Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. For example, during the Panama Canal debate, they would table a lot and vote a lot. They would stay up on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. Pretty soon Senators would be thinking about going home or seeing their grandchildren or maybe their amendment was not so important and their bill would either be passed or defeated, but everybody went home thinking: I have had a chance to be a U.S. Senator. I may be in the minority, I may be in the majority, but I have given voice to the feelings of the people of my State which is what I was elected to do. So is the filibuster rule a problem? No, the filibuster rule is not the problem. The problem is if I come down to the floor with an amendment, the majority leader uses a procedural motion to cut me off and I don't get to vote on it. I don't get to talk about it and I don't get to vote on it. To his great credit, he is not doing that with the Defense authorization bill. He did not do that with the postal reform bill. There have been a number of other bills this year that proved the Senate can work. There is even an amendment by the Senator from Kentucky that Members of both sides did not want to vote on. It had to do with cutting off aid to three Middle Eastern countries. The administration did not want to vote, but we finally voted and what happened? We had a huge, great debate. Many Senators spoke their feelings, and in the end the vote was 81-10 and the amendment failed. It did not do any damage to anybody. In fact, it made the Senate look more like what it should be. The filibuster is and has been democracy's greatest show: the right to talk your head off. We need to get back to the situation where we have committee bills like the Defense authorization bill where we bring them to the floor and the majority leader asks for amendments. Let us all put our amendments in and let us start voting. Let's get back to the time where the majority leader and the minority leader, or the committee chairman and the ranking member, have a product they are invested in and they work together to keep it intact. If they do that, they usually defeat Republican amendments or Democratic amendments, or occasionally an amendment will come along that has so much support that it seems like an improvement to the bill, and it is adopted. My purpose today is not to make a hard job harder. I said at the beginning the majority leader has the toughest job in town and maybe one of the toughest in the country. My hope is that maybe if he has a few minutes tonight, he would go back home and reread his own book. He and I agreed at that time that that would be a bad result. And remember the words he said in 2005 about the value of the filibuster, the value of having a body that protected the minority rights and how damaging it would be to make the Senate like the House. I hope the majority leader and the Republican leader could quietly meet and talk this through. Senator Schumer and I and many others spent a lot of time on this 2 years ago. It took 6 months and we thought we had an agreement, but somehow it broke down. There is no reason it should break down. We can operate the Senate under the rules we have. We can get bills through committee. We can get them to the floor. We can let anybody have an amendment and we can talk about it, vote on it, and pass it or defeat it. That is what we should be doing. I know the majority leader cares about this institution. I know he cares about it deeply. He spent his life here devoted to it. I know he is responding to a variety of suggestions from Members of his caucus as to what is best to do. I think it is the responsibility of the leaders of both sides and people who have seen this body for a while to remind everyone, particularly those who have never been in the minority, that this is a body to protect the minority. Any of us can be in the minority at some time. I know he does not want to destroy the U.S. Senate, but in his words: If we change the filibuster rule, it would be the end of the United States Senate. I don't want that to happen. I don't want that to be the majority leader's legacy, and I don't believe he wants that. I, as one Senator, am willing to encourage the Republican leader and the majority leader to work together, solve this problem, and get our attention focused back on the big problem facing our country, which is how to get a budget agreement that gets our economy moving again. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to put into the Record a few articles: a excerpt from the majority leader's book, an article from The Hill by Martin Paone--who used to work here and makes the points I have been making--an article by Richard Arenberg, who worked on Senate and House staffs for 30 or 40 years. We find that people who have worked in the Senate and leave it, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, seem to have the same view. I wish also to put in Senator Byrd's statement which he made during his last appearance before the Senate Rules Committee before he died. I was there and he urged us not to break down this fence. His comments go hand in hand with those of Senator Chris Dodd's final address to the Senate on November 30, 2010. And finally, I include a copy of an address I gave at the Heritage Foundation on this subject 2 years ago.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I see the Senator from Louisiana. I know she expects to speak about 5:30. I want to say to her through the Chair I will be finished by then. Fungal Meningitis I see the Senator from Connecticut I believe is still here. I compliment him on his participation this morning in a hearing in which we both participated. It was a sad hearing, really. It was about the fungal meningitis--the Senator from Minnesota was there as well--the fungal meningitis outbreak that in our State, Tennessee, has become a nightmare. It has claimed thirteen lives, 81 very ill in many cases, and a thousand others who worry they might become ill. It became obvious as we went through the discussion that something, incredibly, slipped through the cracks. We have more than 60,000 what I would call drugstores, pharmacies in the country; maybe more than a thousand in Tennessee. Many of them are doing this pharmaceutical compounding. You go in and get a prescription filled. They might adjust the prescription, or an FDA-approved drug based upon your prescription. That is normal and necessary. Then over here on the other side are the big manufacturers of drugs. As the Senator from Connecticut has pointed out, they are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. But then there are these entities in the middle, and there was one in Massachusetts that was apparently masquerading as a compounding pharmacy--it was really a drug manufacturer, but it was not complying with the rules of a drug manufacturer. As a result, it provided tainted medicine all over the country. Had it not been for remarkable work by the Tennessee Public Health Department