Mike Braun

Mr. BRAUN

Mr. BRAUN. Mr. President, here in a moment, I am going to ask for unanimous consent on the ATF Accountability Act and the Protecting the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act. Governor Cuomo has declared gun violence a public health emergency in New York. ``We want to do with gun violence what we just did with COVID,'' Governor Cuomo says. During the pandemic, Governor Cuomo and other elected officials used the public health emergency to infringe upon Americans' constitutional rights. They barred Americans from exercising their freedom of religion by closing churches. They infringed upon Americans' right to assemble by banning many gatherings, and now gun control activist organizations are pressuring President Biden to declare gun violence as a public health emergency. Doing so would allow the administration to take Executive action to hold up gun sales. Declaring a public health emergency should not give the executive branch the right to infringe upon our Second Amendment. This is why I introduced the Protecting the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act to stop this. This bill would prevent the White House from declaring an emergency for the purpose of imposing gun control. I took an oath to represent Hoosiers and protect their Second Amendment rights. That is why I will oppose the nomination of David Chipman and why I will ask for unanimous consent to pass the ATF Accountability Act and the Protecting the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Act. Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 1920 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, a quick response to that before I ask unanimous consent on the next item is that that is an argument I hear so often, that the city that supports some of the toughest State gun laws and local laws that ends up having the statistics that no one would want to have across our country and then would try to cast that blame on a neighboring State tells me that you are looking in the wrong place to solve the problem. The ATF here, we are just wanting clarity--that is the purpose of this act, and I suggest that my friend from Illinois look at some of the more basic issues that might be underlying what is happening there.

Mr. BRAUN

Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, in the Senate here, prior to getting here, I have been a tree farmer since the late eighties and have been involved in the agricultural part of farming, other than driving the tractor, for a long time. And farming has got to be one of the most difficult things God ever created in terms of a complicated business that involves risk for a return that, in many cases, just isn't there. Thank goodness, currently, the markets are rewarding that effort and that great risk. Environmental credits present an incredible opportunity for American farmers because that bottom line is so meager to begin with. And when you have got voluntarily markets out there that are wanting to reward good stewardship, it should be easy. But significant barriers still remain. In today's market, if you are a small farmer, you are not able to connect with these markets. Only the large farmers, both tree and egg, can do it. This simplifies it; it democratizes it; and it does something, finally, that that small guy, the landowner, the American family farmer, can get some benefit for his or her good stewardship. The Growing Climate Solutions Act creates a USDA certification program for third-party technical providers and verifiers. It allows the USDA to provide legitimacy to the trustworthy actors in the marketplace. And what is really unusual, in the short time I have been here in the U.S. Senate--it was a surprise yesterday, when I told some folks we are actually voting on something on the floor, and it has 55 cosponsors, almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. More than 100 outside organizations back the bill. Farm bureaus, which are generally very conservative about doing anything where they are going to endorse, stick their neck out, across the board like it. I won't mention all the others. It also does it without adding a dime to our deficit. So it is doing something that has got bipartisan support, tapping voluntary markets, and just providing that portal that all farmers are familiar with to use as the way they take advantage of it. We are demonstrating the right solution. We are making a statement that we need to be involved in addressing climate, and we are doing it in a place where, thank goodness, agriculture in this country is only 10 percent of the CO2 emissions. The rest is spread among electric generation, transportation, industrial emitters. What that says, when it is 25 percent emissions across the world due to agriculture, there is a lot to be learned from this as well. A quick comment on the amendment that we are going to vote on. The key point is, under both the underlying bill and the Lee amendment, the USDA will publish a list of entities on a USDA website for farmers to use. The Senate Ag Committee worked closely with the Agency, both Under Secretaries Perdue and Vilsack, to ensure the bill provided the necessary quality checks so that the folks certified under the program know what they are doing. The Lee amendment keeps the website but strikes these requirements. This is why groups like the American Farm Bureau write that Senator Lee's amendment would dilute farmers' influence in the composition of the bill's advisory panel and also removes critical protections in the base bill. I urge my colleagues to oppose the Lee amendment and to support the underlying bill

Mr. BRAUN. I yield the floor.

