John Cornyn

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio), and the Senator from Alabama (Mr. Shelby).

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz) and the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio).

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, yesterday the Senate unanimously voted to advance consideration of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, commonly known as CARA, and that is because this legislation gets at a big problem. The abuse of heroin and prescription painkillers is devastating families and communities across the country, including Texas. The truth is, the problem is getting worse, not better. Deaths due to heroin and prescription drug overdoses have even surpassed car accidents as the No. 1 cause of injury-related deaths nationwide. It is time for Congress to do something significant to address this disturbing trend. This bill is a good example of how Republicans and Democrats, working on a bipartisan basis, can zero in on a problem that is harming our Nation and work together to address it. I am proud to cosponsor this legislation, and I look forward to continuing to work on this bill and to voting on amendments that will actually improve it. Speaking of amendments, while this bill touches on how to battle drug addiction in this country, we need to do more to cut these drugs off at the source and keep them from getting into our country in the first place. The Senate Armed Services Committee recently heard about the supply side of this equation--this primarily goes to the heroin coming from Mexico--when they heard testimony from the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. In his testimony, Director Clapper talked about how Mexico has ramped up the production of heroin in response to this growing demand in the United States. I know the Presiding Officer is also from a border State and has had frequent conversations with our Mexican counterparts. When we complain about the supply, they usually turn it on me and say: Well, what about the demand in the United States? The truth is, we have to get at both components--both the supply and demand. In 2014, drug cartels smuggled more than a quarter of a million pounds of heroin across our borders. This was done by the same transnational criminal organizations that traffic human beings for sex or forced labor and who man the illegal immigration pipelines into our country. This is no longer a mom-and-pop operation. These are major criminal networks and organizations that will do anything for money and, of course, are happy to make money from the heroin that comes across our border. If we are going to make significant strides in the fight against addiction and drug abuse, we need to take a critical look at where the drugs are coming from and consider the strategies we can employ to keep them from even coming onto our soil. Unfortunately, even while the production and demand of these illegal drugs have been growing, we have not done enough to combat it. Earlier I mentioned that the U.S. Southern Command--that is the combatant command for the U.S. military that is south of Mexico and goes into Central and South America--has been given zero Navy ships to conduct counter-trafficking missions, and that is because our Navy fleet is simply too small and these resources have been diverted elsewhere to counter the growing threats around the world. It is irresponsible to ignore the transnational criminal threats in our own backyard. We need a strategy to interdict drug shipments and cut them off before they reach our shores, so I have submitted several amendments that would help focus our resources to interdict these shipments and to help stem the growing tide of illicit drugs entering the U.S. market. One amendment would simply require the Defense Department, when it allocates funding to the States for the National Guard Counterdrug Program, to prioritize drug interdiction. More effectively using the National Guard's military capabilities to help interdict drug flows would provide a needed boost to law enforcement and counternarcotics efforts, especially on our southern border. Too often, law enforcement agencies have been left with scant resources to handle this growing problem, so this amendment would allow the National Guard to play a bigger role in drug interdiction. Another amendment I have submitted would require the President to create a plan--a strategy, really--to increase interdiction of illegal drugs that enter across the southwest border. It would require the interdiction goal of 90 percent of those drugs, which would be a great leap forward from the current levels. Last year, General Kelly, then the commander of Southern Command, estimated that only 15 to 20 percent of drugs bound for the United States were interdicted, just 15 percent to 20 percent. General Kelly said that, due to a lack of resources in the Southern Command, basically many times they were relegated to being observers as illegal drugs would transit across their area of operation. Given our shortfall here, it is pretty amazing that a comprehensive plan across all relevant agencies doesn't already exist. It is shocking really. This amendment would make sure that one is created to boost the amount of drugs that we successfully interdict. It would also require the President to submit this plan to Congress so we can have a conversation between the executive branch and the legislative branch and so the American people could review it, could hold us accountable, and to make sure we are making progress on this front. Finally, I have submitted an amendment to strengthen the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program. This would help Federal, State, and local law enforcement officials use task force funding to implement a multidisciplinary heroin response strategy. This has been tested in several high-intensity drug trafficking areas with great success. This amendment would help implement this strategy nationwide, giving law enforcement additional tools to combat the growing threat of heroin from both the supply and demand side. Mr. President, I am glad we are making some progress on this legislation. I am optimistic that we will be able to complete it this week in a bipartisan fashion, which is the only way you get these done around here. We desperately need to target the opioid epidemic happening across the Nation, and we also need to cut off as much of the supply of the cheap heroin as we can. When people can't get access to prescription drugs, too often they turn to cheap heroin, and that is why the supply issue is so important. But we need both pieces in order to make real progress and restore our communities currently plagued by addiction and drug abuse. