-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, it is actually good to be back in the Senate this week after 2 weeks back home, and we certainly have a busy schedule ahead of us. The fact is that, unfortunately, this was a product of the inattention or lack of urgency that the majority leader has had to deal with the Senate's necessary work so far. We are a quarter of the way through the 118th Congress, and we, frankly, don't have a lot to show for it.

Under our colleagues' leadership, this Chamber developed an embarrassingly short list of accomplishments. Despite the chaos at the southern border, we haven't had the opportunity to vote on legislation to address this humanitarian and security crisis, either in the Senate Judiciary Committee or here on the floor. They simply just ignore it: 5 million border encounters since President Biden took office. Last year alone, 108,000 Americans died of drug overdoses. Seventy-one thousand of those were from synthetic opioids, virtually all of which come from Mexico, the precursors having been imported from China.

Would that be enough to get the attention of the President and the majority leader to actually do something in that area? Well, apparently not.

Yesterday, I was interested to see that the Senator from New York-- the majority leader--sent a letter to our Senate colleagues highlighting his plans for the next 3 weeks. Actually, we only have about 10 workdays in these next 3 weeks before now the regularly scheduled August recess. Again, more of the same that we have seen so far this year--not much time and a lot to do.

Senator Schumer mentioned his desire to move forward on bills relating to drug pricing, fentanyl, permitting reform, rail safety, marijuana banking, China competition, artificial intelligence, and a number of other topics in the next 3 weeks.

Now, to be clear, I don't think the majority leader actually believes we are going to produce legislation in these areas. Maybe you would call this a wish list. But it is only wishful thinking to believe that in the U.S. Senate you are going to be able to get all of these necessary items addressed in the next 10 working days.

And, of course, that ignores the fact that we have a bicameral legislature. We have the Senate and the House. Has he prevetted any of this legislation with the House to see whether, assuming the Senate would act, that the House would actually take it up and pass it and the President would sign it into law?

That is how we legislate around here. It is not performance art. It is not show business. This is actually about doing the people's business and passing legislation through an admittedly difficult process.

But this is where we find ourselves having waited until this late moment to deal with so much important legislation. The Democratic- controlled Senate has been downright sleepy for the last 6 months. And I have no reason that this letter, this wish list, will prompt some miraculous turnaround.

The lack of productivity in this Congress has created a major backlog of important bills, which must be our top focus. We have a lot to do and not much time to do it, but that is by design. That is not the way the Senate should be operating.

We heard from the previous speakers a lot about the national defense authorization bill, which is our annual Defense bill, which we passed for the last 61 years in a row--61 years in a row. Before this last break, the Senate Armed Services Committee completed its work on that bill and passed it out of committee by a vote of 24 to 1--bipartisan bill out of the Armed Services Committee demonstrating an overwhelming bipartisan support.

This legislation, as we all know, is about supporting our servicemembers, modernizing our military, and addressing our biggest security challenges, including China.

Senator Wicker, from Mississippi, the ranking member, has shared his disappointment over the fact that this year's Defense bill doesn't adequately seek to fund our defense needs.

Now, of course, this is an authorization, in the jargon of the Senate--it is not an appropriation--but typically what happens is the authorizing committees will set a level of funding and then the Appropriations Committee will come behind that and fund it, presumably, at that level.

But I know many of us are committed to working in the coming weeks to increase those funding levels to ensure that our military has the resources it needs to protect the American people, especially in the face of 40-year-high inflation.

I don't have to tell anybody within the sound of my voice what inflation has done to their standard of living and their purchasing power over the last couple of years. Basically, this is like a silent tax, where you have less and less to spend for the necessary expenditures in your life, whether it is your transportation, your food, your clothing, your childcare, your healthcare, or the like. Well, the military is experiencing the ill-effects of this 40-year-high inflation, too, and its purchasing power has been decreased dramatically.

Well, I hope that we will have a turnaround of sorts and that the Defense authorization bill will get off to a strong start, but it is a long way from the finish line.

While this bill did pass the committee, it still needs to be brought to the floor. There needs to be an opportunity for Senators to offer amendments and debate the bill, hopefully improve it, and then vote on it by the full Senate, and that takes time.

Under the regular procedures of the Senate, to bring a bill like that to the floor and to account for all of the potential procedural obstacles that would be encountered, it would take you more than a week to process the bill. And we have 3 weeks before August--10 days of actual working time--and this is what the majority leader has presented us with.

So we know that we need to get to work. The NDAA should pass before the end of fiscal year, which is September 30, and the Senate is only scheduled to be in session for 7 weeks before then. So even after we come back from the August recess, in order to meet the deadline of the end of the fiscal year, September 30, we only have 4 more weeks after we get back before the NDAA essentially lapses--the national defense authorization bill--absent our action in the meantime.

I don't have to tell my colleagues that providing for the common defense is one of our most important responsibilities. And the National Defense Authorization Act is the foundation for that. So I hope the majority leader will allow the Senate to take up the bill soon.

I think I heard the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee just now suggest that perhaps the NDAA will come to the floor next week, and I hope that is true. But certainly, in order to give Senators an opportunity to participate and hopefully debate and offer amendments and improve the bill, it is going to take time, and that is something we don't have a lot of.

