Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I yield 7\1/2\ minutes to the Senator from Nebraska.

Mr. COBURN. I continue to yield.

Mr. COBURN. I think we had an agreement with the majority whip that some unanimous consent requests would come in; is that correct? I will be happy to yield out of our time to the majority whip.

Mr. COBURN. I will consume the remainder of our time. I thank Senator Johanns and Senator Sessions for being here. We have heard the word ``emergency.'' The emergency that is in front of us is, we are a boat upside down fiscally, and there has to be a set of competing priorities for how we right that boat. But the No. 1 way we do not right the boat is to continue to add to the debt when we have programs that are not working and are wasting money, that are consuming precious resources we need to spend in other areas. I am particularly interested in the very fast revisionist history that has been presented by the Senator from Michigan. Let me tell you what happened here today. What happened here today was that a bill was offered and a motion to proceed on a bill that would accomplish this was totally paid for. That motion was tabled, with all of the Republican Senators voting against that, and some Democrats. We worked, through the next couple of hours, negotiating with the majority leader, with great help from Senator Durbin, the senior Senator from Michigan, and a compromise was reached that we would, in fact, make sure no interruption would happen over the next 2 weeks to those who are dependent on unemployment insurance. That was communicated to the House of Representatives and the majority there, and it was rejected. Then the final thing that happened is we had an adjournment resolution, for which everyone on our side of the aisle voted against to stay here. Now, that probably was not a truly sincere vote. I would put that out to my colleagues. But the fact is, the Senate does not have to go home. And the reflection for this not passing should not fall on the Senate; it should fall on the fact that the Senate came together and agreed on a solution that was not acceptable to the leadership in the House of Representatives. So if there is a problem with what we have done today, it is that when we compromised in the Senate, the House would not take it. And we did compromise. We compromised on spending. We compromised on time. We compromised on making sure the people who needed to have this extension were going to get it. I started out the debate earlier today on the basis of, where are we going in our country and what is our problem? Our problem is that we are drowning in debt, that our foreign policy is affected by it today, our ability to borrow is affected by it, and the manipulation of our ability to stabilize our own economy is affected by it. But, most importantly, what we do today has dramatic impact on those who know us. It is unfortunate that we did not work out a deal tonight. So we are going to have a week of exposure for people who actually need the help. It is actually going to be harder on the bureaucrats to handle this. But it did not happen. But I think the bigger question is, Should we just lay down and add more money to the debt because we could not get agreement across the Capitol? And so what we are going to do, when we come back, the day after we get back, we are going to have a cloture vote, which I think will be very difficult to achieve, but it may be achieved, because the same principle is going to lie here. With over $300 billion worth of waste, fraud, and duplication in the Federal budget every year, there are many of us who believe sincerely that it is time to stop spending money on lower priorities, time to stop calling things an emergency when we actually have the money in waste and fraud and duplication that we can use to pay for this. We needed to start somewhere. The unfortunate aspect that we did not accomplish that this evening means some people will suffer. But I want you to contrast that with what the suffering is going to be in 2019 within our country when we have double-digit interest rates because we can no longer maintain our borrowing; when we are, in the next 9 years, going to pay $5.6 trillion in interest on $9.8 trillion we are going to borrow. Of that $9.8 trillion, $5.6 trillion is going to be interest payments. What is coming is a tsunami to our country. So I feel a failure tonight because I could not accomplish both goals, both protecting our children and their future opportunity and taking care of those who need us right now. But the principle is still there. We have to, in fact, start making tough choices. If we learn to do that together, the country benefits. And the future of our children is at hand. But we can no longer make the decision that we steal from our children to take care of things we are responsible for today. And I understand the resistance to that, but the fact is, our future depends on us starting today. It does not matter if you are liberal in philosophy or conservative in philosophy, the economics will be borne home to everyone. It has to stop. And we have to start with us. I appreciate the congeniality of my friend from Illinois. Tough week for us all--probably more tough for us than you. I congratulate you on your victory on the yearlong battle with a difference in philosophy on how we fix health care. But I know that 20 years from now, the Senator from Illinois and I will suffer the same pain if our kids are diminished by our lack of action here. So I will say, let's let it not be so. Let's let it not be so. Let's start making hard choices. Let's start doing what is in the best long-term interests of our country. With that, I yield back a minute of our time to the Senator from Illinois.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, while the Senator from New York is here, I might go over 5 minutes to 6 minutes or 7 minutes. I wonder if he will object and modify his request.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, under this scenario, we will pass this bill and add to the debt. Because of that, I object.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and section 4(g)(3) of the Statutory Pay-as-you-go Act of 2010, I move to waive all applicable sections of those acts and applicable budget resolutions for purposes of my amendment. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. COBURN. They lost it under their health care.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, 140,000 of our troops have lost their second amendment rights as they go through the VA hospital system. They are not a danger to themselves or anyone else. This amendment is something that has passed this body unanimously, has come out of the committee unanimously, but still we have 140,000 of our long-serving veterans who have lost their rights to own a gun, hunt with their grandchildren, or to hunt birds in North Dakota. We have taken it away, not because of anything we did, because the bureaucracy did it. This amendment restores that. As they have gone through the VA system and the health care system, a bureaucrat has taken that right away. This is supported by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, AMVETS, Military Order of Purple Heart, NRA, Gun Owners of America, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the American Legion. