Floor Statements

Mr. President, I move to proceed to legislative session.

I ask the Senate execute the order of March 26, with respect to S.J. Res. 37.

``Taxation without representation is tyranny,'' bellowed James Otis in the days and weeks and years leading up to the American Revolution.

This became the rallying cry of American patriots: No taxation without representation. The American Patriots thought that a distant Parliament in England where they had no representation had no right to tax them.

This was the rallying cry: ``No taxation without representation.''

Our Founding Fathers believed so strongly in this, they embodied it in our Constitution. Our Constitution doesn't allow any one man or woman to raise taxes. It must be the body of Congress.

Now, this wasn't new. This was part of maybe a thousand-year tradition from Magna Carta on. In Magna Carta, it is stated:

No taxation without the common counsel of the realm.

Even at that time they were chafing at one man, the King, determining the taxes for the land.

One hundred years before our Revolutionary War, in the English Civil War, there was a debate over parliamentary supremacy versus supremacy of the King. They did not want to pay taxes that weren't approved by the Parliament.

In 1683, the New York Charter on Liberties, the beginning charter for the colony of New York stated:

No taxation without representation.

And after this English Civil War, the English Bill of Rights embodied: No taxation without the consent of Parliament. This principle was longstanding. It was nonnegotiable. This was what sparked the Revolution. And, yet, today we are here before the Senate because one person in our country wishes to raise taxes.

Well, this is contrary to everything our country was founded upon. One person is not allowed to raise taxes. The Constitution forbids it.

The Constitution was so concerned with the power of taxes--which some have said the power of taxes is the power to destroy--but our Founding Fathers were so concerned with this, that they said: No, the President will not have the power to legislate. The President will not have the power to tax. Only Congress will be able to tax the people and only by originating tax bills in the House.

It was that specific. They were so mortified. They were so worried by having a monarchy. They were so worried about having all the power gravitate to the Executive, that they said: We must split the power.

They based a lot of their thinking on Montesquieu. Montesquieu wrote in the 1740s--40, 50 years before our Constitution. Montesquieu wrote that when the legislative and executive powers are united in one, there can be no liberty. This is something that our Founding Fathers took to heart. They said: We must separate the powers. We must, at all cost, limit the power of the Presidency.

This isn't about political party. I voted for and supported President Trump, but I don't support the rule of one person. We are set--the President is set--to have a 25-percent tax on goods coming from Canada and Mexico. This is a tax--plain and simple--on the American people.

But one person can't do that. Our Founding Fathers said: No, that would be illegal for one person to raise taxes. It has to come to Congress. It has to originate in the House. This has gone on for 200- and-some-odd years.

You can't simply declare an emergency and say: Well, the constitutional Republic was great, but, gosh, we have got an emergency. The times are dire.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly said: There are no exemptions for emergency.

There was no exemption for a pandemic. There was no exemption for emergencies. The taxation clause stands.

It is an important part of the Constitution: Taxes must originate in the House. They must be voted on in Congress. No one man can raise taxes on the people.

They are set to do this through a process in which an emergency has been declared. But realize this: One person declares an emergency, the President. And even if we are successful, which I think we will be successful here today--a majority will vote to say: This is wrong- headed, and the emergency should end. It would have to go to the House. But even if we were successful in the House, the President would veto it. It would take a two-thirds vote in order to stop an emergency. That is such a burden that we need to consider reforming the emergency powers and reversing this.

I think a President can have times that there are emergencies and the President can declare an emergency. But it should last 30 day, at most. At the end of 30 days, the emergency would be brought to the people's House--the House of Representatives and the Senate--and we would vote to affirm or uphold the emergency.

Right now, the pretense of this emergency is fentanyl. I don't discount fentanyl. I know families who have lost kids to fentanyl. But there is more fentanyl going from the United States into Canada than there is from Canada going into the United States.

There is no emergency. The Canadians have actually been cooperative with us and said they will try to do even more. The problem isn't in Canada.

Even if the problem is valid, even if that is something that we all agree on,

you can't have a country ruled by emergency. You can't have a country without a separation of powers, without checks and balances.

Madison put it this way. Madison said that we would pit ambition against ambition; that all men--and, frankly, all women--are motivated by self-interest and the self-accumulation or aggrandizement of power; and so we would limit their power by pitting ambition against ambition. We would give some of the power to the House, some to the Senate, and some to the President. There would be checks and balances in a jostling of power, but we would check and balance each other.

Part of the problem we face today with this emergency, though, is that Congress has abdicated their power--not just recently, not just for this President. This is a bipartisan problem. I am a Republican. I am a supporter of Donald Trump. But this is a bipartisan problem.

I don't care if the President is a Republican or a Democrat. I don't want to live under emergency rule. I don't want to live where my representatives cannot speak for me and have a check and balance on power.

One person can make a mistake. And guess what: Tariffs are a terrible mistake. They don't work. They will lead to higher prices. They are a tax, and they have historically been bad for our economy.

But even if this were something that was magic, and there was going to be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I wouldn't want to live under emergency rule. I would want to live in a constitutional republic where there are checks and balances against the excesses of both sides, right or left.

If one person rules, that person could make a horrible mistake.

On things so important as war, it is the same thing. We don't want a President just to go to war because a President might get angry with some country or have a vendetta. We are supposed to vote. That is why there is a declaration of war. War originates also in Congress.

But we have lost so many of these things and so much of this. It is Congress's fault for giving it. Over the last 70 years, there are probably a dozen pieces of legislation where Congress said to the President: Here, take this power. Create emergencies. Put on tariffs. Negotiate for us because we are too feeble-minded to do it ourselves.

But the thing is, the Constitution doesn't let us give our power away. There is something called the nondelegation clause, and it says that we are not allowed to give power away. We can't just say: Here, Mr. President, take it.

In this particular case, it is even worse. The rule of law--IEEPA is the acronym for it--has never been used for tariffs before and doesn't mention the word tariff.

So this isn't something that was targeted in times of need: The President can have the power to put on tariffs. It never says that. This will be an extraordinary use of something never intended to be a way to have--unilateral--one single person invoke a tax on the people.

With regard to tariffs, let's be very clear. Tariffs are simply taxes. Tariffs don't punish foreign governments. They punish American families. When we tax imports, we raise the price of everything from groceries to smartphones, to washing machines, to prescription drugs. Every dollar collected in tariff revenue comes straight out of the pockets of American consumers.

Conservatives used to understand that tariffs are taxes on the American people. Conservatives used to be uniformly opposed to raising taxes because we wanted the private marketplace, the private individuals to keep more of their incomes. So we were always for lower taxes. And yet now the mantra that is coming is: We want higher taxes.

What happened? Did we, all of a sudden, give up all of the things we used to believe in as conservatives?

I, for one, haven't. I still think more taxes is bad for the economy. More money taken out of the productive sector, the private sector, given to the government is a mistake.

To those who still call themselves conservatives but now support tariffs, let me remind them that Milton Friedman said tariffs ``raise prices to consumers and waste our resources.''

To those who still have a fond memory of Ronald Reagan on my side, Ronald Reagan said:

Protectionism costs consumers billions of dollars, damages

the overall economy, and destroys jobs.

Ronald Reagan's vision for America can be seen in our trading relationships with Canada. In 1986, President Reagan said:

Our trade policy rests firmly on the foundation of free and

open markets. . . . I . . . recognize the inescapable

conclusion that all of history has taught: The freer the flow

of world trade, the stronger the tides for human progress and

peace among nations.

And it is absolutely true. If you look at a chart or a graph of world trade over the last 70 years, it has gone like this. We have been trading more with each other. If you look at a world map of prosperity, it is the same curve. It is a hockey stick. It is going up exponentially.

If you look at a curve of poverty, 100,000 people are escaping poverty every day around the world, and it is because of international trade. Trade is good, not bad.

Think about it. If you buy something, you are trading. If you go to the store and you buy a smartphone, and you give them $1,000, you want that smartphone, and you don't lose. It doesn't matter where the money went; you got your smartphone. You only give money to somebody for something if you want it. If it is a voluntary trade, it is always equal. Well, it is, actually, always mutually beneficial.

And so when people say: Oh, we have lost, and China is winning, and China is winning, and we have a trade deficit with China--America doesn't trade with China. An individual buys a product. You are the trader.

When you go to Walmart and you buy something at Walmart, and you say, ``My goodness, I can get this TV for $200 less than I can get it if there were only domestic TVs,'' you are the contractor. The U.S. Government didn't buy the TV; you bought the TV, and you did it because you saved $200. You are now $200 richer and can go somewhere. You can buy gas to go on a trip somewhere.

If trade were bad, you wouldn't buy the TV. You made the decision; the government didn't.

Our government doesn't trade with their government. Our individuals buy products from their individuals. If it is a voluntary trade, everyone benefits or the trade doesn't occur.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the United States and Canada share the world's longest international land border and are continuously at peace.

Canada is a great customer of ours. In fact, Canada buys more American goods than China, Japan, England, and France combined. So do we want the Canadians to buy less of our stuff or more of our stuff?