in conjunction with Vanderbilt University and the Centers for Disease Control, there could have been many more deaths and many more injuries. We saw an example of government. We saw an incompetent State Board of Pharmacy in Massachusetts, a confused Food and Drug Administration, and we saw a textbook model of what ought to be done by the Centers for Disease Control and the Tennessee Department of Health. I am committed to work with Senator Harkin, the chairman of our committee, and other members of our committee throughout the rest of this year on this issue. I hope the Senator from Minnesota and I, and the Senator from Connecticut, and Senators Burr and Roberts, who have been working on this for some time, can begin the new year with a bipartisan bill that can put somebody on the flagpole for this so we can continue, when we go to the hospital or go to the pharmacy or outpatient clinic, to not worry about whether the medicines we are receiving are tainted or unsafe. I thought it was an excellent hearing. I look forward to working on it. I have some ideas about a model for this regulation. I found as Governor years ago, if you give a committee responsibility for getting something done they often end up pointing fingers at each other. If you put somebody on the flagpole, it often gets done because you will know what happened. I think that is why Admiral Rickover created such a good system with nuclear submarines. We have never had a nuclear related death on a nuclear Navy submarine since the 1950s. I think I know why. It is because the Admiral interviewed every one of those captains of the submarines and the Navy made it clear to them if there was a problem with a nuclear reactor that went unfound or unfixed on their submarines their career was in deep trouble, and so we have never had any trouble. Wind Power If I may move to another subject, there's been a lot of talk this week about the fiscal cliff. The President and Congressional leaders are meeting tomorrow, as they should, about how we can reduce our debt. That will require, in my judgment, reform of our entitlement programs. Saving our Medicare Program, for example. The average couple who is 65 years of age when they retire pays $119,000 into the Medicare Program. They will take out $357,000. That kind of program is not sustainable. For the next generation of older Americans there will not be a Medicare Program unless we work on that. We need to work together to find a way to restrain entitlements, produce revenues if that is what is necessary, and come to a result. In the meantime we have to be saving money--42 cents out of every dollar we spend is borrowed--so that is what brings me to the floor today. Supporters of wind power have used this week to proclaim it ``Wind Week'' in Washington, DC, launching an event to try to persuade us to extend one more time--this would be the eighth time--the Wind Production Tax Credit which, if we were to do so, just for 1 year, would cost another $12.1 billion over 10 years. I want to suggest a different name for this week. Let's call it the ``Wind Down Wind Week.'' It is time to end a 20-year-old temporary subsidy that has already been renewed seven times. The reason is very simple. We can't afford it. The Joint Tax Committee says the 1-year extension will cost that $12.1 billion--but it is not just a 1-year extension. The developers of wind power will get the tax credit for 10 years. That is a lot of money. It is one-third of the Tennessee State budget. It is 2 times what we spend each year on energy research. This money could be used to help reduce the debt instead of fund this subsidy. The cost $12.1 billion is on top of the $16 billion in Federal subsidies and grants already given to wind developers and their Wall Street backers between 2009 and 2013, according to the Joint Tax Committee and the Unites States Treasury. How can we justify this? We hear a lot about big oil. What about big wind? Big wind received, according to the Energy Information Agency, an $18.82 federal subsidy per megawatt hour--25 times per megawatt hour as all other forms of electricity production combined. Given our fiscal crisis we should eliminate special tax breaks for big oil and big wind. The big wind tax break was put in place in 1992. It was to be a temporary measure. It was intended to boost a new technology. Now, 20 years later, President Obama's respected Energy Secretary says wind is a mature technology. What do we have after 20 years and billions of dollars of subsidies? A puny amount of unreliable electricity. Our country uses nearly 25 percent of all the electricity in the world. Wind produces 3 percent of that. And of course it only produces electricity when the wind blows and it is not easy to store it. So it is of limited use in a country that needs huge amounts of low-cost, clean, reliable electricity. Relying on wind power is the energy equivalent of going to war in a sailboat when nuclear submarines are available. The wind subsidy is so large that wind developers are now paying distributors to take their wind power, undercutting the baseload energy plants that are necessary to provide the reliable, low-cost electricity our country needs. On top of that, there are better ways to produce clean electricity, better ways than subsidizing a technology that destroys the environment in the name of saving the environment. For example, it would take a row of 50-story wind turbines along the entire length of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, 2,178 miles, to equal the energy production of 4 nuclear reactors. The best way to produce cheap, clean energy in the United States is to let the marketplace do it. Let the marketplace produce large amounts of clean, reliable energy for all businesses and households--not to just subsidize jobs for a technology that can stand on its own and produces only a small amount of unreliable electricity. Let's use this week to celebrate. But let's celebrate the end of the temporary 20-year-old wind production tax credit and use the $12.1 billion saved to reduce the Federal debt. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, some say the reason for a do-nothing Senate--or the cure for it--is that we need to change the rules. I say we need a change in behavior, and I wish to offer a single example. We have a big spending and borrowing problem: 42 cents out of every dollar we are borrowing. We are headed off a fiscal cliff. The minority leader has described that. The Australian Foreign Minister has said the United States of America is one budget deal away from restoring its global preeminence, so one would think we would have a budget. Then one would think we would deal with the appropriations bills which are the basic work of the Senate. I and others on both sides of the aisle came to the floor earlier this year to compliment the majority and minority leaders for their decision to bring all 12 appropriations bills to the floor. The committee did its work; 11 of the 12 have been reported to the floor. The House did its work; 11 of the 12 were reported to the floor, and 6 were passed. But the majority leader said we are not going to consider any appropriations bills--no appropriations bills. Being elected to the Senate and not being allowed to vote on appropriations bills is like being invited to join the Grand Ole Opry and not being allowed to sing. We need a Republican majority. If we have one we can have a budget, and if we have one we will bring appropriations bills to the floor. We will debate them, we will amend them, we will vote on them, and we will do our jobs. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent that the following article from the Wall Street Journal on September 18, 2012, on the cost to taxpayers for the wind production tax credit be printed in the Record.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, the majority leader is coming to the floor at 6:30, and I will yield to him at that time. I would like to thank Neena Imam, who is sitting with me, for serving on my staff for the past two years as a fellow with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She has done a terrific job working for me on energy and environmental policy. Mr. President, today is the 100th anniversary of Milton Friedman's birthday, the Nobel Prize Laureate. One of his most important statements, in my opinion, was this, ``Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.'' It was reported by several media outlets that Governor Mitt Romney has taken the position that the wind production tax credit should be allowed to expire at the end of the year. He must have known Milton Friedman's birthday was coming today. I wouldn't presume to speak for Milton Friedman, but I think he would applaud Governor Romney's position. It shows his seriousness about our fiscal problems in the United States. It's time to end a temporary tax credit that was put into law in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush was in office and when Milton Friedman was only 80 years old. The wind production tax credit was a temporary tax break, in 1992 to encourage wind power. We give wind developers 2.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour of wind electricity produced. And now it's about to expire at the end of the year. It needs to be extended again the developers say. Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program. They tell us just one more time. But it is an argument like this that has got us into the fiscal mess we have as a Nation. The United States of America, according to the Joint Tax Committee and the U.S. Treasury, is spending $14 billion on subsidizing giant wind turbines over a five-year period, $6 billion of it is this production tax credit. That's why I am so pleased to see Governor Romney support the idea of more responsibility in our spending. We spend too much money in Washington that we do not have, and it has to stop. There are many reasons we don't need this particular provision of the tax code. First, we can't afford it. From 2009 through 2013, the tax credit will cost taxpayers $6 billion over five years, and the grants will cost another $8 billion over that same five years. At a time when the federal government is borrowing 40 cents of every dollar it spends, we cannot justify such a subsidy, especially for what the U.S. Energy Secretary calls a ``mature technology.'' Second, despite all the money, it produces a relatively small amount of electricity, producing only 2.3 percent of our electricity in the United States. We're a big country. We use 25 percent of all the electricity in the world. We're not going to operate our country through windmills. Third, these massive turbines too often destroy the environment in the name of saving the environment. Some are 50 stories high--taller than the Statue of Liberty--with blades as long as a football field, weighing seven tons and spinning at 150 miles an hour, with blinking lights visible for 20 miles. These aren't your grandma's windmills. These gigantic turbines are three times as tall as the sky boxes at University of Tennessee's Neyland Stadium in Knoxville. There is a new movie called ``Windfall'' about residents in upstate New York who are upset and have left their homes because of these big wind turbines. Mr. President, the majority leader has come to the floor, and I will forgo my remarks at this time so he has a chance to say what he wishes to say.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, 5 minutes would do it.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the majority leader for his courtesy, and I will continue. The fourth reason that we don't need to allow these production tax credits for wind to be renewed is that they have not created as many American jobs as expected. An American University study reported in 2009 that the first $1 billion of stimulus grants to wind went to foreign manufacturing companies. And what did we get in return for these billions of dollars of subsidies? A puny amount of unreliable electricity generated mostly at night when we don't use it. I mentioned a little earlier that our country is a big country. It uses lots of electricity. The Senator from Rhode Island was talking about the problems in India that are being caused by failure of the grid. We need large amounts of reliable baseload electricity to power this country. We're very fortunate that we have, through unconventional natural gas discoveries, found that we're going to have a lot of cheap natural gas in the United States, and we can make electricity from natural gas power plants at a low cost and with very little air pollution. Nuclear power produces 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity, and 20 percent of the total electricity generated in the U.S. It needs to be a part of our future energy mix. Coal should also be part of our energy future, as long as coal plants have pollution control equipment on them to reduce the sulfur, nitrogen and mercury. I was one of those senators who voted to require coal plants that operate in the future to have pollution control equipment on them. This means in a few years every operating coal plant in the United States will be clean except for carbon, and I am convinced that such programs as ARPA-E at the Department of Energy will find what I think is the holy grail of energy technologies. One of the companies that ARPA-E invests federal research dollars in is experimenting with growing micro-organisms on electrodes. These bacteria can turn carbon dioxide into fuel. In other words, they create a commercial energy use for the carbon that comes from our coal plants. And when that happens, the United States will have massive amounts of cheap, clean, reliable electricity. And we won't be powering our country with windmills. We should congratulate Dr. Friedman for his great career, for his wisdom in pointing out to us that nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program, and applaud Governor Romney for recognizing that and calling for the end of this tax credit. We're coming upon