Press Conference with Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ); Senator John Cornyn (R-TX); Senator John Ensign (R-NV)

Statement

Press Conference with Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ); Senator John Cornyn (R-TX); Senator John Ensign (R-NV)
Subject: Appropriations, SCHIP, FISA

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SEN. KYL: I think we'll go ahead and get started. We're waiting for Senator Ensign, who will be arriving in just a moment.

Let me just mention that in the Republican luncheon just held, Republicans are expressing some significant concerns about the direction the Democrat leadership is taking us.

First of all, the inability to get a single appropriation bill signed by the president portends to more wasteful Washington spending, and Senator Ensign will speak to that and to our strategy in trying to deal with that in just a moment. That's also manifested by the unwillingness of the Democrats to even sit down and talk about, to discuss or negotiate the resolution of the SCHIP bill, which has been vetoed and the House will be dealing with this week. They need to do that for the sake of America's children and America's taxpayers.

And the thing I'd like to speak to briefly is another deficiency of the Democratic leadership, and in this case, emanating from the House of Representatives, where tomorrow the Democratic leadership will be proposing a bill for so-called FISA reform, which utterly fails to protect America's national security and pay any attention whatsoever to the recommendations of Admiral McConnell and our intelligence community about what we need.

Remember that a few months ago, he talked about the fact that we were missing about 66 percent of the intelligence that we should be gathering on al Qaeda abroad, that this was a gaffe that we could not sustain and hope to win the war against these terrorists.

Now, that's the first obligation of government, is to protect our citizenry. And the best way to deal with the threat of the terrorists is to have good intelligence, and yet our basic collection capability was crippled by a court decision relating to the way this was collected and the inability of the Democratic Congress to respond in an appropriate fashion.

We finally were able, at the last minute, to get a bill which marginally dealt with our intelligence collection requirements. Now -- and because that bill was sunsetted after six months -- the Democrats in the House are going to be proposing legislation which is woefully deficient, which ignores the recommendations that were made by Admiral McConnell, that requires for the first time the obtaining of warrants for the collection of foreign intelligence and in other ways (and give it ?) to the collection of that intelligence and fails to provide for the liability, really, for those cell phone companies and others that have cooperated with the United States government helping to collect that intelligence.

This is unacceptable. And it's important for us, I think, to demonstrate the fact that the Democratic leadership in the House does not represent the American people, who overwhelmingly support FISA continuing to provide us the intelligence we need to fight these terrorists. And we're very hopeful that when that bill comes to the Senate, or as our Senate colleagues sit down to work out FISA reform, that we will pay attention to the concerns expressed by the experts in our government, who we've put in charge of gathering the intelligence to help protect us and will write a bill that can be permanent and provide that protection.

I would also note that the House bill is another sunsetted bill after just two years. As I said, this is unacceptable.

So the three specific areas we'd like to talk about today -- and let me turn to Senator Cornyn next to talk about the SCHIP veto override attempt.

SEN. CORNYN: After the president's veto (sustained ?) on SCHIP, I hope that Senator Reid and the Democrat leadership will rethink their decision not to come to the table and to try to reach some compromise to extend the State Children's Health Insurance Program, a program that we all agree should be reauthorized hopefully at a level that represents some fiscal responsibility as well as acknowledging the necessity of providing some assistance to low-income children for their health coverage.

On September the 27th, Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling by another trillion dollars, meaning that for every man, woman and child in America, instead of leaving the country a little bit better off for our children and grandchildren, we're delivering them an IOU for $30,000 each that we're unlikely to repay unless we change our ways.

We're spending from the surpluses of Social Security and Medicare to pay other bills, as well as the civil service retirement system. We see that the baby boomers are now qualifying for Medicare, meaning that we're going to be in red ink by 2013 for Medicare, 2017 for Social Security. And as Senator Kyl said, under the current leadership there has yet to be a single appropriation bill passed. We're not taking care of the basic business of government.

It's in this context that many of us supported a 40 percent increase but rejected a 140 percent in the State Children's Health Insurance Program, especially one that distracts us from the task at hand of providing health coverage for low-income kids and rather covers adults and people in the middle class, often displacing people who have private health insurance in the process.

So I hope that the Democratic leadership will -- now that the president's veto is going to be upheld, which I expect it will be tomorrow in the House -- to rethink their decision not to compromise, will sort of forgo the political gamesmanship and partisan point scoring that seems to dominate so much of what happens here in Washington and get on with taking care of business, particularly when the lives and the health of low-income children are at stake.

SEN. ENSIGN: I want to mention just a couple things before I talk about spending. And one is, I think we need, as Republicans and Democrats, to work together to be more concerned about the security of Americans here at home than we are about the civil rights of foreign terrorists.