It is a crazy notion to put a 25-percent tariff on this enormous amount of goods. There are predictions that cars are going to cost $10,000 more because the cars go in and out. We have cars made in Kentucky, but some of the parts go to Mexico. Some of the cars go to Mexico. Some go to Canada. They come back--a $10,000 increase. Do you love the idea of tariffs? Is it such a great word to pay $10,000 more for a car?

Canada is also the leading provider of grain, livestock, meat, and poultry. The United States imported $97 billion worth of oil and gas from Canada last year. Canada is a major provider of cars, car parts, steel, lumber, aluminum.

This amount of trading demonstrates that no American will be able to avoid the high taxes, the high prices. They will be forced to pay because of tariffs. The taxes on Canadian imports will come at a great cost to American families. The taxes on Canadian imports will make the cost of food, fuel, cars, and furniture more expensive.

The former conservatives that now sing a populist tune know deep down that their advocacy of higher taxes will cause suffering for the American family. The converts to this protectionist faith cannot help but acknowledge that even they know that the tariffs will raise prices. They admit it readily. The tariffs that they put on in 2019 are still punishing the farmers in our country to such an extent that the farmers are still asking for more subsidies.

When the Trump tariffs went on in 2018, 2019, the farmers immediately

complained, and they were given $20 billion of taxpayer money. That is an acknowledgment that the tariffs hurt farmers.

So we are going to do it again, and they are all lining up. People say we are going to have to bail them out.

Are we going to have to bail out the car companies? Are we going to bail out everybody that is going to be hurt by these tariffs?

It is not a good idea.

The administration is currently considering a bailout for farmers. The idea that the American taxpayer will have to bail out an industry to dull the pain of tariffs is not a novel one. We have seen this one. We have seen this story.

What our parents told us when we were kids is still true today: Actions speak louder than words. The supporters of tariffs know that their policies impose suffering, and they are willing to spend your money to alleviate that harm. So they know tariffs are going to hurt farm exports. So they are going to take your money and give it to the farmers.

Well, what kind of policy acknowledges: Hey, I have got a terrible policy. I am going to hurt these people. We will just give them some of your money.

It makes no sense at all.

In addition to the previous costs, the Peterson Institute estimates that tariffs will cost the average family $1,200 a year. The Budget Lab at Yale University estimates that tariffs will cost the average family $4,200 a year. In fact, according to the analysis, tariffs could cost the least fortunate families on average $2,400. The middle class will likely pay higher costs of about $3,000. Tariffs are a cost. Taxes are a cost. If you tax a good, it is added on to the cost. This is what happens. It happens whether inflation is the tax or whether the tax is a tariff. It adds to the cost of goods, and it will be passed on to the consumer.

The average American family won't get the bailouts though. If you are a special interest and the taxes hurt you, the tariffs hurt you, you will get a bailout. But if you are just an average person working for yourself, self-employed, and the tariffs cause all of your groceries to go up and cause your electronics to go up, no one is going to help you; you will just pay higher prices. If you think the cost of eggs is high, just wait until the tariff hits.

Tariffs will raise the price of a car between $5,000 and $15,000. Despite arguments to the contrary, Americans know that tariffs are a tax they will have to pay. That is why vehicle sales jumped almost 13 percent last month--because people are trying to buy their cars before the tariff gets on their car and raises the price. People are smarter than politicians. That is nothing new.

It is not just cars that will be more expensive as a result of tariffs; energy will be more expensive. Gas prices in some parts of the country could see a 15- to 30-cent per-gallon increase in price.

According to the National Association of Home Builders, the building of a single-family home could become up to $10,000 more expensive. Why? Because we import lumber. We import steel. If we make it more expensive to import lumber from Canada and steel from Canada, the price of your house goes up.

Look, people already can't buy a house because interest rates are so high. Young people are living in apartments. More and more, people feel stuck in their life, and we are going to add to the price of lumber and steel to make homes even harder to purchase? It is a terrible idea.

Washing machines were already almost $100 more expensive as a result of the original tariffs 4 years ago.

Here is really bad news: Even beer will become more expensive. A professor at Northeastern University states that a six-pack of Corona could go up by 45 cents, but a small craft beer could be increased by as much as $1 a pint.

The former and never-were conservatives who try to sell tariffs as anything other than a tax cannot fool the American people, who know that their purchasing power will be weakened with every new protectionist measure unilaterally imposed by the White House.

None of these tax hikes are necessary. The populists argue that the threat of tariffs is needed to force Canada to stop the flow of illicit drugs. In fact, one of the social media posts today said there was going to be a tariff on fentanyl. Really? You think the drug dealers are going to pay a tariff on fentanyl? Fentanyl is not being tariffed. That is some kind of mistaken notion. This isn't going to happen. As I have stated, there is more fentanyl going from the United States into Canada than there is coming from Canada to the United States.

It is not a real emergency. It is being used to place a tax on the American people.

But already we have seen a response from Canada. In response to the threat of tariffs, Canada announced a $1.3 billion plan dedicated to border security, to up border security on fentanyl. Yet the tariffs are still coming despite their help. They have also announced more tariffs as well.

The threat of tariffs seems to have worked. We need not make Canada and America go through this when they have already responded to our request.

The chaos of one day the tariffs are on, one day they are off, the next day there is a loophole for this industry or that industry, is chaotic and is leading to turmoil in our markets.

A week ago, when the thought of tariffs came forward, the markets plunged to historically low levels.

The tariffs on Canadian imports, the tariffs on Mexican imports, the tariffs on European imports--the chaos it creates in the marketplace makes it difficult to plan for businesses.

The interesting thing also about the tariffs is--some have said: Well, you know, the people will see that we are standing up for them with tariffs and we are for America first. Yet, when we put tariffs on historically, it has been Republicans.

In 1890, McKinley put tariffs on. He was all for it. So there were people lauding McKinley. In 1890, the big McKinley tariff goes on. Do you know what happened in 1892? Out of 170 Republicans, they lost 100 seats because prices went up with tariffs.

Has this ever happened before? Yes. It happened in the 1840s when they put on the ``Tariff of Abominations'' under John Quincy Adams. He signed it. Once again, the ruling party lost seats.

When is the last time this happened in dramatic fashion? Well, if you study history and you want to know when the Republicans went to their lowest ebb in the entire history of our country, it came after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in the early 1930s. Hoover was President, a Republican. Republicans controlled Congress. They passed this dramatic tariff, which most historians and most economists now say prolonged the Depression for 10 years and caused the worst part of the Depression to actually be in 1937--7 years after the tariff and nearly 8 years after the stock market crash.

Do you know what happened to the Republicans in 1932? The Democrats won the Presidency, and they won the House. Do you know when Republicans got back in charge after 1932? It was 1994 in the House and in the eighties in the Senate. They went 50, 60 years into the desert because tariffs were such a turmoil to the country that the country rejected Republicans for nearly half a century.

The emergency declaration we are considering today is unprecedented. By declaring an emergency, the President invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. They call it IEEPA, but it is an acronym. Don't get me started about government acronyms. It is a law that has been used to put sanctions on, like, Iran. That is what it was intended for. But it was never intended for tariffs and ``tariffs'' doesn't appear in the law.

Using this bill to impose tariffs is attractive to a President. He doesn't have to work with the messiness of democracy, the messiness of Congress. But do you know what? That messiness is a check and a balance on power. Unlike most of our trade laws that require several procedural hurdles, IEEPA just says ``Declare an emergency,'' and it becomes very hard for Congress to overturn this.

When the Trump administration first implemented tariffs on China, it took 11 months before the tariffs could take effect. By using IEEPA, the technique now, the tariffs have an almost immediate effect.

We are not at war with Canada. I don't even think we have real disagreements with Canada. They are an ally that buys more of our stuff than almost any other country in the world.

Expediency is not the same as legality, though. As legal scholars have pointed out, there is reason to believe that this bill--this IEEPA, this emergency bill--does not authorize the President to impose tariffs for at least two reasons.

First, despite broad powers conferred to the President by this act, the plain, simple text does not mention the ability to impose a tax, tariff, or duty. It runs counter to Congress's habit of clearly referencing tariff authorities in other trade statutes. This may explain why no previous President has attempted to use emergency powers to impose tariffs.

Second, it is difficult to see how using this emergency power, this IEEPA Act and a national emergency, to impose tariffs would comport with something called the major questions doctrine. Under this doctrine, the Supreme Court will reject claims of Executive authority on issues of vast economic and political significance. It is hard to imagine that a 25-percent tax on everything from Canada would not be considered to be of vast economic significance.

Congress has not clearly empowered this administration. I think it is hard to even argue that it is ambiguous. The power was never granted. This question is ripe, and this power is ripe to be rejected by the Supreme Court.

Hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of imports from Canada are at issue here. Clearly, this is a major economic question. Yet Congress has not expressly delegated the authority to impose tariffs to the President.

We need to return to constitutional government. We used to abide by the ancient principle of ``no taxation without representation.''

One of the first acts enacted into the law was the Tariff Act of 1789, which sought to generate revenue by placing a 5-percent tax on all imported goods and was signed into law, after passage by Congress, by George Washington.