Every Member of this Chamber has the right to offer their ideas to strengthen and improve this legislation, just like we should on any piece of legislation. And the majority leader should not try to jam the process by saying: Oh, now, we don't have enough time so we are going to have to do away with the opportunity to have full debates and amendment process because we are running up against a deadline. Well, that deadline is of his own making because he failed to deal with this in a timely manner.

But September 30 isn't the only deadline that we have for the Defense authorization bill. It is also the farm bill. Every 5 years, Congress passes a farm bill to support everything from crop insurance to nutrition programs, to rural broadband. The impact of the farm bill is felt in communities across America, including those in my home State of Texas.

Texas is home to nearly a quarter of a million farms and ranches, more than any other State in the country. And one out of every seven working Texans actually works in an ag-related job. These hard-working men and women raise cattle, chickens. They grow corn and sorghum. They produce cotton and hay, not just for the Nation but for the world. Texas farmers and ranchers produce food and fiber for America and for exports as well, and they are facing increasingly strong headwinds.

I mentioned inflation, which has been at a 40-year high. It has increased the cost of every input that farmers and ranchers have, from diesel to fertilizer, you name it. It has eroded their purchasing power. Their operating costs have skyrocketed for everything. I mentioned fertilizer and fuel. Pesticides is another major expense. And so their profit margins continue to get slimmer and slimmer.

I was somewhat amused to hear that President Biden, during our 2-week period away from Washington, DC, began to tout something he calls Bidenomics, like he is proud of it. He said: This is a lot like Reaganomics, except it is Bidenomics. It has nothing to do with Reaganomics, which actually worked. But I was amused because when I looked at the RealClearPolitics' average of the President's approval rating for his economic policies, it stands at a whopping 38.7 percent--38.7 percent approve of President Biden's economic policies. Bidenomics is like putting lipstick on a pig to try to dress it up to make it look better than it really is.

But in addition to our economic woes, Mother Nature has unleashed a set of challenges as well. Last year alone, natural disasters caused more the $21 billion in crop losses nationwide. Today, areas across Texas are experiencing a hot and dry summer. We are used to that. It is summertime. It is July. We are used to hot and dry summers. But farmers are also battling very little rainfall, and they are praying that their crop loss will not be more than minimal.

The farm bill includes farm safety net programs which are a lifeline for countless producers. They are critical at managing the risks inherent with this critical industry. Everybody knows farming and ranching is risky, for the reasons I mentioned and others.

But this year I hope we can build on the progress we made in the last farm bill to ensure that the agriculture sector is as resilient as possible.

This sector not only feeds, fuels, and clothes America, as I said, it also drives our economy and feeds the world.

In Texas alone in 2021, ag exports totaled more than $7.2 billion. In 2019, Texas A&M's AgriLife Extension Service estimated the economic impact of the ag sector to be nearly $160 billion, which is more than 8 percent of my State's GDP.

So a strong, on-time farm bill is essential to the health and well- being of this important sector of the economy, but it is also important beyond that. It is important to the American people, and it is important to our economy.

Our colleague Senator Boozman from Arkansas is a ranking member. And our colleagues on the Agriculture Committee, I know, have been working hard to draft this year's farm bill, and I appreciate the hard work that they put into it. But I am eager to work with our colleagues to get this bill across the finish line on time, again, before it lapses at the end of this fiscal year.

And then, there is another big one, Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization. As though we needed another big, heavy lift before the end of the fiscal year, it is also the deadline to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration. Over the last couple of years, travelers have dealt with widespread flight cancellations, paralyzing staffing shortages, and rising prices. We have also witnessed some jarring safety issues, including near-collisions on airport runways in Minneapolis and New York.

Last month, Senators Cantwell, Cruz, Duckworth, and Moran introduced the FAA Reauthorization Act to address these and other issues. But like the National Defense Authorization Act and the farm bill, the FAA needs to be reauthorized by September 30. Again, all of these deadlines are well-known by the majority leader, but here we are finding ourselves with very little time and a lot to do.

And last but not least is, likely, the biggest lift before us for before September 30, and that is to fund the government. As part of the debt limit agreement, Senator Schumer vowed to bring all 12 appropriations bills to the Senate floor by September 30. How he is going to be able to keep his promise is not clear to me, given the traffic jam that we are going to experience, because this includes funding for our military, veteran services, border security, and so much more.

Senator Collins and Senator Murray and all of our colleagues on the Appropriations Committee are determined to restore some regular order and common sense to the funding process. I hope the majority leader will stick by his word and put all 12 appropriations bills on the Senate floor before the end of the fiscal year.

We don't need, and the country does not want, another omnibus spending bill like we saw at the end of last year, which, of course, was by design, because it empowers the leadership to the detriment of rank-and-file members of the Congress. When you are presented with a ``shut down the government,'' ``take it or leave it'' proposition at the end of the year, having bypassed all of this normal process, the question is, Are you going to keep the government open? Are you going to fund the government? Are you going to fund defense, veterans, border security, or not? And that is simply an abomination we do not need to repeat again. And so I do hope the majority leader will keep his word.

None of these bills are an easy lift. They require a lot of hard work, cooperation, and time, and we only have 7 weeks of legislative session to pass them all. So far, the 118th Congress hasn't been a productive one. The Democratic majority has struggled to complete even the most basic tasks, and now we have a lot of work to do, maybe an impossible amount of work to do, by design. The clock is ticking, and we can't let these critical responsibilities slip through the cracks.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source