something we call the fiscal cliff. I know the senator from Colorado is very interested in this, spending a lot of time working in a bipartisan way to try to find a way to deal with it. My friend, the Foreign Minister of Australia, is a great fan of the United States, and he said to the United States that we're one budget agreement away from restoring our global preeminence--One budget agreement away from restoring our global preeminence. Now, to get that agreement what do we have to do? We have to deal with appropriations bills at the end of the year, a problem we may have solved today with a solution the leaders recommended. We have to deal with the Bush tax cuts, and multiple items that expire at the end of the year such as the tax extenders that need to be renewed or not, and the alternative minimum tax which started out as a tax on rich people and now threatens to impact millions of Americans. There's appropriate payment to doctors who provide medical care, we call this the doc fix. There is the sequester that none of us likes. There's the problem of the debt limit, the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits. All of this is happening at the end of the year. This is a good time to get serious about with dealing with the fiscal cliff, and let a 20 year, temporary tax break to encourage wind energy--which costs the American people $6 billion over five years--to expire and let wind stand on its own. I would suggest that for the $6 billion in savings we put $2 of every $3 we save into reducing the debt and $1 into energy research to see if we can find even more amounts of cheap, clean energy. So it is a good occasion to celebrate Milton Friedman's 100th birthday, and it is a good occasion to applaud Governor Romney for following Milton Friedman's advice: ``Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.'' I thank the Presiding Officer. I thank the majority leader for his courtesy.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to enter into a colloquy with my Republican colleagues.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, the Senator from Washington said Republicans often change the subject. That is exactly what we intend to do. We intend to change the subject from raising taxes to creating jobs. In terms of taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office report recently released--this is hard to believe. You have to go back and read it again, but 20 percent of Americans who pay individual taxes pay 94 percent of all the taxes. Twenty percent of Americans pay 94 percent of the taxes. The President and his allies are about the only ones in the country right now who are going out across the country and saying: The way to solve this 5 years of recession and the bad economy we have experienced is to raise taxes on the people who create millions of jobs. That is their argument, that the way to deal with the bad economy we are in is to raise taxes on the people who create millions of jobs. We do not believe that. We are prepared to keep the tax rates where they are while we deal with what we need to deal with, which is the fiscal cliff that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board talks about, where he says, if we do not deal with it at the end of the year, we will produce, according to the Congressional Budget Office as well, a recession in the first 6 months of 2013, which means more loss of jobs. So the subject we are here to talk about this morning is how to avoid that. The question we are going ask is, why not bring up the appropriations bills and do our job under the Constitution to limit spending and get a head start on the business of putting the fiscal problems we have behind us. Nothing could create jobs more rapidly than for us to bring Washington into some solvency, create some certainty. People have said: We are not going to invest, we are not going to hire until we can see whether Congress can act. As far as the appropriations bills, here are the basics: We have 12 of them that we are supposed to pass every year. A bipartisan group of us went to the floor a few months ago and praised the majority leader and the Republican leader for their agreement to try to bring them to the floor and pass them. That has only happened twice in 12 years. So we worked hard to do that. Nine of the 12 appropriations bills are ready for the Senate to consider. In other words, they have been all the way through the committee process. They are ready for the Senate to consider. Only the majority leader can bring them to the floor. Yet he said 2 weeks ago suddenly: No appropriations bills this year. That is 38 percent of the budget. That is more than $1 trillion. That is our job to do. It is the way we control spending. Yet we are not even going to deal with it. So this morning we are going to talk about the consequences of that and hope the majority leader will change his mind and bring these bills to the floor. The House is doing its job. The House has acted on eleven of their 12 bills and the House has passed 7. While they may be at a different overall spending level than we are, we have a well-established procedure for dealing with that called the conference, which is the way we normally deal with differences between the two Houses. So suddenly we are saying, no budget, no appropriations bills. That is why we are on the floor today. I wish to begin by asking the Senator from Georgia, who is a former leader of the Republicans in the Georgia legislature, who has been here for a number of years, and who has been one of the leaders in this body of working across party lines to try to cause the Senate to do its job, whether he can think of a good reason why we should not be dealing with appropriations bills this year.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Georgia for his clear statement about solving the appropriations problems, solving the fiscal problems, creating an environment in which the private sector in this country is willing to create more jobs, and how failing to do that, in the words of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, would be ``destructive.'' In the estimate of the Congressional Budget Office, it would create a recession in the first 6 months of 2013. The Senator from Missouri is the former No. 2 leader in the House of Representatives and now he is a part of the Senate Republican leadership, so he has some special knowledge about how the two Houses work together. The majority leader gave as his reason why he could not bring up the appropriations bill, one, that it did not fit the Budget Control Act. Well, the Budget Control Act, which we passed, I voted for it, set a limit on appropriations, and the Senate is marking up its bills to that number. The House is marking up to a number a little below. The majority leader said: Well, they are at one number, the Senate is at another number, so we will not do anything. I would ask the Senator from Missouri, I thought it was a pretty normal procedure for the House of Representatives to do what it thought it ought to do, and the Senate to do what it thought it ought to do. There is something called a conference of the Senate and the House to work out the differences.