TAXPAYER FIRST ACT OF 2019--Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, it is telling that the bill we are considering this week called the Great American Outdoors Act was written behind closed doors and has now been hermetically sealed, walled off from amendments, by the people's elected representatives.

Forget the theatrics in Seattle; this bill is the real Capitol Hill autonomous zone. In its current form, this bill enables the Federal Government, if it is enacted, to purchase new lands in perpetuity, without accountability and without oversight or any measures to make sure that it can actually care for the land that it owns, perpetuating and worsening our already highly problematic Federal public lands policy.

This policy will have one overarching impact: to make life easier for politicians and bureaucrats and harder for the American people whom they, ostensibly, serve.

This is not the way the Senate is supposed to run. The point of this body, its whole reason for existence, is to take imperfect bills, bring them to the floor of the Senate, and then come together so that we can hone and fine-tune them, so that we can debate them and discuss them, so that we can identify their weak points and make them stronger--or at least less weak.

The Senate is supposed to have an open debate and amendment process precisely so that we can raise concerns and we can find solutions and arrive at genuine, rather than forced, compromise and consensus. This week, I have been encouraged to discover just how many of my colleagues want to do just that. Many of my colleagues from different States and from both parties are filing amendments in response to this bill. Some of those amendments would significantly change it; others would present simply small tweaks to tighten up the language or to provide for better congressional oversight so that the American people are guaranteed that what it says in the law is going to reflect what happens on the ground. These amendments have already been written. They are waiting for consideration.

Anyone watching C-SPAN 2 today will notice there is nothing else happening on the Senate floor--I mean, literally nothing else happening on the Senate floor. In fact, I would note for the record that there are exactly three Members of the Senate in the Chamber right now--two on the floor and one at the Presiding Officer's desk. There is literally nothing else happening on the Senate floor. There is literally no other business with pressing deadlines pending before this body right now. The House of Representatives is adjourned and is apparently set to remain adjourned until June 30, so it is not as though we have any realistic deadline with the other side of the Capitol.

The Senate, right now, would simply rather do nothing than vote on amendments that those of us from the West, Senators from the gulf coast and from various States around the country, would like to propose and have, in fact, proposed.

I myself have proposed several. One of my amendments would require State legislative approval for any land acquisition proposed in that State so that land acquisition would be something Washington does with the States rather than to the States.

Many people don't realize there is a big disparity among and between the States with regard to how much Federal land is owned. In every State east of Colorado, the Federal Government owns less than 15 percent. In every State Colorado and west, the Federal Government owns more than 15 percent. The average is more like 50 percent in the Western United States, and in many of those States, including my own, it is more like two-thirds of the land.

In these States and particularly the rural communities and those rural communities in particular where there is the highest concentration of Federal land, there is also poverty--poverty that is not just correlated with or coincidental to the Federal land ownership, but it is causally connected to its widespread existence.

Another of my amendments would require the Federal Government to dispose of current Federal lands before acquiring new ones, forcing land agencies to exercise fiscal responsibility and prioritize which lands they want to keep under their control.

So getting back to referring a few minutes ago to those areas, particularly those rural areas in my State, places like San Juan County, UT--San Juan County, UT, happens to be the poorest county in the State. It is also a place where the Federal Government owns 95-plus percent of the land. This is not a coincidence.

So there ought to be something in place that requires an offset so that when the Federal Government buys new land under the Land and Water Conservation Fund or otherwise, it has to offset it by disposing of land elsewhere.

There also ought to be some mechanism in place so as to give the State's sovereign lawmaking body, the State legislature, the ability to accept or reject the proposed expansion of the Federal land footprint in that State.

It is really easy for my colleagues from certain parts of the country--particularly those living east of the Rocky Mountains--to suggest that, you know, Federal land ownership is a great thing. First of all, a lot of people who say that do live east of the Rocky Mountains, and a lot of people who say that also incorrectly imagine that Federal public lands are more or less just national parks or declared wilderness areas. They are not.

In my State, most of the Federal land is not a national park, is not a national recreation area, is not a declared wilderness area; it is just garden-variety BLM or Forest Service land that is chronically environmentally mismanaged, and that leads to chronic environmental and economic problems.

I also have a number of other amendments that would reform the NEPA process--the process under the National Environmental Policy Act--to help address the maintenance backlog on neglected land that Washington, DC, already owns and controls from its perch generally thousands of miles from the land in question.

