John Cornyn

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. I thank the Senator from Wyoming, who is one of the most knowledgeable, eloquent Members of our side of the aisle or in this Chamber on the subject of health care law. As a former practicing orthopedic surgeon, he knows the subject better than almost anyone I know. But we are on the floor today to talk about the cuts to the only real choice that seniors have when it comes to their health care coverage under Medicare. There are basically two choices. One is called Medicare Advantage, which I will talk more about in a minute, and the other is Medicare, traditional Medicare, which is a fee-for-service program that many people find is less advantageous to them than Medicare Advantage. Close to 16 million people currently receive health care benefits through Medicare Advantage--about 1 million of them in Texas, the State I am honored to represent. Of course, they represent roughly 30 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries. Why would somebody choose Medicare Advantage rather than traditional Medicare? Because it gives a lot more flexibility and greater patient choice. It actually delivers better results than traditional Medicare. It has been one of the main sources of innovation when it comes to health care, producing better outcomes for seniors under Medicare. Medicare Advantage is the primary driver. Unfortunately, the President's health care law, known as the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare, slashed about $300 billion from Medicare Advantage. My constituents are already going to start to see premium increases to their Medicare Advantage policies. Many of them will have to then question whether they can afford that, whether they will drop Medicare Advantage, lose the choices, the flexibility, the innovation that goes along with it, and end up basically turning to traditional Medicare fee-for-service. In Texas, about two out of every three doctors will see a new Medicare patient because it actually reimburses physicians at a lower rate than regular health insurance does, so many doctors have found that they have to limit their practice, much as they have under Medicaid as well. But we know that the $300 billion that has been taken from Medicare Advantage, and these seniors--who rely on it to shore up the Affordable Care Act or ObamaCare--know that the news on ObamaCare continues to unwind and bring us bad news almost every day. Not only have millions of people lost their existing health care coverage, even though they were promised by the President of the United States that if you like it, you can keep it--I lost count of how many times the President made that statement, but I think it is somewhere in the high twenties. Of course, now we are finding out that more and more people are having to pay higher premiums as a result of ObamaCare. Another promise the President made is he said that a family of four would see a reduction of $2,500 in their average premiums, but they are seeing their premiums go up. Indeed, on Friday, in a late-afternoon news dump--that has become a new art form for the administration, they dump news on Friday afternoon and hope nobody notices, or it won't be covered--we learned that roughly two-thirds of the people who work for small businesses will see an increase in their premiums as a result of ObamaCare, some 11 million small business employees. The people who are concerned about Medicare Advantage aren't only on this side of the aisle. In fact, we have had bipartisan accolades for Medicare Advantage, called a great success by both Senators from New York, for example, and the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee from Colorado. They recently joined me, along with a couple of dozen colleagues, to urge CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner to ``maintain payment levels that will allow [Medicare Advantage] beneficiaries to be protected from disruptive changes in 2015.'' This bipartisan support for this important choice for seniors, known as Medicare Advantage, is in real jeopardy as they are going to see as a result a $300 billion cut from Medicare Advantage in order to shore up this failing experiment in big government known as ObamaCare. People's existing health care arrangements are in serious jeopardy and they are concerned and they are calling and writing us and wondering what we are going to do. Unfortunately, those calls and letters seem to fall on deaf ears, as far as the President and the people who voted for this bill are concerned. The American people have seen they are whistling past the graveyard and hoping that what will likely happen in November--which will finally be the day of electoral accountability--is that their voices will actually be heard. I yield the floor.

