voted with Democrats. I have often voted with Republicans. I probably have two dozen bills I cosponsored with Democrats. I am also seen as one of the most conservative Members of the Senate. I think there is a way you can have bipartisanship.

Bipartisanship doesn't mean you have to give up on everything you believe in. That is what this spending bill is. It is a bipartisan spending bill that gives up on everything that Republicans ostensibly believe in as far as deficit, debt, and spending. I will vote against this bill.

I will continue to advocate. If they want to vote earlier, they can vote earlier, as long as I get a vote on an amendment where we would have an open debate and an explicit vote that says: Are you for or against breaking the spending caps that we put in place?

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, the question is often asked, if not now, when? We have all been told: Now, Senator, is not the time to discuss this. If we can do this through the committee in an orderly fashion, there is always going to be a better day. But the day never comes.

The vast majority of the Senators will admit that the way we do our budgeting and the way we do our spending around here is abominable. It is an abomination. Most people are opposed to it. Yet they come to the floor and say: Let's just keep doing it the way we have always done it. So until a majority of us will say no, enough is enough, it will continue to be the same thing.

The promise of making it different in the future is somewhat of an illusion or a false promise that just never gets here. There have been four times in 41 years that we did the right thing, that we did the appropriations bills--four times in 41 years.

So what I am proposing--and this actually would have been nice to vote on tonight--people come to the floor and say they want to vote, but they don't want to vote on anything they don't agree with. They don't want to have any kind of an open amendment process where we can have votes. I am interested in putting forward something that is called the Government Shutdown Prevention Act. This is legislation I have put forward that says that if, after a year of being able to put forward your appropriations bills, you haven't done your job, then the spending point will go down by 1 percent.

I object.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object.

I think it is interesting, as we follow the debate this evening, and people watching at home may be interested because it kind of turns on some inside baseball things, and you are not sure what to know or believe.

One side says they are ready to vote, and the other side says we are ready to vote. That is the way it has kind of been, except for one side wants to vote only on what they want to vote on and they have agreed to beforehand. The other side wants an open debate, where we would have amendments. That is the side I am on.

I have been arguing all day, basically, to have open amendments, and I want to do an amendment that would say that, basically, we should obey the spending limits. Instead of having a $1 trillion debt, we should obey our spending limits.

So it is about open debate. It is about voting. I am all in favor of voting, I am in favor of voting right now, and I have offered the other side a 15-minute vote on containing or retaining the spending caps.

So I object because I think there should be amendments, and there should be sufficient debate on this subject.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I think it is very important that the American people know why we are here this evening, and why we are here is because Washington is completely broken.

We are spending money like it is out of control. This bill will have a trillion-dollar deficit, as bad or worse than any of President Obama's. So what I ask my Republican colleagues is, Why are we doing this when we condemned it on the other side?

I object.

Reserving the right to object, I think it is interesting how much energy we are expending when we could have had a 15-minute vote on this, but nobody wanted to vote.

I object.

Reserving the right to object, it seems like a lot of work for a trillion-dollar deficit.

I object.

Reserving the right to object, a trillion-dollar Republican deficit--the hypocrisy is astounding. Every one of these Republicans complained about President Obama's deficits. Yet now we have them out there bragging and pushing and doing everything they can to get their trillion-dollar deficit through.

I object.

Reserving the right to object, I realize this charade is about Republicans wanting a trillion-dollar deficit.

I object.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, we are talking about a trillion-dollar deficit.

I object.

Mr. President, I think it is interesting--the debate we are having, an important debate--and it is important to call attention to how we spend money in Washington and how the system is irrevocably broken. We can cast blame where we want to cast blame, but, I think, for the record, it is important to know that I have been offering all day to vote.

I would like nothing more than to vote, but it is the other side. It is the leadership that has refused to allow any amendments. So we have what is called a closed debate. There will be no amendments. There will be no questioning of the authority. The deal was made in secret, and the deal will not be debated on the floor, and there will be no amendments.

So what I am advocating for is, one, that we should reform the process. I don't advocate for shutting the government down, but neither do I advocate for keeping it open and borrowing $1 million a minute. In fact, the statistics this year are closer to $2 million a minute.

This is a government that is horribly broken. This is a system that is horribly broken, and Senator after Senator will come up quietly, and they will say: Oh, this is the last time I am voting for a continuing resolution. This is terrible. This is a terrible way to run a government. This is a rotten way to run the government. Yet they keep voting for it. They are in charge. Why have we been doing this for 40 years? Four times in 40 years have we actually done our job where we voted on each individual appropriations bill.

Earlier today, I went through some of the waste. It is amazing the waste that has been going on. William Proxmire was first pointing out this waste in 1968. One of the examples he pointed to was that money was being spent studying why men fall in love with women. You may be curious about that, too. If you are, ask your friends to get Crowdsourcing, and you could get a study of why men fall in love with women. That is not a function of government. That waste goes on decade after decade, and nothing is ever fixed.

What we have is a 700-page bill that will not have been read by anyone. I was just reading some of the things that will be stuck in there. Nobody will have any idea how they got in there--all of the spending glommed together in one bill with no oversight.

This is a terrible, rotten, no-good way to run your government, and it has been going on decade after decade. Everyone admits it is a terrible, rotten, no-good way to run your government. Yet nobody stands up and says enough is enough. They say: It is a binary choice, young man. Take it or leave it. I will leave it.

I don't want to shut down the government, but somebody ought to insist that we have an open amendment process. Someone should insist that we root out waste in government. We have had a partial audit of the Pentagon, and we

found out that $800 million was misplaced or lost. What has been done so far in the audit showed over $100 billion has been wasted in the Pentagon. So what do we do? We reward them with more money. We have been trying to get a complete audit of this Pentagon for 17 years, and you know what they argue? They say: We are too big to be audited. How galling is that, when your government tells you that we are too big to be audited?

This goes on decade after decade. Everybody in Washington complains about it. All the constituents complain about it. All of America complains about it. Yet we do it time after time. Then, people say: Well, look, this is a bipartisan deal. Kumbaya. Republicans and Democrats are holding hands to spend more money.

It is the opposite of what you want. You want compromise in Washington, but we should be compromising to spend less money, not more. Every one of the Republicans--count them; you can look it up on the internet--said that President Barack Obama was a spendthrift and he had trillion-dollar deficits, and we railed day in and day out, year in and year out against it, and rightfully so.

It was too much debt and too much spending. We were against that. That is what I ran for office on. I am not about to turn my head the other way and say it is fine because my party is doing it. That is what this is about. It is pure, empty, partisan politics, where people are saying: It is OK for Republicans to have debts, but it was bad for Democrats to have debts.

It is time we stood up and said it is a rotten system and it should end.

How will it end? It is never going to end by people always passing the buck and saying: Oh, I am voting; this is my last continuing resolution. I hate continuing resolutions. They are terrible. This is my last one, but I am going to vote for one more--maybe next year or actually in a month, because we will be doing this again in a month.

Do you realize that we are on our fourth continuing resolution? This has nothing to do with the budget, and the media confuses this. They say we have a budget deal. No, we have a continuing resolution deal. This is not a budget. This isn't some sort of plan. This hasn't gone through a committee. There are no appropriations bills that have gone through committee. There is no oversight happening to your government. So when I tell you that $356,000 was spent last year studying what happens to Japanese quail when they are on cocaine--whether they are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine--this is what your government is spending money on. But it doesn't get any better because we never root out the waste. In fact, the agency that has been doing this research ends up getting more every year.

They are like: Oh, we like science. If you like science, you will like this one. They took $700,000 from autism research, and they spent it studying what Neil Armstrong said when he was on the moon. Did he say ``one small step for man,'' or did he say ``one small step for a man''? We spent $700,000 studying whether the preposition ``a'' was in Neil Armstrong's statement. That is $700,000 that should have been spent on autism.

This isn't really just about fiscal conservatism, although it is. It is about how best to spend money for legitimate expenses. Every time you spend money in a wasted way, you are taking away from something that presumably was less wasteful. So this is a big deal.

Do I want to shut down the government? No. But do I want to keep it open and not reform it? Hell, no. That is what is going on. It is a trillion-dollar deficit this year. It is going to be bigger, probably, but we were approaching a trillion dollars before they added $300 billion of new spending to this. So this is a problem. This is a big deal.

I have said all day long that I will vote. Start the process. Open the doors. We could have had 40 amendments today. We have been at this all day, with the other side blocking amendments, trying to have no debate and trying to close the door so a secret deal--a deal done in secret--can be forced on everyone else.

So yes, we should have debate. Yes, we should have a vote. Let's have a vote tonight on amendments. Let's have amendments. Let's determine whether the American people or the Senate are really in favor of busting the caps.

I have one amendment. I am not asking for a dozen amendments. I am not asking for 100 amendments or 1,000 amendments. I am asking for one. It takes 15 minutes.

So realize that all day these people wanted to paint a picture. They are embarrassed, and I understand that. They are embarrassed by this situation because they know the hypocrisy is thicker than pea soup. They know the hypocrisy is out there. They railed and they railed against President Obama's debt--trillion-dollar deficits. Every one of them railed against it, and now they have to vote tonight for a trillion-dollar deficit. That is the problem here. So there is a certain embarrassment to bring this up. The embarrassment causes them to say: We don't want any amendments. We don't want to discuss this. They ought to be discussed, and so much more should be discussed.

It isn't just that we are blocking amendments or debate on spending or that we are not doing our job on appropriations bills. We are also not doing our constitutional duty on the declaration of war. This was something the Founding Fathers were explicit on. The power to declare war was given to Congress in article I, section 8--given to Congress. In fact, there is discussion of this. There was extensive discussion of this. Almost every Founding Father weighed in on the fact that war should be declared by the legislature. Madison put it this way. He said that the executive branch is most prone to war; therefore, with steady care, that power was vested in the legislature.

When was the last time we declared war? Well, officially, we haven't declared war since World War II, but we have sort of voted. At least we came to Congress--at least George Bush came to Congress when we went to Afghanistan the first time and when we went to Iraq the first time, and there were votes. But those votes were long ago, nearly a generation ago. They really don't apply to anything we are doing now, and there is a certain intellectual dishonesty by those who continue to say that the vote to go into Afghanistan has anything to do with what we are doing over there now. There is no military solution there, and that also ties into our budgetary problems.

We do not have enough money to build nations around the world and think that we can build our Nation here at home. So when people talk about nation building, I say: Yes, you are right, but we need to do some nation building here.

The President has talked about a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, but there is no money for it. So we are borrowing $1 trillion before we get started with people advocating for a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. There is no money. If we want to find the money, we have to make difficult choices.

As people come to my office, they say: We want money for X; we want money for Y; we want money for Z. I listen carefully, I listen sympathetically, and I try to say: Look, we are a rich country. We ought to be able to do what you are asking. Yet we have a $1 trillion deficit, and everything has to be reflected by the fact that we are out of money and horribly spending a great excess of what comes in. But nobody is making these difficult choices because we just keep adding on to the tab. We basically just borrow more money.

When President Obama was President, we were--under George W. Bush, we went from $5 trillion to $10 trillion in total debt. With President Obama, we went from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. We are almost at that same curve again. In fact, we may be escalating that curve as we speak. As Republicans, we all criticized that enormous debt and said that it was a bad thing for our government. There was a debt commission, and there was all of this discussion and a lot of pandering. I was one of those who was concerned, and I am still concerned.

We have this debt that continues to escalate. Yet what do Republicans do when they are in charge? You remember the stories. If you were asked to help Republicans, they said: Well, we took over the House, but that will only--we control one-half of one-third of government. We can't get everything we want. So it didn't happen.

Then we took over the Senate. We controlled one-third of government, and they said: Well, we have to have the Presidency.

Then, lo and behold, we won the Presidency. We have all of the branches of government, yet we still are putting forward a spending bill that will be the equivalent of a $1 trillion deficit.

Is it wrong to point that out? Is it wrong to want better of your own party? Is it wrong to think that we ought to do our job, that we ought to go into an appropriations process? The House actually did it. People say: Oh, we can't do that anymore. The House of Representatives passed all 12 appropriations bills. It can be done.

Actually, maybe it is not the panacea I would hope in the sense that there is still too much money being spent, even in the appropriations process. It really needs to go hand in hand with two things. We should still do the appropriations bill. There are 12 departments of government; let's pass them one at a time. But we should also keep in mind, as we are spending money or voting to spend money, that the Constitution limits very much what the Congress can do. There are enumerated powers given to Congress under article I, section 8. That is what we are supposed to do. This was a big deal to the Founding Fathers. In fact, they were very specific that those rights not listed were not to be disparaged, so the listing of the Bill of Rights was a partial listing of your rights. But they were also very careful to say that the powers that were granted to the Federal Government were a complete list, and anything not listed in the powers granted would be retained by the people and the States--by the States and the people, respectively.

