National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018
Floor Speech
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Madam President, I want to clarify something about what is going to happen this afternoon. Whenever a Democratic Senator says they are worried about the state of our military, that they are horrified about the kind of cuts we are making, and they can't sleep at night because of what we are doing to our troops in the field, don't believe them. They don't mean it. They are not serious. It is all for show because they had a perfect opportunity to stop all of these terrible cuts--and not just for the troops, for their own State, for their constituents, even for their little parochial projects. What did they do? They turned it down. They said no.
Well, actually I take that back. They didn't say no. They couldn't even bring themselves to say no. They didn't have the courage to say no. They did something much worse. They said nothing because we are not even going to vote on the amendment I wanted to offer, which would have repealed the sequester spending cuts for defense and nondefense-- defense and nondefense spending.
Now, the Members of this body know I am no fan of frivolous, pork- barrel spending. A lot of the projects that my Democratic colleagues sponsored could easily fall in that category, and we should rein that sort of thing in at a time when we are $20 trillion in debt, but I understand the only way we were going to get something done about the radical spending cuts to our military was to forge a bipartisan compromise.
After all, it is not like the sequester spending cuts really did that much to control spending. Did spending go down in 2011, 2012, 2013? Yes, it went from $3.6 trillion to $3.5 trillion, to $3.4 trillion, but the sequester wasn't even in effect for those first 2 years. Spending went down because Republicans won control of the House in 2010. At the end of 2013, however, Congress raised the budget caps and pushed off the sequester for those 2 years ahead. So, by 2015, Federal spending was back to $3.6 trillion, and it has been growing ever since. Time and time again, Congress has proven itself utterly incapable of sticking to the caps under the Budget Control Act of 2011.
Instead of actually saving money, all the sequester does is create an endless series of crises for Congress to escape just in the nick of time. Take this year. We all know what is going to happen. We just passed a 3-month continuing resolution earlier this month. We are going to reach a 2-year budget agreement in October or November that doesn't control spending. We are going to have an omnibus in December, written in secret in our leaders' offices, and then we are going to have another omnibus spending bill, written in secret in our leaders' offices, next December, and we will repeat that cycle over again in 2019 and 2020. How do I know that? Because that is exactly what happened in 2013 and 2015. We will never make the cuts the Budget Control Act called for. We will just pass giant budgets that nobody has read in the last minute in an attempt to avoid the crisis of our own making.
My amendment was the last best chance in years to stop this bust-and-boom cycle of budgeting. But what did the Democrats do? They threw it away. They took a perfectly good, bipartisan opportunity to repeal these automatic spending cuts, and they threw it away.
You have to ask yourself what goes through Senators' heads when they make such a cynical political calculus. Do they not understand the implications of what they are doing? Do they not see the appalling lack of readiness that is so apparent to everyone else?
Did they not see what happened to the USS John McCain? Did they not see what happened to the USS Fitzgerald? Did they not see all those caskets carrying the dead bodies of America's young coming home to families in grief? Do they not see them or do they see them and just not care?
What do they think when they hear respected men like Secretary Jim Mattis say: ``No enemy in the field has done more to harm the readiness of our military than sequestration''?
What did they think when Secretary Mattis said, after 4 short years of retirement, when he returned to the Department of Defense, ``I have been shocked by what I've seen about our readiness to fight''?
Is it just background noise? Does it not register with Democratic Senators? In fact, what must they think when they have been saying the exact same thing for years?
The junior Senator from Connecticut said: ``The so-called sequester is another example of governing at its worst.''
The junior Senator from New Jersey said: ``It is blunt, brutal, and blind.''
He gets bonus points for alliteration.
The senior Senator from Virginia: ``Sequestration is stupidity on steroids.''
I could make that claim about a lot of things that have been said in this Chamber.
The senior Senator from Washington: ``We need to replace sequestration as quickly as possible''; although, apparently, not if it requires a vote on the Cotton amendment.
The junior Senator from Minnesota: ``There are a lot of people suffering needlessly because of the sequester.''
That is not a joke, even coming from him. I guess all of these cries of anguish are falling on deaf ears.
