Trade Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, I come to bring a very important subject to the attention of my colleagues.

``Sequestration'' is just a fancy word for cuts, mindless cuts.

That is why I have always opposed sequestration. This thoughtless, across-the-board approach to the Federal budget has harmed States across the country, but its effect on Massachusetts has been disproportionate.

Sequestration significantly reduced Federal research and development funding for science and medicine. That is Massachusetts. Investments in those fields are critical to our economy with its world-class universities, medical centers, industry-leading bio- and high-tech companies, and clean-tech industries exploding with new technologies. This is the future of our country. This is the future of the 21st century. This is what we must be investing in: research and technology, research and science.

I am pleased that for the next 2 years this budget agreement will give us desperately needed relief from sequestration and will extend the debt limit. This legislation will also protect vulnerable Americans who rely on Medicare and Social Security. It will ensure that for the next 7 years, millions who depend on the Social Security disability program do not face a benefit cut. The legislation will also help millions of seniors by avoiding a Gronk-like spike in Medicare premiums. But this bill comes with a price: more unwanted calls and texts to Americans.

Back in 1991, consumers were constantly harassed by unwanted telemarketing phone calls that interrupted their family dinners. In 1991, my bill, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, stopped these intrusive and unwanted calls from telemarketers.

Yes, this budget being debated today actually makes it easier to harass consumers on their mobile phones. That is wrong, just plain wrong. Current law contains important safeguards against abusive practices. Before a caller can make autodialed or prerecorded calls or send texts, that caller must have the consent of whoever is being called.

Section 301 of this legislation before this body today removes that precall consent requirement if someone is collecting debt owed to the Federal Government. The provision opens the door to potentially unwanted robocalls and texts to the cell phones of anyone with a student loan or a mortgage, calls to the cell phones of delinquent taxpayers, calls to farmers, to veterans, or to anyone with debt backed by the Federal Government.

That is why, once the Senate takes action on this budget bill, I plan to file a bill that strikes that provision. I also intend to ask the majority leader for a vote on my bill at the earliest possible time. We must protect American students and consumers.

That rollback of protections against abusive telemarketers is not the only problem with this legislation. The bill also would sell off part of our Nation's oil stockpile simply to raise revenue. The Presiding Officer is an expert in this area. Our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is there to protect American consumers and our security in the event of an emergency, but now it is increasingly viewed as a piggy bank to fund other priorities.

If we are going to sell oil from our strategic reserve, we should at least do so strategically to get the best deal for our taxpayers, but the budget deal that we are considering would require the sale of a specific amount of oil each year from 2018 to 2025 regardless of its price.

When the majority attempted to use similar Strategic Petroleum Reserve sales to fund the highway bill, Senator Cassidy of Louisiana and I authored a bipartisan amendment to fix the problem. Our commonsense amendment gave the Secretary of Energy flexibility to sell more oil when prices are high and thereby maximize the return for taxpayers.

Unfortunately, that bipartisan fix is not part of this legislation, but I will continue to work with Senator Cassidy on this important issue. You know that we are right when a conservative Republican from Louisiana and a liberal Democrat from Massachusetts agree on an issue. It is foolish to buy high and sell low. That is essentially what this legislation is now mandating.

Rather than saying to the government that you have to find just the right time when the price of oil is high to sell it over the next 7 years, it says sell it on this schedule regardless of whether or not you are going to get a good return on your investment. That is not the way this government should be operated. We should be using some common sense, especially since the Senator from Louisiana and I had already drafted the legislation and had already attached it to the Transportation bill when that was going to be the place where they use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve money.

This is a very bad provision that is in a bill which is going to pass--and it should pass--but this is a flaw. It is going to lose a lot of money if it continues on with the language that is in this bill.

I am going to continue to work with the Presiding Officer, the Senator from Louisiana, so that we can correct it. It will save a lot of money if we do it the correct way.

We need to ensure that we have a rational approach to budgeting--unlike sequestration--which will finally allow us to get back to the business of legislating instead of lurching from crisis to crisis. That is not possible unless we begin a new era in this institution. Hopefully, that is what today and perhaps tomorrow will represent. Maybe we can work together again across the aisle the way I think all Americans want us to. I pledge to work on these two pieces of legislation going forward to correct real flaws that are built into this legislation.

Thank you for allowing me to have the floor at this time. I hope the Presiding Officer and I can partner to correct at least one of the problems in this bill.

I yield back the remainder of my time.

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