Part of our problem is that we decided we wanted a government that is everything to everyone. You ask yourself: Is one party better than the other? Maybe at times. But, really--if you are looking for responsibility--they want to cast blame. All of a sudden, I, myself, am somehow responsible for the whole problem here. Actually, I have made them angry, and they are very upset with me because I have made it difficult. We are going to have to be up late tonight, and they are angry that I am pointing out their hypocrisy. That is a big problem, and nobody likes to have that pointed out. But if we don't, if we just continue on this course, I think there is a great danger to the Nation.

I think there is a day of reckoning coming, and I think that our debt eventually could get the better of us, that it could really threaten the underpinnings, the undergirding of our country, and it could do it in a couple of different ways.

For some time now, we have manipulated interest rates through the Federal Reserve. We kept them below the market rate, which led to a huge housing bubble and a housing correction. We don't really have a housing bubble happening, but many of you may have noticed that there has been a huge stock market bubble. There is a question as to whether the fury of that has been fed by Fed policy and whether the desire to keep interest rates low to make it cheap to borrow money--whether someday we will have a boom that leads to a bust. I really think that is a worry.

The stock market has been very jittery in the last few days. I think some of that has to do--it is funny how people interpret it. Some on the left will say: Oh, the stock market is jittery because the government might shut down for 2 hours. That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard in my life. But it could be, perhaps, that they are jittery because we have a government that is profligate in its spending, is perpetually spending more than comes in, and has such a great imbalance that maybe one-third of what we are doing here is financed.

They say: Well, it would be one thing to actually finance a house or something like that, but if you are financing your rent or if you are financing your groceries each month, there is a problem. We are having trouble paying our day-to-day expenses because we are borrowing them.

Much has been said about the military needing money, and I believe in a strong national defense. In fact, I believe that our national defense is actually the most important thing the Federal Government does. It is one of those things that State government can't do. So, yes, I want a strong national defense, but you have to ask yourself whether a $20 trillion debt makes us a stronger country or a weaker country.

I think it was Admiral Milligan who said that, currently, the No. 1 threat to our country is our national debt. There is this question of whether an insolvent nation can be a strong nation.

As we look through this, I think it would be wise to look at the spending bill and say: This is not the way we should run a government, and we, as Republicans--if we really, truly are conservative--should be putting forward something that looks toward balance, at the very least, instead of going the opposite way.

I would ask the Senate to really take a look at themselves, to look in the mirror and say: Is this really what we stand for? Is this what we have been running for all these years, to control government and then be no different from our counterparts across the aisle?

I think today is a day of reflection but hopefully a day where there will be some who will say: Enough is enough. I am not going to do it anymore.

Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the government listening to your phone calls, reading your emails, or reading your text messages without a warrant. It doesn't mean the government will never do this, but it means they would have to ask a judge. They would have to ask a judge if they have probable cause that you committed a crime. They would have to name you. They would have to name the information they want. It is called the Fourth Amendment. All Americans deserve the protection of the Fourth Amendment.

In fact, I believe it was John Adams who said that James Otis's argument against blanket warrants, against generalized warrants that they called writs of assistance--he said that the argument James Otis made in the 1760s was the spark that led to the American Revolution.

Lincoln is said to have written that any man can stand adversity, but if you want to challenge a man or a woman, give them power.

Over almost 1,000 years, the history of Western civilization has been the struggle to contain the power of the monarch, the struggle to contain and maintain the power of the government in every form. From Magna Carta on, it has been the people trying to take power back from either the monarchy or a despotic government. We get to the formation of our government, and Jefferson wrote that the Constitution would be the change, that the government would be bound up in the change.

Patrick Henry wrote that the Constitution is meant to restrain the government, not the people. It is about trying to restrain government from abusing the power to take our rights. You have a fundamental right to be left alone. Justice Brandeis put it this way. He said that the right most cherished among civilized men and women is the right to be left alone.

But we know also that the history of those who grab the reins of power, the history of those who take up the mantle of power is a history of abuse.

In World War I, President Wilson arrested 10,000 Americans because of their objection to the war.

FDR had an enemies' list that he actually was very vocal about and published in newspapers. There were 77 people who were his enemies, and he used the IRS to go after them.

LBJ illegally spied on Martin Luther King. We just had Martin Luther King Day yesterday. LBJ spied on him illegally in all manners and in all forms. They spied on Vietnam war veterans.

Nixon had an enemies' list.

You name it--President after President has abused this power.

President Obama had a fight with the tea party groups. It turns out that if

you registered as a tea party group, you were given extra scrutiny. And people were denied being allowed to form as a charitable group or political activist group under President Obama because they disagreed with President Obama.

We now have a current administration where there have been accusations of people in the FBI having a personal animus against this President and conspiring and discussing how they could block him. We have had members of the Department of Justice who were married to people doing opposition research on President Trump, paid for by the opposition candidate, by Hillary Clinton.

Without question, that power has been abused and will always be abused. It was Lord Acton who said that ``power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'' The history of our country is about trying to restrain the power of government.

Realize that we have the ability to collect all of the phone calls in Italy in 1 month. There was a story saying that we did it, that we collected every phone call from Italy. Who gets trapped in that? If you collect everyone's phone call in Germany or everyone's phone call in Jordan, who gets caught in that? Many, many innocent, legitimate Americans get caught up in the other end of phone calls because it is not just the phone calls of terrorists, it is everybody's phone calls. They are all being vacuumed up, and innocent Americans are caught up in that.

Senator Wyden has been a leader in asking tough questions on the Intelligence Committee. Are there communications that are purely between two people in America that somehow get caught up in this database? He has been given a variety of answers on this, but we suspect that Americans talking to Americans in this country are caught up in this database. Should the government be allowed to search this database to prosecute you for not paying your taxes or for a minor marijuana violation? Absolutely not. Why? Because this information is gathered without a warrant. It is gathered without any constitutional protection.

As others have said, we actually are OK with a lower standard for gathering foreign intelligence. We acknowledge that the Constitution doesn't apply to everybody in the world. But if Americans get caught up in that, Americans deserve the protection of the Constitution.

Some on the other side have started saying: Well, it is lawfully gathered, so it could be used for any lawful purpose. That is the most ridiculous argument I have ever heard. It is gathered lawfully for foreigners, and we made the standard zero. There is no constitutional protection. We never said that we are going to gather foreigners' information, put it in a big pool, mix it up with Americans' information, and then type your name in--John Smith--and then find out whom you have been talking to.

Realize that they could listen to your conversation, then they could bring you in for an interview with the FBI, and if you say anything in the interview that contradicts what they eavesdropped on in your conversation, you have now committed a felony. Do you really want all of your phone calls recorded and then the government to have the ability to bring you in and ask you questions about your phone calls? And if you are not perfectly accurate in recalling your phone calls, you could go to prison.

All we are asking is that, for Americans, the Constitution should be in order. We should not get rid of the Constitution. We shouldn't throw it out. The Constitution should protect us all.

We take an oath of office to defend the Constitution. Our soldiers take the same oath of office. Wouldn't it be sad if our soldiers came home from fighting and defending the Constitution to learn that we gave up on it while they were gone?

The sad state of affairs here is that the majority doesn't want any debate. They want to ram this through with no amendments. Senator Wyden and I have worked for months on amendments and on an alternative bill which actually reauthorizes the program. Senators Leahy and Lee have another bill that is similar that replaces the program. None of us are for ending the program. All we are saying is that if you want to look at an American's information, you have to get a warrant.

People say it will slow us down. All of our bills have an emergency exception. If they declare an emergency, they can look at the information and get the warrant the next day. We hope that would be extraordinary and not the norm.

The thing is, we want the program to work, but we don't want Americans caught up in it. I hope Senators will think this through. This will not kill the program.

They are going to scare you to death and say: Tomorrow, we are all going to die. The world is going to be taken over by terrorists if we don't have this.

If we win this vote tonight, they will be negotiating within an hour and will come to a compromise that allows the Constitution to protect Americans. That was our oath of office. That is what we should do.

I urge a vote against the bill in its current fashion.

Mr. President, the question is, Do deficits matter? We often say they do. You will hear Republicans say they do, and for the last week or two, you have heard from Democrats that they were against cutting taxes because it might add to the deficit. Well, if this is true, tonight we will get a chance to vote on the deficit because, you see, Congress about 6 years ago, put something forward called pay-go budget caps. What does that mean? They kept seeing the deficit explode. So they put in these budget caps, and if we were to adhere to them, we would actually get the debt under control. Guess what. Congress has evaded them 29 times.

So tonight we will have a bill, and it will be the 30th time that Congress has evaded their own rules on the debt. Is it any surprise that the debt under George W. Bush went from $5 trillion to $10 trillion? Is it any surprise that under President Obama it went from $10 trillion to $20 trillion? Is it any surprise that the debt continues to rise? No, because both parties are responsible for it.

Look, I was all for the tax cut. I think it is good for the country, but I am also for restraining spending. So we did the tax cut earlier in the week, and now we are going to do a spending bill. We have rules in place, and the rules in place say that there are budget caps. So they have a special little waiver that they have put in the spending bills because we are now going to exceed those caps.

So the question is, Are we serious about the debt? Are we serious about adding a million dollars a minute to the debt? That is what happens. We borrow a million dollars a minute. The deficit this year will be over $700 billion--$20 trillion in total. The total debt is bigger than our entire economy.

So both sides give lip service to it, and yet both sides want more spending. On the Republican side, this year's request is $80 billion above the caps for military. On the Democratic side, they say: Well, you don't get yours unless we get ours. Yet nobody cares about the debt. So really the debt is being driven by the GOP, who want more military money but the only way they can get it is giving the Democrats more welfare money.

So the interesting thing about this vote is--you have heard the other side of the aisle saying it--they can't vote for the tax cut because of the debt. If they care about the debt, let's cut spending. This is their chance. This will be a vote on cutting spending. These pay-go budget caps were put in place by the Democrats when they were in the majority in 2010. These are their budget caps, and yet everybody is clamoring to waive them on both sides.

We have a real problem in our country, and we must do something about it. Ultimately, there will be a day of reckoning. You cannot continue to borrow so much money. Ultimately, it bankrupts the Nation, or the currency becomes worthless, or you get to a point where the interest on the debt actually becomes the No. 1 spending item. Within about a decade, interest will push out all other spending, and it will be the No. 1 item. We will spend more on interest than national defense. We will spend more on interest than welfare and anything else. So there are those who say: Well, we have to have more money for military; we have to have more money for welfare. You are going to have none of that if you keep spending money at this rate because we are going to ruin the country through debt.

So can we have a strong military? Yes. We spend about $600 billion, but you can't necessarily spend $700 billion. That extra $100 billion is making the debt worse. But it is the same on the other side of the ledger with the Democrats.

So we have a chance. There really is a chance. The media would say: Oh, you are irresponsible for voting for the tax cuts. No, you are irresponsible if you are not also willing to vote for spending cuts.

So tonight I will put forward in a few minutes a motion, and this motion will be to say that we should obey the spending caps. We have put them in place. Unless our outrage over debt is fake outrage, if we truly care about the

debt, we should vote to keep in place the rules we have put in place. These are spending caps. If we care about the next generation, we should vote for the spending caps. So I will put forward a motion that says: Let's obey our own rules.

It will be interesting to watch the vote and to see how it turns out--who truly cares about the debt on either side of the aisle, who is willing to say: You know what; I am for tax cuts but I am also for saying across the board that we need to have spending restraint. Will we obey our own rules? We have broken our own rules. This will be the 30th time we broke our own rules on budget caps since 2010. If you go back farther, it is in the hundreds of times. If you were scoring Congress on integrity and honesty about the rules we have set up, it would be a zero. We aren't adhering to our own rules.

So what I would admonish my colleagues to do is, if they care about debt, is to vote for this point of order that says that we should adhere to our budget caps and we should really truly care about the budget deficit.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, the question is, Do deficits matter? We have had a lot of debate over deficits and people complaining that tax cuts add to deficits. Well, tonight we will have a vote on whether we should honor what are called pay-go budget caps. We have had these in place for about 6 years. Congress has disobeyed their own rules 30 times as of tonight. These budget caps would keep spending in order. Yet we are going to have them waived tonight.

My budget point of order would actually say that we should not waive these budget caps. We should honor them because deficits do matter.

We borrow $1 million a minute. The deficit this year will be over $700 billion. The overall debt is $20 trillion. We have a spending problem. We have rules to keep spending in check, and we disobey our own rules.

With that, I make a point of order on the statutory pay-go scorecard that says we should spend within certain limits. This budget point of order is pursuant to section 306 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Mr. President, we currently have a $20 trillion debt.

Now, we might ask ourselves, whose fault is it, Republicans or Democrats? The easy answer is both. Both parties are equally responsible, equally culpable, and equally guilty of ignoring the debt, ignoring the spending problem, and really I think allowing our country to rot from the inside out.

This year, the deficit will be $700 billion, for just 1 year for our country, $700 billion. We borrow about $1 million a minute. Under George W. Bush, the debt went from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. Under President Obama, it went from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. It is doubling under Republicans and Democrats.

Right now, we are in the midst of another spending frenzy. People will say: Well, we are spending the money for something good. We are going to help those in Puerto Rico, in Texas, and in Florida. My point is, if we are going to spend money to help someone in need, maybe we should take it from another area of spending that is less in need. I think that just simply borrowing it--even for something you can argue is compassionate--is really foolhardy and may make us weaker as a nation.