Right now, other States have received protection and are protected from unilateral land grabs by the Federal Government for designation of national monuments. This is important, you see, because when they designate Federal land as a national monument, that changes the way that land can be accessed, the way it can be used. It goes from one Federal land classification to another. It is one of the strictest classifications in the sense that it is very, very difficult to use that land or for local affected populations to have influence over that land once it becomes a monument.

This is significant for Utah because 28 percent of the national monument acreage designated within the 50 States over the last 25 years has been in Utah. My State is due for the same types of protections that are already in place in Wyoming and in Alaska. Those States in years past have received far too many monument designations against their will. Eventually, they received statutory protection.

Utah has borne far more than its share of the burden in the designation of national monuments--monuments designated that way, by the way, by Presidents who were acting in open willful defiance of the will of the locally affected populations.

I believe that this is one of the most important changes we need to see in Federal lands policy. I will continue to fight for it until we achieve justice for Utah. In fact, this change could be achieved through a single 1-page bill, one mostly consisting of two words. Inserting the words ``Or Utah'' enables Utah to receive the same protection from hostile designation of national monuments by a President not interested in the will of the local population.

As important as all of these amendments are to me and my State, I am not even asking for the right to propose all of them this week. I am willing to set aside some of my priorities in order to help my colleagues pursue theirs and, most of all, to help the Senate as an institution to get back to the essential work that the Senate and the Senate alone can do. The Senate was created to be the place--the one place in our constitutional framework--where our diverse, divided Nation could come together, where we could air our disagreements and find common ground.

Every time we have a national controversy, a lot of people throw around the word ``conversation.'' We need to have a conversation about race, about police brutality, about freedom of speech, about the environment, about the national debt. The list goes on and on. These are all things about which we need to have conversations. This isn't just a media trope. Senators say it too. I agree. We need to have conversations about each of these and so many other important national issues.

Guess what. This, right here, is literally the room where America is supposed to have these conversations. This place right here, within these four walls, is where these conversations are supposed to happen. It is not supposed to be done only on Twitter. It is not supposed to be done only on cable news shows. It is supposed to happen right here on this floor.

Yet here we are on a Thursday afternoon at 4:23, 4:24 p.m. Look around. Three Members are in the Chamber--two on the floor, one in the Chair. That is it.

This is where the conversation is supposed to happen. It is not occurring--not this conversation, nor any other, not on the Senate floor, not in the middle of the week. With a whole lot of things going on in the world, we are not having it.

We are not even having it on this piece of legislation, which, significant as it is, is dwarfed in comparison to the magnitude of many other issues that we have to deal with. That doesn't mean we don't need to deal with this legislation. We do. But as long as we are going to deal with it, as long as we are being asked to pass it, we need to at least have a conversation about it, and we are not doing that.

The only reason that the U.S. Senate was given the powers that we have in this body by the Founders and by our constituents is to facilitate those vital conversations. This isn't the New York Times op- ed page. We are not supposed to be afraid of debate here. The Senate is here to provide the venue where all Americans and all views can be heard, to hash out our differences and arrive at a consensus and compromise in the public eye.

It is especially important to do this in the Senate because this is the place where each State has equal representation. Big, heavily populated States have two Senators. So do small, sparsely populated States have two Senators. This, by the way, is the one type of change that cannot be made to the Constitution. It is the one type of constitutional amendment that is, itself, preemptively unconstitutional. You can't pursue article VI of the Constitution or amend the Constitution in such a way--even if you follow the article V amendment procedures, you cannot amend it in a way that changes the principle of equal representation in the Senate among and between the States.

It is especially important to have these debates and discussions when it comes to legislation like this one, like the Great American Outdoors Act, that, while important to the entire Nation in many respects, affects some States differently than it does others. This bill has a very different impact in Utah than it does in Colorado or in Montana or in Tennessee or in Maine. It is very, very different.

This is why we have the Senate--so that we can air out these grievances, so that we can air out our differences, so that we can make improvements to legislation.

Perhaps we can't improve it. There are a lot of things about this bill I don't like. There are other things about it I can live with. Yet if we can't have the conversation, we don't have the ability to amend or improve the legislation. As a result, the conversation doesn't happen. And most of the American people are excluded from this debate and this discussion and this conversation entirely.

This is where these conversations are supposed to occur, where we can arrive at consensus and compromise in the public eye. And this, I should note, is not for our convenience and comfort. Rather, the Senate's purpose as a deliberative body is to add another layer of republican and democratic legitimacy to the very laws we pass. The House exists to assert immediate public opinion on the basis of the proportional representation they have on that side of the Capitol.

