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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, before he leaves the floor, I want to say to the Senator from Mississippi how proud I am to stand here beside him as he delivers an inconvenient truth, which is, our national security is not something we can take for granted. You pay for it with your treasure or your blood. That is an inconvenient truth.

In the course of our Nation's history, we remain the beacon of freedom, opportunity, liberty, and prosperity for the world, but we cannot take that for granted because we see everywhere we look rising threats and challenges to America's leadership role in the world. Whether it is in Europe, whether it is in Asia, whether it is in the Middle East, the threats and the challenges go on and on.

What emboldens our adversaries is when they believe that we lack the resolve and commitment to do what is necessary to preserve the peace. The way you preserve the peace is to make sure none of your adversaries want to take a chance to engage with you militarily because they know they will lose. That is what deterrence is all about.

I think the Senator from Mississippi has hopefully started a really critical discussion at a critical time when we sort of lurch back and forth between continuing resolutions and an appropriations process that is fundamentally broken; when, in fact, the money we appropriate through that process is only about one-third of the money the Federal Government spends. The Federal Government spends trillions of dollars more on mandatory programs and through the Tax Code. We need to look at all of that spending, and we need to rightsize our commitment to what should be our No. 1 priority, which is the safety and security of the American people and our way of life, and to figure out what that means in terms of where the Federal Government spends money elsewhere.

And it is a very, very important debate. We shouldn't be afraid of it. Nobody is talking about touching Social Security or Medicare.

Both President Biden and President Trump has said no matter what the outcome of the election is, neither one of them want to touch it. We could argue the merits of that. Certainly, those debates won't occur without bipartisan leadership, like Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan, but in the absence of our addressing those challenges, certainly there are other mandatory spending programs, which are essentially on autopilot, that grow at 7 or 8 percent a year that we can look at and say: Does this still make sense?

Maybe it made sense 10 or 20 years ago when that program was created, but maybe we ought to look at indexing the amount of money that we spend to inflation, rather than just have an open-ended entitlement.

And then there is the Tax Code. I know next year we are going to be looking at the expiration of the individual tax rates of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

President Biden has said that he is happy to have those expire, which would result in a tax increase for 62 percent of American taxpayers and a $3 trillion tax increase. I know his staff came back later and said: No, no, no. He is not for raising taxes on anybody who makes less than $400,000 a year, but that is not what would happen if you let these tax rates expire next year.

So we are on the precipice, I hope, of having a fundamental debate and decision about the future of our country, and it starts with a discussion about America's leadership role in maintaining the peace because there is no other country in the world that can fill that gap. And we know that if that gap is created, that it will be filled likely by the Vladimir Putins, the President Xis in China, or the mullahs in Tehran, and people like Kim Jong Un in North Korea.

So I will just conclude now by saying I am really profoundly grateful to our friend from Mississippi for having the courage and demonstrating the leadership to initiate this discussion. It could not be more important, and it could not be more urgent.

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