John Cornyn

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: The Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. Johnson), the Senator from Utah (Mr. Lee), the Senator from Arizona (Mr. McCain), the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski), the Senator from Alabama (Mr. Sessions), and the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Vitter).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Alexander), the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Flake), the Senator from Nevada (Mr. Heller), the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Inhofe), and the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Vitter). Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Alexander) would have voted ``nay.''

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Flake).

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Flake), the Senator from Nevada (Mr. Heller), and the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Inhofe).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Flake).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Flake).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, back in October 2012, two Iran experts at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies wrote a sobering article about the Iranian nuclear program. They concluded that, despite years of international and unilateral sanctions, Iran's economy had been allowed to remain healthy enough to leave a vanishingly short period of time for sanctions to do the work that might possibly head off military action. Seven months have passed since that article was written, and over that period of time the following things have happened: The Iranians have upgraded their biggest uranium enrichment plant. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has found credible evidence that Tehran has secretly been pursuing nuclear weapons technology. The United States renewed sanction waivers for countries that import substantial amounts of Iranian oil. President Obama installed a harsh critic of Iran sanctions as his Secretary of Defense. The Iranians have continued to prop up Syria and its dictator Bashar Asad and transport dangerous weapons to Hezbollah as well. In short, the Iranians are feeling emboldened, America's credibility is being tested, and time is running out. For these reasons, I am a proud cosponsor of S. Res. 65, which would send a clear message we are determined not just to contain Iran but to prevent the Iranians from acquiring a nuclear weapon. It would also send a clear message the United States will stand with Israel if our democratic ally is forced to take military action in legitimate self-defense. I would also add that I have joined my colleague from Illinois Senator Kirk in introducing a separate bill, the Iran Export Embargo Act, which would further expand U.S. sanctions by prohibiting companies from doing business with any entity that is owned or controlled by the Government of Iran. More specifically, our bill would prohibit all export-related transactions conducted on behalf of Iranian Government entities, and it would block their assets. One final point. The Iranians are not just waiting to see how we beef up sanctions, they are also waiting to see how we respond to Syria's apparent use of poison gas. After all, President Obama famously warned the Asad regime that deploying chemical weapons would be tantamount to crossing a red line. Yet the White House is walking back its red line comments and issuing retroactive qualifiers. We can be sure the mullahs are taking notes, and we can be sure the outcome of the Syrian civil war will help determine the outcome of the Iranian nuclear crisis. I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, this last weekend White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer visited all five Sunday morning talk shows. What he tried to do there was to defend the Obama administration's handling of the various scandals we are all too familiar with. Unfortunately for the President, I think he only made things worse. For example, he said President Obama's whereabouts on the night of the Benghazi terrorist attack were irrelevant. That is a strange use of the word. Where the President is when a terrorist attack kills four American citizens in Libya, to call that irrelevant strikes me as an odd choice of words. He was also asked whether it is illegal for the IRS to target individuals and organizations for political reasons. Again, he said, ``It is irrelevant.'' Strange choice of words. In other words, if the American people were hoping that this White House would finally provide straight answers to basic questions, they were once again disappointed. Let's review the facts starting with Benghazi, as the Senator from Nebraska was just talking about. Eight months, of course, have passed since four brave Americans were killed by terrorists linked to al-Qaida. Eight months have passed since the Obama administration blamed the attack on a spontaneous demonstration incited by some amateur YouTube video. Is it irrelevant that we don't know where the President of the United States was on the night of the attack or what he did or did not do to come to the aid of these four brave Americans who were at risk of losing their lives and did, in fact, lose their lives? Is it irrelevant that members of the Obama administration deliberately misled, time and time again, the American people about this act of terrorism? Is it irrelevant that Ambassador Susan Rice was blaming the massacre on a YouTube video the very same day Libya's President was calling it a preplanned terrorist attack? Is it irrelevant that the former deputy to the late Ambassador Chris Stevens has said that everybody at the U.S. Embassy believed from the start that it was a terrorist attack? Finally, is it irrelevant that this former deputy, Gregory Hicks, was punished by the State Department for cooperating with congressional investigators so the truth could get out? That is a strange choice of words--``irrelevant.'' I don't think the American people believe that is irrelevant--any