Executive Calendar
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, it is hardly breaking news that this is December 20--5 days before Christmas, a day celebrated by 2 billion people throughout the world. It is also the last day of the 118th Congress, and there is no better time than the present to take stock of what we have done or not done this last year.
Students around the country wrapped up their semester, and they have come home with a report card to show their parents the grades they have earned in things like math, science, English, and other subjects. Of course, report cards are a helpful metric of advancement--or not, as the case may be. It is also a means to hold people accountable--where they are excelling, where they need to improve.
Here in the Senate, I think it is important to issue the Democratic majority a similar report card-style evaluation. People may wonder: Well, why would it just be of the Democratic majority and not the Senate as a whole? Well, obviously each of us represents our respective State, but there is one important difference: Only the majority leader, the Democratic majority leader, sets the Senate's schedule.
That means we consider bills that only he calls up for consideration. No one else in the Senate--not the other 99 of us--can schedule bills for votes.
That also means that what he does not schedule on the Senate's calendar is not considered, including bills that have passed the House, even by broad bipartisan majorities. And in a few short days, all the bills that he has chosen not to schedule will suffer a quiet death.
The majority leader's ability to run this Chamber has repercussions in every State, city, and community across the country. As public servants, we are all accountable to the people we serve. And leaders of the institution should be accountable as well, which is what I want to proceed to do now.
Last year, the majority leader's report card at the halfway mark of the congressional session showed that he had quite a bit of room for improvement in the second half of this 2-year session. But, unfortunately, I am sorry to report, he did not improve his performance last year. In fact, in the recent referendum on Senate Democrats' performance, which is the general election of November 5, the American people voted for Republicans to take over the reins of the Senate next year because they believed the Senate--and the country--was headed in the wrong direction.
So let's start with government funding. That seems particularly timely now, since here we are in another government shutdown narrative, which is--I will show or attempt to show that it is entirely contrived and is by design and is not the way the Senate should be running.
You recall, last year, the majority leader earned an incomplete on this subject. I had hopes that we would see a change in the way we handled the government funding. So the first 2 months of this calendar year, we saw the Appropriations Committee pass bipartisan appropriations bills that were never scheduled on the Senate floor.
Now we find ourselves in the exact same situation as last year. The Appropriations Committee did their work, again, on a bipartisan basis. Many of the 12 bills they passed were passed unanimously but never called up or scheduled for votes here in the Senate.
Leader Schumer made the exact same mistake he made last year. He procrastinated on scheduling floor time to consider the bills, and we are, even now, as I speak, dealing with the funding decisions that should have been decided and settled last September.
So here we are, less than 3 days before the Senate was scheduled to head home, he negotiated a text of a bill that was more than 1,500 pages. You might wonder why is it that he would fail to call up the 12 funding bills for the entire rest of the year and then 3 days before we are supposed to leave for the Christmas recess, propose a 1,500-page bill.
Well, it should seem pretty obvious. It is because the people who negotiate that bill are not the rank-and-file members of the Senate. As a matter of fact, they don't even get a chance to change the negotiated product, which is done between the so-called Big Four. So he was hoping to shove through a ``cramnibus'' that lawmakers would not even have time to read, and he snuck in a pay raise for Congress to boot.
Now it is only a few days before the end of the year, and we are in the exact same boat we found ourselves last year. We are now tasked with passing a continuing resolution to kick the can down the road even more into March. Again, this should have been addressed last September.
I must say, I am disappointed but not entirely surprised. It was part of a plan.
So I believe that on the appropriations process, keeping the lights on and keeping the government open, the report card for the Democratic majority and the majority leader is an F.
Now let's turn to the National Defense Authorization Act. I have said time and time again on this floor something that I think we all recognize; that this is the most dangerous world since World War II, with North Korea sending soldiers to fight with the Russians in Ukraine; with Kim Jong Un launching missiles over allies of the United States into the Sea of Japan; with Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis--the proxies for Tehran--killing innocent people; and then, of course, the war in Ukraine, which has tragically gone on for 2 years with hundreds and thousands of people dead. So you would think that one of the most important things we would do is pass the National Defense Authorization bill--something we have done literally 63 years in a row.