The Senate exists to identify broad-based compromise and consensus that is essential to the political legitimacy in a nation as diverse as ours, and to do so in a way in which each State is equally represented. That is why we require supermajorities to end debate here. That is why we have 6-year terms. It is not to serve us. It is, rather, so we can serve everyone else.

But right now, we are abusing our constitutional privilege. We are willfully taking the powers of the American people--the powers that they gave us, that they have given us--to deny them their right to a diverse, deliberative, transparent, accountable process. We are doing this for no other purpose than for our own convenience. No wonder they can't stand us.

But it is not too late. It is not even too late for this week. There is still plenty of time to salvage this process, to flex our badly atrophied legislative muscles and to get to work.

After speaking with my colleagues all week, and, frankly, all of last week on these topics, I believe the consensus concerns about this bill are as follows: one, the inequity of natural resource revenue-sharing between the Federal Government and the States; two, the cost of the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund; three, the cost of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, or LWCF; four, the implications of an ever-expanding Federal land ownership; and, five, transparency for the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

We could pick just one amendment for each of the aforementioned categories--just one for each of those categories. We could have just five amendments all together. By so doing, we could make significant progress on this legislation. More than that, we could strengthen our legislative muscle memory and take a step toward restoring the vital deliberative powers of this body.

The Senate has long called itself the world's greatest deliberative body. These days, when it doesn't debate, when it shuts out amendments from individual Members--keeping in mind that this is supposed to be one of the two fundamental rules of the Senate, where each Member has access to unlimited debate and unlimited amendments--when it does this, it is neither great nor deliberative. It is not living up to its name, to its history, to its traditions, to its capacity, nor to its constitutional purpose.

Five amendments are not a lot, especially considering this legislative text bypassed the committee process all together in the first place. This bill, as a bill, was never even processed by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, on which I serve. It bypassed that committee all together. It didn't go through it. Even if the Senate votes on these amendments and votes them down-- notwithstanding the fact that we bypassed the committee--it is here now. There is nothing in the Constitution that says it has to go through committee. It is better if we do. We didn't here. We can still deal with some of the concerns that individual Members have. This is the appropriate place to do that, after all, with or without committee action.

Regardless of the outcome of those votes, even if the Senate votes those amendments down--every one of them--at least we will then be on record about our priorities and about our positions. At least then we have a chance to weigh in and say: Here is what I liked about the bill, and here is what I didn't like about the bill.

That, in turn, helps us to communicate to the public about why we either do or don't support whatever legislation is intact at the end of that process. That, in turn, would strengthen the bonds of accountability between the government and the governed, and, I would hope, restore some of the public trust that Washington, DC, has squandered for the last several decades.

If we require Senators to speak on their amendments and then move to a vote, we could dispose of all five of these amendments in just a few hours. We could do this today. We could have done it earlier today. We could have done it at any moment yesterday. It is just not too much to ask. We have to give this, like all legislation, the due consideration and the careful deliberation that it deserves and that the American people deserve.

Now, more than ever, our country needs us to be able to come together, work together, and find solutions to the problems that we face. I believe this bill presents us with an opportunity to do precisely that. I am hopeful that my colleagues and I will get the chance to take it. This is what we need to do.

We know that the Senate in the past has functioned in such a way as to allow every Member of this body to represent his or her State. We also know that can't really happen in a way that our system has always contemplated unless every Senator has a chance to weigh in on and to propose improvements to each bill and not be shut out of a process. What we get when we jettison that is, instead, a process by which a small handful of individuals will write legislation, that legislation gets airdropped on to the Senate floor in a hermetically sealed Chamber, and then Members are told: You have to vote for this entire package or against this entire package. You have a simple binary choice: Take it all or leave it all.

That isn't fair. The American people deserve better. We have settled. It is time for us to no longer settle, but to expect more, to expect the Senate to do its work.

Consistent with that, I think it is important for us to propose alternatives. I have nothing but a desire to see these things debated and discussed. 1599, which would allow Gulf States to receive a greater portion of revenues produced from energy sources off their coast; Cruz amendment No. 1651, which would reflect honest budgeting practices, direct the Secretary of the Interior to sell off excess Federal lands to the public as the ``pay for'' for this legislation, subject all Trust Fund spending to congressional oversight through the appropriations process, and strike the provision that allows the Trust Fund to receive credit for interest that will not really be earned based on money that does not really exist; Braun amendment No. 1635, which would prevent unrelated spending increases in the future by reducing the discretionary budget limit by $450 million; Lee amendment No. 1647, which would prohibit the Federal Government from making acquisitions using LWCF funds until they have received from the State, where the proposed acquisition would be located, notice that the State has enacted legislation approving the acquisition; and finally, Lee amendment No. 1639, which would require reports to Congress on costs of acquisition, maintenance, and administration of lands obtained under the LWCF, reports to States and local units of government regarding lost property taxes due to LWCF land acquisitions, and reports to Congress on Restoration Fund projects to be funded, currently being funded, and the amount of money expended for that project, as well as an estimate of expenditures needed to complete each project.

