America's Small Business Tax Relief Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I am always impressed with the distinguished Democratic whip and his eloquence, but he is telling the American people that we have to choose between being a nation of immigrants or a nation of laws. The fact is, we don't have to make that choice; we can be both. But we can't do it when we have a President who simply believes he can do an end run around the U.S. Constitution.

In fact, according to Pew, about 3.5 million people could claim the benefits of the President's unlawful Executive action, receiving work permits, driver's licenses, and Social Security numbers. While we are a compassionate country, we are a nation of immigrants, that is not the kind of decision the Constitution gives to a single political actor, even if he is the President of the United States.

So there is a right way and a wrong way. And I realize the distinguished Democratic whip believes that just because they can't get what they want when they want it, the President can then resort to this end run, but thankfully that is not the view of the courts. The U.S. Federal district court in Brownsville, TX, issued an injunction against the President's Executive action. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that injunction, and now the Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments in the case this afternoon.

This is really more than just about immigration. This is whether, under the doctrine of separation of powers, the Constitution we have lived under for lo these many years gives the President unilateral authority without the approval of Congress, the elected representatives of the people, and in flagrant disregard for the laws that are already on the books.

The heart of the case the Court heard today is about stopping a President who said: I have a pen and I have a phone. And even though the American people have given Republicans a majority in both Houses and obviously forced the President to deal with a Republican conference to come up with consensus legislation, the President said: Forget that. I am not about trying to achieve bipartisan consensus on anything. If I don't get what I want, I am going to jam it through the system and hope the courts don't stop me. So it is not just about immigration, it is about the Constitution itself.

There are perhaps 22 different times, by my count, where the President of the United States acknowledged he didn't even have this authority. I remember in a speech he gave to La Raza, an interview he gave on Univision, the President denied he had the authority, which now, miraculously, our Democratic friends think is clear-cut under the law. How can that be? It cannot be.

I remember specifically being at a meeting where the President invited the leadership of both the House and the Senate to the White House after the 2014 election. Many may recall that leading up to that point, there had been a lot of rumors about the President issuing an Executive action, but he had not done so. I remember specifically sitting there in the White House with some of my colleagues from the House and the Senate, where then-Speaker Boehner said to the President: Please, Mr. President, don't do this. Don't poison the well. Don't make it impossible, by such a polarizing action, for us to build consensus on the building blocks of immigration reform where we could actually agree.

I remember Majority Leader McCarthy making the same comment. I joined in and reiterated the same point. The President, defiant, told us he was going to go ahead and do it.

There are a lot of conversations people are having today across the United States. I had some of those earlier today during some visits with people who were just wondering how to explain the political environment in America today. What I tell them is that this seems unprecedented in my experience. People are so angry. People are so scared. People are frightened and worried about the next generation. And for the first time in my memory, parents are doubting whether their children will enjoy the same sorts of freedom and prosperity that we enjoy today. That is a tragedy.

My parents were part of the ``greatest generation.'' My dad was a B- 17 pilot in the Army Air Corps, even before the Air Force came into being. On his 26th bombing mission over Nazi Germany, while he was flying in the 8th Air Force out of Molesworth, England, he was shot down and captured as a prisoner of war for 4 months. Fortunately, that was toward the tail end of the war. Even though he was injured in his parachute jump--not seriously, as it turned out, although he had some disability associated with that later in life--he managed to survive that and even survived an appendectomy by a fellow prisoner of war when he had appendicitis in a POW camp. It is amazing.

I always thought my dad had nine lives. Even though he passed away at the very young age of 67, he survived countless occasions when surely he could have lost his life, including those occasions of jumping out of a burning B-17 plane over Germany and an appendectomy in a POW camp at the hands of a fellow prisoner of war.

The reason my parents and all of our parents sacrificed so much and risked so much and worked so hard is that they believed in the promise of America--the promise that exists only when the law is respected, when people in high office are bound by and obligated to and held accountable to the same laws that govern the most humble among us. That is what America is all about--a country where people, if they work hard and play by the rules, can achieve their dreams. I think that is the reason America seems so polarized today. People have sort of jumped outside the usual paradigm of political calculation where you are a liberal or you are a conservative or you are somewhere in the middle. People have sort of jumped that track, and we are seeing something entirely different on the left and on the right. I think the reason is, in part, because of a President who believes he is not bound by the Constitution and laws of the United States.

People are frightened because they have seen over the last 7 years-- even though the President was stopped legislatively after the Affordable Care Act was passed and after Dodd-Frank was passed and then stopped by the electorate giving the Republicans a majority in the House and in 2014 a majority in Senate--that this President will not be stopped by the voters. That is the determination he made, and this Executive order is exhibit 1 because he said: I don't care what the voters think. I don't care what the American people think. I don't care what the Constitution says. I don't care that what Congress says should be the law of the land. I am going to do it the way I want to do it. Frankly, that is scary stuff when you are talking about the Commander in Chief, the leader of the free world, and the sort of power that goes along with that.

Rather than heed the warning--or I would really call it the plea of leaders in the House and the Senate after the 2014 election--the President decided to go around Congress and try to essentially change the law, giving work permits to people who were illegally present in the country, giving them driver's licenses, even giving Social Security numbers to an estimated 3.5 million people. How can the President do this when Congress is deadlocked? Well, he did it. And that is a question the Supreme Court is going to have to decide.

At the time, the President called it a middle-ground approach. He is a master of rhetoric. The problem is the facts belie his words. The fact of the matter is this was a constitutional scorched-earth tactic. And more than anything else, it eroded public confidence in Congress's ability, working with the White House, to get anything constructive done in the area of immigration.