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. Mr. President, I see the Senator from North Carolina is here on the floor. I know he is likely here to respond to the Senator from Vermont and the Senator from Washington on the veterans bill that is on the floor, and what I believe is a much better alternative for us in dealing with the needs of our veterans in a way that is fiscally responsible. But what I would like to do is to turn to another story that continues to unfold worse and worse news over time, that unfortunately we tend to get distracted from because there are so many other things that are happening. But when the President's signature health care bill, the Affordable Care Act, was signed into law 4 years ago, we knew that it did not just create a brand new health care entitlement. It actually weakened existing programs like Medicare and Medicaid. For people who do not deal with these programs on a day-in and day- out basis, of course, Medicare is for seniors, for health care for seniors; Medicaid is a separate program which is shared by the States and the Federal Government to provide the safety net health care program for low-income Texans in my State. But because of the massive new burdens that ObamaCare is placing on the health care safety net, which is already failing the neediest members of society, the share of physicians accepting new Medicaid patients in Texas has fallen from 67 percent in 2000 to only 32 percent in 2012. So in 2000, 67 percent of physicians would accept a new Medicaid patient. Today it is roughly one-third, one out of every three. Of course, the reason for that is the Federal Government continues to pay less and less. Now I think it is roughly 50 cents on the dollar compared to private insurance to a physician who treats a Medicaid patient. So we know that many Texas physicians, including a majority of established primary care physicians, are not accepting new Medicaid patients at all because they are being asked essentially to work for 50 cents on the dollar, something they cannot afford to do. Yet the architects of ObamaCare thought that it was a good idea to add millions more people to a broken program, one that already was not providing access to quality health care. This, of course, will further reduce the quality of Medicaid, which is one reason why many State Governors refused the Federal Government's request to actually expand the coverage of Medicaid absent reforms to fix it and make sure that it would work more fairly and better and more cost effectively. Of course, the consequence of that is it will make it even harder on the poorest and most vulnerable Americans to gain access to quality health care. As for the Medicare program, of course that is for seniors, ObamaCare created a new panel of unelected bureaucrats known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board. What an innocuous bureaucratic-sounding name. Some people call it the IPAB. These are unelected bureaucrats who will decide whether your health care is worth a cost-benefit analysis. What they will end up doing is slashing Medicare payments to doctors so that many physicians can no longer afford to see new Medicare patients and provide the treatment that those patients and their doctors believe they need and that they want. So it has become abundantly clear that the goal of ObamaCare is to make Medicare more like Medicaid. We know what that means. We know it is not hard to predict, that fewer and fewer doctors will treat Medicare patients and some will leave the program all together. Why do we know that? Well, we have seen the experience with these new major cuts to Medicare Advantage. Not to confuse things too much, but Medicare Advantage is actually a private insurance alternative to traditional Medicare which pays doctors based on the services they provide. Medicare Advantage is a remarkably successful program that covers roughly 30 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries, close to 16 million people. The funds to those programs, to those 30 million, to that program that benefits 30 million beneficiaries, are being slashed by approximately $308 billion as a result of ObamaCare. This is another one of these hidden problems with ObamaCare that is now just coming to light, even though we talked about it a lot back in 2009 and 2010. Now it is coming to fruition. The truth is, these cuts in Medicare Advantage will force many seniors to pay higher premiums and further undermine their existing health care arrangements. You remember the President said: If you like what you have, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. We are now learning that is absolutely not true in many cases. Just to give you a sense, though, of Medicare Advantage's popularity, according to the Wall Street Journal, about one of two people newly eligible for Medicare chose Medicare Advantage and enrollment is growing at a rate of roughly 10 percent per year. Why is Medicare Advantage so popular compared to traditional Medicare fee for service? Well, for all the reasons you might expect. The program offers a lot more flexibility and much more patient choice than traditional Medicare based on a number of different performance measures that also deliver better results than traditional Medicare. It has become the primary driver of innovation within the Medicare system. Yet we know, and we have known now for 4 years, and we are now seeing that the reality is the administration is trying to undermine Medicare Advantage to help pay for ObamaCare. Neither one is working the way the beneficiaries