Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Let me describe also what is going to happen in about 20 years, maybe 10. If we don't address these problems, it won't matter what the debt rating agencies say; we will have developed a pattern that says we think we can continue to borrow and continue to raise the debt limit and not make the structural changes that put us on a path to solvency. So what does that look like? What that looks like is borrowing costs going up. My friends all say--and the President said today--maybe our borrowing costs will go up if we don't, in fact, raise the debt limit. Guess what. Our borrowing costs are going up every day we don't address these problems whether we address the debt limit or not because eventually the rest of the world is going to say: We don't think they are willing to cut up the credit card. They are not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to put their country on a path of prosperity. We have all the capabilities in the world to address our problems. We do not have the leadership that will get us there. I am not just directing that at the President; I am directing that at my own party. So what is the solution? I am going to spend the next couple days outlining waste in the Federal Government, fraud in the Federal Government, duplication in the Federal Government. But the solution is called sacrificial leadership. It means modeling the behavior that says you are willing to give up something--maybe the prestige of being in office--to actually fix the long-term problems of our country. It is leadership that calls out the best in us instead of pointing out the worst in us. You do not see that very often here. You did when I first came. You certainly do not now, and that is a function of leadership in the Senate. Majority Leader Reid and I do not agree on much. That is obvious. But in a previous discussion on the Senate floor, Leader Reid said: ``Meaningful deficit reduction requires shared sacrifice.'' We are never going to get there unless everybody shares in it. The other point I would make is that we are living off the next generation right now. We are going to borrow $2,000 against the future of every man, woman, and child in this country this year alone. They are going to have to pay it back. Another way of putting it is that 1 out of every 4 hours you work, the Federal Government right now is confiscating--of everybody in our economy. It is soon going to be 2 out of every 4 hours you work. Our country was founded on the idea of liberty and freedom. When the confiscatory rates that will have to be there to pay back our debt or to at least borrow more money come, half of your work is going to be for the Federal Government--not your State or local governments; it is going to be to pay the bills of the Federal Government. So money that is going to go for interest is money that is not going to be invested. It is money that is not going to improve education. It is not going to invent the new technology. So I believe we can solve our problems, but I think it requires an informed public. Do you realize the Federal Government is twice the size it was in 1999? It is twice that size. It is two times as big as it was in 1999. Think about that for a minute. If you extrapolate that, that means in another 12, 13 years, it is going to be four times as big as it was in 1999. The question comes: Are you getting value? Is it efficient? It is productive? Is it what we want to do? I think we can cheat history as a republic. As a constitutional republic, I think we can cheat history. I do not think we have to go down the path every other republic has gone down, but it is going to require real leadership and shared sacrifice on the part of everybody in this country. It is going to require that we take the spending out of the Tax Code for the well-heeled who have placed special benefits in the Tax Code for themselves. It is going to require that we reform Medicare.

Mr. COBURN. I thank the Presiding Officer. It is going to require that we reform Medicare, that we fix Medicaid, that we control how the Federal Government buys and uses things. It is going to require us to eliminate multitudes of duplicative programs that have no real benefit other than to benefit the politicians. It is going to require shared sacrifice. So we can go down that path, unite our country, bring us together with a vision that through this, together we can all accomplish what is needed for our children and grandchildren or we can continue this petty little kindergarten game that is going on in Washington right now where everybody's nose gets bent out of shape, saying they are right or they are right, and playing off the American people. None of us in Washington are right. The Founders were right. The enumerated powers were right. The 10th Amendment was right. We are dead wrong. It is time we grow up and start understanding the vision of our Founders that secures our liberty and preserves our future. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I will respond to a couple points my colleague from Vermont referred to. If one looks at the votes on everything that has come to the Senate thus far, I think the lowest vote total was 221, which is a majority of the House. A majority of the House spoke. What we do with it is our business here in the Senate. So it is not necessarily a minority of the minority. If it were, you would not have 221 votes. That is the first point I make. The second: I do not know what the Texas Republican Party's platform is. But yours truly has thought that one of the things we ought to do for veterans is to give them real health care rather than promise them health care and then make them travel 200 miles to get it. So part of privatization is giving veterans who have service- connected health care available to them a card that says you can go wherever you want so you do not have to travel--like in Oklahoma, if you are going to have a knee operation--145 miles to the VA center in Oklahoma City. You can actually get it done by an orthopedist who has a whole lot more experience than a local hospital, paid for at Medicare rates. So the point is, there are options that will give our veterans better access than they have now. I do not know if that is what they are talking about. But that was part of the Patient's Choice Act that was never considered by the Senate. I want to spend some time talking about where we are and why we are here, and then I want to talk about the continuing resolution, whether it has something attached to it or not. As I look at the process, what I see us stuck on has to do with a principle that has been true throughout our Nation. When you do big things in government, the only way those things are successful is when they are done in a bipartisan manner. To quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Historic laws don't pass barely. They pass 70-to-30 or they fail. They either fail in implementation or they fail in acceptance by the American public. I applaud the vigor of my friends in opposing the Affordable Care Act. As a practicing physician, I see what this is ultimately going to do. As the majority leader has spoken, the whole idea behind this--and I think my colleague from Vermont would concur--is for a single-payer government system as a better solution. Certainly what we had was not working well. I would not disagree with that. But not having a bipartisan health care bill, rather than a strictly partisan health care bill, has probably instigated a lot of the problems we have with this bill, besides the fact that over 62 percent of the American public do not favor this bill. They do not want the Government shutdown over it. That is obvious. But we are where we are. One of the reasons we are where we are is failed leadership, both by Republicans and Democrats, and a polarization in our country that is not healthy. So we have now said--with 800,000 employees on furlough, having a real but small negative effect on our economy--what has to happen when you have people far apart? What you have to have is leadership that says: I am going to try to solve this problem by brokering toward the middle. I do not know what that middle is. But what I have not seen yet in the leadership, including the President, is a willingness to find the common ground that will move us in a direction that puts us where we need to be. The thing we forget too often in the Senate is that we are all Americans, every one of us. What we do up here matters. It has a profound effect on individual lives. The fact that we find ourselves unable to come to a consensus on this very difficult subject is what happens when you have an absence of leadership. So it is great that the President is meeting or has met with the leaders of the House and the Senate. It would be great if they spent time working on a solution rather than giving press reports after the meeting. It would be good for all Americans if we were not in a government shutdown. The very premise that you can get the President and those who have foisted the Affordable Care Act--which I think will be highly unaffordable for our children and us--to change this law at this time is probably not going to happen. But there has to be a way for a continuation of dialog rather than to say: We will not consider anything. So the House today is going to offer up several bills that will actually take care of very great necessities of this country. It will be unfortunate if we do not consider them. We can vote them down. But not considering is not talking. It is not reaching across and trying to find a solution. It is hardening positions. I would think the American people would want us to take a timeout and say: What are you doing? What is your job? I recently got a letter from the Liberty Foundation of America, from a man I greatly respect, Dr. David Brown, a renowned orthopedist in Oklahoma. What he is saying to people in America today is a recognition of the failure of our leadership. I ask unanimous consent his letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. COBURN. He makes some profound observations about where we are and the lack of leadership. Here is a practicing orthopedist who loves his country, who wants us to solve the problems, who wants us to take back control of our government and do what is in the best long-term interests of the country, not what is in the best long-term interests of a politician or a political party. I think that is where we have gotten off. Everything is measured by the next election rather than by the next generation. Although I do not always agree with my colleagues, as most of them know, I am willing to work and compromise and meet as long as we are attaining long-term good goals for our fellow countrymen and for our children. The other issue I want to talk about is the CR itself, because lost in all of this battle is a CR that plays a lot of games on the American people. It is disappointing for me to see that we play games with mandatory spending by moving numbers from one year to the next year so we can actually spend more money in a present year. I did not vote to have a sequester because I think it is an idiotic way to cut spending. But I do support trimming the spending of the Federal Government. As a matter of fact, nobody in the last 9 years has done more to offer amendments, to outline duplication, to outline