of these facts. In fact, I think what we can only conclude is that the culture the White House, unfortunately, has created is one where coverups, misdirection, prevarication and dissembling are OK, not being straight with the American people. No wonder the American people doubt their leadership in Washington and particularly in the White House if the White House is going to create a culture in which these sorts of coverups are OK or, in the words of Dan Pfeiffer, simply irrelevant. When the American people can't trust the White House to be honest with them--and refuses to accept responsibility for their mistakes--it is not irrelevant. As for the IRS scandal, some people have tried to dismiss the targeting of various conservative groups as a rogue operation managed by a few renegade staffers in the Cincinnati office. Yet the more we learn about this scandal, the bigger it seems. Anybody who has been around a big bureaucracy--and certainly the IRS qualifies as a big bureaucracy--knows that when you ask the bureaucrats something, the easiest answer is no because they don't get in trouble for saying no. They may not be very helpful or responsive, but they don't get in trouble. What strikes me as so bizarre about this idea that there are a number of free agents in Cincinnati who decided to cook this up on their own is it really goes against the grain of everything we know about bureaucracies. Why in the world would they take the initiative to target political speech unless they thought they either had the explicit or the implicit approval of their higher-ups? It just doesn't make any sense otherwise. Last week one Cincinnati IRS employee told the Washington Post--and I think this has the ring of truth--that ``everything comes from the top. We don't have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.'' Now, that sounds like the bureaucracy that I know and am familiar with. So I would like to ask the White House if it is irrelevant that America's tax collection agency was turned into a political attack machine, deciding that they were the ones who could police political speech and activity protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution? Is it irrelevant that an agency with the power to destroy people's lives adopted the tactics of a dictator? Is it irrelevant that senior IRS officials learned about these abuses at least 2 years ago and lied to Congress and the American people when we asked them about them? When I got reports from the King Street Patriots and True the Vote in Houston, TX, and the Waco and San Antonio tea parties in 2011 and 2012 about some of the tactics they were being exposed to, I and other Members of the Senate wrote to the Commissioner of the IRS Mr. Shulman, and Mr. Miller, the Acting Commissioner, and they failed to disclose what we now know is the truth. Senator Hatch, the distinguished ranking member of the Finance Committee, yesterday told Mr. Miller that was a lie by omission at the very least. Certainly it was not telling the whole truth to the Members of Congress, whose responsibility is to provide oversight to the American people of the IRS and of the Federal Government. I don't think it is irrelevant when IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman categorically denied these abuses in sworn testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee in March of 2012. Furthermore, I don't think it is irrelevant that IRS officials may have committed criminal offenses. I realize that is a serious statement and charge to make, but we know this morning that the director of the Internal Revenue Service division overseeing nonprofit organizations has taken the Fifth Amendment when asked for sworn testimony by a congressional oversight committee. To refresh everybody's memory, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution means that you cannot be compelled to incriminate yourself and possibly expose yourself by virtue of your own testimony to a criminal prosecution. That is what taking the Fifth Amendment is. While she is within her rights to take the Fifth Amendment, if she has a credible fear of prosecution for violating the criminal laws, I believe this elevates this scandal to a new level. Finally, I would suggest to our friends at the White House that it is not irrelevant that a Texas businesswoman named Catherine Engelbrecht was targeted not only by the IRS but by the FBI, the ATF, and OSHA after she founded a pair of organizations in Houston, TX, known as the King Street Patriots and True the Vote. I think most Americans would agree that all of this information is quite relevant, quite reprehensible, and something that Congress ought to, on a bipartisan basis, investigate. I congratulate the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, a Democrat--not a member of my political party--and Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, for the bipartisan way they have begun the investigation into this IRS scandal. What we all recognize, Republicans and Democrats alike, is that this is a threat to the public's trust in government institutions and that this culture of intimidation is not something we can stand for, using the extraordinary power of the Federal Government to target American citizens for exercising their constitutional rights. Indeed, if President Obama wants to know why the American people's trust in the Federal Government has plummeted to an alltime low, all he has to do is look at these two scandals and consider how the administration is handling them. When government officials consistently mislead, stonewall, and abuse their power, people take notice, they don't forget, and the day of reckoning will surely come. Madam President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) and the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Inhofe). Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Inhofe) would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Inhofe), and the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski). Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Inhofe) would have voted ``nay.''