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, as we have heard from the Senator from West Virginia, this week the Senate will begin consideration of a bipartisan bill that targets an epidemic that is raging across the country, but apparently it is especially hard-hitting in places such as West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the like. But this abuse of prescription painkillers and heroin is not just isolated to those areas, even though the leaders of this particular legislation come from places such as Minnesota, Rhode Island, Ohio, and New Hampshire. Sadly, Texas has been no exception. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in Texas opioid-related drug deaths have increased by 30 percent since 2002. Houston is widely recognized by the DEA and law enforcement officials as a key hub for the trafficking of illicit prescription drugs. In South Texas, right next to the U.S.-Mexico border, the transnational criminal organizations are exploiting our porous border to import increasingly large amounts of hard narcotics like heroin, which ultimately wreaks havoc in towns and cities across America. In 2014 alone, drug cartels successfully smuggled more than 250,000 pounds of heroin across our borders and into the United States at a street value of approximately $25 billion. These are the same criminals who traffic in human beings, including young girls and boys. These are the same people who traffic in illegal immigrants. These are the same people who traffic in illegal drugs. Indeed, this has become such big business and the network so large that these transnational criminal organizations are basically in on everything and anything that will make them money, including transporting these terrible drugs like heroin across the border. As we all know and have heard, this epidemic destroys families, it increases the crime rate, and it robs millions of Americans of their future. As I mentioned a moment ago, thousands are dying every year. That is why the bill we are voting on this afternoon, called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, is so important. It will help give families and law enforcement additional resources to beat drug addiction through proven treatment programs. I am proud to cosponsor the legislation. The reason we have been able to move this bill forward so far--and it passed unanimously out of the Senate Judiciary Committee 2 weeks ago-- is because it reflects bipartisan input as well as bipartisan concern with this epidemic. As I mentioned earlier, I wish to particularly recognize the junior Senators from Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Ohio--Senators Whitehouse, Portman, and Ayotte--for their laserlike focus on this legislation and making sure that it is at the top of our list of things we need to do this legislative session. By highlighting how bad the problem is in our country and providing legislation to address it, they are helping us attack this epidemic head-on. I must say that while so far this legislation has moved forward on a strong bipartisan basis, there are some signals on the horizon that indicate some potential trouble. At a press conference after the Judiciary Committee unanimously passed the bill, several of our friends on the other side of the aisle were explicit. They said that if the Senate did not add hundreds of millions of dollars in duplicative funding, they might withhold their support. This legislation is an authorization bill, and it does not appropriate funds. Our friends across the aisle know that if an appropriation is added to this legislation, particularly if it is duplicative, it causes a number of problems. First of all, a spending bill can't originate here in the Senate. So it raises a so-called blue- slip problem. But perhaps just as importantly, this is not an orderly process by which we determine what is actually needed and to make sure that we are appropriating money in a fiscally responsible sort of way. I don't have to remind the Acting President pro tempore or anybody else who is listening that we have a $19 trillion debt in our country, and recklessly throwing money at a problem rather than carefully targeting it in a fiscally responsible way is simply irresponsible. It seems to be part of the message: Give us what we want or we might hijack a bipartisan bill that would literally save lives. I hope I am wrong, and I hope the signals on the horizon don't prove to ultimately be true. But it does seem like this is part of a new political strategy. Earlier this month, we know that our Democrat colleagues blocked a bipartisan Energy bill from moving forward on an unrelated issue-- something on which Senator Murkowski has shown the patience of Job, trying to work through this process so we can get back on the Energy bill rather than having it hijacked by an extraneous subject that could well and should well be handled in a different way, certainly separately. This is not the way the Senate gets anything accomplished. As I have said before, playing political games with important issues like fighting drug addiction is what lost our friends the majority in 2014. I urge the Democratic leadership to listen to those in their own caucus who have worked alongside Republicans in a responsible fashion to draft and put forward this bill that is so clearly needed in this country. This afternoon I hope we will move forward on the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. I hope we will consider it and consider amendments that are being offered in good faith on both sides to try to improve the legislation. But what we should not do is allow anyone to hijack this important legislation for partisan purposes. I think we should restrain ourselves from any impulse to do so. It happened, unfortunately, on the bipartisan Energy bill. It has been threatened on this legislation. But my hope is that cooler heads will prevail. