National Sea Grant College Program Amendments Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz) and the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio).
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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, as the world now knows, this morning President Obama nominated his choice to fill the vacant seat created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. In doing so, the President exercised his unquestioned authority under the Constitution to nominate somebody to this vacancy, but that same Constitution reserves to the U.S. Senate--and the U.S. Senate alone--the right to either grant or withhold consent to that nominee. It is the same Constitution. They can't argue that the President somehow has an unquestioned right to see his nominee rubberstamped by the Senate and still show fidelity and honor to the same Constitution that gives him that authority to make that nomination.
At this time, I reaffirm my commitment to share with other members of our conference that the President--this President--will not fill this vacancy. The Senate will not confirm this nominee to this vacancy. In so doing, we will follow the same rule book that Democrats have advocated for in the past. It can't be that one set of rules apply to a Democratic President and a second set of rules apply when there is a Republican President. This isn't just about speculating what Democrats might do were the shoe on the other foot and we had a Republican President because they have told us what they would do--they have done this since 1992--and in many ways they have kept their promise.
There is a lot at stake. Justice Scalia served for 30 years on the U.S. Supreme Court. The next Justice could well change the ideological makeup and the balance of the Supreme Court for a generation to come and fundamentally reshape America as we know it.
At this critical juncture in our Nation's history, and particularly with regard to the judiciary and the highest Court in the land, the American people deserve a chance to have a say in the selection of the next lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, and the only way to empower the American people and ensure they have that voice is for the next President to fill the nomination created by this vacancy.
I have heard some people say that we had that election in 2012, when President Obama was elected, but I would say that you are half right. We also had another election in 2014, where the American people gave Republicans a majority in the U.S. Senate because they saw what happened when this President didn't have any checks and balances. We saw this during the beginning of his term of office when ObamaCare was passed by a purely partisan vote. We saw it when Dodd-Frank was passed--again, by an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote. So, in 2014, the American people said to President Obama: We want an effective check on Presidential power--and that is what the American people got.
We can't just look at the one side of the equation--the President's authority under the Constitution--and the fact that the President was reelected in 2012. We have to look at what happened in 2014 and the constitutional prerogative of the U.S. Senate either to grant or to withhold the confirmation. Our National Debt
Madam President, later today the Judiciary Committee will be holding a hearing addressing America's impending fiscal crisis, including some potential solutions to help reverse the unsustainable course we are on. I know we don't hear very much about it here in Washington. This seems to be ``people walking by the graveyard,'' so to speak, regarding the fact that our national debt hit $19 trillion for the first time ever. This means our debt climbed more than $1 trillion in a little over a year. In fact, this is a shocking statistic that we will not read about in most of the mainstream media. The national debt has roughly doubled-- roughly doubled--since President Obama took office a little over 7 years ago.
The Congressional Budget Office projects that for the fiscal year 2016, spending will reach $3.9 trillion, an increase of $232 billion from the previous year. I know that when we are talking about trillions and billions of dollars, it boggles the imagination. Most of us can't even conceive of numbers that large, but the fact is, when you borrow money, you have to pay it back at some point. Frankly, what I worry most about is that my generation is not going to be the one to repay the money we borrow. It is going to be the next generation. I know a lot of parents and grandparents worry about whether the American dream will still be alive and available to the next generation and beyond. This is a huge moral lapse on the part of the current generation, to not pay our own debts and to not come up with a system or a framework by which to begin that process.
Rather than addressing this problem head on, government spending is set to remain high over the coming decade, even with the discretionary spending caps and sequester put in place by the Budget Control Act. Inside the beltway, people talk a lot about sequester and the Budget Control Act, but that is only 30 percent of Federal spending. Seventy percent of Federal spending is on autopilot, growing in some cases by a rate of 70 percent or more a year. Not addressing this is irresponsible, it is dangerous, and it also limits the choices available were our country to become embroiled in another fiscal crisis like we saw in 2008.