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Inhofe), and the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Vitter).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Alexander), the Senator from North Dakota (Mr. Hoeven), the Senator from Kentucky (Mr. Paul), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Scott), the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Vitter), and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Wicker). Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Alexander) would have voted ``yea'' and the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Scott) would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, we have been informed that the Secretary of Health and Human Services has become a private fundraiser to raise funds from the very industry she regulates in order to implement ObamaCare. This raises all sorts of troubling concerns. There is an appearance of impropriety and a conflict of interest. There is an appearance that there is basically a shakedown going on--extracting money from companies she regulates in order to implement the President's health care law. This is certainly unethical--representing a conflict of interest--and possibly illegal. However, it has provided us a useful reminder about ObamaCare: that it represents one of the worst examples of crony capitalism that exist today. Unfortunately, that is true of a number of the administration's policies, but let me just explain what I mean. When the private enterprise and the government become so intertwined as to become mutually dependent, usually what that means is the people who can hire the most lobbyists, the best lawyers, and others, compete unfairly for government benefits. The concern is that since Secretary Sebelius is going to be the one who doles out grants and other benefits under ObamaCare, there is the all-too-human temptation to favor those who have gotten you out of a crack and done you a favor. Let's review how ObamaCare is supposed to work in the first place. The Federal Government is supposed to come up with its own definition of health insurance. What we own right now may not be good enough for the government and its standard for health insurance. It is demanding that private businesses offer their employees this Washington-approved insurance or they get penalized. It is also demanding that some Americans--many Americans--pay for coverage they don't want, don't need, and may not be able to afford. The best example of that is young adults--sometimes called the young and invincible--who may not think they need comprehensive health care insurance. They may think, well, perhaps I need more of a catastrophic policy or something else that will take care of me if things really turn bad. As a result of ObamaCare, these young people will be forced to buy coverage they don't need. Many of them don't want it and can't afford it. They will literally see their insurance premiums skyrocket because of a phenomenon known as age-banding. Age-banding is where older Americans cannot be charged more than three times what younger people can be charged. We all know that as we age, we utilize more health care services. Here again, younger Americans are being asked to subsidize their elders in ObamaCare. One way to look at it is the Obama administration has decided that the purchase of an expensive government-approved product sold by certain private companies is a condition of American citizenship. For those who are American citizens and live here, they have to buy it. If they don't, they pay the penalty. That is one example of crony capitalism. Private companies are turning into de facto public utilities, and Americans are forced to buy their products but only those products approved by the regulators here in Washington. It is the ultimate marriage of big business and big government, and it is bad for the American taxpayer. Now Secretary Sebelius has gone a step further. She is using her leverage and power as a regulator over private companies to force them to fund ObamaCare. We all see what is going on. Secretary Sebelius is making the health care industry an offer they cannot refuse. After all, her agency regulates those companies and has enormous influence over their business operations. Indeed, ObamaCare has expanded Health and Human Services' regulatory power so much, we could say it essentially amounts to a government takeover of one-sixth of the national economy. Anytime there is a dramatic increase in Federal regulation of bureaucratic authority, there will also be a dramatic increase in crony capitalism. Health and Human Services granted a series of waivers from ObamaCare's annual limit requirements, which fostered the impression that certain companies, labor unions, and other institutions were getting preferential treatment. Why not treat all Americans the same rather than have the government pick winners and losers, with the temptation to pick their friends and political supporters and give them special favors? We saw this also in the government-run bailout of the Chrysler Corporation when the company's secured bondholders received less for their loans than the United Auto Workers pension fund. For that matter, we also saw it in the notorious Solyndra project. President Obama's entire green agenda energy policy is based on the idea that the Federal Government should be playing venture capitalist with taxpayer dollars. We all know that when Solyndra went bankrupt, the administration favored private lenders over taxpayers, which was a violation of the law. But there are many other private companies that have received taxpayer funding for political or ideological reasons, and that is why we say that crony capitalism undermines public trust in government because not everybody is treated the same. The government--those in power--picks winners and