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Alexander), the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Blunt), the Senator from Arkansas (Mr. Boozman), the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio), the Senator from Alabama (Mr. Shelby), the Senator from Alaska (Mr. Sullivan), the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey), and the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Vitter). Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Alexander) would have voted ``yea'', the Senator from Alaska (Mr. Sullivan) would have voted ``yea'', and the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey) would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, notwithstanding our occasional dustups and kerfuffles and disagreements that we have in the Senate--and that is not a bad thing--the Senate is supposed to be a place where differences of opinion and different points of view are debated, voted on, and played out here on the floor of the Senate in an attempt to achieve consensus on a bipartisan basis and make legislative progress for the American people. I have to say that since 2015, under new leadership, this Chamber has been marked by a spirit of hard work, bipartisanship, and accomplishment. I am sure we have all been frustrated by the things we cannot accomplish because, frankly, there is no consensus, but that shouldn't deter us from working together where we can to make progress for the American people. So I am frankly proud of what the Senate has done, again on a bipartisan basis. I think one of the greatest frustrations under the previous leadership was that even if you were a Member of the majority party, you could not get amendments on legislation. You could not get votes on amendments. So you were basically shut out of the process, not just if you were in the minority but including when you were in the majority. That is a little hard to explain to your constituents back home. Indeed, I think that is one reason we saw some races for the Senate turn around the way they did in 2014. The truth is that under new leadership we have proved we can work together on the issues that matter most to the people of our country. That is not to say there will not be some partisan differences. There is a reason people choose to be Republicans or Democrats. But my experience has been that most of the time we agree on the goal, just not on the means to achieve the goal. While bipartisanship is important, leadership really does matter, and I think we have seen what a difference it can make in the 114th Congress--since the last election in 2014. I will mention just a couple of examples. One is the first major overhaul to education reform since No Child Left Behind. We also passed a major long-term Transportation bill. I know it seems like a small thing in isolation, but it really does make a difference to fast-growing States such as mine--Texas--to be able to plan ahead when it comes to maintaining and operating our transportation infrastructure. Frankly, it saves taxpayer money when you can plan on the long haul rather than in a series of starts and stops. A subject that is near and dear to my heart is the first major help we have been able to provide to victims of human trafficking in 25 years. Because of a resource deficit at the local level, a lot of big- hearted people who wanted to help simply didn't have the resources to do it--simple things such as rescuing people who are victims of human trafficking and providing them a safe place to stay. Now, as a result of the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, we are going to be able to provide through a victim's compensation fund up to $60 million a year to help provide grants for housing, for rescue, and for victims of human trafficking. It is true there are some differences between the political parties, and that shouldn't be a matter for panic. We shouldn't say: Well, I guess we can't do anything since we can't do this one thing. It is certainly true with respect to the recent passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. It is clear that we have reached a major point of disagreement or I guess you could look at it this way: We actually are agreeing with the position that Vice President Biden took when he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. We are now agreeing with the position that was taken by then-Senate Democratic leader Reid, and we are agreeing with the position that was taken in 2007 by Senator Chuck Schumer, a Member of the senior Senate leadership of the Democratic Party. I mentioned these yesterday. I will just go over them really quickly again. Surely, our Democratic friends don't think that Republicans, when we are in the majority, ought to be constrained by different rules than apply to them. That does not make any sense at all. How foolish we would be, in the majority, to say that this is the way that Democrats view the rules and that we are going to apply a different set of rules to ourselves. This is what Senator Reid said in 2005. He said: The duties of the Senate are set forth in the U.S. Constitution. Nowhere in that document does it say the Senate has a duty to give Presidential appointees a vote. That is a fact. Senator Reid is correct. The President proposes a nominee, and the Senate either grants or withholds consent under the terms of the Constitution itself. But of course, that is what Senator Reid was suggesting back when George W. Bush was President of the United States--that the Senate was under no obligation to even give those nominees a vote. Then, more recently, there is Senator Schumer, who