Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act of 2013

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. My friend and my distinguished colleague from Missouri is absolutely correct in citing the Constitution and pointing out the fact the two Houses do have to agree before something becomes law.

It is also important to point out that under article 1, section 5, clause 2 of the Constitution, each House of Congress is constitutionally charged with the task of establishing its own rules for operation. The rules of operation in this body, as they apply right here, require this kind of request receive unanimous consent. What that means is every one of us has to be willing to vote for this. What I and a few of my colleagues have said is that regardless of what you might decide to do, we respect your opinion. But if you are asking us to vote for this, meaning to give our consent, which is a vote, we are asking for one slight modification, and that slight modification includes something very simple, which says we are not going to negotiate the debt limit as part of a budget resolution.

They are two separate things. We didn't consider a single amendment that would have addressed the debt limit. Not a single part of the budget resolution passed out of this body addressed the debt limit. The debt limit not having been the subject of the budget resolution, it is not important for that to be addressed by the conference committee.

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, for 62 days several of my colleagues and I have objected to the majority's request for unanimous consent to circumvent regular order to go to conference with the House on the budget.

They want permission to skip a few steps in the process, and jump straight to the closed-door back-room meetings.

There, senior negotiators of the House and Senate will be free to wait until a convenient, artificial deadline and ram through their compromise--un-amended, un-debated and mostly un-read.

And with the country backed up against another economic cliff crisis, we are concerned they will exploit that opportunity to sneak a debt-limit increase into the budget.

We think that is inappropriate.

And yet, objecting to this dysfunctional, unrepublican, undemocratic process has invited anger and criticism from colleagues here on both sides of the aisle.

We just don't get it, you see.

Proceeding to a secret, closed-door, back-room, 11th-hour deal, we are told, is the way the process works. It is the way the Senate works. It is the way the House works. It is the way Washington works.

We know this. That is why we're objecting. In case nobody has noticed, the way Washington works stinks. Closed-door, back room, cliff deals are not the solution, they are the problem.

The unspoken premise of every argument we have heard in favor of going to conference on this budget without conditions is that Congress knows what it is doing.

"Trust us--to go into a back room and cut a deal.''

"Trust us--to ignore special interests and only work for the good of the country.''

"Trust us--to not wait until the 11th hour, to not hold the full faith and credit of the United States hostage, to not ram through another thousand-page, trillion-dollar bill, sight unseen.''

"Trust us--We're Congress!''

As it happens, the American people don't trust Congress--or either party. And we have given them at least 17 trillion reasons not to.

I can even provide physical evidence to support my claim. If the American people had confidence in the way the Senate works I know for a fact I would not be here. I do not think my colleagues joining me in this objection would be here either.

We were not sent here to affirm ``the way the Senate worked'' as Congress racked up trillions in debt, inflated a housing bubble, doled out favors to special interests, squeezed the middle class and trapped the poor in poverty.

We were sent here to change all that. We are fully aware that "Washington'' and the establishments of both parties do not like what we are doing--but as computer programmers say, ``that's a feature, not a bug.''

The tactics of Washington serve the interests of Washington--of Congress itself, the Federal bureaucracy, corporate cronies and special interests.

And does so at the expense of the American people, their wallets, and their freedom.

The only time I can think of when it has not worked out that way was with the recent budget sequestration and that was--literally--an accident; a mistake.

The sequestration process worked out exactly the opposite of how Washington expected and intended.

There is a reason that six of the ten wealthiest counties in the United States are suburbs of Washington, D.C.--a city that produces almost nothing of actual economic value.

And it is not because the two parties have been so effective taking on the special interests and doing the people's business.

There is a reason Tea Partiers on the right and Occupiers on the left protest their shared perception that our economy, our politics, and our society seem rigged.

That elites on Wall Street, K Street, and Pennsylvania Avenue get to play by one set of rules and people on Main Street have to play by another.

It is because they are mostly right. This is our true inequality crisis: not between rich and poor, but between Washington and everyone else.

The national debt, and its statutory limit, is a hidden part of this inequality crisis.

After all, what is new debt but a tax increase on future Americans? On those who cannot yet vote? On those who have not yet been born?

Raising the debt limit thus results in a form of taxation without representation. That is why the American people resent it. And it is why Washington desperately wants to raise the debt limit with as little public scrutiny and accountability as possible.

And that is why we're objecting.

Our critics say we should allow the process to move forward so we can have a debate. I don't know if they've noticed, but we are having the debate. We have had it several days in a row.

More than that, we are having the debate here on the floor, open to public scrutiny, and not secretly behind closed doors. This, right here, is how the process is supposed to work. The only way the American people can have any hope of supervising their Congress--not ours, their Congress--is for us to do our work above board and in the open, according to the rules.