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Well, I can't imagine how that would be. In fact, this is such a breathtaking assertion by the majority leader, it is hard to grasp it. Here we are in a fiscal mess. Everybody says that. They will say it is for a different reason on that side than we do, but everybody acknowledges it. Everybody acknowledges as well that while the rest of the world is in trouble, we are just in a little less trouble and we can get out of our trouble more easily than the rest of the world; that the single biggest decision about whether the United States deals with its fiscal crisis and gets the economy moving again is whether the President and the Congress can govern. That is what everyone says, and we know it is true. In other words, this isn't out of our hands. This isn't out of our control. In fact, it is within our hands. All we have to do is come to some agreement about how much money we can spend, reform the taxes, reduce the debt, control entitlement spending, and this country will take off like a rocket. The retiring head of the World Bank last month told a briefing of about 35 Democratic and Republican Senators--all of whom are concerned about this, all of whom are committed to working on it--that people who are making decisions about whether to hire people or whether to invest more money in the United States have stopped. They have stopped because of the uncertainty. And what are they waiting on? They are waiting to see whether we can function. They are waiting to see whether we can govern. They have stopped to wait and see. This is not an encouraging indication about whether the United States can govern. We had some encouragement earlier in the year. That is why several of us from both sides of the aisle came to the floor and complimented the majority leader, complimented the Republican leader, and said: We applaud your agreement to do the appropriations bills. It says right here in the Constitution, Section 9 of Article I, that no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law. In other words, Article I--this is our job. People say I use the Grand Ole Opry as an analogy too often sometimes, but why would you join the Grand Ole Opry if you didn't want to sing? Appropriating money is what we do. If the Senator doesn't like the Solyndra loan, then I am supposed to come up here and make that argument if I agree with that. If Senator Blunt has a flood problem out in Missouri, he can make the argument that he made last year: Put some more money in to take care of the flood victims; take some more money out of here to pay for it. If we want less of this or more of that, the way we do that is by going through the appropriations process, coming to the floor, offering amendments, and representing the people who elected us and sent us here. What are we supposed to say when we go home and they say: We think there should be more money for the Center Hill Dam on the Caney Fork River or more money for the levees down along the Mississippi and there ought to be less money for loans like Solyndra. Are we supposed to say: Well, sorry, we are not in business in the Senate because the one person who can put an appropriations bill on the floor has announced suddenly that he is not going to do it. It is not because we don't have time to do it. Look, we could be doing it today. I will bet we don't even have a vote today, much less debate something interesting. We have been wasting the entire month. We could have taken up almost every one--most of the nine appropriations bills that are ready to be enacted and put them on the floor to vote. The Senator from Missouri is a part of the Republican leadership. He has that honor. There is a different way to run the Senate, and maybe that should be a major factor in the election this year. Maybe people would like to see the Senate work on the $1 trillion that is a part of the appropriations bills, bring amendments and bills to the floor in a bipartisan way, let Senators from every State vote on those, and vote them up or down. That would be one way to run the Senate. And I wonder if that kind of discussion has been going on in the Republican leadership. If we were fortunate enough to have a majority and move a few desks from that side over to this side as a result of the election, how do you think Senator McConnell and the Republican leadership would conduct business in the Senate?

Mr. ALEXANDER. If the Senator would yield, I have heard Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, speak both in our Republican caucus and in meetings with Democrats in committee and publicly. I believe he has made it absolutely clear that if he were fortunate enough to be the majority leader, that he would bring appropriations bills to the floor, that he would see that a large number of amendments from both sides of the aisle were offered, and that we would be working longer, working later, and getting more done.

Mr. ALEXANDER. We are all good friends here. People sometimes talk about lack of civility in the Senate. The fact is the Senate is probably the most civil place in the United States. We are excessively nice to each other. We have disagreements, but we are nice to each other. But what is disappointing is that it is not functioning. The Senate is not functioning the way it is supposed to. It would be as if the President announced: Well, I am not going to the office for a month or two; or if the Supreme Court said: Well, it has gotten to be February, and we think we will stop deciding cases and go home, we will go on vacation. What would the American people say? Well, that is what is happening here. And it is not that we don't have the time. We have it right now. We have it this minute that we could do be doing it. What makes it especially disappointing is that earlier this year there was what I call an outbreak of good government. We had the majority leader and the Republican leader saying: Let's bring all the appropriations bills to the floor, and people on both sides were applauding them. And then we had some discussions, and lo and behold, suddenly we had bills coming to the floor that made a difference in the lives of Americans: the FAA bill, which is about airline safety, the farm bill, the highway bill, and the Postal Service bill. And thanks to suggestions by the Senator from Michigan, Mr. Levin, and others, we began to adopt an agreement: Let's allow all relevant amendments to the bill be considered. So we began to vote a lot. I think one bill had 73 amendments. And then there were even some amendments that weren't relevant. It began to look like the time in the 1980s when Senators Byrd and Baker ran the Senate. Senator Byrd or Senator Baker would come to the floor and say: All right, here is a bill that is supported by the Democratic chairman and the ranking Republican, or vice versa. They put it on the floor, and they would ask for amendments. They might get 300, and then they would say: I ask unanimous consent to have no more amendments. And of course they would get it because everybody who wanted an amendment had offered one. Then they would start to vote, and the majority leader would say: OK, we are going to stay here until we finish. And they did. Now, it never was perfect. It is always a little messy. That is the way the Senate is. But they got a lot of work done. That is what makes this so disappointing.