Floor Statements

Reserving the right to object, again, after looking at this, if what the majority leader said is accurate, I plan on supporting this. But until I have had a chance to read what was sent over this morning--I will object until that time.

This bill has never been before the HELP Committee. It

has never had a hearing in the Senate. There has been no discharge of this from the committee. We have never even voted on this bill. With that, I plan on objecting until I see exactly what has been offered by the majority leader later today.

I object.

Reserving the right to object, five different Government agencies already have significant programs in that. This bill does not eliminate any of those, make improvements in those, just lays a layer of bureaucracy on top of that. With that, I object.

Reserving the right to object, a question for the majority leader: Is this bill similar to what we had discussed in our negotiations and does it, in fact, include the SAFE Act or not?

I would object pending our review of the legislation.

Reserving the right to object, I have a question for the majority leader. I understood from your statement that this does not have any of the changes we talked about, this is strictly the House- passed bill.

Reserving the right to object further, we will relook at what that is. I will object at this time and hope we can work out with the majority leader what we had discussed earlier in terms of a compromise.

Reserving the right to object, a question again for the majority leader. As confused as I was on a previous act, this does not include the language of the SAFE Act?

Continuing my reservation of the right to object, by the same logic that the majority leader has argued on all these other bills, the SAFE Act passed the House 390 to 2. So with the wisdom of the House, under which we are basing all the other requests for unanimous consent, why is that wisdom not any good now with the SAFE Act? The fact is that it isn't. I regret that unless we can pass the PROTECT Act with the SAFE Act and unless we can actually do something-- the SAFE Act actually will do something tomorrow, the day it is signed. The PROTECT Act will not do anything until the money comes through Congress a year from now. So the fact is, if we had the SAFE Act, we will stop child pornography faster than if we don't. The question of the fourth amendment rights of child pornographers versus the rights of children being abused is not a hard thing to figure out. With that, I object until we add that to the bill.

Reserving the right to object, pending examination of what we received less than 30 minutes ago--we have to take a look at that, and I will come back to the majority leader--I object.

Reserving the right to object, pending the information, I will get back to Senator Reid. I object until that time.

Reserving the right to object, with the same answer as before, I object.

My answer, through the Chair, Mr. Majority Leader, I appreciate that you have made concessions on many bills. I have not seen those. My staff is working on what you have sent over 30 minutes ago. I will communicate to you as soon as we finish the review, which should be before 1 o'clock today.

Answering the majority leader through the Chair, my staff has advised me a moment ago that we have come to agreement on that. I have no objection to the way that is written at this time.

Madam President, it is my understanding I have 14 minutes remaining in morning business.

Madam President, I appreciate the attitude with which the majority leader comes. We have attempted to work out several bills that I think we will get worked out today. I would like to provide a more general discussion about what went on here because the American people need to know.

All these bills could have come to the floor for debate and amendment. They haven't been blocked. What has happened is one Senator, myself, to the dismay of most of my colleagues on my side of the aisle who want these bills to pass, has said the American people ought to hear a debate. We ought to be able to amend the bills. We are talking about $10 billion in new spending, 37 new Government agencies, and we are to pass that by not having any debate and just saying yes.

I will not do that. I understand that is frustrating to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. As a matter of fact, I get much more consternation from Republicans than I do from Democrats for my desire for us to be frugal with taxpayer dollars and also to be transparent. The fact is, we ought to have debates. We ought to amend. If one watches C-SPAN at all, what they see is, the vast majority of time, we are not doing anything in here. So there is plenty of time for us to do it.

I will make another significant point. We have in front of us a financial crisis that we are going to ask the American taxpayer to fund, some $700 billion in guarantees on loans, one way or the other, for loans that are not performing, whether that be mortgages or other loans, commercial real estate, home real estate. We are getting ready to ask the American people to do that. The contention I have had in this body since I have been here is completely opposite of what Senator Reid voiced yesterday and again this morning, that these don't cost anything. If they don't cost anything and we are not going to spend any money, then they are not ever going to have any impact, if we don't spend the money. The fact is, authorizations matter because we do intend to spend the money. Therefore, if we continue to authorize and authorize and grow the Government bigger than what it is today--and one of reasons we are in the jam today is because the Federal Government is trying to do things totally outside the enumerated powers of the Constitution that were specifically given to us to limit the range and impact and reach of the Federal Government. That is why we are going to be asking for $700 billion of the next generation's money to make up for mistakes that Congresses have made as we have reached beyond what the Constitution says.

