Continuing Appropriations

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, we are in the eighth day of a completely unnecessary partial government shutdown. Last week there was an official at the White House who said they were winning the shutdown debate and they were not concerned about how long the shutdown lasts. Well, there may be Democrats and folks at the White House who are content with the current situation, but Republicans remain focused on finding a solution to reopen the government.

The Republicans have offered multiple solutions to fund the government and will continue to work to find common ground while providing ObamaCare relief for middle-class Americans. Middle-class Americans deserve the same relief from ObamaCare the Democrats have already given themselves and big business. Senate Democrats even had the opportunity to give the same 1-year relief from ObamaCare to their constituents that President Obama has already given to big business.

We believe this is an issue of basic fairness. We believe this law should be delayed--not just for big businesses and not just for the favored constituencies but for all Americans because of the harmful impact it is having.

In fact, there is bipartisan support for giving individuals and families relief. A colleague of ours on the other side of the aisle--a Senate Democrat--recently said a delay for individuals would be very reasonable and sensible. There have been a number of votes in the House where Democrats have voted with Republicans in support of providing that delay to middle-class Americans.

With regard to where we are right now, we have a near-term issue and we have a slightly longer term issue. The near-term issue has an awful lot of folks increasingly concerned about the impact the government shutdown is having on people across this country. The House of Representatives has passed nine bills that have been sent to the Senate which are sitting here at the desk that would provide funding for some of these programs and services which impact people across this country that could be picked up today and passed by unanimous consent. And, by the way, many of those have passed with bipartisan support.

As recently as Saturday the House passed a bill that would provide back pay for Federal workers. There were 189 Democrats in the House of Representatives who voted in support of that bill. There have been up to 57 Democrats in the House of Representatives who have voted to give pay to our National Guard and Reserve, the same thing we have done for our active-duty military. They have also voted to provide relief to our national parks so they can open again. They have voted to provide funding for the National Institutes of Health so that those lifesaving medicines can continue to be provided. They have voted to provide funding for FEMA so FEMA can respond to the natural disasters that are occurring across the country.

There are nine bills sitting at the desk of the Senate that could be picked up and passed today by unanimous consent. There wouldn't be a single Republican that I know of who would object to any of those measures being passed that would provide funding and relief in support of the services and programs which impact people across the country.

The House will pick up a couple of more bills today. They will do one that funds Head Start and will then send it over here, so that will be the tenth bill that will be sitting at the Senate. They will pass a bill that funds Impact Aid, something which is very important to the people I represent in South Dakota. That will be the 11th bill that will be sitting at the desk in the Senate awaiting action. As I said, they could all be passed by unanimous consent. There would not be a single Republican that I know of who would be opposed to any of those being moved forward.

It is not a question of addressing the funding concerns and making sure the programs and services which impact people across this country are being funded; that can be done. It has been done by the House, and those items have moved over here to the Senate. All that is necessary is for the majority leader to come over, pick them up, ask for unanimous consent to pass them, and those items would pass.

I see the near-term issue as being one that is very easy to solve, and all that it entails is for the leadership in the Senate to pick up those bills and pass them.

The other issue I mentioned that is a little bit longer term, but not much, because it is about 9 days away, is we are going to hit the debt limit, which means the United States of America will no longer have borrowing authority. We will hit up against the amount we are able to borrow on our credit card to fund the services of our government. There is a request obviously to increase the debt limit to allow the Federal Government to borrow more money. I have had private conversations with members of the administration's team. They said they would like to see a debt limit increase that would take us through the next election--through November of 2014. To do that we would be looking somewhere in the trillion-dollar range. It strikes me that--and I think it is something supported by the American people--if we are going to have a debate about increasing the debt limit, we ought to do something about the debt. I think that is a sensible position to take. By a 2-to-1 margin, polls show the American people believe if we are going to raise the debt limit, we ought to do something to fix and address the debt.

What we are simply saying is: Let's sit down and have a discussion about things we can do that will put us on a different and sustainable fiscal trajectory for this country that won't saddle future generations of Americans with massive amounts--trillions and trillions of dollars--of additional debt. That issue is looming out there and it is not very far away. We don't have a lot of time to deal with that. It is not, as I said, as immediate as the government shutdown, which can be addressed by the majority

of the Senate. I think the debt limit is going to require both parties here in Congress and the President and his team to get together and figure out what it is we can do that would not only raise the debt limit--the amount we can borrow--but address the underlying fundamental problem, and that is the fact that we have a $17 trillion debt.

There has been a lot said about things that various Senators have said in the past on the floor and in the course of these various debates we have had about debt limit increases, and I wanted to point out that the President of the United States, President Obama, when he was here in 2006, said raising the debt limit is a failure of leadership. He said it is a failure of leadership and described it as unpatriotic. Unpatriotic--failure of leadership to raise the debt limit.

Now he is saying he wants a clean debt limit increase--no negotiation, period. No negotiation on the debt limit. Well, at the time when he said that raising the debt limit was a leadership failure, the total Federal debt was $8.3 trillion. Today it is $16.8 trillion, $16.9 trillion. So the Federal debt, literally, is double what it was when the current President said back in 2006, as a Member of this Chamber in the Senate, that raising the debt limit would be a failure of leadership. Now it is twice that amount. It was $8.3 trillion in 2006, and now we are going on $17 trillion.

