Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act of 2010

Floor Speech

Mr. BARRASSO. I ask unanimous consent to be allowed to engage in a colloquy with my colleagues.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. BARRASSO. As Members of this body know, for the past 9 months I have come to the floor every week to offer a doctor's second opinion on the new health care law. I do this as someone who has practiced medicine, taken care of families around the State of Wyoming for a quarter of a century.

Each week I repeatedly criticize another one of the unintended consequences of this health care law, a law that I think is bad for patients, bad for providers--the nurses and the doctors who take care of those patients--and bad for the taxpayers.

Americans heard how this law breaks most of the President's promises about health care reform. That is why, on election day, Americans across our country spoke out. They called on Washington to work to repeal and replace this law. The Republicans have answered. We realize we cannot just object to the law, we must do our best to repeal and replace it. That is why I am delighted this morning to be joined on the floor by Senator Wicker from Mississippi. He is joining me to talk about his new bill that he is introducing today that will allow State officials to challenge Federal regulations before these regulations actually go into effect. This will allow States to fight back against outrageous health care regulations that continue to be written.

With that, I would like to ask my colleague if he would please share with the body and with the country the remarkable bill that he is introducing today.

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Mr. BARRASSO. Well, I am very impressed by what the Senator have come up with. This leadership position takes that next step forward to protect our rights that he and I believe are in the Constitution and apply to the people of our States and apply to the people of this country.

One would hope everyone would join in, and I ask unanimous consent to be added as an original cosponsor of this legislation.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. BARRASSO. The Senator mentioned the unelected bureaucrats in our comments. There was a story today in the New York Times. I would like to ask a couple of questions of the Senator from that story because I think it gets to the point he is making. This was by Eric Lichtblau and Robert Pear.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record this story from today's New York Times.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record...

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Mr. BARRASSO. It talks about Federal rulemakers. That is whom I believe we are talking about, these unelected bureaucrats.

Federal rule makers, long the neglected stepchildren of Washington bureaucrats, suddenly find themselves at the center of power--

The bureaucrats--

as they scramble to work out details of hundreds of sweeping financial and health care regulations that will ultimately affect most Americans.

We are talking about not just the health care law but also the financial regulations.

The one part I want to ask the Senator about says:

But the laws were so broad and complex that executive-branch regulators will have wide leeway in determining what the rules should say and how they should be carried out.

Well, isn't that why we need this piece of legislation--to let the States get in there before some of these rules and regulations are put onto the people of Mississippi, the people of Wyoming, the people all across the country?

Mr. WICKER. Well, the Senator is absolutely correct. And this coming from the New York Times in particular, this article is an astounding bit of information for the American people, and they need to know about it. I think the American people have the quaint idea that their elected officials, both in the executive branch and in the legislative branch, should be the center of power. I did not come to Washington to be powerful. But at least I have to stand before my constituents every so often and get their approval. What this article says is that the bureaucrats are now at the center of power because of this ObamaCare legislation and the financial services legislation.

We have enacted, over my vote and over the vote of the Senator from Wyoming, a 2,700-page health care overhaul. Yet we are told the main thing it does is empower bureaucrats and make them the decisionmakers. Certainly, if this is the result of this unfortunate piece of legislation, a Governor or a speaker of the house of representatives at the State level ought to be able to quickly and expeditiously go to Federal court and say: Wait a minute, this violates the 10th amendment. All we are saying is that they need a path to go quickly to the Federal courts and challenge this.

I am sure the Senator noticed this--this is just one example. In neighboring Bethesda, MD, this new ObamaCare law has resulted in 200 health regulators rushing to a new facility there and paying twice the fair market value. This is Uncle Sugar coming in. They can pay as much money as they want. So they pay twice the fair market value in rent, and they have taken over three floors of a suburban office building to begin getting started on actually writing the rules that will apply this Federal mandate to the people. It is amazing.

You know, actually, I will say this to my friend: When we talk about defunding the Federal Government, I would like for our Appropriations Committees, our investigative committees, both House and Senate, to look at how they got the right to pay twice the fair market value.

Mr. BARRASSO. Well, it is astonishing. I know the people of Wyoming as well as the people of Mississippi always oppose Washington's wasteful spending, but when I read that the health care officials are leasing more than 70,000 square feet of space on three floors of this office building in Bethesda for 230 employees, rushing to rulemaking, and see that the government--Washington--agreed to pay over $51 per usable square foot, compared with the average of less than $30 a square foot in Bethesda--why? Because it wanted to get the operation running in July. They were rushing to get to this.

But it says that this may only be the beginning. This may only be the beginning. A recent report--not by my colleague from Mississippi and not by me but by the Congressional Research Service--says that the publication of rules under the health care law could stretch out for decades to come.

That is why I am going to cosponsor this legislation. I have great concern about States rights and individual rights being trampled on by a Washington government that is out of control in terms of spending, and it is doing it in spite of the cries of the American people.

So I congratulate and compliment my colleague from Mississippi for bringing this piece of legislation to the Senate today and thank him for joining me on the floor as part of a doctor's second opinion because you don't have to be a doctor to know that this health care law is not good for patients, it is not good for providers, it is not good for taxpayers. As more and more people see the rules and the regulations come, they will once again see the broken promises by this President, who said: If you like your health care program, you get to keep it, and then they turn 2 pages in the rules and regulations into 121 pages which said, for many people in this country, they are not going to be able to keep what they have, they are not going to be able to keep what has been promised them, and it is because the rules and the regulations are so complicated. And the rulemaking continues.

Mr. WICKER. If I might add, this is really a new chapter in the history of the American Federal Government. According to the senior vice president of the American Benefits Council:

There has never been a period like what we are going through now, in terms of the sheer volume and complexity of rule-making.

My friend, this is unprecedented in American history. The scope, the cost, the magnitude of this legislation is unprecedented, according to the American Benefits Council. And the point of my bill is that that does violence to the Bill of Rights, it does violence to the intent of the Founding Fathers that the Federal Government be limited in its power and scope and that we leave most of the rights we are endowed with by our creators to the people and to the States themselves. So it is a great privilege to join my colleague today in making this point.

Mr. BARRASSO. With that, I thank and congratulate my colleague for his vision and his foresight and his leadership because this is, I believe, how the Founding Fathers would have seen it. I believe those who wrote the Constitution would be on board with this piece of legislation to say, as the 10th amendment does say, ``The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.''

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

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