National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, yesterday, a bipartisan majority of Senators rejected the Democratic leader's efforts to shut down debate on the National Defense Authorization Act and block new measures to get tougher on Russia.

The Democratic leader wants to block the Senate from fully and robustly debating a number of important issues--from how to manage the fallout from the reckless Afghanistan retreat to how to respond to China's dramatic and destabilizing military modernization, to how to restore deterrence against an emboldened Iran.

The NDAA is supposed to be the bipartisan forum for debating and acting on these kinds of issues. Months ago, the Armed Services Committee moved this process forward--listen to this--23 to 3, but the Democratic leader has botched the floor process.

It is especially bizarre to see the Democratic leader so focused, so intent, on blocking the Senate from dealing seriously with the growing aggression from Putin's Russia. He seems downright desperate to block new bipartisan action on Nord Stream 2. It is really quite strange to see. Senators Risch and Cruz have proposed language concerning this Putin pipeline that the House was able to pass almost unanimously. Unlike the House provision, the Risch-Cruz amendment includes a waiver provision that would give the President more flexibility, which makes the Democratic leader's effort to shut the process down and block their amendment all the more baffling.

If there is opposition to the amendment--if it can be improved with modifications--then, by all means, let's have a public debate.

Likewise, Senator Portman has been a leading voice for bolstering our European partners and delivering more meaningful support to Ukraine's military. As Putin amasses forces on Ukraine's border, the Senate should debate how to help the Ukrainians defend themselves. The Democratic leader is trying to shut that down as well.

So the NDAA is not finished yet. So the Senate cannot be finished yet either. We need the same kind of normal, robust, bipartisan amendment process that always characterizes this bill, and we need the Democratic leader to stop trying to block the Senate from sanctioning Putin's cronies. Inflation

Now, Mr. President, on an entirely different matter, 88 percent of Americans are concerned about inflation--most of them are very concerned--and 77 percent of Americans say inflation has affected them personally. We have a big and diverse country. It is hard to get that many Americans to agree on anything. But President Biden did promise he would unite the country, and on the Democrats' watch, under the Democrats' policies, the American people are united in their fear and frustration at runaway prices, falling purchasing power, and all the consequences of inflation. The men and women of this country are spending 20 percent more than last year for beef at the grocery store, 50 percent more to fill up the gas tank, 26 percent more for less choice in used cars.

One recent article in the New York Times suggested that perhaps Americans should forget about trying to buy their family members normal gifts and settle for exchanging handwritten promises to tackle household chores, such as ``washing out the reusable plastic bags.'' I guess the Grinch is doing some ghostwriting in his spare time.

Some weeks back, the White House Press Secretary tried to laugh off reporters' questions about the supply chain and inflation crises. She literally laughed at the idea that anybody would be worried about the ``tragedy of the treadmill that's delayed.''

Well, the President's staff are yukking it up, but working parents aren't laughing. Middle-class families aren't laughing.

A Kentuckian named Mike Halligan isn't laughing either. He runs a big food bank in Lexington called God's Pantry. They distribute more than 40 million pounds of food every year at the local pantries all across my State.

Here is what he says:

We've seen the cost of our ``sharing Thanksgiving basket'' go up this year by 14.5 percent. . . . We've seen our costs go up by about 50 percent. The transportation component of that is literally doubled.

And he also explained that, since inflation is also hammering his contributors, charities and nonprofits may face ``donor fatigue'' at precisely the time they cannot afford a fall-off. The Democrats' inflation is hitting, literally, every part of our society.

A famous economist once said that inflation is the only form of tax that can be levied without any legislation, but what is remarkable about 2021 is that Democrats did directly legislate a big chunk of this inflation into existence. It is unusually traceable to deliberate policy decisions they have made.

One of the most famous Democratic economists in the country, Larry Summers, tried to warn them. On February 4, he wrote that the Democrats' stimulus could ``set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.'' He said the same thing all springtime long.

So did President Obama's CEA chair:

Jason Furman . . . said that the American Rescue Plan is definitely ``too big for the moment,'' stating, ``I don't know of any economist that was recommending something the size of what was done.''

But Washington Democrats had already decided months ago they would try to use the temporary pandemic as a Trojan horse for permanent socialism.

Remember last spring, when one of the senior-most House Democrats called it a ``tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision'' or, earlier this fall, when President Biden himself said the pandemic ``does present us with an opportunity.''

For Democrats, this go-around, it has never been about what families need; it has only been about what activists want.

So we got the first massive spending bill in the springtime, and now a majority of Americans ``worry they won't be able to afford what they need during the holidays due to inflation.''

President Biden inherited an economy that was primed and ready for a historic comeback--a fantastic inheritance. Since then, they have had less than a year at the controls, and we have got more than half the country actively worried their checking accounts might not even get them through the holidays.

But Democrats aren't offering the country any contrition, any apology, or, more importantly, any course correction. Amazingly enough, they want to come back around for an even bigger bite at the apple. They want to try to inflate their way out of inflation.

Our colleagues have spent months huddled behind closed doors, neglecting the most basic governing duties, writing another reckless taxing-and-spending spree that even the most conservative estimates say would add about $800 billion to deficits over the next 5 years alone. They want to take the inflationary fire they helped start and pour jet fuel on it. Even the CBO, which has to swallow most of the Democrats' gimmicky math, estimates this bill would spend nearly $2 trillion and pile almost hundreds of billions more onto deficits over the next decade.

Perhaps more realistic are the outside, nonpartisan estimates that actually account for what we all know: Democrats would never let the new entitlements in their bill expire. Those more realistic estimates put the total cost--listen to this--just short of $5 trillion, at a time when Chairman Powell, who has been willing to let the country run hot, is now warning that current uncertainties could keep inflation elevated to a troubling level.

Now, I could talk all day about how the actual contents of this bill would hurt American families even more, about how it would take another big step toward socialized medicine and pour cold water on the innovations and cures that save lives, how it would incinerate huge chunks of our energy sector and the jobs it supports in order to keep pace with green preferences of California liberals, how it would wrestle authority over intimate decisions about childcare away from American families and put it in the hands of Washington bureaucrats, but the overall picture is impossible to mistake: Inflation is hurting the American people, and Democrats want to print, borrow, and spend trillions more--the most out-of-touch agenda you could possibly imagine.

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