Insular Areas and Freely Associated States Energy Development

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the spending bill before us. I rise in opposition to the cynical substance of the legislation. I rise in opposition to the un-Republican and undemocratic process by which a small collection of political and economic insiders crafted it to benefit each other at everyone else's expense.

Finally, I rise in particular opposition to the signals that this so-called CRomnibus sends, the signal it sends to political insiders on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, the signal it sends to special interest cronies on Wall Street and K street, and the signal it sends to working families struggling on Main Streets across this country who have been waiting for a decade for someone in this city to start putting them first.

Those problems with this bill--each one alone enough to merit opposition--do not even speak to its greatest weakness, its failure to correct the President's lawless Executive amnesty. Since last night when it was taken up in the House of Representatives, supporters of the CRomnibus have couched their support in the language of compromise: ``This isn't a perfect bill,'' they say.

But on the contrary, it is perfect. As a representation of everything wrong with Washington, DC, as an example of exactly the kind of unfair, unrepresentative legislating that triggered successive electoral waves of bipartisan condemnation in 2006, 2008, 2010, and again in 2014--the CRomnibus is perfect.

Members of my party do not have the luxury of blaming this latest failure on the outgoing Senate majority. No. This one is on us.

Americans just last month thought they went to the polls and voted for change to stop this kind of thing: unread, 1,000-plus page bills written in secret, filled with hidden favors for special interests while funding the lawlessness of an out-of-control President.

Americans looking for that change will not find it in this bill. Rather, they will find what the discarded revolutionaries of ``Animal Farm'' found at the end of George Orwell's classic:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Americans across our country are facing a new and unnatural kind of squeeze, an opportunity deficit that is warping our free enterprise economy and our voluntary civil society. This opportunity deficit is not simply the result of globalization or technology or free trade. No. It is the result of politicians creating a welfare system that traps poor families in poverty--sometimes for generations at a time--and locks lower skilled workers out of potential jobs, an education system that traps poor kids in bad schools and college students into a lifetime of debt, a health care system that locks the poor in second-class care and erases what few wage gains the middle-class families ever see, a tax system that unfairly discourages work, saving, investment, marriage, and children.

Government policy unfairly protects the privileges of those who have already climbed the ladder of success, while putting that ladder out of the reach of those who have not yet grasped its very bottom rungs.

On Wall Street, corporate profits continue to soar. In Washington the influence economy booms and booms on. Almost everywhere else, take-home pay is flat. Jobs remain scarce. Small businesses are struggling to grow, while new businesses are struggling even to get off the ground.

More and more today in America, the people who work hard and play by the rules are being forced to subsidize political and economic elites who don't. It is not big business or big special interests who created this toxic environment. All they can do is ask. Only government--big government--can rig the system. Only government can carve out a regulatory exception for certain big banks while intensifying its regulatory squeeze on smaller banks or tweak accounting rules to line the pockets of certain big insurance companies or create new taxpayer subsidies for certain industries and cynically present all of the above as unamendable--take it or leave it, take it or shut down the government propositions, as this bill does.

We wonder why the American people distrust their government, distrust this government. We wonder why the principled grassroots of both political parties--conservatives and progressives--are up in arms against their Washington establishments over this bill. The American people do not trust Congress because, as we are proving once again today, Congress is not trustworthy.

Yet as rotten as the CRomnibus before us is, I want to state for the record that this week leaves me with nothing but optimism about the prospects we have for real reform and revival in the coming years.

The miserable process we witnessed this week represents the last gasping throes of a discredited Washington status quo. Ten years ago this bill would not have been controversial. Five years ago an easy majority would have been purchased with earmarks. This week, with the full weight of both party's leaderships, it barely made it over the finish line. Change comes slowly, as we know, and it comes most slowly to those institutions that make the rules, but change is coming. The era of passing 1,600-page bills, written in secret, via a process that includes lobbyists but excludes the American people is coming to an end. The era of big government rigging the rules for special interests while leaving everyone else behind is coming to an end. A new era is coming in which Washington will once again be forced to work for the American people instead of the other way around. To those Americans who have watched with dismay what Congress did--and did not do--this week, who made their voices heard by flooding both sides of the aisle with phone calls and emails, my message is simple. Take heart. It may not look like it today, but you are winning. America is winning.

The beltway establishments of both parties are exhausted, out of ideas, and running out of time. Next year a new unified Congress has an opportunity, a real open opportunity, to reshape the national debate, to challenge Washington's failing status quo and its failed champion in the Oval Office.

We can finally begin the hard, overdue work of rescuing our economy from the grips of government dysfunction and political privilege, of rescuing our health care system from ObamaCare, of reviving our education system and modernizing our transportation system, of ending special interest manipulation of our tax system and reforming regulations to level the playing field for small and new businesses, of fixing our broken immigration system.

Next year, just next month, we can begin to craft a new reform agenda, to increase access to and opportunity within America's middle class, an agenda that grows the economy and increases take-home pay, an agenda that restores mobility and opportunity to working families and communities while putting political and corporate elites back to work for everyone else. We can look to our own House of Congress to reform the way Congress conducts the people's business, the way we budget and spend the people's money, so embarrassments such as this CRomnibus might become relics of the past. We can do this. We must do this and we will.

For too long the working families of and aspiring to America's middle class have been fighting an all-too-lonely battle to keep up and to get ahead. For too long, Washington has been an obstacle, even an opponent, in that fight. That fight will remain uphill, but the first time in a long time there is hope. There is a real chance that fight may get a little less steep, and it might get a little less lonely. Help is on the way.

I know it is hard to see right now. It is hard to see it in Washington, and it must be even harder to see out in the country, but change is coming. A new Congress is on the way, with new ideas and a new renewed reform sense of purpose.

Temporary setbacks such as this bill should not discourage us, and they will not deter us, for the only way to keep winning is to keep fighting. Washington may still be broken, but America is ready to fix it, no matter how long it takes and no matter how much Washington resists it. Our opportunity to finally begin that work is almost here. We just need to know where to look for it, for:

..... not by eastern windows only
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!

I yield the floor.

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