fraud, to outline abuse than I have on the floor of the Senate. So it is one thing to do it stupidly. It is wholly another to actually keep your commitments to the American people. The vast majority of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle voted for the Budget Control Act, as did most Republicans. So we have a commitment to keep our word. I will outline to you that--first of all, I will make two points. One is that we are not keeping our word with the continuing resolution coming from the House. It actually will spend $38 billion more than what we promised the American people we would spend. I know in Washington $38 billion is not a large amount of money. But the way you get rid of trillion-dollar deficits is a billion dollars at a time--or $38 billion at a time. I am disheartened we are playing the green-eyeshade and walnut-shell game on the American people with this bill. To make my point, I would like to outline some of the spending and some of the false maneuvers that have been done in what is called CHIMPS, which are changes in mandatory program spending. We have a program in the United States called the DOJ Assets Forfeiture Fund. These are funds that the Justice Department collects that are forfeited by criminals, by people breaking the law, whether it be a car in a drug bust or the money from a drug bust. So what we are going to do is take that money out of that fund, which goes toward things that actually enforce our law enforcement, and plus that down-- in other words, steal that money--so we can spend more money somewhere else. That is just $723 million. It is almost $1 billion. More concerning to me is the fact that there is a victims compensation fund in this country--and that is where criminals pay into a fund to compensate victims--there is $8.9 billion in that fund, supposedly. But last year the appropriators did exactly the same. They took that $8.9 billion and said they would pay it back next year--this year--and they were allowed to spend almost $9 billion more on other things, taking that money that should have been given to victims and spending it through the Federal Government. Lo and behold, they did not add the $8.9 billion back this year. They counted the same thing again. So now we have $18 billion of not taxpayer money but criminal money that should be going to victims that is now going to be spent on other things, and the victims will not receive the money that is due them through either court orders or judgments. Finally, there is a lot of spending in the bill that most Americans would see as foolish. I thought I would outline just a little bit of it. One other point I would make. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office collects fees when you file a patent. For years they have been falling further and further behind. Thankfully, they got caught up. But the money that is paid for a patent application has been siphoned off, not for patent applications but for spending on other things. It is a user fee. Consequently, now it is over 8 months if you file a patent before someone ever even looks at that at the Patent Office. It is 27 months before you get a response. If we are going to get ahead and compete in this competitive world, we have to allow our Patent Office to work. They are taking hundreds of millions of dollars from the Patent and Trademark Office. What does the CR spend money on that we really should not? Here are some examples for last year when we spent money that we should not have: funding for the National Science Foundation for the development of a Snooki, a robot bird that impersonates a female sage grouse; funding an NSF grant that studies American attitudes toward the filibuster in the Senate; an NSF grant, sitegrabber.com, a new Web site to rate the trustworthiness of other Web sites; an NSF grant funding ecoATM, a company commercializing an ATM to give out cash if you give them your old cell phone--that is totally a private separate sector venture, yet we are funding that, in an era when we have a $750 billion deficit this year and a $17 trillion debt--an NSF grant paying for participant expenses to attend an annual snowmobile competition in Michigan through 2015. I do not think that is a priority when we are struggling to pay our bills. I have a list of Department of Agriculture grants. I will put those in the Record. We are still spending $30 billion a year for 47 job training programs, none of which have a metric on them. All but three, according to the Government Accountability Office, overlap one another, in other words, do the same thing. There are 20 Federal programs across 12 different Federal agencies for the study of invasive species. I think we should study invasive species, but I do not think we should have 12 agencies studying them. I think we should have one agency study them. We ought to concentrate the dollars so we get good value out of that. We are still sending unemployment checks to people who make more than $1 million a year. We have 15 different financial literacy programs, a new one being created by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is across 15 different agencies. We are spending millions on that. We are spending $1 million for NASA to test food that can be eaten on Mars 30 years from now. I would not think that is a priority. We are spending $4 billion for 250 different grant programs at the Department of Justice which, as GAO says, has the worst record of any agency in terms of monitoring their grants and the veracity and the compliance of those grants. We are spending $3 billion on 209 different programs for science, technology, engineering, and math across 13 different Federal agencies. I think it is fine if we want to incentivize that, but do we really need over 200 programs to do that? No, we do not. But we have not addressed any of that. It has been known. We have the GAO out with a report, their third report this year, and they will come with another one next year, outlining at least $250 billion that could be saved by the Federal Government on duplicative services; in other words, multiple agencies doing the same thing, stepping on each other. Not one bill has come before this body that addresses that $250 billion expenditure that could be saved every year, not one bill in this session of Congress. So we are having a fight over spending. Yet Congress is the very real problem we are having on spending. We need to look at what the real problem is. The real problem is the failure to do our job, the failure to look at programs and see if they are effective, the failure to look at programs and see if they are truly a role for the Federal Government as far as the Constitution and as far as common sense, a failure to offer substantive changes or have the ability to offer substantive changes to those bills. I will conclude with one final remark. The Appropriations Committee did a good job this year, even though at higher levels above the Budget Control Act, of getting their bills in order. Only one of those bills was offered on the floor. It was withdrawn when Members of my caucus were not allowed to offer amendments, because it was not going anywhere if we were not allowed minority rights to offer amendments to change an appropriations bill. So we are doing a continuing resolution to fund the government and handicapping the very employees we are going to ask to make good decisions for our country, because we will not pass appropriation bills on time. We do not need a budget to pass appropriations bills, because we have the Budget Control Act that spells out where we are going to be on discretionary spending for the next 10 years. We know what the levels are. Consequently, we end up at an impasse over a continuing resolution-- over a continuing resolution that says we have not done our job anyway. I think what Dr. David Brown says in his letter is quite accurate. There is a total lack of leadership in this city, sitting at the executive branch, in the House and in the Senate. Only America can change that. I hope it does. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I have spent a lot of time in the last few weeks and listening last night to the Senator from Texas make a big point that Members of Congress in his opinion were not listening to the American people. I have a lot of experience listening. As a physician that is what I got paid to do. I think the motives of Senator Cruz and some of his allies in the Senate are pure. Their tactics are tremendously erroneous, in my opinion, but I want to draw a picture for you in a minute about this idea of listening and what it means. Even though I disagree with their tactics, I admire their spirit and their vigor. Having delivered 4,000 babies, I have had a lot of sleepless nights. I have gone 2 or 3 days with 2 or 3 hours of sleep over that period of time to care for people. But I would make this point: As a physician, the first thing you are taught in medical school is to listen to your patient and they will you what is wrong with them. So we do have to spend time listening to our constituencies. But doctors don't just listen to the patient. They observe the patient, they examine the patient, they do tests on the patient, and then can combine all that listening with all the other data they have collected, and then they make a decision about giving advice to that patient. They give what is called informed consent. That is the big story that hasn't been told to the thousands and thousands of people from Oklahoma who have called my office. They haven't been given informed consent. They have been sold a bill of goods. When I have young interns and young staff in my office taking significant calls from people who have been misled, there is no way you are going to talk them out of a position that outside interest groups and a small number of people inside the Senate have planted. So I want to spend a few minutes addressing this. Then I want to go back to the patient for a minute, because in my broad experience of treating everything from newborn babies to grandmas to broken bones to gall bladders to you name it, I have gained a little bit of experience on how you judge inputs of information. What we have had outlined--and I want those people who call my office to listen to this. What we have had outlined is a group of people who said somebody has a terribly swollen knee, and if you don't fix it they are not going to be able to walk, and that we have got to fix it right now. Nothing else matters. We have to fix it right now. Except they have a staph infection in their knee, a methicillin-resistant staph infection in that knee. But because we don't listen to all the facts and we didn't do all the studies, they don't recognize that that staph infection has already infected the heart valve. The knee is what is red and hot and what they are complaining about, but the good physician will do the tests, the studies, the listening, and the exam and find out what the real problem is. The staph infection in the knee came from the staph infection in the heart. If you don't go after treating the heart of the problem, it doesn't matter if you cure the knee; the patient is going to be dead. That is what we have had put upon us by some of my colleagues. They have been misdirected in terms of what the real problems are. I would say nobody fought harder against the Affordable Care Act as a practicing physician than I did. I was still practicing, being a Senator at that time. I was still delivering babies on the weekends in Oklahoma. Senator McCain said it was a fair process. It wasn't a fair process. The one bill that actually would have solved our health care problems never got a vote on the floor of the Senate. It is called the Patient's Choice Act. The majority leader wouldn't allow a vote on that amendment. It was a complete substitute. It actually fixed the real problems, and did so without putting the government between you and your doctor. But let me go back. What Senator Reid, the majority leader, has said is right. What is the Affordable Care Act about? It is about ultimately getting to a single-payer system where the government controls all of health care. So Senator Cruz and Senator Lee aren't wrong about worrying about it, aren't wrong about wanting to change it. But we have a whole lot bigger problems than the Affordable Care Act. It is just one of them. