Jobs, Energy, Families, and Disaster Refief Act of 2008 - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

JOBS, ENERGY, FAMILIES, AND DISASTER RELIEF ACT OF 2008--MOTION TO PROCEED -- (Senate - July 28, 2008)

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I am trying to visualize somewhere in America where a father walks into his living room and says to his son: What are you watching?

The son says: Well, I was watching C-SPAN. I was watching the Senate.

The father says to the son: What were they talking about?

The son says: Filling the tree.

The father says: What is that?

The son says: I don't have any idea.

The father says: You would think they would talk about things that were important to us. Turn off the television. Watch the cartoons.

I listened to this debate and wondered how we can get tied into knots, just as we have today. I will tell you that we had 34 bills before us today. They were in a package. These are 34 bills that were considered noncontroversial bills--bills that had passed the House of Representatives without dissenting votes, in many cases, or overwhelmingly on a bipartisan basis. These are bills reported out of our committees--including the Judiciary Committee Senator Specter and I serve on--unanimously. These are bills which, in the ordinary course of business in the ordinary history of the Senate, wouldn't have caused a ripple because they had been agreed to and written and both sides said: This is a good idea; let's do it.

However, under the rules of the Senate--and it is a unique institution--any Senator can object to any bill. They can stop the train and say: Don't go forward, don't consider the bill, if one Senator--just one Senator--should object. Well, in this case, the Senator from Oklahoma, Mr. Coburn, objected.

Senator Coburn is a friend of mine. We use that term a lot around here, but this is for real. He is a friend of mine. He is the ranking Republican on a subcommittee that I chair, the Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law of the Judiciary Committee, and we have done a lot of work together. In fact, he has been the cosponsor of some bills that have been enacted and signed by the President which I initiated and he joined me, so we truly do have a good working relationship.

I think he has a peculiar fiscal philosophy, and here is what it is. There are two kinds of bills that we consider. One is an authorization bill, and the other is an appropriations bill. Let me use an example.

That same father I mentioned earlier says to his son one day: Why don't you go out and buy a bicycle.

The kid says: You mean I can buy a bicycle? Great, he says.

At that point, the son says: Can I have some money?

The father says: No, we don't have the money, but you can buy one if you want to.

The kid says: I don't have the money.

That turns out to be the important question--not whether you have the permission to buy the bicycle but whether you have the money to buy the bicycle. Permission--authorization. The money to make it work: appropriation. So the 34 bills here are all permissions to spend money. That is it. They don't provide any money. That is another part of the process.

I think that is the critical difference which Senator Coburn does not acknowledge. We are authorizing these. We are permitting these things to occur, but we are not spending the money for them. That comes later. We have a finite, limited amount of money to spend in our Federal budget and we will decide: Will this be the priority or will it be something else? Senator Coburn believes that if you give permission, all the money is going to be spent. Historically, that never happens, but that is his philosophy, that is his point of view. So he objected to some 34 bills.

UNANIMOUS CONSENT REQUEST--S. 3297

Now, it is my understanding that there is a consent script available which I would like to propound before Senator Specter leaves the floor.

Of the 34 bills which were included in S. 3297 which was considered today, Senator Coburn has come to the floor and asked that 1 or 2 of the bills be modified, changed, and passed. I wish to make sure it is clear for the record that we are asking consent on our side, unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to S. 3297, the bill in its entirety, that the bill be read three times, passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements be printed at the appropriate place in the Record as if read.

Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Coburn, who could not be present, on his behalf, I am objecting.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, the bills I just asked to be passed and the ones which were not passed earlier today, some 34 bills, were permission bills, authorization bills. I think they were meritorious and valuable and very important--for some families in America, more important than maybe anything else we would consider.

What kind of issues do they take up? You have heard it here on the floor: Lou Gehrig's disease. Just down the block from where I live in Springfield, a fellow I practiced law with had a son who contracted Lou Gehrig's disease. He didn't last long. His wife would come to me begging that we do more in medical research so that her son would be spared. When it became obvious he couldn't survive, she still pushed for more research, saying no family should ever have to go through this again. Well, we understand that, all of us do--anyone who has had an illness in the family--and that is what the bill did. The bill would establish a registry of Lou Gehrig patients around the United States to track them, to gather information, to try to find out a way to find a cure.

Now, who is going to object to that bill? Well, it turns out that in the House of Representatives, the bill was passed 411 to 3--overwhelmingly passed. It came to the Senate in May of last year, over a year ago, and was reported by one of our committees, the HELP Committee, on December 4 of last year, and that is when Senator Coburn objected to it and put a hold on the bill. He didn't want it to go forward. I think this is a good bill. I don't know who would argue against it, but one Senator did, so it became the top bill on our list of 34.