Mr. BRAUN

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

Mr. BRAUN

Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, I come here, probably more than any other Senator, on this topic of budgets, and it ought to be called the ``lack of budgets.'' Thank goodness that, currently, we have the blueprint out there in black and white for what we intend to do--for what the President intends to do, and he is going to try to sell it to the American public. We have been on this pathway for decades. During the Reagan years, we talked about enlivening the economy, bringing taxes down, letting people keep more of their own resources. That worked. I think that still makes sense. It works in most States. It was driving the economy with that dynamic pre-COVID. But what we did lose along the way is that--regardless of our revenues, which stubbornly average 17 to 18 percent of our GPD--when you raise rates, people don't produce as much. There is not as much income to tax. When you lower them, you get more revenue to tax, and you actually are gaining more revenue for the government, to boot. So we were there pre-COVID. We only need to look to see what was working just 1\1/2\ or 2 years ago. It was the best the economy was doing. It was raising wages. We always should be interested in doing that but not through government--through the productive private economy. It was raising it in places that we had never been able to do it before. So rather than throw that blueprint out the door and go with something like this that has never worked in the past, whenever you get government becoming that large a part of your economy--and it used to be 20 percent. Even though we were only taking in 17 to 18 percent, regardless of the tax rates in our own government revenue, we got used to running deficits. That is what happened decades ago, and we have all gotten used to it. If you want to see a budget that takes the theory that it doesn't make any difference how much more you spend than you take in, this is it. If you like it, it is the best budget we have ever done. Again, we shouldn't be calling it a budget because budgets mean that you live within your means from year to year like all other entities do. State governments do it and some that don't generally have issues in their own States' economies, but we cannot take all of these resources from the private sector, run them through government with the inefficiency that goes along with that, and expect to have a good outcome. Senator Grassley was here earlier and Senator Portman. They gave you a bunch of statistics. I am going to describe how this shipwreck ends up on the shore over time. It is just a question of how much we buy into this as the way we need to run our government, which has not worked over the last two decades--from the Gulf wars and from all of the stuff that we have tried to do through government for which we used to at least have pay-fors. The biggest drivers of our current deficits nobody wants to talk about. They are Medicare and Social Security. We knew decades ago that the Social Security trust fund was going to go bust and that it is going to happen here in a little over a decade. Will we do anything to try to change it? That takes political will. I have been here a little under 2\1/2\ years and have not found a lot of that. The bigger driver of our structural deficits would be a broken healthcare system. I, more than any other Senator, have talked about that--not solving it through more government but reforming healthcare to make it become a true industry that believes in transparency, competition, and getting the healthcare consumer involved. We can fix that part of it, but we can't get any interest even in my own party for much of that because we defend a broken healthcare industry. We don't ask it to be transparent, competitive, and engage the consumer like most other industries do and do well and that provide a good service to the American consumer. So government will end up doing what it always does. It is so easy to borrow from others and to spend the money. You are going to have a sugar high. You are going to feel good, but there is going to be indigestion down the road. The way it is going to end up is we are going to have calamities within our credit markets, and we are going to have people no longer willing to lend us money. We have now taken these trillion-dollar deficits, which are going to be closer to $1.5 trillion, and this new budget--again, I hate even calling it a budget--is going to add to that, not lessen it. When you talk about raising revenues, there is even anxiety on the other side of the aisle because raising taxes never goes well. It is generally tough to get everybody to agree on it, and that means our deficits are going to be even larger. Is it going to take our completely depleting the Social Security trust fund that we have been paying into since the thirties, and is it going to take depleting the Medicare trust fund, which now happens in 5\1/2\ years, and is the American public going to allow us here to keep spending more money than we take in year after year and end up where the Chinese won't lend us any money down the road? Others won't as well because our interest is going to be about as much as we pay for defense, and then you are going to have a calamity. You can blame it on everyone here who thinks this feels good now. When you want to feel good in the future, you make hard decisions in the present. Any well-run organization or any well-run State or local government makes those tough decisions in the short run so they don't have to solve things through a calamity in the long run. I yield the floor.

Mr. BRAUN

Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, I call up my amendment No. 1771 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, in recent years, research involving human-animal hybrids has become much more prevalent. For example, in April, researchers in China created a monkey-human hybrid embryo that they allowed to grow and studied for weeks. I have serious ethical concerns with this type of human chimera research. My amendment would ban the practice by applying the NIH's current anti-chimera policy universally. Due to the dangerous and offensive nature of this research, my amendment imposes penalties on those who participate in this unethical research. We must act now. Just this morning, the International Society for Stem Cell Research, an international standards-setting body, issued guidance that permits the creation of human-animal hybrids. I ask that my Senate colleagues reject this foreign position and maintain our own NIH's ethical standards. All life is sacred. It is Congress's responsibility to enact commonsense bioethics.

