Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I have come to the floor to express my appreciation for the ranking member of the Budget Committee, Senator Sessions, and to express many of the same concerns I know he has articulated.

One of the most basic responsibilities of any business or family or, frankly, of Congress itself is to pass a budget. But, as the Senator from Alabama pointed out--and it has been pointed out time and time again--Congress has failed for more than 800 days--800 days--to perform one of its most basic and fundamental responsibilities, and that is to take up and pass a budget.

Even though we haven't passed a budget and taken up a budget, that doesn't mean the spending has stopped. Indeed, the spending goes on in a reckless sort of way. We have spent $7.3 trillion since the last budget was passed, and we have increased the national debt by $3.2 trillion.

Now the Senate is considering a spending bill, an appropriations bill, before we have even passed a budget. It strikes me that is exactly backward. We should be passing and debating a budget first before we then take up appropriations bills. This is not the way Congress should operate.

Now, taxpayers who might be watching this on C-SPAN or elsewhere or in the gallery may be asking themselves, well, how can Congress spend money without having a budget in place, because we know a budget is a very important form of self-discipline. It requires us to identify what our priorities are. What are the things we have to spend money on? What are things we would like but we can put off until tomorrow or next year? What are the things we would like to have but we really can't afford? The fact is, Congress has been operating in an undisciplined and extravagant sort of way not with our money but with the taxpayers' money and, even worse, with the money these young men and women who are sitting in front of me are going to have to pay because our legacy to them will be a burden of debt which will limit their opportunity and their prosperity.

As Senator Sessions, our ranking member, has pointed out, this is not only a bad idea, this is not only bad policy, this is not only a breach with our precedent and policies, there is, in fact, a Budget Act rule that prohibits what is going on; that is, spending money without a budget in place. It violates the Senate rules.

Everybody knows spending money without a budget in place is not fiscally responsible. Of course, I would say to the distinguished Senator from South Dakota, we all support our military and our veterans, and there is no greater responsibility of the Federal Government than to defend our citizens and to make sure the needs of our troops and veterans are met. But Congress should not, in the interest of doing something that is important, circumvent its own rules.

Taxpayers deserve transparency. With transparency comes accountability. And without a budget, taxpayers get neither.

We know what has been going on in the absence of Congress doing its job. Indeed, the President's own proposed budget would have vastly expanded the debt and the deficits, and that is why it lost when we brought it to the floor and said we want to vote on it. It lost 97 to 0. No member of the opposing party, the President's own party, voted for the President's proposed budget because it was irresponsible. It did nothing to solve the problem of reckless spending, deficits, and unsustainable debt.

So what are we left with? Well, we are told that on August 2 the Secretary of the Treasury says we will run out of money. Rather than having a budget debated and voted on in front of the American people where every American citizen could watch it and see what is going on and call our offices and express their concerns either supporting that budget or saying, no, Members of Congress ought to change it by offering an amendment, what we are given now by the President is secret negotiations behind closed doors. I assume it will be rolled out at some point, and we will be told: Take it or leave it. August 2, we are out of money. And Mr. Senator, Madam Senator, Madam Congressperson, you can't do your most fundamental job; that is, have a debate in the light of day in front of the American people.

Now, does this ring a bell? It seems to me this is starting to be a habit--a bad habit. It started with the health care bill. It was rammed through Congress. It was a product of secret negotiations. All sorts of special deals were cut behind closed doors. Only now are we really beginning to see what the consequences of those special deals were and the costs that were vastly underestimated in the health care bill.

I hate to say this, but President Obama has failed to lead on the debt ceiling. First, we know he called for a clean up-or-down vote without any cuts or any entitlement reform. That is the first thing he called for. Thank goodness he has moved away from that position, but there are problems yet. But when he was a Senator in 2006, he said, ``Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally.'' At the time, he also said, ``It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies.'' That was back in 2006 when then-Senator Obama made those statements. So today we are presented with a much different officeholder--the President of the United States--who is now demagoging those who hold the same truths he espoused himself in 2006, back when our debt and our deficits were much smaller than they are today.

This isn't a matter of the President not understanding the problem we find ourselves in because he appointed a bipartisan commission, the Simpson-Bowles commission, that reported back in December in a report called ``A Moment of Truth'' which laid out in sobering detail the unsustainability of our national debt, the reckless spending that had gone on, and the borrowing from the Chinese and other governments. But rather than the President taking up the report of his own fiscal commission, he simply ignored it. He ignored it in the State of the Union Message. He certainly ignored it in his proposed budget, which was dead on arrival over here, without a single Democrat voting for it.

In essence, the President has outsourced his leadership responsibilities to others. We know the President's current proposal, if one can call it that--and, frankly, the devil is in the details, and while the House has passed a budget, while the Simpson-Bowles commission has made a recommendation, as well as the Domenici-Rivlin bipartisan recommendation, we have yet to see the President's plan. Yes, he has held press conferences, he has bashed those rhetorically who have held the very same position he held in 2006, but he has failed to lead and offer a plan to deal with this impending crisis.

In fact, the President's current rhetoric--I don't think we can dignify it by calling it a plan--is significantly to the left of his own bipartisan Simpson-Bowles recommendations. He is certainly to the left of Simpson-Bowles when it comes to spending--calling for much more spending, no cuts but continued spending. He is to the left of Simpson-Bowles when it comes to taxes, when ``more'' is the only word he seems to know when it comes to taxes--more taxes. In fact, when the President says we are going to cut $1 trillion, let's say, or $2 trillion, but we are going to raise taxes $$2 trillion, what does that net? That means no net change in the size of the Federal Government, and that means no real downpayment on our national debt or deficit. It is a sleight of hand. It is phony. It is designed to give the appearance of doing something serious while doing nothing serious at all.

