Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2013 -- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I would also like to address the matter of the President's State of the Union speech tonight. I am sure that, as has been the rule, President Obama will make an eloquent speech. He is very good at that. There is just one problem: The President's credibility has been shattered. Indeed, on issue after issue we see a massive gap between his rhetoric and the reality. You might say that the two biggest challenges the President faces tonight are those two challenges. One is to his credibility, and the other is to his competence and the competence of the Federal Government, actually, to be able to deliver on the promises it makes.

The most obvious example is the health care law, which we have heard a lot about and will continue to hear a lot about in this ensuing year. I was visiting with one health insurance company executive who told me that basically the bad news is going to continue to unroll and unravel over the coming months. There will be nowhere to hide.

Perhaps what people want most from Washington, DC, is accountability. I hear it all the time. People say what does it take to get fired? Do people promise the Sun and the Moon and deliver nothing without any consequences? How about people who were charged with implementing the policies of the administration, whether it is the Web site contractor or whomever. The Web site contractor finally did get fired and a new one hired, so I assume that sooner or later the Web site will actually work as advertised. But that still leaves us with the flaws in the underlying policy, which will not work. The American people understand that and they are looking to Washington for help, saying please deliver us from this epic failure which is not what we were promised. In the event there is not a response to that that they deem credible, I promise there will be an accounting come November 2014.

The President said repeatedly that under his signature health care law, if you liked the coverage you had you could keep it. Public opinion polls then showed that roughly 90 percent of the American people liked their health care coverage. Why in the world did we undermine or did ObamaCare undermine the existing coverage people liked just in order to cover more people, which in fact it did not do. We know ObamaCare has forced millions of Americans to lose their preferred coverage, the coverage they said they liked back in 2009. The President repeatedly said ObamaCare will reduce your premiums, make them lower--for a family of 4, about $2,500. The stories we see, day after day, of American citizens signing up on the health care exchanges is just the opposite. They are experiencing premium shock, and the fact is it is going to continue to get nothing but worse as people realize that the ones who are signing up for ObamaCare are older, sicker Americans and that young healthy Americans are simply taking a pass, saying I cannot afford it and if I have a problem I will take care of it later.

Premiums are going to continue to skyrocket, and Americans who are looking for more affordable health care coverage will find out that indeed it has been priced beyond their ability to pay.

Here is the rub. The President said--and I think this was the implicit, underlying promise of ObamaCare: If you pass ObamaCare, Congress, everybody will have coverage. We will have universal coverage. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that ObamaCare, even if it were implemented to perfection, exactly as the proponents and the President had expected, it would still leave 30 million people uninsured--30 million people uninsured.

The President said this new law would bring a greater sense of certainty to the U.S. health care system. Instead, we see one of the credit rating agencies actually slashing the credit rating of America's health insurers, citing the uncertainty generated by the implementation of ObamaCare--the opposite, again, of what was promised.

The President also said the Web site, when you plug in your personal information--your Social Security number, your health information that is protected already by Federal law--if you plug it into the ObamaCare Web site it is going to be safe and secure. Cyber experts have testified, particularly in the House of Representatives, that the security of the Web site is worse today than it was several months ago. There is no guarantee that if you put your personal information, your private information, your confidential information into the Web site, it is going to be protected.

Here is the real surprise: I remember when Secretary Sebelius appeared before the Senate Finance Committee just a couple of months ago. I asked her about the navigator program. You remember, the navigator program was supposed to get people to help you sign up for ObamaCare. I said: There is no background check, is there, to be a navigator.

She said no.

I asked: So is it possible that a convicted felon could be a navigator, somebody you are giving your personal information to, to help you sign up for ObamaCare?

To her credit she said, in all candor: Yes; that is possible.

I nearly fell out of my chair.

ObamaCare's broken promises have caused enormous pain and anxiety in millions of Americans in Texas and all around the country. We see from the Wall Street Journal poll that came out this morning, which had to be a wake-up call to the administration and its allies, the American people are anxious, they are dissatisfied, they are wondering what has gone so terribly wrong in Washington, DC, and ObamaCare is exhibit 1. That is why we are committed on this side of the aisle to working with our colleagues, when they are ready to talk to us, and to replacing ObamaCare with patient-centered alternatives that will actually bring down the cost and make it more affordable.

What better way to get more people covered than to make it more affordable and to make sure government does not make these private decisions for us and our family when it comes to health care but that we, families, get to make that decision in consultation with their family doctor.