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I would be happy to do that. Actually, Bob Zoellick, the retiring head of the World Bank, reported this story to 35 or 40 of us--both parties--to find out how to do what we are talking about, which is to deal with the fiscal cliff issues coming at the end of the year. He repeated Bob Carr, the new Foreign Minister in Australia, who said in a speech in Washington that the United States is one budget agreement away from reasserting its global preeminence. All of us believe the United States is the preeminent country in the world. That statement comes from a great friend of the United States who wants us to succeed and who knows we can. If we want to get our economy moving again and help the world get its economy moving again, the main thing we need to do is make this fiscal agreement, deal with the debt, deal with tax reform, deal with the payroll taxes, deal with the sequester, and deal with the appropriations bills. This is the single most important thing we can do to get our economy moving again instead of heading into a depression. He put it that way to reassert, establish, claim, renew--whatever adjective or verb we want to use. The way to maintain America's global preeminence is to get a budget agreement at the end of the year. We were off to such a promising start this year and now we slid backwards. I will let the Senator from Missouri make the final remarks in the colloquy. It is my hope the majority leader will decide to use the rest of our time this week and next week to deal with appropriations bills, and then when we come back in September we could deal with more. It doesn't take long. Let's just put them on the Senate floor and get to work. We can agree on a reasonable number of amendments. We showed we could do that before, and the American people would appreciate us doing our job. Remember, 9 of the 12 are ready to go. It affects 38 percent of the budget. That is more than $1 trillion in spending. That would be one more indication we are capable of governing ourselves, which is the single most important signal that those who invest and create jobs in America need to see and hear from Washington, DC. I thank the Senator from Missouri for his leadership and for coming to the Senate floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, we yield back the remainder of our time. I see the Senator from Nebraska is here. I wonder if he is here to be a part of our colloquy or to make another statement.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, on July 11, I addressed the Fund for American Studies annual Congressional Scholarship Award Dinner here in Washington. I ask consent to have this transcript of my remarks printed in the Record.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, would the Chair please let me know when there is a couple of minutes remaining.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Chair. Senate Responsibility Mr. President, earlier this year I came to the floor with a group of Republican and Democratic Senators to congratulate the majority leader, Senator Reid, and the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, as well as the leaders of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Inouye and Senator Cochran. The reason for the congratulations was this: They said they were going to do their best to bring all of the appropriations bills to the floor and pass them. That may not seem like such a monumental pledge or promise, but it, in fact, is, because only twice since the year 2000 has the Senate gone through the whole process of bringing all 12 appropriations bills to the Senate floor and enacting them in time for the beginning of the fiscal year on October 1. Why is that so important? Well, we are in the midst of a fiscal crisis. We are borrowing 42 cents out of every dollar we spend. One way to deal with that is through the appropriations process. That is our first constitutional responsibility. Judges judge; we appropriate. That is the first thing we do. We have control of the people's money. The appropriations bills I am talking about, the 12 of them together, constitute a pretty big number. More than a third--38 percent--of all the dollars we spend in the Federal Government go through those 12 bills. It used to be a lot more. So when the majority leader and the Republican leader said, Yes, we are going to do our best to bring all of those appropriations bills to the floor, I thought the Senate had taken an important step in functioning the way the American people expect the Senate to function. The American people expect us to get about the serious business of this country so that, in the words of the Australian Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, we can show the people we recognize that we are really one budget agreement away from reasserting America's preeminence in the world. We have that within our power. The economy of the country, the economy of other countries depends, to a great extent, on our ability to govern ourselves properly. So I was very encouraged when the majority leader and the Republican leader said, Yes, we are going to do our best to bring all 12 of those bills to the floor. I regret to say I am equally disappointed that the majority leader suddenly announced last week he won't bring any appropriations bills to the floor. The reasons he gives are very puzzling to me. First he says, Well, the House is using a different number than the Senate. What is so new about that? That is why we have the House and the Senate. They are one kind of body and we are another kind. They have their opinion; we have ours. We vote on our opinions. Then we have a procedure called the conference in which we come together and we get a result. We have had so few conferences lately that maybe some people have forgotten we do that, but we have a way to do it. Then the majority leader said, Well, they in the House violated the Budget Control Act. The Budget Control Act was simply something we agreed on--I voted for it--to try to put some limits on the growth of discretionary spending in the budget. If we stick to that over the next 10 years, the discretionary spending--not the two-thirds of the budget that is entitlement spending but this one-third we are talking about-- will only grow at an little bit more than the rate of inflation. If our whole budget grew at that rate, we wouldn't have a fiscal problem. Those aren't good reasons. We have a way to reconcile our differences. The Budget Control Act is only