1617, and the Senate vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the substitute amendment No. 1617.

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I would like to note now for the record that there are exactly two Senators remaining in the Senate Chamber. It is now 4:38 p.m. Now we are three again--now four. We have four Senators in the Chamber at 4:39 p.m. on a Thursday. This is not the end of the week, unless perhaps you are in the U.S. Senate.

There is no reason why the Senate shouldn't be convening and debating amendments right now in order to do this. There is no valid reason why Members who understand and appreciate the legitimate concerns that are the focus of this or any other piece of legislation ought not be able to raise concerns with that legislation and offer up amendments to improve the legislation in question, especially as is the case here.

There are particular States, including my own, that would be disproportionately disadvantaged and harmed by this legislation. It is interesting to note that the Federal Government owns more of my State than in almost any other State, than it does in any of the States of any of the sponsors or prominent cosponsors of this legislation. Some of the cosponsors, in fact, are people who live in States where the Federal Government owns very little land. Look, I don't complain--no fault. In some cases our disagreements here represent differences in our background or differences in the preferences of our constituencies, but as much as anything, I think they stem from and reflect differences in the States that we represent, not just the preferences of the voters, but also the way the public land is owned--the extent to which Federal public land is owned and the impact that it has on our local economies. This is a big deal.

So like I say, I don't fault them. I regard each of the people behind this legislation as beloved friends and colleagues and as people who I deeply respect and trust and admire. They are people with whom I have agreed and cooperated with on countless instances on many wide-ranging topics.

They are not wrong to want to pass legislation that they believe is correct. They are, however, grossly mistaken in believing that it is appropriate in this circumstance to shut out Members of this body who have a different point of view, to exclude them from the debate process.

One could argue and some might argue in connection with this: Fine, let's debate it. We are debating it right now. What is debate after all other than giving speeches in a legislative body?

That is what we are doing, and that statement is true as far as it goes. Nevertheless, in order for that debate to have full meaning, we need to follow our own rules, and we need to allow Members, pursuant to our rules--and not just our rules, but also our precedents--our time- honored traditions and the spirit of comity that once inhabited and pervaded every corner of this room. It is that spirit of comity, those traditions, and those rules that really contemplate a much more collegial environment, one in which we don't come to the floor with legislation and say: That is it. There is no more. That is it. This legislation was written as if on stone tablets. There is no more to be written. This book is sealed. You can't have anything more to say.

That is not how colleagues treat each other. That is how one would treat a subordinate, and frankly, I think it is insulting--not to me but to those I represent and to those represented by my colleagues doing it.

What I find also offensive is the notion that it is so important somehow and so urgent to pass this legislation that we do so now, and that we not wait until next week to consider it. But it is apparently not important enough to allow individual Members to introduce amendments--even amendments crafted in good faith, amendments that wouldn't do any structural damage to the bill, amendments that may or may not pass, but that haven't been written by the principal authors and principal proponents of this legislation. This institution is better than that, and I thought we were. I think we owe each other more than that.

Look, this isn't always going to be the case in every single piece of legislation. There are a number of things that are passed by this body by unanimous consent. Others that come to the floor will receive an overwhelming vote one way or another and don't necessarily, in every circumstance, trigger the need for amendments. Those are, in some cases, matters that are relatively noncontroversial. I see no reason for an open amendment process if we were, for example, to declare June 2020 to be National Sofa Care Awareness Month. I don't think anybody is going to care that much about that legislation, certainly not enough to care deeply about filing amendments. In other cases, some legislation might have been adequately vetted through a process of committee action and public debate to the point where maybe no one really sees the need for additional amendment by the time it gets to the floor. But that is not always going to be the case. It should come as no surprise with a piece of legislation like this one, sweeping in its effect, adding to our already unaffordable mandatory spending, putting Federal land acquisition on an equal footing with programs like Social Security and Medicare by making it mandatory. Any time you trigger any of these alarm bells, it ought to send a signal that this is not an appropriate moment to expect that no Member from any State will have any different perspective. It is not right. Deep down they know it is not right.

