SESSIONS. Mr. President, I want to say some things that are
pretty hard right now. I say them out of affection and concern for the
Senate of the United States and for the way we are conducting the
people's business. I believe they ought to be heard and all of us ought
to think about them. Some of our new Members have not been involved in
a Senate that functioned differently than the one in which we are
participating today. They do not know how a real Senate should operate.
We have gradually, and at a very accelerated pace in more recent years,
made some very unwise choices about how we do the people's business.
This has been the most dysfunctional Senate in history. The majority
has abused and altered the powers and duties of the Senate more than at
any time in history, to the detriment of the institution and to the
detriment of the public interest.
That is a hard thing to say, but I truly believe something very
unfortunate has been occurring and people have not talked about it. I
would also criticize the Republicans a bit here because we are supposed
to be the loyal opposition. The majority always has pressures on it to
advance an agenda and the loyal opposition has the duty to advocate for
its views and make sure the institution is handled in a way that
protects the institution as the majority seeks to advance its agenda.
Frankly, I do not think we have done a good enough job at that. But I
would say the majority is using tactics--I refer to them as postmodern
tactics--to advance an agenda. And in so doing has done damage to the
institution.
Our leader, Senator Reid, will not acknowledge a single error in his
aggressive leadership and movement of legislation. He simply blames all
the problems on Republicans who, he says, are obstructing his vision,
his goals, and the agenda that he and his team want to advance. Not
satisfied that these actions have brought the Senate to one of its
lowest levels of public respect in history, if not the lowest, the
majority party is now demanding even more power.
The majority leader and the majority are threatening to violate the
rules of the Senate and change the rules of the Senate so they can grab
even more power. I would say the majority leader himself has obtained
more power than any leader in history, and now it appears that he is
asking for more.
We don't like to talk about this. We are reluctant to talk about what
is happening and be as critical as I am today, but in fact we have been
silent too long. The bottom line is that this issue is not just about
politics. This issue is about the historic role of the Senate and our
constitutional order.
This Senate is not functioning as it should, and that is for sure; we
all may agree on that. The question is, Why? Perhaps it was due to the
2010 election when the Democrats took a shellacking and lost six Senate
seats. At that point there seemed to be a doubling down of the desire
and ability of the majority leadership to dominate this institution.
Actual Senate rules and actual codified law--and certainly the
traditions of the Senate--were eroded. They were changed and run over.
The Republicans who fought back were called obstructionists. I don't
know, but maybe when someone has been in power for a long time--as the
leadership and the Democratic side has--they begin to think they are
entitled to get all these things done. They believe they are entitled
to bring up bills and not have Senators offer amendments so they can
slow down the train and pick and choose what amendments the opposition
can offer and how long they can debate. Maybe this goes in their mind
in a way that when they get in that cocoon of power, everybody becomes
an obstructionist when they simply insist on the rules of the Senate.
I always thought one of Senator Reid's charms--the old Harry Reid I
knew--was that he could actively and aggressively talk politically and
stick it to the opposition. He always got to the point. Sometimes I
could admire his skills. He could do it with a smile. We all tolerate a
little political license and a certain amount of political exaggeration
in the world we live in, but I thought Senator Reid would not seek to
advance powers beyond what he understood were the limits of the
majority in the Senate because he has been in the minority, and he has
operated there. He had to fight for his rights to have full minority
rights. So I am a little baffled. I am not sure I understand this new
Senator Reid, and I am not sure all of the decisions he is making are
good.
Now we are talking about a nuclear option that would break the rules
of the Senate to change the rules of the Senate. That is a very
dangerous thing, and I do not believe it is necessary.
Let me describe what is happening. I want to make a complaint about
how this Senate has been operating. I said it is dysfunctional. The
majority has said the reason it is dysfunctional is because Republicans
object too much and they are obstructionists. Let me point out some of
the things that are actually occurring.
First, I would dispute that. I don't believe it is accurate that
Republicans object too much and are obstructionists. I don't believe
Republicans are any more vigorous in their defense of their ideas than
the Democrats were when they were in the minority when I came to the
Senate 16 years ago. I know they were not. So it is the little
constraints that we operate under every day, such as rules, tradition,
actual statutory law that controls how we conduct our business that are
being eroded, gone around, and run over. These are the things that make
the institution what it is. A person has to be able to accept the fact
that those who disagree with them have at least some power and a right
to have their voices and ideas heard and their amendments brought up.
