Drug Quality and Security Act-- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. KING. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

BASIC FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT

Mr. KING. Madam President, I rise this morning in high hopes but with deep concern. The high hopes are that a budget conference at long last is taking place, that representatives of the Senate and the House are meeting together--met last week and I know have been meeting informally this week--in order to try to achieve, finally, a budget for this fiscal year. My concern is that it has been so hard to get here, it has been so difficult, and that we are now in a process where we do not seem to be able to function.

I am worried about the country. I am worried about whether we are going to be able to address our problems. This is not a speech about subject matter. It is not about global climate change or employment or the minimum wage or health care, but it is about whether this institution can function in order to confront any of those problems.

When I was a young man, there was a famous book. It was kind of a cult favorite called ``Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.'' Sometimes I feel as though that is where we are here. This institution has been so compromised in its ability to function that it has become the norm and people have low expectations, even people who are here.

I remember being on the floor a few months ago when one of the Senators stood up and said: This amendment should be subject to the normal 60-vote requirement, and my head snapped back because there is no such thing as a normal 60-vote requirement. For 200 years, we did not function with a normal 60-vote requirement. That has become a rather new innovation. I am not going to talk about the filibuster or the 60-vote requirement, but the idea that this Senator asserted it was normal indicates a change in attitude about the way this place functions.

Another example is that, to my knowledge, the conference committees that are going on now on the budget and on the farm bill, I believe, are the first two conference committees convened in this entire year. I worked here as a staff member 40 years ago and remember going to conference committees rather frequently--walking through the Capitol with my boss and going to the meetings and seeing the Senators and the Congressmen sit down and argue and disagree and agree and compromise and reach settlements on legislation on a fairly regular basis.

It is cause for celebration. It took a government shutdown, in effect, to produce a simple conference committee. Statistically, I am told this is the least productive Congress in American history thus far--no budget in 4 years. A budget is the basic function of any government. I understand there has been 1 appropriations bill out of 48 in the last several years. The result has been a complete and total loss of confidence from the public.

That has significance. That is important because in our economy confidence is the mainspring. This is not an academic concern. I am not giving a lecture about civics. The lack of functionality of this institution is damaging the country. For example, we know from studies that just the shutdown cost our economy $24 billion, for no purpose that I could discern. But there is an untold broader cost.

The reality is that two-thirds of the American economy is driven by consumer spending. Consumer spending is driven by confidence, by the millions of individual decisions that people make in their daily lives, based on how they feel about their future, how they feel about their country, how they feel about their personal situation.

Part of that is whether they feel they have representatives in Washington who are representing their interests and, in fact, are capable of serving the needs of the country. Ironically, this lack of confidence that is generated by events such as the shutdown harms the economy and therefore makes the deficit worse. The very best way to solve the deficit problem is not necessarily taxes or cuts, it is growth in the economy. If the economy grows, the deficit shrinks. That was part of what happened in the late nineties, the last time we had a budget surplus, because the economy was roaring along.

It is also about national security. I was provoked to come to the floor by reading a speech made recently by Robert Gates, one of our most distinguished public servants, the former Secretary of Defense. He talked about the defense posture of the country and the national security situation. Here is what he said toward the end of his speech:

Let me close with a word about what I now regard to be the biggest threat to national security--

The biggest threat to U.S. national security.

the political dysfunction within the two square miles of Washington, D.C. encompassing the White House and Capitol Hill.

Those are strong words. He is not talking about Al Qaeda. He is not talking about a resurgent China. He is not talking about a world threat of terrorism. He is talking about us as the greatest threat to U.S. national security. He went on to say:

American politics has always been shrill and ugly business going back to the Founding Fathers. But as a result of several polarizing trends we now have lost the ability to execute even the basic functions of government, much less solve the most difficult and divisive problems facing this country.

Basic functions of government: passing a budget, operating the government itself, paying our bills--the basic functions of government. Secretary Gates said:

Looking ahead, it is unrealistic to expect partisanship to disappear or even dissipate. But when push comes to shove, when the future of our country is at stake, ideological zeal and short-term political calculation on the part of both Republicans and Democrats must yield to patriotism and the long-term national interest.