of those programs expected and were promised they would work. Earlier this month I joined with 39 of my colleagues here in the Senate to send a letter to CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner urging her to ``maintain payment levels that will allow Medicare Advantage beneficiaries to be protected from disruptive changes in 2015.'' Our letter described Medicare Advantage as ``a great success,'' noting that one study published in the American Journal of Managed Care found that ``the hospital readmission rates for [Medicare Advantage] enrollees are 13-20 percent lower than for Medicare [fee-for-service] enrollees.'' In other words, it is more effective delivering quality care, keeping seniors healthy and reducing dramatically the need to have them readmitted to hospitals once they are discharged. The Members who signed this letter were not just folks who work on this side of the aisle. They included several prominent Democrats, such as my two colleagues from New York, the senior Senator from Minnesota, the junior Senator from Massachusetts, the junior Senator from Oregon, and from Washington State, and from Colorado, who also happens to be the Chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. They signed this letter--39 Senators--saying: Please do not cut Medicare Advantage in a way that disadvantages current seniors. It is bad enough that ObamaCare is effectively taking money out of a successful program, Medicare Advantage, to fund a new entitlement. It is bad enough that seniors are being forced to pay higher premiums and deal with enormous uncertainty in order to facilitate a government takeover of the health care system. What makes it even worse is that ObamaCare continues to be an unmitigated disaster. Every day you pick up the newspaper, every day you watch television: Millions of Americans have lost their preferred health insurance, and millions more are paying higher premiums for coverage. Many families have discovered that their new ObamaCare- mandated coverage does not give their children access to their preferred doctors and hospitals. As one physician from Washington State recently told CBS News: We're seeing denials of care, disruptions in care; we're seeing a great deal of confusion and, at times, anger and frustration on the part of these families who bought insurance thinking that their children were going to be covered. And they've in fact found that it's a false promise. A false promise--that is ObamaCare in a nutshell, if you think about it. A program that was sold as a way to help the uninsured and the economy has instead hurt the economy and forced millions of Americans to lose their existing coverage--a false promise. The Congressional Budget Office--the latest bit of bad news--now estimates that ObamaCare will reduce the size of the American labor force by 2.5 million full-time workers over the next decade. Here is the latest news. In addition, CMS has projected the law could lead to higher insurance premiums for about 11 million employees at small businesses. As for the promise of ``universal coverage''--do you remember, this was the whole basis for government-mandated health care: Everybody is going to be covered. Well, when all is said and done, ObamaCare will, according to the Congressional Budget Office, leave upwards of 30 million people without health care coverage in 2023. After witnessing a tidal wave of disruptions and hardships caused by his signature legislative accomplishments, what is President Obama's response? His response is to either minimize the political damage, to kick the news past the November election, to delay the employer mandates, to refuse to enforce other provisions of the law, and to waive the law which has no clear means for waiver. So basically, it is to refuse to enforce the law, to get it past the election. Let's cut the bleeding, politically speaking. Earlier this month, for the second time since July, the administration announced they would unilaterally delay enforcement of the employer mandate. Of course, the President--like so much of what he does these days--has no clear legal authority to do that, but our colleagues across the aisle do not seem to care as long as they kick it past the election because they are worried about the accountability that comes with this false promise made to sell ObamaCare. Americans want the same type of health care reforms that they wanted back in 2009. There are plenty of alternatives, sensible patient- centered reforms that will actually bring down the cost. You know, if you want people to buy more of something, you reduce the cost. You do not raise the cost. That creates just the opposite problem. We also know there are alternatives to expand quality insurance coverage and improve access to quality care. I might just add--since I know the Senator from North Carolina has been patiently sitting there to speak on a different topic--that he and Senator Hatch and Senator Coburn have offered what has widely been heralded as a very sensible alternative approach to ObamaCare that avoids the problems and reduces the costs, and it does not interfere with patient choice. We know ObamaCare promised these results, but it failed to deliver. In response, we have many different alternative ideas that increase patient choice, increase transparency, and increase provider competition, all of which is designed to produce for consumers lower cost, wider coverage, and better quality care. I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to be recognized following the remarks of the Senator from Washington.

