John Cornyn

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, once again, the President of the United States has failed to meet the statutory deadline to propose a budget. In fact, he has missed the deadline so many times that people hardly notice anymore. Failure seems to become the rule, not the exception. The President has now missed the budget deadline five times since he took office in 2009. By comparison, his three White House predecessors missed the deadline a total of four times in 20 years. Five times under President Obama; four times in the last 20 years under his three immediate predecessors. All totaled, it is now the 18th time that the Obama administration has missed a legal deadline related to the Federal budget. I guess the President and his administration consider the law purely an advisory matter not binding on them. The law is for other people, not for this President and for his administration, seems to be their attitude. The reason this is so important is because, as we all know--whether it a family budget or a budget for your business--setting a budget is where you establish your priorities: the things you have to have, the things you would like to have but maybe need to put off, and then those things you really cannot afford. That is how you budget. That is why it is so important. But if your budget includes massive amounts of new spending, along with firm opposition to major reforms, you would have no choice but to ask for a huge tax increase. The President, I do not think, wants to put himself on record again, like he did last year, for another huge tax increase, nor does he want his party's members, who are running for election in 2014, to have to cast the hard vote on the President's own budget. Last year, his 2014 budget proposal would have raised taxes by roughly $1 trillion--a trillion-dollar tax increase. That is on top of the $1.7 trillion that taxes have gone up during the last 5 years under this administration. It looks as if the President's priorities are more taxes, more spending, and more debt. But if those sorts of priorities led to robust economic growth and job creation, we would see one of the strongest economic recoveries in American history. But the truth is more taxes, more spending, and more debt are not a recipe for economic growth and job creation--just the opposite. We are seeing the evidence of that right now. We are suffering through the weakest economic recovery since the great recession in modern history. Actually, we are seeing the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression right now. There are a lot of reasons, but the Congressional Budget Office has given us some reasons that I want to talk about just briefly. They talk about ObamaCare and its impact on job growth and economic growth. As a matter of fact, the Affordable Care Act, the President's signature legislative accomplishment--the Congressional Budget Office said the number of full-time workers will go down by 2 million in the coming years as a result of the Affordable Care Act. So in addition to people getting cancelled policies or sticker shock and finding out that their health care costs did not go down, they went up, or finding if you like your doctors you cannot keep them, what we are finding is that these same people may find themselves out of work as a result of the policies in the Affordable Care Act. The Congressional Budget Office looked primarily at how employers would respond to a new penalty for failing to offer insurance to employees who worked more than 30 hours. That response would include cutting people's hours, hiring fewer workers, and lowering wages for new jobs. I know my friends on the other side of the aisle agree with the President when he said we ought to raise the minimum wage. Well, one of the problems is the President's own health care policy that they all voted for is killing full-time work and putting people in part-time work, meaning that their weekly wages have been depressed. For them the answer is not to deal with the source of that problem, which is ObamaCare, but to fix wages at 40 percent higher than they currently are per hour, which we know--economists tell us and it is intuitively true--is going to put more people out of work, put more pressure on workers. Perhaps one of the most distressing things about the Congressional Budget Office's report today is what they said, what the prospects look like for the President's remaining term in office. The Congressional Budget Office does not see unemployment falling below 6 percent for the rest of President Obama's term--6 percent for the remainder of his term. Yet, despite all of this, the President still will not get behind genuine progrowth reforms. He will not support genuine reforms of our existing programs such as Medicare and Social Security that would actually save them and put them on a fiscally sustainable path. He has no plan for controlling our national debt. I went back and looked. Last time Congress came within one vote of passing a balanced budget amendment, do you know what the national debt was then? It was $4.85 trillion. Do you know what it is today? It is in excess of $17 trillion, with no end in sight. So the truth is Republicans have put forward ideas for streamlining Federal regulations, for mitigating the negative effects of the Affordable Care Act and for replacing ObamaCare with patient-centered reforms that would cut costs, broaden quality insurance coverage, and improve patient access. But so far, the majority leader and the President have shown zero interest in trying to work with Republicans to solve our Nation's most serious economic challenges, which are having a direct impact on the American people. Instead, the President said he is going to go it alone. He has a pen; he has a phone. But as I have suggested before, one of the things he could do that would put Americans back to work almost immediately and make us more North American energy-independent would be to sign the Keystone XL Pipeline. I know my time is expired. I ask unanimous consent that the three articles I was referring to on the CBO report be printed in the Record.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey) and the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Vitter).