Admiral Mullen put it this way. He said: The No. 1 threat to our national security is our debt. In fact, most people who follow world politics--while we do have problems around the world--don't really see us being invaded anytime soon by an army or an armada, but people do see the burden of debt.

So what we have before us is a bill, $36 billion, much of it going to Puerto Rico, Texas, and Florida. My request is very simple: We should pay for it.

About 1 month ago, we had $15 billion for the same purposes. We are set, in all likelihood, to have over $100 billion spent on these hurricanes. I simply ask that we take it from some spending item that seems to be less pressing. We could go through a list of hundreds and hundreds of items.

One thing I think we could start with is why don't we quit sending money to countries that burn our flag? If you are a country saying: ``Death to America,'' burning the American flag, maybe we shouldn't give you any money. We give money to Pakistan, we trade and sell arms with most of the Middle East, which does not like us, and we do this with borrowed money. We don't even have the money we are sending, but we can make the burden a little less if we say: Let's not give any money to countries that hate us, to any country burning our flag.

In Pakistan, there is a Christian woman by the name of Asia Bibi. She has been on death row for 5 years for being a Christian. She went to the well to draw water, and the women of the village began chanting, ``Death. Death to the Christian.'' As she was being beaten and pummeled on the ground and thought she was going to die, the police finally showed up. She thought they were there to rescue her. They were there to imprison her. They took her off to prison. That was 5 years ago. It is not easy being Christian in the Middle East.

In Pakistan, there was a doctor who helped us get bin Laden. His name is Afridi. He also has been in jail now for about 5, 6 years. He helped get us information that helped us to target bin Laden and finally get this great enemy of our country. The Pakistanis put him in jail for helping us.

The Pakistanis help us one day and stab us in the back the next day. When the Taliban was defeated under President Obama, when he put 100,000 troops in there, they scurried off into Pakistan, they had a sanctuary, and then they came back. I think we ought to think twice about sending money to countries that burn our flag, sending money to countries that persecute Christians, sending money to countries that, frankly, don't even like us.

We spend about $30 billion helping other countries. If you were going to help your neighbor, if your neighbor was without food, would you first feed your children, and if you have a little money left over, help the children next door? That is what most people would do. If you are going to give money to your church or synagogue, would you go to the bank and borrow the money to give to somebody? Would that be compassionate or foolhardy? Is it compassionate to borrow money to give it to someone else?

People here will say they have great compassion, and they want to help the people of Puerto Rico and the people of Texas and the people of Florida, but notice they have great compassion with someone else's money. Ask them if they are giving any money to Puerto Rico. Ask them if they are giving money to Texas. Ask them what they are doing to help their fellow man. You will find often it is easy to be compassionate with somebody else's money, but it is not only that. It is not only compassion with someone else's money, it is compassion with money that doesn't even exist, money that is borrowed. Of the $20 trillion we owe, China holds $1 trillion of that.

All this might be said, and you might say: We just have to help people. You are worrying too much. Do you have to talk about details? Really, all the money is being well spent. If you look back at money that has been spent before on disasters, guess what--people replace everything, including things that weren't broken.

I remember, in Katrina, a family who was holed up in a beachside resort for weeks with taxpayer money. They could have put them up across the street for about $60 or $50 a night. They were staying in a $400-a-night beachside resort with government money, with FEMA money.

I think we have to look at how well government spends money. Do you want an example of how well government spends money? Last year, we had some great science. There was a lot of great taxpayer-funded science going on. They wanted to study whether Neil Armstrong, when he set foot on the Moon, said: ``One small step for mankind'' or whether he said: ``One small step for a man.'' So it was either ``One small step for man'' or ``One small step for a man.'' They wanted to know if the article ``a'' was in there. So they took money that was actually intended for a good purpose--to study autism--and they studied Neil Armstrong's statement when he landed on the Moon, $700,000.

In the NIH last year, they spent $2 million studying whether, if someone in front of you in the buffet line sneezes on the food, are you more or less likely to eat the food that has been sneezed on? I think we could have polled the audience on that one.

They spent $300,000 studying whether Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. I think we could probably just assume yes.

This kind of stuff goes on year after year. You think: Oh, those are aberrations. That is new.

William Proxmire was a Senator--a conservative Democrat back in the day--and he used to do something called the Golden Fleece Award. He would put out these awards. They sound exactly the same as the stuff we are finding now.

We spent money studying the gambling habits of Ugandans. We have studied how to prepare the Philippines for climate change. You name it, we are studying it around the world, with money we don't have.

If you want to make the argument: We are running a surplus, we are a great country, we are going to help all the other countries of the world--I would actually listen to you if we were running a surplus, but we are not. We are running a $700 billion deficit. We borrow $1 million a minute.

We have a lot of rich people here. We ought to ask these rich Senators: What have you given to Puerto Rico? What are you giving to Texas? Instead, they are giving your money. They are really not even giving your money. They are giving money they borrowed.

So what am I asking? Not that we not do this. What I am asking is: Why don't we take it from something we shouldn't be doing or why don't we try to conserve? So if you decided you want to help the people next door, you might say: I am not going to the movie theater. I am not going to go to the Broadway play. I am not going to the NFL game. I am going to save money by cutting back on my expenses so I can help the people next door who are struggling, the father and mother out of work, and they need my help--but you wouldn't go to the bank and ask for a loan to help people. That is not the way it works, unless you are a government. Then common sense goes out the window, and you just spend money right and left because you are compassionate, you have a big heart, because you have the ability of the Federal Reserve just to print out more money.

There are ultimately ramifications to profligate spending. We are approaching that day. Some say you get there when your debt is at 100 percent of your GDP. We have now surpassed that. We have about a $17 trillion, $18 trillion economy, and we have a $20 trillion debt. Is it getting any better? Have we planned on fixing it at all? No, there is no fixing. Is one party better than the other? No, they are equally bad. They are terrible. One side is at least honest. They don't care about the debt. The other side is just hypocrites because they say: We are going to win the election by saying we are conservative, we care about the debt, but they don't. The debt gets worse under both parties. Voters need to scratch their head and say: Maybe they are both equally bad with regard to the debt.

Most of the debt is driven by this. It is driven by mandatory spending. What is mandatory spending? These are the entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security. This is driving the debt. It is on autopilot. So when we talk about a budget, nobody is talking about doing anything about the spending on autopilot. Why? It is risky to talk about reforming entitlements because everybody is getting one. If we don't, though, we are consigned to more and more debt, and ultimately I think we are consigned to resign to a time in which the currency may well be destroyed and the country could be eaten from the inside out through this massive debt.

Last week, we voted on a budget. From appearances, you would say: Well, the Republicans put forth a conservative budget. It had $6 trillion worth of entitlement savings. In the first year, it had $96 billion worth of entitlement savings.

But ask one Republican, ask any Republican in Congress ``Where is your $96 billion worth of entitlement spending coming from?'' and most of them wouldn't even know it was in the budget. It is in the budget to make it look good and look as if it balances over 10 years. Yet there is no plan to do anything to entitlement spending. There is no plan to do any entitlement savings. There is no bill in committee and no bill to come forward.

I introduced an amendment to the budget. I said: Well, if you are going to cut or save or somehow transform the entitlements into responsible spending, where we spend what comes in and we don't borrow, why don't we put rules or reconciliation instructions into the budget to tell people that, yes, we are honest, we are sincere, and we are actually going to cut spending? Do you know how many people voted for it? There are 52 Republicans; we had 5. They say they are for spending cuts, but they are not really because nobody will vote to give the instructions to actually do the spending cuts.

The budget we typically vote on is called discretionary spending. This is the military and nonmilitary. If you were to eliminate all of that, you still wouldn't balance the budget. That is one-third of the budget. You can't even balance the budget by eliminating one-third of it. You have to tackle the entitlements. Yet nobody has the wherewithal, the guts, or the intestinal fortitude to actually do it.

We did have a big fix once upon a time on Social Security. In 1983, President Reagan and Tip O'Neill--Republican and Democrat--came together to

say that we were out of money, and we gradually raised the age of Social Security to 67. Is anybody happy to do that? Is anybody jumping up and down, saying: Oh, I want to wait longer to get Social Security. No, nobody is, but if we don't do it, there will be no Social Security because we are destroying the system.

Social Security pays out more than it brings in. Once upon a time, it was the other way around. We used to have about 16 workers for every retiree. Now we have a little bit less than three workers for every retiree. Families got smaller.

People ask me: Why are Social Security and Medicare running a deficit? Whose fault is it--Republicans or Democrats? Really, it is a little bit of both, but it is also the fault of your grandparents for having too many kids. A whole bunch of baby boomers were born, and they are all retiring, but the baby boomers had fewer kids, and the baby boomers' kids had even fewer kids, so it is a demographic shift.

If we put our heads in the sand and do nothing, the debt will continue to accumulate. We are accumulating debt by the billions of dollars every year. This year, it is $700 billion, and it is estimated that it will be close to or may exceed $1 trillion next year. During President Obama's tenure, we had deficits of over $1 trillion in several years. Over an 8-year period, we actually increased the debt over $1 trillion a year. There was about a $10 trillion increase in the debt in the 8 years of President Obama.

If we look at whose fault it is, Republicans or Democrats, it is both. But I will tell you the way it works around here. People say that it is noble, that you are enlightened if you compromise. So here is the compromise you get. You heard that four of our brave young men died in Niger the other day. Most of the people here didn't even know we were there, to the tune of 1,000 soldiers. Once they heard about it--the hawks--they said: Oh, we need more. They didn't know 1,000 were there, but they said that we need more there, that we need more people in Niger.

No one has bothered to have a debate over what the war in Niger is about, whether we should be there, and whether we should send our brave, young men and women there. Our Founding Fathers said that was the first principle--the first principle of going to war. The initiation of war, the declaration of war, is to be done by Congress. They specifically took that power away from the President. It is not just about funding, although that is another way we control war, but the primary way we control whether we enter into war is the declaration of war. It is under article I, section 8. This is where the congressional powers are laid out. People say: Oh, that is an anachronism; we don't obey that anymore. They certainly don't. But it was never removed from the Constitution; they just quit and began ignoring this.

How important was this to our Founding Fathers? Madison wrote this. Madison said that the executive is the branch of government most prone to war; therefore, the Constitution, with studied care, granted the power of war to the legislature. It wasn't just Madison who said this; it was Jefferson, Washington, Adams. The whole panoply of Founding Fathers said that war was to be initiated by Congress.

We have had no vote, no debate, and most of the Members didn't know we were in this part of Africa. Yet here we are. But the knee-jerk reaction by those on the right typically, but some on the left, is that we need more, that we wouldn't have lost those 4 lives had we had 10,000 troops in a country in which none of us knew we were going to be at war. None of us fully debated who the parties are to the war. Yet we are going to be at war there now. So the knee-jerk reaction is that we are to expand our role in this war in Africa.

I had my staff ask a question: How many troops do we have in Africa? Nobody here knows. We looked it up, and we found out it is 6,000. We have 6,000 troops in Africa. We knew we were at war in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya, but we didn't really know we had 6,000 troops in Africa. That would include Libya. Six thousand troops are in Africa.

The point is, when you get back to the debate we are talking about-- the budget--there are a great deal of expenditures to have troops in a hundred-some-odd countries. So we literally have troops in over 100 countries. We currently have 6,000 troops in Africa. It is expensive. How do you convince the other side of the aisle to pay for it?

Typically, the Republican side of the aisle says: ``Katy, bar the door.'' We will spend whatever it takes, and then some, on the military.

The Democrats say: Well, what about welfare? We need more welfare.

Then they tell you that to compromise is noble, to be enlightened, to be pragmatic, that to compromise is what we should shoot for, that we should work with the other side. So that is what happens.

There has been a bipartisan consensus for maybe 50, 60, 70 years now, and that is to fund everything. If the right wants warfare, the left says we must get more welfare. If the left wants welfare, the right says we have to have more money for warfare. So it is guns and butter. It began in an aggressive way during the Vietnam war, but it has proceeded apace. We continue to spend money as if there is no tomorrow, but both parties are guilty. It is the right and the left. It is compromise that is killing this country. It is the compromise to spend money on everything, for everyone, whether you are from the right or the left.

But there could be another form of compromise. We could say that we wish to compromise in the reverse direction. We wish to say that, look, maybe for the Republicans, national defense is more important than welfare, and maybe for the Democrats, welfare is more important than warfare, but maybe the compromise could be, you know what, we don't have enough money for either one. Maybe the compromise could be that we will spend a little bit less on each.

You know what. We did that recently. When I first came up here, I was elected in this tea party tidal wave that was concerned about debt. Something called a sequester was passed. Guess who hated it. All the big-spending Republicans and all the big-spending Democrats. They couldn't pass out their goodies and favors enough because there was some restraint.

You say: Well, I heard the sequester was terrible. I saw people at school and I saw people in my town saying that the sequester wasn't giving them enough money.