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, would the Senator yield for a unanimous consent request?

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Corker). Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Corker) would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Isakson), the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski), the Senator from Idaho (Mr. Risch), and the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, as everyone knows, last year our friends on the other side of the aisle invoked the so-called nuclear option. The stated reason was to strip the minority of any ability to stop any executive or judicial nominees on the floor. But, in fact, prior to the President's attempt to fill up the DC Circuit Court with judges they didn't need, the Senate actually had a very good record of confirming the President's judicial nominees, 215 to 2. Now the majority leader would like to short-circuit the process which was put in place as a result of the nuclear option and seek to get confirmation of these judicial nominees by unanimous consent. My hope would be that the majority leader would choose to reverse the partisan rules change so we can go back to the bipartisan cooperative process which resulted in more than 200 Obama judges being confirmed. Absent that, I object.

Mr. CORNYN

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

Mr. CORNYN

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

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Chambliss) and the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn). The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Coons.) Are there any other Senators in the Chamber desiring to vote?

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necesarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) and the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn).

Mr. CORNYN

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

Mr. CORNYN

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

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, we have reached a historic moment in the history of our Republic when the President of the United States claims the unilateral power to waive, delay, or just simply ignore the law of the land. One of the most frequent questions I get back home in Texas is, How can the President do that? How can he do that? They remember when he was sworn in and put his hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States, and now how can he simply ignore what those laws are? How can that contradiction exist? Usually what I find myself doing is saying: Well, Congress has the authority to pass the laws, and it is the executive branch--the President--that has the authority to enforce the law. That is why he has the authority to appoint the head of the Department of Justice, the Attorney General of the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder. But when the President and, by extension, his own Department of Justice refuse to enforce the law of the land, what have we become? Well, we certainly cannot claim in good conscience to believe in the rule of law, where the law applies to all of us no matter whether you are the President of the United States or you are the most humble of our citizens. That is the promise over the top of the Supreme Court of the United States. All you have to do is look out the window here. It says: Equal Justice Under The Law. Quite simply, the President has no legal authority under our Constitution or under any law in America to pick and choose which laws he is going to enforce or not enforce based on political expediency. And the fact that he claimed to do so again, for perhaps the two- dozenth time, does not change anything. So my constituents at home ask me--they say: Well, Senator Cornyn, what are you going to do about it? I said: Well, I am going to support private litigation to challenge the President. Indeed, that is the nature of the litigation that originally challenged the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare. There was private litigation that challenged the President's claimed authority to make a recess appointment and bypass the advice and consent function in the Constitution for the Congress to the National Labor Relations Board, which has now been held unconstitutional by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, and now the Supreme Court of the United States is considering an appeal from that court. So there is a way to challenge the President, although it takes time and it is not exactly very satisfying because people say: Well, months, if not years, will go by before we will ultimately get a decision. But just think about the implications of what the President is doing. How would our Democratic friends feel if a Republican President decided not to enforce certain laws--let's say as they pertained to the environment? They would be outraged. You know what. They would be right; it is wrong. I do not care whether you are a Democratic President or you are a Republican President or an Independent or whatever. It is wrong for the President to put his hand on the Bible, to take an oath to uphold the law of the land and then refuse to do so and to have no embarrassment, no sense of regret, but just the hubris and the arrogance to say: I am going to do it until somebody stops me. I have said it before, and I will say it again. The issues here go far beyond the health care policy and ObamaCare. Checks and balances are not optional. They are the very fundamental structure of our Constitution. James Madison and the authors of the Federalist Papers, who wrote so eloquently about the new Constitution, at the time said that the concentration of power in a single branch of government is the very definition of tyranny. If the Obama administration continues to undermine checks and balances, it will not only undermine respect for the rule of law but also will create even greater distrust of the Federal Government and Congress itself, not to mention the office of the Presidency. Make no mistake. We all understand why the President is going down this path. It is because ObamaCare has proved to be even more unworkable than its biggest critics might have imagined. The entire law needs--well, we need a do over. Let me put it that way. This side of the aisle has repeatedly encouraged the President and his allies to work with us to try to replace ObamaCare with patient-centered reforms which would bring down the cost and make sure that we as patients and our families get to make decisions in consultation with our family, and not outsource those to the Federal Government. We could come up with some ideas, and we actually have ideas that would lower costs, expand coverage, and improve access to care. Unfortunately, the President has shown zero intention in addressing those. I know I heard him say, even at the latest State of the Union: If my Republican friends have some good ideas, bring them to me. We have been bringing them to him since 2009 and he simply has ignored or affirmatively rejected any other idea because he is so wed to this signature piece of legislation. I cannot help but think that one reason why the President claimed the authority to unilaterally waive the employer mandates until after the election is because he is focused on--you guessed it--the November elections, and he realizes what an albatross this is around the necks of those people who are going to be going to the voters and asking for them to reelect them. But if he is wondering why Americans have grown so cynical about Washington, DC, all he needs to do is to look at his own administration's handling of this signature piece of legislation, a program that has come to symbolize big government overreach, and--I hate to say it, but it is true--contempt for the rule of law. I want to say just a few more words in conclusion about America's fiscal health. As you know, Members of Congress have once again been asked to raise the debt ceiling, even though the national debt is in excess of $17 trillion. The President likes to boast about short-term deficit reduction. That is the difference between what the government brings in on an annual basis and what it spends. It is true that on an annual basis the last couple of years the number has gone down a little bit, primarily because the President raised taxes by $1.7 trillion, coupled together with the caps on discretionary spending in the Budget Control Act. But the long-term trajectory remains just as bad as it ever was, and America continues to spend money that it does not have. We are waiting for the President. He is the Commander in Chief. He is the