John Cornyn

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), and the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), and the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), and the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I wish to make some very brief remarks about divided government. Since 1981, there have been more than 25 years in which one party controlled the White House while the other party controlled at least one Chamber of the Congress. By comparison, there have been fewer than 9 years in which one party controlled both the Presidency and all of Congress. So as we can see, divided government has been the norm and unified government--single-party government--the exception. The truth is I suspect the American people like divided government because they realize it is another layer of checks and balances on what happens up here in Washington, DC, which are very important to making sure we get things done right and give it the kind of deliberation and thoughtful consideration they deserve, particularly if we are talking about legislating for a country of about 320 million people or so. It also forces us to do something that maybe isn't our first instinct; that is, rather than to insist on our way, it forces us to build consensus, which is actually a good thing when we are talking about the American people. So what has it given us in the recent past? It has given us a Republican President and a Democratic House that worked together on Social Security reform in 1983 and tax reform in 1986. Several years ago it was another Republican President and a fully Democratic Congress that worked together on landmark disability and environmental laws. In the mid-1990s, it was a Democratic President and a Republican Congress that worked together on welfare reform and balanced the budget. This is what can happen when we have divided government and the willingness of the President and the Congress to work together to try to solve problems. We can actually do hard things--things that we could never do with a purely one-party government or the other. Then in 2001 a Republican President and Democratic Senate worked together on education reform--No Child Left Behind. I still remember when former Governor Bush--then-President Bush as the 43rd President-- worked together with Teddy Kennedy, the liberal lion of the Senate, on No Child Left Behind. It raised more than a few eyebrows back home in Texas, but that demonstrated what can happen when one side of the aisle and the other side of the aisle try to work together in the best interests of the American people. Here is the short of it: Divided government does not translate into gridlock. It doesn't have to. It can, but it doesn't have to. We actually have another choice. Each of the four Presidents who came directly before President Obama found it possible to sign major bipartisan legislation despite having serious philosophical differences with Members of the opposing party. I remember a conversation I had recently with one of my colleagues who was just reelected to the Senate and he is, let's say, from the other end of the political spectrum from me. He made the obvious point: I am not going to change who I am, I am not going to change what I believe in, but I am going to look for ways to legislate in the Senate. I thought he stated it very well: I am not going to change who I am as a conservative. I am not going to do something which I would view to be unprincipled in order to get an outcome. But I do think that leaves an awful lot of room for us to work together to try to legislate in the center. My impression is--from the Presiding Officer and others I have talked to and chatted with and seeing their reported comments--there is a big appetite on both sides of the aisle to make this place work again. I think if there is a single message that I heard from November 4, in this last election, it is that people do not want their government to not function. They may want it to function more or less or in some areas and not the others, but they don't want it to be dysfunctional. Indeed, that makes common sense. What remains an open question is what path the President is going to choose--whether he is actually going to work with the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate. I was somewhat encouraged the President had a meeting yesterday with the incoming majority leader Senator McConnell. It was reported to me they talked about things they thought they could work on together. But we have sort of been led down this pathway before with happy talk, and then the actions did not follow the rhetoric. Unfortunately, I think the President started off on a bad foot after this election on November 4 by issuing this Executive action order. I realize it is very controversial and we can be frustrated at times with the slow pace of actually getting things done around here. But I have expressed myself previously, and I will say it again: I think the President made a serious mistake in doing it the way he did. No. 1, I don't think he has the authority to do it, something he himself said he didn't have 22 times in published comments, but it poisons the well at a time when I think there was a lot of hope that maybe we could turn this place around. It is not just my view; it is the view of a number of my Democratic colleagues too. For example, after the President's Executive action on immigration, the senior Senator from Louisiana said: We are all frustrated with our broken immigration system, but the way forward is not unilateral action by the President. I agree with that comment. Her sentiments were also echoed by the junior Senator from Indiana, who believes President Obama should not be making what he called ``significant policy changes'' on his own. The senior Senator from Missouri said similarly, ``How this is coming about makes me uncomfortable, and I think it probably makes most Missourians uncomfortable.'' The reason they feel uncomfortable is that the President's Executive order represents a direct affront to the constitutional separation of powers. Even if you agree on the substance of what he did, which itself is controversial, how he did it was a direct affront to our Constitution and the separation of powers, and it is unsustainable. It provokes a response from Congress when it feels