The sequester was actually a slowdown in the rate of growth of spending. This is why you have to understand newspeak. We talk about newspeak and how people change the meaning of words to make them meaningless or even to make them mean the opposite. You hear all the time--when we were having the debate on repealing ObamaCare, we were talking about capping the rate of growth of Medicaid. You heard all the squawking on the left saying we were going to cut Medicaid. No. We were going to cut the rate of growth of Medicaid.

So we had a sequester, and it was evenly divided between military and nonmilitary, between Republican interests and Democratic interests. It did not cut; it slowed down the rate of growth of spending over 10 years. It was actually working to a certain degree. We got it because people who were concerned about the debt fought and fought and said: We need to be concerned about the debt. We are hollowing out the country from the inside out.

Who destroyed the sequester? Really, the voices were louder on the Republican side than the Democratic side, but both parties were complicit. The sequester has essentially been gutted and destroyed, and the spending caps have become somewhat meaningless.

We have before us today $36 billion. It will exceed the spending caps. We have a sequester in place, but there are all these exemptions, so it is exempt. Anytime you say it is an emergency, it is an exemption. Within the $36 billion, though, there is $16 billion because we run a terrible government-run flood program that is $16 billion in the hole. So we are going to bail it out by letting it wipe out all of its debt. That sounds like long-term mismanagement in a badly run program rather than an emergency. Yet it is going to be stuck in an emergency bill so it can exceed the caps.

What am I asking for today? I am asking that we obey our own rules. We set these rules. We set these spending caps. We set the sequester. Let's obey

them. The other side will say: Oh, we are obeying the rules; we are just not counting this money. That is the problem. We have this dishonest accounting where people say: Oh yeah, we are obeying the rules. But we are not.

There are a couple of ways you could pay for this. The first way, I tried a couple of weeks ago. We had a $15 billion bill, and I said: Why don't we pay for it with the foreign aid, the welfare we give to other countries? Why don't we say: You know what, it is time we looked at America first. It is time that we took care of our own. It is time that we spend money taking care of those in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico, but let's spend money that we were going to send in the form of welfare to other countries. Maybe we should take care of our own.

Instead, though, the Senate voted otherwise. I forced the issue. They weren't too happy with the amendment. I only got the vote because I was persistent and I threatened to delay things, and I was able to get a vote. Do you know how many Senators voted for this? No Democrats. No Democrats wanted to offset any spending, and 10 Republicans did. I think the vote was 87 to 10. Eighty-seven Senators voted to keep spending money without any offsets, to basically just borrow the money.

Now we are having the same debate again. I have an amendment to offset the $36 billion. In all likelihood, I am not going to get an amendment vote because they don't have time. It would take 15 minutes, and God forbid we spend 15 minutes talking about how we are being eaten alive by a $20 trillion debt. God forbid we talk about how a $20 trillion debt is an anchor around the neck of the country. God forbid. God forbid we offer an amendment and at least take 15 minutes to have an offset, to say we should pay for this money we are going to send to Puerto Rico, Texas, and Florida, pay for it by taking it from some other element in the budget.

Last time, I offered foreign welfare. This time, what I put on the table is something that is very similar to a bill that has been put forward and offered for several years called the Penny Plan. The Penny Plan is this. There is a great illustration of this--if you want to look at this on YouTube--of a guy with a bunch of pennies stacked and showing sort of in a visual way what it would be like to cut one penny out of every dollar. That is what we are talking about. A 1-percent cut across the board would pay for this $36 billion bill. It is actually a little bit less than 1 percent. One percent of a $4 trillion budget would be $40 billion. We need $36 billion, so it is less than 1 percent. Just cut the budget less than 1 percent.

Do you think there might be 1 percent waste in every department, including even departments of government you might like? Do you think any American families ever had to deal with a 1-percent cut? Government is so wasteful at every level that we could probably cut several percentage points of every division and department of government, and you wouldn't know it was gone. I mean, the waste is astounding. When we looked at where money is spent, we looked at some of the money that was being shipped overseas not too long ago, and one of the programs that we found was a televised cricket league for Afghanistan. All right, self-esteem is really important, and you are going to pay for it. So we are going to pay for television so that the Afghans can feel better about themselves by watching cricket on TV.

The first problem is that we don't have the money. We have to borrow it. The second problem is that they don't have televisions in Afghanistan. Well, some do, but the 1 in 1,000 people who have a television, I guess, are going to feel better about the Americans paying so that they can watch cricket on TV. It is one thing after another. We paid $1 million for a variety program to put little songs and skits on their televisions. Once again, most of them do not have a TV to watch.

In the war effort in Afghanistan, we spent trillions and trillions of dollars on the war effort. We have defeated the Taliban many times, and I am sure that we could defeat them again, but that just means that they will go across the border, hide in caves, and go back when we are tired.

We spent $45 million on a gas station in Afghanistan. This is an interesting gas station. It serves up natural gas. You might say that is great because we are lessening the carbon footprint in Afghanistan, except that it is completely absurd. They do not have any cars that run on natural gas in Afghanistan.

So they built a $45 million plant. The original estimate was that it was going to cost about $500,000. It was like 46 times the cost of overruns, and it ended up costing $45 million. It serves up natural gas, but nobody has a car that runs on natural gas.

We said whoops, and we immediately bought them 24 cars that run on natural gas so they could go to the $45 million gas station to get their natural gas. But that was not enough. We had natural gas cars for them, but they had no money with which to buy the natural gas. So we bought them all credit cards. We bought them natural-gas-burning cars, we gave them a natural-gas gas station, and we bought them credit cards to reduce the carbon footprint of those who are living in Afghanistan. This is absurd.

When we look at the budget and when we look at accounting, a lot of the money that has been spent overseas in the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, the Syria war, the Niger war, the Libya war, the Somalia war, and the Chad war is not really budgeted. A lot of this money is actually done as an off-budget thing. It is called the overseas contingency operations. It is really a way of cheating, a way of being dishonest in your accounting. It is a way of evading spending caps, but it has also gone a long way toward making it easier to keep spending money without restraint. We tried to put restraints on military and nonmilitary, and they were exceeded by this slush fund. They call it OCO funding, or overseas contingency operations. When we had the budget vote recently, I put forward an amendment and simply said that we should not spend above our caps. If we put these caps in place, this is what we should spend. I think that we got maybe 15 or 20 votes on that, but this is the problem.

Ultimately, we have to decide as a country this: Are we going to obey the Constitution? Are we going to go to war only when we declare war, when Congress does its job and declares war, or are we going to go to war anytime, anywhere? That is sort of what we do now. We go to war anytime, anywhere on the face of the planet, and it is not for free.

Not only is it expensive in dollars, but it is expensive in the lives of the young men and women who are sent to these wars. Yet no one has ever voted on them. We lost a soldier in Yemen 3 or 4 months ago. For his family, it was devastating, but America pays little attention because America is, basically, not fighting the war. A very small percentage of America--brave young men and women who are often from rural parts of our country--is fighting our wars, but the mass of America is not fighting. You could say that they are volunteers--that is great, and I think that is the best kind of army to have--but I hate it that we do not show the responsibility and care of actually doing our job and of taking the time to debate it.

Should we be at war in Yemen or not? Should we be at war in Niger? Should we be at war in Libya? Should we be at war in Chad? Should we be at war in Somalia, in Djibouti, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan? We have troops in probably 20 or 30 nations in which there is conflict going on, and we are actively involved in the midst of conflict in at least 6 or 7. It is very expensive in human lives and dollars.

We need to ask ourselves this: Will we do this forever?

The Sunnis have been fighting the Shia for about 1,000 years.

People say: Well, we are going after ISIS in Africa.

ISIS is basically a name for radical jihadist Islam, and it is all over the planet. Are we going to go everywhere and kill every one of them? Is there a possibility that, when we kill 1 that 10 more will pop up? Is the Whac-A-Mole strategy for killing every terrorist on the planet or every radical on the planet the way that we are going to win?

We went into Yemen on a manned raid in January or February of this year, and we lost one brave Navy SEAL. They say that we got information, but they will not exactly tell me what information they got. They claim

that it was this great information that is going to make the war on terror so much easier. I have my doubts. In the raid, though, which was a manned raid in the middle of Yemen, women and children died. I do not blame our soldiers. I have members of my family who are Active Duty. They do what they are told. They take orders. It is tough being put in a situation like that. You are dropped in the middle of nowhere in a village. Maybe the women and children are shooting at you as well. You have to defend yourself and complete your mission.

Yet I wonder whether or not the policymakers should be more involved with making the decision as to whether we should be in Yemen and whether or not the people who live in the surrounding area to that village will, for 100 years or more, recite through oral tradition the day that the Americans came, and whether or not we will have actually killed more terrorists than will have been created by the oral tradition of when the Americans came.

We are also aiding and abetting Saudi Arabia in this horrific war in Yemen. There are 17 million people who live on the edge of starvation in Yemen, and the war is exacerbating that. Yemen is a very poor country to begin with. They import about 80 percent of their food. Currently, the Saudis have a blockade. So no food is getting in. They say that it is to prevent arms, and I am sure it is, but one of the consequences is no food. There are a half million people with cholera right now. It is sort of a bad form of dysentery, and in poor countries, you die from cholera. There are a half million people with cholera. It goes along with no food and no clean water.

The Saudis are blockading Yemen, and the Saudis are bombing Yemen. We are selling the Saudis the weapons. We are refueling the planes and helping the Saudis pick the targets. One of the Saudi targets about 1 year ago was a funeral procession. This was a funeral procession of a Houthi leader or rebel. There were 500 people--civilians--who were wounded in that procession, and there were 150 who were killed by a Saudi bomb on civilians.

Do you think they are going to soon forget that? Do you think that by killing 150 people in a funeral procession and wounding 500, you killed more terrorists that day than you created?

I would say that that day will live on in oral history for 1,000 years. The day the Saudis came with American bombs and bombed an unarmed funeral procession will live on for 1,000 years, and hundreds-- if not thousands--of people will be motivated to become suicide bombers because of the day that the Saudis bombed a funeral procession.

It is incredibly expensive in lives--their lives, our lives. When you look at the cause of famine around the globe and when you look at it extensively and study the causes of famine, it is war probably 6 or 7 times out of 10. War is a terrible thing, and we must acknowledge that and try to think of ways that we can make war the last resort instead of the first resort.

I mean, for goodness sake, the people on television this Sunday did not know how many troops were in Niger. Yet their immediate response was that we should have had more--that we need more troops over there in Africa--in a place that most Americans have not heard of and have no idea who is fighting whom or whether or not it is an achievable goal. They say that 1,000 was not enough, that if we had had 10,000 in air support and all of this, we would have prevented these deaths. That is one lesson you could learn. The other lesson you could learn is that maybe we should not have been there at all.

You see, people have to stand up for themselves. There is this idea of sort of self-rule and independence, but if people are coddled and not sort of forced into the position of defending themselves, they will not.

We have been in Afghanistan for 16 years. In the 16 years we have been there, what have we found? We have found that about 60,000 to 80,000 Afghans have come over here. We have to help these translators. Well, they speak English, and they are pro-West. So they need to stay in Afghanistan and create a country. The best people left.

It is the same in Iraq. We won the war in Iraq, and all of the good people came over here. I have nothing personally against those who came other than that I am disappointed that there were not enough people who were heroic enough to stay in their country to help build a new country.

Who fights over there? Some of the Afghans fight. Some people join their army to shoot us. We have this green on green, where their soldiers are shooting our soldiers because they come in and intentionally are there to kill our soldiers. Yet the question is, How come, after 15, 16 years, the Afghans cannot fight to preserve their nation?

Now everybody says: Oh, if America comes home, the Taliban will take over. The Taliban is not quite ISIS. It is also not quite the same international sort of jihadist. They did harbor bin Laden once upon a time. Most of those people are dead if not all of them.

If you look at how terrorism ended when the IRA ended in England and in Ireland, it ended up being a negotiation. So many say that they will never negotiate with the enemy. If you never negotiate with the Taliban--they are, unfortunately, pretty popular in Afghanistan, and they are going to be there forever--can we kill them all? No. It is just like the radicals throughout these Islamic countries. I think there are too many to kill. The question is, Do you create more than you kill?

If you put this in context and say that we have to be able to defend ourselves and that our country needs to be strong to defend itself, I could not agree more, but do you know what? We become weaker every day as we run up this debt. We are $20 trillion in debt--$700 billion this year. We borrow $1 million a minute. Realize that predicament, and then realize that the powers that be do not want to allow amendments to offset spending.

I am proposing, if we spend money on Puerto Rico and Texas and Florida, that we offset it by taking it from something that is less of a priority, from something else in the budget. If we were to cut 1 percent of the rest of the budget, we would have more than enough to pay for this. Would anybody notice 1 percent? Sure. One would have to push things around a little bit, but they would all survive.

