The Debt Ceiling

Floor Speech

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Madam President, let me, first of all, compliment my friend and colleague, the Senator from Kansas, for his comments and for his approach. He made a few comments we haven't heard much of in this Chamber or in the other Chamber in the last few days. He said before he was a Democrat and before he was a Republican, he was an American. I want to compliment him on those sentiments, and I want to rise in that same vein because whether you are somebody from Kansas or somebody from North Carolina or folks I hear from Virginia who keep saying to me: Why can't you guys get this thing done? Why can't you both be willing to give a little to put our country first? As somebody who has had the honor of serving as Governor of Virginia and somebody who served as a businessman for 20 years, I never thought that I would be standing on the floor of the Senate 6 days, 5 1/2 days away from the United States of America potentially defaulting on our obligations. Yet most of the debate and, Lord knows, almost all of the press conferences have been less about solutions and more about who is to blame.

Whether they are sitting in the gallery or they are watching at home or, like most Americans, trying to get through an unbearably hot summer, they wonder who are these folks they hired to get the people's business done.

I have been involved with a group of Senators over the last 9 months who have done something I didn't think was extraordinary, but unfortunately today is pretty extraordinary. There is a group of Democratic and Republican Senators who have said the most important issue we face in our country is to get our debt and deficit under control, and who have said that the only way we can get that under control is to sit together for hours on end, reason together, argue, and do something as basically American as compromise.

After months and months of going back and forth, last Tuesday, when we revealed the so-called plan--which, frankly, the Gang of 6 has built upon the work of a previous year's work of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and business leaders, the President's deficit commission--a remarkable thing happened for a couple of days in this body. Instead of everybody coming out and saying why this couldn't happen, they said: Hey, this isn't perfect, but this would actually lower our deficit by close to $4 trillion, take on tax reform, take on entitlement reform, and cut spending. It might just be a path out.

Well, that lasted a couple of days, and then we got back to who was going to score points in the next 24-hour news segment.

Well, I desperately hope and pray that at this moment in our country we will rise to the task and make sure, with the eyes of not only the Nation but the world on us, that we do our basic job. Let's make sure the United States of America doesn't default next Tuesday.

The only way I think we are going to get there is if we lower the rhetoric, lower the finger-pointing, and recognize it is going to take ideas from both sides. It is going to take a change in attitude from some.

There is a Congressman who gave a press conference sometime in the last day or two who paraphrased Winston Churchill. He said:

We're going to fight you on the beaches. We're going to fight you at sea. We're going to fight you in the air to make structural changes in the way this place known as Washington, DC, operates.

Who is the ``you'' he is going to fight? Is he going to fight people who say maybe America and Americans want us to actually work together and compromise? I mean, this kind of sentiment goes beyond the pale in a moment when our Nation is in this kind of crisis.

There has been a lot of talk recently--particularly coming from the other body--that the only way to solve this problem is an amendment, a constitutional amendment. Well, I would point out 49 States have that kind of amendment. They have to balance their books. My State, Virginia, and the Presiding Officer's State, North Carolina, meet that goal. There are an awful lot of States that have that kind of amendment in place. I don't know what kind of accounting they use, but I have not heard many folks point to the California State budget and say: That is a balanced budget.

So some kind of process argument isn't going to solve the problem. We have to make the hard choices. We have to cut spending. We have to reform our entitlements. We have to reform our Tax Code to generate additional revenues.

The numbers don't lie. We are spending at an all-time high, 25 percent of our GDP. We are collecting revenues at only 15 percent of GDP. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out any time our Nation's budget has been in relative balance is when we have been with spending and revenues at 19.5 percent to 20.5 percent. Why can't we come together to put a plan in place that does that?

Folks who are watching are saying: Well, there is actually a plan. More than one-third of the Senate has said: We will be with you--about an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. But instead we are going back and forth, ping-pong, who is going to have which plan? Who is going to win each day? It is also pretty remarkable at this moment in time--I don't know who this Congressman is, but when we have roughly one-fifth of the House who at least on record saying they will never vote to increase the debt limit, I wonder when they took the oath to uphold the laws of our country, which said we have to pay our bills, how that commitment matches with those promises or those political positions.

My sense is they want to have an amendment to the Constitution. What they are advocating, this we will never change, our way or the highway approach, the amendment they ought to talk about is basically restructuring our whole Constitution and turning our government into a parliamentary system. There are a lot of places around that if you win an election, you get to choose the chief executive. You get to control the legislature. You can pass anything you want. Yet these very same folks are the ones who say they want to support the Constitution.

Well, the Constitution and the genius of our Constitution was the fact that the Founders said the most basic American principle was checks and balances. We have a House, we have a President, and actually they have to work together. Somehow the attitude of some of these Members in the House, do it our way or let's drive our country over the cliff, is dramatically as un-American as anything I have ever seen.