When you begin to scrape the surface, the President's problem of credibility and competence--those are the two crises he confronts tonight as he addresses the Nation--all we have to do, beyond ObamaCare, is look at what is happening in the economy. After raising taxes $1.7 trillion, that was about 1 year ago, during the time President Obama has been President of the United States, the national debt has gone up $6.6 trillion. But my friends across the aisle, many of them--I would exclude the present occupant of the Chair who I know is concerned about this--my friends across the aisle think nothing of bringing legislation to the floor that is unpaid for that would add to the national deficit and national debt. That is the reason we now have a national debt in excess of $17 trillion.

That is more than any of us can possibly conceive. When President Obama became President, the national debt was about $10 trillion. That is bad enough. But in the last 5 years it has gone up $6.6 trillion--or more than $6.6 trillion. It is no coincidence that he has presided over the weakest recovery and highest unemployment since the Great Depression back in the 1930s.

President Obama has this very strange idea that the best way to get the economy going is to raise taxes and spend more money. It is just not working. As a matter of fact, we have great debates in Congress about the role and the size of the Federal Government. But perhaps the best example of why big government does not work has been the lousy economy, the slow economic growth, the high unemployment, and the number of people who have actually dropped out of the workforce.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has this figure that it calculates. It is called the labor participation rate. You can Google Bureau of Labor Statistics or labor participation rate. That will show you that the percentage of people between the ages of 25 and 54 who are actively engaged and looking for work is lower today than it was at the height of the recession in 2008. Another 347,000 people dropped out of the workforce in December alone.

I know when we look at the unemployment rates that are released from time to time, we see the rate coming down a little bit, and we say: That is great. The unemployment rate is coming down. The problem is that in December alone almost 350,000 people quit looking for work. They gave up. We know that nearly 4 million people who are still looking for work have been out of a job for more than 6 months. That is not an economy to be proud of.

Let me just contrast that with what happened in the 1980s during the Reagan recovery. Typically, what economists will tell you is that when we have a recession, it is sort of a V shape. So when it hits bottom, it actually bounces up pretty quickly because there is nothing but the upside left to go. Yet this recession has been more of a U shape. In other words, we hit bottom, and we are still bouncing along the bottom. We haven't seen the kind of economic growth that we need to get people back to work, to grow our economy, and to get our budget balanced. I think the reason for that is some of the very policies I talked about a moment ago. It is due to the same misguided policies that the President has advocated and will no doubt talk about again tonight in his State of the Union Address.

I heard my colleague Senator Barrasso from Wyoming talk about the Keystone XL Pipeline. The President likes to say: I have a pen, I have a phone, and I'm going to go it alone. Of course he can't do that under our Constitution. We all learned in high school about the checks and balances of the three coequal branches of government. The President can't spend a penny without Congress appropriating the money.

If we take him at his word, and he really wants to do something about the economy and reduce our dependence on imported oil from dangerous sources abroad, he could use that pen he talked about to authorize the Canadian-American connection of the Keystone XL Pipeline. You would then see a lot of the oil and energy produced in Canada, which is combined with the energy added to that pipeline, make its way down to southeast Texas where the refineries will turn it into gasoline and jet fuel, and in the process create thousands of new jobs.

Rather than using that pen to put people back to work and make sure that we have safe sources of energy, his administration is working behind the scenes to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline. Politics is the only explanation.

The President should not be surprised at what this Wall Street Journal poll showed this morning--that most of the voters disapprove of how he handled the economy. Likewise, he should not be surprised that trust in the Federal Government has also fallen to historic lows; that is the credibility problem. You can't promise the Sun and the Moon and deliver squat and expect people to trust you next time when you make another promise.

Then there is this. The Obama administration has repeatedly ignored or waived laws that prove inconvenient--from ObamaCare to immigration to welfare reform to education, energy, and drug policy.

One of the most frequent questions my constituents ask me back home in Texas is: How can the President do that? I thought we were a Nation that believed in the rule of law, that the law applied to everybody in America no matter how humble your station in life or how exalted--whether you are the commander in chief. I guess we have to revisit that when the President picks and chooses which laws he wants to enforce. Of course, Congress can pass laws. That is what Congress does.