That bill should have been signed into law by the end of the last fiscal year, which is September 30. But, yes, once again, the majority leader--the only person who can schedule these bills on the floor-- procrastinated.
That bill was finally completed the last week of the year, more than 2 months past the deadline. But just like government funding, the majority leader did not learn from his mistakes on the NDAA.
Two days ago, on Wednesday of this week, he actually came down here and brazenly acknowledged what many people had said; that they were worried that we would not even be able to pass the Defense Authorization bill this year because he hadn't scheduled it for consideration on the floor. But he came down and bragged that, yes, here we are; we are going to vote on the NDAA. But it is a conference report that rank-and- file members have never had the chance to debate and amend on the Senate floor. This, again, was a bill negotiated behind closed doors, not in the light of day with Senators--all 100 Senators--having a chance to participate. It was just a railroad job. He acts like the way he handled it was to his credit, but just the opposite is true.
Next, we have the farm bill. A strong and on-time farm bill is essential to the health and well-being of the agriculture industry, the American people, and our economy.
Texas, which I am proud to represent, is home to more than 230,000 farms and ranches--more than any other State in the country. One out of every seven Texans works in an ag-related job, so this legislation provides critical lifelines for the folks back home. And here again, last year, the Senate failed to pass a farm bill on a timely basis and instead kicked the can down the road.
Unfortunately, recently, the chair of the Agriculture Committee--a Democratic chair--waited until November--that was just last month--to release a partisan farm bill that was simply not going to cut it for our farmers and ranchers back home, and it had no chance of passing because it was strictly a party-line, partisan bill. So instead of working together on a bipartisan basis to pass a fair and effective farm bill on time, we had to scramble to include farm assistance in the end-of-the-year continuing resolution. That was part of the 1,500-page bill that the majority leader and others negotiated, which, unfortunately, does not look like it is going to go anywhere--that part of it, the farm assistance.
But we wouldn't have needed to do that, or at least not the scale at which that farm assistance was provided for, if we had simply done our work on time and passed a timely farm bill.
Of course, this continuing resolution, or whatever the House ends up sending to us, doesn't allow producers to plan, doesn't give them certainty for multiple years. The least Congress could do for our farmers and ranchers is to provide them agricultural assistance now.
Playing politics with the livelihoods of the very people who grow our crops and feed the world is unacceptable. That is why getting our work done on the farm bill on time is so important, and it is something that the Republican majority will deliver on next year.
So for this Congress, the Democratic leader, once again, has earned an F for failing to pass a timely farm bill.
With a C-plus on the NDAA and multiple Fs, we have to wonder, What has Senator Schumer been doing all year? What has the Senate been doing all year if we haven't done our work on time? What has happened?
The answer is, we have simply squandered our time. There are 365 days in a year. According to my colleague, the incoming Senate majority leader John Thune, in 2024, the Senate had been in session only 116 days out of 365--116 days--as of today. Last year, we were in session a little bit longer, 124 days. But this year, we had nine Mondays during the regular session weeks where the Senate took an extra recess day off. So we came in on Tuesday and left on Thursday. Honestly, looking at it, we only worked about 2\1/2\ days a week.
I am relieved that the incoming majority leader is going to put this Chamber back to work and produce our work on time next year.
The majority leader has also wasted a significant part of the year with the summer of show votes, when he could have been getting this other essential work done. Show votes are something that he knows are not going to pass but are designed for political messaging or to embarrass the opposing political party.
We voted on a number of bills that were never intended to pass. We voted on a tax package that hadn't even been considered here in the Senate by the Finance Committee mere hours before the Senate was scheduled for a recess.
This is a huge bill that hadn't received any input from the Senate Finance Committee--none. It could not have been more clear that the majority leader was playing games, not actually trying to produce a legislative result.
So the only subject where the Democratic leader was remotely successful was this last one here, procrastination. He gets an A. But no one takes a class in procrastination. Recess is not a subject that receives a grade either.
In short, this is an embarrassing report card for the majority leader and the Democratic majority this last year.
It is no surprise, given this lack luster performance, that the American people chose a different direction in the November 5 election.
While I am disappointed, I am very much looking forward to working with my Republican colleagues and President Trump and any willing Democrat who is willing to join us to make sure we can report back to the American people with some better news and a better report card next year.
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