That is one of the great traditions of the Senate.
So I say--sort of metaphorically--I am going to tack on the walls of
the Senate a few charges. I don't take pleasure in this, but it is time
to tell the truth about it.
First, to a degree unknown in the history of the Senate, the majority
leader has used his power under rule XIV to bring bills straight to the
floor without normal committee process. They are violating and avoiding
the
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process that goes on in committee where Members offer amendments, have
debates, call expert witnesses, and consider these things. It may take
weeks or months, but finally a bill ripens and it is then brought to
the floor.
The majority leader does have the power under rule XIV to bring a
bill to the floor without having had that committee process. The
committee process is public, the debate is transcribed, and the
amendments in the committee are voted on and recorded. It holds the
Senators accountable so the public and their constituents know what
they have done, how a bill is progressing, and at the end of the day
whether they think they like it or not.
For example, this last-minute fiscal cliff tax legislation didn't go
through the committee process. It was a big, important piece of
legislation. We have a finance committee that is supposed to debate and
decide tax issues. That did not occur with this bill. Additionally, no
amendments were allowed to this bill--because it was brought directly
to the floor by the majority leader. It is a very bad process. We are
too often using midnight-hour votes to ram through big,
historic legislation that has never been fully debated. We didn't even
have an opportunity to fully read the legislation the night before
last. That is not the way to run the Senate. What we know now from a
preliminary estimate from the Congressional Research Service is that 58
percent of the bills which came to the floor of the Senate did not come
through committee during this Congress. Nearly 60 percent of the
legislation was not brought through traditional Senate committee
procedures, and that is not good.
Second, the majority leader and the majority were quick to block
President Bush's recess appointment attempts. Some of them were
dubious; some of them were probably OK. They had the majority. They
have done nothing to defend the Senate's historic and constitutional
role when President Obama made a much more blatant recess appointment.
The institution itself was weakened by this act. The Senate has to
defend its legitimate confirmation powers, and there is a limit on the
President's ability to initiate recess appointments.
The majority leader--righteous to defend it against President Bush--
who is now the leader of this institution, has allowed President Obama
to weaken the confirmation process. That goes beyond just the politics
of the moment. Maybe it furthers a long-term agenda, but clearly does
harm to the long-term interest of the Senate.
Third, the majority has directly violated the formal role of the
Senate and plain statutory law that requires the Senate to produce a
budget every year. The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 sets up a
public legislative process--a public process--by which both the House
and Senate must openly confront the Nation's fiscal challenges every
year and lay out a plan. For 3 years the majority in this Senate has
refused to comply with the law simply to avoid public accountability.
The majority leader said it would be foolish to have a budget. Those
are his words. Senator Conrad, chairman of the Budget Committee, was
clearly uneasy about this. Senator Conrad was determined--at least in
his committee, which I serve on with him--to bring up a budget. We were
going to discuss it, mark it up, and then it would be up to the
majority leader whether he would ever bring it to the floor because he
didn't bring it to the floor the year before.
We have now gone 3 years without bringing a budget to the floor.
Apparently, the majority had a caucus within a day of the Budget
Committee markup occurring. My staff had studied it, made amendments,
and we were going to offer ideas to the budget. But the markup was
canceled. Only a shell of this matter went forward. There were no
votes, no formal budget process or budget offered. That is directly
contrary to the statute of the United States.
The Budget Act requires an open process with committee votes, floor
votes, and 50 hours of debate in which Senators who propose or oppose a
budget have to do so publicly and with accountably. People should be
able to offer amendments so we can have a vote on them.
Senator Reid was thinking it was foolish to have his Members actually
have to vote on concrete budget proposals. He didn't want them to do
so. Apparently, the previous election had not gone well enough, and he
wanted to protect his Members from those votes. That is what he meant
by being foolish. It was foolish politically for the Democratic Party,
but certainly we know it was not foolish for the American people that
the Senate would actually discuss the financial future of our country
and bring up a budget. A budget can be passed with a simple majority.
