Recovery Rebates and Economic Stimulus for the American People Act of 2008 -- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

RECOVERY REBATES AND ECONOMIC STIMULUS FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ACT OF 2008--MOTION TO PROCEED -- (Senate - February 04, 2008)

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, if we ended up doing nothing tomorrow, that would be like last Tuesday, last Wednesday, and last Thursday, in which we could never get a vote. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday we could not get a vote because we could not get an agreement on the FISA bill.

Finally, last Thursday night, we get an agreement on the FISA bill, and the majority leader tells me he will give us the paper--in other words, what he wishes to bring up on this stimulus package--last Thursday night. In addition, last Thursday, he says if that is defeated, of course, we will amend the House bill. Neither of those things apparently is going to happen.

No. 1, we got a few moments ago the version of the Senate Finance Committee package that the majority leader wants to call up. We wish to read it. It is a fairly extensive package. Secondly, apparently it is no longer the case that if this package is not approved that we will amend the House bill. We all know the House bill needs to go back because it needs to be fixed because of the illegal immigration problem.

The majority leader has been arguing all along that the House bill was inadequate. So it would make no sense at all, if whatever the final version of the Finance Committee provision is not approved, why we would not want to add seniors and veterans and fix the immigration problem to the House bill.

There is a certain amount of spin in politics, but this is beyond spin. These are the facts. Three days last week--Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday--there were no votes on FISA because we could not get an agreement. Finally, on Thursday, we get an agreement on the FISA amendments, and the majority leader tells me he is going to give us the paper on what he is going to bring up on the stimulus. We got it a few moments ago. It is not unreasonable for the minority to read the proposal. To suggest from that it is a certainty we will not have anything voted on tomorrow, I would suggest to my good friend, the majority leader, is nonsense. We will insist on reading it. It is in the process of being read now. When we read it, we will be happy to communicate further with the distinguished majority leader.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized.

Mr. REID. Mr. President, to show the absolutely

dilatory tactics of this Republican minority, think about last week. My friend, the Republican leader, said we did not have votes last week. Why didn't we have votes last week? They would not let us have votes.

During the time that Rockefeller, Leahy, Bond, and Specter were trying to work something out on FISA, we wanted to finish Indian health. No, you can't do it. You can't do Indian health. Indians can wait another 6 years. They have waited 6 or 7 years during this administration. What is another few weeks for the Indians? They, according to the Republicans, don't matter that much anyway, as they have been treated like--the worst health care we have in America today is on our Indian reservations, and the Republicans don't seem to be at all concerned about that. So Senator Dorgan brought a bill to the floor, and we have been rocked and socked and pushed and pulled. We can't do that either.

The other thing we could have done last week--of course, we have an agreement to do a package that has been held up by the Republicans for a year dealing with bills that are some 45 in number--energy bills--that usually are handled just like that, in wrapup. Oh, no, not now, not with this Republican minority, we do not do them.

I suggested we go to those last week. No. Work out FISA, the President's favorite, his ability to spy. That is what he wants. The problem is that he wants to do it not in keeping with the Constitution, which raises some concern with us and the American people.

So, no, we could not do anything on Indian health, we could not do it on the energy package, until we got an agreement on FISA. It is obvious what is being done here. The Republicans are trying on FISA to do what they did last August. Even though the President has been forced to extend this for 15 days, they now want to do what they did in August: Stall it until the last day so we are forced to do something here and send it to the House so the House has no time to do anything about it.

The House has passed something. What we want to do--what we think is good government--is pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and do it quickly so the House and the Senate--Democrats and Republicans--have an opportunity to work together to come up with something to give to the President that is not 1 minute before midnight on the last day of that legislation.

It is not as if this picture has not been seen before. This is the same picture we had to deal with all last year--all last year. Every inch we have been able to grind out has been tough because there has been a stall that has been ongoing with this White House and this Republican minority.

For 6 years, Congress was ignored by this President--ignored. There was not--in his mind, there was not a legislative branch of Government. He did not have to deal with it because the Republicans in the House and the Senate gave him anything he wanted. Why wasn't there a veto? Because there was nothing to veto. He got everything he wanted.

Last year, suddenly some people in the White House, at least, came to the realization that there was another branch of Government that the Founding Fathers put in the Constitution. So last year they were forced to realize that there was a legislative branch of Government. We had to prove to the President that we were part of the process. We were able to get some things done, but it was difficult, and we had 64 filibusters to overcome. I would have thought this year would be a little different. We have a Presidential election. We have many Senate seats that are up. I would think the Republicans would like to get something done this year. I would have thought this continual stalling that is going on might reflect on these elections we are going to have next November, that maybe there would be a new day in Washington, that the Republicans are used to being in the minority and would try to work with us on a bipartisan basis to get some things done. But it does not appear that is the way it is going to be. If that is the way it is going to be, that is the way it is going to be, and we will continue to work around their dilatory tactics.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Republican leader is recognized.

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, we have before us--last week and this week--two measures that are overwhelmingly bipartisan. We have a FISA proposal--Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act proposal--we tried repeatedly last week to get some votes on, and to no avail. That came out of the Intelligence Committee 13 to 2--the Rockefeller-Bond bill--overwhelmingly bipartisan, which would be signed by the President. That would be a significant accomplishment on a very important issue to the American people.

With regard to the stimulus, the American people witnessed something they rarely see. They saw the Speaker of the House--a Democrat--the leader of the House Republicans, and the Secretary of the Treasury have a joint press conference among the three of them, indicating they had an agreement on a stimulus package that we could pass rapidly.

Senate Republicans have been prepared to do that. It came over to us January 29. The majority leader felt that the Senate Finance Committee needed to reconvene and do it a different way.