leader of the free world. We are waiting for the President to put out a serious plan to address this problem. Many of us held out hope in December 2010 when the Simpson-Bowles bipartisan fiscal commission got together and made some bipartisan recommendations for doing exactly that. Unfortunately, they were ignored by the President. He demanded, in exchange for the so-called ``grand bargain'' that he wanted $1 trillion more in revenue, more taxes. Imagine what a body slam that would have been to the American economy. The American economy is still so weak that unemployment is at a historic high, particularly compared to recoveries following recessions. But $1 trillion of additional taxes would have been catastrophic in terms of people looking for work and not being able to find work. But since the President took office in 2009, our national debt has increased by $6.6 trillion. It is now larger than our entire economy. I wonder who the President thinks will have to pay that back. Probably not our generation; we will not be around. But this generation will be around. They will be left holding the bag as a result of our irresponsibility and unwillingness to deal with this important problem. Even though interest rates are at a very low point now, and, yes, the interest we have to pay the Chinese government and our other creditors is at a relatively low rate, imagine what will happen, as the Congressional Budget Office has, when interest rates start to tick back up to their historic norms. We will see that more and more of the tax dollars of the American people are used to pay interest on the debt. Whether you are concerned about safety net programs that our most vulnerable citizens need or our national security, we will not be able to do either the way we want to and need to. According to the CBO's baseline projections, the annual deficit will steadily rise after 2015 and exceed $1 trillion in 2022, at which time the Federal Government will be spending $755 billion a year on net interest payments alone. To put that in another perspective, net interest payments in 2014 are estimated to be $233 billion. That is not money that helps the most vulnerable in our society. That is not money that helps the warfighter keep us safe. That is money we are paying on the debt to our creditors, to the Chinese and other creditor nations as interest for all of this money we are borrowing that eventually somebody some day is going to have to pay back. The Congressional Budget Office has consistently reminded us that even a small change in U.S. economic growth or interest rates or inflation could dramatically affect the Federal budget outlook. In fact, if interest rates were to rise just 1 percentage point above the CBO baseline each year over the next decade, our cumulative deficit will increase by $1.5 trillion. That shows you how fragile the condition of our fiscal house is. On multiple occasions back in the mid 1990s, this Chamber came within one vote--one vote--of passing a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Since the vote in March of 1997, our national debt has gone from $5.3 trillion to $17.2 trillion. It has more than tripled. Yet even as the debt problem has gotten massively worse, the number of folks on the other side of the aisle who are willing to acknowledge that we cannot continue to spend money that we do not have and that the debt is a threat to our national security and our ability to do the things we know we want to do and need to do, continue to seem to ignore it. I am proud to say that everyone on this side of the aisle has cosponsored a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution that would force Washington, whether led by Democrats or Republicans--it would force Washington to live within our means and meet the same type of fiscal requirements that virtually all State governments have to meet. To those who think that a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is not the answer, I ask: Where is your plan? I realize that there are some who think that we can raise taxes. Let's raise taxes some more. But even they must understand that we simply cannot tax away our long-term debt problem. The only way we can solve that is by controlling our spending and reforming our programs like Social Security and Medicare. Sooner or later, even the President will have to acknowledge that. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I will be brief, but I just wanted to commend the Senators from Arizona, Kansas, and my friend and colleague from Utah, Senator Hatch, for their comments and for their support for getting the IRS out of the speech police business. As if the IRS doesn't have its hands full already with the addition of the implementation of ObamaCare, on top of all of its other problems. I don't know anybody who thinks they need more to do, particularly when it comes to discriminating against people based upon their political affiliations and their desire to engage in debate and advocate their views in the arena. This is a politically neutral issue because we know this legislation will protect people on the left as much as on the right. I have to agree with my colleagues that it appears there has been a disproportionate amount of attention given to people on the right under this administration. I know my colleague from Arizona has heard of Catherine Engelbrecht of Houston, TX, with the King Street Patriots and True the Vote. She founded two organizations dedicated to improving elections and furthering the ideals of our Founding Fathers. She led a coalition of citizen volunteers to work as election monitors who provide resources for voter registration and to root out election fraud. One would think those would be commendable actions, not a reason for government discrimination and investigation. But for 3 years the IRS denied her organization tax-exempt status while comparable organizations--as I think the Senator from Arizona pointed out--had received expedited or fairly routine treatment. In the meantime, she was subjected to over-the-top inquiries by the IRS and even by the ATF and other government organizations. The IRS wanted to subpoena every one of her tweets on her Twitter account as well as entries made on her Facebook account. You can't make up this stuff. It is extraordinarily offensive. What these proposed rules are going to do is to institutionalize the role of the IRS as the speech police, something we ought to avoid like the plague. We ought to make sure people of all ideological and political affiliations are free to engage in their constitutional rights of association and of political speech. I wish to point out, in conclusion, that 60 years ago the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a very important decision. It is called the NAACP v. Alabama. The question there was whether the government could compel the disclosure of the membership list of the NAACP when the NAACP felt its members would then be targeted by the government in a negative sort of way. The Supreme Court said the Constitution of the United States and the First Amendment guarantees the right of free association in addition to a right of free speech and that was constitutionally protected activity. Given the importance of that right under the Constitution and also given the likelihood of negative attention by the government, they said the NAACP could keep its membership list confidential. So at a time when the American people have taxes on their minds--I know my wife and I have a deadline in our family that by the end of February we like to get everything to the people who help us prepare our tax returns--and with a midterm election looming, the last thing we need to do is to support the IRS becoming the speech police and suppressing the constitutionally protected rights of the American people. I would particularly say to my friend from Arizona that I pulled out a Gallup poll report, dated January 15, 2014, where government was cited as the top problem. That report shows that 21 percent of people in the poll said they were dissatisfied with the government, Congress, politicians, poor leadership, corruption, and abuse of power. What greater abuse of power could there be than to confer upon the IRS the legitimacy to intimidate and suppress people exercising their constitutionally protected rights of free speech. So I commend the Senator from Arizona and others who are working on this. They can count on me to lend my voice and support to their efforts.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Corker), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. Johnson), and the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio).