The very idea to claim that these don't spend any money flies in the face of reality. I would like to submit to the record a release on military aid spending. It shows the duplicity associated with our words. The majority leader said none of this spends any money. We passed the Defense authorization bill. Lo and behold, what are the releases of all the Members of Congress that had marks and things that go home on parochial interests? Here is what they say. They will spend money. Major research and military infrastructure needs will receive an enormous boost. Nearly $200 million in Federal spending to ensure the State's bases have everything they need.

Well, if authorizations do not spend any money, why are we claiming in press releases they do? We cannot have it both ways. The fact is, if we say they do not spend any money, and we do not intend to appropriate it, what we are doing is playing a hoax on the American people.

We are going to have before us this week some very difficult challenges for the Congress. The medicine, the painful medicine this country is going to have to take to reestablish confidence in our financial markets is directly related to the behavior of not deauthorizing and not getting rid of wasteful programs. The fact is, the Government Accountability Office has specifically listed out, along with the inspectors general of each of the agencies, as well as the Congressional Budget Office and Congressional Research Service, over $300 billion of waste, fraud, or duplication.

When was the last time we aggressively eliminated waste, we aggressively eliminated fraud, we aggressively eliminated duplication? The President has admitted that combining the debt with what we are borrowing from Social Security, this next year we are going to have a $600 billion deficit.

Not only are we going to take $700 billion and put it into nonperforming loans, we are going to borrow another $600 billion from the next generation to operate the Government, when we know over $300 billion of that is waste.

What are we doing? We are passing more authorizations with new spending, which will get spent, or we are being dishonest with those people who say we are supporting those programs. It is time for a change. Both campaigns on the Presidential side are talking about that. But the change that needs to happen is a change inside Congress, that we will start addressing the real problem. Imagine the fact that HHS put out that in 2007 31 percent of all Medicare payments were improperly made, with about 80 percent of those being overpayments.

It does not sound like much until you see that is almost 80 billion of Medicare dollars that were improperly paid. Where is the bill on the floor now to fix that? Where is the bill on the floor to get us out of the energy jam we are in? Instead, we are authorizing new programs without eliminating others and continuing the very errors of our ways that got us into the jam we are now going to ask the American taxpayers to give us $700 billion to get us out of.

It time for a timeout in Washington. It is time for us to reconsider how we do things, why we do things, and when we do things. Passing large numbers of new authorizations without eliminating the areas that are not working now does not fix anything. All it will do is make it more expensive to continue to fail. It also means we do not hold the bureaucracies accountable, which we are not.

I ask the Presiding Officer the amount of time I have.

I thank the Presiding Officer. I will finish in a moment.

The question the American people ought to be asking of Congress right now, I believe, is this: You took an oath to uphold the Constitution. The Constitution has in it this very significant component that is called the Enumerated Powers Act. It is article II, section 8. It tells us exactly what we are to be about, what we are to do, and what we are not to do. The question you ought to measure us on is: Are we following the U.S. Constitution? Many of the bills Senator Reid just brought forward are well within the bounds of the Enumerated Powers, but many of them are not. Yet we think at a parochial level and a political level about our own reelections and we forget this document that has guided this country so well.

My hope is the American people will start demanding that we follow this rule book, this guide book. If we do, not only will we eliminate that $300 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse, we will eliminate another $300 billion worth of programs that do not have any role coming out of the Federal Government, and we will put Government closer and more directly accountable to the very people who are being governed, and that is back at the local and State levels.

I will say in finishing up, Senator Reid made several references to the Republican caucus. I will assure him that the vast majority of the members of my caucus do not support my position on authorizations. Their only support of me came in light of contrasting it next to an energy bill, which we still have not accomplished.

Congress has still not done anything about the No. 1 national security issue facing us, which is our dependence on foreign sources of energy. That is what we ought to be about this week. We ought to pass a CR. We ought to do what we have to do to fix the financial crisis. And we ought to be back making sure that another year does not go by where we do not have a comprehensive plan that utilizes every bit of America's talents, every bit of America's resources to make us less dependent and more secure on the issue of energy.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that this document be printed in the Record.

With that, I yield the remainder of my time.

Let me say how much I appreciate the hard work done on this bill. It is a hard bill. It is important. My question would be to both the chairman and ranking member: How are we to be afforded an opportunity to amend earmarks if none of them are in the bill, yet they carry the force of law as if being in the bill?