The Acting President pro tempore is, of course, from the great State of Oklahoma, and he went to school in Texas. He understands what I understand: We have a large Hispanic population in Texas--about 38 percent. But we are a very diverse State. Many people are surprised when I tell them the third most commonly spoken language in Texas today is Vietnamese--Vietnamese. Can you believe that? We also have a large Indian American population.

We are a very diverse State, and the main reason for that is we still represent that land of opportunity that America used to be, where people can come, work hard--those of modest means, with little on their backs and maybe nothing in their pockets--and achieve something and live the American dream. So I resent, I really do resent, the distinguished Senator from Illinois trying to tell us the President was only trying to do something that was good for Texas. He doesn't have a clue. In fact, if we were to follow the policy choices of the leadership in Texas, the country would be a heck of a lot better off when it comes to taking advantage of our energy resources, when it comes to taxes, reasonable regulation, and a willingness to try to accommodate those who invest capital and create jobs. To me, that is the single biggest difference between where I live in Texas and what I see across our country and what is coming out of Washington, DC. There seems to be an attitude here in Washington of how many more obstacles, how many larger impediments can we place in the way of those who invest the capital and those who are creating the jobs and still expect the American dream to be alive.

Believe me, we have tested it. The Obama administration has tested it, and what it has produced is disaster. It has produced a health care system that, rather than making health care more affordable, has made it more expensive, has caused people who liked their coverage to give up their coverage only to buy something that had a deductible that has, in essence, made them self-insured. It has created stagnant wages. It has created stagnant economic growth.

There are not a lot of problems we have in this country that couldn't be mitigated, made better, if we just saw our economy growing again, instead of the sort of anemic and flatlined growth we have seen since 2008.

My predecessor in the Senate, Mr. Phil Gramm, has a Ph.D. in economics from Texas A&M University. He has made the point that, historically, what you see after a recession like the one we saw following the fiscal crisis in 2008 is a V-shape recovery. In other words, you hit the bottom and you bounce up and you grow quickly because basically you have worked the problems out of the system. But what we have seen since 2008 is a U-shaped recovery, if you could even call it that. It is pretty close to flat, where the economy is growing at less than 2 percent, which is not fast enough to keep people fully employed. And we still have--although the unemployment rate has dropped down, we still have the smallest percentage of people participating in the workforce that we have had in the last 30 years. Many people have simply given up, retired early, or made other arrangements. This is a serious matter.

The Supreme Court heard arguments today. We know there are currently eight members of the Supreme Court. I heard the distinguished Democratic whip complain about the fact that we have decided to allow the voters to choose in November the President who will make the choice to fill the Scalia vacancy. Well, the fact of the matter is, it is simply too important to allow President Obama, given his penchant for lawlessness and usurpation of constitutional authority--to give him the chance to stack the Supreme Court in favor of a Court that would likely rubberstamp his actions and those of future Presidents for the next 25 years.

The hypocrisy is rich, listening to our Democratic colleagues. These are the folks who invented the judicial filibuster. They invented the judicial filibuster. They did that when President George W. Bush was President. As controversial as the nomination of Clarence Thomas was, I believe he was confirmed with 52 votes--not 60 votes but 52 because nobody dreamed back then that Senate rules would allow the minority party to insist on 60 votes to confirm a President's appointee.

We know that after the election where the Democratic majority lost that majority, in a lameduck session they jammed a number of appointees onto the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in an effort to pack that court to match the ideological picture they wanted. Again, this is the second most important court in the Nation, which they believed would be more inclined to rubberstamp the overreaching by the Obama administration.

We are all familiar with the Biden speech in 1992 when, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he suggested it would be perhaps inappropriate to confirm a Presidential nominee in the waning days of that President's term.

We saw the Harry Reid speech in 2005, where he said it is the President's prerogative to appoint, but the Senate is not obligated to grant consent to that nomination. Actually, I agree with Senator Reid back then, but not today, when he has taken the exact opposite approach.

Then there is Senator Schumer, the heir apparent to the Democratic leadership in the Senate, who said, in 2007, 18 months before George W. Bush left office: I think there ought to be a presumption against confirmation.

To listen to my Democratic colleagues complain about the decision we have made to let the voters vote for the President who is going to fill that vacancy and to watch them--well, it looks like crocodile tears to me, and it smells like hypocrisy.

As we have said, the Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments today in a case brought by the State of Texas and other States that would otherwise be compelled to grant work permits, issue driver's licenses and Social Security numbers to people illegally present in the United States who did not comply with our laws. I am confident the Court will find that the States have suffered real harm from the standpoint of the constitutional notion of standing; in other words, you have to have standing before you can sue. Basically, it means you have to show real or potential harm if the Court doesn't act. I am confident the Court will find standing.

But the Court will do one of two things. Either the Court will affirm by being split 4 to 4 or all eight Justices could write in favor of the Fifth Circuit decision to let the injunction stand or, if the Court deems that this issue needs to be held over until the Court has all nine members, after the first of the year, that is a decision the Court can make.

This is a very important issue, and I am glad the Court is taking it up. We need to know--we need to know whether we remain a nation of laws as well as a nation of immigrants. The whole idea our Democratic colleagues have foisted on us that somehow we have to choose between those two is a false choice. It is a false choice. We are both. We aren't one or the other. America has always been made better by people who have risked coming to the United States because they weren't satisfied with what they had or where they lived, but the day we begin rewarding people who do this in disregard of the laws is the day we begin to no longer be a nation of laws, and that is a legacy and a treasure we should not squander.

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Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Blunt), the Senator from Idaho (Mr. Crapo), the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Flake), and the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey).

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