Most people remember Christopher Reeve, who played Superman in the movie and then got involved in an equestrian accident and was paralyzed and spent the rest of his life pushing for more research and more work to deal with paralysis. Well, there was a bill introduced that pushed for paralysis research and rehab at the National Institutes of Health. It was so overwhelmingly popular that it passed the House with a unanimous vote, by voice vote. No one dissented. It came over here, and Senator Coburn said: No, I am stopping that bill--a bill that Senator Cochran of Mississippi and Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts offered involving stroke victims for comprehensive systems to treat these stroke victims to save their lives and to save their faculties. It passed by a voice vote in the House of Representatives with not a single dissenting vote. When it came over here, despite support by our Senate committee, Senator Coburn objected.

The Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act, this is one I am familiar with. It deals with women suffering from postpartum depression. Sadly, many of these women are not only sad but resort to suicide. This bill was trying to work out a way so that new mothers would have someone to speak to.

I met with some of those mothers in my State who have been through postpartum depression. It turns out everybody is focusing on the new baby and how beautiful it is, and mom is over there as blue as can be, not going to see another doctor for some time. Well, she will see a pediatrician with the baby, and we were trying to find a way for pediatricians to be sensitive to this and try to help deal with depression before it got more serious. That is what the bill is all about. It passed the House 382 to 3 on October 15 of last year. Senator Coburn held it up. He said he didn't want this bill to go forward.

The Vision Care For Kids Act, this one establishes a State grant for the Centers for Disease Control to help kids be tested to make sure their vision is good and to help them get glasses if they need it. You would think there is enough there, but there isn't. A lot of kids failing in the classroom just can't see the blackboard or read the computer in front of them. This is why this is necessary. It passed in the House by a voice vote unanimously in October of last year. The lead sponsor, incidentally, is a Republican--Senator Bond of Missouri--and Senator Coburn held up the bill.

The list goes on and on. In the Judiciary Committee, efforts to establish and reauthorize programs for runaway kids; the Emmitt Till Unsolved Civil Rights Act to try to bring to justice those who killed civil rights workers so many years ago; an effort for funding mental health courts to deal with mental illnesses, one of the important elements when it comes to crime in this country; the Child Pornography Prosecution Act--all of those bills, incidentally, passed out of the committee, which Senator Coburn serves on, and then he held up the bill after it passed out. It is a long list of bills. Drug Endangerment of Children. All of these bills are designed to deal with real-life problems and issues, and Senator Coburn objected to every single one of them. It was his right to do it.

So we brought these bills together with many others and said: Certainly the Senate, understanding these are bipartisan measures with strong bipartisan support, would want to bring these to the floor and vote on them. Senator Coburn could have voted no. If that is what he wants to do, it is his right to vote no, but that isn't what he wanted to do. He wanted to preclude the opportunity for anyone else to vote on this bill; he put a hold on the bill.

We had a test rollcall on this earlier today, and if you followed the debate earlier, you would know that only three Republicans joined us on the Democratic side. We didn't get the 60 votes we needed. This package of bills, all the things we mentioned, and many other items, unfortunately, are not going to go forward.

Now, it is not right that bills that are so important, that have strong bipartisan support, that have been carefully worked on, won't even get the chance to pass. I think it is unfortunate. It is unfortunate that a number of Republican Senators, even those who cosponsor these bills, would not come forward and join us in this effort. I don't know that we will have the time to get back to this, but I hope we will at some point. Senator Reid has said, and rightly so, we are running out the time. We just can't keep doing this over and over.

The last point I wish to make is there has been a lot of talk about suffering here. Most of the people who are suffering here are staff who have to weather these storms of oratory on the floor of the Senate. Senator Reid brought up that issue because some people are threatening we are going to stay in session all the way through August to deal with energy. Senator Reid made the point that it is no hardship for him, nor for our side of the aisle if that happens, if that is what we end up doing, and that, in fact, there are many others on the other side of the aisle who are anxious to get home for political reasons in a pretty tough election year. That was the point he made. He didn't diminish the suffering the American people are feeling all across this country, of families who are trying to pay gasoline bills. I hope tomorrow will see a better day and a more reasonable approach.

We have tried repeatedly to bring up an energy bill and offer the Republicans a chance to bring up their amendments, we would bring up our amendments, subject them to a 60-vote margin, and let the better amendment win. They rejected that last week. I hope they will reconsider. I hope they will understand, as we do, that it is much more important for us to take up bills such as the ones that were objected to today so that some families across America with genuine concerns can have their concerns addressed by the Senate.

Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I apologize publicly on the record if I said at some point that Senator Coburn was holding a bill that he wasn't. I certainly don't question his statements in the Record about which bills he held. I will tell you that there is a small group--and he is the most visible member of that group on his side--that is now in the practice of routinely holding routine bills. If he is not the reason why some of these were held, I hope the Record will be clear. But it won't, because they are secret holds--except for you, and I acknowledge that you are very open when you hold a bill.