Mr. BRAUN. Please support this amendment.

Mr. BRAUN. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. BRAUN

Mr. BRAUN. Thank you, Senator Hawley. This was an easy one. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal gave us some news. We have had a cascade of others weighing in now, where this is maybe an epiphany that some have had that we need to look further into the roots. Look at what our country has gone through. It has been a year and a quarter, and it has ravaged not only the United States but the world. And why, for the sake of simple transparency, wouldn't we want to get to the root cause of it? The World Health Organization made an attempt at it. It was not effective. It looked to me like it was apologizing for what might have occurred in China. President Biden finally has said that we need to put more light and attention on this. So thank goodness, for whatever the reason, we are going to get to the bottom of it. When it has caused this much grief across our country and across the world, it needs to be done. The intelligence communities in our own country are storing information that needs to be revealed to the American public. It needs to be revealed to anyone who can look at it to make sense out of what has happened. So our bill is very simple. Since I have been in the Senate, whether it is weighing in on issues of healthcare, national security, COVID-19--who disagrees with transparency, the sunshine that reveals everything? I was in a committee hearing. And when you get the two individuals whom we have relied on mostly in this whole journey, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins, first acknowledging that transparency is paramount, and that, yes, we should declassify this information, and when we have listened to them help navigate us through this tricky journey, and they tell us earlier today, ``Give us the information,'' I think that is why here, this evening, this will go through with unanimous consent, because it makes sense. And wherever it leads us, we should be happy that we finally might get to the bottom of this--whatever it reveals. We don't know where it will take us. It is relying on what is most important--on the information we housed. Let's make sure the American public can see it and that any group that wants to analyze what happened can, including the rest of the world. So it was easy for me to get onboard, to get behind something so simple that says nothing more than if we got the information, let's show it. Let's not hide behind it. And when you get individuals like Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins, the director now of the WHO, something is afoot, and we need to find out. I am glad that we are here this evening punctuating this so that we get it done.

Mr. BRAUN

Mr. BRAUN. Madam President.

Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, I rise here today, and I have been in the Senate a little over 2\1/2\ years, and I never imagined that I would have to drift back to my days at Wabash College, as I migrated from a biology major to a political science major and, thank goodness, to an economics major. In that time, I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be able to talk about macroeconomics because back then there were a couple of points of view. You had Milton Friedman, who was a disciple of monetary theory--that if you get too much out there circulating, your currency devalues and you get inflation. And then there was Keynes, who was a big disciple of the government, either through tax policy or spending. And, my goodness, how either one of them would react to what we are contending with today, I think it would give them some pause in terms of where we are at. This has nothing to do with the underlying policy goals. I am someone that comes from a State legislature in Indiana where we tackle things like infrastructure, defined there and then as roads and bridges. We came together. We actually paid for it through user fees, which we haven't done here since 1993. That is fuel taxes, which generally would be at least one thing you would look at when you want to spend a lot of money on infrastructure. So here we are today. We had a hearing a couple of weeks ago, and I will cite him in a moment. Robert Reich was in there, and I threw that question at him: How could we have come so far from Keynes' economics and Milton Friedman, which has controlled the dynamic of this country, its monetary policy, and its fiscal policy, until just recently? Then comes along the Modern Monetary Theory, a new approach to macroeconomics. This theory proposes that governments can spend however much they want, go into debt as much as they want, and have these structural trillion-dollar deficits that would work nowhere else. It only works now because we are the only reserve currency. Being the only reserve currency, people come to us with their currencies, and that keeps our interest rates down. That doesn't acknowledge that there are places like China, which will be a larger economy than ours and lends us money currently. In places like China and most other places across the world--unless you were Greece, Italy, maybe Spain and Portugal, which kept the euro from being a prominent currency because they lived beyond their means-- you cannot, just because you can get by with it in the short run, continue to do things into the mid and long term without consequences. This fanciful theory has found its way out of the faculty lounge and into the halls of Congress. Considering that President Biden has proposed another $4 trillion in spending. There is $1.9 trillion that we have recently done--a done deal--borrowing every penny of it. We have not raised taxes. That is a false argument too. With the amount of taxes that you could raise, you wouldn't even cover part of our day-to- day trillion-dollar deficit. It adds to our debt. When I got here, I think it was around $20 trillion. Soon it is going to be over $30 trillion. And listen to this: World War II was the highest debt we ever had as a country. We were savers and investors then. Now we are consumers and spenders. They paid that off. We had basically no debt until the wars came along that we financed by borrowing, not paying for it. Then, 2008 and 2009 came along, and that looks like chump change compared to what we are doing now. Now we had an approach to one of the biggest challenges we have ever had as a country, navigating through COVID, and of course we did things that basically needed some new idea how to justify it--Modern Monetary Theory. It is a recipe for hyperinflation and continued higher deficits. By the way, the trillion-dollar deficit without any COVID, just in its own momentum forward, is going to be $1.5 trillion in 4 to 5 years. I am not surprised the big spenders in DC have latched on to a theory that tells them it is OK to spend irresponsibly and hike taxes. They may not acknowledge that pre-COVID we were in a pretty good place. We were raising wages. Senator Sanders and I would share that. We need to raise wages in places, but you can't do it through the government. That is not the productive economy. Everything that the government gets comes from the productive economy. I am surprised there has not been more pushback because it is a flawed economic theory. When I asked Robert Reich about it, he dismissed it: Well, it is too new. It is too novel. I can't really talk about it. That shouldn't be the foundation upon which you are having your spending plans laid out currently. What it is, in my opinion, is a bunch of malarkey that is embraced because we want to spend like drunken sailors. Coming through a crisis, we can't do that. We have already done that. What we did in a bipartisan fashion in 2020 probably made sense. Continuing that forward, you can't base it upon this new idea that debt, deficits don't make any difference. It is kind of like a kid coming up with a modern dietary theory that says it is OK to eat cookies for every meal. It wouldn't work. Many noted economists from across the political spectrum have warned that the implementation of the Modern Monetary Theory will pose a danger to the economy, and this wouldn't be center and right economists. Let's listen to a few of them. The Secretary of the Treasury and Director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, back in the Clinton years, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who has been OK with accommodating some of it--he said that is not a new theory that you can rely upon. Even Paul Krugman, whom we know that generally he would be eating this up, he has reservations, and not to mention a host of others. I just told you what Robert Reich said when he dismissed it as something too new to comment on. Now, Secretary Janet Yellen discussed Modern Monetary Theory's idea that interest rate payments can be handled by the central bank buying the debt back in 2019, calling it ``a very wrong-minded theory because that's how you get hyper-inflation.'' Joel Griffith, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, summed it up well when he wrote: There is no free lunch. We will pay either through the visible burden of direct taxation, the hidden tax of inflation, or higher borrowing costs. I said earlier that we are the only reserve currency. Interest rates are starting to go up. The Chinese could do things that could knock interest rates up two to three points quickly if they decided to take a different point of view. There is a lot of danger in living in the moment because you don't feel any of the pain that will inevitably come in the future, and it is not far out The acceptance of Modern Monetary Theory would lead to higher deficits and higher inflation. The underlying policy in terms of higher wages, trying to do things to improve the lot of Americans, that is fair game for discussion. Just don't mislead them, putting all that debt on our kids and our grandkids. That would be like running a business, running it into the ditch, going to your banker, and thinking that you could get a loan. You would be laughed out of the office if you tried to do it 2 years in a row. That is now standard operating procedure with trillion-dollar deficits built into the system, not to mention this. The Senate must abandon this fundamentally flawed, irresponsible economic model in favor of mainstream fiscal and monetary frameworks that work everywhere else. The European Union, a recent example, headed to be a reserve currency, and even Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy have found that they can't do that and get by with it. Madam President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged from further consideration and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 136. I further ask that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. BRAUN. So I don't disagree with what Senator Sanders said in terms of policy that needs to be debated, but a classic tactic when you are focusing on how you are going to pay for something is to change the subject. And whatever you think about what happened over in the House of Representatives, whatever you think about the other issues, this is about being honest with future generations and where has that worked and been a good end result. When it comes to some of the taxation part of it, that is a smokescreen because even if you raise all the revenue they are talking about with those taxes--and I am a believer that corporations should pay their fair share. Multinationals that flatten their tax rate, that is different from many C corps, many corporations. But the dishonesty in that argument is that you couldn't cover even 20 percent of our existing structural deficit. So you need to be honest. If you want to do this, ask your kids, ask your grandkids if they are willing to put that burden on them. And there is no theory out there, other than this which is being used as a current rationalization, that would make that ever have a pleasant outcome.

Mr. BRAUN. Madam President.