We have looked at spending, and to show you how bad spending in the Federal Government is, it gets faster each month as you get toward the end of the year. When there is only 1 month left, these bureaucrats say: Oh, my goodness, we might not be able to spend the money fast enough. So spending in the last month of the year is, actually, five times faster than in any other month of the year. In fact, in the last month of the fiscal year, not only is it five times faster, but each progressive day it gets faster. The last month of the fiscal year is September. On September 1, they spend the money like this. On September 2, it is like this. On September 3, it like this. On September 4, it is like this. It goes up every day because they are trying to shovel the money out as fast as they can. If they do not spend it all, they are afraid they will not get it next year. The common parlance is ``use it or lose it.''

When you get all the way to the last day of the fiscal year, spending actually increases and goes with the rising and setting Sun. So it is 8 o'clock, earlier here than it is in California. As the Sun rises, we begin spending money in the East. We are shoveling it out as fast as we can. As the Sun progresses towards sunset, the spending shifts to the west coast. They are shoveling it out at 5 o'clock Pacific time in their trying to get rid of the money.

If you look at when most conferences are, when most government employees go to a conference in Las Vegas, it is in the last months of the year. They found that they have some money. What is a million bucks? You don't mind spending a million bucks, right? You want these government employees to have a good time. So there was a group--I think it was the General Services Administration--a couple of years ago, and you saw those pictures of the head of the GSA and his wife in a big Las Vegas hot tub, drinking champagne. I think that was a million-dollar event--it was either at that conference or at another one--in which they decided that it would be good and instructive for their employees if they actually had a Star Trek reenactment. So they hired Star Trek reenactors.

With that, I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, there have been many who have said, including Admiral Mullen, among others, that the greatest threat to our national security is our debt. We have a $20 trillion debt. This year, the debt for 1 year will be about $700 billion. We borrow $1 million a minute. What we have before us is a bill that will exceed our spending caps.

We will be told that this is an emergency and we must do it. Yet I think the true compassion comes from helping those but also making sure we don't add to our debt. I think the truly compassionate person helps their neighbor by giving part of their surplus to their neighbor but not going to the bank and borrowing money to give it to their neighbor.

We are $700 billion short in the budget, and we are simply going to print more money and send it to Puerto Rico, Texas, and Florida. What I ask is, if you are going to help people, why don't we set our priorities? Why don't we take money from other areas of the budget where it is not needed?

What I propose is that we cut 1 percent or a little bit less than that across the board. I think there is not a department of government that couldn't deal with 1 percent less, and we would take that money and we could spend it on the emergencies in Puerto Rico and Texas.

I think if we think somehow that it is compassionate to go ahead and just borrow more money and continue doing this, I think we are fooling ourselves. I think our country becomes weaker each day we add to the debt, and I think it is time we become honest with ourselves.

If you look at whose fault this is, there is enough blame to go around, frankly. The debt doubled under George W. Bush from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. The debt then doubled again from $10 trillion to $20 trillion under President Obama.

We are on course to add, some estimate, another $10 to $15 trillion over the next 8 years. This is a real problem for our country. So I think, as we look toward helping those who suffer from the hurricanes, we should look toward taking it away from less pressing priorities.

There is also $16 billion in here for the flood program that continues to pay people to build in flood zones. We do it year after year after year. We continue to rebuild in flood zones, and then the taxpayers are left on the hook. So we are wiping out $16 billion in debt for the flood program, and we are also then spending money we don't have.

At this point, what I would like to do is raise a point of order that has to do with us exceeding the spending caps. I think, if we are going to be honest with ourselves--we are in the midst of talking about a large tax cut, which I favor, but how can we be the party or the people who cut taxes at the same time we continue to borrow more? So what I am asking, through this budget point of order, is that we actually adhere to our rule to not exceed our spending caps and try to slow down the accumulation of debt.

With that, I raise the section 314(e) point of order, pursuant to the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, against sections 304, 306, 308, and 309 of the Additional Supplemental Appropriations for Disaster Relief Requirements Act of 2017.

Mr. President, this amendment is about whether or not we are serious about the debt. In the current budget, there are instructions to reduce the debt by $96 billion in mandatory spending. I applaud that, but we need budget reconciliation instructions to allow it to happen. This amendment will allow instructions so we can really do what we say we are going to do, which is to cut spending.

I think, in light of the fact that we are for tax cuts, we ought to also be for reducing spending so we don't explode the debt.

I recommend a ``yes'' vote on reconciliation instructions to allow for mandatory savings and spending.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, this amendment is about the debt. We have a $20 trillion debt. It is about whether we are serious about tackling that debt. The budget before us exceeds our own spending caps by $43 billion.

You will be told that technically that is not so because we hide the money by sticking it in an account we call the Overseas Contingency Operations. Over the past 3 years, we have spent more than $1.7 trillion in this account, but we don't account for it, and we don't budget for it. What I am asking us to do is to be responsible, budget for this, stay within our self-imposed caps, and actually act as though we really believe in what we say--that the debt is a problem.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, across the country, Republicans promised to repeal ObamaCare. They promised to repeal all of ObamaCare, root and branch. Not one Republican promised to keep and block grant ObamaCare. They promised to repeal ObamaCare.

Tonight I present another chance. My amendment will provide budget reconciliation instructions so Republican Senators can fulfill their promise; so they can actually repeal ObamaCare, root and branch, as they promised.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, rather than bicker over raising taxes on some people and lowering taxes on other people, we should cut everyone's taxes to make sure we get a middle-class tax cut across the board. The best way to do that is to give the tax committee a mandate that is larger, a mandate for a bigger tax cut.

My amendment provides budget reconciliation instructions to increase the tax cut to $2.5 trillion. If we were to believe this budget, it claims to save over $6 trillion over 10 years--more than enough to go bigger, better, and bolder on cutting taxes.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, for the first time in 15 years, we are debating the congressional role in the declaration of war.

We have fought the longest war in U.S. history under an original authorization to go after the people who attacked us on 9/11. That war is long since over, the war has long since lost its purpose, and it is long past time that we have a debate in Congress about whether we should be at war.

It is the constitutional role of Congress. Interestingly, the folks you have heard on either side of the issue have said it is our job. It is what we should be doing. Yet we haven't done it for 16 years. Who in their right mind thinks that Congress is actually going to do their job without being forced to do their job?

My resolution is actually silent on whether we should still be at war. My resolution simply says that the resolutions we have previously passed will expire. I don't believe they have anything to do with the seven wars we are involved with currently, anyway, but if we were to force them to expire, we would then have a debate.

But for those who say: Yes, Congress should exert its authority; Congress should be involved in the initiation of war--they don't really believe that unless they are going to vote that way. What will happen is the continuation of the same--that we abdicate that role and let the President do whatever he wants.

It is worse than that. Let's say that we were to vote for my resolution and that the authorization to go to war after 9/11 expired. Do you think any of the wars would end? No. The neoconservatives and the neoliberals believe the President has unlimited authority. They call it article II authority for war. There is some authority given to the President--an enormous amount of authority--to execute the war but not to initiate the war. The sole duty of initiation of war was given specifically to Congress.

So if these authorities were to expire--the President already says: I have all the authority I want under the Constitution to do whatever I want. But that is not what our Founders wanted. Madison, if he were here, would vehemently disagree. Madison wrote that the executive branch is the branch most prone for war; therefore, the Constitution, with studied care, vested that power in the legislature. It was supposed to be difficult to go to war.

Some wrung their hands and said: Oh, the Senate can never agree on any authorization to go to war. How long did it take us after Pearl Harbor? Twenty-four hours, and we declared war on Japan. How long did it take us after 9/11? It took 3 days. We can come together as a body when we are attacked, when we are unified in purpose. But guess what--after 16 years, it is difficult to determine the purpose in Afghanistan.

Also, those who say: We need a new authorization, but it is going to authorize war anywhere, anytime, with no geographic limit and no time limit--basically they would be authorizing everything we are doing now and not putting any limitations on it. We are in Yemen. We are aiding and abetting the Saudi war in Yemen. Yet there has been no vote on it. Seventeen million people live on the edge of starvation because of the Saudi blockade and bombing campaign. We are aiding and abetting that. Yet there has been no vote here in Congress.

Look, we have problems here at home. These wars are costing trillions of dollars. They are unauthorized. We

have not voted on them. And I say, look, let's pay attention to some of the problems we have here at home. We are going to have a $150 billion tab for the Hurricane Harvey damage in Texas. Yet we continue with unauthorized, unconstitutional, undeclared war. I think it is time to think about the problems we have here at home. I think it is time to think about the $20 trillion debt we have. But we still have this wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, saying: What if Congress doesn't do its job? What if we allowed this authorization of force to expire and we didn't get another one?

The thing is, that is abdicating your constitutional duty. The duty is to do what is within your constitutional duty. It is not to say: Well, the other Congressmen won't do their job, so I am not going to do my job.

Our job is to enforce, obey, and execute the Constitution. The Constitution says Congress shall declare war. It doesn't say the President can go to war anytime, anywhere around the globe. It says Congress shall declare war. So for the first time in 15 years, we are debating whether Congress has a role in this.

Those who vote no against my resolution are basically voting--even though they will say otherwise, they are voting to say: Well, let's just let the status quo go on. The President can do what he wants. It is too emotional, it is too controversial to debate war. So we will keep letting the President do whatever he wants.

My vote is to grab power back. My vote is to say: The Senate has prerogative here. The Constitution gives the power to the legislature. That is what this vote is about. It is about grabbing back the power to declare war and saying this is a Senate prerogative. So the majority, in all likelihood, will say: No, we do not want to do that. We think that would risk some war somewhere, sometime.

That is the point. We should be debating where we should be at war. Should we be at war in Somalia? Should we be at war in Libya? Should we be at war in Yemen? Should we be at war in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan?

Look, President Obama ran on ending the wars; yet he ended up taking the war and bombing campaign to seven countries without his having any authorization. Intriguingly, the left was relentless in criticizing George Bush; yet George Bush did come to Congress. We had a vote to go after those who attacked us on 9/11. We had an ill-fought campaign with regard to the Iraq war, but we did actually vote on it. We have not voted for a generation. Should one generation be able to bind another generation?

Realize that, if we do not force these authorizations to expire, this war could go on forever. This is 1984. This is George Orwell's saying that Oceania has always been at war with East Asia and then, a month later, his saying that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia-- because no one is stepping up to say no. That is what Congress is supposed to do. We are supposed to be a voice that debates and asks: Should we go to war? It is part of doing our job, but the only way to get Congress to do its job is to actually let these expire.

We should have a full-throated debate over who initiates war. There is no murkiness to the Constitution. The Constitution is explicit. The power of the initiation of war--the declaration of war--lies with Congress, but the war in Afghanistan has gone on for 16 years now. Our young men and women who will be fighting in the war in the next year or so were not yet born on 9/11. We have long since killed the people who perpetrated 9/11. With the killing of bin Laden, there is no person left in the leadership of al-Qaida or the Taliban who was around at that period of time. Yet we say: Well, it is still the Taliban. If you are going to say that we are going to fight until the end of time--that we are going to have a perpetual war until the end of time--and that we are going to kill every radical Islamist in the world, it is an impossibility.

I would say, at the very least, let's have a debate. If that is your purpose, if that is your goal, and if that is what you stand for, step forward, and let's have a debate. Let's debate the war in Yemen. Let's debate the war in Somalia. Let's debate whether we should be bombing people in Nigeria. Let's debate whether we should be in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. Let's have a debate about all of these different wars. Let's not just muddle on and say: Oh, the President can do what he wants.

Realize that the people in this body who are for perpetual war do not even think we should have any role in it. They tell me quietly every day that the President can do whatever he wants under article II of the Constitution. That is absolutely false. Read the Federalist Papers. There is extensive debate over the war-making power. From Washington, to Adams, to Jefferson, to Madison, they all said very explicitly: We give this power to Congress because we fear the perpetual wars that we have seen in Europe. We fear the wars of brother fighting brother and brother fighting cousin within these royal disputes that went on endlessly in Europe. He set up our founding document to try to make war difficult, but when we have been attacked, it has been easy to come together. For 9/11, virtually unanimously, we came together within 3 days. For Pearl Harbor, it was within 24 hours.

What I would say to my colleagues is: Do your job. This is your constitutional role. Let's let these expire, and over the next 6 months, let's debate whether we should be at war and where.

I, for one, am one who says that we should oppose unauthorized, undeclared, unconstitutional war. At this particular time, there are no limits on war. The 9/11 proclamation has been interpreted so widely that it could mean anything. You have people who interpret it widely, but you also have people who say that the Constitution says that the President can do anything. This is not what our Founding Fathers intended.

I am proud to be a part of and an instigator of the debate. For the first time in 15 years, the full Senate will vote on whether we have a role in initiating war, whether we should continue to be at war, or whether we should even vote on whether we should continue to be at war.

I urge the Senate to adopt my amendment, which would be a 6-month moratorium--a 6-month sunset--on the 2001 and 2002 resolution so that we could then have the real debate. But mark my words: Those who will come out and say that they are for the real debate are not really for it unless they are willing to sunset it, because we have been going for 16 years without having a real debate. There will be no real debate on war unless we pass this resolution.

I yield back my time.

