Unanimous-Consent Request - S. 3421

Floor Speech

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, it should be perfectly clear by now that Democrats here in Washington have no intention of being encumbered by the will of the American people. Whether it is health care, financial reform, creating private sector jobs, spending, debt, or even the oilspill, Americans say they want one thing and Democrats do another.

And we are seeing the same thing in the ongoing debate over the deficit extenders bill that is on the floor. Americans are anxious in a way they have never been about our monstrous national debt. Yet for nearly 3 weeks now, Democrats in Congress have been arguing among themselves not about how much they should cut the debt down but about how much they should increase it.

So we can add this to the list of crises Americans are begging Congress to address but which Democrats are either ignoring or exploiting to advance their agenda. The White House likes to talk about inflection points. Well, for most Americans, a $13 trillion debt should have marked an inflection point for Democrats on the issue of debt. But the debate over this extenders bill has shown Democrats to be oblivious to the gravity of this crisis.

At a moment when certain European countries appear to be coming apart because of their own debt, Democrats in Washington still can't break the habit. Economists are warning us every day to get the debt under control. Just today, in fact, it was reported that Germany's Economy Minister is pleading with the Obama administration to cut spending and to restore fiscal balance or risk instability.

Yet nearly 3 weeks into the debate over the extenders bill, Democrats still can't agree to pass it without borrowing more money to pay for it. Republicans offered a fully offset 30-day extension of this bill that didn't just cover its cost but actually reduced the deficit in the process. Democrats rejected it. We offered an amendment that would have provided a long term extension of the expired provisions and lowered the deficit by $55 billion over 10 years. Democrats rejected that too.

This should be an easy one, but Democrats are making it difficult because they just can't seem to bring themselves to pay for legislation.

But the American people aren't conflicted on this issue. And they want us to show we are serious, that we are willing to make the same kinds of tough choices they themselves have been forced to make in this recession. So I say to my friend from Nevada I am going to ask, now, a unanimous consent.

I again ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 411, S. 3421; further, that the bill be read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table. Before the chair rules, for clarity, this is a paid-for 30-day extension of the extenders bill.

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, our good friends on the other side still do not seem to get it. They are twisting and turning, not in an effort to cut the debt but to borrow as much as they can with the minimum votes they need to pass this bill. And the best part of all is their justification. You guessed it. They want to blame President Bush for their own unwillingness to pay for this bill. They say that because the debt grew during his administration they are immune to any criticism for dramatically increasing it themselves.

Well, I have some news for our friends on the other side: Nobody is buying that anymore, because there is not any comparison here. When President Obama took office, the deficits he inherited were projected to $4.3 trillion over the next 10 years. One year later, one year after President Bush left office, the Congressional Budget Office had to put out a revised estimate: After 1 year of Democrats controlling Washington, estimated deficits just over the next decade had nearly doubled to $8.1 trillion, in the middle of a recession; in other words, at a time when projected revenues coming in are actually decreasing.

Or consider this: The largest annual deficit ever accumulated by the previous administration was $455 billion. The largest annual deficit ever accumulated by the previous administration was $455 billion. So what did President Obama do when he took office? He wrote a budget that guarantees average annual deficits of more than double that every year for the next 10 years. More than doubles the largest deficit we had during the Bush years and anticipates that for every year for the next decade.

So the kind of spending and debt Democrats are engaged in and which they are committed to continue year after year is like nothing this country has ever seen. We have never seen anything like this. It threatens not only the livelihoods of our children, it threatens our national security and the very safety net Democrats claim they want to protect.

The fact is, the longer we wait to address this debt in a serious manner, the more that safety net actually frays and the harder this crisis will be to address. At some point a choice has to be made, and that point is now.

I noticed that the President's Chief of Staff had some ideas over the weekend about how to frame up the November elections. I cannot think of a better example of how detached the Democrats seem to be at this moment from the concerns of the American people. Americans want to know what is being done to fix a broken pipe at the bottom of the Gulf, not what is being done to fix the election. The White House might view the upcoming election as its biggest crisis at the moment, but the American people are focused on fixing this pipe and cleaning up this mess. Two months of delays and bureaucratic redtape have done nothing to solve the crisis, but they have done a lot to discredit the kind of big-government solutions that Democrats continue to promote. Every day the oil continues to flow is a day Americans' faith in government ends.

I yield the floor.

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