Continuing Appropriations

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, amid all the rhetoric and the blame games and, yes, even theatrics, I want to make sure the American people actually understand what President Obama and the majority leader are asking us to do. Their position is that Congress should raise the debt limit--actually suspend the debt limit through the end of 2014 and increase our national debt by another $1.1 trillion without doing anything to solve our underlying fiscal problems, including the $17 trillion in debt we have already run up.

I cannot imagine there is anyone in this Chamber or within the sound of my voice who thinks that is a good idea. At some point, if we keep maxing out our credit card rather than dealing with our debt problem, our spending problem, we come back to the bank, so to speak, and ask for our debt limit to be increased another $1.1 trillion, where will this end? I can tell you where I think it will end: It will end in disaster. Ultimately, at some point our creditors will lose confidence in our ability to repay that money. At some point interest rates are going to not be zero or next to zero, they will be up around the historic average, 4 percent or 5 percent, and we will have to pay China and our other creditors more and more of our Federal budget just to pay interest on the national debt.

At some point that becomes unsustainable. It will hurt our national security. It will hurt the safety net programs we all care about, to protect our most vulnerable. Unfortunately, the President and the majority leader remain dug in. Notwithstanding the charts we have seen on this floor that talk about negotiations, there have been no real negotiations. The President called Speaker Boehner last night to tell him: In case you missed the message, Mr. Speaker, from when we met at the White House last week, we are still not negotiating.

What is that all about? The President could have sent him a text message with as much information as that conveyed.

I am told the President has invited the Republican Members of Congress to the White House to meet with him tomorrow. I hope that meeting is more productive than the meetings he has already held or the phone conversations he has had with the Speaker. I can only hope the President has reconsidered his unsustainable position, that he is not willing to negotiate.

The Founders of this great country created a Constitution for us with coequal branches of government. Congress is not better or worse than the executive branch. We are coequal. We cannot function without one another. We can pass a law, but it cannot become the law unless the President signs it. The President cannot pass a law without Congress. So we have to learn to work together.

In the context of the recent history I want to recount for everybody, the President's refusal to negotiate is simply unsustainable and quite remarkable. Over the last 30 years, virtually every major domestic policy reform has involved at least some kind of bipartisan compromise.

In 1983, a conservative Republican President worked with a liberal Speaker of the House and Senate leaders from both parties to save and preserve Social Security. That was in 1983. At the time those Social Security amendments were signed into law, Republicans had the same Senate majority the Democrats have today, 54 Republicans then, 46 Democrats. Meanwhile, the Democratic House majority was significantly larger than the Republican House majority today. Yet both sides did what so far we have been unable to do and that is come together, negotiate and reach an outcome. Ronald Reagan, back in 1983, then signed that negotiated outcome into law. In the end, the majority Senate Democrats voted for those Social Security amendments, as did a majority of Senate Republicans.

Three years later, in 1986, liberal Democrats and conservative Democrats joined together to enact another landmark reform bill. Once again the President's party controlled the Senate but not the House. Once again, there was not a refusal to negotiate; rather, there was a negotiation and a bipartisan outcome--notwithstanding the normal partisan rivalries that will always exist. In June 1986, 97 Members of this Chamber, a massive, overwhelming supermajority, voted in favor of the Tax Reform Act which lowered Federal income tax rates and broadened the base. The final version of that bill was supported by a majority of Senate Democrats and a majority of Senate Republicans as well. That was the kind of historic accomplishment that seems to be slipping through our fingers today by virtue of the refusal to negotiate. That was a historic accomplishment that dramatically simplified the U.S. Tax Code and made it more conducive to economic growth--a lesson we would do well to recall and emulate today.

Fast forward a decade to 1996. A Democratic President, Bill Clinton, joined together with the Republican House and Senate and, despite partisan pressure enough to go around and all sorts of heated rhetoric, Democrats and Republicans joined together and reformed our welfare system, helping millions of disadvantaged people to get off welfare rolls and make the transition from dependency to work, dignity and self-reliance. That was a great accomplishment. In the end, 78 Senators, including most Senate Democrats and every single Senate Republican, voted for that.

One more prominent example. In 2001, a conservative Republican President worked with a prominent liberal Democrat to enact a major overhaul to our education laws. Indeed, the No Child Left Behind Act was a direct result of President Bush's negotiations and collaboration with the late Senator Ted Kennedy. The final legislation 87 Senators voted for, including a majority of Senate Democrats and a majority of Senate Republicans.

I am not necessarily saying every single one of those pieces of legislation was something that was perfect in every way. I think we have learned there are things that still needed to be done, particularly when it came to education reform, but the three Presidents I mentioned, two Republicans and one Democrat, worked together to make substantial compromises in order to pass Social Security reform, tax reform, welfare reform, and education reform. But they also understood that politics is the art of the possible and they did not treat the word negotiate as a dirty four-letter word.

I want to emphasize one more time that Republicans stand ready to work with President Obama in addressing our country's most serious fiscal and economic challenges. Yet rather than to pursue serious good-faith negotiations over things such as entitlement reform and tax reform, things

that would actually be good for our economy and good for our country, President Obama decides to erect and then knock down strawmen.

For example, when Republicans talk about entitlement reform, he says we want to eliminate the safety net. When Republicans talk about tax reform, he says we want to give tax breaks to rich people. That is campaigning, that is not governing.

Here is the reality, though. Republicans do not want to eliminate the safety net, we want to improve the safety net, particularly Medicare and Social Security. We don't want to give special tax breaks just to the wealthy, we want to give all Americans a simpler, flatter, fairer Tax Code that is more conducive to economic growth. We want the type of Tax Code the President's own bipartisan fiscal commission, Simpson-Bowles--the recommendations they made in 2010. Yet the President ignored it, walked away, and has done nothing to contribute to that debate.

We understand, being elected officials ourselves, that all elected politicians have to campaign for office. It goes with the territory. You cannot get here unless you run for office and you win an election. But at some point the campaign has to end. At some point we have to govern. At some point the partisan rhetoric has to give way to actually accomplishing things and solving problems. At some point America's elected leadership needs to demonstrate real leadership and a willingness to govern.

President Obama has now reached a critical point in his Presidency, in his second term. He will be remembered for one thing or another. He will be remembered either as a President who was willing to step up when America needed that kind of leadership, when Congress needed bipartisan cooperation in order to solve our Nation's biggest challenges, or he will leave a legacy, if he does not do that, of a President who refused to do his job in order to try to win the partisan battles.

We need something better and America deserves better. We need a President who will govern and not campaign perpetually.

I yield the floor.

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