At the same time, we hear other Members who say: Maybe we just need a little more economic shock to make us do the right thing. What are these folks thinking of? The stock market closed down 200 points today. It has been down about 400 points this week. There are an awful lot of Americans who only now are starting to recover from the financial crisis of 2 years ago. There are an awful lot of retirees who saw their 401(k)s plummet 2 years ago, who slowly have seen that nest egg that is going to get them through rough times recover.

Now 400 points--how much more stock market decline do we need before we all have the courage to do the right thing, 1,000 points? Do we need to put another 1 million Americans out of work? Do we need to throw more people out of their homes because of the tax increase that will result--the real increase that will result with the rise in interest rates that will happen next week?

There are others who say: Let's do it short term. Let's kick the can down the road for a short while, something that is being discussed in the House. It doesn't matter whether it is Democrat or Republican. It matters because that approach will result in a lowering of our debt rating. I know people's eyes glaze over when they hear about debt ratings. Unfortunately, debt ratings matter--and we are the only country in the world with a AAA debt rating. That means we are kind of the gold standard.

If we have that debt rating reduced, it is not only a black eye for America, it not only means that what we have to pay in interest rates will go up, not just for government but if you have a school bond, if you have a State bond, the prices are going to go up. You have an auto loan, a home mortgage, you have a student loan, you are a business trying to expand, the cost of that is all going to go up.

The very same folks who say they will never look at raising more revenues don't seem to mind at all that if we have to have an interest rate rise because of a default or downgrade of our debt, doesn't that take more money out of Americans' pockets? I just don't get it.

Frankly, as the Presiding Officer knows, I have been pretty obsessed about this issue for months on end. I hope that we will check our Democratic and Republican hats and go with what my colleague, the Senator from Kansas, said and recognize when we get out of bed tomorrow morning we get out of bed as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans; that we not only get over the debt limit, which, hopefully, through some convoluted process we will, but we also recognize that getting past August 2 doesn't mean, OK, we are done, everybody go have a nice August. All that does is buy us a bit of time to decide whether we are going to come back to the really hard issues of not only how we start with some spending cuts, which will be part of our down payment, but how we really make sure the entitlement programs--important to so many of us on both sides of the aisle, but particularly on this side of the aisle--are actually there 10, 20, 30 years from now.

The notion that they are not going to change, that they cannot continue to be sustainable at the current rate, it is not Democratic or Republican.

Thank goodness a lot of us are living a lot longer. When I was a kid there were 15, 16 people paying in for every Social Security retiree. Now there are 3. We have to make sure that for my kids, your kids, that there is Social Security in their framework. At the same time we have to have our colleagues on the Republican side recognize that we have to reform our Tax Code in a way that makes it simpler, flatter, and, yes, generates some additional revenue.

The only way we are going to get there, if and when we get past this August 2 date, is if we combine that effort with long-term debt reduction. I am more than open to any valid, balanced comprehensive bipartisan plan that is around.

For the effort of the so-called Gang of 6, a third of the Senate said, yes, this is worth considering. It isn't perfect, I can assure you.

Some would even say, from some of the descriptions I have heard, that it may not meet all of those. But I will tell my colleagues three things it is: It is comprehensive, bipartisan, and, under any analysis, it does what our country desperately needs: It starts to drive our debt-to-GDP ratio in the right direction, which is a fancy way of saying we can maintain our books on a path to lead us to fiscal stability. Frankly, what that would also allow us to do is get back to what we should be spending our time on, which is creating growth in this economy and starting to unleash American creativity and innovation. But that is not going to happen if we spend all of our time pointing fingers back and forth about how we got here or which short-term plan best meets the short-term interests of the next 5 or 6 days.

I, for one, believe the plan Senator Reid has laid out is not perfect, but it gives us the time to deal with this debt and deficit problem in a serious way. It gives us the ability to ensure that we don't have a credit downgrade. Unfortunately, the plan being debated in the House right now may have some merits, but the one thing that is clear is that it will lead to a downgrade--not my words, but the words of all the rating agencies. Whether we like them or not, they are the folks who set that standard.

Again, I urge folks who are making statements such as ``We are going to fight you on the beaches, we are going to fight you at sea, we are going to fight you in the air,'' to consider your fellow Americans here. If you don't like our system of government, then be honest and propose a change to a parliamentary system. If you do honor and respect the Constitution which we all took an oath to uphold, recognize that it is a Constitution that puts in place checks and balances to have us all work together, give a little, and recognize that when we get out of bed in the morning, we are not a Democrat or a Republican but an American first and foremost.

I hope and pray we will find the path through these next 5 days and that we won't do the unthinkable. I have said on a couple of occasions--I am sure it will come back and bite me--that if we don't do this we should all get fired, because the fact is the most basic promise we make is to uphold the laws and rules of our country. Frankly, I can't think of anything that is more quintessentially American than making sure we pay our bills and that we honor our obligations. So let's get that done, and then let's work together to make sure we put in place the long-term, comprehensive, bipartisan approach that is needed so we can get this Nation back on the right fiscal path but, more importantly, back on the right path to ensure that everybody gets that fair shot for that economic growth we all seek so much.

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

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