Mr. President, I rise today to oppose unauthorized, undeclared, and unconstitutional war. What we have today is basically unlimited war, anywhere, anytime, anyplace upon the globe.

My amendment would sunset in 6 months the 2001 and 2002 authorizations for use of force. What does that mean? This was legislation passed many years ago to go after the people who attacked us on 9/11. I supported that battle, but I think the mission is long since over. I don't think anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty believes these authorizations from 16 years ago and 14 years ago--I don't think anyone with intellectual honesty believes they authorized war in seven different countries.

Not only is it lives we are losing, the American soldiers, the brave young men and women who are sent to distant lands and asked to give their lives for their country without the Senate taking the time to authorize the war--I think that is terribly unjust and should end.

There are some who argue that we don't even need to vote at all. Some of the Presidents, Republican and Democratic, have said they have article II--this is the second article of the Constitution--they say that by the Constitution, they can do what they want, when they want, where they want, and that Congress never has to approve their authorization and never has to give authority to go to war. These advocates of perpetual war argue that these powers are implicit and that no one can stop a President who wants to go to war.

This is diametrically opposite of what our Founding Fathers thought. Madison in particular disagreed. Madison wrote that the executive branch is the branch most prone to go to war; therefore, the Constitution, with studied care, vested that power in the Congress. Our Founding Fathers saw the

history of Europe as the perpetual history of war--brothers fighting brothers, Kings of two different countries who were cousins, brothers, uncles, fathers, sons. The history of Europe was perpetual war.

When we broke away, we said: We are going to have some checks and balances in place. We are going to make it difficult to go to war. We are going to vest that power in the Congress.

But somewhere along the way, we lost our way, and we now commit ourselves to war or one man or one woman commits us to war without any vote by Congress. This is not what our Founding Fathers intended.

Former President Obama, when he was a candidate, wrote that no President should unilaterally go to war unless we were under imminent attack. That is the understanding of the Constitution that most originalists take. Yet, once Mr. Obama was in the White House, he bombed seven different countries. He expanded the use of Executive power. He expanded the war-making power of the Presidency, even while all along saying that he was for a narrower interpretation.

Candidate Trump said that the war in Afghanistan had lost its purpose, that it was a disaster, and that it should end. He said that on maybe 15 different occasions. Yet, now that he is in the White House, the generals have said: We must fight on. We must continue to fight. If we leave, the Taliban will take over.

My question is, When will the Afghans stand up and fight? We have spent $1 trillion helping them. We spent billions of dollars trying to convince them not to grow the poppy that becomes the opium that addicts the world. Yet last year Afghanistan had the biggest crop of poppy they have ever had in recent history. The people who run Afghanistan, whom we put in to govern, the Karzai family--full of drug dealers, crooks, and thieves. You wonder why they are not popular in their own country. But my question is, Where did the $1 trillion go? Why can't they defend themselves? Why do we have to fight their wars for them?

One thing is certain: The war was not authorized by you, the people, and the war was not authorized by us, the Congress, and therefore the war is unconstitutional. The war is unauthorized.

You say: Well, do we ever get it right? Have we ever voted to authorize war?

Yes, we have. When we went to war in Afghanistan the first time--and I would have voted yes--there was a vote, and overwhelmingly we voted to go in.

Some have argued: Well, is 6 months enough time for Congress to do anything? Can they get anything done in 6 months?

When we were attacked in Pearl Harbor, do you know how long it took us to declare war? Twenty-four hours. When we were attacked on 9/11, how long did it take us to authorize the military force to go in? Three days. People say Congress will never get it done. Maybe it is because we are divided.

We haven't been attacked, we have no clear purpose in Afghanistan, and there is no clear route to victory. Realize that in 2011 President Obama put 100,000 troops into Afghanistan. Sure, he pushed the Taliban back. Where did they go? To our ally Pakistan, which has gotten billions and billions of dollars of American welfare and as we sit here is destined to get another half a million of your money in American welfare over the next month. Billions and billions of dollars we send to Pakistan, but where does the Taliban live? In Pakistan. They run back and forth across the border.

So we have to ask the question, What is our purpose? Are we nation building? We spend hundreds of billions of dollars building their roads, building their bridges, building their schools. They bomb them, we bomb them--somebody bombs them, and then we rebuild them again.

We have $150 billion worth of damage in Texas. Do you know how we should pay for it? Let's quit sending welfare to foreign countries. Let's look at our country first, the problems we have here, rebuild our roads, our bridges, our schools, and not borrow it, not add to a $20 trillion debt. Take the money we are sending in welfare to foreign countries and let's rebuild our own.

We are at war in seven countries--none of them voted on by Congress. Is it expensive? Yes, to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Today we will debate the issue of war and whether Congress is constitutionally bound to declare war. We will debate whether one generation can bind another generation to perpetual war.

We are at the point where we have been in Afghanistan so long that within the next year, there will be people fighting who were not yet born on 9/11. This war no longer has anything to do with 9/11, no longer has anything to do with any vital interest in our country. It has to do with us believing we could reshape the world and make the world safe for democracy--everyone is going to love America, and everyone is going to become a western style democracy. Guess what? It is never going to happen.

Afghanistan is not even a real country; it is a collection of five or six tribal lands that were stuck together by Europeans who had no knowledge of the local people. They don't even like each other, much less us. Do you know what they call the President, who resides in Kabul? They call him the mayor of Kabul derisively because he has no sway over them. They are interested in who their chieftain is in their local area. They speak five different languages. They are never going to be a country.

If you want to be at war there, you want to send your sons and daughters to Afghanistan, you think somehow it will make our country safer, let's vote on it. So what I am advocating is a vote. For the first time in 16 years, I am advocating that we should vote on whether we should be at war. It should be a simple vote, but it is like pulling teeth. I have been trying very hard to get this vote for 5 years now. I am this close. I am hoping to get the vote today or tomorrow, but it isn't easy because we have been obstructing and obstructing, and no one wants to be on the line. Yet that is why we are elected--to put our names, our John Hancock, on the line. Are you for the war or against the war?

I am done. I am done. I am ready to come home. I remember my father saying, in 2008, in one of the Presidential debates, when they asked ``How will you get the people home?'' he said ``We just marched in, and we can just march out.''

There is no more meaning or purpose in Afghanistan. We had 100,000 troops there in 2011. All of the Taliban scurried into Pakistan, and as soon as the troops diminished, they went back. Some people take from that lesson--they say: We need 200,000 or we need half a million troops or we need to stay there forever and police every corner for them. I take it to mean that the governments themselves over there do not have the popular support of the people.

Stand up and fight for your country. Half of the people in Afghanistan who were helping us over there came to our country. They fled. It is the same with Iraq. All of the good people in Iraq--our translators, pro-Western people--came to our country. I understand wanting to come to a good place, but it would be like having the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, after they had fought the war and America had won, going back to England and saying: Oh, it is dangerous in the new country. Yet that is what we have been saying year after year, so the people who have pro-Western values from Afghanistan now live in the United States and the same in Iraq.

The thing is that we need to have some tough love. They need to practice some responsibility, and they need to take ownership of their country. But as long as you coddle people, as long as you give people stuff, and as long as you fight their wars for them, they are not going to step up and fight.

We are going to debate whether Afghanistan is a winnable war.

We will also debate whether war in Yemen is in our national interest. Most of America does not know that we are at war in Yemen. Most of America does not know where Yemen is. We need to know why we are there and whether it is of any value to the United States.

We will debate whether our support for Saudi Arabia is exacerbating starvation and the plague of cholera in Yemen.

We will debate whether it is in our national interest to topple the Government of Syria. There are 2 million

Christians who live in Syria. Guess what. We may not understand it, but most of those Christians support Assad. On the side of the war that we have been funding and arming with the radical Islamists from Saudi Arabia and with the radical Islamists from Qatar are the people who hate the Christians. We are fighting on the side of the people who hate the Christians in Syria. Does that make Assad a good guy? No, but the thing is that maybe sometimes there is no good person in a war, no good side to a war.

For 5 years, I have been fighting to have a vote on whether we should be at war and where. I think there is no greater responsibility for a legislator than to vote on when we go to war. I tell the young soldiers whom I meet that it is my responsibility to discuss, debate, and think seriously about whether we send them to war.

One of the things that is most mistaken by politicians--even by some who are well intended--is that they think every soldier in America is jumping up and down to go to his eighth tour in Afghanistan. Go out and meet the soldiers. They are not allowed to be politically active, and they are not a political force on Washington, but I guarantee that if you were to ask our soldiers ``Are you ready to go back for your eighth tour of Afghanistan? Do you see purpose in Afghanistan?'' that they have lost sight of what that purpose is.

I met a Navy SEAL about a year ago. He had been in for 19 years--a tough guy, as they all are--and he said to me: Do you know what? We can defeat any enemy. We can kill any enemy. We can succeed at almost any mission that you give us. But the mistake is when you--Congress or a President--tell us to go somewhere and plant the flag and create a country. We are just not very good at nation building.

We have the world's most elite military. We can defend our country. We can defend, without question, against all invaders. Yet we are not very good at making countries out of places that are not.

What we should think about is that we have a $20 trillion debt. We borrow $1 million a minute. Even if you thought it was a good idea to try to create a country in Iraq or create a country in Afghanistan or create some sort of paradise in Yemen or Somalia or Nigeria or Libya or any of the places we are--even if you thought some paradise was a great thing--we have no money with which to do it. We are destroying our country from within. We are eating out the substance of the very greatness of America by borrowing $1 million a minute. We are flat broke. We cannot afford to be everybody's Uncle Sam. We cannot afford to be everybody's Uncle Patsy. We cannot afford to keep exporting our money and our jobs to the rest of the world. We need to look at our country and say it is time that we did things for our country, for our people, and it is time that we quit borrowing $1 million a minute.

The question is, Will the Senators--will those who gather to vote-- stand for the rule of law? Will the Senators stand for congressional authority for war? Will they stand for what the Constitution clearly says in article I, section 8, which is that Congress, not the President, shall declare war? Will the Senators sit idly by and let the wars continue unabated and unauthorized?

Some will argue that sunsetting the old authorizations is too soon, too dramatic. Really? So 6 months and 16 years later, we have not decided whether we should be at war or where we should be, and we cannot decide in 6 months? It took us 24 hours to decide with Pearl Harbor. It took us 3 days to decide with 9/11. I think 6 months is more than enough time.

Will Congress do its job unless it is forced to? All history says no. Why does Congress have an 11-percent approval rating from the people? Because it is not doing its job. How do we force Congress to do its job? Give it deadlines. How can we get a deadline? Let's pass this. Let's let the authorizations expire. Let's have a full-throated, deep, and heartfelt debate over whether we should be at war and where. Should we be at war in Afghanistan? Is there a winnable and foreseeable winnable future there? Should we be at war in Iraq? Syria? Yemen? Libya?

Today's vote can be seen as a proxy vote for the Constitution. Today's vote is not really a vote for or against any particular war. Today's vote is simply a vote on whether we will obey the Constitution. Today's vote is a vote on whether Congress will step up and do its job. Sixteen-and-a-half years is more than enough time to determine whether the war in Afghanistan or Yemen or Libya or Somalia has purpose or real meaning for our national security.

Often, it is said--very glibly--that, yes, it is in our national security interest. Realize when people tell you that they are giving you a conclusion. That is the beginning of the debate. We could debate for hours and hours. Hopefully, we will have some of that debate, but we have to debate what is in our vital national interest. Just to say it is so does not make it so.

Does anybody in America think the war in Yemen is in our vital interest? Most people do not know where Yemen is, much less think it is in our vital interest. Guess what. The war in Yemen may actually be opposed to our vital national interest. It may be making it worse. The war in Libya certainly did.

President Obama, when he chose to act illegally and intervene in Libya, made the world less safe. It was not his intention. I will grant him that his motives were to make it more safe, but he made the world less safe. Why? Because when Qadhafi was toppled, you got chaos. You have two competing governments in Libya, and you have chaos. If you want to set up a terrorist camp, if you are ready to go find a good place in the world, Libya is one of the prime places to go now because the government is gone and there is chaos. So I would argue that the intervention--one of the wars that we fought illegally, without the approval of the Senate, under the unilateral action of the President-- made us less safe. That is why we are supposed to debate before we go to war. We are less safe because of the Libyan war.

How about the Syrian war? It is the Christians on one side and us on the other side. That is the first problem I have. The people on the side of the war that we supported are the radical Islamists. ISIS was on the side that we were supporting. In fact, one of the most famous, if not the most famous and important leaked email about Hillary Clinton from WikiLeaks was when Hillary Clinton sent an email to John Podesta, writing to him: Hmm, we need to exert some influence on Saudi Arabia and Qatar because they are giving financial and strategic assistance to

Madam President, in Washington, we have a disease--or a syndrome rather. I call it the dinosaur syndrome: big hearts, small brains. Unfortunately, it is a recurring problem year after year, bill after bill, day after day.