Mr. CORNYN

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

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran) and the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Roberts).

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran) and the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Roberts).

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, yesterday the Congressional Budget Office reported--and it continues to be the buzz about town--the latest report known as the long-term outlook. Of course, we know from the news that its report on the Affordable Care Act is absolutely devastating. According to the Congressional Budget Office, ObamaCare will reduce full-time employment by 2 million workers in the year 2017 and 2.5 million by the year 2024. The reason for that is pretty clear. With the employer mandate and the additional cost associated with ObamaCare, many employers will simply put people from full-time work onto part- time work in order to avoid the employer mandate and those penalties and additional costs. We human beings are enormously sensitive to incentives--both positive and negative--and this is predictable, and it is tragic. The Congressional Budget Office says: The reduction will almost entirely be a reduction in labor force participation and in the number of hours worked. In other words, this was a piece of legislation that we were told would enormously benefit, not only individual Americans by getting them access to care, but the President said it would benefit the economy as a whole. The sad truth is it is hurting the economy and hurting the very people whom I presume the President wanted to help. I heard Representative Ryan on the news talk about this as a poverty trap. Of course, many of the folks who supported the Affordable Care Act--and I am thinking about organized labor--have petitioned the President and his allies and said: This is turning into a nightmare for us. This is one of the things they mentioned--people are being moved from full-time work to part-time work. I might just add, the answer is not to say: We are just going to order an increase of 40 percent in the minimum wage. In other words, you can see that moving people from 40 hours a week to 30 hours a week--perhaps there will be some people who say we will compensate for that. We will order businesses to pay at least $10.10 an hour, when simple common sense tells us that many of the people, again, whom we are trying to help, are the ones who will be hurt the most with high unemployment among minorities and teenagers. What is a small business going to do when the government orders them to pay $10.10 an hour without regard to the markets or economics? They are going to hire fewer people or perhaps go out of business. This sort of micromanagement and attempts to compensate for the effects of ObamaCare will make things worse, not better. Needless to say, if the advocates of the Affordable Care Act had understood back in 2009 and 2010 what the facts would turn out to be today, then ObamaCare never would have passed. Millions of Americans said they liked the coverage they already had. I think the poll numbers I have seen showed between 88 percent to 90 percent of the people said: We like what we have. We would like it to be more affordable, but we like the coverage we have. If these people knew they were going to have their coverage canceled because it failed to meet the mandates of ObamaCare, ObamaCare never would have passed. The people who liked the coverage they had would still be paying lower premiums than they are being charged in the exchanges under ObamaCare, not to mention the huge deductibles. Families are now being asked to essentially self-insure up to $5,000 for their deductible. They can say you get the tax subsidy and you have better coverage beyond that, but you still have a $5,000 deductible, and those are the first dollars that come out of consumers' pockets. You might as well be self-insured but for catastrophic health care needs. Of course, there is a much cheaper way for people to buy that kind of coverage. We also know an untold number of Americans would have access to at least 40 hours of work, which is not the case, sadly. Under ObamaCare-- and we now know because of the projections of the Congressional Budget Office--things will continue to get worse. The President's health care law has become a genuine public policy disaster. By the way, even the Congressional Budget Office said at least 30 million people will still be uninsured even if ObamaCare was implemented exactly as advertised. So not even that addresses what I always thought was the main reason for ObamaCare; that is, to cover more people. ObamaCare is reducing full-time employment at a time when the percentage of people participating in job seeking--the workforce--is at a historic low. Many people have given up. They just quit looking, and they get dropped out of the unemployment statistic. So when the number comes down--and we actually think maybe we are doing better and maybe the economy is stronger. We found out, for example, in December alone that 345,000 people quit looking for jobs. They quit. They got worn out. They gave up because they have been looking for so long and the jobs just are not there. To be clear, the question in 2009 and 2010 was not whether we would expand health coverage but how we would do it. ObamaCare represented one option, and it is obviously the one our Democratic colleagues chose to adopt on a party-line vote. Despite what the President suggested, yet again, in his State of