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, earlier this month the Quinnipiac poll asked voters what the top priority they had for President Obama and Members of Congress in 2014: 18 percent said health care; 16 percent said jobs and unemployment; 15 percent said the economy in general. By comparison, only 1 percent of the voters said income inequality. In other words, 99 percent of the voters in this Quinnipiac poll felt that income inequality should not be our top priority and that, rather, they would like for us to focus on not only the symptoms of the problems but the root causes: how do we get people back to work; how do we increase upward income mobility, letting people climb that ladder of success so they can pursue their own American dream. Yet the most significant economic proposal President Obama mentioned in his State of the Union was aimed not at fixing our health care system, creating jobs or boosting growth but, rather, at this idea of reducing income inequality. The American people are pretty darn smart, and they understand that we need to grow the size of the pie, not only cut up the pie into different pieces. The best way to do that is by guaranteeing that people have the opportunity to pursue their dreams, not some socialistic notion of let's slice up the pie in Washington, DC. No one does better under that kind of system. But I also mentioned the President's--apparently--signature proposal for addressing income inequality; that is, by raising the minimum wage. I heard my friend from Maryland talking about the minimum wage as if Washington can wave a magic wand and say: You, Mr. Employer, you, Madam Employer, are now going to start paying your employees 40 percent more than you did yesterday because the big bad Federal Government orders you to do so. They act as if that would have no other consequences or costs. As I mentioned yesterday, there are studies that have been done that indicate that if we raise the minimum wage to $10.10, for which the President has argued, it could well dislocate as many as several hundred thousand people from their existing jobs. Let's think about this for a minute. A small employer has a business--let's say they have a fast food restaurant; I have hundreds of them, maybe thousands of them in my State--and the employer is worried about bringing money in the front door from selling their product, selling the food at their fast food restaurant, they know they are going to have certain expenses. Some of that is the materials or food they put together. Some of it is their overhead such as electricity and energy, but a significant part of that is going to be the cost of labor, paying people to work there. If we automatically tell that small employer, that fast food restaurant, instead of $7 an hour, they now have to pay 40 percent more, what is that going to do to their ability to not only hire and grow their business but to maintain their current level of employment? Perhaps there is a reason the President has counterintuitively decided to come up with some sort of feel good quick patch such as the minimum wage, which would actually make things worse. Perhaps he has decided to focus on this because maybe he is feeling a little bit guilty about his record over the past 4 to 5 years. According to the New York Times--hardly a bastion of conservative propaganda--the trend of rising inequality ``appears to have accelerated during the Obama administration.'' The President--and I will get to this in a moment--appeared to concede that much in his State of the Union speech. In fact, one measure of the income gap suggests the inequality of wages has increased four times faster under President Obama than it did under the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush. The best thing we could do to support upward mobility is not to address the symptom of lower wages but to address the root cause, expand the economy, jobs, and to give people the tools they need to qualify for good, high-paying jobs for which they don't have the job skills currently. We know a lot of our community colleges, such as the one I visited last week in Houston, San Jacinto College, does a very good job of training people for the skills they need in order to qualify for good, high-paying jobs. That is where we ought to focus our government, not by the Federal Government trying to fix prices when it comes to wages and actually end up making things worse. Unfortunately, the President seems incapable of embracing an economic strategy that doesn't involve more government, particularly more government spending and more government control over the private sector. My constituents in Texas tell me one reason they are feeling uncertain about the future and the economy, particularly if they are a business owner, is they don't know what kind of new taxes, they don't know what kind of new regulation, and they don't know what financial burden, such as ObamaCare, will be thrust down on them that will totally change their business model and cause them to go bankrupt-- perhaps because they hadn't counted on what the Federal Government might do to them, as opposed to the market. But we have tried the President's approach: big government, spending, stimulus