America's Small Business Tax Relief Act Of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, we have a unique opportunity for the American people to have a voice in the direction of the Supreme Court. The American people should be afforded the opportunity to weigh in on this very important matter.

Our side, meaning the Republican side, believes very strongly that the people deserve to be heard, and they should be allowed to decide through their vote for the next President the type of person who should be on the Supreme Court.

As I have stated previously, this is a reasonable approach, it is a fair approach, and it is a historical approach--one echoed by then- Chairman Biden, Senator Schumer, and other Senators.

The other side, meaning the Democratic side, has been talking a great deal about the so-called pressure campaign to try to get Members to change their position. It is no secret that the White House strategy is to put pressure on this chairman of the Judiciary Committee and other Republicans in the hopes that we can be worn down and ultimately agree to hold hearings on the nominee.

This pressure campaign, which is targeted at me and a handful of my colleagues, is based on the supposition that I and they will crack and move forward on the consideration of President Obama's pick.

This strategy has failed to recognize that I am no stranger to political pressure and to strong-arm tactics--not necessarily just from Democratic Presidents but also from Republican Presidents.

When I make a decision based on sound principle, I am not about to flip-flop because the left has organized what they call a pressure campaign.

As many of my colleagues--and especially my constituents--know, I have done battle with administrations of both parties. I have fought over irresponsible budgets, waste, fraud, and policy disagreements. I have made tough decisions. I have stuck with those tough decisions regardless of what pressure was applied.

The so-called pressure being applied to me now is nothing. It is absolutely nothing compared to what I withstood from heavyhanded White House political operations in the past.

Let me say, by the way, that most of that has come from Republican White Houses. To just give a few examples, in 1981, as a new Member of the Senate and a brand-new member of the Senate Budget Committee, I voted against President Reagan's first budget proposal because we were promised a balanced budget and it didn't balance. I remember very specifically the Budget Committee markup in April 1981 on President Reagan's first budget.

It happened to be that I wasn't alone on this. I was one of three Republicans to vote against that resolution because it did not put us on a path to a balanced budget. You can imagine that when a budget has to come out on a party-line vote, you cannot lose three Republicans, and three Republicans who were elected in 1980 on a promise to balance the budget did not go along with it.

What a loss this was for this new President Reagan--that his budget might not get adopted by the Budget Committee. We were under immense pressure to act on the President's budget regardless of the deficits that it would cause. But we stood on principle and didn't succumb to the pressure.

As an example, right after that vote where the President's budget wasn't voted out of the Budget Committee, I was home on a spring recess. I remember calls from the White House. I remember threats from the Chamber of Commerce while I was home for Easter break, even interrupting my town meetings. Four years later, I led the charge to freeze spending and to end the Reagan defense buildup as a way to get the Federal budget under control. In 1984 I teamed up with Senator Biden, a Democrat, and Senator Kassebaum of Kansas, a Republican, to propose a freeze of the defense budget that would have cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the annual deficit.

At the time, it was known as the Kassebaum-Grassley Budget or the KGB defense freeze. We were going to make sure that across-the-board budgets were responsible.

For months, I endured pressure from the Reagan administration and from my Republican colleagues who argued a freeze on defense spending would constitute unilateral disarmament. President Reagan had put together a less aggressive deficit reduction plan. We didn't think it went far enough. My bipartisan plan was attacked for being dangerous and causing draconian cuts to the defense budget. I knew it was realistic and a responsible approach. I didn't back down.

We forced a vote that year in the Budget Committee. We forced a vote on the Senate floor on May 2, 1984, and that particular year we were not successful. However, this effort required the Senate and the Nation to have a debate about a growing defense budget. We started that debate, about the waste and inefficiency in the Pentagon and the growing Federal fiscal deficits. Despite the weeks-long pressure from conservatives in the Reagan administration, I did not back down because I knew the policy was on my side.

In this process I stood up to pressure from President Reagan, Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, Secretary Barry Goldwater, Senator John Tower, Chairman of the Budget Committee, and many others. I remember a meeting at the White House where I reminded the President that he had been talking through the campaign about the Welfare queens impacting the budget. It happens that I reminded him there were Defense queens as well.

I started doing oversight on the Defense Department. It wasn't long before the evidence of waste and fraud began appearing. We uncovered contractors that billed the Defense Department $435 for a claw hammer, $750 for toilet seats, $695 for ashtrays. We even found a coffee pot that cost $7,600.

I had no problem finding Democrats to join my oversight effort back then, but it is interesting how difficult it is to find bipartisan help when doing oversight in the current Democrat administration. Nevertheless, 12 months later, on May 2, 1985, after a year of work to make the case that the Defense Department needed structural reforms and slower spending growth, I was successful. My amendment to freeze the defense budget and allow for increases based on inflation was agreed to when a motion to table failed by a vote of 48 to 51.

A majority of the Republicans opposed me, and a majority of the Democrats were with me. That didn't matter because I knew we were doing the right thing. I went against my own party, my own President, to hold the Pentagon accountable, and I never backed off.