That is all we are asking for--and only on one issue. For all our concerns, we have still said all along that we will not block a budget conference. We can go to conference right now. We are willing to give the majority permission to break from regular order and scurry off to closed door negotiations to cut their back room deal.

All we have asked is one thing, a very small and simple request: leave the debt limit out of it. Do everything else you want, spend all the money you want, use all the accounting gimmicks you want, but when you go into that back room, check the debt limit at the door. That way the American people can have that separate debate, on its own merits, here on the floor.

This should not be controversial. The House Republican budget did not include a debt limit increase or instructions to include one. The Senate Democratic budget does not include it either. House and Senate negotiators, therefore, have no procedural or democratic justification for including a debt limit hike in their talks. They have no right to do it. Yet they won't promise not to.

Once again: Trust us, we are Congress.

"This is how the Senate works,'' they say. "This is how we do things.''

Respectfully, this is how we fail. This is how we earn our 15 percent approval rating. We know this is business as usual around here. That is why we're objecting.

If the majority wants to proceed to a budget conference through regular order, we can not stop them. But again, that is not their request. Their request is for permission to break from regular order, skip a few steps, and go straight to the secret negotiations, behind closed doors, where in the Washington-centered view of the world, the real governing can be done.

The American people do not trust secret, back-room deals, and neither do I. Unless and until the American people are assured that we will not sneak a debt limit increase into the Conference report, I will happily continue to object.

I object to the motion on the floor.

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, as to the suggestion that this produces a budget resolution that at the end of day does not go to the President, and therefore it isn't law, technically, on its own face, is accurate.

What we are concerned about are the instructions which would accompany the conference report. We are concerned about instructions that would allow the normal rules of the Senate to be circumvented specifically for something like this or perhaps a piece of legislation which would itself raise the debt limit to be considered----

Mr. DURBIN. Would the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. LEE. I would like to finish what I am saying--legislation which would itself raise the debt limit and voted on a 51-vote margin rather than a 60-vote margin. So this is different.

Regardless of how open they make that conference meeting, it is not the same kind of open debate in which every Senator and every Representative is able to participate in the same way they would be able to on the floor.

Mr. McCAIN. Does the Senator admit it is not a deal that is made behind closed doors? Does the Senator admit that? Does the Senator admit he misspoke on that issue? It is not behind closed doors.

Mr. LEE. Compared to the way we do things on the floor, this is a closed-door deal. Compared to the way we do things on the floor, this is not subject to the same kind of scrutiny.

The fact is that we have rules in the Senate--rules--on something like this, which would allow us to proceed on the basis of a 60-vote threshold. That is the whole purpose of this discussion. That is the basis of our concern. We don't want legislation that can run through to raise the debt limit, incurring potentially trillions of dollars in borrowing authority on the basis of only a 51-vote threshold. That is our concern.

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Mr. LEE. Madam President, I thank my friend and my colleague, the Senator from Texas, for his remarks and I speak briefly to respond to a couple of points that have come up today.

First of all, it is important for us to remember that although the rules of our body might allow for a conference committee to meet in public, and although that may have happened in the past from time to time, it is not the norm. In asking around to some senior staff members who have been here longer than I have, it typically has not happened in recent years. In fact, it has become relatively rare in recent years. So to suggest it necessarily is an open process because it has the capacity to be made into an open process, those are not the same things. Typically, we can legitimately expect for this to be a backroom, closed-door process.

That is not the end of the world; we, of course, need conference committees. They do valuable, important work. We are not disputing that. We are not disputing the fact that sometimes it is important for conference committees to meet in order to reconcile competing versions of the same legislation--one passed in the House and one passed in the Senate. But what we are talking about here is a very limited request: to limit the scope of their work so as to exclude the possibility of a debt limit increase without the 60-vote threshold.

It is also important to remember that although this is the procedure the majority has chosen to use in order to try to get to a conference committee, it is not the only way. In fact, it is possible to do this without unanimous consent. It is possible to do this without, in other words, all of us being willing to do it--all of us--by withholding our objection as effectively voting to do that.

If, as has been suggested, the other body does, in fact, want to go to conference, the other body could take the budget we passed, could slap their amendments on top of it, could even replace most or even all of our budget with theirs, send it back over, and at that point it is my understanding we could go to conference without the need for a unanimous consent.

So there are other ways. This is just the way the majority has chosen to go. The majority has every right to do that, and we have every right to object. That we do and that we will continue to do until such time as it either becomes unnecessary or until such time as the majority agrees to modify the request along the lines we have specified so as to permit and ensure that any debt limit discussions and votes will take place subsequent to the normal order and subject to a 60-vote threshold.

Thank you, Madam President.

I yield the floor.

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