I know is really stirred up about our intention not to process a nominee this year and to have a referendum as a result of this Presidential election on who makes that appointment--perhaps for the next 30 years. That is how long Justice Scalia served on the Supreme Court of the United States. But here is Senator Chuck Schumer, the senior Senator from New York. This was 18 months before President George W. Bush left office--18 months, or a year and a half, before he left office. Senator Schumer said: For the rest of this President's term, we ``should reverse the presumption of confirmation.'' In other words, he was saying there was a presumption against confirming. He said he would recommend to his colleagues that we should ``not confirm a Supreme Court nominee except in extraordinary circumstances.'' Then, of course, more recently a little research was done into the record of Vice President Biden when he was Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee back in 1992. He said: The Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over. Action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over. So it strikes me as rather hypocritical for our Democratic friends to say that these were the rules when George W. Bush was in office or when his father, George Herbert Walker Bush, was in office, in the case of 1992, but now that President Obama is in office, a different set of rules ought to apply. It would be completely hypocritical of them to say that. But this is a matter of disagreement. There is no debate about that. But it does not mean that just because we are divided along party lines on this matter that there are other things we cannot do together. I think our friends across the aisle would agree that there is a lot of important work that we can and should do together. The chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, along with the ranking member from Washington, has worked diligently on energy legislation that we are currently considering. It is legislation that would update and modernize our country's energy infrastructure for the 21st century. We still need to find a way forward to deal with this legislation. I know this is an opinion that many members on the Energy Committee and in this Chamber share on a bipartisan basis. There is another piece of legislation that has strong bipartisan support that was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, unanimously, called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, known as CARA. This legislation is in response to the growing opioid abuse epidemic that affects our Nation, an epidemic that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Americans each year, along with the concomitant scourge of cheap heroin coming across our borders from Mexico, because when people can't get the prescription drugs--the opioids--then too many of them revert to cheaper heroin with disastrous consequences. I know that on a bipartisan basis the junior Senators from New Hampshire and Ohio have particularly led on this on my side of the aisle. But they have worked with the junior Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Whitehouse, and the senior Senator from Minnesota, Ms. Klobuchar, to make this a top priority. So we are going to have a chance to show very soon that we are committed to actually getting important legislation, such as the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, passed by this Chamber. This week also, the senior Senator from Vermont, Mr. Leahy, who is the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and I introduced legislation called the Justice for All Reauthorization Act. That bill would provide important resources to victims of domestic violence, and it would target resources on the rape kit backlog, which is, just frankly, an embarrassment to our criminal justice system. It has been estimated that there are as many as 400,000 rape kits; that is, forensic evidence taken after a sexual assault that would, if tested, reveal the identity of the attacker through DNA testing. There is just no excuse not to test those rape kits, which are part of that backlog. We know that many of the assailants in these cases are serial abusers, and many times we can stop someone before they attack again, if we will just test those kits. There is about $120 million each year that Congress appropriates for the Debbie Smith Act. Debbie Smith is the person for whom this legislation is named--and quite appropriately so. She has been a champion of eliminating that rape kit backlog. That is a large part of what the Justice for All Reauthorization Act would help us do. So I would ask our friends across the aisle, while they come out on the floor or give press conferences and express mock horror at the fact that Republicans in the majority now would apply the same standards that they advocated for when they were in the majority, to tone down the rhetoric and avoid the hypocrisy that seems so apparent when they argue for different standards today than they advocated in the past. That is nothing more, nothing less than hypocritical. What is out of line is when you have personal attacks against the Members of the Senate, particularly the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The minority leader, the Democratic leader, made a personal attack against the chairman of the Judiciary Committee right here on the Senate floor just yesterday. What he said was so far from the truth that it is not even worth repeating. But what I would like to make clear is that Chairman Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has made a big impression on this Chamber and on the legislation that we have passed. I mentioned the CARA Act that passed out of the Judiciary Committee unanimously. Senator Grassley has a decades-long dedication to serving the people of Iowa in this body. So I don't know how the Democratic leader can come out and personally attack a colleague who has done an outstanding job as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, while basically what we are embracing is what he himself argued for in 