This was a situation where you had the Democratic leader of the House, the Republican leader of the House, the Republican leader of the Senate, and the President of the United States all on the same side. That is pretty close to bipartisan. But, no, my good friend, the majority leader, said the Senate needed to do it differently, in spite of the fact that everyone was saying the two most important things to do with regard to a stimulus package were to keep it targeted and do it quickly.

We had an opportunity to do that. We may have an opportunity to do it again. But make no mistake about it, no amount of finger-pointing or no suggesting that just because you file cloture motions, that amounts to a filibuster. Nobody believes that. You can't just run around routinely filing cloture motions on everything and then claim there are filibusters going on.

In fact, the message from the last session was: When you meet in the middle, you get things done. It finally happened in December: an omnibus spending package that met the President's top line, $70 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan without strings attached, an AMT without raising taxes on anybody else, and an energy bill that neither raised taxes nor raised rates in the Southeast. All of that was accomplished at the end by meeting in the middle.

Now, in spite of all of this back-and-forth between my good friend, the majority leader, and myself, we are pretty close on these two issues as well. The American people are expecting us to cooperate. But I repeat: We are going to read the proposal which we got some 15 minutes ago. I don't think anybody in America would think that is an unreasonable request. When we get through reading the new stimulus proposal, which I was told we would get last Thursday night, we will respond to my good friend, the majority leader, and we will see how we can go forward to accomplish two important things for the country. In the end, they will be done and must be done on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis.

I yield the floor.

Mr. REID. Mr. President, to show you, with all due respect, how shallow this statement just made by my friend is, let me just say this: It is a public record, what came out of the Senate Finance Committee. It is a public record. You can read it on the Internet, what is in the stimulus bill. It came out days ago--days ago--not Monday, not today, but days ago. Last week, it was reported out. I believe it was on a Wednesday that it came out. I told my friend that we added LIHEAP to it. One reason I added it is because the Republicans want LIHEAP. Republicans want it. Why not have a chance to vote on it? So to talk about: We want a chance to read this bill--this is really something.

I cannot take any more lectures on the bipartisan nature of the Intelligence bill because it was referred at the same time to the Intelligence Committee and to the Judiciary Committee. That is the way it is sometimes around here. There are joint referrals.

Now, I admire people who have had us take a close look at what is going on with spying in this country, OK? Senator Feingold and Senator Dodd are the leading advocates of taking a look at this bill. Are they saying we are not going to have a bill? No, they are not saying that, but they are saying it needs to be improved. So, yes, it came out of the Intelligence Committee on a bipartisan basis, and that is good, but the Judiciary Committee wanted to put their stamp on it, and they did, and big time. A number of the amendments that were offered today and will be offered whenever we have the ability to go back to the bill are measures that came from the Judiciary Committee.

We want to work to get things done, but we don't need excuses such as: We need to read the proposal--30 hours to read the proposal, and in the meantime we are doing nothing.

Last week, I repeat, we had a lot of we could have done. We were prevented from doing that while this very difficult agreement was reached on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Mr. President, let me just say this: People around here in the Senate, in the country, know me by now. I pretty much call things the way I see them. Sometimes I need to step back a little bit and look at how I see them.

I want to say to my friend, my friend from Kentucky, the word ``shallow'' was improperly descriptive. So I will have that stricken from the record and insert therein--let's see, what word? Something that I didn't agree with, OK?

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Republican leader is recognized.

Mr. McCONNELL. I thank my friend, the majority leader. It is, it seems to me, possible to have a civil and spirited debate without violating rule XIX, and I appreciate his withdrawing that comment.

I see the Republican whip is here on the floor.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Republican leader has the floor.

Mr. McCONNELL. It looks as if I may lose the floor, so I wonder if the Senator from Arizona has a question.

Mr. KYL. I do have a question. This is why I was trying to get the attention of the minority leader just a moment ago.

I am on the Finance Committee, and I am very familiar with the Finance Committee bill. Now, I am certain the majority leader did not mean to suggest that the proposal we were just handed is, in fact, a bill that passed the Finance Committee. It is more than that, is it not?

Mr. McCONNELL. Yes. It is my understanding--again, we just got it 15 minutes ago. In response to the question of the Republican whip, we are not sure what is in it, but our impression is that it may not be what came out of the Finance Committee last Thursday.

Mr. KYL. If I could ask just one more question, I just asked my staff. I haven't had a chance to read it yet. My staff has begun to look at it. I would simply represent what my staff said, which is the first thing they noticed is that there is an additional $1 billion--$1 billion in spending on a program called LIHEAP. Is the minority leader aware of that yet?

Mr. McCONNELL. No, I didn't know because I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but that would make it somewhat different from the Finance Committee bill, I gather.

Mr. KYL. It would, indeed.

The majority leader would like to comment.

Mr. REID. Yes. I said starting at 2 o'clock this afternoon and every chance I get that we added that, they didn't add it. I added it to the Finance Committee. I told the Republican staff, I told my friend this afternoon when we first--the first time we visited that LIHEAP had been added.

Mr. KYL. And there are some additional changes from the Finance Committee version as well; is that not true?

Mr. REID. Yes, there are some minor changes, but I say to my friend, who is a member of the Finance Committee, that we have made some changes, but they are very minor, other than the LIHEAP matter.

Mr. McCONNELL. I am not sure who has the floor, Mr. President. Do I still have the floor?

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Yes.

Mr. McCONNELL. I will be happy to yield the floor.

Mr. DURBIN. Would the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. McCONNELL. I am happy to yield the floor as I see there are others who wish to speak.

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