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about what this debate has taken our attention away from. The real problem in our country right now is that we are bankrupt. Our total unfunded obligations of the Federal Government are $124 trillion. The entire net worth of the entire country is only $94 trillion. We are $30 trillion in the hole and growing that hole. What that means is we are leaving a legacy of pauperism and debtor's prison to our children and our grandchildren. So while we have had this big debate, nobody is focused on the fact that Washington is still lying about the numbers up here, including the bill that came across from the House. I am going to spend a little bit of time going through that so we can refocus on the infected heart instead of looking at the infected knee. I am very glad they have raised the issue. The problem is we are double-minded and double-speaking when we talk about the numbers. Let me show this for a minute. Congress, the President, the House, and the Senate voted for the Budget Control Act. We made a promise. We said we recognize we have some problems. The first thing we can do is we can start addressing some of those problems through discretionary spending. You had all of these claims that we made all these savings, over $2 trillion. Well, here are the real numbers. The real numbers are, in 2011, the base discretionary spending was $1.062 trillion. By the time you add up the emergency spending, the troops, spending for the war, we spent $1.221 trillion. In 2012, as we worked this Budget Control Act through, the base spending was $1.043 trillion. Real spending, when you add in everything else that was spent through emergencies and everything else, we spent $1.198 trillion. This is the discretionary spending. In 2013 through the Budget Control Act, the base according to that was $988 billion. With all the extra things we allowed, emergency spending, war spending, et cetera, we spent $1.145 trillion. According to the CBO, reading what the law is and the promise to the American people, this next year it is supposed to be $967 billion. If you add what is expected in war and discretionary spending through emergencies, it is to be $1.114 trillion. So what have we done? By forcing a discussion about the wasteful spending, we have set us on a path to slowly actually cut actual discretionary spending, something we are going to have to do if we are not going to have our kids in debtor's prison. What is the bill we have coming over here? The bill we have coming over here is $985 billion. So it is $18 billion bigger than what we promised you just last year. Besides that, it is even $18 billion higher because we have got fake pay-fors in there, so it is actually $18 billion higher than that and something we call CHIMPS, where we assume something that we have assumed the year before but didn't count it the year before and will count it again this year. It is the type of accounting that anybody in a publicly-held company in this country would go to jail for. They would be convicted and go to jail. But what we agreed to in the Budget Control Act is 2014 would be the last year of discretionary cuts; then every year after that it would rise by 2.5 percent, i.e., the estimated rate of inflation, and that we could change the mix and we could get there. But we are not doing that. Just to show, the spending is still going to rise. The discretionary spending is still going to rise. Here it is in terms of baseline and actual, and you can see we are not cutting spending anymore after this year. It is going up. Which begs the question: What are we doing with this continuing resolution? We are breaking our word that we gave you last year and the year before. We can't help ourselves. We are addicted. You can say--as Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader in the other party, has said--there is not anything else left to cut in discretionary spending. Of course, that belies the fact that the Government Accountability Office has listed 165 different sets of duplicative spending, wasteful duplicative spending--that is $250 billion a year-- that if the Congress would do its job you could save half of that. So instead of doing this, we can be doing this. What does that mean? That means your children have a brighter future. That means we don't waste money. We clean up the fraud and corruption in the Federal Government. That is what it means. There are points of order that can be raised against this bill and I am hopeful we will do it because we violate the Budget Control Act. If 60 Senators want to say we don't care what we promised you before, we have to spend more money, then they will vote. They have to have 60- plus votes to waive that budget point of order. I predict they probably will because we cannot help ourselves. I will not, but we are going to spend more money than what we just last year promised the American people we would do. Of course, that doesn't address any of the real problems that are facing our country, which are the mandatory programs. I want to give just a short flavor of some of the programs. I will just take green buildings, for example. I ask unanimous consent to use an oversized chart on the floor.

Mr. COBURN. If you just look at this, nobody in their right mind would create this. But of course Congress is not in its right mind. We would not have a $750 billion deficit if we were in our right mind. Here it is for all the green building programs in the country. We have in this different departments that are running a multitude of programs that all do the same. A cogent person would say if it is good to have green building programs, why don't we have one? Why don't we create a czar of green building programs, put him in charge, and let's have one set of grants, one set of incentives and one bureaucracy that runs it. But we have not done that. Let me just go through, for a moment, this series of duplications that the Government Accountability Office has outlined and just see if you think we are doing our job. See if you think we are doing the oversight we should be doing. Here is the first group. We have 15 unmanned aerial aircraft programs, of which we are going to spend $37 billion over the next 5 years. Why do we have 15? Maybe we need one for each branch of the service and they could subcontract what they deliver to Homeland Security if we need those for homeland security or for the intelligence agencies. Why do we have 15? We have 18 different food programs running through 23 agencies at $26 billion a year. We have 21 homeless programs, 7 different agencies, 2.9 billion. We have transportation services for transportation of disadvantaged persons, 80 different programs in 8 different agencies spending $2 billion a year. Job training and employment, we have 47 job training programs for the nondisabled. We have 6 veteran job training programs and we have over 50 job training programs for the disabled, spending $18 billion for the nondisabled and a total of $21 billion combined. What we did as the oversight in the State of Oklahoma was to look at that. What GAO says on this particular one is all of these programs overlap one another except for three. They all do the same thing, except there is no metrics on any of them to see if they are actually giving somebody a family-stabilizing, long-term job or the skills for a long-term job. We have 82 different teacher quality programs run by 10 different agencies not at the Department of Education that we are spending $4 billion a year on. Food safety, military and veterans health, economic development, 80 different programs, $6.5 billion a year. I can go on. I will not. I will not bore you. There are two other pages, 165 sets of different duplication, over $250 billion, and here is what Congress has done. We have addressed 8 percent of it. There have been hearings. That doesn't mean we have had an answer for it. We have addressed 8 percent of them. When we look at the activity of Congress, of doing real oversight to solve the problems, to truly eliminate duplication, to truly eliminate fraud, to truly eliminate waste, most Members of Congress are not interested in doing that. They do not get the glory, but it is our oath, it is our responsibility to do that. Yet we fail to do it. I heard the Senator from Virginia mention the debt limit. I am going to say again something I said in 2009. We do not have an income problem in this government, we have a spending problem. Do you realize the average American spends one-quarter of their life working to fund the Federal Government. Think about that for a minute. You are going to spend one-quarter of your life working to fund it, if you count the unfunded liabilities that we have and count the 25 percent of GDP where we are on spending today, you are going to spend one-quarter of your life funding that. If I remember correctly, and if I read the Constitution correctly, this little book, what our Founders talked about was limited government, not a government that consumes 25 percent of your labor to run it, not a government that ignores the 10th Amendment or ignores the enumerated powers. I introduced the Enumerated Powers Act. It is a simple act. It has 37 cosponsors. What it says is, before you introduce a bill on the floor of the Senate, you have to reference the area of the Constitution that gives you the authority to legislate in that area. Sad to say, I could not get any of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to join on that one very simple bill that would help bring us back to what our Founders thought about a limited government and our responsibility. Our Government is limited only to the extent to which it can borrow right now. We have tons of structural deficits in our economy today. We have a job deficit in terms of creating jobs. We have a skills deficit in terms of matching the skills to the jobs that are available. We have a demand deficit because of the overbearing overreach of the Federal Government and the regulation that is imposed upon the citizenry. We have a deficit of watching out for those who cannot watch out for themselves. We have programs that are supposed to do it, but when you go back and read our Founders' vision and read the Federalist Papers and read what this most wonderful government that was ever created was designed to do, first and foremost it was designed to be limited because our Founders knew that when