the Union Message, there are a lot of options out there, so it is not ObamaCare or nothing, which is what is so often mentioned. I hear some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle say: We have to have ObamaCare because only then can we cover people with preexisting conditions. That is poppycock. It is not true. We can do it cheaper and more effectively by other alternatives. We hear people say: The only way young people can be covered up to age 26 is under their family's health care with ObamaCare. That is poppycock too. It is just not true. To suggest that you have to basically have the whole enchilada--you have to buy all of ObamaCare, which is trillions of dollars, along with all of its negative consequences--in order to address these health care concerns is false. It is not true. If I heard the President say this one time, I heard him say it 1,000 times. He said: If critics of ObamaCare have a better idea, just bring it to me. I would like to respectfully suggest that the President has a tin ear when it comes to alternatives and he is not listening. One of the latest proposals came out of three of our best experts on the Republican side on the health care issue: Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking member of the Finance Committee, Senator Richard Burr, and Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. They released a comprehensive blueprint for what our alternative might look like. At some point there has to be a resolution because policies are being canceled. The costs for people with coverage are going up, and it is hurting the economy. It is turning full-time work into part-time work. At some point--I don't know when it is. Maybe it will be sometime after the November election. I am just guessing. At some point we will have to confront this reality and deal with it in order to protect our constituents, the people we are privileged to represent. The alternative to the government's takeover and the President's command and control--one-sixth of our economy--under ObamaCare is that the government gets to choose, and under our alternative you get to choose. I wish to highlight a few more of the findings in the Congressional Budget Office report. Last March the President told ABC News that ``for the next 10 years [America's national debt] is going to be in a sustainable place.'' I am afraid the President is falling in a trap because we are living in a surreal time when interest rates are so low because of what the Federal Reserve is doing that, yes, the interest we have to pay on our debt is not as much as it would be if it went back up to historical norms--4 or 5 percent. By the way, somebody is going to have to pay that back someday. These young people who are sitting here and listening will be the ones left holding the bag, as well as people such as my two daughters who are working in Austin, TX. Somebody is going to have to pay that money back. For the President to say our debt is sustainable for the next 10 years ignores the fact that we have a moral obligation to deal with it today so as not to dampen the aspiration of these young people by saddling them with a bunch of debt they didn't charge up. The fact is our debt is highly contingent on three factors: the economic growth of our economy--how fast our economy is growing; inflation is the second one; and interest rates, which I alluded to. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if America's real economic growth rate were just one-tenth of a percentage lower than it projects currently each year over the next decade, our cumulative debt--the annual difference between what we collect in taxes and what the Federal Government spends over the next 10 years--would go up by $311 billion. That is with a ``b.'' Likewise, if annual inflation was 1 percentage point above what the Congressional Budget Office projects, our cumulative deficit--in other words, the difference between what we bring in, in tax dollars and what the Federal Government spends projected over 10 years--would be $762 billion higher. That is just inflation. Just minor changes in the growth rate or in inflation can have dramatic consequences in terms of the debt. Yes, you don't have to just pay the principle back, you have to pay the interest on that debt. As I said, interest rates are at historic lows because of the quantitative so-called easing that the Federal Reserve is doing-- churning out dollars. Of course it has been a boon to the stock market and the top 1 percent of our economy. Working people are finding their wages have been stagnant for the last 5 years. If interest rates were to rise 1 percentage point above the current Congressional Budget Office baseline each year, our cumulative deficits or our debt would go up $1.5 trillion--that is with a ``t'', not a ``b''--$1.5 trillion. So these numbers confirm that despite the short-term deficit reduction produced by the Budget Control Act--we have seen some bending of the spending curve under the Budget Control Act; and, of course, those caps have been lifted as a result of the budget negotiations between Senator Murray and Congressman Ryan--America is still dangerously vulnerable to a fiscal shock. We experienced one of those back in 2008, and we are still vulnerable to a fiscal shock, if things change in terms of growth, inflation, and interest rates. Any one of those could have a dramatic impact, making things much more difficult and much worse. To quote the Congressional Budget Office once again: Over the next decade, debt held by the public will be significantly greater