Alexander Hamilton's ``Report on Manufacturers'' is well known. According to Professor Douglas Irwin of Dartmouth College, every tariff recommendation put forth in the report was adopted by Congress in 1792. But simply voting on tariffs does not convert them into a good idea. It could make them constitutional. It could make this legal if Congress voted on it. It would still be economically a bad idea.

As we move forward in this debate, you will see that there are people on both sides of the aisle who question really whether we should be ruled by one person or whether the power should be separated. To me, this is not a partisan question. Some will try to make it a partisan question. To me, it makes no difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. This is about the distribution of power. This is about the separation of power. This is about the admonition that Montesquieu gave us that when the Executive power and the legislative power are united in one person, there can be no liberty.

Our Founding Fathers all believed that. They so feared the power of taxation that they gave it only to Congress. They so feared the power of taxation that they gave it specifically to originate in the House before it came to the Senate because the House was closer to the people, with elections every 2 years.

This goes against the traditions of our country. I stand to speak against these tariffs. I stand to speak against these emergencies. I stand against the idea of skipping democracy, of skipping the constitutional republic, of rejecting our founding principles, not because I have any animus toward the President; I do this because I love my country, and I want to see the division of power enabled such that it protects us all from the amalgamation of power into one person such that it can be abused.

Another name for ``emergency rule'' is ``martial law.'' Who would want to live under one person? That is the thing we all object to. In all the countries around the world that we object to is the idea that they don't have democratic rule.

We should vote. This is a tax, plain and simple. Taxes should not be enacted by one person.

So I will vote today to end the emergency. I will vote today to try to reclaim the power of taxation, the power of the tariff to where the Constitution designated it should properly be, and that is in Congress.

Mr. President, President Trump has pledged to balance the budget. I want to help him. I want to help him with this task. But to balance the budget requires much less spending than this current bill entails.

Our national debt now exceeds $36 trillion. That is 124 percent of the size of our economy. That should not be a surprise. We are adding $2 trillion every year to the debt, this year included.

Critics of excessive Federal spending have rightly argued that we should return spending to prepandemic levels. This is something I could support. The spending bill before us, though, spends $400 billion more than we were spending before the pandemic. Spending went through the roof during the pandemic, and it never came back down, and the deficits are out of control. In order for this bill to get back to prepandemic levels, it would have to be $400 billion less. That is something I could support.

Three months ago, when the current continuing resolution was passed at the end of last year, we were told that we just needed to clear the decks. President Trump was going to come in, the Republicans would be in charge, and then everything would be OK. Just wait. Pass it. Pass it along in September. Come March, Republicans will be in charge, and something will happen.

Yet the bill before us doesn't change anything. The bill before us keeps the same Biden spending levels.

We were told with relentless fury that we would fight for the taxpayers come spring, and we were given a bill that doesn't change. It doesn't change the course of accumulating $2 trillion in debt every year.

The powers that be, I believe, waved the white flag of surrender when they presented the American people with this bill that fails to make the cuts that are necessary to slow down the accumulation of our debt.

The malpractice is made even worse this time around. Presidents of both parties pay lipservice to the idea that the national debt must be addressed. Despite tough talk, deficits and the debt inevitably keep rising. We now have over $36 trillion in debt.

Unlike past Presidents, though, President Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency--affectionately known as DOGE--to identify wasteful programs and eliminate them. Despite DOGE working around the clock identifying appalling waste of taxpayers' dollars, this bill continues to fund the same programs that are funding the waste and fraud that have been located.

How can that be? If we have located the waste and fraud, why are we not telling them to reduce foreign aid? If the foreign aid budget is full of all kinds of crazy, leftwing advocacy and nonsense, reduce the amount of money you give them.

This bill will give them the same amount of money they got last year. This bill allows foreign aid to continue. It doesn't incorporate any of the DOGE cuts. It doesn't cut waste. This bill embraces the waste. It allows the waste to continue. This bill doesn't respect the taxpayer. It continues to throw their money away.

This bill continues the Biden levels of spending that caused historic inflation, that caused prices to rise, that caused people to be outraged, to vote for a new President. Why in the world would we continue the same spending levels that led to the debt that led to the inflation that is plaguing us?

This malpractice is compounded by the fact that President Trump and DOGE made it easy for Congress to fix. They actually told us where the waste was and where the waste and abuse was and told us how to root it out, how to remove it.

The waste found by DOGE truly shocks the conscience. Taxpayers paid $25,000 for an LGBT trans opera in Colombia. They spent $2 million on sex changes in Guatemala. They spent $1.5 million advancing DEI initiatives in Serbia. They spent $6 million on tourism in Egypt. They spent $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.

Some of the USAID's programs have actually gone beyond woke absurdity into pouring money and support to people who are the enemies of the United States. The Agency provided millions of dollars to EcoHealth, which funded the dangerous research in Wuhan which, in all likelihood, created and caused the pandemic.

From this account, also, millions of dollars went to support agriculture in

Afghanistan, including fertilizer for the poppy fields grown by the Taliban.

And yet, even after all that DOGE has uncovered--and I commend them-- Congress is still on the verge of passing a bill that fully funds foreign aid. Many in this Chamber think it is wasteful to do all these things, and they say: Well, why should we keep spending money on foreign aid that is paying for sex changes in Guatemala? And yet the funding levels in this bill stay the same. These are the same funding levels for the foreign aid that were occurring under the Biden administration.

Let me say that again and clearly: This bill fully funds the outrageous foreign aid programs that Elon Musk and DOGE have exposed. Something doesn't make sense here.

While Congress seems slow to open its eyes to waste and abuse, Secretary Rubio has acted. He recently said that the United States is canceling 83 percent of the foreign aid contracts. I am for that. In fact, that is what my amendment will do. My amendment will take the contracts--the dollar amount of the contracts--that President Trump and Secretary Rubio have canceled and put them into language so they don't get funded. Why in the world would we not be for getting rid of the funding for the crazy programs we are trying to get rid of? Something doesn't make sense here.

President Trump and his team identified the cuts that need to be made, but it is ultimately Congress, not the Executive, that has the power of the purse. Congress has to act to make the cuts identified by the administration a reality. And on that score, the bill under consideration today is a disappointment. The bill is a disappointment to those who believe that congressional leadership should have used the 3 months since they came into office, since DOGE and Elon Musk have identified this waste--they should have used that waste and incorporated it into the spending bill.

None of the DOGE cuts, none of Elon Musk's suggestions, have been incorporated into the spending bill. The spending bill continues spending at the Biden levels. When everybody wakes up and scratches their head and says, ``What happened here?'' the spending will lead to $2 trillion in debt. People will wake up and say: Well, what about all those cuts? What happened? I thought we were cutting out waste and fraud. And come September, the deficit for the year will be $2 trillion. Because we are not actually cutting the spending. Congress has to do the heavy lifting.

We owe the American people an answer to this question: Exactly how many Republican seats are required in Congress to achieve a majority that will actually fight to lower government spending?

I don't think the taxpayers need to wait for that fight any longer. I am not willing to say: Oh, just wait, young man. Wait for another day. We will be fixing this 6 months from now.

It never comes. This is the story of this place: Wait until another day. Wait until the sun shines; we will finally cut some spending.

It never comes. Someone must make a stand and fight. To that end, I offer a DOGE cuts 1.0 amendment that would codify the cuts in foreign aid, reducing USAID's budget by 83 percent and aligning with Secretary Rubio's recent decision to eliminate thousands of these programs.

So what I am doing is not inconsistent with the Trump administration; what I am doing is in support of the Trump administration. What I am doing is taking the preliminary cuts that Secretary Rubio has given to foreign aid and making them law.

Why? Because the whole judiciary is opposing the President. They are telling him he can't fire people, that he can't cut spending. He needs Congress to step up and do their job. The people who support the President need to be supporting the President's cuts. They need to be supporting an amendment--DOGE 1.0--that puts those cuts into law.

I am not even talking about codifying all of the cuts. I am only taking a small sliver of them in foreign aid. This is the low-hanging fruit. This is the worst of the worst. This is $3 million for girl- centric climate change in Brazil. This is $4.8 million for social media influencers in Ukraine. This is hundreds of thousands of dollars spent sending Ukrainian fashion designers to the Paris fashion show. This is waste--utter and simple waste--and it ought to be cut.

Why would people tell you publicly they are for it and then vote against it? It doesn't seem to make any sense. What my amendment does is put DOGE's findings into action, eliminating much of the funding for an Agency that spent tax dollars on woke entertainment and advocacy. It sets in law the reductions that the Trump administration has made known to be necessary.

I applaud DOGE's work to uncover these many instances of abuse of taxpayer dollars, and it is now Congress's turn to make the cuts stick. If we do not adopt my amendment, then taxpayers will simply continue spending substantial amounts of money to defund components of the government rather than using savings to pay down our mounting debt. In other words, you might cut it and think it is cut one day; but what if the courts say you have to spend it somewhere else? It never comes back. The cuts are never real. The only way the cuts the administration is making will ever be real, will ever be counted, will ever lessen the debt in the country is to vote in Congress. That is what this is about.