If I might through the Chair ask another question?

And he yielded to me.

I say to Senator Sanders, I will finish this very quickly.

My concern is, I have talked to the McCain folks. They are very unhappy with this provision. The reason they are unhappy is there is no way the Parliamentarian will allow me to amend report language on the floor because it is not part of the bill we are discussing. I would be happy to work in the background with both the chairman and ranking member to move all of this to the bill so it is not a question.

That is what I would ask that you, please, try to accommodate us on because having the debate and amending things--and I will raise that out of the $5.9 billion worth of earmarks in this bill, the vast majority are noncompetitive bid. In other words, there is no competition for value for the American taxpayers' dollar. They are direct mandates that certain money will be spent with certain companies with no estimation, no competitive bidding.

So I will not delay this any longer. I would ask that the chairman and ranking member--I think the Senators have done a great job on the bill. I do not think it is significantly different in terms of earmarks than what it has been in the past. But if, in fact, we could figure out a way to make them where we could have them at least discussed and have an opportunity to amend them, I would appreciate that deference.

Mr. President, I will be happy to yield.

Absolutely.

Mr. President, I appreciate the indulgence of the Senator from Vermont, and I yield back.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized for 10 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, I heard, this morning, the majority leader talk about the objection to the request by Senator Gregg. I do not believe there is anybody in this body who does not want us to fix the highway trust problem, and it will probably be the fact that there will be no amendments offered at the direction of the majority leader, which I think is probably somewhat tragic because we would not be able to have the debate we need to have on this issue.

But it should not be lost on the American public that some $16 billion in the last highway bill was not for roads, bridges or highways. One of the amendments that was going to be discussed, had we had the opportunity to amend it--which we are not because the majority leader is not going to grant that opportunity--was the idea that of the $8.5 billion we are going to put in there, no new projects ought to be started unless they are for roads, bridges or highways. In other words, we should not be building museums. We should not be building parking garages. We should not be doing ancillary work that does not have anything to do with true transportation needs associated with the trust fund. That was the only amendment we were going to offer.

All the States are going to be at a significant disadvantage if we do not do this. But I found it somewhat curious that before we left we had an omnibus bill that had to spend $10 billion. We had to do it. We were contrasted as terrible because we did not agree with it. Now we have $8 billion, and we want to do it, we want to debate it, and we are not going to be allowed to debate or amend it. I would think that is to the detriment of the body, that, again, we are losing the history of this body, we are losing the deliberative nature of the body, and at the whim of the majority leader, because we have an emergency, we have to have a unanimous

consent, we do not even have to have a vote, and that is the only way we can do it. I think it hurts the institution in the long run.

As far as what Senator Reid said about the omnibus package he put forward, let me correct the Record. First of all, the childhood cancer bill was agreed to by unanimous consent. It was not even a part of that package he claimed it was. The irony is, as we heard from the majority leader's statement today his disdain for the largest deficit in history, do you realize the President of the United States cannot spend one penny unless we let him? If there is a deficit in this country, it says a whole lot more about this body and the House than it says about the President. We are the ones who approve the spending.

So far, this year, we are going to spend off-budget about $270 billion. Where is that money going to come from? It is going to come from the next two generations paying it back. So I find it curious we have to have a bill that spends $10 billion and then we are critical of the deficit and now we have to have a bill that is going to spend $8 billion, but we cannot have any amendments and we cannot debate it in a thoughtful way and still get it done this week. We could get it done in less than 2 or 3 hours.

It shows you the lack of consistency. To be fair, Senator Reid has a very difficult job. This is a hard place to manage, there is no question about it. But we are getting on the edge of a lack of fairness. We are getting very close to an edge where the traditions of the Senate are going to be thrown out the window.

As we look at it, as Senator Reid complains about the deficit, I would remind that he sponsored $531.2 billion worth of new spending in the 109th Congress. So far, he has sponsored $56.7 billion in the first 8 months of 2007. So it is another $150 or $200 billion in this Congress. We cannot continue to have more and more new spending without getting rid of some of the spending that is not effective.

So when we have the claims that we are disgusted with the deficit, and then we can have $500-plus billion sponsorship of new spending and routine votes against an earmark moratorium, against the idea of stealing money from Social Security to spend new money, against amendments that say we have a moral obligation to offset the cost of new spending so we do not charge it to our children, against prioritizing the reconstruction of Louisiana bridges instead of earmarks in Alaska, these are the votes of Senator Reid.