it became 25 percent of your labor, your liberty was diminished, your freedom was diminished. Of course, that ultimately is what the fight is over, the Affordable Care Act--what will it ultimately cost and how much freedom will you have when we give you something that some need, what will you give up when you receive that. I will end with just the following. I think there are four questions the American people ought to be asking Members of Congress right now. There are four critical questions. I think too often we fail in answering these questions. Here they are. Are you leading in such a way as to restore confidence in ourselves, our Government, and our institutions? Are you trying to unite us or are you trying to divide us? I already described we are bankrupt. How do we get out of it? The only way we get out of it is working, coming together with real leadership that draws us together, that says, hey, folks, no finger- pointing here, there are lots of mistakes made. How do we solve these problems and how do we do it together without making somebody else look bad? How do we restore confidence we know we need? I wish to tell a story. I did townhall meetings in August, and I went to Miami, OK. There is a wonderful plant there that grows mushrooms and vegetables. It is a big operation. The owner of the plant, Virgil Jurgensmeyer, came to my townhall meeting. He is probably my age, maybe a little older. He said: Tom, I am spending $60 or $70 thousand a month buying from my competitors right now to fill my orders. I could create a couple of hundred jobs with my own. It is not a big city. But I don't have the confidence in the future of the country right now to invest $5 million and go to the bank to borrow that to create those jobs because I don't think we have it together as a country anymore. He is not partisan. I don't know what his political leanings are. But what I do know is he has lost confidence. That has happened all across our country right now because we do not have leadership that does anything except point out what is wrong with the other side. What we need is leadership that brings us together, that compromises, that works to identify and solve the problems. The second question I think ought to be asked is: Are you more interested in the short-term political game as a legislator than you are the long-term problems of this country? I am a term-limited Senator. I set my term limit when I first ran. I have a little over 3 years to go. I will never run for another office the rest of my life. I would like to think that most of my thought has been about long term since I have been in the Senate, not short term--of actually solving problems, the long-term problems, not the short-term problems. I talked about our structural deficit. We have to get after it. We have to get after it now. If you look at the political dynamic, right now is the only time between now and the next Presidential election that it will be positive for Republicans and Democrats to join hands together to solve the problems of Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and our structural deficit. We have less than 3\1/2\ months to come to an agreement to do that because the political dynamics will never allow that to happen until after the next Presidential election because everybody will be pointing fingers. Wouldn't it be nice if we had the leadership that saw Republicans and Democrats come together, compromise, fix these problems? Even if you lose your election, fix the problem for the country, fix the problem for the children, fix the problem for our grandchildren. But the selfishness of careerism drives us to do what is politically expedient and what is popular rather than what is right. The third question: Are you willing to look at this institution of government and ensure that we are not wasting, duplicating or being defrauded in the programs that we authorize through a congressional continuing resolution? The answer to that question is we are being defrauded every day. We have waste every day that we are not working on, and we have duplication like crazy from the GAO that we are not even attempting to fix. I have to take my hat off to the President. If we look at his budget, he took more of the GAO recommendations that they made and put them into his budget than we have even considered in both the House and the Senate. At least he is listening to someone. They actually acted on them in his budget for the fiscal year 2014. The question on this third question is: Do you have the political courage to fix what is wrong and compromise on the solutions to fix what is wrong? The GAO has told us what is wrong. Yet we fail to address it. Then, finally, and maybe this is more of an Oklahoma thing--I hope not--but do you actually believe what the Constitution says about a limited role for Federal Government? Do we vote to ensure that the 10th Amendment that our Founders added is brought up-to-date and is revered? Unfortunately, that is hardly ever a concern in the Senate. I have been here over 9 years. We don't worry about the enumerated powers. We want to fix those, and in our good desire to fix things, we trample the Constitution. So now we are $17 trillion in debt. We have $124 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and that is growing every day. So the one thing this debate we have had the last few days in the Senate has caused us to not focus on is the very thing that is the real problem facing this country, which is ineffective leadership. It is fixing the wrong problem. It is the heart, not the knee. It is the heart that is infected, and we have to address fixing the heart before we can ever hope to cure the knee. I thank the Presiding Officer for his patience, and I thank the Senator from Missouri for his patience. We don't have one problem in front of this Nation we can't fix. If we restored confidence, we would be growing at 4 percent a year right now. If people had the hope that we were going to do what is right, not what is expedient, and in the best long-term interests for all of us--not me as a Republican and not just Democrats--and we had that kind of leadership, we could get out of our funk, we could get out of our debt, and we would be the America we had when I was growing up. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, this bill, the Audit the Pentagon Act of 2013, sharpens the teeth of the appropriations and accountability clause in the Constitution, article I, section 9, clause 7, which says: No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time. The intent of this clause is simple: Congress cannot possibly know that the executive branch is obeying the first part of the appropriations clause--spending--of the Constitution without confidence in the second--accountability. The decades-long failure by the Pentagon to comply with existing Federal financial management laws is against the very spirit of the Constitution--our Founding Fathers demanded that those spending taxpayer dollars are accountable to taxpayers. The Pentagon's financial management problems are intimately related to the problems of waste at the Pentagon and the budget crisis that has created sequestration. Currently, neither Pentagon leaders, nor Congressional members can consistently and reliably identify what our defense programs cost, will cost in the future, or even what they really cost in the past. When the Pentagon doesn't know itself and can't tell Congress how it is spending money, good programs face cuts along with wasteful programs, which is the situation in which we find ourselves today under sequestration. Unreliable financial management information makes it impossible to link the consequences of past decisions to the defense budget or to measure whether the activities of the Defense Department are meeting the military requirements set for it. Passing a financial audit is a critical step that will protect vital priorities and help the Pentagon comply with current law and our Constitution. The problem is clear: if the Pentagon doesn't know how it spends its money, Congress doesn't really know how DOD is spending its money. This incomprehensible condition has been documented in hundreds of reports over three decades from both the Government Accountability Office, GAO, and the Department's own inspector general (DOD IG). Our current Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel knows that this is a problem. In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee he said that the Pentagon needs ``auditable statements, both to improve the quality of our financial information and to reassure the public, and the Congress, that we are good stewards of public funds.'' Secretary Hagel agrees that the Pentagon must audit the Pentagon and says, ``Our next goal is audit-ready budget statements by the end of 2014 . . . I strongly support this initiative and will do everything I can to fulfill this commitment.'' For far too long, Congress has abdicated its constitutional role and its duty to the taxpayers by choosing not to hold DOD accountable for the deadlines it sets for itself, and the result has been continued missed deadlines and wasteful, non-value added spending. Past efforts to make the Pentagon comply with the law by passing additional laws with no teeth has not worked--the Pentagon simply ignores the laws because it suffers no consequences. The result is that unlike every other major Federal department, the Pentagon continues to fail at their requirement and responsibility to report to Congress and the American people that it can show where the hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money goes. I hope my fellow Senators will join me in supporting this bill for auditable financial statements.