Republicans cannot filibuster a budget. They get to offer amendments--
for a change around here--but they don't get to filibuster it. They get
an up-or-down vote--50 votes--after 50 hours of debate.
The leader violated plain statutory law, which requires us to have a
budget by April 15 because he didn't want his Members to be
accountable, but he blames Republicans for being obstructionists.
Fourth, for the first time in history, the Senate has abdicated the
most fundamental requirement of Congress: responsible management of the
money that the American people send here. We violated that requirement.
Not a single appropriations bill was brought to the floor this year--
not 1. That is the first time in history. We researched this--there has
never been a time in history when not a single appropriations bill was
brought up before the Senate. Frequently we don't get them all done, so
then a continuing resolution has to be passed to keep the government
from being shut down.
Congress is supposed to pass the appropriations bills telling the
President, and all his Cabinet people, how much money they have to
spend in the next fiscal year that begins October 1 of every year. The
President cannot spend any money Congress has not appropriated. That is
a fundamental requirement of the Senate. That is not just an idle idea,
it is a fundamental requirement.
So we get to the end of the year and nothing has been done so we
passed a continuing resolution, a CR. We stacked 13 bills--1,000-plus
pages of spending--in one continuing resolution, and we just funded the
government with no amendments, no debate, and no discussion for 6
months. That is no way to run a government. Each one of those bills is
supposed to be brought up: defense, highways, education, health care.
People who have amendments are supposed to bring up ways to save money
or spend more money on each one of those bills, and we are supposed to
vote on them. For the first time in history we did not do that.
Perhaps this was a clever political maneuver. It avoided public
debate and public accountability because we had an election coming up
in November and we don't want to vote before an election.
Another example is the Defense Authorization Bill. The fiscal year
concluded this year without us passing the Defense Bill. The Senate has
passed the Defense Bill for 50 consecutive years. Yet, just a few weeks
ago, well after the elections, we were finally able to pass the Defense
bill.
The House has sent over a budget that lays out a firm financial
course for America. They voted on that budget in public. They were
prepared to defend and explain their budget. It would have changed the
debt course of America. But what did the Senate do? Nothing. Did
Republicans filibuster the budget? Did they block a budget from being
brought up? No. Republicans demanded that we go through the process. We
pleaded with them to have a budget hearing in the committee. We asked
them to bring up the budget and noted that they have the power to pass
a budget with a simple majority. That is a burden a majority party has,
really--to bring up a budget and pass it. It is not easy. It is a
challenge. But it is the first time we have ever gone 3 years--or maybe
the first time ever we have gone through the situation in which they
refused to even bring up a budget. We have had budgets fail in the
past, but we haven't had one, to my knowledge, where we just go for
years and refuse to even bring one up.
In that secret Budget Control Act deal, we set spending limits on
most of the discretionary spending caps, but that is not a budget.
There were no amendments. There were no public discussions, no
committee hearings, no
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floor debate, no 50 hours to deal with the great issues of our time.
One more point. The majority leader has been trigger-happy in filing
cloture motions. We have altered the way the Senate operates. We have
to plead with somebody to be able to get an amendment in the Senate
today. It is amazing. This goes against the history of this
institution.
The two great guarantees in the Senate, as Robert Byrd, the great
majority leader and historian of the Senate, has said, are the right to
debate and the right to amend. Those are fundamental. We are seeing an
erosion of both.
So what does this cloture motion do? Senator Reid said: I am going to
bring up a certain bill, and the Republicans can have five amendments.
Well, we have 15 amendments we want to debate--maybe more--on a bill.
Somebody reminded me that the Panama Canal bill had 80 votes to give
away the Panama Canal. It eventually got two-thirds votes and passed.
It went through weeks of debate and lots of amendments. That is what
the Senate is about. Now they say no amendments. So that begins to
cause a problem.
The majority leader says: You have to filibuster. You won't agree to
my limited number of amendments. You are obstructing. I am going to
file the bill and immediately file cloture to end debate. So 30 hours
goes by, has the vote to end debate, and says: All this time, the
Republicans have been filibustering. The Republicans are obstructing.