2005. How does that work? Well, I would say the Democratic leader does not have a lot of firm ground to stand on when it comes to judicial nominations. I would like to remind my colleagues that the Democratic leader, just a few short years ago, took the position that there were no fixed rules when it comes to judicial nominations. Then, in 2014, he simply tore up the rule book by invoking the so-called nuclear option, breaking the rules to change the rules on judicial nominations, as he attempted-- successfully, I will say--to pack the District of Columbia Court of Appeals by breaking the rules of the Senate in order to pack the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, which many have said is the second most important court in the Nation. So I hope he will take into consideration his prior actions, which are far more disruptive and poisoned the well of this institution more than anything we are talking about doing now, especially when we are agreeing with him, at least on this point. But most of all, I would hope that we can conduct our debates in a civil and a dignified fashion. People watch what we do and we say here. When people come out here and make hypocritical attacks, I don't think it reflects very well on the person making that attack, and I don't think it reflects well on the Senate as a body. It is certainly not a good example for our young people or other people who might be looking at how we conduct ourselves as they think: Well, that is the way we air our differences. Then certainly they can be forgiven for thinking: Well, maybe that is the way I ought to conduct myself. That is not the message we should be conveying. Well, we can continue to do a lot of good work here on a bipartisan basis in the Senate this year. It is true that we do have a major difference of opinion when it comes to filling the vacancy left by the untimely death of Justice Scalia. But it is true that we are only applying the rules that were advocated for by the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, now Vice President Biden, in 1992, and by minority leader Reid in 2005 and Senator Schumer in 2007. Surely they cannot expect us to apply a different set of rules today than they themselves said they would apply if the shoe were on the other foot. But we can still work together on other legislation, such as the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, such as the energy legislation we are considering now, because we do have a lot of work left to do, and there is a lot we can accomplish together. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 24, 2016, at 10:30 a.m., to conduct a hearing entitled ``The Unfunded Mandates Reform Act: Opportunities for Improvement to Support State and Local Governments.''

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities of the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 24, 2016, at 2:30 p.m.

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Special Committee on Aging be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 24, 2016, at 2:30 p.m., in room SD-562 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Opioid Use Among Seniors: Issues and Emerging Trends.''

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Veterans' Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 24, 2016, at 10 a.m., in room SH-216 of the Hart Senate Office Building.

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 24, 2016, at 10 a.m., in room SD- 430 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct a hearing entitled ``Zika Virus: Addressing the Growing Public Health Threat.''

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 24, 2016, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing entitled ``Ending Modern Slavery: Now is the Time.''

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Environment and Public Works be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 24, 2016, at 10 a.m., in room SD-406 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Oversight of the Renewable Fuel Standard.''

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 Tennessee (Mr. Corker), the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. Johnson), and the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio).

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, yesterday it was my privilege to say a few words honoring Justice Antonin Scalia, known to his friends as ``Nino,'' a man whose intellect, wit, and dedication to our Constitution have served our country for decades. I am pleased that others have said appropriate words honoring his memory and the many ways he helped strengthen our constitutional self-government and our democracy. As we know, the Constitution gives the Senate an equal role in deciding who eventually is to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. President Obama called me and other members of the Judiciary Committee yesterday, saying he intends to exercise his constitutional authority, and I recognize his right to make that nomination. But not since 1932 has the Senate, in a Presidential election year, confirmed a Supreme Court nominee to a vacancy that arose in that Presidential election year. And it is necessary to go even further back--I believe to the administration of Grover Cleveland in 1888--to find an election-year nominee who was nominated and confirmed under a divided government, such as we have now. So I found it very curious that some of our colleagues across the aisle are effusive in their criticism of our decision to withhold consent until we have a new President and in effect say this ought to be a choice not just confined to the 100 Members of the Senate and the President but to the American people. We are not saying--we are not foreclosing the possibility that a member of one party or another party would be the one to make that nominee. This isn't a partisan issue. This is about the people having a chance to express their views and raising the stakes and the visibility of the Presidential election to make the point that this isn't just about the next President who will serve 