left out, and, in fact, the President is going to need Congress to work with him to fix our broken immigration system because Congress remains the possessor of the power of the purse. The Senator from Maine put it this way. He said: The Framers knew what they were doing, and it doesn't say if the president gets frustrated and Congress doesn't act, he gets to do what he thinks is important for the country [on his own]. So this is not a partisan issue in the sense that Republicans and Democrats see the world through entirely different lenses. Plenty of Democrats understand that the President's action has made it significantly harder for us to get off on the right foot in the new year on a number of issues we already agree on by and large. The junior Senator from North Dakota said the immigration order ``could poison any hope of compromise or bipartisanship in the new Senate before it's even started.'' I agree with the sentiment. I hope she is wrong, and I hope we can prove that wrong by saying we are not going to give up and we are not going to let what the President does determine what we do. We have to do our job and we have to function, and then we are going to have to work with the President hopefully to try to move the country forward in a number of these areas. I hope we can find a way to stop the President from acting on his own and to recommit ourselves to the rule of law and particularly the Constitution and get about the job of addressing our country's biggest challenges, such as those outlined in the comments from the senior Senator from New York, Mr. Schumer, who gave a very noteworthy speech at the National Press Club recently. He mentioned issues we should be focused on, such as the needs of the middle class, stagnant wages, mass underemployment, and widespread pessimism about the future of the American dream. The last thing we need is a protracted constitutional crisis, and that is really an unfortunate distraction from what we ought to be doing together. If we recognize these challenges and the message that was sent on November 4, we ought to be working together to address them. Because of this crisis, it will be more difficult, but we cannot give up. We need to work together to overhaul our job-training programs and give American workers relief from the burden of government that does not work in their best interests. It will be more difficult for us to pass progrowth tax and regulatory reforms, and it will be more difficult for us to do what we need to do to shore up and sustain Social Security and Medicare before they go bankrupt. We have reached this point because of yet another manufactured crisis--a crisis that was completely and totally unnecessary. I can only hope the President will decide to reverse his desire to do everything unilaterally and to work on a more sensible course--one where he appreciates the possibilities of divided government. Based on the examples I gave earlier, there certainly is reason for hope that divided government can work and address some of our urgent needs. Unfortunately, given his record, it is hard to be optimistic, but I am an optimist by nature, and hope springs eternal. I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from North Carolina (Mr. Burr), the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Chambliss), the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), and the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), and the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), and the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), and the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, ever since November 4--this last election, some 3 or so weeks ago--a number of people have speculated as to what a new Republican majority in the Senate will mean for the country. We will be working together with our Republican colleagues in the House and with the President, who has hopefully heard the message the American people sent him on November 4. He was the one who said it was his policies that were on the ballot. I believe the vote by the American people came through pretty loud and clear as to what they thought of those policies. It was pretty clear that they want a new direction. When people ask me what my constituents expect--my 26.5 million constituents in Texas--I tell them they want us to demonstrate that we can govern. They want us to demonstrate that we can actually solve some of the problems confronting our country. Those problems primarily deal with how we unleash the American economy, get it growing again to create jobs and opportunity so people can find work, provide for their families, and pursue their dreams. I believe that is what Senator Schumer was saying the other day at the National Press Club. We need to focus on the needs of the middle class and the wage earners. They are seeing stagnant wages. While health care, energy, and other costs go up, their paychecks are shrinking. As a result, they are having to live on less, which is not the American dream most people have bargained for. The truth is no political party or branch of government can govern on its own. The fact is that even though we have a Republican majority in the House and Senate, we still have a divided government, with President Obama in the White House--and he is not constitutionally irrelevant. In fact, he is critical in terms of actually getting things done. My hope is that we can find issues we can work on together. I believe Republicans and Democrats can vote to put legislation on the President's desk, but then he has a choice to make--either to sign that legislation into law or veto it. We then have a decision to make as to whether we want to try--and whether we can--override his veto. The truth is none of us can govern on our own. What has been troubling to me--since the election--is that President Obama seems to think he can govern on his own without regard for the Congress. Now, part of the consequences are the debates going on in the House and here in the Senate about the appropriate response to what has been widely seen as an overreach by the President--particularly when it comes to his Executive action on immigration, which circumvented the Congress. He acted as though he could do this alone without any consequence. We know one thing for sure, and that is the President cannot appropriate