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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I want to take just a few moments to go back to March of this year. After a very tough year fighting COVID-19, the American people had many reasons to be optimistic about the future. Millions of people were being vaccinated every day. The winter surge was fading away, and travel was slowly ramping up. Families were able to get back together who hadn't seen their loved ones, particularly those who were the most vulnerable to the virus. People were able to visit face-to-face and resume their lives, gradually discovering what I will call the new normal.

We knew the war against the virus was not over, but our communities were well-resourced to keep up the fight, thanks to the five bipartisan bills that were signed into law in 2020.

Yes, it is true. Just last year, we passed five bipartisan relief bills with broad bipartisan support--in some cases, unanimous consent support. My, how quickly things changed. After President Biden was sworn into office, our friends on the other side of the aisle began to view things quite differently. Where Republicans saw progress, Democrats saw, as one House Member put it, a ``tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit [their] vision.'' Democrats tried to capitalize on the pandemic to check items off their liberal wish list. They crafted a nearly $2 trillion bill that included some of the far- left's highest priorities and tried to brand it as pandemic relief-- backdoor funding for Planned Parenthood, a blank check for mismanaged union pension funds, money for ``climate justice''--whatever that is. Less than 10 percent of the money for COVID-19 was directly related to the pandemic, and less than 1 percent supported vaccination efforts.

In addition to being wasteful and irresponsible, this level of spending has brought with it serious risks. Leading economists who are Democrats, like Larry Summers and Steve Rattner, warn this level of spending could trigger inflation. Most of the young people who were not alive during the seventies, during the tremendous inflation in the country, have never experienced anything like that or even like what we are experiencing today. But Larry Summers presciently warned that this level of Federal spending could ``set off [some] inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.'' Still, our Democratic colleagues couldn't be persuaded to change course.

They moved forward with their nearly $2 trillion spending bill, and lo and behold, guess what happened. Well, Larry Summers was right, and the Federal Reserve that called inflation transitory was wrong. We are now experiencing inflation at a level we have not seen in a generation, exactly as Larry Summers predicted.

In October, inflation hit a 31-year high. Consumer prices jumped 6.2 percent compared with a year ago, making this the highest inflation rate we have seen since 1990. If you were to ask the average Texan if they were surprised by this news, they would say: Not at all.

Month after month, families have adjusted their budgets as prices ticked up. They are now paying more for everything from gasoline to groceries, from cars to Christmas gifts.

And our Democratic colleagues seem to think the only solution is to add more fuel to the fire. They put together a second partisan spending spree, which will cost approximately $5 trillion. That has already passed the House of Representatives.

Taxpayers will be disappointed by what they get for so much money: tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires--that is in the House bill--cuts to healthcare for low-income and uninsured patients, special favors for organized labor and union bosses, and taxpayer-subsidized electric vehicles for the well-off.

Our colleagues have worked diligently, I must confess, on this bill all year, and this is what they have come up with. Meanwhile, they have ignored some of the most basic responsibilities of governing.

So far, the Senate has not passed any regular appropriations bills. There are 12 of them that routinely we pass. They are deliberated in the Appropriations Committee, voted on, on a bipartisan basis, and ultimately come to the floor and pass as part of the most basic function of governing.

We haven't done that this year. Our colleagues have delayed the National Defense Authorization Act, and we are just 1 week away from a deadline that Secretary Yellen has given us for a potential debt crisis. Our colleagues have failed to do the bare minimum.

Why on Earth are they pouring every ounce of their time and energy into this damaging partisan spending spree when they can't even cover the fundamentals of governing?

One thing is for sure: It is not because of a lack of opportunities to advance bipartisan legislation.

In fact, over the last year, I have been proud to work with a number of our Democratic colleagues on legislation to address some of our biggest challenges, so it is not impossible. For example, Senator Warner, the Senator from Virginia, and I have partnered on the CHIPS for America Act, which became law earlier this year, and now we are working together to provide the funds to fund the programs that the bill created.

Then there is Senator Sinema, the senior Senator from Arizona. She and I teamed up on legislation to deal with the humanitarian crisis and security crisis at our border and to make sure that migrants are treated fairly and humanely.

Senator Padilla, the junior Senator from California, and I have worked together on legislation to make big investments in infrastructure projects across the country without increasing the deficit by a dime.

Earlier this year, State and local governments received huge sums of COVID-19 relief money--more than they could use--and they found themselves with more cash than they did eligible expenses. So the idea behind our bill was pretty simple: give State and local leaders more flexibility to invest in the most critical projects for their communities--largely, infrastructure and disaster relief.

In some places, this still means pandemic-related expenses. We don't require them to do anything; we just merely give them an option. Cities can continue to use Federal dollars to expand hospital bed capacities, increase staffing, or support vaccination campaigns.

The flexibility granted by this bill wouldn't interfere with any plans to bolster the fight against the virus. It simply gives States and local governments the ability to invest excess funding in infrastructure projects: constructing bridges, extending railways, modernizing ports, expanding broadband. This particular bill includes a long list of qualifying expenses.

State and local leaders know their communities best, and they should be able to use excess COVID-19 relief funds in a way that makes the most sense for their State and their community.

Senator Padilla and I were happy to work with our colleagues on both sides of the aisle to make changes to the bill to gain bipartisan support. We added additional qualifying infrastructure projects to ensure unique but no less important infrastructure projects in some States were eligible. And we placed a cap, working with the White House, on the amount of funding that could be used because of the White House's concerns that it would take away from necessary COVID-19 expenses.

In October, this bill passed the Senate with unanimous support. Now, nothing passes this Senate with unanimous support without a lot of hard work and a lot of input from a lot of people on both sides of the aisle. At a time when something as simple as K-12 curricula are controversial, the full Senate supported this legislation. Local officials, highway safety groups, and the transportation infrastructure construction industry all support this commonsense legislation.

Leaders from three dozen organizations representing these groups sent a letter to House leaders earlier this week encouraging the bill's passage. As they said, providing State and local leaders with flexible resources is the surest way to see that our Nation's preparedness and responsivity continue. And it is important to note that this money had already gone out the door, so all of these projects, all of this new infrastructure, can be funded without increasing the deficit by a dime.

As I said, all 100 Senators supported this legislation, and the bill currently has more than 120 bipartisan cosponsors in the House. So we would encourage our House colleagues to delay no longer and take up and pass this commonsense, bipartisan bill.

So my point is, even in times when we seem irreparably polarized, where some colleagues decide it is my way or the highway when it comes to trying to pass legislation in a 50-50 Senate--which is, admittedly, very hard to do--the truth of the matter is there are real opportunities to address some of the biggest challenges facing our country in a bipartisan way.

But none of these opportunities are contained in the Democrats' partisan spending bill. This legislation would, as Larry Summers predicted, continue to fuel the red-hot inflation that is already burning the American people. It will harm our energy security. It will give massive tax breaks to the wealthy while increasing taxes on the middle class. It cuts funding to our safety-net hospitals that provide charity care and care for Medicaid patients. And it will drive our national debt to unimaginable heights.

It will also hand the government control of decisions that should be made by families on everything from childcare to healthcare--basically hand those decisions to the Federal Government. This is not the type of legislation that should be on our Senate's agenda at all, let alone at the top of the list.

There are plenty of opportunities to work together to notch big bipartisan wins for the American people. It is a shame, though, that our colleagues across the aisle have chosen not to do that and that this partisan spending spree has prevented real progress from being made in so many other areas.

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