Keystone XL Pipeline Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, let me say to the Senator from Alaska and the Senator from North Dakota, congratulations, and tell them how much I admire and appreciate their tenacity. The 114th Congress had a lot to prove. Mainly what we had to prove is we weren't like the 113th Congress that was completely dysfunctional, particularly the Senate.

I have to say to our good friend, the Presiding Officer, it wasn't the House. It was the Senate that was dysfunctional. The House passed a lot of legislation that came to die in the Senate because the then-majority leader made the decision he wasn't going to move it. It is a new day in the Senate. While I am sure the bill managers would tell us it wasn't easy, we actually have an accomplishment thanks to the leadership of the Senator from Alaska and the Senator from North Dakota, and thanks to an awful lot of people. That is progress.

I hope the first efforts we have made by being able to pass legislation--hopefully the House will concur, the Senate, and the President--we will have done our job. What the President decides to do is about him doing his job, but we can't fail to do our jobs just because he refuses to do his job.

In fact, when he has announced for seven different pieces of legislation he is going to veto them, the easiest thing for us to do would be to curl up in a fetal position and say we give up, we are not even going try. We haven't done that. Again, I think this is a great accomplishment.

I would say to my friends, the Senator from Alaska, the Senator from North Dakota, and others who have gotten us here today, well done.

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S 2016 BUDGET

Madam President, I would like to turn to another topic. That seems as though it is a metaphor for life in the Senate. We finished one important piece of legislation, and we turn the page to the next topic. I would like to talk about the budget.

Next Monday the President is expected to release his 2016 budget. Budgets are a time when you talk about and deal with your priorities. This budget will reflect the President's priorities, I am sure. I hope one of those priorities is to put the country on a more sustainable path. But one of the things I am very glad about is that for the first time the President, in a long time, is actually going to propose his budget on time. The President missed so many previous deadlines over the years that people hardly ever notice anymore--but that is good, the President releasing his budget on time.

While I am happy to see he will finally meet his statutory deadline in submitting his annual budget, what I am interested in seeing is what he has in the budget, to see if he is willing to meet the challenges of our day by drafting a serious budget, including realistic priorities. That also means making tough decisions, but that is where budgets are so helpful.

I am an optimistic person, but if the President's State of the Union rhetoric is any indication as to what we will see next week, I am concerned the budget will be loaded with more taxes, more spending, and more debt. That certainly isn't a sustainable path forward for the country, but last year the President's 2015 budget would have raised taxes by more than $1 trillion and increased our national debt by trillions more and his budget would have never balanced.

I can't think of anything worse during a time of slow economic growth than layering on $1 trillion of additional taxes on the people we are depending upon to create jobs and make the investment to get the economy growing again and get America back to work.

Here is another sort of sleight of hand the President has been using lately. He has been talking a little bit about deficits. Deficits, as we all know, is the difference between the money that comes in and the money that is paid out on an annual basis. The debt is a different topic. That is the long-term debt. Actually, it is the accumulated deficits which represent the biggest challenge.

The President likes to say that, well, the deficit has come down--which is true--but primarily the reason for that is because of a huge tax increase he embraced a couple of years ago along with the sequester or discretionary spending caps that were in the Budget Control Act of 2011. The combination of higher taxes the President sought and got and the spending restraint that essentially was championed on this side of the aisle resulted in lower annual deficits.

But the fact is we are still spending money we don't have. As the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee likes to say, we are still overspending. We are still spending money we don't have as long as we have any deficit. But deficits will not hold up for long as a reliable red herring. Factors contributing to lower deficits will soon change. Spending on ObamaCare and other broken entitlements will only ramp up from here. On the President's current trajectory, it is only a matter of time before those annual deficits start building again and adding even more to our national debt.

What the President is hoping is that they will be distracted by his happy talk about lower annual defenses, and we will not pay attention to the looming elephant in the room, which is our national debt which has grown more than $7 trillion in the 6 years he has been in office. More than $1 trillion a year. The national debt is $18 trillion and counting. It is set to explode over the long term.

I realize most of us can't possibly conceive of what $18 trillion is, but if we consider the fact we have 320 million people in America and we have an $18.1 trillion national debt, each one of us--from the oldest American, most senior American, to the baby who was just born--owes $56,500 in debt.

Earlier this week the Congressional Budget Office released its annual Budget and Economic Outlook which provides an updated economic forecast for the current fiscal year and for 10 subsequent years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, under current law the national debt is expected to grow more than $9 trillion in the next 10 years. The President added $7 trillion during the 6 years he has been in office. If we don't do something quickly, we are on a trajectory to add $9 trillion more over the next 10 years.