money, which is why we are now having this discussion. But there will be other ramifications and consequences as well. I hope one of those consequences is not that we fall back into the dysfunction we have experienced over the last few years where we find ourselves incapable of working together and getting things done. All we can do is all we can do. As a Senate--as a Congress--we can't make the President do anything he is bound and determined not to do, but we can do our job. I and others have said: Well, with a new majority in the Senate, we have to show we can govern. The truth is we can't govern by ourselves. The President can't govern by himself, and we can't govern by ourselves. That is the constitutional separation of powers and the division of responsibility that we must embrace together. I don't know where the President has gotten this idea that he thinks he can govern on his own. For 225 years our constitutional norms have said otherwise, and experience has shown otherwise. If we want to make real progress on improving our broken immigration system--we actually saw a bill passed out of the Senate. The President said he is frustrated with the timetable in the House. But there continues to be a bipartisan desire, I believe, to fix our broken immigration system. If we want to reform our Tax Code, I think that is something we ought to be getting to work on. The fact of the matter is we have the highest tax rate in the world. That is making America less competitive in terms of attracting investment and jobs. It discourages multinational corporations headquartered in the United States from bringing back the money they have earned overseas because they don't want to have to pay taxes twice--for what they have earned on their income overseas and then pay double again when they bring that money back home. We ought to look at what kind of Tax Code makes sense for us and incentivizes investment and job creation in the United States and not be content with a system that discourages that. I believe there is bipartisan support for doing what we can to shore up Medicare and Social Security. We have all seen the numbers--the aging baby boomers and more and more people retiring. Unfortunately, these young people are being left holding the bag. We are going to be OK--people my age and my generation--but future generations will not be OK unless we do our job now to deal with Medicare and Social Security and make them sustainable into the future. What I feel has been most discouraging is health care. Whether you supported the Affordable Care Act or were a skeptic, such as I was, I think by and large the evidence is that it didn't work the way the people who were the biggest cheerleaders thought it would work. One little factoid that jumped out at me yesterday in the Wall Street Journal is that between 2007 and 2013 the average cost for middle-class families for their health care went up 24 percent. That is part of what has made this wage stagnation even worse because people are actually paying more for items such as health care. If there is one thing we ought to all be able to agree on is that what makes health care more available and accessible to more people is when it is more affordable. Unfortunately, the Affordable Care Act did not do that. Well, I mentioned my disappointment with some of the President's actions--including his Executive action on immigration, which I think has made our job harder--not easier. More recently there were stories of a pending negotiation on the tax bill that the President said he would veto if it got to him. Why didn't the President say: Mr. Majority Leader, if this isn't in it, I am going to consider vetoing it? In other words, why didn't he use the bully pulpit and the leverage the President has to change the package if he didn't like it and make it more acceptable? That is the kind of compromise and negotiation that needs to occur. What happens when you say I want everything my way or I want nothing? More often than not, you are going to get nothing. Unfortunately, that is what the taxpayers got--a temporary reprieve from the retroactive taxes and no real long-term solution which creates an opportunity to plan and make investments. That is what encourages job creation and job growth and grows the economy. All of this churning and uncertainty is the antithesis of what we need when it comes to growing our economy, creating jobs, and creating more predictability. I know back in 2008 when President Obama was elected, millions of Americans thought President Obama would be the kind of President that would bring the country together on a number of levels--whether it was a matter of race or just getting the government to be responsive to the needs of the middle class. Unfortunately, he seems to have developed this disdain for the very job he was elected to do. This stuff doesn't happen by accident. It happens as a result of hard work. A lot of that hard work happens behind closed doors where Members of both parties sit around the table and say how can we work this out. When we are doing our best work, it does work out, and although it is not perfect, it is a vast improvement over the status quo. That is the sort of thing the President, unfortunately, seems unwilling or unable to do. The Executive action on immigration is perhaps the freshest demonstration of the President's contempt for the role of Congress and the normal legislative process. What I find hard to understand and believe is that for the weeks and months leading up to the announcement, the President was repeatedly warned that such a decision would provoke a constitutional crisis. And he was repeatedly warned that what he was getting ready to do was something he did not have the power under the Constitution to do. And not coincidentally, the President--I think on 22 different occasions--admitted publicly that he didn't have the authority to do what he ultimately decided to do with this Executive order, but he did it anyway. I can't think of many things he could have done that would be more damaging to public confidence and Congress and the Presidency and our ideal of self-government. If the President says ``I don't have the authority to do this without Congress'' but then he proceeds to do it anyway, what are we supposed to think? As a result of the President's ill-advised