This lack of functionality, this chaos, if you will, also affects us internationally. Tom Friedman, this weekend, had a column. I thought the title was rather provocative. It was, ``Calling America: Hello? Hello? Hello?''

``Few Americans,'' Friedman says, ``are aware of how much America has lost in this recent episode of bringing the American economy to the edge of a cliff. ..... ''

People always looked up to America. He quotes a citizen of Singapore.

People always looked up to America as the best-run country, the most reasonable, the most sensible. And now people are asking: ``Can America manage itself and what are the implications. ..... '' [for the rest of the world]?

Our Constitution has always been based upon two somewhat competing principles in tension with each other. One is the fundamental purpose of the Constitution, which is to create an effective government. The Constitution was not what ran this country immediately after the American Revolution. We experimented with something called the Articles of Confederation. It did not work. The chaos and the economic problems of that period is what led the Framers to draft the Constitution in that blessed summer of 1787.

But the one principle in the Constitution is right in the preamble: To form a more perfect Union, to establish justice, to provide for the common defense, to ensure domestic tranquility and promote the general welfare. That is government.

At the same time, the Framers were concerned about the ancient question of who will guard the guardians; how do we control the government we just created in order to protect ourselves from its own abuse?

They built this elaborate system of checks and balances. They had never heard of Rube Goldberg in 1787. But if they had, that is what they did. They created an elaborate, cumbersome, slow system. They wanted it to be that way in order to curb the excesses of the government they had created. They wanted it to be slow and cumbersome. They succeeded beyond their wildest imagination.

Those two principles, governing and checks and balances, as I say, are in tension in the Constitution. The problem is, we seem to have reached a moment in time where the governing part has been taken away and all we have left are checks and balances. We have a system that is ridiculously easy to monkey wrench if you do not have the basic commitment to governing. That is the problem we face today.

So what do we do? We have to do something. That brings me back to where I began at the budget conference. This budget conference is very important. This is not one of many conferences that are going on. This is a--I do not want to say a last chance, but it is one of our last chances to show the American people we can govern. It is almost less important what is in the deal than that there be a deal, that the parties show they can come together that they can solve a problem.

Just the fact of the headline, ``Congress passes a budget which the President signs'' would electrify the country. It would be the most positive thing we could possibly do for the economy. By the same token, a headline that says, ``Congress once more fails to act'' will be one more weight on the future of the country, one more stone in the pile of evidence that we can no longer function; that this system which has served us so well for so long can no longer serve us as it must.

What do we do to get there? As I say, we do something. I hope and pray and urge and support the chair of the Budget Committee, the House chair of the Budget Committee, the members of that conference to try to find solutions that will not make everybody happy, by definition, but at least will show we are able to do the most basic function of government.

How do we get there? We listen. We have a company in Maine that has a sign on the wall that I think we ought to put in this room. It says: All of us are always smarter than any of us. The wisdom of the group--there is tremendous experience and wisdom in this institution if we can bring that to bear, but it does not work if people are not listening. If people say: I know the answer, I have all the results, I do not need to listen, I do not have anything to learn, we will never get there if that is the idea.

When people say to you: I am not going to compromise, what they are saying is: I have all the answers. I am entirely right.

I have never known anyone that was entirely right. So we need to listen. Yes, we need to compromise. We need to remind ourselves of the pretty simple oath we take. The oath that we take when we come into this place is to the Constitution of the United States. It is not to a political party. It is not to an ideology. It is not to a particular issue, no matter how precious to us or our constituents, it is an oath to the Constitution of the United States.

I hope and pray that if we can hold to that and remind ourselves why we are here and the heavy weight of responsibility that we bear, we can find solutions, we can solve problems, we can begin to rebuild the trust the American people want to have in their government, if we can only prove ourselves worthy of it. It is a heavy responsibility. It is one, I believe, we can meet and do so with honor and good faith to that oath we all took.

I yield the floor.

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