The Congressional Budget Office's report also shows that in 5 years the Federal Government will spend more than $500 billion in interest on the debt alone and $827 billion in 10 years.

Here is the ticking timebomb if you think about it. Because of slow economic growth globally, a lot of the Federal Reserve Banks essentially for the United States and other countries have done the best they can to keep interest rates low. In America they are next to zero. All we need to do is look at the return on our savings accounts to see what a meager interest rate is being offered by the bank or credit union on our savings. That is because of Federal Reserve policy. That is true of central banks throughout the world. But inevitably over time those interest rates are unsustainable, so they are going to start ticking back up. When they go from roughly zero to 4 percent or 5 percent, the amount of money we will have to pay on the current $18.1 trillion in debt and on the additional debt that will be added over the next 10 years--unless we get hold of this problem--is going to crowd out our ability to do everything from protecting the most vulnerable in our society through our safety net programs to jeopardizing our national defense which is something we can't outsource to somebody else. This is something only the Federal Government can do.

We had an office holder in Texas a few years ago who talked about the Yellow Pages test. It always resonated with me. She used to say government should not be doing things that we can find in the Yellow Pages because that means the private sector is doing it.

But the one thing you won't find in the Yellow Pages is national security, and so our ability to protect our way of life and our future is going to be jeopardized by this debt. That is why Admiral Mullen--former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a few years ago--shocked all of us when he was asked ``What is the single largest threat to our national security?'' and he said ``The debt.'' That got a lot of us going to the books trying to figure out what he was talking about, and what he was talking about is what I have been referring to here.

Let me repeat that second part again. In 2025 we will be spending $827 billion in interest on our debt alone. We won't be paying down the principal; we will just be paying interest on the debt by 2025--$827 billion. That would be the third largest line item in the Federal budget, just behind Medicare and Social Security.

The Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, has been testifying on findings from this report. On Tuesday, before the House Budget Committee, Dr. Elmendorf stated that ``such large and growing federal debt would have serious negative consequences.'' He is exactly right. When we have to basically take up available credit to finance our national debt, that leaves less credit available to the private sector to make investments that will actually create jobs. It acts like a wet blanket on economic growth. Nothing but fiscal uncertainty and crisis will come from our debt continuing to spiral out of control.

The bottom line is this: Under President Obama the Federal Government has spent the past several years raising taxes. It has increased regulations. It is driving our national debt to unprecedented levels, and we have a growth rate which reflects that.

I know the President was celebrating. He was almost spiking the football at the State of the Union, saying: Well, we had a 5-percent spurt of growth in the gross domestic product last quarter.

Well, that is great, but all of the projections show that for the next year, because of all of the factors I have mentioned, growth is going to continue to bounce along the bottom at a rate of roughly 2 to 2.2 percent. That is not enough growth to get the economy moving again to create the jobs to create the prosperity and lift our economy needs to get Americans back to work.

In my opinion, the President's policies over the last year have actually made it more difficult for businesses to hire workers and for families to plan for the future. I would argue that his policies have introduced enormous uncertainty into our health care system, our tax system, and our financial system.

What our country needs now is the same thing which we have needed all along but which we haven't had over the past 6 years. We need genuine Presidential leadership, the type of leadership that is required to restore Americans' confidence in the future and to ensure better opportunities for the next generations and beyond. We don't need Presidential leadership that leads us into more debt, less opportunity, and a more dismal future.

It is my hope that the President's budget will be exactly what it should be and exactly what the American people deserve; that is, a responsible blueprint for robust, economic growth. There are not a lot of problems that face our country that couldn't be addressed in large part by robust economic growth. Our economy would grow. Revenues to the Federal Treasury would grow, thus reducing our deficits and giving us a better opportunity to address our debt. More Americans would be working again instead of the lowest percentage of people in the workforce in the past 30 years. That is what they call the labor participation rate.

I hope the President's budget will get behind some of these progrowth policies, such as progrowth tax reform--something we are eager to work with the President on--and support serious efforts to save Social Security and Medicare. The dirty little secret in Washington is that if we don't do anything to save Medicare and Social Security, they are going to fall off the fiscal cliff. So doing nothing is not an option, but we need a bipartisan commitment to save Social Security and Medicare.

I hope the President's budget will be a balanced one and finally offer a long-term plan for controlling our national debt. If it is not, well, we are not going to depend on the President alone; we are going to do our job in the Senate and the House and pass a responsible budget. If the President does not propose one, we will show the American people what one looks like because we cannot let the President continue to lead us down this path of unsustainable debt and a darker future for American people.

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