losers, political favorites, friends, and family. I have one final point. We learned about the Sebelius shakedown on the same day we learned that the IRS has been deliberately targeting and harassing some organizations based on their political views. As we all know, the IRS has a very important and key role in administering some of the biggest parts of ObamaCare and thus will be collecting massive amounts of new information about individual Americans. That was always a bad idea, but now, after we have learned about the abuses at the IRS, it sounds even more dangerous than ever. After what we have learned so far, how can Americans feel confident that the IRS won't abuse these new powers after having abused its current powers? Why should the American people believe what they have been told when they have been lied to time and time again about the IRS's activities? Back in March 2012, the former IRS Commissioner categorically denied that his agency was targeting certain political organizations. Now we know that he was not only wrong, we also know they intentionally lied. We also know that senior IRS officials--many who still have their jobs--learned of these abuses 2 years ago and never corrected the record. In short, if we ever needed another reason to get rid of ObamaCare and replace it with market-driven, patient-centered reform, the IRS has provided us with one. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Blunt), the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), and the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski) and the Senator from Idaho (Mr. Risch).

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski).

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski).

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, like millions of Americans, the events of the last few days and the last few months have caused me to reflect on the nature of our Federal Government and our special system of federalism which delegates to the Federal Government certain powers but reserves to the States and the people those remaining powers. That is roughly what the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says. I have also reflected a little bit on what some wise people have said over our history, and even before America was founded, about the nature of power, government power: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Our Founders pointed out in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere that the concentration of power in the hands of the few is the very definition of tyranny. We have learned from hard experience over the course of our Nation's history that when government thinks it knows best, particularly here in Washington, in a country as big and diverse as ours, the natural tendency then in Washington is to try to suppress the voices of those who see things differently, those who want to exercise their constitutional rights, particularly to free speech, freedom of association, and, yes, even freedom of the press. It is not true to say we have not been warned about the dangers of concentration of power in the Federal Government, and big government, and the human frailties that follow. We have been warned time and time and time again. Now we have been reminded once again of the wisdom of our Founders and the wisdom of the structure of the U.S. Constitution. Over the last week a series of events has highlighted the administration's massive credibility gap. First, we learned more details about the coordinated attempt to misrepresent the September 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. You may recall immediately after that attack the President was at a press conference, and he said later: Well, I said it was a terrorist attack then. That was reviewed by the Fact Checker in the Washington Post--hardly an unsympathetic newspaper editorially to the administration's point of view--and the Fact Checker gave the President of the United States four Pinocchios. Some ask why four Pinocchios? I think the true answer is because they never give five Pinocchios--maybe they do--but you get the point. Of course we cannot escape the fact and we should not ignore the fact that this attack took four American lives. Then we learned this last week that a senior IRS official had acknowledged that her agency deliberately targeted certain political speech and activity for harassment, using the instruments of power given to the Internal Revenue Service. Perhaps the most awesome, pervasive, and potentially intrusive power the Federal Government has is in the hands of that agency. Interestingly, the White House counsel said she learned about it in April. The President said he did not learn about it until later. An investigation needs to be undertaken, and I am happy Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking member of the Finance Committee, have committed themselves to doing an investigation of the IRS and how this could possibly happen. On top of all that, the top administrator of Health and Human Services, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, has been soliciting funds from the very industries she regulates to help implement ObamaCare. It does not take a rocket scientist to imagine the potential for coercion by the government of these private sector industries because of their fear of retribution if they do not contribute to this effort--a huge conflict of interest, and perhaps illegal. We need to get to the bottom of that as well. So whether the issue is terrorist attacks in Libya, political and partisan abuses by the IRS, or efforts by the Department of Health and Human Services to shake down the health insurance industry they regulate, it appears the birds the Founders warned us about have come home to roost. The concentration of government power invariably leads to abuse of that power, and it is the same old