4 years, maybe 8 years; this will likely be about who will serve the next 30 years on the Supreme Court of the United States. I am going to remind our colleagues of some of the things they have said in the past for which they have so roundly criticized us. People understand when there are differences of opinion. It is a little harder to understand hypocrisy when you have taken just the opposite position when it suited your purposes in the past to the position you take today. So let me just be charitable and say maybe they have just forgotten. For example, the minority leader, Senator Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said on May 19, 2005, when George W. Bush was President of the United States: The duties of the Senate are set forth in the U.S. Constitution. Nowhere in that document does it say the Senate has a duty to give Presidential appointees a vote. That was Senator Reid. I agree with him. That is exactly right, but that is not the position he appears to be taking today. The President has every right to nominate someone, but the Senate has the authority to grant consent or to withhold consent. And what I and the other members of the Judiciary Committee on the Republican side said yesterday in a letter to the majority leader is that we believe unanimously--all the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee-- that we should withhold consent, exercising a right and an authority recognized by Senator Reid in 2005. I have read some of the press clips. People recoil in mock horror: Well, you are not even going to have a hearing? You are not even going to meet with the President's proposed nominee? Well, that is right, for a very good reason--because it is not about the personality of that nominee. So it would be pretty misleading for us to take the same position that Senator Reid has taken and then to say: Well, we are going to go through this elaborate dance of having courtesy meetings, maybe even having a hearing, when we have already decided--as Senator Reid acknowledged is the right of the Senate--not to bring up this President's nominee for a vote. And not to preordain who that next nominee will be, whether they will be nominated by a Republican or Democratic President--we don't know what the outcome of the Presidential election is going to be. But this is too important for the Congress and for the Senate to be stampeded into a rubberstamp of President Obama's selection on the Supreme Court as he is heading out the door--a decision that could well have an impact on the balance of power on the Supreme Court for the next 30 years. I am not through with my charts. The next Democratic leader in the Senate, Senator Schumer--first, I guess you could call this the Reid standard. We call it the Reid rule and the Schumer standard. That rolls off the tongue better. So this is what Senator Schumer said 18 months before President George W. Bush left office. We are only looking at, what, 10 or 11 months until President Obama leaves. In 2007, Senator Chuck Schumer said: ``[F]or the rest of this President's term. . . . We should reverse the presumption of confirmation.'' I, frankly, don't know what he is talking about. The Constitution doesn't talk about a presumption of confirmation. But it is pretty clear to me that he wants a presumption that the nominee will not be confirmed for the next 18 months. Senator Schumer, one of the Democratic leaders, said: ``I will recommend to my colleagues that we should not confirm a Supreme Court nominee except in extraordinary circumstances.'' So what we are doing is what Senator Reid and Senator Schumer advocated back when it was convenient and served their purposes way back when. They are now taking a different position because, of course, their interests are different. They want to make sure President Obama gets a chance to nominate and the Senate confirm President Obama's nominee, who will serve for perhaps the next quarter of a century or more on the Supreme Court. But it is pretty clear that the Senate is not bound to confirm a Supreme Court nominee or even hold a vote. Finally, I wish to point out--we will call it the Reid rule, the Schumer standard, and the Biden benchmark. This is what the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, said in 1992 when he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He gave a long speech, of which this is an excerpt. He said: ``[T]he Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over.'' He went on to say: ``[A]ction on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over.'' That is the Biden benchmark--the Reid rule, the Schumer standard, and the Biden benchmark. I read a statement from the Vice President that he issued after he saw that this old news clip and his statement had been made public. He quite conveniently said this was ``not an accurate description of my views on the subject.'' Well, I think the words are very clear. I think what he might have said is ``These are no longer my views on the subject'' because, of course, he would like President Obama to be able to make that nomination. So I wish to reject this myth that many of our Democratic colleagues are spreading that what we are doing here and now is somehow unprecedented. Quite the contrary. What we are doing is what the Democrats' top leadership has advocated in the past. What do they think we are? They think we are going to abide by a different set of rules than they themselves advocated? How ridiculous would that be? I could not explain that to my constituents back home in Texas. If I were going to say: Well, the Democrats can apply one set of rules, but then when the Republicans are in the majority, the Republicans must apply a different set of rules--well, the fact is, the rule book has been burned by the Democrats, and what we are operating under is the status quo they advocated back in 1992, 2005, and 2007. The Senate has every right under the Constitution not to have a hearing, and we shouldn't go through some motions pretending like we are or that this is really about the personality of whomever the President nominates. I