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, this bill, the Audit the Pentagon Act of 2013, sharpens the teeth of the appropriations and accountability clause in the Constitution, article I, section 9, clause 7, which says: No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time. The intent of this clause is simple: Congress cannot possibly know that the executive branch is obeying the first part of the appropriations clause--spending--of the Constitution without confidence in the second--accountability. The decades-long failure by the Pentagon to comply with existing Federal financial management laws is against the very spirit of the Constitution--our Founding Fathers demanded that those spending taxpayer dollars are accountable to taxpayers. The Pentagon's financial management problems are intimately related to the problems of waste at the Pentagon and the budget crisis that has created sequestration. Currently, neither Pentagon leaders, nor Congressional members can consistently and reliably identify what our defense programs cost, will cost in the future, or even what they really cost in the past. When the Pentagon doesn't know itself and can't tell Congress how it is spending money, good programs face cuts along with wasteful programs, which is the situation in which we find ourselves today under sequestration. Unreliable financial management information makes it impossible to link the consequences of past decisions to the defense budget or to measure whether the activities of the Defense Department are meeting the military requirements set for it. Passing a financial audit is a critical step that will protect vital priorities and help the Pentagon comply with current law and our Constitution. The problem is clear: if the Pentagon doesn't know how it spends its money, Congress doesn't really know how DOD is spending its money. This incomprehensible condition has been documented in hundreds of reports over three decades from both the Government Accountability Office, GAO, and the Department's own inspector general (DOD IG). Our current Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel knows that this is a problem. In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee he said that the Pentagon needs ``auditable statements, both to improve the quality of our financial information and to reassure the public, and the Congress, that we are good stewards of public funds.'' Secretary Hagel agrees that the Pentagon must audit the Pentagon and says, ``Our next goal is audit-ready budget statements by the end of 2014 . . . I strongly support this initiative and will do everything I can to fulfill this commitment.'' For far too long, Congress has abdicated its constitutional role and its duty to the taxpayers by choosing not to hold DOD accountable for the deadlines it sets for itself, and the result has been continued missed deadlines and wasteful, non-value added spending. Past efforts to make the Pentagon comply with the law by passing additional laws with no teeth has not worked--the Pentagon simply ignores the laws because it suffers no consequences. The result is that unlike every other major Federal department, the Pentagon continues to fail at their requirement and responsibility to report to Congress and the American people that it can show where the hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money goes. I hope my fellow Senators will join me in supporting this bill for auditable financial statements.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, and I don't intend to object, I would like to modify his unanimous consent request and ask that I be permitted to speak for 15 minutes after his colloquy.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I appreciate having the opportunity to talk about this subject. I also appreciate my colleagues. They are absolutely right in everything they said in terms of the effect of ObamaCare. I was here when that debate took place. But there are two contentions on which I disagree with them. I thought I would voice them on the floor. One is one of the quotes from the Senator from Texas: You can thank the men and women of the Congress for ObamaCare. I would just say you can thank the Democrats for ObamaCare because there was not one Republican who voted for it. So it is not the Congress that did this; it is the President and his allies who created this mess that we are about to experience. The other thing I disagree with is the fact that you can design a piece of legislation that will defund ObamaCare, because the vast majority of it is mandatory spending. So no matter what we did in terms of a continuing resolution, and according to the CRS--which I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record after I finish what I am talking about--all of the things would continue in terms of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act if we carried out the strategy that is outlined by my colleagues. Now, their motivations are absolutely pure. I have never voted for a continuing resolution since I have been in the Senate. My American Conservative Union rating is 99 percent. I would love to defund it. I want somebody to show me a mechanism where we can do that because the vast majority of the money being spent today is mandatory spending that does not come under a spending bill associated with appropriations. It was passed by a law. So the only effective way to truly stop ObamaCare--and I think we ought to do it. To stop it would be to totally reverse it. We do not have the votes to do that, but we do have the votes to delay it. When you go out and talk about the fact that they are not going to implement the employer mandate but implement the individual mandate, we can have a vote on that in the Senate. Then we can have our colleagues go home and say why they think it is fair to do that. We can actually add that. The fact that they are not going to do a check on the claims for eligibility under the exchanges, 88 percent of Americans think that is wrong. Why do they think it is wrong? Because they know right now, with the earned-income tax credit, between 25 and 34 percent of it is fraud. On the child tax credit it is the same thing. They know exactly the same thing will happen when it comes to credits and payments in the exchanges. They also know the Independent Payment Advisory Board is going to ration care for the vast majority of the Americans. We can have a vote on that again. A good portion of my colleagues on the other side would like to get rid of that. So we can have a strategic method of delaying ObamaCare by putting the votes up. But there is no way, according to the Congressional Research Service, that the vast majority of funding can be stopped unless you totally reverse the whole bill. As my colleague said, they did not think President Obama would sign that. So you would have to have 67 votes to let that happen. I spent hours on this floor trying to defeat the Affordable Care Act. Many of my colleagues on this side came around to other proposals, the Patient's Choice Act, which accomplished many of the same things without large government, without tremendous cost, and without the government getting in between a patient and their doctor. I do have a little bit of experience on that side of the ledger in terms of caring for people for the last 25 years as a practicing physician. So I would think it would be important that we have a way. I do not disagree with the intent of what my colleagues want to do. I want to defund this bill, but I also want to do it in a way that kills it. There is not a legislative method that we have that is capable of defunding it short of 67 votes in the Senate, short of two-thirds votes in the U.S. House. Now, can we put some riders on it to say you will not implement a certain section of it? Yes, as long as it is associated with discretionary spending. So what I would ask is that my colleagues look at what the Congressional Research Service has said and what the approach will be based on their analysis of a plan. I believe the vast majority of Americans want us to get rid of this bill, this law. They want it reversed. There is a dissonance between what Americans want and what Congress is willing to give them, much as my colleague said. It is different. But to claim the fact--and I will be with them on not voting for a CR. However, it will not necessarily be for the same right reasons. There are good reasons. I think that is a terrible way to fund the government, but the fact is, there are a lot of ways that we can delay this bill and accomplish what we need to accomplish. I don't think we can do the other. I don't believe we can accomplish that. So my colleagues will remember, it was actually 1996 when we had the government shutdown. Everybody was all for it until they were not. I voted against reopening the government. Had we held, much like our colleagues want us to hold today, we would not be $17 trillion in debt. We would not have a budget deficit of $800 billion this year. We would not be borrowing $34,000 a second--a second--in this government. But I also know human nature. The very people who say they will do things today, when it gets tough, do not do it. So I praise my colleagues for what they are trying to do. They are right in wanting to try to kill the Affordable Care Act: the costs, the lack of effectiveness, the long-term diminution of the doctor-patient relationship, government involved in every aspect of your health care. To have a litmus test of, if I do not agree with the process then I do not really want to defund the Affordable Care Act, that is not a claim that settles very well with me, especially spending the last 4 years trying to fight this bill. I would say that the administration is lawless in its implementation of this bill, the fact that they are going to pick and choose--regardless of what the law says, they are going to pick and choose what they will implement and what they will not. I think it is unacceptable. I think it is unfair to the average American. It is certainly unfair to the middle class. It is certainly unfair to those people who are trying to get a job today and cannot get full-time employment. We had 334,000 part-time jobs created last year. At this time in the economy, we should be creating 800,000 full-time jobs a year. They are correct in terms of what it is doing to job creation. They are correct in terms of the negatives that it is having on our economy. They are correct about every part of this except whether it will actually solve the problem. In contrast to that is what it is that we have done that we can talk about with the American people that has been positive? We have actually shrunk the size of the Federal Government. For the first time since 1995, the discredited spending of the Federal Government is going to decline--for the first time. We ought to use the continuing resolution, in my mind, to accentuate that one positive thing, which is that the reach and impact of the Federal Government in everybody's lives should be downgraded, as well as with the Affordable Care Act. There is no one perfect way to do this. There will be disagreements, but the fact is we have accomplished some great things with the Budget Control Act and with the sequester. What we need to do is improve on that. When I first came to the Senate, the average individual's debt was $23,000. It is at $54,000 today. Every man, woman, and child in this country, if you are born today, by the time you are 20 years of age--if you count unfunded liabilities--you will be responsible for in excess of $1 million of debt and unfunded liabilities. Let me say that again. If you are born today, by the time you become a majority citizen, you will be responsible for debt and unfunded liabilities in excess of $1 million. The Affordable Care Act adds to that, but it doesn't add much compared to everything else we have done. We need to rein in this President. I agree. We need to rein in spending. We need to rein in the Affordable Care Act. If we could end it, I would be for ending it tomorrow. What we need to do is delay it to where we can get to the point where we can kill it. It does need to be terminated. There are positive things we need to be doing. There is no question that we ought to make available, without discrimination, health care for people who have preexisting illnesses. Those are positive things. We can do that. There are ways to do it other than the inefficient, ineffective way this bill does it. They weren't even ever considered for a vote when we had this. There wasn't any real debate on alternatives because we weren't allowed to offer them in the Senate. My time has expired. I commend to my colleagues the CRS, Congressional Research Study, ``Potential Effects of a Government Shutdown on Implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).'' I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I wanted to speak for a moment about----