It would be the height of hypocrisy for Congress to pay lipservice to DOGE's exceptional work, support it on the superficial, and then vote against it when you have a chance to vote on it.

Continuing to spend at this bill's level will add $2 trillion in debt. That is a fact. All the newspapers reporting yesterday--it was all over the news: record-setting accumulation of debt.

We have accumulated over a trillion, and we are not halfway through the year. It is a record accumulation of debt. It only stops when people stand up and say: Enough is enough.

The least we can do is make sure that it doesn't include the egregious spending that has come from the foreign aid, the craziness, the sex change operations in Guatemala, trans operas, trans comic books. All of these ludicrous things that no American supports will only go away and will only go away with permanence if we vote for it.

Before us is a chance to enact about $16 billion worth of DOGE's cuts in foreign aid. These cuts are only real in the long term if they are reflected in congressional action. If we continue to fund the Federal Government at the Biden administration levels, which is what this bill does, then the money from DOGE's hard-found savings will just be spent somewhere else.

I urge all of my colleagues who have praised DOGE's work to match their actions to their words and vote yes on this amendment.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1266 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, I compliment President Trump and DOGE for exposing waste and abuse in foreign aid spending. It boggles the mind to think that some in Congress defend spending $2 million on sex changes in Guatemala, thousands on an LGBT opera in Colombia, and thousands on a trans comic book in Peru. This is the low-hanging fruit. If Congress can't vote to cut this egregious, crazy, leftwing lunacy, will Congress ever have the courage to tackle entitlements?

Yet there does remain a significant constitutional question as to whether these cuts need a congressional vote to give them permanence. Today, with my amendment, Congress can make these foreign aid cuts the law.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, was there a unanimous consent request?

Mr. President, what was the consent request?

Two minutes? If it is going to take longer.

If we can be done in 2 minutes.

Mr. President, Senate Standing Rule XXVI requires each committee to adopt rules to govern the procedure of the committee and to publish those rules in the Congressional Record not later than March 1 of the first year of each Congress. On February 27, 2025, a majority of the members of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs' Subcommittee on Border Management, Federal Workforce, and Regulatory Affairs adopted subcommittee rules of procedure.

Consistent with Standing Rule XXVI, today I ask unanimous consent that a copy of the Rules of Procedure of the Subcommittee on Border Management, Federal Workforce, and Regulatory Affairs be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, Senate Standing Rule XXVI requires each committee to adopt rules to govern the procedure of the committee and to publish those rules in the Congressional Record not later than March 1 of the first year of each Congress. On February 27, 2025, a majority of the members of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs' Subcommittee on Disaster Management, District of Columbia, and Census adopted subcommittee rules of procedure.

Consistent with Standing Rule XXVI, today I ask unanimous consent that a copy of the Rules of Procedure of the Subcommittee on Disaster Management, District of Columbia, and Census be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, Senate Standing Rule XXVI requires each committee to adopt rules to govern the procedure of the committee and to publish those rules in the Congressional Record not later than March 1 of the first year of each Congress. On February 20, 2025, a majority of the members of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs' Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations adopted subcommittee rules of procedure.

Consistent with Standing Rule XXVI, today I ask unanimous consent that a copy of the rules of procedure of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, things are not as they appear to be, and in Washington, that is not unusual. In fact, that may be the norm--that in Washington, things are often not what they appear to be.

If you follow the news, you have been seeing reports of Elon Musk and DOGE and getting rid of waste and fraud and abuse by the billions, if not trillions, of dollars. And yet, we are meeting here today, though, because Congress, namely the Senate, wants to increase Federal spending.

So on the one hand, you have Elon Musk and DOGE, and the Democrats complaining to high heavens, ``They are cutting too much; they are cutting too much,'' and Senate Republicans are coming forward today to pass a budget to allow them to raise Federal spending. What gives?

Are Republicans for getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse and reducing the deficit, balancing the budget, as the President says? Or are they really for increasing spending $340 billion?

The budget that we will vote on will allow increased spending in the military by $150 billion; increased spending for the border, $175 billion; $20 billion for the Coast Guard. That adds up to about $340 billion.

Well, if we were fiscally prudent, if we were fiscally conservative, why wouldn't we take the savings from Elon Musk and DOGE and move it over here and help with the border? Why would we be doing a brandnew bill to increase spending by $340 billion?

That is because the Senate is acting as it always has. The Senate hasn't gotten the message. President Trump came to town--a new way of thinking. They are shuttering the Agencies. They are shutting people down. They are buying things like $2 million spent in Guatemala for sex changes, $2 million spent in Brazil for girl-centric climate change, $4.8 million spent in Ukraine for social media influencers.

While you are at it, we spent--not we, but the people who voted for this. I voted against all of this. But the Members of the Senate who voted for this spent several hundred thousand dollars sending designers in Ukraine to the fashion show in Paris.

It goes on and on: thousands of dollars for a trans opera in Colombia, more thousands of dollars for a trans comic book in Peru, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent studying rats to see if lonely rats use more cocaine than well-socialized rats. Guess what. Lonely rats love the cocaine. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of your money on this craziness.

Why not take that crazy spending that DOGE and Elon Musk are finding and move it over to secure the border? Instead, fiscal conservatives are faced with a bill they are putting forward to just simply increase the spending.

I am all for moving it around. I am all for saving it from the craziness and pushing it over into something more valuable. There is a procedure for doing this. It is a special procedure. It doesn't require any Democrat vote. It can happen through simple majority, and it has a fancy name. It is called rescission. So all the administration would have to do is bundle together several million dollars of savings--which it appears they are finding--bundle it together in one bill, send it back to us, and by simple majority, without any help from the Democrats, Republicans can cut spending.

Instead, things aren't what they appear to be. You see all this great work being done to cut spending, to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, and then you see the Senate acting--we are going to vote all night long to set up a bill to increase spending by $340 billion.

There is a true philosophical debate within the Republican Party--and really within both parties--about what the biggest threats to our country are. Are the greatest threats to America from within or from without?

I would argue that they are from within. I don't lie awake at night fearing foreign invasion, that invaders are coming to our shores any moment. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be prepared, that we shouldn't defend ourselves. But it does mean that we don't have to have unlimited spending on our military.

Look, many of my family served. Soldiers have to be paid. We should take care of them. But, at the same time, we shouldn't be everywhere around the world, all the time.

We spent close to $300 billion in Ukraine. We have got soldiers all over Africa. We have got soldiers in Syria. We have got soldiers everywhere.

We don't need to be doing that.

If you want to put our military's money and spending in perspective, we spend more than the next nine countries combined. It is not that we are spending too little. We are spending a lot. But if you decide that you want more money for the military, take it from the climate change-- the girl-centric climate change in Brazil. Quit spending your money overseas.

Over the years, we have given Egypt nearly $60 billion. Who runs Egypt? A general, where there are no elections, kind of like Ukraine, where there is a president, but he doesn't have to run for reelection because he has canceled the elections.

Why in the world would we be giving money hand over fist to dictators and people who don't stand for election? In Egypt, we gave it to one family, the Mubarak family. When he was finally ousted from power, he had $20 billion on him.

Well, it actually wasn't on him. A lot of it was in Swiss banks and all over the place, but he was worth 20 billion. That is nothing. Each of his kids was worth another 5 billion. So he basically was able to steal 30 billion of the 60 billion that American taxpayers sent to Egypt.

That is foreign aid. That is the story of your foreign aid. It is that you have been being ripped off decade after decade.

But while Elon Musk and DOGE are doing their job working overtime until late at night, finding us those savings for foreign aid, send them back. We spent 40 billion in foreign aid. You could send 30 billion back and America would be safer and stronger, and you could put the 30 billion toward either the military or to the border--your choice.

There is money like that that can be saved and moved around, but it is going to have to come back. Ultimately, all the talk of the savings is ephemeral. It isn't real until Congress has the courage to vote on it. It has to be certified by a vote.

If Congress doesn't vote, it sort of wishes and washes around in the ether and may or may not wind up being savings. Ultimately, Congress is going to have to do their job.

But what we are doing today to vote on the budget is not doing our job. What we are doing today, which will be a Republican-led effort-- minus me--will be an effort to tee up a bill to increase Federal spending.

I would say, let's take the savings that we are finding, move that over to any accounts, do it through a vote of Congress, do it through a simple majority. It can actually be done even without the budgetary process.

A rescission package can be sent back without even going through the whole budget problem. What we are faced with, though, is come the end of the year--we are halfway through the year, so we are voting on a budget today that is really somewhat of a fiction because the year is already half over. We know what is being spent. We know that in the end, we are going to spend a little over $7 trillion this year. The problem is, we are going to bring in about $5 trillion, and we are going to spend about $7 trillion. We are $2 trillion short.

They are getting ready within weeks to add a couple hundred billion dollars for California. It is appropriate to have sympathy for people in their plight, but it is not good for the country simply to borrow money to send it to anyone. If we are going to help people in need, we should be taking that money from the taxes that come in. We shouldn't be borrowing it from China and sending it to California. No matter how noble the purpose is, we should be spending what comes in. We should not be borrowing a penny.