Mr. BRAUN. I know we have a vote coming up, and I won't belabor it. I think the basis for maybe a good conversation, because we are not going to solve it today, is when it comes to the tax package that was put through in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017--and I would have some authority on this, Senator Sanders. I spent 37 years in the trenches running a small business that ended up being a larger company. Three of my kids run it with a good young executive team--the American dream. And my observation was that we had kind of hit the sweet spot. And the CBO, which actually put that original cost of $1.5 trillion-- $150 billion per year, over 10 years--said that we were actually generating record revenues pre-COVID and that they could have revised, and still might, that trajectory. I think if we are going to go forward, you have to realize that there is a limit to anything you can do through government. And when you try to raise taxes, you have to be honest about it. Over 50 years, regardless of what the tax rate has been, the economy has generated about 17 percent of our GDP with tax revenues because when they are high, there is less economic activity. You actually find a sweet spot, like we did with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and the economy was proving it pre-COVID.

Mr. BRAUN

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

Mr. BRAUN

Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, today I am proud to join my colleague Senator Coons in relaunching the bipartisan Senate ALS Caucus. Currently, there are no effective treatments or cures available to stop or slow the disease, and we still do not know what really causes ALS. More than 5,000 Americans are diagnosed each year. Yet there is no ALS survivor community. Individuals diagnosed with ALS and their loved ones rely on their elected officials to advocate on their behalf. That is why the mission of the Senate ALS Caucus is to raise awareness about the difficulties faced by ALS patients and their families and to advance policies that improve their quality of life to advocate for meaningful research. May also marks ALS Awareness Month. Last Congress, Senator Coons and I introduced and passed a resolution to designate May 2020 as ALS Awareness Month. This effort, like the ALS Caucus, will raise awareness about the impact of ALS on those who are diagnosed, their loved ones, and their caregivers. I look forward to reintroducing again here in May 2021 the awareness month for ALS, and I hope my colleagues will help to pass this resolution again this year. There is more to be done, though, in really battling ALS. Promising therapies that have demonstrated clinical safety and efficacy are on the horizon for those with ALS. Failure to approve those promising treatments means the difference between life and premature death for these patients, and, sadly, the paradigm of the past has been to not be erring on the side, when there is a promising treatment, to push it through the system. Sadly, it has been indicative of what happens often in this place, and that is that you belabor it, you stretch it out, and, in this case, it has a much different consequence Patients with ALS have been very clear that they are willing to take a higher degree of risk to have access to these treatments at an earlier point in time. In September 2019, the FDA issued new guidance on developing drugs for ALS, which touted regulatory flexibility when applying the standard of safety and efficacy to drugs or diseases with serious, unmet medical needs. FDA guidance has been an empty promise, and patients with ALS lack flexible regulatory pathways to promising treatments as a result. Indicative, in a way, of what I mentioned earlier, where we seem to always be aware of those kinds of issues, we tell the Agencies that might be involved, and then there is that natural tendency toward inertia. For example, Amylyx, a pharmaceutical company focused on developing ALS treatments, announced clinical trial results of a promising treatment that slowed the progression of the disease and increased survival by 6 months. It may not seem like a long time, but when you take into consideration from the point of diagnosis to the point of dying from ALS, that is a lot of time, and the benefit of the doubt, when you have a promising clinical trial, needs to be given to the patient so that they have some hope. Europeans and Canadians have put a dynamic into place that would be quicker footed than our own FDA's. We need to take that as some guidance. Unfortunately, the FDA has expressed the need for additional clinical trials before allowing patients to access these drugs in the United States. This means Americans with ALS will not receive access when they can see others in Canada and Europe being able to. We need to get with it, and when you have the condition of no effective treatment and it is working in other places, we need to give the benefit of the doubt. It is failing to use its flexibility, and we have just seen--and I witnessed, all of us did, with the coronavirus--FDA, CDC squabbling out of the gate about what to do with coronavirus. Thank goodness we did do something that was going to change that dynamic. We would still be wrestling over a vaccine if it had been business as usual. So it is clear here, for even a better reason, that nothing is out there that is working, promising things on the horizon. We need to do better. That is why I will be reintroducing the Promising Pathway Act, the legislative solution to give those struggling with life-threatening illnesses, like ALS, a fighting chance of access to timely, meaningful treatments, especially when they are overwhelmingly wanting it, willing to take the risk. The Promising Pathway Act would require the FDA--require the FDA--to establish a rolling, realtime priority review to evaluate the progress and not make it subjective, the way it is now, to where they can do what they have been doing, and that is dragging their feet. Under this pathway, provisional approval would be granted by the FDA to drugs demonstrating substantial evidence of safety and relevant evidence of positive therapeutic outcomes, like those demonstrated in Amylyx's clinical trials. It is right here. We just need to do it, and you are going to be doing what ALS patients would prefer. This also encourages further research and clinical trials in not only ALS, but this, of course, should apply to other diseases that are similar where we are still wrestling, in clinical trials, with the ability to get these across the finish line. But it does strengthen the FDA's postmarket surveillance, which is another important thing for patient safety, and grants access to promising treatments covered by insurance. To my colleagues, it is time to roll up our sleeves and to work to advance policies that improve the quality of ALS patients. I encourage every Member to lean in on this, to be a part of it, so that we can help people that have no other hope. It is up to us to speak for those who can no longer speak, to stand up for those who can no longer stand. I am grateful to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who are returning members of the ALS Caucus, and I welcome those who are new to the caucus this Congress. As the ALS Caucus continues to grow its membership, our commitment to the mission of the ALS Caucus and the ALS community is strengthened along the way. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BRAUN

Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, I rise to honor the 50th anniversary of the signing of Coach Robert Montgomery Knight at Indiana University, who set the standard for excellence as a collegiate men's basketball coach. Coach Knight had a legendary career as a college head coach for more than 40 years, 29 of which were at Indiana University. During those 29 years, Coach Knight had 11 Big Ten Conference championship teams, took 24 teams to the NCAA tournament, and earned 8 Big Ten Coach of the Year Awards. His 1975-1976 team at IU remains the last team to complete an undefeated season and win every game in the NCAA tournament. They got close this year. Maureen, my wife, attended IU, and I can remember what a thrill it was to watch his teams play. Their drive and will to succeed were infectious. Coach Knight's success at IU continues to be a source of pride for the entire State of Indiana. Coach Knight never focused his coaching on winning a game but on the effort it takes to become a champion, saying that the will to succeed is important, but the will to prepare is even more important. Due to his focus on his players' success on and off the court--this is amazing--Coach Knight had an astounding 98-percent graduation rate for all players whom he coached for at least 4 years--more than twice the average graduation rate for Division 1 schools. On the world stage, Coach Knight led the U.S. men's national basketball team to a Gold Medal in the 1979 Pan Am Games and to a Gold Medal in the 1984 Olympic Games. Victory is fleeting, but Coach Knight both propelled young men toward greatness on the court and gave them experiences and lessons that have shaped their entire lives. We honor the drive, determination, and character of Coach Knight and all that he did in educating and mentoring hundreds of Indiana University players over three decades to bring pride to the State of Indiana. For all the memories, Coach Knight, we give you a heartfelt thank you. Madam President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 157, submitted earlier today.

Mr. BRAUN. I know of no further debate on the measure.

Mr. BRAUN. I ask unanimous consent that the preamble be agreed to and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. BRAUN. I yield the floor.

Mr. BRAUN

Mr. BRAUN. Reserving the right to object, coming from the world of business, I have been dismayed by Washington's inability to fix problems in a timely, rational manner, and that has been over a stretch of many years before I got here. I do, respectfully, disagree with my friend from West Virginia. We should fix this tax cut prohibition right now that was forced into the American Rescue Plan in the wee hours of the morning. If we want to fix a commonsense problem, we are being told that our only choice is to hold Hoosier seniors hostage. This is the most deliberative body in the world; this cannot be the best the Senate has to offer. We must get the Federal Government out of the way and stop complicating and confusing States. They should be allowed to do their jobs. And, by the way, they do their jobs--balancing their budgets every year, living within their means. Most of the rest of the country accepts that as well. Given the looming April 1 deadline for cuts to return to Medicare, I am not willing to let Hoosier seniors suffer. As a result, I will withdraw my amendment in the interest of seniors across Indiana. I look forward to working with the two leaders after the recess to fix this issue. I will not object.

Mr. BRAUN

Mr. BRAUN. I think it begs the question in that, by cutting taxes, you are going to lower gross tax revenues, and that has been a discussion we have all had for many years. I know in places like Indiana--and we just had it occur here with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act at the Federal level--that the CBO--and I was working with it--was getting close to saying its original forecast of when you had a tax cut, which was $1.5 trillion over 10 years, $150 billion per year, wasn't working out that way because there is the phenomenon called: When you find the sweet spot of taxation, you can cut taxes and generate more revenue. Then you penalize a good fiscal move by the way you are interpreting your reading. I am willing to get into the nuance to see if that would muster that particular case, but I don't think it would.

Mr. BRAUN. Yes, I will yield.