action, the coming weeks and months threaten to be dominated by a political fight that was completely unnecessary. Meanwhile, the bipartisan prospects for compromise on everything from immigration to tax reform have been significantly reduced. The tragedy is that once we get beyond the daily partisan rhetoric, there are more areas of bipartisan agreement in this Senate than people might think. For example, Members of both parties want to vote on the Keystone XL Pipeline. Members of both parties want to pass commonsense regulatory reform that will reduce the burdens on families and businesses. Members of both parties want to improve our patent system in order to discourage the abuse of costly litigation. Members of both parties want to address America's counterproductive business tax rate to help boost investment and create jobs here at home. Members of both parties want to take action to restore the 40-hour workweek that was penalized by ObamaCare to get people back on full- time work and off of part-time work. People would like to work full time. And there are Members from both parties who want to repeal the law's medical device tax, falling as it does on the gross receipts of medical device innovators here in America, causing some of my constituents, for example, from Dallas to move their operations to Costa Rica and places where this tax won't be collected. Those are the sorts of incentives and disincentives that tax policy can have--and in this case, very damaging. Both parties want an immigration system that puts more emphasis on skills and on education. We are a very compassionate country when it comes to immigration. We naturalize almost 1 million people a year in this country. It is part of what makes our country great. But we ought to recognize that we need to use both our heads and our hearts on a lot of these issues. It makes sense to me and I think to a lot of other people to say: What do these immigrants bring to America that will make us better, and not just operate strictly on the basis of compassion, as in, what do they need? This seems to be a system that helps us to continue to attract the best and the brightest people from around the world through a legal immigration system. Finally, Members of both parties believe we need a permanent solution to our transportation needs in this country. I come from the fast- growing State of Texas, where we simply don't have enough resources to build the mass transits and the highways and deal with the transportation needs we have in order to continue to grow our economy and create jobs. What we have done, sadly--and both parties are complicit in this--is one temporary bandaid after another, making it very hard to plan. We have just put patches on it, and then we come back and--sort of like the movie ``Groundhog Day'' we do it all over again 6 months or a year later. None of this is going to be easy. Nobody told us it would be easy, but we need to do it anyway. We need to vote, and we need to come up with solutions. This is only a partial list of some of the bipartisan, smart ideas that could become law pretty quickly with the right leadership. I am hopeful that after the first of the year in the new Congress, we will look for opportunities--and I am confident we will--to work together to put legislation on the President's desk to show we can actually function and hopefully regain some of the public's lost confidence in their government and in self-government itself. So the question is, What do we do if the President continues to give very little indication that he is going to be a partner in this effort? We need to do our job anyway. His initial reaction in 2014 has been to flout the will of Congress and the will of the American people. I know the temptation is to say we are going to retaliate for the President's action which we consider unlawful. I think we need to make a measured and prudent and appropriate response. There needs to be consequences when one branch usurps its power under the Constitution. But we don't need to fall back into the same sort of dysfunction we were in previously that got us to where we are today. So governing is not about having the executive branch or the legislative branch see how much they can get away with on their own. That is not our Constitution. That is not our form of government. It is about having the two branches working together to try to find common ground and proposing and negotiating policies that serve the national interests--not the interests of one political party or the other but the interests of the country as a whole. In January I hope to demonstrate that the newfound confidence voters have in Republicans is well-founded, not in the sense that we receive any mandate--believe me, I don't believe that for a minute, but I do believe people are looking for responsible alternatives to the status quo, and I believe sincerely that, working together, Republicans and Democrats, the Senate and the House and the President can demonstrate that we can actually do our jobs and govern. None of us can do it alone. We can and we must demonstrate that we are able to do our job and function. But, again, in order to move the country forward, in order to find solutions to the problems we have on so many fronts, we are going to have to do this together. I only hope the President reconsiders his record and his attitude about trying to go it alone because we know that is not going to end very well. Madam President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. CORNYN. 