We know the President has failed to lead in other ways. He has delegated or outsourced his responsibility to the Vice President. It took only a few weeks ago for the President to finally step up and engage personally, and we find that more often than not he proposed phony solutions such as changing the depreciation schedule for corporate jet owners, dealing with the tax treatment of oil and gas companies, and changing an accounting rule called ``last in, first out.'' But the facts are that those changes, even if adopted, would be a drop in the bucket. They would do nothing significant or serious to deal with our huge deficits and our unsustainable debt.

Unfortunately, the President's own personal engagement is frequently nothing more than personal attacks. His recent press conferences have been full of name-calling and straw man attacks that are, frankly, beneath the dignity of the office of President of the United States. Instead of being a Commander in Chief, it is more like he has decided: I am going to be campaigner in chief. I am not going to deal with the problem. I am going to just look at winning the next election.

Then we read yesterday that even in private the President is throwing temper tantrums like he did yesterday and stomping out of the meeting at the White House--again, failing to show leadership.

But the most cynical thing the President has done, the most cynical abdication of leadership he has displayed so far is his new threat to hold seniors, our veterans, and our troops hostage unless Congress will agree to job-killing tax increases immediately. This is shameful behavior.

We all know that even if the August 2 deadline passes without a deal, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the U.S. Treasury will still have enough revenue--about $172 billion--to pay for Social Security benefits, to pay for Medicaid and Medicare, to pay Active-Duty military, and other national priorities. Let me repeat: The only reason seniors and our troops will see their checks stop coming is if the Obama administration decides to make other spending a priority, if the Obama administration chooses to hold our troops and seniors hostage just so they can raise taxes.

This is another amazing display of cynicism, or I guess the most charitable way I can say it: short term memory. The President himself said last December the reason we should not raise taxes in a fragile economic recovery is because it would be bad for job creation. It would further discourage job creation at a time when we need jobs badly.

Well, let me say just a word about tax increases and why this side of the aisle believes so strongly that tax increases are not the answer to our debt crisis.

As one President famously said:

The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession because that would just suck up--take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.

Well, the President who said that was President Barack Obama back in 2009. The President makes our case for us.

Another President said low taxes help ``millions of entrepreneurs ..... hire new workers.'' Oh, yes, that was again President Barack Obama when he signed the extension of tax relief last December.

Then there was another President, somebody our Nation holds in high regard, who happens to have been a Member of the other political party, who said:

The final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system. .....

That was President John F. Kennedy in 1962. President Kennedy also said:

In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now. .....

He said--and he was exactly right:

Only full employment can balance the budget, and tax reduction can pave the way to that employment.

The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.

He had it exactly right. We need to not only cut spending, but we need to grow revenue. The best way to grow revenue is to get more taxpayers, to get more people back to work. The reason Federal revenue is so low is not because tax rates are too low or people are not taxed enough, it is because too many people are out of work.

When people do not have a job, they do not pay taxes, they do not pay their home mortgages, and they lose their homes. We are for more people getting back to work. We have tried the failed stimulus, the goal of which was to keep unemployment below 8 percent. We know that failed. Yet we racked up another $800 billion in debt.

So why don't we try the old-fashioned way: take our boot off the necks of the job creators in America to make it easier, not harder, to create jobs, to provide incentives for entrepreneurs to start new businesses, to help existing small businesses expand their business. But they cannot do it, and they will not do it with uncertainty about their taxes, with the regulatory overreaching and other policies coming out of Washington, DC.

Republicans are holding the line against the President's demand for higher taxes for a very simple reason. President Kennedy was right about taxes back in 1962, and President Barack Obama was right about taxes as recently as last December. Unfortunately, he has changed his mind, or he has forgotten the position he took just last December.

Republicans do not want tax increases, and we do not want to see the Federal Government default on its obligations. So we have an obligation to come up with an affirmative plan, a positive plan to solve the problem. I believe we have done so.

The first is a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution that is cosponsored by every Republican on this side of the aisle. The last time we voted on a balanced budget amendment in the Senate was 1997--before I got here--where 11 Democrats voted to support that constitutional amendment. I hope our Democratic colleagues will join us in doing not an extraordinary thing, not a heroic thing--it is a very ordinary but a very commonsense thing--and that is to make sure the Federal Government learns to live within its means and not spend money it does not have. We hope they will join us.

Part of that plan is also the cut, cap, and balance legislation I have cosponsored and that I hope the House of Representatives will take up and send over here soon. This legislation is a plan that avoids defaulting on our obligations. It prevents more taxes, particularly during a fragile economic recovery. It cuts reckless spending, and it gets our fiscal house in order.

What is painfully apparent is we are running out of time, and I am not just talking about the August 2 deadline. Yesterday, Moody's Investors Services said it was reviewing the Nation's top-notch, AAA credit rating for a potential downgrade.

If credit agencies downgrade our debt, it will cost more for us to borrow from the Chinese and our other creditors. As we know, because of Federal Reserve policies, the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates below historic norms. If those were to grow to historic norms because our debt has been downgraded by the credit agencies--or for any other reason--the interest on our national debt alone will crowd out other priorities for our Nation. It will make it less likely we can afford to do what we need to do to defend our national security or to provide the very safety net that our Democratic colleagues claim to care so much about. We will not have the money to do it because we will not have acted responsibly in dealing with the deficit and the debt today.

I urge my colleagues to heed these warnings and to join us in cutting spending and to get our debt under control. In the end, everyone will come out a winner if we accomplish that goal. This is not a Republican plan. This is not a Democratic plan. This is what is right and good and necessary for the United States of America, and so that generations in the future can enjoy the same opportunity and prosperity we ourselves have enjoyed. Heaven help us--Heaven help us--if we fail to take advantage of this opportunity and to deal responsibly with this impending crisis.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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