If we ask our national security experts--former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff ADM Mike Mullen said the No. 1 security threat to the United States was the debt. That shocked me a little bit when I heard him say that, but what he meant--and I know it to be true--is that more and more of the tax dollars the Federal Government receives are going to be paid to the bondholders who own that debt--the Chinese and other people around the world. We have to pay the interest on the debt if we are going to borrow the money, but more and more the spending decisions will be taken out of the hands of the elected representatives of the American people and simply be left up to the accountants who say: OK. You have accrued this much debt. Here is the interest that needs to be paid on that debt to the bondholders, and there is not going to be enough money left over to protect the national security of the United States of America.
We have already seen our military on a dangerous trajectory potentially leading to the smallest Army since World War II. We tried to deal with some of that just last fall to begin to reverse some of this because frankly this was no longer a matter of just cutting superficial cuts. These were into the muscle and the bone of what makes up our national security structure, and we know what happened too. Our friends on the other side said: If you want to spend more money to protect this country with national security spending, then we are going to demand dollar-for-dollar more spending on nondefense, discretionary spending. That is why we ended up with the deal we ended up with.
I have found it very frustrating in my time in the Senate how many of our colleagues will talk about this issue, but I have to be honest, the ones who frustrate me the most are the ones who will not talk about it at all, to even acknowledge the fact. We need to have a conversation, and more than that we need to have a commitment and we need to have a goal when it comes to dealing with this national debt and runaway spending.
Our Democratic friends apparently share the same philosophy as the current President to create a tax-and-spend agenda without considering the long-term ramifications to job creation, the economy, not to mention our children and grandchildren. I am glad to say this side of the aisle has tried to do what I described earlier, which is to take a responsible position on embracing a policy which would help us to pay down the debt, deal with this in a fiscally responsible way, and allow us to get our books back in good order.
We are going to take up this matter before the Senate Judiciary Committee today. We will be discussing reining in spending and making progress on the debt, including an amendment to the United States Constitution that would require a balanced budget.
I can hear it now--because I have heard it before--some of our colleagues across the aisle saying: Heaven forbid. We can't amend the Constitution. Well, we have done it 27 times. Now, we don't do it willy-nilly. We don't do it for small things, but for something like this, it may well be required. Frankly, this is one of the most important lessons of economics that all of us who have children have tried to teach our children, which is you don't spend money that you don't have--well, I guess, unless you are the Federal Government and you can print it or you can borrow it, but at some point the birds come home to roost.
Of course, our commitment to commonsense spending goes far beyond today's hearing on the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Many will recall that folks on this side of the aisle highlighted gimmicks in the discretionary budget process that only hide the real cost and don't actually reduce spending. There are a lot of shell games that go on here in Washington, DC. I am glad our budget amendment last year focused on bringing stunts like those to an end and placed a limit on their use in the appropriations process.
Most recently, we used reconciliation through the budget process to keep our promise to vote to repeal ObamaCare--a law that has been burdening American families and businesses with higher taxes and mandates, while failing to contain premiums and financial losses on the exchanges. But instead of offering solutions to our growing debt, many of our Democratic colleagues are content to sit back and criticize those of us who are trying to come up with a solution to address this problem: how to safeguard our Nation's fiscal health. They argue that a balanced budget amendment isn't feasible or that certain government programs are so essential that we have to up their funding at the expense of the taxpayer, or they act as if the debt isn't a problem, or if it is a problem, that all they will do is raise taxes enough to try to balance the budget. You can't do that. You cannot raise taxes high enough on the American people to pay off $19 trillion in debt. Those aren't solutions; those are talking points. They don't help the American people make ends meet, and they don't help the U.S. Government live within its means.
So I would like to ask, what are the Democratic solutions to our national debt? We are going to ask that question this afternoon. We are going to have some expert witnesses offer a number of suggestions. Then we are going to ask our friends across the aisle, what is your solution? I hope we hear more than just crickets or criticism that what we are proposing simply will not work.
I know my colleagues and I would welcome constructive input and serious, good-faith proposals to stem the burgeoning national debt, but until then, our friends across the aisle need to do more than sit on their hands or just whistle past the graveyard of this impending national disaster.
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