So the disdain for the--and I have three pages of them by the way, all similar. So the fact is, our country is in trouble right now. We are going to have a trillion-dollar--a trillion; that is with a ``T''-- deficit next year. We have $382 billion worth of documented waste and fraud every year in this Government. We have not had one amendment to get rid of any of it in this body this year that has passed, save the hippie museum in New York. That is it. We saved $1 million out of $380 billion of waste, fraud, and duplication.

So it rings hollow to come down and complain about the administration when they cannot spend one penny we do not send to them. We are at least as culpable and liable as the administration in terms of this deficit. To say we cannot debate and clean up the priorities of the transportation fund by saying it is going to be spent on some of the 240,000 bridges that are in desperate shape in this country and spend the money on highways and roads and bridges and not other things that benefit Members of this body but do not benefit the majority public and are outside the transportation goals of every State transportation department in this country rings hollow.

There are a lot of great things we can do. We can help people with disease. We can solve problems. He mentioned the Emmett Till bill. He objected twice to a compromise that the Emmett Till board had agreed to--twice--that Senator Dodd had agreed to, that Senator Biden had agreed to. As far as the child pornography, Senator Dodd and Senator Biden had agreed to that too. It was offered as a unanimous consent request twice. Both had agreed to it.

Is this about politics or is this about doing things for the country? I would tell you the evidence shows it is about politics. We need to wake up. Our country is at a crossroads. We had Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac taken over. The first number, of course, is low: $200 billion. It is going to be $600 or $700 billion that we are going to charge to our kids for the mismanagement of those two agencies. That is going to get added next year. We are getting ready to do another emergency supplemental that everybody is piling things on. It is going to be $50 or $60 billion. It is going to be another free-for-all. It is going to fly through here in spite of my votes against it. We are going to do another stimulus package--none of it we have the money for. We are going to borrow every bit of it. We are compounding to make the problems worse. Because we will not work on the $350 to $380 billion worth of waste, and we would not even put an effort out toward that, we are going to continue to see a downward spiral in our economic position in this world.

So I would think most Americans, as we add $8.5 billion back to the highway trust fund, would want us to see that it goes for highways, bridges, and roads, not for earmarks, special pork projects that make us look good at home that are outside the boundaries and the priority lists of the State departments of transportation. That was the amendment I was going to offer. I knew I was going to lose, but we ought to have the debate.

The fact is the majority leader does not want us to have the debate. We could dispense with the bill in less than 3 hours, be done with it, and it could be going to the President, but we have decided we want to make it political. It is not about what is best for the long-term interests of this country, but about what is best for the upcoming election in November. To me that is a disservice to this body and it is a disservice to the American people.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I have listened to the debate today and the majority leader's remarks this morning, and I do appreciate the job my senior Senator has done in trying to secure funds for infrastructure through the trust fund. I intend to support passing this. Begrudgingly I will support it because I think it is the wrong way to do it. It is not wrong to put the additional money in there; it is wrong to not pay for it.

I can't help but note that the Senator from Washington stated that this is an emergency. Well, you haven't seen anything when you start talking about the emergencies we are getting ready to face. What about the emergency when, by law, Social Security benefits get cut, when we can't make Medicare trust fund payments? What emergency are we going to have? How is this going to compare to that? We are not allowed to do anything on this bill except debate.

I wonder what the American people would think, that we are going to spend an additional $8 billion that we don't have--whether it is owed to the trust fund or not, we don't have it--that we are going to collect that money but we are not going to pay for it out of some of the $300 billion-plus waste we now know exists every year in the Federal Government? Imagine if you applied that to your own situation. You have a family. You have an emergency, as the Senator from Washington said, but you know that about 12 percent of everything you spend in your household is wasted. Are you going to go out and make a note at the bank and have your kids be responsible for paying for it or are you as a family going to get rid of some of the 11 percent or 12 percent of pure waste, pure fraud that you have going on in your family budget? None of us in America are going to do that. We wouldn't do that to our kids. We wouldn't do that in our family budget. But that is exactly what we are doing here today. This is a small one. This is a small one we are facing.