I had a similar experience with President George W. Bush in 1991. In January 1991, the Senate debated a resolution to authorize the use of U.S. Armed Forces to remove Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait. I opposed the resolution because I felt the economic and diplomatic sanctions that I voted for should have been given more time to work. I was not ready to give up on sanctions in favor of war.

In the end, I was one of just two Republicans, along with Senator Hatfield of Oregon, to oppose the resolution. I was under pressure from President Bush, Vice President Quayle, and White House Chief of Staff John Sununu. I was even pressured by Iowa Governor Terry Branstad. I heard from a lot of Iowans, particularly Republicans, who were disappointed and even angry with my position. Some were even considering a public rebuke because of my vote. As one of just two Republicans, it was difficult to differ with a Republican President on such a major issue. But as I stated at the time, my decision was above any partisanship. It was a decision of conscience rather than a matter of Republican versus Democrat.

After a tremendous amount of soul-searching, I did what I thought was right, regardless of the political pressure. The same is true today with regard to the Supreme Court vacancy.

Under President George W. Bush, I faced another dilemma. The President and the Republican congressional leadership determined that they wanted to provide $1.6 trillion in tax relief in 2001.

I was chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance. The problem is, we had a Senate that was divided 50-50 at the time. The parties' numbers also equal, on the Senate Finance Committee. I had two members on my side who were reluctant to support a huge tax cut because they had concerns about the deficit and the debt.

As we saw a few years later, their concerns were not totally unwarranted. But, at the time, the administration leadership would have nothing to do with anything except what the President wanted--$1.6 trillion in tax relief. Obviously, the White House wasn't thinking about how many Republicans might vote against it, and when you have a 50-50 Senate, you can't lose a lot of Republicans.

After very difficult negotiations, I finally rounded up enough votes to support $1.3 trillion in tax relief. A hailstorm of criticism followed. There were Republican House Members who held press conferences denouncing the fact that the Committee wasn't able get enough votes for the whole $1.6 trillion. Those House Members were more professional in their criticism of my position, than what we currently witness almost every day from the current minority leader about my role as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. But, it was still a very contentious and difficult period that included both the budget and the reconciliation process.

Minority Leader Reid has already recently brought up the pressure I came under in regard to ObamaCare back in 2009. Of course, his version is his usual attempt to rewrite the actual history. At that time, I was the ranking member of the Finance Committee. I was involved in very in- depth negotiations to try to come up with a health care solution. We started in November of 2008. We had negotiations between three Republicans and three Democrats on the Finance Committee. We met for hours and hours at a time.

We met between November 2008 and mid-September 2009, and then the other side decided they ought to go political and not worry about Republicans. The minority leader, in his usual inaccurate statement of facts has tried to say that Republicans walked out of those negotiations on ObamaCare. The fact is, we were given a deadline and told that if we didn't agree with the latest draft of the bill, then Democrats would have to move on.

I would suggest that anybody in the Senate who wants some reference on this should talk to Senator Snowe or Senator Enzi. I was the other Republican. Talk to Senator Baucus, talk to Senator Conrad and the then-Senator from New Mexico. The President called six of us to the White House in early August of 2009. The first question I got was this: Would you, Senator Grassley, be willing to go along with two or three Republicans to have a bipartisan bill with ObamaCare at that point? And I said: Mr. President, the answer is no. What do you think we have been working on for 9 months? We have been working, trying to get a broad bipartisan agreement. It's something like 70 to 75 votes you need to get if you really want to have a changed social policy and have it stick.

We didn't abandon this until 2009. But my idea is that probably it was that meeting at the White House in early August 2009 where this President decided: we don't want to mess around with those Republicans anymore. We have 60 votes; we are going to move ahead. Well, that happened then in that September.

The fact is, we were given that deadline, and we were shoved out of the room. So when we didn't bow to this pressure and agree to Democratic demands, it ended up being a partisan document. That is why it still doesn't have the majority support of the American people.

I want the minority leader to know that is what happened, not what he described a couple of weeks ago. Eventually, as we all know, the former majority leader--now minority leader--had his staff rewrite the bill that came out of the HELP Committee and in secret in the back rooms of his leadership office. And we ended up with the disaster called ObamaCare that we have today.

The Senate minority leader also recently proclaimed that rather than follow Leader McConnell--and these are Senator Reid's words-- ``Republicans are sprinting in the opposite direction.'' The minority leader also wishfully claimed that the Republican facade was cracking on the issue. Senator Schumer fancifully stated that ``because of the pressure, Republicans are beginning to change.''

You can almost hear the ruby slippers on the other side clicking while they wish this narrative they describe were true. The fact is, the pressure they have applied thus far has had no impact on this Senator's principled position or the principled position of almost everybody on this side of the aisle. Our side knows and believes that what we are doing is right, and when that is the case, it is not hard to withstand the outrage and the pressure they and the White House have manufactured.

The pressure we are now getting on this issue pales in comparison to the pressure I have endured and withstood from both Democrats and Republicans in the past.

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