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 Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, last week, before the Thanksgiving holiday, our colleague from across the aisle, the senior Senator from New York, gave a very significant speech at the National Press Club. Senator Schumer is not just a senior Senator from New York; he is an important Member of the Democratic leadership here in the Senate. While giving the speech about the midterm elections, he said what many Members on this side of the aisle have been saying for the last 4 years, and that is that the Democratic party, by making the passage of ObamaCare their top priority after they won the election of 2008, ``blew the opportunity the American people gave them.'' He said they did so by focusing ``on the wrong problem.'' What I think he meant and went on to say is that they should have focused on the lack of jobs and the wage stagnation for hardworking, middleclass families in America. As he pointed out, that broader group of the middle class represented a much larger segment of the electorate than just a small percentage of the electorate represented by the uninsured. I would add, parenthetically, that we know that even the best laid plans with the Affordable Care Act has proven to be a terrible failure. Today the Wall Street Journal reported that between 2007 and 2013 health insurance premiums for an average middleclass American family have gone up by 24 percent. As we know, when the President said if you like your doctor, you can keep him, that proved not to be true. When he said the family of four would see their premiums go down by $2,500, that ended up not to be true either. Two weeks ago, despite the overwhelming rejection the President's policies received at the polls, the President then decided to circumvent Congress and take Executive action on immigration, far exceeding any arguable authority that I believe most lawyers would think he has. Certainly, while we recognize it is within the President's discretion to prioritize the people against whom enforcement action will be taken, there is no legal authorization for doing other things he purports to have the authority to do, such as issuing work permits. Then there is this. Just when it seemed that the Senate was beginning to work on avoiding a retroactive tax increase for millions of Americans, the President threatened to veto an important tax relief package, which, as I said, had bipartisan support, including the support of the majority leader, Senator Reid, and Senator Schumer, the senior Senator from New York. He did so because it did not include every single provision he thought it should include. If we have not learned before, we should now know that if you insist on absolute perfection--in other words, you want everything you want, and the alternative is nothing--then most of the time you are going to get nothing. That is what taxpayers are getting when it comes to aborting this retroactive tax provision in the so-called tax extenders bill. To again quote our good friend from New York, by threatening to veto this job-creating tax relief, it appears that the President has once again focused on the wrong problem and is certainly going about this in a nonproductive and unconstructive way. It is unfortunate because the President seems to be positively allergic to good-faith negotiations and genuine compromise. Again, if your attitude is ``my way or the highway,'' you are going to get the highway all the time because that is not how our democratic institutions work. The only way things work is for us to find common ground and to compromise. Yet the President's attitude seems, unfortunately, out of touch. He seems more interested in getting his way by any means necessary--hence, the Executive action on immigration. We increasingly know that actions are dividing the country and hurting hard-working Texans and American families across the Nation-- and not just by not contributing to the solution but by being a positive obstacle to bipartisan resolutions of so many of these problems. I realize the President must think that it is much easier to issue Executive orders and threaten to veto legislation from the White House, but it was not helping to solve problems we were sent here by our constituents to solve. There is no real reason preventing us from getting to the tax relief I mentioned earlier that the President said he would veto. For years House and Senate Republicans--often with significant bipartisan support--have focused on making progrowth provisions of the Tax Code permanent, such as the research and development tax credit, accelerated depreciation, for example, and the section 179 provision. To show how counterproductive it is for us to do these on a short- term basis or to try to jam them through a lameduck session, I had a farmer from Texas come and see me. He said: I am prepared to spend and invest $200,000 on my farm if I know this tax provision is going to be the law. If it is not, I won't. To me, that is just another example of how what we do here--or what we don't do here--has a negative impact on our economy and on investment in job creation. While I know the bipartisan package proposed last week was not perfect, it certainly would have moved us in the right direction. It would have provided some certainty--indeed permanency--for some tax provisions and would have provided some temporary relief on others. Perhaps most importantly, it would have sent a signal to our constituents that we got the message that was delivered to us on November 4, and that we are going to commit ourselves anew to try to work together to provide certainty and protect millions of Americans from tax hikes that are just right around the corner and work on other constructive proposals to help solve problems that affect the middle class. Unfortunately, the President has persisted in his attitude of refusing to negotiate with Congress, resulting in another missed opportunity, and ultimately another short-term fix that will provide no long-term certainty to taxpayers struggling in the Obama economy. Come January, there will be a new majority in the Senate that will make the priorities of the American people the priorities of Congress. As for President Obama, we can only hope he will somehow have an epiphany and decide to work with us to unite the country rather than continue to divide the country with more Executive actions and his harmful ``take it or leave it'' approach to governing. I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) and the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski), and the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Roberts).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski), and the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Roberts).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski), and the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Roberts). The PRESIDING OFFCIER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber desiring to vote?

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski), and the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Roberts).