limits. The Senate actually has exceeded those limits, according to my colleague Senator Corker, already three times in this year. So there is no excuse whatsoever for not bringing up appropriations bills on the floor of the Senate. If we think the Solyndra loan was a bad idea, that is the place to take it out. Or, if we want to spend more money for national defense, that is the place to put it in. Or if we think we are wasting money on national parks or too much government land, that is the place to take it out. Are those bills ready to come to the floor? Yes, they are. In the Senate, we have been doing our job in our committees. Let me be exactly right about this, but I believe we have nine of our appropriations bills that are ready to come to the floor, that we are ready to go to work on right now. The House of Representatives has already passed 11 of the 12 appropriations bills through committee and 6 of those have been passed by the House. So this month, we could be debating any of those appropriations bills. We could have amendment after amendment after amendment. We could reduce our spending. We could increase our spending. We could say to the American people: We are doing our job. That brings me to my second disappointment. I was greatly encouraged this year--and a lot of the credit goes to Senators on the Democratic side as well as some on our side--who are saying, Wait a minute. We are grownups. We recognize we are political accidents. We have been given the great privilege of representing the people of our State and swearing an oath to our Constitution of the United States so we can help lead this country. So we want to go to work. We want to go to work. What does the Senate do? Well, the Senate brings bills up through committee, it brings bills to the floor, and then, as the late Senator Byrd used to say, almost any amendment comes to the floor and we debate it and we vote on it, and then we either pass the bill or we don't pass the bill. That is what the Senate does. We on our side have been saying to the majority leader: Mr. Majority Leader, let us offer our amendments. Don't silence the voices of the people in our States that we represent. So he has been allowing that to happen more. Of course, he has the procedural ability to stop that. The Senator from Michigan said: Let's try just having relevant amendments, so we said: OK, let's try that. So we began to make some progress. There was a dispute over district judges. We resolved that. We have been confirming them. The Postal Service bill, the farm bill, the FDA bill, the highway bill--these are all important pieces of legislation that affect almost every American family, and what did we do? They went through committee; they had the expertise of the members who work on those committees; they came to the floor; we had a lot of amendments, we voted on them, and they were passed by the Senate. In other words, we did what we should do. I thought we were on a lot better track until the last 2 or 3 weeks. Suddenly, what has happened? Suddenly, all that ends. We revert to political exercises--little bills of no real importance compared to the bills we should be debating. We have a jobs bill, the DISCLOSE Act bill, and the bill we are about to go to that the Senator from Michigan is proposing. The problem with those bills is they have not been through committee. They are not going to pass the House. Everybody knows that. So we are wasting our time at a time when we could be debating all of the appropriations bills of the U.S. Government. At a time when the U.S. Government is borrowing 42 cents out of every dollar we are spending, we are not even going to do our job and consider appropriations bills on the floor and amend them. What will the whole world think? What will our constituents think about our ability to govern ourselves if we can't pass--even consider--an appropriations bill in the U.S. Senate? On top of that, we haven't had a budget for over 1,000 days. I remember when Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, came back and met with a group of Senators. She came back from Iraq early after their government was formed and she said, They can't even get a budget over there in Iraq. Senators looked around at each other, and here we have been a Republic for a long time and we can't get one, either. So I am very disappointed by the fact that after such a promising surge of activity that was bipartisan and that got results, we have suddenly reverted back to forgetting that we have a way to deal with our differences. It is not because we don't have anything to do. Where is the cybersecurity bill? Where is the Defense authorization bill? Where are the appropriations bills? They are all ready to be considered, at a time when we are in a fiscal crisis, looking at a fiscal cliff which, if we don't solve, according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board yesterday, it will plunge us into a recession in the first 6 months of 2013. Those are the stakes we are playing with. There is also a third area in which I must express my severe disappointment. We worked hard at the beginning of this Congress to accommodate a number of Senators who felt we needed changes in the rules, and we made some changes. But we preserved the Senate's integrity as a different sort of institution--as a place where the party that has 51 votes doesn't run over anybody else. Alexis de Tocqueville said the two greatest problems he foresaw with the American democracy--this was back in the 1830s--were, No. 1, Russia; and No. 2, the tyranny of the majority. Well, the Senate, as Senator Byrd used to so eloquently say, is the single most important institution in our country, to protect minority rights and minority points of view. Sometimes we are in the minority on this side, and we will notice there are some fewer desks. Then after an election, maybe more people vote for Democrats and they come in and they pick up the desks and they move them over to that side. Whichever side is in the minority in the Senate still has rights, and those aren't just the rights of the Senators themselves, those are their rights to speak the voices of Tennessee or Maryland or Nevada or New York or Kentucky. It is those voices that need to be heard on the floor of the Senate. And when we can't debate, when we can't offer amendments and we can't vote, those voices are silenced. So to my great surprise, the majority leader--and as I said, I came to the floor more than once to compliment him for this--said at the beginning of this Congress that he wouldn't seek to change the rules of the Senate except according to the regular order--except according to the rules of the Senate which say we have to have 67 votes. That is what the rules say. We agreed on that. What that meant was we needed a change in behavior, not a change in the rules, to show that the Senate could function. Last night on television, apparently the majority leader said that in the next Congress--he had changed his mind and that if he is the majority leader, he will