But come the end of the year, we are going to be over $2 trillion in increased debt for 1 year. What is our total? Our total is going to be over $37 trillion, maybe $38 trillion by the end of the year. Interest? The largest item in our budget is now interest--about $1 trillion in interest every year. One estimate is that over the next 10 years, it will be like $14 trillion in interest.

Now, interest doesn't buy anything. Interest isn't feeding anybody. Interest

isn't putting out fires in California. Interest is simply wasted because of the profligate ways of both parties.

People voted for a change. They said: We are going to get a change. They like what Donald Trump is doing. They like what DOGE is doing. They like what Elon is doing. Yet here we are. The Republicans are acting like the Democrats. They are going to vote to increase spending by $342 billion. It is all going to be borrowed.

Now, some will say: We are going to cut spending to equalize the money we are going to spend here. But none of that is listed in the budget.

Now, the House has a budget. The House Republicans have passed a different budget, and in their budget, they list $1.5 trillion worth of savings. They have to get to this. They cannot do their special simple majority vote, the reconciliation vote, unless they find $1.5 trillion.

In the Senate bill, there is $4 billion. Now, they will say, ``That is just a floor; we are going to find more than that,'' but all they would promise was the 4. In the House, they realized that is not really believable, that is not really comforting, so the House said: No, we are doing $1.5 trillion.

So as this debate unfolds over the next 10, 12, 15 hours--we will be here for a long time. You know, get your popcorn. Turn your C-SPAN on. But as this unfolds, I will offer an amendment, and my amendment will say, let's alter the budget to not only say we are going to increase spending by $340 billion, my amendment will say we should cut spending to pay for it by $1.5 trillion.

Ideally, we would do this simply by bringing a rescission package of the savings that Elon and DOGE are finding, but it would work this way as well to at least show that we are serious about this. I have seen this happen again and again, and I know how the story is going to turn out. I know that come September, which is the end of our fiscal year, we are about halfway through it. As we get to the end of the fiscal year, Republicans are going to be going: Uh-oh, I have to go home and explain to people that the deficit is $2.2 trillion--one of the worst years ever. I have to explain to people ``Republicans are in charge; we are taking care of it now'' when it looks like the problem is getting worse.

We have to immediately start cutting spending. Every Republican needs to be voting to cut spending. There is a way to do it. It is called a rescission package.

If you continue to borrow, though, if you think ``I am going to be nice to everyone and give everyone money,'' you can do it, but the borrowing is going to crowd out everything, because we have made many, many promises. We have promised people Medicare. We promised people Medicaid. We promised people Social Security. We promised people food stamps. Well, guess what, that equals all of our tax revenue. Those four promises--Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security--that equals all of our tax revenue. We don't even vote on those programs.

The programs that we vote on--that is the budget, that is military and nonmilitary--are a third of the spending. It is all borrowed now. Essentially, our debt equals our budget. Everything we vote to spend in the budget is borrowed. So things are out of whack. You can't help everyone and be everything to everybody.

A way to look at this is, let's say you make $25,000 a year, and all of your money goes to your rent and your food and taking care of your family. You have nothing left over. You are working poor. You walk by somebody on the side of the street, and they are homeless, and you feel sorry for them. Would you immediately go to a bank and borrow $1,000 and give it to a homeless person? No, you wouldn't, because that would make no sense whatsoever.

That is what we are doing. We look around the world, and we see homeless people. We look around the world, and we see hungry people. So we just simply go to China, the bank, and we borrow money from China and then we send it to Africa. Well, you know what, if you send your own money, it is charity. If you send your own money, it is noble. If you send somebody else's money or you borrow the money and you make the country go further in debt and you put us more in peril, that is not charity. That is what is destroying our country. That is what is eating us up from the inside out. The greatest threat to America is from within, not from without.

What happens when the currency unravels? What happens when the value of the dollar doesn't lose 5 percent in a year but loses 5 percent in a week? That is what happens in the end stages of a currency being destroyed. People say it will never happen to America. Can't happen in America. We are the strongest dollar. We are the reserve currency of the world. Can't happen here.

It can and has happened to great nations. It has happened to great civilizations that have lost their currency, that have destroyed their currency. Does it always unravel gradually enough that you can fix it? No. Sometimes it unravels in the space of weeks.

When the German money lost its value in the early 1920s after the first war, in September, it took like 100 marks to buy a loaf of bread. Two weeks later, mid-September, it was 1,000 marks. At the end of September, it was 1 million. In the middle of October, it was 10 million.

The currency, if you look at the currency and what it would buy in a 2-month period, was completely destroyed in a 2-month period. The pictures from the history books will show people putting the German mark into wheelbarrows and wheeling it up to fires to burn for warmth. It was worth more as fuel than it was to buy things. The workers were demanding that they be paid more than once a day because you had to go out and get your pay at noon and spend it then because it was worth half as much by the end of the day. That is what it looks like when a country destroys its currency.

How do you destroy your currency? How does inflation occur? If you watch television, you see that these people are either dishonest or would fail basic economics. They are like: Well, inflation is transitory, and, you know, we are not sure where it is from, but maybe it could be--oh, greedy people owning grocery stores causes inflation.

No. Inflation is an economic fact that comes from borrowing money, and the Federal Reserve prints up money to buy the borrowed money.

Treasury--when we get behind on our payments, we spend more than comes in, so we have to borrow money. The Fed buys our Treasury bills. Well, the Fed doesn't have any money; the Fed creates that money. That is what inflation is. And so much of it gets passed on to government.

Everybody knows that in the last 3 or 4 years--and part of the election was over the inflation of the Biden administration. Prices were up about 20 percent over 3 or 4 years. But in order to keep up with that, we built in inflation protection to most of our government programs. So Social Security has cost-of-living increases. So they keep up with inflation or try to keep up with inflation, but as they do, the programs just get larger and larger and larger, and we get more and more behind the eight ball. That is what is happening.

But it is coming to a head. Social Security runs out of money in 2033. When it runs out of money, everybody gets 20 to 25 percent less in Social Security. What do you think is going to happen in our country when the poorest among us who live only on Social Security--when they lose the value of their check, they lose 25 percent of their check? What do you think is going to happen in this country? And nobody is preparing them for it. Nobody is doing anything to reform Social Security, reform Medicare, reform Medicaid.

You know, people are just petrified of everything. What is so horrible and so hard to say about people who are able-bodied ought to work? I think everyone should work. I think everyone who is able-bodied should work not as punishment but as reward. We should have a work requirement on every check that goes out. Everybody should work. I mean, it is how you get your self-esteem. You can't give people self- esteem. You can't say: Here, Johnny, here is a trophy. We know you can't spell or add, but here is a trophy for being a mathlete.

No, you have to earn your self-esteem. You earn it through work.

Just adding work to Medicaid and saying: You want free health insurance from the government--adding a work requirement saves $100 billion. Having the States pay more for Medicaid. Why

do I want the States to pay for more Medicaid? Because they don't have a printing press. Why are the decisions of this body so awful? Because there is a printing press.

I had a conversation with one of my Democratic colleagues, and I said: We have to make a choice. You have to decide whether you want to help the poor in our country or help the poor in Ukraine or help whoever you are paying in Ukraine.

He said: We shouldn't have to make a choice.

It is like, you do have to make a choice. The fact that you think you don't have to make a choice is why we are $36 trillion in the hole. You have to make choices. Which comes first--Ukraine or America? You can't do both because we don't have enough money. We only have enough taxes coming in to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Everything else is borrowed.

So maybe able-bodied people need to go back to work. Maybe there needs to be a work requirement. Maybe, for goodness' sake, food stamps shouldn't buy sugared drinks, chips, Ding Dongs, and Twinkies. Could we not reform our system such that we try to cure the obesity plague in our country by cutting back what the government buys as far as food?

But today, the opposite will happen. Things aren't what they appear to be. Things are never, in Congress, really what they seem to be. We will pass a bill ostensibly by the conservative majority, but the purpose of this bill is to spend $340 billion in new spending.

Instead, what we should be doing is taking the savings from the waste, fraud, and abuse that DOGE and Elon are finding--we should take those savings and use it to spend for things that people think are of higher priority, such as the border and/or the military.

But I will oppose this budget because I am not for spending more money. I will oppose this budget because I want to have nothing to do with a $2.2 trillion deficit. At the end of the year, those who vote for this budget and those who vote for the new spending will have to explain to people at home: How about that $2.2 trillion deficit? How did that happen under a Republican watch?

Until someone is brave enough to say no, it is going to go on and on, and there is a danger that if we don't stop it, we are going to destroy the country.

So I will offer an amendment later on to cut spending, to actually put teeth into this budget resolution, to cut real spending, to balance our budget, and to do and complete the promises that the President had in the campaign.

I yield the floor.

I call up my amendment No. 999 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, the budget bill before us instructs the Senate to find $342 billion in new spending. The budget bill, as written, is a spending bill. My amendment would add language to cut spending. The cuts would

total $1.5 trillion. These cuts mirror the cuts from the House budget resolution that has been passed.

This year, the deficit will exceed $2 trillion. It is a fiscal imperative that Congress begin to cut spending.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment. This amendment is unnecessary. We already have laws on the books to protect people's information.

