Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, pending on the floor is S. 743. This is a bill which, in its simplest terms, will allow the States to ask Internet retailers, when they sell in the State, to collect sales tax. Currently, every State requires consumers to pay the sales tax, but it is not collected at the point of purchase. So this legislation will respond to a 20-year-old Supreme Court decision that said to Congress: You have to write a law to do this. This is the law.

Senator Enzi and I, Senator Heidi Heitkamp, as well as Senator Lamar Alexander, we have all worked together on this legislation on a bipartisan basis.

This measure was before the Senate last week. It is not a long bill; it is 11 pages. It is certainly within the grasp of any Senator to secure and read it and understand it. It is very straightforward.

We have had efforts made on the Senate floor to delay consideration of this measure. We have taken three votes on it over the past month or so. The first vote under the budget resolution was a generic vote: Do you support the idea or not? Seventy-five Senators voted in the affirmative--a dramatic commitment from the Democratic side and a majority commitment from the Republican side to this measure. We then faced a vote on cloture--in other words, closing down the debate--on the motion to proceed. We had that vote on Monday. Seventy-four Senators voted to proceed. Yesterday, on the actual motion to proceed: 75 Senators. So this is clearly an issue where a substantial majority of the Senate believes we should move forward and pass this legislation.

We have invited our colleagues--Senator Enzi and I have--if they have amendments, to file their amendments. They have had 6 days--6 days--to prepare the amendments and file them. The deadline is an hour and a half from now for filing amendments. So far we have received 31 amendments.

We sat down last night and said: Let's pick a good number of these amendments. Call them. Let's debate them. Let's vote on them. Let's act like the Senate. Let's see how that works.

We started to do that. We came up with a list. Included in that list are amendments being offered by people we know are going to vote against this bill, so they are not friendly amendments. They are adversarial amendments. But that is all right. Isn't that what we are here for--debate it out; express your point of view; we will express ours; let's vote. I think that is fair. No one can criticize us for not being open to that. We are not trying to fix the outcome. We are ready to bring this to full debate. But when we contacted the Senators who are opposed to the bill and said, call your amendments, they said, we are not ready.

I wish those Senators who said they were not ready could meet the Senators we run into in the hall who say, when is this going to end, when can I go home, because the two of them need to get in conversation. We want to do this in a timely, thoughtful way because it is a critically important issue. But we cannot do it unless our colleagues will come to the floor of the Senate and offer their amendments.

Yesterday we had one amendment we thought was simple and easy. It is an amendment that said: We will not impose across America a tax for you to use the Internet--the Internet Freedom Act it is called. It is bipartisan. Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas, a Democrat, and Senator Blunt of Missouri, a Republican, came together and offered to extend the current policy of the United States on Internet freedom.

Senator Enzi and I looked at that and said: We can put that in this bill. That is something with which we agree. We are not imposing any new taxes in this bill--none. So that is certainly a statement of policy with which we would agree.

We brought this to the floor, and a Senator from Oregon came and objected to considering that amendment yesterday. So yesterday, no amendments. Now we are told that as to any amendments we bring to the floor today, there will be more objections.

I do not think this makes the Senate look very good. I do not think this is in the best interests of this institution nor our government. We were elected to roll up our sleeves and go to work and address the problems facing this country. We understand that with 100 people there will be differences of opinion. We are supposed to engage in civil debate on the floor and then vote. But to lunge from one filibuster to the next and have Members coming to the floor and objecting to amendments puts us in a terrible position.

I have served in the minority, as Senator Alexander and Senator Enzi do at this point. The one thing you really want in the minority is a chance to offer an amendment, to express your point of view, even if you lose. Now we are offering that opportunity, and unfortunately there is a resistance to it. Well, we are going to try it. We are going to test it. If the people who are going to continue to try to block any debate on this bill want to come forward, I hope they will face questions from colleagues as to what their intent is.

Ultimately, we will finish this bill before we go home. If it means staying through the weekend--if that satisfies some Members--we will do it. But it is a terrible waste of opportunity. We have gone 2 straight days with no votes on amendments. And Senators Enzi, Alexander, Heitkamp and I believe it is time for the Senate to be the Senate.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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