spending, and the like. That is a big reason why we are suffering through the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression and the highest and longest period of high unemployment since that same time. Even when the President seems to be supporting a fresh approach, he is actually selling old ideas in a new package. I remember the President talking, for example, about tax reform. He called for abolishing loopholes in the Tax Code and simultaneously lowering the marginal rates. That sounds pretty good. I would support that, and I believe we could get strong bipartisan support for that kind of tax reform--lower the rates, cut out a lot of the underbrush, the tax expenditures. They are much like the President's own bipartisan fiscal and debt commission, the Simpson-Bowles commission, recommended in December of 2010. But what did the President do when his own bipartisan fiscal commission reported to him a bipartisan plan to deal with the debt and to get the economy moving again? He ignored it. He walked away from it. Unfortunately, the President, when he talks about tax reform, is actually talking about a way to raise taxes, to raise revenue. This is what I mean by that. He talks about tax reform as a vehicle for a tax increase, even though he has already raised the taxes of hardworking American families by $1.7 trillion while he has been President. But the American people are plenty smart and they can figure out if the President is going to eliminate their deductions and tax credits and the like that he is going to have to bring down their rate or else it will actually be a tax increase. There is another good reason why we need to do the kind of tax reform I am talking about, and that occasionally the President talks about when he is talking about progrowth tax reform, and that is to make it revenue neutral, to bring down the rates, which will encourage people to invest and create jobs because they know the incentives will be there for them. They will be able to reap the fruits of their labor and of their risk. That is the kind of tax reform both political parties supported back in 1986 and the kind of tax reform we need to do again. Sadly, the President and the majority leader have chosen to hijack this wonderful idea of tax reform while demanding another $1 trillion tax increase. Meanwhile, the President wants to use the Tax Code to pick winners and losers by discriminating against certain industries and increasing government subsidies to others. I heard him talk about the oil and gas industry again. This is actually one of the brightest sectors of the economy. But the President wants to take the goose that laid the golden egg and burden it with additional regulations and taxes. Truth be known, 80 percent of the tax benefits that flow to the energy sector flow to the so-called green energy sector--many of which I think are important--but we have to be realistic. We are actually writing them a check as opposed to the millions and millions--and literally hundreds of millions of dollars--of tax revenue generated from the oil and gas industry. If there is one sector of the energy economy that is creating more jobs and opportunity and provides more chance for us to reduce our imports from dangerous parts of the world, it is our domestic energy sector. But the President wants to raise their taxes. The President acknowledged on Tuesday night that what has happened during the 5-year term of his Presidency is that average wages have barely budged, inequality has deepened, and upward mobility has stalled. In other words, he agrees with the assessment of The New York Times. The problem is the solution to that condition would actually make things worse and not better. So I actually agree with the President's assessment: During his 5 years as President, average wages have barely budged, inequality has deepened, and upward mobility has stalled. So why in the world would we want to add another $1 trillion tax burden on our economy and on the productive sector of our economy at a time when average wages have barely budged, inequality has deepened and upward mobility has stalled? Why in the world would we jeopardize the renaissance in American oil and gas production, which represents one of our few economic bright spots? Why in the world would the President continue to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline from Canada, which would create thousands of well- paying jobs? You will notice, by the way, Madam President, that President Obama said nothing--zero, zip, nada--about the Keystone XL Pipeline in his State of the Union. It really is just mind-boggling. I would like to close by noting something the President said about health care, and this is another interesting aspect of his State of the Union speech. It was about 40 minutes into his speech before he even mentioned health care, when that is the big, looming, 800-pound gorilla in the room. People are anxious about this rollout of ObamaCare--first the Web site, then the cancellations, and then the sticker shock. People are worried about it. But the President waited 40 minutes into his State of the Union speech before even addressing it. But here is what the President said to congressional Republicans. He