The most recent cases I can remember of leaking information like this involved an IRS contractor who illegally leaked the tax returns of President Trump, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos to the delight of many on the other side of the aisle.

That person, fortunately, though, is now in jail, which proves the point that we already have laws in place to take care of this. This amendment is a thinly veiled attempt to prevent DOGE from doing the constructive job of finding waste. This is an amendment that says it is OK to spend $2 million in Guatemala on sex change surgery. This is an amendment that says it is OK, look the other way, transgender comic books in Peru are great. This is an amendment that says it is OK to do trans operas in Colombia. This is an amendment that attacks people who are looking to save our money and spend it on legitimate diplomacy, not crazy, looney, leftwing ideas. And I am done.

Mr. President, I have five requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.

Mr. President, rule XXVI, paragraph 2, of the Standing Rules of the Senate requires each committee to adopt rules to govern the procedure of the committee and to publish those rules in the Congressional Record not later than March 1 of the first year of each Congress. Today, the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs adopted committee rules of procedure.

Consistent with standing rule XXVI, I ask unanimous consent to have a copy of the rules of procedure of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs printed in the Congressional Record.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, once again, we are asked to extend the flood program without any reforms to protect the taxpayers.

Like many Federal programs, the flood program is well-intentioned, but it may very well be the best real-life example of a moral hazard.

The program covers about 5 million policyholders and provides over $1 trillion in coverage. We were told that the program is funded through insurance premiums. But charging below the market price on insurance and capping how much these rates can rise inevitably has led to shortfalls. They are out of money.

They are always out of money.

A 2014 report by the Government Accountability Office found that the flood program collected as much as $17 billion fewer in premiums than the market would have demanded.

So when the program inevitably found itself in need of money, it, in theory, ``borrowed'' from the taxpayers--not that the taxpayers had any choice in the matter. As they often are, they were on the hook regardless of whether we want to be or not.

Just a few years ago, the flood program owed over $30 billion to the taxpayers. Congress later just canceled that debt.

Poof, it is gone. It disappeared.

But the flood program has not made any further repayments to the taxpayers and today still owes over $20 billion in debt. So the taxpayers are expected to cough up money whenever the program needs it, but the program doesn't seem to be in a hurry to pay the taxpayers back.

But perhaps the greatest insult to the taxpayers is the lack of true limits on this delinquent program. There are no limits on how many claims can be filed or how much money can be received by a policyholder filing multiple claims. Rather than encourage people to leave flood- prone areas, it encourages people to stay and rebuild where it continues to flood.

In thousands of instances, the program encourages people to rebuild and rebuild and rebuild again. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, over 150,000 properties have been rebuilt over and over again.

They say the definition of insanity is doing things over and over again and never understanding you are doing the wrong thing.

In fact, 25 to 30 percent of flood program claims are made by policyholders whose properties flood time and time again. Over 2,000 properties have flooded over than 10 times. We bail them out every time.

One home in Batchelor, LA, flooded 40 times and received a total of $428,000 in flood insurance payments. It doesn't seem like we are learning our lesson. It doesn't seem like that is encouraging good building behavior. It is encouraging the opposite.

If you can believe it, that isn't even the most times a house has been paid for. In Virginia, one home flooded 41 times and received more than $600,000 in payments. It is argued, no matter how much a home is worth, that the Federal Government will only cover the first $350,000 in flood insurance coverage--$250,000 for the structure, another $100,000 for the contents.

That is true.

But the $350,000 limit is only applied per event. That is how you wind up with a home that floods 40 times and gets paid over $400,000. What if the home that flooded 40 times was paid 350,000 times? What if it is a $10 million home, and it has $300,000 worth of damage 40 times? That would mean the policyholder would receive $14 million from the government program.

It was also mentioned during previous debates that there really isn't a private flood insurance market. Well, there is a private insurance market that will cover beyond $350,000. Rich people use the government to insure their beach house up to 350, and then they buy private insurance on top of that. So there is a market and would be a market at whatever number we set.

The government flood program is a disaster for many reasons, but chief among them is that it crowds out the private market for the first $350,000 in losses. That is why the private flood insurance market is so small.

Madam President, $350,000 coverage per event may be enough for most people, but instead of allowing private markets to work, the government has put the primary responsibility of flood losses on taxpayers.

Can you imagine having to withstand the ordeal of your home flooding 10, 20, or 40 times? Well, the taxpayers do not have to imagine paying to rebuild the same home time and time again because that is the reality of the current program.

Adding insult to injury, the Congressional Budget Office found that the flood program tends to benefit the wealthy and that 23 percent of the subsidized coastal properties were not even the policy's primary residence.

So one out of five homes that the taxpayer--people who don't live on the gulf shore, people who don't live on the Atlantic coast, people who don't live on the Pacific Ocean--people who live in Middle America are insuring the second homes of rich people. One in five of the homes being insured are rich people. Ordinary taxpayers in Kansas or Kentucky are asked to pay for the insurance for the second home of rich people.

How in the world would that make any sense? The government forces the taxpayers to pay and rebuild the elite summer homes of the rich. It is estimated that the national average replacement cost of homes in government flood insurance programs--that these homes are valued at over $400,000. So the average home of this government program that is supposed to help the poor--the average home that we are insuring, that the government is insuring--is worth over $400,000, and it is people's second house.

How in the world is that something we should keep borrowing billions and billions of dollars to insure rich people's homes?

In fact, sometimes it seems the flood program caters directly to the wealthy. Nearly 80 percent of the flood program's policies are located in counties that rank within the top 20 percent of income. Enough is enough. It is an insult to rob the taxpayers to give to the wealthy.

This is why I offered an amendment that would require the flood program to only cover your primary residence. So if this is your only house and for some misbegotten reason you have to keep building in a flood zone, you would be eligible. If it is your beach house, you are not eligible. If it is your second house, you wouldn't be eligible.

We also might put a cap on it. We might say: Well, if you have more than a half-a-million-dollar house, you have to buy your own insurance; the government doesn't pay for that.

These are reasonable amendments, reasonable reforms, reasonable changes that have been offered for years and never get done because people come with the song and dance of people needing help and we must help people, but nobody ever says: Are some of these people, people who should be helping themselves?

And that is why it is always bankrupt.

So what I would recommend is that my amendment be added to this bill. We can reauthorize the program. We can re-fund it. But we would now limit who it goes to. The money would not go to homes over $500,000, and it would have to be your primary home, not your second home. To me, that is a modest proposal. It won't fix the whole thing, but it is very, very reasonable.

So I will offer that today. If the Senator from Louisiana wants to pass this tonight, we can pass it tonight. All he has to do is agree to my amendment.

No one is here to object. It is a unanimous consent arrangement. He can

agree right now. We will pass it. The program will, from now on, exclude people with homes over half a million, and it will exclude people where it is their second beach house. How reasonable is that? He can do it tonight.

So, therefore, I ask the Senator to modify his request so that the Paul amendment at the desk be considered and agreed to; the bill as amended be considered read a third time and passed; and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Reserving the right to object, let the record show that what I have offered is a way to limit government insurance to regular people of modest income but to say rich people with beach houses shouldn't have government-subsidized insurance. The program costs billions of dollars. It is $30, $40, $50 billion in the hole, anyway you want to measure it. Something has got to be done.

What would those reforms be? What would the most obvious reform be for a flood program that is billions of dollars in the hole? Why don't you tell rich people: Buy your own insurance.

Does that mean I don't like rich people? No. Probably nobody in this body more appreciates success and people who work hard and make a good living--nothing against that, other than we shouldn't give them free stuff.

I mean, I am all for them. If you have got a yacht, invite me over. But I am not for buying insurance for your yacht with taxpayer money. That doesn't mean I don't appreciate that you are wealthy and you have got a yacht. I will ride on your yacht. I will come to your party. But I am not going to buy your insurance with the taxpayer money, which is billions of dollars in the hole with this just one program. The whole government is $2 trillion in the hole.

So let the record reflect that I offered to amend this program, let it go on, and we exclude only the homes of people who have homes-- second homes--over $500,000. And that was rejected.

So I have another offer. This will be the second amendment, and this offer will be, if $500,000 for your second home means you are still poor and you need help from the government, what about if your second home costs $2 million or more, should we buy your insurance? Should the government subsidize your insurance?

So I brought along a couple of pictures, and these are pictures of some people that you might have heard of their homes.

This is President Biden's home in Rehoboth Beach, DE. It is worth $2,700,000, and, yes, it is eligible for government insurance. Does anybody think we should be buying insurance for President Biden's home?

Let's see what else we have.

Oh, Nicholas Cage--boy, that is a nice house--4.2 million, in New Orleans, also eligible for government insurance.

Look, I love Nicholas Cage. I would go to parties at his house too. I love his movies. I would pay 20 bucks to go to the movies. Actually, I don't want to pay 20 bucks. I would pay to go see his movies, but I don't think we should buy insurance for his home. If he can get a $4.2 million home, I bet you he can buy his own insurance.

Let's see who else is eligible for government insurance. Oh, Matt Damon--he has had a lot of good movies. Man, he must be doing great. His place costs $20 million, and it is eligible for government insurance too.