We didn't have an amendment on the floor to say we will pay for this $8 billion by reducing the fraud in Medicare from $80 billion to $72 billion. There is $80 billion a year in fraud in Medicare. We weren't offered the opportunity to offer that amendment to get rid of the fraud in Medicare so we could afford to do this. It was just released 2 weeks ago that 31 percent of the payments Medicare makes are improper payments, with 80 percent of them overpayments. That is not included in the $80 billion worth of fraud. There is not any opportunity for us to offer an amendment to offset that incompetence and clean that up so we can pay for this.

There are similar projects in Medicaid. The Social Security disability trust fund--the GAO tells us there is $2.5 billion a year in fraud in the Social Security disability trust fund. We didn't have an opportunity to offer an amendment to get rid of that fraud to help pay for some of this $8 billion shortfall.

The American people are going to be scratching their heads. We are going to borrow more, and we are not going to eliminate any of the other problems, any of the other excess, or any of the other waste or fraud, which came to over $382 billion this past year of American taxpayers' money that was unwisely spent.

We weren't given an opportunity to get rid of the performance bonuses at the Pentagon that are $8 billion that they pay every year to Pentagon contractors who do not meet the performance requirements of their contracts but they pay them anyway. There was no opportunity for us to offer that amendment, to be able to pay for this rather than charge it to our children.

There is $15 billion worth of excess costs associated with no-bid contracts at the Department of Homeland Security. There is no opportunity to offer an amendment to change the discipline in the contracting at Homeland Security, which we could have easily done and mandated to pay for this. There is no opportunity to do that.

There is $4 billion in wasted excess payments for crop insurance every year. We, in fact, passed a farm bill, but we didn't fix that.

That is $4 billion a year of hard-earned taxpayer money that goes out the window, which doesn't benefit anybody. Yet we are not given an opportunity to try to grab that to pay for this, and $10 billion is wasted a year, at a minimum, on IT contracts in the

Federal Government. There is no opportunity to offer to save that money to pay for the highways.

The American people have to be scratching their heads and saying: What are we doing? Why aren't we addressing the real issues? We need to build infrastructure, take care of our highways and bridges and our roads. That is what the trust fund is for. Why would we not pay for it when we have such a large amount of fraud, waste, and duplication in the Federal budget?

I could go on and on. There is mismanagement of U.N. contributions. We know at least $2 billion out of the $6 billion we send to U.N. is pure waste every year. There is no opportunity to offer that amendment against this. There is no opportunity whatsoever to say we are not going to send another penny to the U.N. until they show us how they are spending American taxpayers' money. The only government that is less efficient than ours is the U.N. The only one that obfuscates more of the numbers than ours is the U.N. The only one with less transparency than ours is the U.N. There is no opportunity to do that.

We wanted to offer an amendment because part of the problem with the highway trust fund is that too much of the money doesn't go for bridges, roads, and highways. My senior Senator is committed to making sure we get back on that with the next Transportation bill. We have 242,000 bridges in disrepair in this country--242,000. This body rejected fixing that. Instead, we went on to build bike trails. Which do you think is more of a safety concern, building bike trails or building bridges?

I hope the American people are paying attention to what we are doing and that they become very dissatisfied with what we are doing. We have earned our 11-percent approval rating. How we are handling this bill today exactly fits the expectations of the American people--that Congress doesn't get it, that we are different, that we don't have to meet the expectations that every small business and every family does. We don't have to eliminate waste because it may be hard to do or we may have to take a hard vote. We just fit the mold of their expectations. It is time for us to change that, not just for us but for the generations that follow.

I will state to you today that the estimates for next year's budget deficit are far under what it will actually be. We will be much closer to $1 trillion than we will be to $500 billion. Think about $1 trillion. That is $3,300 for every man, woman, and child we are going to spend next year that we don't have. We are not going to add it to the seniors because they are never going to pay it back. If you are born today, instead of owing $410,000, which you will ultimately be responsible for in terms of unfunded liabilities, we are going to move you to about $500,000. None of our kids can afford that. We are stealing America away from our children. The process--not the goal; the goal is a worthy one--under which we are doing this is something that cannot continue if our Republic is to survive.

Of every republic in the history of the world that has failed, none of them failed because they were conquered from without. Every one of them failed on fiscal issues. We should wake up. We should start addressing the waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication in the Federal budget before we ask the next child or grandchild to take on debt for our benefit.

Like I said, I support that we are putting the $8 billion in there. What I don't support is the process under which we cannot eliminate other waste, fraud, and other duplication to be able to pay for it. We do a disservice to our country and to ourselves, and we do a disservice to the body of the Senate.

With that, I yield the floor.