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I wish to spend a short period of time, and hopefully it will not even be 5 minutes. What we have seen on the floor this afternoon is a motion to accomplish what the chairman of the Finance Committee wanted us to accomplish, without adding to the debt. We did not reach agreement on that motion. It was tabled. Then what we saw was a motion to proceed to take care of these issues by adding $9.2 billion to the debt. That is the real debate: are we going to pay for what we do? There is not an agreement to move forward and pay for it, and there is not an agreement to move forward and not pay for it. There is a process here called cloture, which means that by Wednesday, if all time is consumed, this problem would be solved and it would be dealt with. It is unfortunate that the potential is that we may go home and not deal with this issue, having us vote against tabling a motion to supply these needed priorities but also making sure we do not add to the debt as we do it. I look forward to the rest of the afternoon. I will not consume any additional time but will note that I do not care how we pay for it as long as it is legitimate, as long as we do not add to our kids' debt. I am hoping and willing to negotiate on any area of waste in the Federal Government that we can eliminate to pay for it. We cannot pay for part of it; we need to pay for all of it because we violate the principle of stealing from our kids. I advise the Senator from Alabama that we have unanimous consent and I cannot break off, and the Senator from North Dakota will be recognized after I yield the floor, so I cannot in good conscience yield to the Senator from Alabama.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes talking about where we are as a nation and what the future is for our children. We have at this point in time $12.6 trillion worth of debt. We now have equivalent debt for every man, woman, and child in this country of $42,000. For our children who are under 25 years of age, in the year 2030, each one of them will be responsible for $1,113,000 worth of debt and unfunded obligations. If we think about what that means, it means that for our children who are under 25 years of age, the ability for them to experience the opportunity that we as a nation have experienced in the past 230-plus years is going to be put at risk. We have before us some things that need to get done. They have to get done. We have two options: We can add another $9.2 billion to that $12.6 trillion we have today and bump up more than that $1,113,000, or we can relook into the mirror and say: Should we as Americans start making some of the hard choices that are going to be necessary for us to get out of the mess we have created for our children? When I travel around the country--and I travel in Oklahoma--Americans are concerned about our future right now. What are their concerns? What does it boil down to in their hearts? In their hearts, they have this gripping sensation that what they have experienced as an American may not be available for their children. It is a painful realization. Their hope for us is that we might change that outcome for their children. We have an opportunity to start that right now. By way of background, most of us know there is a tremendous amount of waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication in the Federal Government. Oftentimes, it is hard to weed out because every program, whether it is efficient or effective or not, has people who tout it. Our nature as politicians is to offend no one. That is our nature. How in the world do we accomplish what is going to be necessary in the next 5 to 10 years and solve this most difficult problem that we, the politicians, have created? America didn't create this. The States didn't create this. This problem was created in Washington. As has often been said, the easiest thing in the world is to spend somebody else's money. So the earnestness with which I come to the floor is to say we ought not be doing that, especially when we know there is waste and there is fraud and there is duplication and there is abuse in much of the Federal Government. I was reminded of the trouble the State of New Jersey is in. What the people of the State of New Jersey have said is: We recognize the problem, and we need to change things. So they elected a new Governor on the basis that he would make the tough decisions about priorities to change the future path--that he might change the path of the future for the citizens of New Jersey. He put forth a bold budget. As a matter of fact, one of the Senate Democratic leaders is helping him fix the problem. So we have a Republican Governor with a bold plan who has come forward to the people of the State of New Jersey. They elected him by a fairly large margin and said: For us to have this great future we all want for our kids, we are going to have to do some things that aren't necessarily pleasant, but they are necessary. It is kind of like when you have a child and they have to take a medicine, or the first time you take a child to the pediatrician's office for their first set of shots. That is an easy visit. The hard visit is the second visit because they have a memory of getting the injections the first time. So all of a sudden you have resistance, you have resistance, you have resistance to a medicine or a vaccine that actually fixes the problem, but there is a small amount of pain with it. So the Governor of New Jersey has started out on a bold, fresh course not because he is a Republican--it doesn't matter the label. The fact is, the people in New Jersey, in a bipartisan manner, recognized they had to make changes. So we have unemployment insurance. We have COBRA. We have flood insurance. We have the doc fix for 30 days. We have all of these things in front of us that we all agree we want to get done. Where lies our disagreement? It is very simple. One says we will declare it an emergency, not pay for it, and send the bill to our grandkids. The other says: Maybe it is time we quit doing that. What is the expectation of the American people in terms of how we should respond to that? A recent poll said 72 percent of the American people, not divided by party, pretty neutral between both parties, say the No. 1 issue in front of us as a nation is our debt. We had a warning from the rating agencies just 2 weeks ago that the United States of America is about to lose its AAA credit rating on its bonds. If you watched bond prices yesterday, what you saw was the yield shot up. The interest payment we are going to have to pay for when we borrow a huge amount of money is going to rise. One of the most significant things we could do to help ourselves is send a signal to the world that we are not going to wait until our bond rating crashes, that we are going to start taking the steps that are necessary for us to get back on a road to fiscal health. With all good faith, I think the majority leader and the minority leader tried to work out an agreement where we could perhaps accomplish this. We did not get there. Therefore, we find ourselves where we are going to have to have a debate, and we are going to have to discuss in front of the American people if we do these good things--and they are good--should we get rid of things that are a whole lot less good or should we take the immoral choice and not make any choice at all and pass it on to our children and grandchildren. That is the question of where the American people are today. The majority and the President have had a great victory on health care, with not partisan differences but policy differences with my side of the aisle. That is now the law of the land. Whether you believe CBO and how it is scored, the fact is, even if it saves that amount of money, that does not come close to solving any of our problems. We have had these multiple month-long extensions, of which none have been paid for, at about $9 billion to $10 billion a month. We find ourselves, because we want to go home or we want to go on a codel or we want to campaign or we want to fundraise, we want to make it easy and just pass it on down to the next generation. I cannot agree to that anymore, ever again; that, in fact, if we are going to spend money on things we know we ought to do, then the obligation ought to be on us to get rid of funds that are spent on things that are very much less important. That is the hardest thing a political body does, is that they end up isolating and irritating those who are well connected who have an