Do you think Matt Damon would be embarrassed to find out that the government is subsidizing his first $250,000? Shouldn't we all be embarrassed?

The program is $16 billion in the hole, and we want to renew a program without any reforms. Just keep doing it. Keep losing money. Just keep doing the same thing.

Maybe Matt Damon can buy his own insurance.

Who else has a house that would be eligible for insurance? Oh, Phil Collins--he made some good music. He must have made some great music. His home is worth $40 million, in Biscayne Bay, FL, also eligible for government insurance.

So I can't imagine how we couldn't come to a compromise. So if ordinary people have second homes that are $500,000 beach homes, if we just went up to $2 million, then we are only going to be clipping Phil Collins and Nicholas Cage and a few others.

Do we have anybody else? Let's see who else we have.

Oh, now Cher, she has been doing well for a long time. She has a $42 million place in Miami Beach, also eligible for government insurance.

You know, we could go on and on. But the thing is, this doesn't mean we don't like rich people or appreciate their success. I am all for it. I am just not for giving them free stuff. Why would we give them subsidized insurance?

So what I will offer now is a second amendment, and this one might be easier to accept. And realize that this could be accepted right now. This entire program could be reauthorized with these amendments tonight if the Senator from Louisiana will accept this amendment.

This amendment would say that if your house is worth more than $2 million, and it is your second home, that

it wouldn't be eligible for government insurance.

That would be pretty easy. You know, it still would have significant savings, because there are quite a few homes out there. And do you think they would figure out a place to buy insurance? Sure, they would. A market would develop immediately. So therefore I ask the Senator to modify his request so that the Paul amendment at the desk, the second Paul amendment, be considered and agreed to; the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, the argument is made that this is not a gift; this is not subsidized insurance. Well, if it weren't subsidized insurance and if it were a market price for insurance, it wouldn't lose $16 billion a year. By definition, if you lose $16 billion a year, you are not charging enough in premiums, so you have subsidized premiums.

This is a subsidized government insurance program that, even with the subsidized premiums, is woefully inadequate. It is accumulating tens of billions of dollars of debt. It is currently $20 billion in the hole. We have a problem here. I haven't really heard how we are going to fix this, and one obvious, easy way would be that people who can afford to should maybe pay the full price for their insurance and maybe not a subsidized price.

So I object.

Mr. President, well, we have arrived. We are here at last, another government shutdown averted. The government will remain open.

I am not sure if that is good news or bad news. People need to know, yes, the government will stay open, and it will not be chaotic. Congress can adjourn, which is probably a good thing when Congress adjourns.

But the thing about government staying open is we will pass something called a continued resolution. What does that mean? It means we are resolved to continue, continue as we have for, really, decades.

We will continue to spend money, regardless of whether we have it or not. We will continue to spend money at a pace such that we will accumulate about $2 trillion in debt each year; the deficit will be about $2 trillion.

Now, the spending is comprised of a lot of different areas. It is about $6.8 trillion in spending, and we bring in about $4.8 trillion in revenue.

So it is about a $2 trillion mismatch. A lot of the spending is entitlements, probably two-thirds of the spending is entitlements, but this body refuses to address entitlements, so as part of the continuing spending tonight, keeping government open, all of the entitlements will be taken off board, and there will be no reforms to entitlements, no reduction in spending in entitlements. They will continue growing; some will be about 5 and 6 percent per year.

Almost everybody on both sides of the aisle acknowledges that entitlements are the problem; entitlements are driving the debt. What we vote on, people call it a budget, or another word they call it is ``discretionary'' spending. It is about $1.7 trillion or so, about $2 trillion. Of that $2 trillion, about half is military, half is nonmilitary.

Well, the military has been taken off the table also, primarily by Republicans, but Democrats are complicit as well. No military spending will be addressed; no waste in the military will be addressed; and the Pentagon will not be audited.

They have said for decades the Pentagon needs to be audited, and the Pentagon says: We are too big to be audited. Leave us alone. We are too big.

Occasionally, we will find some things, $500 toilet seats or $800 hammers, things like that, but overall, we have no idea where the money is going and neither do they. They sometimes talk about hundreds of millions of dollars really literally missing that they have no idea.

But it is taken off the table because the powers that be say that military is sacrosanct, cannot be looked at, and must have increased spending. So all the entitlements are going up. That is two-thirds of $6.8 trillion. The remaining $2 trillion is half military. It is going up, and nobody is looking at it either.

So we have discretionary. Nonmilitary discretionary spending is part of the budget also. And we couldn't come to an agreement, other than we are going to be resolved to continue spending at about the pace we are. It will be short term, and that would be bad enough because the spending will accumulate and is accumulating about a $2 trillion deficit. But that is not enough.

This has been a horrendous week for fiscal conservatives because we are not going to just continue as we have been doing, continue loading on the debt, we are also adding to it in a dramatic fashion.

This week, there will be $330 billion added on to the spending; $200 billion of it will be for Social Security. You say: Well, we should want to help people. Why wouldn't we give people that are senior citizens more money? Well, if we give new people more money, we have to take it from somewhere. We are going to have to either borrow it or we are going to have to print it, but it has to come from somewhere. Money doesn't grow on trees.

So $200 billion increase in spending for Social Security. Where is the money going to come from?

Now, I will offer an amendment that would pay for it. My amendment would be to raise the age gradually of Social Security 3 months a year for about 12 years, and that would pay for the expansion of benefits.

I think that is the only responsible way to do this. You want more benefits for people? You can't just, you know, push the bankruptcy of Social Security and say: Well, yeah, it will go bankrupt in about 9 years, but maybe I won't be here, or maybe I won't be alive, and maybe it will still exist for people.

But shouldn't we care about what is going to happen to the future of Social Security? Shouldn't we care about how this is going to be paid for? But it will be interesting to see how the vote is. I suspect I won't win, but we are going to have a vote on gradually raising the age.

But here is the rub of how difficult it is and how far behind the eight ball we have become. I proposed this solution 12 years ago, 13 years ago. When I did, it fixed two-thirds of the shortfall. If you raise the age gradually from 67 to 70, about 2 or 3 months a year, it wiped out most of the shortfall and fixed the problem 13 years ago. If you do it now, it only gives us 1 more year of solvency before bankruptcy comes.

So we have taken a problem that was eminently fixable a decade ago, and at this point, if we were to do it and my amendment were to pass, it would pay for the expansion, but still the system is going bankrupt because we just keep adding stuff to it.

Most people don't realize this, but Social Security actually will give you money no matter what your income is if you have teenage children and one of the parents is over 65. Now, somebody thought up this program and said: Wow, this would be good. We should help out elderly parents that are taking care of teenagers.

You can be a billionaire and--I know people who are wealthy whose kids drive Porsches who are getting $1,500 a month for each of their kids because the dad is 65.

Why would we do a program that is not based on income at all? Why would we let anybody join in that? Is that why Social Security is going bankrupt? No. That is just an element, though, of where the money is going.

But everything that happens in this city is based on compassion. I feel for people, and I want to help people, but nobody does anything based on math. Nobody really looks at this and says: Well, shouldn't we do something to

make sure it is paid for? What about next decade? What is going to happen to Social Security? Not a care. They just expand it, and it is feel-good.

You know, the free lunch, the mantra of free lunch is good. Here is stuff. Here is manna. We are going to give you more money. Just be content. Take some soma. Just relax. Here is some more money.

But we are destroying the entitlement programs. Social Security is going bankrupt, and we sped up the bankruptcy this week by adding $200 billion. That is going to be concluded tonight.

That is $200 billion in brandnew spending to a system that was already $2 trillion short. Now, we also gave $30 billion to farmers. That is going to be in the package tonight, too.

Now, why do the farmers say they need money? Many farmers are actually pretty well-off and doing pretty well actually. But they say that the tariffs during the first Trump administration hurt them so badly that they are still having to reduce exports, and they need more money. So we are still paying them for the tariff wars that were begun 4 years ago, and still half the people in the country are jumping up and down and saying they want more tariffs.

What are we going to do, pay off everybody that doesn't benefit from the tariffs? Think about it. If you put tariffs on a steel mill and you say: Well, we are not going to let the Chinese sell any steel over here. You have this bright, shiny steel mill and all the thousand workers stand in front of it, and they love you because you are going to help them with their jobs, and they are going to be more secure.

But for every person making steel, there are 80 workers working somewhere buying steel. So what you do is you just ignore the other half of the equation. Why? Because it is easy to see the shiny steel factory. It is easy to see those workers.

The 80 workers that are working for other industries, car industry, building warehouses, anybody that uses steel, fences, all these people buying stuff are scattered through small industries, and you don't see them.

But their economic impact at least equals but probably exceeds the one you are trying to benefit. We do so many crazy things. So $200 billion to expand Social Security that won't be paid for and speeds up the bankruptcy and demise of Social Security; $30 billion for farmers, many of whom have other resources and really are not desperately in need of this.

