Nomination of P. David Lopez to be General Counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, last week, before the Thanksgiving holiday, our colleague from across the aisle, the senior Senator from New York, gave a very significant speech at the National Press Club. Senator Schumer is not just a senior Senator from New York; he is an important Member of the Democratic leadership here in the Senate.

While giving the speech about the midterm elections, he said what many Members on this side of the aisle have been saying for the last 4 years, and that is that the Democratic party, by making the passage of ObamaCare their top priority after they won the election of 2008, ``blew the opportunity the American people gave them.'' He said they did so by focusing ``on the wrong problem.''

What I think he meant and went on to say is that they should have focused on the lack of jobs and the wage stagnation for hardworking, middleclass families in America.

As he pointed out, that broader group of the middle class represented a much larger segment of the electorate than just a small percentage of the electorate represented by the uninsured. I would add, parenthetically, that we know that even the best laid plans with the Affordable Care Act has proven to be a terrible failure.

Today the Wall Street Journal reported that between 2007 and 2013 health insurance premiums for an average middleclass American family have gone up by 24 percent. As we know, when the President said if you like your doctor, you can keep him, that proved not to be true. When he said the family of four would see their premiums go down by $2,500, that ended up not to be true either.

Two weeks ago, despite the overwhelming rejection the President's policies received at the polls, the President then decided to circumvent Congress and take Executive action on immigration, far exceeding any arguable authority that I believe most lawyers would think he has. Certainly, while we recognize it is within the President's discretion to prioritize the people against whom enforcement action will be taken, there is no legal authorization for doing other things he purports to have the authority to do, such as issuing work permits.

Then there is this. Just when it seemed that the Senate was beginning to work on avoiding a retroactive tax increase for millions of Americans, the President threatened to veto an important tax relief package, which, as I said, had bipartisan support, including the support of the majority leader, Senator Reid, and Senator Schumer, the senior Senator from New York. He did so because it did not include every single provision he thought it should include.

If we have not learned before, we should now know that if you insist on absolute perfection--in other words, you want everything you want, and the alternative is nothing--then most of the time you are going to get nothing. That is what taxpayers are getting when it comes to aborting this retroactive tax provision in the so-called tax extenders bill.

To again quote our good friend from New York, by threatening to veto this job-creating tax relief, it appears that the President has once again focused on the wrong problem and is certainly going about this in a nonproductive and unconstructive way. It is unfortunate because the President seems to be positively allergic to good-faith negotiations and genuine compromise. Again, if your attitude is ``my way or the highway,'' you are going to get the highway all the time because that is not how our democratic institutions work. The only way things work is for us to find common ground and to compromise. Yet the President's attitude seems, unfortunately, out of touch. He seems more interested in getting his way by any means necessary--hence, the Executive action on immigration.

We increasingly know that actions are dividing the country and hurting hard-working Texans and American families across the Nation--and not just by not contributing to the solution but by being a positive obstacle to bipartisan resolutions of so many of these problems. I realize the President must think that it is much easier to issue Executive orders and threaten to veto legislation from the White House, but it was not helping to solve problems we were sent here by our constituents to solve.

There is no real reason preventing us from getting to the tax relief I mentioned earlier that the President said he would veto. For years House and Senate Republicans--often with significant bipartisan support--have focused on making progrowth provisions of the Tax Code permanent, such as the research and development tax credit, accelerated depreciation, for example, and the section 179 provision.

To show how counterproductive it is for us to do these on a short-term basis or to try to jam them through a lameduck session, I had a farmer from Texas come and see me. He said: I am prepared to spend and invest $200,000 on my farm if I know this tax provision is going to be the law. If it is not, I won't. To me, that is just another example of how what we do here--or what we don't do here--has a negative impact on our economy and on investment in job creation.

While I know the bipartisan package proposed last week was not perfect, it certainly would have moved us in the right direction. It would have provided some certainty--indeed permanency--for some tax provisions and would have provided some temporary relief on others. Perhaps most importantly, it would have sent a signal to our constituents that we got the message that was delivered to us on November 4, and that we are going to commit ourselves anew to try to work together to provide certainty and protect millions of Americans from tax hikes that are just right around the corner and work on other constructive proposals to help solve problems that affect the middle class.

Unfortunately, the President has persisted in his attitude of refusing to negotiate with Congress, resulting in another missed opportunity, and ultimately another short-term fix that will provide no long-term certainty to taxpayers struggling in the Obama economy.

Come January, there will be a new majority in the Senate that will make the priorities of the American people the priorities of Congress. As for President Obama, we can only hope he will somehow have an epiphany and decide to work with us to unite the country rather than continue to divide the country with more Executive actions and his harmful ``take it or leave it'' approach to governing.

I yield the floor.

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