In Washington, it is argued that you are more compassionate if you give away more of someone else's money. I would argue that true compassion is in giving your own money away. I would argue that truly rational policy is giving away money that you have. It is one thing to give away other people's money. It is another thing to give away money you do not even possess. As a country, we have a $20 trillion debt. We borrow $1 million every minute. Yet we are putting forward a bill to allocate $15 billion to those who are suffering from Harvey without paying for it and without finding the money from anywhere. We are simply adding it to our tab--adding it to our $20 trillion bill.

How did we get to $20 trillion in debt? Big hearts, small brains. Nobody has the courage to ask: Why don't we pay for it? Why don't we be legislators and stand up like men and women and say: Let's set priorities.

If it is a priority to help those in Texas--and I have great sympathy for those in Texas. My family is there. I have family members with 2 feet of water in their house so I have great sympathy for those who are in need, but there is no reason to be foolish. We shouldn't just borrow the money. Why don't we take the money from something less important?

My amendment, the America first amendment, would take the money from money we are going to send to foreign countries. We send billions and billions of dollars to countries that hate us. We send billions and billions of dollars to countries that burn our flag. I think it is a very simple choice, when we are looking at helping those in need in our country, that we quit sending money to other countries.

What my amendment would do would be to pay for the $15 billion in aid by taking it out of the foreign aid account. Who gets the money in the foreign aid account? What is it spent on? I will give you a couple of examples of what we spend our foreign aid on.

We spent billions of dollars--I think it is over $100 billion--on building roads in Afghanistan, blowing up roads in Afghanistan, building schools, blowing up schools, and then rebuilding all of them. Sometimes we blow them up, and sometimes someone else blows them up, but then we always go back and rebuild them. What about rebuilding our country? Why don't we look at our country and rebuild our infrastructure and rebuild our roads? For those who are flooded in Texas, let's help them, but let's help them by not sending the money to Pakistan and to other countries that do not even like us.

In the foreign aid account, we spent $273 million last year teaching people how to apply for more of our money. So it is not bad enough that they take your money and send it to foreign countries that do not even like us, but we teach these people how to apply for more of our money.

We had a televised cricket league that we spent $1 million on in Afghanistan--a televised cricket league. The only problem is, they don't really have any televisions. Why it is our obligation? Why is the U.S. taxpayer asked to pay for a cricket league in Afghanistan?

We spent $45 million on a natural gas, gas station in Afghanistan-- $45 million. It was estimated to cost a half a million dollars--86 times cost overruns. What does it serve up? Gasoline. Natural gas. Who has a car that runs on natural gas in Afghanistan? Nobody. So we bought them cars. We bought them cars that run on natural gas. Then they had no money with which to buy the natural gas so we gave them credit cards to buy the natural gas. That is where your money is going. If you want to help the people in Texas or those people who may be hurt in Florida, why don't we quit sending the money overseas? These are the people who chant ``Death to America,'' and we send more money to them.

We spent money on home mortgages in Nigeria. We are spending money on home mortgages in Nigeria? We spent money on tourism in Albania. This is one of my favorites: We spent money teaching people in Kenya how to use Facebook.

All I am asking is, Why don't we stand up like men and women, like real legislators? If we are going to have compassion for those in Texas, why don't we have the good wisdom not to just simply add it to our debt? In hysteria--everyone is hysterical--we must give, give, give someone else's money but not only that. We must give, give, give money we do not have. We are going to destroy our country. There have been people who have argued that our $20 trillion debt is the No. 1 threat to our national security.

So what I am asking is, Why don't we pay for this? Why don't we simply take some money that we were going to spend somewhere else, for something not as valuable in another country, and spend it here? You realize what is going to happen. I will proffer this amendment, and in all likelihood, the swamp--the establishment--will vote this down because they never want to cut a dime of spending. They are always compassionate. They have big hearts. They are willing to give away everybody else's money, but they are never ever willing to pay for it. This is both parties--both the Republican Party and the Democrat Party. Watch the vote and see who is a conservative and who says we should pay for the aid for Harvey and who says, oh, no, that we should add it to the tab.

Where is the $15 billion going to come from? This year, we are going to run a $500 billion debt. There is no money. They are giving away your grandchildren's money to help people. People will say that is compassion, that we are going to help people now. Yet we are stealing it from our kids' futures, and we are stealing it from the future and the soundness of our country, and we are threatening the very security of our country with this enormous and elaborate debt.

Simply pay for it. Simply say: Do you know what? This year, we cannot be so compassionate to people who are wanting to get healthcare in Cambodia. We have USAID money going to Cambodia to help them get cost- effective or lower cost insurance. We could not even do anything with the healthcare in our country. We failed to act on it, but we are sending money to Cambodia to help them with their healthcare. Why don't we act here at home? Why don't we take care of our own problems before we think we can take care of everybody else's problems everywhere around the world?

So we will get a chance to vote today. My amendment will come up shortly, and it will simply say, yes, we are a big, rich country. We can help those in Texas, but we will pay for it by taking the money away from somewhere else in the budget that is less of a priority. We give hundreds of millions--really billions--of dollars to Pakistan. How much do they like us? Sometimes they help us, but sometimes they harbor the enemy. Sometimes they harbor whole networks of people who are plotting to kill us.

What do they think of Christianity in Pakistan? Asia Bibi is a Christian. She has been in jail for 5 years--on death row--for being a Christian. What do they think of helping us with bin Laden? They did not raise a finger to help us with bin Laden. Bin Laden lived among them for years and years and years, and when we finally got bin Laden, we got bin Laden with information from a doctor named Shakil Afridi. What did Pakistan do to reward the doctor who helped us get bin Laden? Pakistan has him locked up for life in prison.

Really, we need to requestion whether this aid works at all to foreign countries, whether it is counterproductive, and whether we have it in the first place, but we should also ask an important question: Maybe that aid ought to be better spent at home. Maybe we ought to start rebuilding our country instead of always thinking we have to rebuild everybody else's country.

I think this amendment is so easy to decide, and I think the American people are behind me on this amendment. If we were to take this to a huge vote of the entire American public, I think 75 to 80 percent of the American public would say: Do you know what? Let's take care of our problems at home; let's don't send our money abroad. And I think we would win this battle.

Watch this vote because in Washington you will see the opposite. You will see three-fourths of this body or more say: Oh, no, we are not going to cut any spending to anyone. We could never cut foreign aid or welfare for foreign countries. We are just going to add it on to the tab. I, for one, want to be a loud voice to say that it is risking our country's future. It is risking the security of the United States to keep adding to a $20 trillion debt, no matter how good the cause is.

Remember, the next time a politician tells you that they are so compassionate because they want to give away more of someone else's money, ask them how much they gave of their own money if you want to judge their true compassion.

Thank you.

Mr. President, I object.

Mr. President, as a physician and an eye surgeon, I have seen ObamaCare up close, and it is not working for Americans.

If you look across the country and say ``Is it working?'' you find that ObamaCare premiums have doubled for those in the individual marketplace in just a few short years. You find that the ObamaCare insurance mandates have caused 4.7 million people to lose the insurance they chose. If you like your doctor, you can keep him or her--that was the promise, and it was a lie. Some 4.7 million people were told that they couldn't choose the insurance they want and couldn't choose their doctor.

It is estimated that there are 800,000 fewer jobs because of ObamaCare. How does that happen? Well, if you work 32 hours a week and your employer has to provide insurance at 30 hours, guess what happens. Some people get moved to 28 hours. You add up all those hours, and millions of people are working fewer hours.

Who are the people who got shafted by ObamaCare? Often, working-class people. In my State, there are 25,000 people who pay a fine because they can't afford ObamaCare. These 25,000 people make less than $25,000 a year. They are our working class.

ObamaCare punishes them and says: You have to pay a fine.

They say: I wish I had insurance, but ObamaCare added all these mandates, things that I can't afford.

Sure, everybody wants to have everything under the Sun covered by their insurance, but when you mandate that, you elevate the price of insurance. So what has happened? Young, healthy people have lost their insurance and don't buy insurance in droves.

ObamaCare says: You can come back any time after you are sick and buy your insurance.

That sounds good, but what it leads to is the death spiral of ObamaCare. ObamaCare premiums have doubled because the young, healthy people are saying it costs too much and the sicker people are the only ones left in insurance.

This is what happens when you let the government get involved in the marketplace. If you allow the marketplace to work--what is the one universal feature of capitalism? You get the lowest amount of cost and the most amount of goods distributed to the most amount of people.

Right now under ObamaCare, 50 percent of America has one choice. What does that mean? A monopoly. Who wants the insurance company to have a monopoly? When the insurance companies have monopolies, the prices get doubled.

There are now some parts of our country that have no choice in the individual market. If you are a plumber or a welder or a carpenter, you have to buy insurance in the individual market. In many places in America, you have no choice. In half of America, if you buy insurance by yourself, if you are not part of a large group, in half of America, there is one choice--a monopoly and monopoly prices.

In my State alone, 50,000 Kentuckians have to pay a tax. They have to pay a fine because they can't afford ObamaCare. They are regular working people, and they do work and they do pay taxes. They pay a fine. We pay $16 million in fines in just my State. Across America, this is happening.

How did it become an American sort of legislation or plan to force people to buy stuff they don't want and then to extract money out of their paycheck if they don't do what you tell them?

Ultimately, Americans should remember that ObamaCare is predicated on force and coercion. ObamaCare dictates what kind of insurance you can get and makes you pay a fine if you don't get what the politicians tell you you must get.

President Obama basically told you that you were too stupid to make your own choices. These people who want to dictate to you are elitists. They think they know better than you what kind of insurance you should get. If you don't buy the insurance they dictate, they will fine you. If you don't pay the fine, they will jail you. How is that consistent with the American ideal of freedom?

This debate is about more than actuarial tables. We get dragged down into this debate, and we think it is all this healthcare wonkiness, this and that. It is about freedom of choice. It is about whether you as an American can make the choice whether you want insurance or don't want insurance, whether you want insurance that is really expensive or not.

They put a special tax in there if you have good insurance. First they tell you what kind of insurance to buy, and then they tell you that your insurance is too good. If you are in a union or you are an executive and you have great insurance, ObamaCare tells you they are going to tax you because your insurance is too good. These busybodies think they know everything about what you want. They are going to dictate what kind of insurance you can get, and then when you buy it, they are going to tell you that you have too much, so you have to pay a tax. That isn't the American way.

Today we will vote on a bill we have voted on many times. The Senate itself voted on this 2 years ago. It is the identical bill. We are going to vote on a bill we voted on 2 years ago. I hope everybody who voted for it before will vote for it again. It is what we call a clean repeal. It is not cluttered with insurance company bailouts. It is not cluttered with this and that, new Federal regulations. It is just trying to peel back ObamaCare.

While it is a clean repeal, it is only a partial repeal. Why? It is only a partial repeal because we have these arcane Senate rules that say we can't repeal the whole thing. Because we are only repealing part of it, ObamaCare will remain. Even if we are successful with this bill, at least half or more of ObamaCare remains. Bad things remain. All of the mandates on what you have to purchase on your insurance will remain. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do this.

The other side does not want to help. The other side has never met a regulation they want to repeal and has never met a tax they want to lower. So if you want to get rid of the taxes, it has to be done today.

People say: Well, this doesn't have the replacement.

Well, sure we should replace ObamaCare. I have been advocating that from the beginning. But we have to figure out what that replacement is. And the only way we are going to be forced into a bipartisan compromise is if we repeal it. If we do not repeal it today, there is no impetus from either side to work on replacing it. If you repeal it, even the other side will say: Oh, my goodness, we have to do something because they repealed these subsidies in this Medicaid expansion. They will say: We will work with you now. But everything else is false.

They will not work on repealing one regulation or one tax. That heavy lift is left to Republicans, and my hope is that Republicans would band together and say: Sure, this isn't everything I wanted. It is not everything I want. It is a partial repeal. It leaves in place a lot of ObamaCare that we should get rid of, and we should continue to try to get rid of these Federal mandates on insurance.

This is a beginning, and it is all we are being offered up as a beginning, but it is a victory for those of us in America who have said: Enough is enough. My government shouldn't be telling me what I can buy and what I cannot buy. My government should not tell me which doctor I can choose and which doctor I have to leave behind. The government should not be involved in my healthcare business. I want to be left alone. The right to privacy, the right to be left alone is a fundamental right of Americans. That is what this is about.

It is about freedom of choice. It is not about actuarial tables. It is not about the Federal Government designing a perfect healthcare system. The Federal Government cannot deliver the mail. They lose a billion dollars a quarter delivering your mail. Do you want them in charge of your doctor? Do you want them in charge of your insurance? This is the one chance we get today. We will have a chance to repeal ObamaCare. We will have a chance to fulfill our promise to the American voters.

There is a partisan divide. Democrats are for keeping it; Republicans are for repealing it. But Republicans made a promise. We made a promise to the American people to repeal it. There may be some Republicans today who say: I am not voting to repeal any longer; things have changed. The problem is that we are not going to get toward a solution if we don't begin to repeal. The other thing about this repeal is that there is a 2-year window in which part of the repeal doesn't take place for 2 years. Over those 2 years, my guess is that we will have impetus from the other side to actually begin to negotiate. Currently, there are 27 million people in America without insurance. From all the talk, you would think that ObamaCare has covered everyone, and somehow Republicans are against that.