Mr. COBURN. If the Senator will yield for a second.

Mr. DURBIN. Yes, without losing my right to the floor.

Mr. COBURN. I write a letter the day I hold it to the committee and the majority leader and minority leader and the sponsors. They know what I am holding. I will make one point to you. Most of the bills we hold at first are held so we can read them. It is a strange thing. We ought to read the bills before we say let them go.

Mr. DURBIN. I acknowledge that. As I tried to make clear, the Senator from Oklahoma does this differently and more honorably than some. Some sneak around and don't want people to know. I have the same attitude. If I am going to put on a hold, I want them to know why. Maybe they will change or withdraw a nomination. But it is very open and clear. I try to do it that way.

Having said that, let me say, if you object to the Lou Gehrig registry, it passed through the committee you serve on, it was reported to calendar in December of last year with an amendment. It must have been debated in committee to some extent. You had a chance then to amend it, to vote against it, and from what I hear you say on the floor today, you would vote against it today. That should be your right. I would defend your right to do that.

But I think it reaches a different level where you say I don't have a right to vote for it if you are opposed to it, and that you are going to put a hold on it and won't let the measure come to the floor for a vote.

If the measure came to the floor for a vote and the Senator from Oklahoma had spoken against it and voted against, he would have done the right thing. But to deny me a chance to vote for this bill, I think that goes too far. I do.

Whether we go through one or the other, I can discuss each one the Senator brought up, but that is the underlying issue. Should I have the right to deny him even a chance to vote on this bill? That is the position he has taken on some of these bills. That, to me, is troubling.

I will say in terms of fiscal sanity, I do wish to make a statement for the Record. The current administration inherited a surplus. The current administration inherited a budget surplus. It was the first time in 30 years that the Federal Government had a surplus.

Bill Clinton, for whatever his faults might have been, put America's economic house in order. We started generating a surplus in the Federal Treasury. Why? Some taxes were raised, some spending was cut, but it was done in such a way that it worked. The economy grew dramatically. Jobs, new businesses, housing grew dramatically, and we reduced the deficit of this country by generating a surplus.

This President inherited that situation and brought to it his own George W. Bush economic philosophy. I would not attribute it to the Senator from Oklahoma unless he wants to say that was his philosophy, too, but it was a philosophy that, best said, the best way to give this economy more is to give tax breaks to the wealthiest people in this country, cut taxes for the wealthiest people and a thousand flowers will flourish.

Unfortunately, September 11, 2001, occurred. We found ourselves spending a lot of money for the security of this Nation and then found ourselves in two wars. This President continued to call for tax cuts in the midst of a war. He became unique in American history. No President has ever done that.

The Senator from Oklahoma, the fiscal conservative that he is, must acknowledge it is mindless to have tax breaks in the midst of a war. You know the war is an add-on cost to your overall economy and budget, and then to cut revenue--that is what he did. As a result of that action by the President and his decision to initiate a war in Iraq that has gone unpaid for now into its sixth year, we have now piled up the biggest deficit in the history of the United States of America.

The Senator from Oklahoma is vigilant on bills that come that may cost us money in the future, but his party and his President have led us into the deepest deficit in our history. Having inherited a surplus, President Bush drove us into a fiscal mess, where we are borrowing money from all over the world. The last thing I will say is this, and I know the Senator from Oklahoma is never going to agree with me, but I want to make a point. If every one of these 34 measures that he and his side objected to today had passed, it would not add a penny to the deficit tomorrow, not a penny, and not next year either. We have to pass the spending bill. These bills give permission for a museum. These bills don't spend a penny for a museum, not one.

I am on the Appropriations Committee. We sit there, and they give us a finite pot of money and say: Take your pick. You want some new programs? Go ahead, fund them, but you cannot fund the old programs if you fund the new ones. You have a finite pot of money. Make your choices.

That is what happens in appropriations and on the floor of the Senate. That is a point which the Senator and I have debated repeatedly and probably will never resolve between us. But we have a genuine difference of opinion, and the only thing I have supporting me is a statement in the Record from the Office of Management and Budget saying I am right, he is wrong. Don't take it personally, but it was put in the Record.

I say to the Senator, I don't think it was right what happened today, that we stopped consideration of 34 bills. If he wanted to have his recorded vote as no on any one of those bills, it was his right to do it. But to stop me from trying to promote treatment of people with Lou Gehrig's disease and paralysis, because I think these are good bills, I do not think that is appropriate.

Today, we tried to get the Senate to rule the other way, and they did not. The Senator's side prevailed. But only three Republicans would join us, and now these bills are not likely to be passed.

I yield the floor.

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