seek to change the rules of the Senate by 51 votes. That will destroy the Senate. That will make it no different than the House. I would say to my friends on the other side, if they want to make the Senate like the House where a freight train can run through it with 51 votes, they might not like it so well when the freight train is the tea party express, which it could be. Republicans could be in control of the Senate after this session. Republicans could have a President, and then where would ObamaCare be? Where will a whole series of things be? There will be a great many Senators on the other side who will say, Wait a minute, let's slow down the train. Let's think about what we are doing. That was the original intention of the Founders of this country. The House is majoritarian and 51 votes control. A freight train can run through it day in and day out. But when it gets to the Senate we stop and think and minority rights are protected. As a result of that, usually that forces us to have a supermajority 60, 65, or 70 votes--in order to do anything big, such as the time when finally the civil rights bill was enacted in the 1960s. Senator Russell, who led the debate against the Civil Rights Act, filibustered it. He was finally defeated. He flew home to Georgia and said, It is now the law of the land; we support it. That is why President Johnson wrote the bill in the office of the Republican leader, even though the President was a Democrat. He wanted bipartisan support. President Johnson knew he had the votes in the 1960s to pass the Civil Rights Act without Republican support, but he had the bill written in the office of Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader. I remember I was a young aide at that time. The Senators were in there and the aides were in there. Pretty soon everyone was invested in it. When it passed, as I said, Senator Russell went home to Georgia and said, it is the law of the land. We have to support it. Now we are coming up on what the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board has called the fiscal cliff. This is a convergence of big issues ranging from the debt ceiling to how we pay doctors to the spiraling, out-of-control entitlements we have, to the need for a simplified Tax Code, to the need for lower rates. We have been working on this in various ways across party lines for several months. There is a growing consensus that the time to act is after the election. It will require Presidential leadership, whether it is newly inaugurated President Obama or a new President Romney, and our job will be to see that the newly inaugurated President succeeds, whether he is a Republican President or a Democratic President, because if he does, then our country succeeds. What are the stakes? The Foreign Minister of Australia, Bob Carr, put it very well when he said in a speech here--and he is a great friend of the United States and I have known him for 25 years--he said: The United States is one budget agreement away from reasserting its global preeminence--one budget deal away from reasserting our global preeminence. But if we cannot even bring up an appropriations bill to debate it, to amend it, to vote on it, and to pass it, if we suddenly are dealing with bills that have not gone to committee that are nothing more than a political exercise, if we are sitting around in the Senate with nothing to do of significance--and there is only one person who can bring up issues here; that is, the majority leader--how is that going to convey to the American people we are capable of governing ourselves? I think it sends a clear message that we are failing to do that. So having expressed my disappointment, I wish to express my respect for the majority leader and to say again how much I appreciated the efforts he made at the beginning of the Congress to say we would not change the rules of this institution, except according to the rules, and the effort he said he would make at the beginning of this year to bring up the appropriations bills and the efforts he has made to allow more amendments on a whole series of bills this year and say: Can we not go back to that, even though this is a Presidential election year? The stakes are too high. As far as voting on amendments, that is why we are here. Why would you join the Grand Ole Opry if you do not want to sing? That is why we are here. We are here to express the views of ourselves and the people we represent to make sure their voice is heard, and then we are here to get results. I hope my record is a pretty good record of working to get results. I sometimes say to my friends--they will say: You are being bipartisan. I am not interested in being bipartisan. I am interested in results. I learned in the public schools of Maryville, TN, how to count, and I know it takes 60 votes to get results. So anything important we do is going to require Democrats and Republicans. We are going to need a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, not 51 or 53 or 54, no matter who is in charge next year. We are going to need a coalition of 60 or 65 or 70 who will come around some of the most difficult issues we have had to face in terms of tax reform, in terms of deficit reduction, in terms of reining in entitlements--a whole series of issues. We are going to have to remember our pledge to the Constitution that we take at the beginning of each 6-year term, and we are going to have to honor that pledge. That is the Senate I hope to see. That is the Senate I am working to create. I wish to create an environment in which the Democratic leader and the Republican leader can succeed on big issues in helping us put together results on the serious problems. I wish to make the Australian Foreign Minister--a great friend of the United States--I wish to show him we can answer his question and that we realize, just like he does, that we are one budget agreement away from reasserting America's global preeminence and that we in the Senate are perfectly capable of doing it. By not bringing up appropriations bills, by reverting to political exercises, by leaving off the table many amendments that need debate, and by even suggesting we would change the nature of the Senate so a freight train could run through it with 51 votes, none of that encourages confidence in the ability of the United States to govern that I think exists. I know my colleagues pretty well. I work hard with people on both sides. I respect them all and their opinions and I do not question their motives. It is my personal judgment that 80, 85 percent of us on both sides of the aisle want a result on the big fiscal issues and on every other big issue that comes here, and I would like to do my best to create an environment in which that could happen. I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I am awaiting Senator Durbin and Senator Enzi. I will be happy to listen to the Senator from Louisiana if she would like to continue for a while until they come. I plan to speak for a few minutes after they speak on a different subject.