Count me as one Republican who wants to figure out how we insure the 27 million who don't have insurance. Of the 27 million people who don't have insurance under ObamaCare, half of them don't buy insurance because it is too expensive. Why is it too expensive? Because ObamaCare dictates about 15 different things that every insurance policy has to have: Vision, hearing, pregnancy--you name it; it is all on there. Everyone wants it. If you put it on every insurance policy, not everyone is going to be able to afford it. You force people out of the market. So 27 million people don't have insurance, and half say they can't get it because it is too expensive.

Where is the problem in insurance? If you are here today visiting in Washington, and you work for Toyota or Ford or General Motors or any big American company--any big corporation in our country--if you work for them, my guess is that you are not worried about your wife getting sick and they fire you from your job or raise your rates. What happens when you have group insurance is, if your family member gets sick, you don't lose your job. Your insurance rates really don't change, and you continue on with your life. You still have the tragedy to deal with of someone in

your family being sick. But if you have group insurance, it seems to work in our country.

What we are talking about is the individual insurance market. We are talking about the plumber, the pest control guy, the carpenter, the welder, the farmer--people who are in a small business. Either they have a few employees or it is just them. That is what we are talking about. It is horribly broken. I don't wish it on any American. I wish no American had to buy any insurance in the individual market. In fact, what I am proposing would so disrupt the individual market that maybe everyone would leave. I am trying to give an exit ramp to everyone in the individual market to get out of the individual market because the individual market is a terrible place to be.

If you are a farmer in America and you buy insurance for you and your wife, and your wife gets breast cancer, you are not only deathly afraid for her health, you are deathly afraid your insurance rates will be doubled, tripled, or you will be dropped. I don't care if you are a Republican, Independent, or a Democrat. People in the individual market do worry. We have had people here worried that people are going to lose their health insurance. The individual market is a terrible place to be.

So what should we do? Should we give hundreds of billions of dollars to the insurance company and say: Please insure these people and make sure their rates aren't too high. I don't like that because I am not for crony capitalism. These companies make billions of dollars a year in profit. I am not for giving them one penny of your money.

Do you know what I want? I want something that doesn't cost anything, that doesn't cost one penny and would completely transform healthcare and insurance in this country. I want to legalize--I want to make it open to every American that you can go out with an association across State lines and buy your insurance as part of a group. What would that mean? In my State, the Farm Bureau has 33,000 people. But when you go to the Farm Bureau to buy your insurance, you get an individual policy. A farmer, his wife, and their family get a policy. It is just them. They are not really protected by the group. They don't get the leverage of price, and they are not protected. If they get sick, their rates are based on them and their family. Why don't we let them join together? There are probably a million farmers in the Farm Bureau throughout the American Farm Bureau. What if the American Farm Bureau had an association and one person negotiated for them? I don't think we can overstate the negotiating value of a group.

In China recently, they negotiated for patented medicines, and they reduced the price by 67 percent. Groups can negotiate prices down. This is a free market reform. This is collective bargaining for consumers. I can't see why either side--I am still hopeful, no matter where this goes, that at some point in time, when partisan fervor dies down, we can go to the other side and say: What's so wrong with collective bargaining? I thought you were for collective bargaining for labor. Why not be for collective bargaining for consumers? Let the consumers band together. AARP has 33 million people. What if one person negotiated the rate for their insurance and their drugs? My guess is that they would have the lowest drug prices in the world, and more people would want to join AARP. What if the credit unions--there are about 20 million people in credit unions, maybe more, across the United States. What if you could join your credit union and became part of a national association to buy your insurance? The leverage of 20 million people would be maybe 40, 50 times bigger than America's biggest corporation.

Right now, if you are General Motors and you are a big corporation, you have leverage to bring prices down. What if you were in a corporation 20 times bigger than General Motors--an association that negotiated your prices? This is freedom, though; this isn't a government plan. This is the Federal Government saying that you are allowed to do what you want. You are allowed to collectively bargain as consumers.

I think there is every chance that we could fix a lot of the market. Would there be anybody left behind? Yes. I mean, we have terrible tragedies. I spent my adult career in medicine. I have seen the terrible tragedies, the terrible disabilities, the terrible neurologic disorders people are born with and have to live their lives with. Those exceptions will be treated and are treated.

Frankly, one of the misunderstandings of this debate is that any Republican is up here talking about trying to take away stuff from those who are disabled, can't work, and do have to have care. That is traditional Medicaid. They will continue to be cared for. Under this, we are talking only about able-bodied people. Should able-bodied people--people who walk around, hop out of their truck--should they be working? Should they be providing for their health insurance? Yes. Can there be a transition zone? Yes. We have transition programs between unemployment back to employment. We shouldn't have people permanently unemployed--people permanently on benefits who don't work or won't work. There should be work requirements. I am not afraid to say that every able-bodied person on Medicaid ought to work. There should be a work requirement. I meet many people on both sides of the aisle who are for that.

I don't say they should work as punishment. I think everyone in America should work as a reward. I think work is a reward. I don't care whether you are from the lowest job on the totem pole to the top, to the chief executive. Work is where you get self-esteem. No one can give you self-esteem. Your self-esteem comes from work. I think we are wrong. In fact, I think what we have done--in some cases, we now have multigenerational dependency on government, and they are so distraught and so lacking in self-esteem that it also compounds the drug problem that we have.

Some say that we need more Medicaid money to fight the drug problem. I worry that more Medicaid trips to the doctor may actually be part of the drug problem--that much of the dependency is coming from OxyContin, which the drug company says was not addictive, but everyone got put on OxyContin because it supposedly wasn't addictive. A lot of our heroin and OxyContin problem came out of going to the doctor.

If we were to get everyone out of the individual market into group insurance, there would be some people left behind. My hope is it would be a small number of people, and we would know after a year or two. Let's see what it is. We already have a safety net. The other side is acting as if there is no safety net. We have had a safety net for decade after decade. The safety net is Medicaid. If your child has a disability, no one is trying to take that away from him.

The thing is, we have to try to fix what we have. We need to understand that what we are looking at--what we are trying to fix isn't just some kind of policy that nobody can understand. Healthcare policy is very technical and detailed. This is about freedom.

Do you think that every American should get to choose whether they have insurance and what kind of insurance they have? This is what it is about. It is freedom of choice. It isn't about whether we want people to be insured. When you hear these hyperbolic statements saying that all these people are going to die--Republicans want people to die-- those hyperbolic statements aren't really helpful to the debate.

I do not question the motives of any of the Democrats as far as wanting to provide care. I never questioned President Obama's desire to help people get insurance. To me, it is more of a question of what will work. What distributes goods better: socialism or capitalism? Look at the Soviet Union. We defeated the Soviet Union because capitalism defeated socialism. Socialism doesn't work.

When the government fixes the prices, it doesn't work. Are we going to have some government involvement? Yes. But because Government is so pitiful at anything they do, we should minimize government's involvement in any industry. If we say that government has to be involved to take care of the poor, let's do it at the State level, not the Federal level.

People ask me: Are the people in government inherently stupid? I say no, but it is a debatable question. The reason is this: Government doesn't get the proper incentives, and they are too distant from the people, and we have a printing press.

What is the fundamental deceit of ObamaCare? This is the fundamental problem of all government, but the fundamental deceit of ObamaCare is this: They said that everyone is going to get free healthcare. Everyone is going to have Medicaid, and you don't have to pay for it, and the States don't have to pay for it. We are going to have the Federal Government pay for it. But the problem is the Federal Government can't pay for most of the things we already have. We already had Medicaid we can't pay for--Medicare we were short of money for. We already have Social Security that we are short of money for. What do we do? We borrow the money. Our deficit this year will be $500 billion. Our deficit is projected next year to be $1 trillion. That is the real question. It isn't, do you want to help people? It is, how are you going to pay for it? If this were done at the State level, what would happen? If the State of Kentucky wants to keep the expansion--we have expanded Medicare to 450,000 people. The question should be, should we double the State income tax in Kentucky? If that went to the State legislature, they have to balance competing concerns. If we double the State tax to pay for it--we live right next to Tennessee, which has no State income tax--would we possibly lose existing businesses or existing jobs or would we encourage new businesses not to come to Kentucky? That would be a valid debate. We want to help people, but what are the ramifications of it?

In Washington, it is said that there are no ramifications because everything goes to the debt. Everything just piles up. We have $20 trillion in debt. Whose fault is it? Both parties. Under George Bush, the debt went from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. Under President Obama, it went from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. Both parties are at fault, but the entitlements are consuming us.

How would we possibly move forward with a bill that sets up a new insurance entitlement, as some of the Republican plans wanted to do? We can't pay for the current entitlements. As we look forward today to the solution, what I would say is that there are alternatives. We really shouldn't question the motives of those across the aisle, and they shouldn't question ours.

I want more people to have insurance at a lower cost. We should have a disagreement on how it works. I think capitalism works better than socialism. I think we should minimize government's involvement because government is not very good at distributing anything. Just look at the mail.

I also think there are exciting opportunities for saying how we could insure the 27 million who are not insured currently. Twenty-seven million people under ObamaCare are without insurance. The question shouldn't be about debating over the past. It should be over debating the future. The future should be about trying to figure out how we insure those 27 million. I think there are a lot of opportunities that involve more freedom of choice, more freedom to choose your doctor, more freedom to choose what insurance works for you. My goodness, that is what this debate is about. It is not about healthcare policy. It is about freedom of choice, and I hope every Senator today will vote for freedom of choice.

Thank you.

Mr. President, pursuant to the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, I move to discharge the Foreign Relations Committee from further consideration of S.J. Res. 42, relating to the disapproval of the proposed foreign military sale to the Government of Saudi Arabia.

Mr. President, today is an extraordinary day. Today is an auspicious day, for we will be discussing issues of war and peace.

Believe it or not, we rarely discuss such important issues. We have been at war for 15 years. There have been a handful of debates--most of them indirect, most of them forced only under duress, and most of them would have been avoided if the leadership of both parties could avoid them, but today they cannot avoid this debate because this is what is called a privileged motion.

Today we will discuss the involvement of the United States in the Middle East, and we will also discuss whether we should engage in a new war in Yemen. Today we will discuss an arms sale to Saudi Arabia that threatens the lives of millions of Yemenis, but we will discuss something even more important than an arms sale, we will discuss whether we should be actively involved. Should the United States be actively involved with refueling the Saudi planes, with picking targets, with having advisers on the ground? Should we be at war in Yemen?

If you remember your Constitution, it says no President has that authority--only to repel imminent attack--but no President alone has the unilateral authority to take us to war. Yet here we are on the verge of war.

What will war mean for Yemen? Seventeen million folks in Yemen live on the brink of starvation. I think to myself, is there ever anything important that can happen in Washington? Is there anything I can do to save some of the millions of children who are dying in Yemen? This is it. This is this debate today.

It isn't about an arms sale, it is about children like Ali, who died. Why are they dying? Because the Soviets have blockaded the ports. Ninety percent of Yemen's food comes in from the ocean and they can get no food and they are starving and dying of cholera because of war. We think of famine being related to the weather. Sometimes it is, but more often than not famine is related to man, is manmade, and the most common cause is war.

How bad is it in Yemen? Seventeen million people live on the edge of starvation. Some, like Ali, have already died. What are people saying about it? They say that the humanitarian crisis in Yemen may be worse than Syria.

Let me repeat that because nobody in America is listening to this. Everybody is paying attention to some silly show trials and silly stuff going on in committees. Nobody is talking about this at all. They say it is worse than Syria. Millions of people have fled Syria. Hundreds of thousands have died, and people are now predicting Yemen may be worse.

One refugee group said this: The impending famine in Yemen may reach Biblical proportions. Think about that. It is astounding what is going on there, and it is being done without your permission but with your weapons.

Today I will force a vote with the help of Senator Murphy, who has been a prime mover in this, to tell you the truth, and has done a great job in bringing people together, but we will force this vote for these children in Yemen because we have a chance today to stop the carnage. We have a chance to tell Saudi Arabia we have had enough.

The question is, Should we give money or arms to Saudi Arabia at all? What has Saudi Arabia done over the last 30 years? They have been the No. 1 exporter of jihadist philosophy, the No. 1 exporter of let's hate America, let's hate the Judeo-Christian ethic, let's hate the Judeo- Christian tradition. It is coming from Saudi Arabia. They teach it in the schools in our country. They teach it in the schools in Indonesia. They corrupt the religion of Islam throughout the world, and we are going to give them weapons? I think it is a huge, huge mistake.

If you say: Well, I doubt that. There is no way they are that bad. Don't they share intelligence with us? Don't they help us in the war on terror?

Yes, every time they help us, they hurt us twofold worse. I will give you an example directly from Hillary Clinton. When she is writing honestly and not talking to the public, she sends an email to John Podesta. This is one that was leaked through WikiLeaks. Writing to John Podesta, Hillary Clinton said: We must put pressure on Saudi Arabia and Qatar because they are supplying logistical and financial support to