interest in those lower priority items. It is hard for us because, as is our nature, we want to offend no one. But we are going to have to talk that out. I guess we are going to have to talk it out on the floor, and we are going to have to debate it. We are going to talk about what our true long-term future is if we do not change. I would rather us not be at this point, but when I wrestle with my own conscience and as I visualize my grandchildren and the grandchildren of everybody in this body, I think it would be immoral for us not to have this debate. I don't know what the outcome of the debate is going to be and the ultimate result. But I can tell you it is a legitimate debate we ought to be having. We ought to not just be having it on this extender package. We ought to be having it on any new spending, in any form, that the Congress does. One of the large segments of the Recovery Act that some of us disagreed with was the amount of money that got transferred to the States to help them through this fiscal crisis. When we look at that, when we did that, I believe--and this is my personal belief, and I am sure many of my colleagues would not agree with it--we transferred the worst habit of Washington to the States, saying there are not consequences to your spending more money than you have. Although all these States have balanced budget amendments--in my own State, even though we had to make some tough decisions because of the tremendous amount of money that came through the Recovery Act, we did not make the decisions we should. So now we are going to make them this year, and we are going to make very difficult choices about priorities in the State of Oklahoma, with a Democratic Governor and a Republican House and Senate. They are going to get the job done. They are going to accomplish it because the people of Oklahoma do not allow their government to run their government on the backs of their unborn children. We do not allow it. We forbid it. We see it as immoral. If you think about it, it is because what we are doing is stealing future opportunity from our children. People can say that is not right, but when you run the numbers--and everybody knows the numbers--it is right. CBO put out 2 weeks ago that we are going to have a $9.8 trillion deficit this decade, not counting last year. They also put out that $5.6 trillion of that $9.8 trillion is money that is going to be used to pay interest. We are now similar to the person who gets in trouble on their credit card. The analogy does not stop there because what happens to the person with the credit card debt? The interest rate rises because they are not paying, when they only pay the minimum. We have now gotten to the point where the vast majority of our debt accumulation in the next 9 years is going to be associated with interest payments rather than defending the country, rather than refilling Social Security, the money we have stolen out of there, rather than picking up the deficit that is in Medicare. We are going to spend that money to pay for interest. It is a double whammy. It is money we are paying that is not helping anybody. It is not helping anybody. I was nominated to be on the Commission President Obama issued by Executive order that has six of our Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate and six of us on the Republican side and six appointed by the President. I have had multiple conversations with many of those people already. Quite frankly, they are worried and scared for our country based on the numbers we are seeing. How is it we would now start down a road ignoring the reality of what is in front of us? Let me describe what is in front of us. I wish to talk about it from an international standpoint first, and then I wish to talk about it from a domestic economy standpoint. We had the Chinese Army say 6 weeks ago to the Chinese Government: Dump a bunch of American bonds; hurt them. You have the Chinese Government that undervalues its currency, stealing our jobs, and we are borrowing money from them. They now have an impact on our foreign policy. All we have to do is talk about Iran. The sanctions we want to place on Iran that are necessary to be placed on Iran to contain the threat of them developing nuclear weapons are not available to us. The reason they are not available to us is because China and Russia have leverage over our debt. We do not have a clear, clean, crisp foreign policy because we have this little IOU of $900 billion to China and $700 billion to Russia that we are worried might influence their handling of that and the consequences of it. When we look at history and we look at all the republics that have ever been, the one key thing in common that happens to them that causes them to fail is what? Is that every one of them got in trouble on a fiscal basis before they withered on an international basis or on a dominance basis. Every one of them withered. They, in fact, fell because they could not support their armies, they could not support the networks they put out and developed as a governing body. The question is, Will that happen to us? There is a potential for that to happen to us. I will tell you, yes, we are in a position now where if we do not change gears and start making priorities on both programs and benefits, drawn in the light of the priorities of our present financial situation, and start making selections about what is most important versus what is least important, we are going to be similar to the Athenian Empire. The real thing that is going on outside Washington and throughtout America is the fear of what is happening to us. They sense it. They worry about it. We have exaggerated that by at times not paying attention to that fear and that worry. But the consequence of not starting at a point in time in which we are going to make a difference and start doing what we were elected to do, which is to select priorities and eliminate nonfunctioning, poorly functioning duplication and fraud from the Federal Government--I said I was going to talk about the other side. What does the domestic side look like for us as we go out, having $9.8 trillion worth of more borrowing in the next 9 years, with $5.6 trillion of that in interest payments? What does that do to our domestic economy? What is the impact? The impact is, we will see changes in our standard of living because of it. They are not positive changes. If we were to stop right now and not borrow another penny and try to manage the debt we have today, we would still see a marked increase in inflation in our country--not immediately, but all you have to do is watch the bond market to see what is going to happen and you watch the yield curve. When you see 10 years go from last year this time 2.4 percent to 3.9 percent, which is a greater than 50 percent rise in yield as we continue to flood $300 billion this week in borrowing from the Fed, what does that mean for the average American? What that means for the average American is inflation. What that means to that $5.8 trillion in terms of interest payments is that it is a larger proportion because as the interest costs rise, the proportion of interest payments versus total debt rises. We now spend in the United States--last year, per household--$38,980 in Federal programs per household. The median family income in America is $50,000, and the Federal Government is responsible for 80 percent of that as a ratio in terms of money we spend. We only collected--and this is not last year but the year before data--$18,000 per household. So what do the numbers say? The numbers said that last year, 43 cents out of every dollar that the government spent we borrowed. It is going to be about 48 cents or 47 cents, we don't know for sure, this year. But I would note that we had the highest monthly deficit in our history in the month of February, and we need to send a signal to the international financial market that we are aware---- Mr. REID addressed the chair.