story of human frailties over and over. It is no respecter of political parties; it has happened to both political parties. We should have been more careful, and we should have listened. We should not have persistently engaged in this power grab in Washington, DC, at the expense of individual liberty on the part of the American people. What is the price to be paid by these scandals? The first price is a lack of credibility and public confidence in the most basic institutions that make up this government. The other damage is to the credibility of folks at the highest level of the administration. After all, if the administration is willing to prevaricate, mislead, and dissemble about an al-Qaida-linked attack in Benghazi that cost the lives of four Americans, what else are they willing to prevaricate, mislead, and dissemble about? Can the public trust this administration and its government to provide accurate information about the war on terror or anything else? Similarly, if IRS officials knew their agency was targeting certain political activity and failed then to hold anyone accountable, how can the American people ever trust the Internal Revenue Service or the Federal Government to be neutral and law abiding? I heard the junior Senator from Virginia, Senator Kaine, on the radio as I came in this morning. I thought he asked a pretty good question. He said: What does it take to get fired in this town? What does it take to get fired in this administration for coverups and for misleading the American people? If Secretary Sebelius is willing to strong-arm the very industry she regulates to fund the implementation of ObamaCare, can the American people trust her agency to be objective, evenhanded, and fair-minded as a regulator? All this boils down to a very sad statistic that demonstrates that the public's confidence in the Federal Government--and particularly in Congress--is at an all-time low. This is not the end of the story, and it should not be the end of the story. That ought to be the beginning of a bipartisan effort to get to the bottom of these abuses and also to restore ourselves to the constitutional framework our Founding Fathers envisioned when this great experiment of democracy was created more than 200 years ago. It wasn't a national government that dictated to the rest of the country how we should run our lives and what choices we should make; it was a Federal system of separated powers with checks and balances, with authority given to the Federal Government to do things that individuals and the States could not do by themselves, such as national defense. We have gotten far afield from the Framers' vision of how our country should operate or from the constitutional system they created and which we celebrate. Now, more than ever, Washington needs credibility. If we don't have the public's trust, how in the world will we gain their confidence that we are going to address the many challenges our country faces? I am not pessimistic about our future, I am optimistic about our future, but it will take a change of attitude. We will need a change of behavior so we can, in some sense, return to the Founders' philosophy on the framework and the structure in which our government operates. The Federal Government has said for too long: We know best; if you don't like it, it is because we have not given you enough information to convince you to like it. We take policies that are unpopular and merely shove them down the throat of the American people and think we are doing our job. We know we have huge challenges which call on us to work together on a bipartisan basis to regain the public's confidence. I know we can do it. It is a matter of whether we have the political courage and the will to do it. Here are some of those challenges: The longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression. We have the largest percentage of the American workforce that simply has given up and quit looking for jobs because the economy is so weak. The second challenge is a woefully unpopular health care law that even some of the architects of that law now say they see a train wreck occurring in its implementation. We know our world continues to be dangerous, as Benghazi reminds us, and as we see from murderers, such as Bashar al-Asad in Syria, and people who threaten the innocent. There are people who have chemical weapons. There are people who are fighting for their very lives in places like Syria. Iran is on the pathway to develop a nuclear weapon which will completely disrupt the balance of power in the Middle East and create an arms race, while other countries seek their own nuclear weapons. Let's not forget Iran was the primary state sponsor of international terrorism with its support for Hezbollah, among others. We have seen in North Africa and elsewhere the proliferation of al-Qaida affiliates and allies. We also need to fix our broken immigration system. None of these individually are easy things to do. All of them are hard, but they are not impossible if we will try to work hard to regain the public's credibility. We simply need to do our work and respect the wisdom of the ages when it comes to concentration of power and its impact on individual liberty. We have to be aware of temptations. When power is absolute, we need to see that power is corrupt and be aware of the abuse of that power when it comes to dealing with the American people. Unfortunately, so far, the Obama administration has valued its agenda more than its credibility. Without regaining credibility, we will never regain the public's trust, and without that trust it will be much harder to solve America's biggest problems. That is the biggest single challenge to President Obama's second-term agenda and to our ability as Americans to show that this 200-plus-year experiment in self-government actually works. I yield the floor.