What happens to the borrowing--$230 billion. Well, it is not over. We also are adding $100 billion for disaster. And you say to yourself: Well, you know, we have got to help people in need. They have had storms. They have had flooding. We have got to help them. Well, shouldn't we try to root out the waste and fraud in those systems, the people that are stealing money from these things? If you want to know how people are stealing things and how many people are stealing things, when we did all that COVID stuff, we stopped the economy and gave free money to everybody.

We actually had foreign scoundrels, foreign fraudsters come in and take tens of millions of dollars, but we also had U.S. citizens buying Lamborghinis and Bugattis and all kind of fancy cars on their government.

We had people signing up for the program. One of them used an ID that had a picture of Barbie on it and got money. Many of them said: I have 500 workers, and they didn't have any workers. They didn't have a business.

So just fraud was rampant throughout it. This happens also in the disaster relief programs as well. People claim things they lost in disasters that didn't exist. But let's put that aside, the waste and fraud in the program, and say: We have to help people. We have to do something about disasters.

Well, maybe there ought to be a decision-making process where we say: What is more important? Ukraine or Asheville, NC?

Do we have enough money to do both? Well, we do if we borrow it. But when we borrow it, we add to the debt. The Fed buys the debt, and you create inflation.

It is no mystery why your goods cost more. During the last 4 years, groceries, meat, poultry, gasoline, rent, everything has gone up on average at least 20 percent. Now did it become more precious? Did we all of a sudden lose a supply of things? No. The dollar became weaker; the dollar became diluted because we had to buy all of this debt.

So it is a bait-and-switch. What we do is we expand, you know, this week 200 billion for Social Security, hundred billion for disasters-- that is 300 billion--30 billion for farm subsidies. That is $330 billion unpaid for. But the people here are gathered. The vast majority of them who will vote for this will go home, pat themselves on the back, and say: I brought you stuff. Isn't that what you want me to do? Bring you free stuff?

Well, it is not free. It has ramifications. They are destroying the dollar. They are destroying the country, and yet it goes on because it seems to be easy just to promise people something for nothing.

So I have a couple different solutions. To pay for the Social Security, let's gradually raise the age 3 months each year. And what it does is it actually pays entirely for this $200 billion expansion and then some. It has to be done. It will be done at some point. I offered it 13 years ago. And every year we have waited, we have gotten further behind the eight ball. And every year we have waited, we have gotten to the point where it is much more difficult to dig out of this hole.

As far as the shutdowns, I will admit that it is chaotic to go through this every 3 months, every 6 months, every year. There could be a way that we could actually say, when there is an impasse and both parties don't agree, we agree to continue spending but not at the same level.

See, the vote today on at least some of the budget, the part that is not going up like this, on a small portion, we will continue at the same level. But realize three-fourths of it is going up. We are not keeping it steady.

So if we vote to keep it steady, does that really fix the problem? No. If you keep it steady and even if you didn't increase spending, the budget never balances. Why? Because you are only keeping a very small portion of the budget steady. It is really about 16 percent. Two- thirds, 66 percent, entitlements; the remaining third: half military, half nonmilitary. Military is going up at 3 percent.

Oh, that is right. I forgot. Republicans have a great plan. Come spring, the Republicans are, by simple majority, going to bust through the military caps.

The military caps are put in place like all other caps to try to restrain spending, and they are ignored. But in the spring, the first reconciliation package the Republicans will pass with a simple majority is to bust through the military caps.

Military doesn't have enough money. We spend more on our military than the next eight countries combined, and yet it is never enough.

People say: We are going to find waste and fraud. I am all for it. I am a big supporter of looking for waste and fraud. I am a big supporter of getting rid of it.

Guess what. If you don't look at the entitlements, you are not a serious person. If you don't look at the military, you are not a serious person. The trouble will go on.

In the first Trump administration, $8 trillion were borrowed. I am a fan of Donald Trump. I supported him. I voted for him. But we borrowed $8 trillion. During the Biden administration, coincidentally, we borrowed another $8 trillion. They were equally fiscally irresponsible.

Now, at least during the Trump administration, you could argue there was COVID and the pandemic and all of that. But the reaction was too much, and the lockdowns were not necessary. They didn't save any lives through the lockdowns, and we spent a ton of money that we passed out for people not to work.

But the bottom line is, when you look at all of this, we have this enormous problem. I am all for eliminating the waste and fraud. It is not enough. You have to look at the entitlements. You have to look at the military.

Currently, we look at only about 16 percent of the budget. If you eliminated all of that--it is called nonmilitary discretionary; it is part of the budget. You eliminate all of it--which isn't going to happen--the budget still

never balances. You have to look at all the spending. We are not looking at any of the entitlement spending.

In fact, it is worse. Entitlements are driving the debt. Almost everybody agrees with it, and we are expanding the entitlements.

Social Security--beginning in 2021, Social Security, for the first time, pays out more than it brings in in taxes. It was the opposite for many years; Social Security brought in more than they spent, and they actually developed and had a reserve. For the last 3 years, Social Security has been paying out more than comes in. In 2021, they paid out 50 billion more than came in. In 2022, they paid out 22 billion more than came in. Last year, we paid out 40 billion more than came in.

If you had a business or even if you had a social program and you were paying out more than you brought in, wouldn't you try to reverse that trend? No. What we did this week is expand Social Security by $200 billion over 10 years. It is 20 billion a year. So if the debt next year for Social Security is going to be about the same as this year, it would be $40 billion. We added 20 billion to that. What is the math? A 50-percent increase in our debt.

So for someone who is fiscally conservative, this isn't a very good Christmas. This is a Christmas of just doing the same old thing.

So when you hear ``CR,'' continuing resolution, realize your government is resolved just to continue doing the same thing. They are kicking the can down the road. The debt is going to continue to accumulate, and they are not doing anything to fix it. So don't be pleased with your people. Look closely. Who are my representatives, and are they doing the right thing?

So we are going to offer a pay-for for Social Security. That will be one of my amendments tonight. We are also going to offer something called the Government Shutdown Protection Act. And what it will do is it says: When there is an impasse, when Republicans and Democrats don't agree, that the spending would continue at a reduced level. The level we chose was enough to try to bring both sides together to actually form an agreement; but also, we chose a number that would be enough of a cut to actually put us on a path to balance.

So if my amendment were to pass, government wouldn't shut down from here on out. But the spending would be at a 6-percent reduced level. This actually balances the budget, and it is a pretty significant cut. Most of them will say, Oh, it is too much. We can't vote for it.

But the thing is, is: Even if my cuts were to go into place, even if my amendment were to pass, a 6-percent cut would take 5 years to get to balance in 1 year. Not to get rid of any debt that we have accumulated, but just to get to an annual balance.

And they are like, Oh, woe is me. We can never do it. We can't cut people. People deserve money. People deserve stuff. We have to give them more stuff.

Do you know that in the European Union, 16 out of 28 countries in the European Union, who many are considered to be socialist, actually balance their budget? I met with a socialist from Sweden. He was more conservative than everybody across the aisle. He was more conservative than half the Republicans up here, because they thought that actual entitlements should be based on the economy. Their entitlements actually go down when the economy goes down. If the economy shrinks, their entitlements shrink. Everyone knows it is going to happen. If it is a bad year, we get a little less.

People would go nuts here. We do the opposite. During the last 4 years, they created so much inflation that people's costs went up 20 percent. What do we do? We have to give cost-of-living adjustments to those on Social Security, and we did; but we were short even more money. And it made the problem even worse and sped up the bankruptcy of Social Security.

So my amendment would say: We actually have to reduce spending. Now some people say to conservatives--both in my party and the others--they say, Oh, you people are unrealistic. You will never vote to raise the debt ceiling. But even if I had my way and we got cuts significant enough that I think the American people would accept, but most of this body wouldn't, and we balance the budget in 5 years, we would still accumulate debt over those 5 years. And I would vote to raise the debt ceiling during that brief period of time as we were on the way toward balancing our budget. But none of that is going to happen.

What we are doing this week and what both parties will be complicit in--and I mean both parties. Every Democrat here will vote for this bill, I assume. Every Democrat will vote to continue to be resolved to spend money at a rate that is $2 trillion more than comes in. And half the Republicans will join them.

There will be a minority of Republicans who will say: We are conservative, and we shouldn't spend this much money.

But we will offer amendments tonight, and people will get to decide where they are. And people at home will have to decide: Are we going to live this way? How long can we live this way? What causes inflation? Can we not have representatives who believe that balancing our budget is the appropriate thing to do?

So the amendments I offer today are such that I think they are necessary. I think they will help us to save Social Security from bankruptcy, but they won't be very popular here. But I offer them in hopes that people will see them across America and say: At least somebody cares about the solvency of Social Security. At least somebody has the guts to say, This is what we would do to try to save and preserve Social Security, rather than just giving free stuff to everybody and saying, No big deal. You can have more. You want more? Here is more.

Somebody's got to ask: How are we going to pay for this? Someone has to be responsible up here. And if you watch closely who votes on this amendment, you will see who are the truly fiscally responsible people in the Senate.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I call up my amendment, No. 3346, and ask that it be reported by number.

I yield back all time on the amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 3352 and ask that it be reported by number.

I yield back.

Vote on Amendment No. 3352

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I object.