Patent Reform Act of 2011

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I rise to speak on an issue that is very important to me. The immediate subject I am going to address is an amendment I am going to propose to our pending patent reform legislation. This amendment calls upon the Senate to get the sense of the Senate that we need a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

As I prepared for this day, I reviewed the maiden speeches of a number of Senators who served in this august body, and I have seen a consistent theme in the speeches that have been given over the course of the last 50 or 60 years. Over and over, they address spending. These issues have spilled over, Congress after Congress, until the point we have reached today, the point at which our national debt stands at an astounding figure, close to $15 trillion.

As I like to say, $15 trillion is a lot of money. A lot of people do not make $15 trillion in a whole year. Even when you divide $15 trillion by 300 million Americans, you are left with a figure of about $50,000 a head. This is not an inconsequential number.

This is not a problem any of us created. It is a problem each of us inherited. Yet it is a problem I think none of us wants to leave to our successors. It is a problem that requires us to do something different than we have done in the past, and by this I mean I think we need procedural, structural, and indeed constitutional reform. We need to put Congress in a straitjacket because we have been unwilling or unable in the past to make the difficult spending decisions that have to be made.

In the past, there has been a great debate between, on the one hand, some Republicans who have been unwilling to cut some programs, to consider in any context cuts in the area of, say, national defense; you have had others, perhaps from the other party, who have been unwilling to consider any cuts to any entitlement program. But we are now faced with a scenario in which both sides of the aisle can understand that our perpetual deficit spending habit places in jeopardy every single aspect of the operations of the Federal Government.

To paint one scenario, I would like to point out that the budget projections produced by the White House just a couple weeks ago predicted, based on a fairly optimistic set of projections, that over the next 10 years we will acquire enough new debt that, when added to our existing debt, will cause us to be spending almost $1 trillion every single year just on interest on our national debt. To put that in perspective, $1 trillion is more than we currently spend on Social Security in an entire year. It is more than we currently spend on Medicare and Medicaid combined in an entire year. It is significantly more than we spend on national defense in any year. This $1 trillion number is one that could actually be much larger if some of these projections turn out not to be correct.

We now face a moment when both liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, regardless of what they most want to protect in their Federal Government, have to realize that what we most want to protect is placed in grave jeopardy by our current spending practices.

I am troubled by the fact that as we approach debate surrounding a continuing resolution this week, a continuing resolution that is likely to operate for just a few weeks to keep the Government funded, we are still talking about adding, on an annualized basis, to our national debt at a rate exceeding $1.5 trillion a year. I think the American people deserve better. I know they demand better.

Some of the things we saw in the 2010 election cycle portend something much greater for what we are going to see in the 2012 election cycle. The polls support the fact that what we can see from the 2010 election cycle is that Americans want Congress to balance its budget. They want us to do something more than just talking about it. They want us to put ourselves in a straitjacket.

Benjamin Franklin used to say: He will cheat without scruple who can without fear. I think the congressional corollary to that might be that Congress, which can continue to engage in perpetual deficit spending, will continue to do so unless or until they are held accountable by the people or required by that Congress to put itself in a straightjacket. That is the straightjacket we need. That is why I am proposing this amendment so, at a minimum, before this patent reform legislation, which I support wholeheartedly, moves forward, we can all agree as Members of this body that we need a constitutional amendment to keep us from doing what is slowly killing the economy of the United States and gradually mounting a severe challenge, an existential threat to every Federal program that currently exists.

I invite each of my colleagues to vote for and support this amendment and to support S.J. Res. 5, a constitutional amendment I have proposed that would put Congress in this type of straitjacket.

Here is, in essence, what S.J. Res. 5 says: If adopted by Congress by the requisite two-thirds margins in both Houses and approved by the States, three-fourths of them as required by article V of the Constitution, it would tell Congress it may not spend more than it receives in a given year, it may not spend more than 18 percent of GDP in a year, it may not raise taxes, and it may not raise the national debt ceiling without a two-thirds supermajority vote in both Houses of Congress. That is the kind of permanent binding constitutional measure I think we need in order to protect the government programs we value so highly and upon which 300 million Americans have come to depend, in one way or another.

I urge each of my colleagues to support this amendment and to support S.J. Res. 5.

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

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