Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCHUMER. I rise in strong support of the proposal by our Democratic leader. We all know that sequestration was a blunt instrument, and now it is beginning to hurt. There is delay after delay at airports throughout the Nation.

This is not only a question of traveler inconvenience. Our economy in all likelihood will lose many more dollars in the next week or two than it costs to furlough the air traffic controllers when businesspeople can't travel, when tourists can't travel. I know my home city of New York is greatly affected. No one stays in the hotels, no one dines in restaurants, and no one attends the shows. This may be repeated in destination after destination throughout the country. If people are so uncertain of air travel that when they show up at the airport, they may wait 1 hour or they may wait 5 hours, they won't go. A good percentage will stop their trips.

So it doesn't make sense to go forward. I think we are in agreement. The problem is, how do we fix it? There aren't many ways to fix it because if you simply say, give flexibility, the Transportation Department has very little flexibility because many of its funds are off limits. The highway trust fund, for instance, isn't affected by sequestration because those are our nickels and dimes that go into the gas tax per gallon, which wasn't affected by sequestration. An extremely high and disproportionate number of the Transportation Department's expenditures are air traffic controllers themselves.

We have this problem. As Leader Reid pointed out, we have other problems--stopping cancer research and cutting back on NIH and NSF, which has always been our seed corn. NIH created a biopharmaceutical industry that is second to none and employs millions of people in your State and mine. NSF research basically created the Internet, which has created millions of jobs and makes the U.S. industry the envy of the world.

So we are cutting our seed corn, the kinds of programs for our homeless veterans, and the kinds of programs for our homebound seniors. The meat-ax approach of sequestration cuts those across the board.

My preference would be to close some tax loopholes to get rid of sequestration. I don't think we should give tax breaks to oil companies. We should not give tax breaks to companies that send jobs overseas. That would be my preference. But we know our friends on the other side of the aisle are against any revenue increases right now, so to put this on the floor immediately would be an exercise in futility.

The leader's plan is the right plan. It is ingenious. We have $600 billion on the budget that we know we won't spend the vast majority of because no one believes we will have troops in Iraq or Afghanistan 5 years from now. Yet that money is sitting there on our budget and preventing cancer research, air traffic controllers, and money for homeless vets from being used where it was supposed to be.

So the proposal to take a certain amount of money out of the OCO--the overseas contingency operations--which we know we won't spend, makes no sense. Now you say: Well, you know you won't spend it; it is a gimmick.

It is not a gimmick. It is sitting there in the budget occupying space and could be used by these other agencies. And to insist the OCO continue is causing real pain, causing our economy not to grow as quickly, causing vulnerable people to be hurt, and causing research--the seed corn of America--to decline.

Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are saying that President Obama is to blame for these delays. He has very little choice if we don't change things, and this is a way to change things.

If we want to get rid of these delays, which we all on both sides of the aisle very much desire, I would propose to my colleagues that the solution proposed by the majority leader is the best way to go given the political necessities on the other side, the desire not to have any revenues--even closing certain tax loopholes.

So I would hope we could come together and vote on this solution. Cutting the OCO has been supported by Republicans. I remember Senator Kyl, a former Senator from Arizona, was advocating this late last year to deal with the doc fix, the DRGs, and other things. The people will come together on this.

So I hope we can vote for this proposal, put the air traffic controllers back to work off their furloughs, get rid of these delays, and then come together in a grand agreement in time for the September budget.

I yield the floor.

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