Bring Jobs Home Act--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I would say to my colleagues who are here on the floor that this is a defining moment for our country. The most basic responsibility and the most important priority we have as Americans is to defend the country. If we don't get national security right, the rest is conversation. We can talk about all these other things in the budget--we can talk about all the other priorities the country has, all of which are important--but if we fail to defend the United States of America, we have failed the citizens of this country. It is the No. 1 priority we have. It is the most important responsibility and obligation we have as public servants here in the Senate--to make sure we are taking the steps necessary to keep this country strong and secure from threats both here at home and abroad.

What happened--and how we got to where we are today--goes back to the fact that we haven't passed a budget for 3 years in the Senate. I need to remind my colleagues why we are where we are today. The reason we are here is because for 3 consecutive years now the Democratic majority in the Senate has not done the most fundamental responsibility we have, which is to pass a budget that addresses our national security interests. What did we end up with? We ended up last summer with the Budget Control Act--something cobbled together at the eleventh hour to avoid a deadline on raising the debt limit--and we put in place a process where a supercommittee would look at ways to define long-term savings so we could avoid the sequester. But the sequester was put in place as a result of the Budget Control Act, which was put in place because the Senate hasn't passed a budget now for 3 straight years. That is why we are where we are.

Having said that, we need to fix the problem. And the problem is we have defense cuts that are going to cut very deeply into our national security interests, and we even have the Secretary of Defense coming out and saying these cuts would be devastating. The President's own Secretary of Defense has made a statement to that effect. With sequestration, we would have the smallest ground force since 1940, the smallest number of ships since 1915, and the smallest tactical Air Force literally in the history of the Air Force. That is the dimension of the problem we are talking about, as has been described by the experts who are supposed to know these things. As I said, the President's own Defense Secretary has made these sorts of statements.

One of the problems we have, of course, is we don't even know what the full impact of the sequester will be because the administration hasn't put a plan forward. So we are awaiting that plan. Today the House of Representatives voted 414 to 2 to require the administration to at least submit to Congress and to the American people how they intend to implement sequestration so we can at least have a better idea about what these impacts will be, where are they going to make the cuts, by account, so we can examine that and come up with a plan, hopefully, to replace those deep unbalanced cuts in the defense budget with reductions elsewhere in the budget. But we don't know that because we can't get the administration to put forward the plan we need to move forward with our proposals here in order to do away with what we think will be a very dangerous cut to America's national security.

I hope the Senate will do something to address that. We can start by taking up the bill passed in the House, pass it here in the Senate, and require the administration to put forward a plan about how they are going to implement the sequester.

As has already been pointed out by the Senator from Alabama and others, we are talking about basically a 50-percent cut in the defense budget--or 50 percent of the cuts coming out of the defense budget on top of $487 billion in cuts that were already approved last year. So we are talking about another huge amount of reduction, up to about another $ 1/2 trillion on top of what already is $ 1/2 trillion in cuts that came last year.

Remember, the defense budget, as has been pointed out, only represents 20 percent of all Federal spending, so we are going to take half the cuts out of 20 percent of the budget. Where is the proportionality in that? And as the Senator from Alabama has highlighted, what we have done essentially is we have shielded many areas of the budget. So a lot of the things some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't want to see cut are protected from this. Yet we are going to make huge, steep, Draconian, and dangerous cuts in America's national military and national security budget.

I would hope we can at least act on what the House of Representatives did earlier today by a 414-to-2 vote, pick up that legislation, and require the administration to tell us how they are going to implement these reductions. Then let's go to work on a bipartisan basis and try to come up with a plan whereby we can avoid what will be a disaster, as has been described by every national security expert out there, for our national security interests.

We live in a dangerous world. We can't avoid that. The United States of America is looked to for leadership around the world. We have to continue to ensure we can protect this country and America's interests around the world. In order to do that, we have to make sure our military is resourced in a way that enables them to protect our interests. We cannot continue to go forward with this sequester, which would dramatically and in a very dangerous way harm those national security interests.

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Mr. SESSIONS. Senator Thune is in the leadership on the Republican side and he is in the Budget Committee and the Defense Committee and is aware of how this all happened. So we are at a point where it appears to me the Defense Department is being asked to take unacceptable, disproportionate reductions in spending that go so far as to create damage rather than improving its efficiency.

Isn't it true the Secretary of Defense and all the top officials under the Secretary of Defense are appointed by the President and serve at his pleasure?

Mr. THUNE. That is correct.

Mr. SESSIONS. The Secretary of Defense now has said this would be a disaster to the Defense Department for these cuts to take effect. Isn't it true that the President is the Commander in Chief of all our military forces?

Mr. THUNE. That is correct.

Mr. SESSIONS. Isn't it true that we are at a situation at this point in history where we are heading toward a sequester, and the Commander in Chief is utterly silent on how to fix the problem?

Mr. THUNE. The Senator from Alabama is correct. That is one of the remarkable things about this. The Commander in Chief, of course, is tasked with the responsibility of being just that, the Commander in Chief. Yet when it comes to the national security interests that we have and to at least spelling out how he would implement what we believe are going to be some disastrous cuts to the defense budget, he is not even informing us about what his ideas are with respect to that so we can react to that. More importantly, he doesn't seem to be the least bit interested in addressing this.

There is a huge silence coming out of the White House--the Senator from Alabama is absolutely correct--and it has to change if we are going to be able to fix this. It starts by at least him presenting a plan, and the Senator from Alabama and I have introduced legislation in the Senate that would require that, much like what passed in the House today, and that is where it all starts.

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Mr. THUNE. I don't think the Senator from Alabama is wrong at all. In fact, that is what much of the news stories that have been printed in the last few days and reporting on the subject have said. Some of our colleagues on the other side have essentially concluded this is leverage--leverage for them to get higher taxes.

It strikes me, at least, that there is a tremendous risk associated with allowing the country to go over a fiscal cliff--which includes not only these Draconian cuts to the defense budget but also tax increases that would occur on January 1, to go over the fiscal cliff, risk plunging the country into a recession, raise the unemployment rate which is already at historically high levels, all to prove a point about raising taxes. But that appears to be--at least by the reporting. There was a story in the Washington Post over the weekend that said: Democrats threaten going over the fiscal cliff basically to get higher taxes out of Republicans.

That, to me, seems like a terrible trade to make, to risk the country going into a recession, to risk these tremendous cuts in our national security priorities, just simply so they can get higher taxes.

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