said: If you have specific plans to cut costs, cover more people, and increase choice, tell America what you would do differently. The problem is we have been telling the President since 2009, but he has refused to listen. He has refused to listen, and he is still refusing to listen. The President went on to say that Republicans owe it to the American people to say what they are for, not just what they are against. I agree with the President, and we have, and continue to do so, but he continues not to listen. Republicans have been offering health care alternatives for at least the last 5 years, most recently just earlier this week when three of my colleagues: Senator Hatch, Senator Burr, and Senator Coburn introduced a health reform blueprint that would reduce costs, expand quality insurance coverage, and improve patient access to doctors and hospitals. If President Obama wasn't aware of this, then perhaps he needs to spend a little more time outside the White House and the Democratic echo chamber and actually engage with Members of this side of the aisle in serious discussions. It is really easy to knock down a straw man, but only when it is not true. Given all the massive problems with the implementation of ObamaCare--not just with the Web site, not just with the cancellations, not just with the sticker shock or the fact you can't keep your doctors if you like them--and along with all of the massive problems still plaguing our economy and stalling wages, it is time for the President to show some real leadership. The way he could show that leadership is simply to get in a room with Members of the opposing party and to say: Let's figure this out. This plan or this blueprint that Senators Coburn, Burr, and Hatch have introduced is just one of dozens of ideas that would actually bring down the cost of health insurance, which would make it more affordable, and that means more people could buy it and more people would get covered. But the difference between our approach and the President's approach under ObamaCare is that under ObamaCare the government gets to choose, and under our alternatives individuals and families get to choose what is best for them. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, in 1991 the free world cheered as Ukraine and other former Soviet republics gained their independence. Unfortunately, Ukrainian democracy is now under siege, as peaceful antigovernment protests have been met with brutal violence. Over the past few years, reports of popular protests against oppressive regimes have become commonplace. Yet the frequency of such events does not obviate our moral responsibility to stand shoulder to shoulder with freedom-loving people around the world who seek to throw off unjust and despotic regimes in pursuit of liberty, democracy, and the rule of law. The United States has been a strong supporter of the Ukrainian people's efforts to create a strong nation, built on democratic and free market principles. Ukraine made a significant step toward achieving these goals when it adopted its first democratic constitution in 1996. But under the Yanukovych Administration, the basic liberties of the Ukrainian people have been trampled. Recent elections have fallen short of international standards, and the government has used the courts to neutralize opposition leaders, sending former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to prison for 7 years on trumped-up, politically motivated charges. Meanwhile, President Yanukovych continues to pursue closer ties with Russia, in spite of the Ukrainian people's clear preference for closer ties with Europe. In addition to the moral imperative we have to support basic human rights, the United States must also recognize that Ukraine--with a population of 45 million and a territory comparable in size to that of France--occupies a unique, sensitive, and strategically important position between Russia and our NATO allies Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. The future of Ukraine will be determined by what happens in the days ahead, and it will have a direct bearing on U.S. interests for years to come. On occasion, protesters have clashed with police, with reports of many injuries and several deaths. Although recent reports from Kiev indicated that protesters had seized the Ukrainian Justice Ministry, they voluntarily gave up the building to avoid creating difficulties in negotiations between the Ukrainian Government and the opposition. Opposition leaders have said they will continue pressing for democratic concessions, including free and fair elections and the abolition of sweeping new antiprotest laws. Their efforts to avoid violent confrontation should be encouraged, and their valid demands supported. It is imperative that the United States send an unequivocal message to the Ukrainian people that we support their efforts to restore democracy and the rule of law. At the same time, we must make clear to President Yanukovych that the only hope for a strong, peaceful, and independent Ukraine lies in building ties with Europe, the United States, and other freedom-loving countries around the world.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: The Senator from Indiana (Mr. Coats).