I have seen each of my most vocal proponents of this legislation on the receiving end of this very kind of strategy. I have stood with them as they have stood against it, even when I don't agree with their substantive policy agenda, even if I don't agree perhaps with their strategic plan in question, but I stand with them anyway because they are my colleagues. They are my friends. It is what colleagues do for each other. You see, the difference between a colleague and a subordinate is that you don't purport to tell a colleague what he or she can do if you don't have the authority to do that. You don't act offended if your colleague doesn't agree with you, and you don't try to silence your colleague. That is how you treat a subordinate.

It has happened for far too long here. I have been here for 9\1/2\ years, and I have seen it under Democratic leadership and I have seen it under Republican leadership. It is not how it used to work here. It is not how it should ever work. I find it revolting. It is one thing to say: I want to vote on this legislation. It is quite another thing to have the gall to say: I want to vote on this legislation, but I don't want anyone else to have any say on what this legislation says, and I don't care what this does to another State. I don't care that there are other parts of other States in the Union, represented by my friends and my colleagues, where people will suffer in this legislation. I don't care--not my problem. I so don't care that that is a problem for somebody else, that I am going to make sure that the other person can't care and that he can't even make changes to this legislation.

If I were their subordinate, perhaps I would understand. As their colleague, I don't. This isn't how you treat a colleague. This isn't how colleagues interact in a body that considers itself deliberative and collegial. So say what they want about this being bipartisan, about there having been a collegial process about this bill's creation--let them say what they want about that. Make no mistake. This is wrong, what they are doing. I am not even talking right now about the merits of the bill. I disagree with the bill. I don't like the substantive policy end that it seeks to achieve, but I am not talking about that right now. What I am saying is wrong and even outrageous is the gall, the temerity that they have to tell colleagues that they don't have an equal seat at this table, that their election certificate somehow matters less.

Sooner or later, I believe that our best days lie ahead of us. I am an optimist at heart. Optimism is something that is hard to have at a moment like this, when you have been completely shut out of a legislative debate. But the reason I am optimistic here has to do with a very simple reality. Sooner or later, in a system like this one, Members will find a way with the system of rules of the Senate and as authorized by the rules and procedures and traditions of the Senate. They will find a way to get around it, and I think you will see a growing dynamic in which Members will reach across the aisle in order to solve this very problem.

This problem is not a Republican problem distinctively. It is not a Democratic problem distinctively. We have seen it under the leadership of both parties, regardless of who has the majority. This is a problem that Senators have among and between themselves, and I think in time you will see more and more Members coming to each other's defense, regardless of political ideology and regardless of the substantive ends that we achieve in a piece of legislation. I think the sun is setting or at least preparing to set on the days of locking out individual Members from the amendment process. It isn't right, and deep down we know it is not.

I will note that other than the Presiding Officer, at 4:53 p.m. on a Thursday, I remain the only Member of the U.S. Senate within this Chamber--just the Presiding Officer and me. That is it.

We could be voting now. We could have started voting hours ago. We could have started voting yesterday. We could have voted on all of these amendments. For all I know, all of the amendments that I am proposing could have been considered and voted down and they would have had their way. So what difference would it make? I am not certain whether they would all fail. It is not up to me for all to fail. Thirdly, even if they did all fail--every last one of them--at least then Members of this body would be able to face their constituents at the end of that process and be able to say: Look, I liked this legislation. Even though it had these problems, the reasons to support it outweighed those for opposing it.

Or they would be able to say: Look, I tried to make it better. I failed. These problems remained. So I voted against it.

That increases accountability, rather than decreasing. That is good. That is good for a constitutional republic like ours. It is essential for the U.S. Senate. It is how it is supposed to work.

So we could have done that yesterday. We could have done that this morning. We could still do it right now. We could start that process right now in a matter of hours. We would have debated, discussed, and voted on these amendments. Then we could move on. We could put this whole thing behind us. We could do it right now.

They are hearing nothing of it, which begs the question: Why? Who benefits from this? The only people who benefit are the small handful of individuals who, on any particular occasion, happen to be involved in this decision making and become more powerful. But they do so in a dishonorable way, at the expense of all of their colleagues, at the expense of their relationship with their colleagues, but most damning of all, at the expense of their relationship and obligations to the voters who elected them--and I mean those in every State.

I am sure they think they are doing the right thing, that the end justifies the means. Nobody is immune to that line of thinking. It is something we have to be conscious of. The circumstance doesn't make it OK. This is wrong. We can do better. We can, we must, and together, we will.

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