have confidence that the President will nominate somebody who he thinks is qualified to be on the Supreme Court. I would point out, though, that this nominee will not be confirmed. I don't know many leading lawyers, scholars, and judges who would want to be nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court to a seat that President Obama will never fill. So during this already very heated election year--and the election is already underway. Democrats are voting in Democratic primaries, and Republicans are voting in Republican primaries and caucuses. The election is already underway, and the Supreme Court can function in the vast majority of cases with eight members. It frequently does anyway because most cases are not decided 5 to 4; most cases are decided on a consensus basis. But let's say, for the six or so cases in which Justice Scalia was a deciding vote on a 5-to-4 case last year--if there is a deadlock, those cases can simply be held over until the next year when there is a new Justice or the Court can come up with some other way to dispose of it as it sees fit. That frequently happens. For example, Justice Kagan was Solicitor General of the United States. She was recused from and could not sit on cases that she handled as an advocate for the U.S. Government once she got to the Supreme Court. So the Court operated with eight Justices for a long time because of Justice Kagan's recusal. Similarly, Justice Anthony Kennedy served on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Once he got to the Supreme Court of the United States, he couldn't then sit on those cases and decide them once as a circuit court judge and another time as a Supreme Court Justice. He recused, which means there were eight Justices to decide those cases. That is not extraordinary; that is not uncommon. And it is not going to paralyze the Supreme Court of the United States from doing its job. It has all the tools it needs at its disposal to handle these cases as it sees fit--either to dismiss them as improvidently granted, to hold them over if they are truly deadlocked, or to find some other perhaps more narrow basis upon which to decide the case, which would command a five-vote majority with eight members of the Court. So Mr. President, I would like our colleagues to come out here and explain this apparent contradiction in the position they took in 2007, 2005, and 1992. Because if they can't explain that, then it looks to me like this is pure hypocrisy--holding Republicans, when we are in the majority, to a different standard than they themselves were willing to embrace when they were in power. As I said, people may not understand a lot of the nitty-gritty details of this, but they do have a strong sense of fairness and evenhandedness, and they do smell hypocrisy and see it when it is right before their eyes. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

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, this past Saturday I was honored to attend the funeral mass for Justice Scalia. I couldn't help but recall back when President Reagan nominated him for the Supreme Court of the United States. At that time Judge Scalia said that ``[his] only [agenda] was to be a good judge.'' Today, 30 years later, it is clear that Justice Scalia, who until his death served longer than any of the current members of the Supreme Court of the United States, was more than a good judge. In fact, he was a great judge. He was a giant of American jurisprudence. As I got to know him even better during the course of the more recent years, thanks to a mutual acquaintance, I can tell you he was also a good man. My first encounter with Justice Scalia was back in 1991 when I won an election to be on the Texas Supreme Court and the court invited Justice Scalia to come to Austin, TX, and administer the oath of office. At that time I already admired his intellect and commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law, and believe me, he was an inspiration to young judges like me who were inspired to do the same. He has been an inspiration to so many judges, lawyers, and law students for decades. I admired and respected Justice Scalia. Like many Texans, I was proud of the fact that he also seemed to love Texas, believe it or not, even though he was a Virginian. He remarked once that if he didn't live in Virginia, he would ``probably want to be a Texan.'' I wish to spend a couple of minutes remembering this great man and the contributions he made to our Nation. Beyond his incredible resume, Justice Scalia was a devoted husband to Maureen for more than 50 years. He was a dedicated father to 9 children and a grandfather to more than 30 grandchildren. As I said earlier, he was not only a family man, which I am sure he would have considered his most important job, he was a role model for a generation of lawyers, judges, legal scholars, and those who loved the Constitution. One of the interesting things about Justice Scalia--and perhaps he could teach all of us a little something these days--was that he was quick to build relationships with people who had different views from his own and fostered an environment of collegiality and friendship on the Court. As we learned earlier, Justice Scalia had relationships with people with whom he couldn't have disagreed more on key issues that the Court confronted--people like Justice Ginsburg, for example. We all know he was a gifted writer and possessed an infectious wit, but Justice Scalia's most important legacy is his life's work and his call for a return to our constitutional first principles. Justice Scalia strongly believed that words mattered, and I think that is one of the reasons why he quickly became one of the most memorable writers on the Court and one of the best in the Court's entire history. He believed the words written in the Constitution mattered because that was the only thing the States voted on when they ratified the Constitution. Those were the words with which the American people chose to govern themselves. For decades he tried to give those words force and fought against an attempt to