It seems to me the President of the United States--who described raising the debt limit in 2006 when the debt was half of what it is today as a leadership failure--ought to be willing to exercise some leadership and engage himself in a process that would allow us to sit down and talk about what we can do to get this debt under control.

There is a series of spending reforms that have been put forward by many of my colleagues on this side of the aisle that would deal with the out-of-control spending, particularly on what we call the mandatory spending part of the budget, those entitlement programs that currently are on an unsustainable path. We would like to try and get that spending under control. There are a number of other things that have been proposed that, frankly, would be good for the economy.

One of the best ways to get our fiscal house in order is to get the economy growing and expanding at a faster rate. When the economy is growing and expanding, more people are working, more people are investing, more people are paying taxes, and government revenues go up. When we have an economy growing at 3 to 4 percent instead of an economy growing at 1 to 2 percent, which is what we have today, the result is a dramatic increase in the amount of tax revenue that comes into the Federal Treasury.

When they are talking about raising the debt limit, we should look at what we can do in association with that discussion to actually reduce the debt. One would be to put spending reforms in place, and the other would be growing and expanding the economy.

One of the things that has been proposed that would grow the economy is tax reform. I happen to believe, and I think a lot of us do, that the best thing we can do to get the economy growing at a faster rate is to reform our Tax Code in a way that makes us more competitive in the global marketplace. That would mean reducing the tax on business, which is the highest in the world. The United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the entire world.

Lowering marginal income tax rates, broadening the tax base, doing away with many of the loopholes, deductions, exemptions, and preferences that are in the Tax Code today that benefit particular constituencies and going to a broader based tax base, but one that has marginal rates that are significantly lower than where they are today--I think that would dramatically unleash economic growth in this country and get people back to work so they can pay taxes and get government revenues up.

In the context of raising the debt limit, we ought to do something about the debt, and as I said, that is fairly straightforward.

One of the ideas that has been put forward here is that we need a clean debt limit increase; we can't have any discussion or negotiation about this. If we look at history, it has been the case that many of the big accomplishments, if you will, when it comes to deficit reduction, when it comes to fiscal plans being put into place, occurred in the context of increasing the debt limit. In fact, throughout our history, going back to 1978, the debt limit has been raised 53 times in those 35 years. Of those 53 debt limit increases, 27, or more than half, were done around other policy considerations and policy discussions and legislation that was put forward to address issues--in many cases to address the out-of-control spending and debt we have in this country.

For 35 years now, with 53 debt limit increases, more than half have involved discussion of other matters. In fact, some of the biggest accomplishments we can point to in the history of the last 30 years occurred at a time when we had both sides trying to figure out a path forward for dealing with fiscal imbalances our country faced.

The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation passed in 1985, the Budget Acts in 1990 and 1993 and 1997, and more recently in 2011. All occurred in the context of a debt limit increase. So there is ample precedent in history for doing big things that are good for the country and good for future generations around the debt limit increase. It defies history to suggest we cannot come to the table and cannot negotiate in the context of a debt limit increase.

As I look at these issues that are converging on us now and what they mean for our children and our grandchildren and for future generations, it seems to me that taking a position of we will not negotiate, period--which is essentially what the President has said and what has been echoed here by the Senate majority--is not only wrong in terms of what we need to do to fix the debt and to get our country on a more sustainable fiscal path, but it is also completely at odds with what we know to be the case throughout our history. We can do better by the American people. We should do better by the American people. It requires leadership.

The President of the United States, President Obama, as Senator Obama back in 2006, said at that time that raising the debt limit would be a leadership failure and described it as unpatriotic. Here we are these many years later, with double--double--the amount of debt we had back when he made that statement.

This situation we are in today cries out for leadership. It cries out for leadership from the President and from those of us in Congress. I hope we can find our way to get together, to sit down, to negotiate, to come up with solutions that are good for the future of this country that would deal not just with raising the borrowing limit so we can borrow more money to fund government, but to address the underlying problem, and that is the fact that we have a $17 trillion debt that continues to grow at $600 billion, $700 billion a year.

We continue to have a chronically high unemployment rate. We continue to have a labor force, a workforce that is at historically low levels; in other words, the number of people who are working today as a percentage of those who could work is at the lowest level it has been in 35 years. We have a sluggish economy that is growing in the 1- to 2-percent range. Take-home pay for most Americans has gone down since the President took office by about $3,700.

We need to get middle-class Americans back to work, middle-class Americans earning more, being able to provide for their families, increasing family household income and take-home pay in this country, and the way to do that is to get the economy growing and expanding.

The other way to do that, I would argue, is to get spending here in Washington under control so we are not out there borrowing more and more money all the time, so that more and more of our country's assets and resources can be deployed toward things that will yield a return, that will put more people to work, that will grow the economy, and expand the standard of living and the quality of life for people across this country. Time is short. The clock is running. Time is a-wasting. We need to get this done.

In the near term we need to bring up the nine bills sitting here in the Senate that were passed by the House. That would put funding for a lot of these services and programs that impact people--which has been expressed so many times by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle--back in place.

Secondly, let's get together--the President, Democrats, and Republicans here in Washington, DC--to talk about not only raising the debt limit but what we are going to do to address the underlying debt.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I note the absence of a quorum.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source