Mr. COBURN. I would be glad to yield for a question.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. COBURN. I assure my colleagues that----

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. What it is going to do is exacerbate the cost shifting going on with Medicare and Medicaid right now, which means insurance rates for everybody else in the country are going to go up.

Mr. COBURN. And people who are not necessarily getting a subsidy.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, this amendment saves $6.5 billion over the next 10 years for what it does on fraudulent Medicaid prescriptions-- $6.5 billion--$650 million a year on fraudulent prescriptions. It also creates a prohibition so that erectile dysfunction drugs are not paid for by the American taxpayers to convicted rapists, those convicted of sexual assault, and pedophiles in this country. You can say a lot of things about a lot of amendments. This is not a game amendment; it actually saves money. All the States are struggling with Medicaid. This is a way to spread $650 million a year to the States. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, do I have time remaining?

Mr. COBURN. Yes, they will pay the fee. They will pay the tax and say it is easier. Consequently, the young people in our country, because we do not have a big enough payment under the ``individual mandate,'' are going to say it is smarter for me to save my money, pay the fine, and not get insurance because when I get sick, I can get it. You are going to get what is called adverse selection, which is even going to drive the rates up further. Anybody 40 or older, watch out, your health insurance rates are getting ready to bloom.

Mr. COBURN. I would make the following point: The vast majority of Americans do not want their taxpayer dollars paying for this kind of drug for those kind of people.

Mr. COBURN. Reserving the right to object.

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