Invest in America Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I appreciate my friend and colleague, the majority leader, for allowing me to finish my remarks this evening.

When we look at legislation like this, I hope we can pay attention to a few details--a few details--that focus on more than just our roads, bridges, wastewater projects, and other infrastructure matters.

Are they important? I hope we will ask specifically: Are they appropriately Federal? Could they be just as easily handled as some other level of government?

I hope that we will also ask: If they are appropriate for the Federal Government, are we spending appropriately there? And, are we doing it at the right time? Are we placing the dollars that we are going to spend on the right things?

I also hope that we will pay careful attention to something that my friend and my distinguished colleague from Arizona, Senator Sinema, said. She pointed out throughout this process it was difficult and time consuming. I liked how she put it. She said: It is supposed to be that way.

Our Founding Fathers set up a system in which it would necessarily be difficult and time consuming to get there. She is absolutely right. It is not supposed to be easy to pass legislation because legislation, especially like this, impacts a lot of people--a lot of people who are not here. There are only 100 of us who have the privilege of serving in this body, and we have 330 million people in this country who will be affected by it, and they will be affected by it for a long time to come.

That is why it is supposed to be difficult and time consuming. There, again, I point back to the fact that it took this committee--this committee--or this group; they are not a committee--this group of 10 or so Senators 4 painstaking months to come up with this. And it is to their credit that they were able to get it done even in that amount of time.

Again, I don't agree with the conclusion that they reached. I can't vote for this bill as it is written. But that really is remarkable that they were able to do it in that period of time.

The fact that they, as a small group, were able to do that in 4 months means that this body has no business passing this legislation in a matter of just a few days. Quite arguably, we should need more time than that, not less, to digest it. But for the sake of discussion, and for the sake of respecting what appears to be a widely held view in this body that we ought to act on this, we at least need a few weeks. We shouldn't be doing this in just a few days.

I also hope that we will keep in mind that every one of us in this body holds an election certificate, whether we participated in the drafting of this bill or not, and every one of us should have the opportunity to offer up amendments and to vote on those amendments to make improvements to the bill, whether we support it in its current form or not, whether we intend to vote for the finished package or not, every one of us deserves an opportunity to offer as many amendments as we may choose. And if we want them voted on, they should be voted on. We shouldn't be afraid of it.

Often it is through the amendment process that we discover the nooks and crannies, we discover the unintended consequences that we allow the public to have visibility and to what has been a process that most people don't have access to. So I hope that we will do that and that we will be respectful to each other's views in doing that.

Bad things happen when legislation--especially legislation spending as much money as this one does or anything close to it--is drafted in secret.

Look, there is no problem--I don't have a problem at all with the fact they have been meeting. Members have every prerogative to decide what they want to propose behind closed doors. That is how the deliberative process works that results in legislation. But once it is here, as it is now, we need to take into account the fact that this hasn't been through committee; this hasn't been aired in its current form. We have got to give it the adequate airing that it needs and that the American people deserve.

So I hope, I expect that in the coming days, what I hope will actually be the coming weeks, we will have the opportunity to review this in full, to share it with our constituents, to have it analyzed, to have it scored by the Congressional Budget Office--we have no business spending this kind of money without a CBO score--and then Members need to be able to offer amendments on it.

We live in difficult times, and we live in times where there is a lot of rancor and there is a lot of disagreement. I am glad that there has been a good feeling here tonight with people who have been able to come together.

Sometimes we can't pass legislation simply because it is bipartisan. We can't be expected to pass it just because some Democrats and some Republicans happen to agree with it. That is actually not all that uncommon.

From watching the news, sometimes you get the impression we can't stand each other and that there is such deep-rooted animus across party lines, that we can't talk to each other, we don't like each other, and that the problem with Congress is that we can't get anything done because there is partisan gridlock that stops everything.

Well, I would offer a different perspective to that. The fact that legislation like this occurs, bipartisanship; the fact that you don't get to be almost $30 trillion in debt without a whole lot of bipartisanship. Every single time we add an enormous sum to our national debt, there is bipartisanship behind it. Just because something is bipartisan doesn't mean that it is taking into account the needs of poor and middle-class Americans, who increasingly, of late, are being robbed blind by those who, for short-term political gain and praising the media, will make things more expensive for the poor and middle class, enabling a small handful of wealthy and well-connected interests to benefit from it. The fact that it is bipartisan shouldn't obscure the problems with it. I hope we will have an opportunity to address those problems and that we will give this legislation the due consideration it deserves.

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