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded just to talk about the THUD bill.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, first of all, I thank the chairman of the full committee and the chairman and the ranking member of the subcommittee. I first want to give them some praise. Although I don't agree with the total numbers in this bill, I do recognize the significant changes they have made to the bill with ideas we had 2 years ago, and I am very appreciative of the fact that the slumlord problem is being taken care of, the count on vehicles for the Federal Government is being taken care of, and the conferences are being taken care of. Almost all of my concerns have been addressed very faithfully in looking at those issues we raised and actually including them in the underlying language, and I am very appreciative of that. In terms of getting amendments up, my desire is just to get them up and pending and to be flexible with the chairman and the ranking member on which ones they will accept, which ones they do not want to take a vote on, and then talk about that and not to ramrod the process. It is only a matter of efficiency for me. If their pleasure is for me to do one or two or three and then come back later and do it again, as long as we have an open amendment process, I don't have any problem with it. I do think we have some ideas to improve this bill, and I think the amendments ought to be considered. So I thank them for their consideration and allowing me to make some amendments pending, and I will talk with both the chairman and the ranking member about when and what we will do with the disposition of those amendments. Amendment No. 1750 Madam President, I call up amendment No. 1750, and I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside for the purposes of calling up this amendment.

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and that I be allowed to bring up amendment No. 1751.

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent that amendment be considered as read.

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and that we bring up amendment No. 1754.

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I would like to spend a moment talking about amendment No. 1750. This bill has a prohibition in it that I think is long overdue and very good. What it does is it prohibits the transfer of funds for Federal assistance in the bill to corporations with delinquent taxes. I believe that is a great step in the right direction. Companies that are contracting with, doing business with the Federal Government have an obligation to pay their taxes, but I also believe our Federal employees ought to be paying their taxes as well. We have $5 billion due to the Federal Treasury from Federal employees where the cases have been adjudicated. They are not under question any longer. There is no question about whether the money is owed. They have run through all their appeals. All this amendment would do is to strike the same balance for both independent contractors, which is not a part of the Senate bill as presently on floor, and individual Federal employees who have a tax obligation. When the average Federal compensation fully absorbed is calculated, it is in excess of $134,000 a year. That includes all the benefits and everything else. That is twice the per capita median family income in America. So the fact that we have this large of an outstanding amount-- it is about $1 billion--with current active Federal employees, I believe there ought to be some consequence for Federal employees who have a tax obligation but aren't paying it and whom we continue to keep in our employ and continue to pay them with no payment back to the Federal Treasury. In one division of the Federal Government--the Internal Revenue Service--if, in fact, an individual is found in a situation such as this, they lose their job. It is grounds for termination. So this is a simple improvement that would say what is good for American taxpayers is also good for Federal employees and what is good for businesses that do business with the Federal Government is good for Federal employees. And what is good for the businesses ought to also be good for independent contractors who owe the Federal Government money. So I would be happy to have any modifications the committee might recommend to this as well, but in terms of fairness and running a $17 trillion debt and running $600 billion in deficits, we ought to be aggressive about collecting the taxes owed to us that there aren't any questions about. The principle the committee used in terms of businesses that deal with the Federal Government ought to be applied to individual contractors and individuals as well. With that, I thank the chairman and the ranking member of the subcommittee, as well as the chairman, for the opportunity to offer this amendment and will await their disposition and their plan. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask consent that the following letter be placed in the Congressional Record.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, as we confront the many challenges facing this institution, it can be easy to lose sight of what is so unique and special about America. From time to time, though, we are reminded of the America we all know and love--a Nation filled with men and women of character and a remarkable ability to put the interest of others ahead of self. I was recently reminded of the true American character in reading the story of an Oklahoman and true American patriot, SSG Jeffrey Keas, who recently succumbed to cancer at the age of 44. As the Tulsa World recently reported, Jeff's journey to military career began at an age when others are usually leaving the service. At the age of 38, Jeff attended a local baseball game that paid tribute to active duty military and veterans. He later told family members that he felt ashamed that he could not stand with his son that day, a recent enlistee, as service men and women were asked to rise for recognition. So Jeff signed up for a long-term commitment with the Army and went on to serve our Nation in Iraq and Korea and most recently at Fort Hood, TX. At the time of his enlistment, Jeff's dad asked him, ``Why in the world, at your age, would you do this, Jeff, when the military is designed for a 19-year-old?'' Jeff's answer says a lot about him and the country he loved so dearly. He said, ``If I can go to Iraq or Afghanistan, and that can allow some 19-year-old to come home to his mom and dad or girlfriend, then that's what I want to do.'' Tragically, SSG Jeffrey Keas passed from this world earlier this month, but not before he inspired countless Americans with his selflessness, his courage, and his service. With men and women like SSG Jeffrey Keas, we should never count America out. We face many challenges, but this land of freedom and opportunity was built and is defended by men and women like Staff Sergeant Keas. I am in awe of the example he set for his own family, his neighbors and all those who came in contact with him. This is the America I know. On behalf of my fellow Oklahomans, I want to thank Staff Sergeant Keas for this remarkable example and to share our great sadness with the Keas family. Thank you for your sacrifices, and for sharing Jeff, as he served so honorably.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I appreciate the comments of my colleague from Texas and his earnest desire to confront the problems in front of us. I would say at the outset that the recognition over the last 8\1/2\ to 9 years of being in the Senate is that we have a problem we need to solve, and I don't think anybody disagrees with that, but I think there are two important points to which the American people expect us to pay attention. One is what Reagan described as the shining city on a hill and that people coming here make us better. There is no question about that. What he wanted in 1986 was not all walls, as some people wanted, not all doors, as some people wanted, but a wall with doors. So there are two basic facts that confront us. One is that the rule of law is the glue that holds us together. And when we hear talk about the American people having confidence as to whether we are going to enforce the rule of law, whether it is on immigration or anything, the very fact is that fabric which is holding this Nation together is being stretched very thin right now, and the last thing we should do in an immigration bill is to stretch that fabric further in terms of the confidence of the American people and in terms of the rule of law. This bill and this amendment is full of holes all throughout as far as the rule of law is concerned. My colleague from Texas outlined some of that. He also outlined the capability of the waiver--waiving the border fence, waving the requirements for RPI status. It is all written, but it is written so that the Secretary of Homeland Security can waive almost every portion of it. So that is not the rule of law, that is the rule of rulers and whatever the rulers decide. One of my great disappointments in the Senate is that we too often don't follow regular order. This bill was put together. It did go through the Judiciary Committee, but not once did it come through the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Homeland Security, where Border Patrol, where ICE, USIS--where all the implementation of anything that is in this bill will take place; where, by the way, all the knowledge, all the experience of all the members on that committee for the last 10 or 12 years, with the exception of Senator McCain, was not utilized in putting this bill together. So what we have is some very good effort and well-intentioned effort by a lot of people to do some things, but let me outline where they have it wrong. The National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers wrote a letter denying the fact that we need 20,000 additional Border Patrol agents. Here are the people who know. How stupid is this? What we are doing is throwing money and hoping it will stick on a wall and that we can convince our colleagues we have a border security plan when, in fact, there is no border security plan in the United States today. How do I know there is no plan? Because 2 weeks ago I had breakfast with Secretary Napolitano, and I asked her to send--and she said she would--sector by sector, a border plan for the United States, and I got a 2-page letter that had nothing in it. This isn't a new border plan. This isn't a specific border plan. The country doesn't have one right now, so we have put this together, outside of the regular order, well-intentioned people trying to solve a problem to assure the American people that in fact we are going to secure our borders. I will readily admit to you that if I lived in the poverty of some of the Central American nations that I would make every effort on my part to get here--legally or illegally--because the opportunity is here, that opportunity to improve yourself, that opportunity to work hard, that opportunity to live in a Nation that has a justice system where the rule of law reigns supreme. If I were from one of the Central American countries and came here, the very irony would be the fact that I am going to break the law that is the very nurturing thing that gives the opportunity to advance for me and my family. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the letter from the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers.