The senior Senator from New Hampshire: ``The blind cuts of sequestration are not the right approach,'' but by all means, let's keep them in place rather than vote on the Cotton amendment.
The senior Senator from Connecticut: ``The safety and strength of our Nation also requires that Congress eliminate the rightly maligned sequestration straight jacket for all Federal programs''--maligned, yet not repealed.
My favorite is by the senior Senator from Rhode Island, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee: ``Instead of dodging fiscal responsibility, Republicans need to help end sequestration and get back to a normal budget process.''
Republicans gave you a perfect example with which to do that, sir, and you turned it down.
That is what this amendment would have done, but now we will not have a single dime more for the military. We will not give a dime more to FEMA or to the National Weather Service or to NOAA or to NASA or what have you. We will not give one penny more to all of those domestic priorities that the Democrats claim to care about. It turns out that they must not care that much about them or maybe I am being too harsh. Maybe they do like them a lot. They like using them to gin up political support because, when the time came for them to actually put their money where their mouths were, they walked away.
The Democrats will tell you that they oppose this amendment because it will not repeal the automatic sequester of mandatory spending. Don't give me that. That is nonsense. That is pure pretext. The automatic sequester consists of a small, almost trivial number of cuts, and it would not have affected one penny--not one penny--of Social Security or Medicare or veterans' benefits.
Here is what is most important. Every single Democratic Senator has voted to extend that mandatory sequester into the foreseeable future. So, far from thinking it is a problem, they have voted to extend its life.
Hey, how about I strike a new deal? Here is my offer. I will support your hiding behind procedural niceties, hiding in your cloakroom, and not voting on my amendment, if you will agree to do one thing--to go home, in person, to your military bases that are in your home States and explain to the men and women of our Armed Forces, face-to-face, why you could not bring yourselves not just to repeal these spending cuts but not even to be tough enough to take a vote one way or the other.
The Democratic leader can go to New York and tell the men and women of the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum.
The Democratic whip can go to the Naval Station Great Lakes.
The senior Senator from Rhode Island--the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee--can go to the Naval War College.
The senior Senator from Missouri can go to the 131st Bomb Wing.
The junior Senator from New York can go to the soldiers at Fort Drum as well.
The senior Senator from New Hampshire can go to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.
The junior Senator from Hawaii can go to the dozen different military bases in Hawaii, while the senior Senator from Florida can go to 20 different military installations in his State.
The senior Senator from Connecticut can go to the Groton submarine base.
The senior Senator from Indiana can go to AM General in South Bend, whose manufacturing he always touts for political purposes.
The junior Senator from Virginia can go to Norfolk or the Pentagon or
Fort Myer or to any one of the numerous bases in Virginia.
The junior Senator from Maine can go to Bath Iron Works.
The junior Senator from New Mexico can go to the Kirtland and Cannon Air Force Bases.
The junior Senator from Michigan can go to General Dynamics, outside Detroit.
Also, the senior Senator from Massachusetts could shake hands with all 115,563 of the people in her State whose jobs are directly tied to defending our Nation.
Every one of those Democrats who sits on the Armed Services Committee and has claimed to want to stop these automatic spending cuts can go home and tell the men and women in uniform in his State that he had a chance to vote on it and that he was too cowardly to even put his name on the rolls.
He can look at all of these Americans in the eye and say: Sorry, just politics--hope you understand.
That is all this is. It is politics of the lowest kind. In maneuvering, posturing, and posing, they are caving to the demands of the Democratic leader simply because he wants more leverage for more pork-barrel spending when we had a budget deal that was negotiated in secret in December. He twisted their arms, and they screamed like little kids. They are putting politics ahead of our troops. They are holding our troops hostage to politics solely because their leader wants them to.
If they were not, they would allow a vote on this amendment. They would vote aye. They would vote aye eagerly, and they would vote aye enthusiastically, but they cannot even do that. They cannot even put their names down as a yes or a no on something that they have all said that they have supported for years.
They just hide behind procedure. They hide in their cloakroom. They hide from the voters. They hide in the back corridors and hallways of this building. They hide to save their own skin. They hide because they are ashamed, and they sure as hell should be ashamed.
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