And that really is a fundamental difference right now in the bills between what's being considered in the House of Representatives and what the president has proposed. We need to come together as Republicans and Democrats to make sure the security of Americans is considered first.

Secondly, on the SCHIP program, there's no question. Republicans want to continue the SCHIP program, to strengthen it, but we don't want to do it in a way that is fiscally irresponsible. And we want to take care of poor kids first, and that's the bottom line.

And lastly, I want to talk about spending. The last -- this appropriations bill, the (CGF ?) bill and the Labor-HHS bill that is coming before us -- when you add the two together, we're look at close to $12 billion over what the president has requested. In this year's budget climate, we cannot afford to continue to spend more and more and more money. What a lot of people don't realize, it's not just the expenditure of an extra $12 billion on these two bills. That $12 billion gets added in to the baseline next year, and then gets added on top. So that $12 billion over a 10-year period of time looks like several hundred billion dollars. So that's what we have to understand. So were are passing further burdens on to the next generation.

In the last 2006 election cycle, all I heard was -- from the Democrats -- is how they were going to be fiscally responsible, that they were the party that was going to control spending. These bills that are before us today are not keeping that campaign promise, so it's once again time to work together, Republicans and Democrats, and work for the American people to join together and say let's show some fiscal restraint up here, and let's think about the next generation and quit passing this debt on to future generations.

SEN. KYL (?): Questions? (No response.)

SEN. : I guess we persuaded them all. Thank you very much.

Q Senator Cornyn, I have a question about -- (off mike). And you talk about fiscal responsibility, about the whole issue. But when you have Bobbys and Billys and Judys dying of toothache and can't afford to have health insurance, aren't you afraid that Republicans are going to come off looking even more callous and will take more political hits on this by refusing to vote against the president on the veto?

SEN. CORNYN: Well, the problem is that this bill is funded on a unsustainable source of revenue, a tobacco tax on each pack of cigarettes, which will target in many cases the very people that -- families that this bill purports to help. And in the end, we know that there's a cliff in 2012 after which it's either going to have to cut a lot of kids from the SCHIP program or we're going to have to raise taxes in other ways.

Everyone agrees that low-income children should be the beneficiary of this program. Where many of us differ is that it should not be extended to states like Wisconsin, where 75 percent of the beneficiaries of the SCHIP program are adults. And this bill, which purports to cover only the intended population, can in some places, given a presidential waiver, cover up to 400 percent of the poverty level. I think most Americans understand -- and a Gallup poll that was reported in USA Today reflects the fact -- that there are some legitimate fiscal concerns.

That having been said --

SEN. KYL (?): 52-40 was the --

SEN. CORNYN: Fifty-two to 40. And I'll give Senator Kyl -- he remembers better than I do the exact polling question. But the point is that it's not an all-or-nothing proposition. And where I believe that Leader Reid is making a terrible mistake is saying, you know: We're not going to compromise, we're not going to talk, it's my way or the highway. Well, that is exactly what people in my state of Texas think is wrong with Washington; that normal people under normal circumstances would sit down and talk and try to work out an accommodation and agree to a compromise. But when the majority leader says no compromise, we're not interested in talking, basically what it does is strikes fear in the heart of many of the very children we're trying to help.

Q But what do you say to these families now? You're talking about cliffs in 2012. What do you say to the uninsured families now?

SEN. CORNYN: Well, we've continued the SCHIP program, reauthorized it by a continuing resolution till November the 16th, and we've offered an 18-month reauthorization to continue it. There is no debate. We all agree that the program should be continued and should be strengthened and we ought to target the population.

In Texas alone, 500,000 Medicaid-eligible children aren't covered because they haven't been signed up, 200,000 eligible for SCHIP have not been signed up, because we haven't had aggressive recruitment programs to go out and identify people who qualify under the current levels of spending. That ought to be our focus, not spending 400 percent of poverty in New York to cover families making $82,000 a year.

Q Senator, can you describe the political opportunity that you see for your party on the issue of FISA and terrorism coming up in the next week or two?

SEN. ENSIGN: Well, I've always believed that good policy makes good politics. The bottom line is, the FISA bill is the right thing to do for the United States. You know, the politics all shakes out, you know, during election time. We should do what is right for protecting the American people, as I said, and not be so concerned with the, quote, "civil liberties" of a foreign terrorist. This is really fundamental in keeping our homeland safe.

Q This is the one issue where your party is stronger than Democrats -- (off mike).

SEN. ENGLISH: This is an issue where certainly they are not with the American people and we are with the American people.

SEN. : Thank you.

SEN. : Okay, thanks.

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