Mr. COBURN. Now, what has Senator Cornyn outlined that does not fit with common sense? He said people who commit three misdemeanors, whether it be child abuse or spousal abuse or drunk driving, shouldn't be given RPI status. Yet, under this bill you can do that. And for those who are not familiar with courts of law, it is on the date. So if you got two on one date, that only counts as one. Theoretically, you could have 10 or 12 misdemeanors and still qualify for RPI status. How does that fit with the rule of law? How does that fit with the glue that holds us together? What that does is flaunt the rule of law. The other thing that I think is very problematic in this bill is we have 20,000 Border Patrol agents but no increase in ICE agents, no increase in USCIS, who are the very people who are going to have to handle the 11 million people here who are going to progress to RPI status. So where is the money to handle the 11 million additional people for ICE and USCIS? It is not in there. If in fact we want the rule of law to work, then we want the people who qualify under this bill for RPI status to do so under the rule of law, which means you have to investigate and do a background check, and make sure the documentation establishes them being here before December 31 of 2011; that in fact they do have residence here, that in fact they have worked here, and that has to be worked on. That can't just be a blanket. Because the opportunists will take advantage of that system. If in fact there are no ICE agents and there are no USCIS agents to actually handle that, that means everything that has been set up in this bill will happen without an investigation, without knowledge that it is true and, in fact, people qualify for RPI status. The other side of the bill Senator Cornyn made a point about which I wish to expand upon is the fact we are not going to have an entry and exit visa system because 80 percent of the people go through the land ports, and this bill exempts those land ports totally from that. You heard Senator Cornyn talk about 40 percent, maybe even 50 percent of the people who are here illegally today came here legally, with a visa. They qualified for a visa, and they overstayed their visa. If in fact we have no internal enforcement, no ICE agents to enforce the visa overstays, we won't change that. The CBO even said you are going to have 7.5 million new illegals--undocumented--come across under this bill. If you have no internal enforcement, there is no way to drive that number down. Yet this bill puts the resources in the wrong place. You control a border by controlling what the situation is on the border, depending on location, geography, topography, and assets. So throwing 41,000 Border Patrol agents across our southern border might work, but it is a tremendous waste of resources. It might be a jobs program. The fact is it takes a combination of technology, fencing, Border Patrol, and the right combination for wherever we are talking about to be effective in operational control of the border. But that is not even a part of the bill. It is not part of the bill to have operational control of the border with a 90-percent effective rate. One of the reasons we can't get there--which is one of the things Americans want to see us promise in this bill--is because our control of the border today is somewhere between 40 and 65 percent. That is opposite of what the Secretary of Homeland Security will tell you, but that is what the studies outside of government say when they go to interview those undocumented workers who are here today. They did a very thorough analysis of that and said we are somewhere between 40 and 65 percent. So the basis of allowing undocumented workers and those who are in our country who can contribute greatly to our country, the basis of putting them on some type of status to move toward a green card status and ultimately citizenship has to be based on some real facts. Why would somebody not agree to 90-percent control of the border? The only reason they would not agree to it is they don't think it is achievable. The only reason it is not achievable is because we don't have the political will to do it. It is technically achievable. You can't get to 100 percent, but with good leadership, good sector-by- sector planning, good internal enforcement, and great legal immigration so you decrease the illegal, we could get there. Why is that not part of this bill? It is because the rule of law does not reign supreme in the Senate. Let me make a couple other points. One of the big holes in this bill in section 1202 says the following: The Secretary shall initiate removal proceedings in accordance with chapter 4 of title II of the Immigration Nationality Act, 8 USC 1221; two, confirm that immigration relief or protection has been granted or is pending or otherwise close to 90 percent of the cases of immigrants who were admitted to the United States as nonimmigrants, et cetera. All that means is she can waive the requirements under the bill. She can waive the fence. All throughout this bill we are letting a nonelected individual have the power to undermine every aspect of any tooth in this bill. When the immigration debate started, my hope was that we would do the principle most Americans want us to do, which is we need to solve the problem of the undocumented in this country. We need to bring them out of the shadows. But the price to do that is cogent and realistic control of our borders. Let me make a point. If in fact you don't have cogent and realistic control of your borders and you do everything else in this bill and everything works as the authors want it to work, guess who is going to be coming across the border. The very people we actually don't want here: the drug runners, the human smugglers, the criminals, the terrorists. So when I say 90-percent operational control of the border and I am in Oklahoma, people look at me with askance. They say, Well, that means 10 percent of the people are still coming. And guess what makes up that 10 percent. The worst of what tries to get into this country. So it is not just about getting a border security plan to secure our border, it is about limiting access of the criminals and the terrorists and the worst from coming into our country. This bill is going to allow that to continue. It is not going to stop that. It will continue. To Senator Cornyn's point, what we need is to take this out of the political arena. We need to make it so the pressure is that we do what is best for America, and one which is best for America is having a lot more people come here and contribute to our melting pot. There is no question about that. But we have to have it where it cannot be manipulated by whoever is in charge for political benefit. That is why the Cornyn plan is novel in terms of actually solving the problem. I am not going to be here much longer, less than 3\1/2\ years, but I can already predict what is going to happen if this piece of legislation comes through: My daughters and their husbands 15 years from now are going to be listening to the same debate on the Senate floor. The biggest deficit the Senate has, in my mind, is failure to put teeth into what they know will actually fix the problems in this country. This bill has no teeth. This bill has $48 billion thrown up against the wall to buy the votes to say we are going to have a secure border when in fact we are not. That doesn't mean we can't get a secure border. I worked for 2 weeks with my staff. I told Senator Schumer from New York I would love to try to do that, but in 2 weeks you can't do it. What you have done, you haven't done it either, and you have done it from a deficit of knowledge rather than using knowledge. You didn't use any of the significant historical staff on the committee of jurisdiction to help write this legislation. The institutional knowledge is not in it. It will not succeed. I don't know ultimately how I will vote on this amendment, but I am certainly not going to vote to proceed to this until we have had a chance--more than 72 hours--to actually work through and be able to ascertain and also share the flaws in the approach. For a third of that amount of money you could easily secure the border, and we are going to spend $48 billion. And in there is another jobs program adding to the 102 we have now, at $1.5 billion. GAO has already said we need to redo our jobs program. Well, we have. We have an earmark for another youth jobs program, and we won't even fix the youth jobs programs we have now. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I have refrained from being on the floor during this debate, as I listened to it and watched, and I would compliment my colleagues in trying to solve a very difficult problem. But I just heard a speech by my colleague from New Mexico that quotes all sorts of statistics that are not accurate. I am the ranking member on Homeland Security. Here is what we know: We have estimates, and that is all we have. But we do not know the total attempts to cross our border. We do not know what they are. So when somebody quotes 70 percent to 80 percent, and you have no idea what the denominator is, you do not know what the numbers are. Here is what the Council on Foreign Relations says about our border. How did they get this data? They went out and interviewed 6,700 illegal immigrants to find out their frequency of attempts, whether they have gone home, what their difficulty was, what their communities were like. Here is what they say right now is the control of our border: It is somewhere between 40 and 65 percent. So we have the administration that says one thing, but when you ask them for details--as I have, as ranking member on Homeland Security-- you cannot get the facts because we do not know. So I applaud my colleagues for bringing this bill forward. I would love to get to yes on this bill. I also want to raise the issue on the CBO scoring. What the CBO scoring said was we are still going to have 7.5 million people in the next 10 years come across the border under this plan. So in reaction to that, we have people who--other than one person on Homeland Security who actually has sat through the hearings, who knows what is going on with Homeland Security--we are going to come forward with a bill that is going to increase Border Patrol by 20,000 people. I can tell you, we do not need 20,000 Border Patrol agents. What we need is a coherent, smart strategy, with transparency, in the agency, Homeland Security, so we as Members of Congress can actually see what is going on. All we have to do is listen to what the administration says and then listen to the people who are actually doing the work--who are the Border Patrol agents, who are the ICE agents, who are the USCIS agents, who are the CBP agents. When we talk with them, we get a totally different story. Why is it that the people who are actually doing the work are telling us a different story than what the administration is telling us? There is a disconnect there, and we need to understand what that is. So I look forward to reading the details of the supposed border security amendment. But ask yourself the question: Is it possible to secure our border? If we were to have a terrible outbreak on either our northern or southern border that had a high fatality rate, a high infectious rate, and we decided we were going to close the border tomorrow, could we do it. There are great things in this base bill that will eliminate a large portion of the draw coming into our Nation through illegal immigration. Those are creating a decline in the attitude of those coming. They know if they come across, they are going to have to be able to prove they are a citizen to be able to get a job. I think that is absolutely right. There is some increase in the work visa programs and the special visa programs--probably not enough. But if you think, let's just believe the administration, let's believe what people say about this bill, if you can cut it down to 8, 9, 10 percent, then the people coming across the border are not the people looking for a job. The people coming across the border are the people who tend to hurt our society--the drug runners, the human traffickers, the terrorists. So the question I would ask is, Shouldn't we know that what we are doing as we establish a border security amendment will actually send confidence to the people of this county that, in fact, we are going to secure our border? The vast majority of people in this country want to solve this problem. I want to solve this problem. The way we are going to go about it is we are going to get to see an amendment sometime late tonight and then on Saturday we are going to have to vote on whether to proceed with that amendment, not having had the full time to actually consider what the outcome of the recommendations of that amendment are. So some of the mistakes have been made as we have brought this bill forward. This bill came through the Judiciary Committee. But almost every other major thing that is of controversy in this bill is under the purview and the control of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee which got no sequential referral on this bill. Where we are hung up on this bill is because we did not do regular order. We did not allow the process to work. We did not let the knowledgeable members of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee have an opportunity to impact this bill in a committee process. So now we are hung up with people who are not on that committee writing an amendment for Homeland Security. We can write a good amendment for Homeland Security. I told Chuck Schumer and other Members of the Gang of 8 that. But we cannot do it in 2 weeks. We cannot do it with one amendment. What we are going to get is waste, loopholes, and problems. The last thing we need to do is waste another $5 or $6 billion on things that are not going to have a difference in terms of solving the real problem, but we are going to claim it solves the problem so we can pass a bill. So I wish to get to yes on this bill. I wish to get to a way where we solve this problem and do not create it again in the future. But my concerns are both process and factually; that we are claiming things that are not true. All you have to do is sit before the committees or go talk to the leadership of the Border Patrol, ICE units, CPB, go talk to them. They are sitting there in amazement. Three weeks ago, I had breakfast with Janet Napolitano. She said she would send me their border control plan by area, by region, the next day. A piece of paper came, but there was no border control plan. So the question I have is, where is the plan? Of all the good recommendations that are in this bill, it is all going to be contingent on execution of what is in there. So we are going to pass a bill and pass an amendment and then we are going to ask the very committee that was excluded from making proper recommendations of the bill to oversight it. We will oversight it. But the fact is we will not have any control to control it. So we will be raising the questions and the ineffectiveness. Yet we will not have accomplished what we are telling the American people we are going to accomplish. What is that? It is that we are going to solve the problems with the illegals who are here. We are going to decrease the demand and draw across our border. We are going to control our border, even though we will not put that as a condition for granting people a movement from the shadows to the open. We will not put that as a condition, even though now with the supposed new border amendment the Border Patrol says they can get us to 90 percent. We will not make that a condition. So my feeling is, right now, there is a great attempt by eight of my colleagues to try to solve this problem because we are in a hurry and we are in a time crunch. We should not be because the House is not going to take up this bill, but they are going to bring their own. So we ought to do it right. I have a lot of amendments. I would love to have votes on them, would love to have them considered. I understand we cannot call up amendments right now, which is the same dysfunction the Senate has been operating under for the last 7\1/2\, 8 years. People who are knowledgeable on the committees of jurisdiction do not have the opportunity to improve the bill, to raise questions about the bill through their amendments, to refine the bill. It means we just want to get a bill passed. It does not mean we truly want to solve the problem. I look forward to a time to be able to come back to the floor and offer amendments that will actually improve this bill, that will give transparency to the American public about what we are doing, that will give transparency on how we are going to spend all this money that we are going to take from the very people we are trying to move out of the shadows, and we are not just going to throw money up against a wall and saying we did something when, in fact, we are not going to accomplish the very purpose that we put forward in this bill. People who come to this country--and I would put myself in the same category. If I was caught in the lack of economic opportunity, I would try any way I could to get into this country of opportunity. But what makes this country a land of opportunity is the rule of law. What we are doing is we are saying--the irony is the people who come here and break the law to get the opportunity from the rule of law, if we do not fix it to where that does not happen again, we are going to unwind the rule of law in this country. That is the glue that holds this Nation together. It goes something like this: If they do not have to abide by the law, neither do I. So we get an unwinding of the fabric and the confidence in the rule of law in this country. We ought to be very careful with what we do as we say laws do not apply. That is what we are saying with this bill, to a certain group of people, the laws we had on the books are not going to apply. We ought to make sure that does not happen again. I wish to come back at some time when I can present the ideas of a lot of people who actually have a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge on homeland security and how it operates and how the different divisions within homeland security operate. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I appreciate the intent of my colleague and that he wants to try to solve this problem. As he knows, several of us have another proposal. What I suggest is that we compromise on the President's proposal. It is a combination, it is a hybrid, and the President is trying to address this matter. Rather than us having dueling unanimous consent requests and playing the political game, I propose that we need to solve the problem. I would be happy to work with the Senator to try to bring the President's proposal to the Senate, which does fix this permanently. It fixes it for all of the loans, not just 40 percent of the loans, and it gives people certainty. If my colleague hasn't yet seen the CBO's accounting today, it shows that there are no savings in this; rather, there is a cost. No matter whose program it is, there is a cost, and this is on accurate accounting. This should give us all pause to try to fix this for the long term. I object to the Senator's unanimous consent but would offer a unanimous consent for the President's proposal or work with my colleague to try to get us to a point where we can solve this problem for those who are in the student loan program.