say that we really don't have a written Constitution; we have a living Constitution that should be reinterpreted based on the times when, indeed, the text had not changed one bit. His originalist interpretation of the Constitution meant that he viewed the Court as a place to vindicate the law and what it meant, not express the preferences of five Justices. Justice Scalia was one of the most fervent advocates for the rule of law and a written Constitution. On many instances, he made the important point that if the Supreme Court was viewed merely as a group of nine individuals making value judgments on how our country ought to be governed under our Constitution, then the people may well feel that their values were equally as valid as those of the ``high nine'' on the Potomac given life tenure and a seat on the Supreme Court. It was his strict adherence to the text of the Constitution, and not evolving value judgments over time, that gave protection to our democracy. Justice Scalia was strongly committed to the separation of powers. This is so fundamental to the Constitution that, until the first Congress, James Madison didn't even think that we needed a Bill of Rights because he felt that the separation of powers and the division of responsibilities would be protection enough because they viewed the concentration of powers, the opposite of separation of powers, as a threat to our very liberty. I think he said that the very definition of tyranny was the concentration of powers. So he saw the separation of powers as nothing less than the most important guarantor of our liberty and the most important shield against tyranny. In one dissent Justice Scalia wrote ``without a secure structure of separated powers, our Bill of Rights would be worthless.'' I guess you would have to say he is a Madisonian and not a Federalist by temperament and view. This recognition of the importance of separation of powers could not be any more important at this point in our history because scarcely a month goes by when this administration has chosen to undermine this basic constitutional precept by exerting itself and claiming authorities which the Constitution does not give the President. Justice Scalia understood what was at stake. He believed that every blow to the separation of powers would harm our Republic and liberty itself. As Justice Scalia wrote in a case in which the Court unanimously struck down the President's violations of the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers, he said: ``We should therefore take every opportunity to affirm the primacy of the Constitution's enduring principles over the politics of the moment.'' He continued, warning against ``aggrandizing the Presidency beyond its constitutional bounds.'' That is what Justice Scalia did time and again, and that is what he reminded all of us about--the importance of doctrines of separation of powers, adherence to the text of the Constitution, and not making it up as you are going along or expressing value judgments that can't be related to the actual text and original understanding of the Constitution. The question arises: When the President makes a nomination to fill the vacancy left by Justice Scalia's death, what is the constitutional responsibility of the U.S. Senate? It is true that under our Constitution, the President of the United States has a unique role and the authority to make a nomination to fill this vacancy, but it is also true that the Senate has an essential and unique role to play as well. The founding generation regarded the Senate's role in the appointment process as ``a critical protection against `despotism.' '' Nothing less. That means that the U.S. Senate has a unique and separate role to play, and certainly a coequal role with that of the President, in the process of filling vacancies on the Court. We are not, and the Constitution never intended us to be, a rubber stamp for the President of the United States. I know that President Obama would love to nominate somebody in the waning months of his last term of office as he is heading out the door and perhaps fill this vacancy, which in the case of Justice Scalia was filled for 30 years, far extending President Obama's term of office. That is not what the U.S. Senate is about. We are a coequal branch of government, and we have an independent and separate responsibility from that of the President. He can nominate anybody he wants, but it is up to the Senate, in its collective wisdom, on whether or not to grant advice and consent. When we say that, we mean that if the Senate did not play its unique role, liberty itself would be weakened and despotism strengthened. As I said before, the American people can and should have a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court Justice. In the waning days of this Presidential election year after voters have already cast their ballots in primaries for Republican and Democratic candidates--even as I speak, there is a caucus convening today in Nevada--I believe giving the American people a choice in who selects the next Justice of the Supreme Court is very important. I think it elevates what is at stake in this next election this November, and that means simply that this vacancy should not be filled at this time by this President. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Blunt), the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from Arizona (Mr. Flake), the Senator from Nevada (Mr. Heller), the Senator from North Dakota (Mr. Hoeven), the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio), the Senator from Alabama (Mr. Shelby), the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey), and the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Vitter).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my Marine Corps fellow, Capt. Matt Dalton, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of this legislative session.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio), and the Senator from Alaska (Mr. Sullivan). Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Alaska (Mr. Sullivan) would have voted ``yea.''