The executive branch is the one that is supposed to enforce the law. So unless someone files a lawsuit--not Eric Holder in the Department of Justice, one of the most politicized Departments of Justice I can even remember. When some private organization or individual--such as the one who recently challenged the contraception mandate in ObamaCare that was recently stayed by the Supreme Court of the United States--or some association or business files a lawsuit that culminates in a judgment of a court years later, but for that, there really isn't much of a check on President Obama. But that can change, and the voters know how to do it: By changing who is in charge in the Senate in November.

Here is another place where the President overreached and recently had his hands slapped by the courts. This had to do with his claimed authority to do another end run around Congress to make recessed appointments. We all know that under the Constitution the advise and consent function of the Senate is to act on the President's nominees and to vote to confirm them or not. Again, in a case of the President trying to go it alone, the court of appeals slapped down his attempt to do this end run around the Constitution and the advise and consent rule of the Senate. But that didn't stop him. Now he is threatening to take even more unilateral action: I have my phone, I have a pen--he is ready to do it again. That is not how the Federal Government is supposed to operate.

For example, after the President made these unconstitutional recess appointments, the DC Circuit of Appeals ruled on them and said: If the President's claim to make that appointment would be upheld, it would ``eviscerate the Constitution's separation of powers''--the three coequal branches of government, checks and balances. What could be more fundamental to our form of government? The court of appeals said that if they upheld the President's claimed power to make those appointments, it would ``eviscerate the Constitution's separation of powers.''

We know how important the role of checks and balances is in our form of government and in our democracy. Indeed, our democracy would not be able to survive without them. The people who founded this great country knew that the greatest threat to their freedom and their individual liberties and their most basic rights was the concentration of power, so that is why they separated power at the Federal and State level in the Tenth Amendment, but they also separated the power at the Federal level between the judicial, executive, and the legislative branches. Yet this President and his administration have shown repeated contempt for the checks and balances that are so essential to our form of government.

I have said many times that no President has the authority to disregard or selectively enforce the law based on political expediency. If he or she can, then we are nothing better than a banana republic. We are no longer a Nation that believes in the rule of law, which has really been the competitive edge that this country has had over other countries. People know if you come and do business in the United States, you are going to have access to the courts, your contracts are going to be enforced, and the laws that are written will actually be enforced by an impartial judiciary. That gives us a competitive advantage economically, morally, and otherwise, but it is being undermined.

Republicans are not the only ones that are worried about the President's willingness to bypass the normal legislative process. Yesterday my colleague from Maine, a Democratic caucus member, urged the White House not to treat Congress as--what he called--an afterthought.

In that spirit, I would like to remind the President of something he said just a few months ago. He said:

We've got this Constitution; we've got this whole thing about separation of powers. So there is no shortcut to politics, and there's no shortcut to democracy.

That is what the President of the United States said just a few months ago. Yet now he is claiming: I have a phone, I have a pen, and I'm going to go it alone. I would like to remind him of something he also said back in 2006, which is very similar. He said:

The Founders designed this system, as frustrating as it is, to make sure that there's a broad consensus before the country moves forward.

I couldn't agree more with the Barack Obama of 2006 or the Barack Obama of a few months ago, but I couldn't disagree more with President Barack Obama of today who somehow has this fantasy--it is nothing better than a fantasy--that somehow he can rise above Congress and the Constitution and the separation of powers and don the robe of a virtual dictator, force new laws down our throat or force the country in a direction that it doesn't want to go. It is a fantasy. It ain't gonna happen.

Yet on issue after issue the President still likes to tell the American people that he can move forward without any regard to consensus or constitutional checks and balances. It is a terrible mistake, and I wish he would reconsider.

In addition to its assault on the separation of powers, this administration has targeted other enemies, such as its intrusive monitoring of journalists' phone records. It has attempted to shake down private companies to get them to fund ObamaCare. It has fostered a culture of intimidation and punished whistleblowers. There have been scandals from Benghazi to Fast and Furious and those responsible for the attempt to intimidate the American people--or some part of the American people--from participating in the political process through the IRS scandal.

We know this administration has repeatedly obstructed the investigations and refused to cooperate with the inquiries that would bring the facts out into the light of day so we can all know what happened, make sure that those responsible are held accountable and, more importantly, make sure it never happens again.

I am confident that this is not the record President Obama will talk about tonight. Although this is his record, it is not too late to change. His own record is what has destroyed his credibility, as well as caused people to question his competence and the Federal Government's ability to actually deliver on the extravagant promises he has made time and time again.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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