relative to GDP than at any time since just after World War II. Coming out of a world war, we can understand why the debt was high, but debt held by the public will be significantly greater relative to the economy than at any time since that time, and we haven't had a comparable world war that would justify this huge runup of debt. They went on to say: With debt so large, Federal spending on interest payments alone will increase substantially as interest rates rise to more typical levels. I mentioned that. Going on, they say: Moreover, because Federal borrowing generally reduces national savings, the capital stock and wages will be smaller than if the debt was lower. That is what they call the ``crowding out effect.'' So if the Federal Government is borrowing all of this money, it makes it harder and more expensive for the private sector to do the borrowing they need, and there is a crowding-out effect and a depressing effect on economic growth. America's massive debt is already hurting our economy. It is exacerbating the already difficult situation that people are experiencing when they are looking for work and they can't find work, and the problem will get worse, not better, as time goes by because we have seen the difference inflation, growth, and interest rates can have, which can allow this to spiral out of control. That doesn't even address the other concerns many of us have about the unsustainability of Medicare and Social Security. These are sacred promises we made to our seniors; that those programs would be there for them once they reach a qualifying age, and they will not be, on the current track. These young people, I doubt any of them believe Social Security or Medicare will be there for them. We have a way to deal with that today if we will simply take advantage of that opportunity. I wish to note that every single Member of the Republican caucus has cosponsored a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. I hear it from Members of my own party who have said: You guys weren't all that great when you were in charge; you guys spent money we didn't have, and that is true. We were pikers by comparison, because back in 1997, the debt was $5.3 trillion--$5.3 trillion in 1997. That was the last time we had a vote in the Senate on a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, and we came within one vote of passing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. But today the debt is $17 trillion- plus--$17.2 trillion. The President says our debt is on a sustainable path. It is not true. It is whistling past the graveyard and it is endangering our prosperity and our opportunity, not only for the younger generation but for people today who want to find work and want to provide for their families and pursue their version of the American dream. We can't defy the laws of fiscal gravity forever, and we can't expect to keep piling up debt without damaging our economy. I expect next week Senator Sanders of Vermont will bring a bill to the floor ostensibly to help our veterans--something we all support-- but which is unpaid for and would add roughly $25 billion--at least $25 billion--to the national debt. We just can't keep doing this day after day after day without enormous risk. I see my colleague from New Hampshire on the floor, so I will close with this thought: Here are the sad facts since President Obama took office in January of 2009--admittedly coming off of a fiscal crisis at a very bad place for our economy. This is his record over the last 5 years: The number of long-term unemployed has increased by close to 1.2 million people--increased--and the labor force participation rate I mentioned a moment ago has fallen by 2.9 percent. There are 2.9 percent fewer Americans actually looking for work today than there were in January of 2009. Here is another sad statistic: Since January 2009, the average amount of time the unemployed have been without a job has nearly doubled. People have doubled the time they have been out of work, looking for work, since January 2009, rising from 19.8 weeks to 37 weeks. The number of people on food stamps has increased by 48.3 percent, reaching 37.4 million people in October. In 2008, the total cost of the Food Stamp Program--something we all support as a safety net program for the most vulnerable--but we spent $37 billion in 2008, and now it has more than doubled to almost $80 billion. This is under President Obama's 5 years in office. The number of people receiving Social Security disability has increased from 7.4 million people to 8.9 million. Meanwhile, the total number of Social Security disability beneficiaries, including spouses and children of disabled workers receiving benefits, has increased from 9.3 million to roughly 11 million. This is not the way it is supposed to be. I know everyone who is out of a job wants a job and the dignity and the self-respect that comes with it. Certainly we need to protect people who are at risk of falling through the safety net, but more than anything we need to give them the opportunity to get back to work and to provide for their family, put food on the table. We can't be content with the status quo, with huge amounts of money being spent on disability, huge amounts of money being spent on food stamps, and huge amounts of money being paid to people who can't even find a job. We have to get our economy growing again so these folks can lift themselves up and get back in the workforce and provide for their families and pursue their dreams. I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Scott).