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, last night during the President's State of the Union speech, I felt as though I was watching another rerun of one of my favorite movies, ``Groundhog Day'' with Bill Murray. Of course, we all remember that movie. Bill Murray, the principal character, relives exactly the same 24 hours over and over and over again. Of course, that is what the President's State of the Union reminded me of, because what we heard is a replay of a lot of the ideas we have heard in previous State of the Union speeches. But, unfortunately, the President's speech and his claims in many respects did not reflect reality for most people. It is apparent the President has not changed in this respect. He still thinks slow economic growth and high unemployment, that the answer to that is more government spending and more government control over the economy. I would say in the debates we have had in this Chamber and elsewhere and that Americans have had throughout the course of our history since our country's founding about the size and the role of the Federal Government, usually we end up debating philosophy, ideology, and theory. But the last 5 years have given us the proof we need that big government does not work; not to deny that people do not have the best of intentions, but we know promise after promise has been made, whether it is for the trillion-dollar stimulus--what it would do to unemployment. The President later said, in a moment of candor: Well, I guess shovel ready was not all that shovel ready. Nancy Pelosi talked about timely, targeted, and temporary stimulus. Again, this was borrowed money. This is money we did not have which was added to our debt, which simply did not work. Then of course there is the example of ObamaCare. But let's just review. For the last 5 years, the President pushed through this trillion-dollar stimulus, a $1.8 trillion dollar health care law, a $1.7 trillion increase in new taxes, and about one- half trillion dollars in new regulations. That is what happens, for example, when I go home to Texas. My community bankers and credit unions say: We have hired new people, but the people we have hired are the ones to fill out the paperwork that is required by the new regulations that are the result of Dodd-Frank. This is another example of where Wall Street perhaps was the target but Main Street was the collateral damage. So all these new regulations have a cost to them because businesses, if they are going to be in business, are going to have to hire people to comply with those regulations, but that doesn't help grow the economy. That doesn't help make us more productive, and it doesn't put as many people back to work as we would hope would be going back to work in productive jobs. Let us consider some of the results of some of these items: the stimulus, the health care bill, the new regulations, and new taxes. Between 2009 and 2013, we have seen median household income fall by more than $2,500, so that is $2,500 less than an average family has to spend on everything from their food to their heating or air- conditioning bill--$2,500 less. Then we know that the labor participation rate--that is a fancy name for the percentage of people actually in the workforce--has fallen to a three-decade low. It has fallen by 3 percentage points since 2009, meaning that many fewer people are actually in the workforce looking for work. If they were still in the workforce looking for work, the employment rate would actually be much higher, but they aren't counted once they drop out of the workforce. Then we know that long-term unemployment has increased dramatically as a total share of unemployment. Of course, all of this happened after the recession was over. The technical definition of a recession, I believe, is two consecutive terms of negative economic growth. But amazingly a poll conducted only last week reflected that 74 percent of the respondents thought we were still in a recession. Whether it is a technical recession, people still feel as if we are in one. That is a remarkable number, an unfortunate but yet scathing indictment of the President's economic policies which have not delivered what he had hoped and had promised to deliver. What is the big idea that the President has to solve this problem or to address these concerns of average hard-working American families? The big idea is let's raise the minimum wage. Superficially, I admit raising the minimum wage has some appeal, but the fact is, when employers have to pay more for their workers, overall that is less money to hire new people. One study estimated that raising the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour--that is less than the $10.10 the President has proposed--would destroy no fewer than 468,000 jobs. Think about it. There is some money with which to hire people, but rather than hire more people, the government sets the wages, meaning they can't hire these other people. That is how it has an either/or effect in terms of jobs. One study calculated that raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour could potentially destroy as many as 2.3 million jobs. The President chose to ignore this reality last night in his speech. He was eloquent, as always, and gives a great speech. But he said once again--or reiterated once again--if he can't get what he wants from Congress, he is prepared to go it alone. Last night he said he was going to issue an executive order giving a 40-percent pay raise to Federal contractors, even though the White House cannot tell us how many workers would actually be affected because they don't know. But who will end up paying more? The Federal Government. We are talking about raising spending by the Federal Government by 40 percent for these Federal contractors. Somebody has to pay that money, so it is either going to be the taxpayers or it is going to be added to our deficits and debt. I don't want to be a wet blanket, so let me end on a more positive note, something we could actually do together that would actually make a difference on those long-term unemployed, on people stuck in jobs that are dead end or which they are frustrated with because they are not able to earn the income they want for their family and to live their dream. One of the debates we should have had earlier but for the majority leader denying us an opportunity to offer any amendments, debate, and vote on the unemployment insurance extension--but I believe we will see that again--is how could we help people learn the skills they need to qualify for the good, high-paying jobs that exist. But there is not enough trained workforce with the skills they need in order to pay for those good, high-paying jobs. We know there are a lot of workforce training initiatives. Our friend and colleague from Oklahoma tells us there are some 40 different worker training programs, and he has proposed they ought to be consolidated and perhaps streamlined so more of that money could be focused on giving people the education and the tools they need in order to qualify for these good jobs. I saw a glimpse of what could happen, and thankfully is happening back in Houston, TX, at San Jacinto College, where I had the opportunity to meet some of these inspiring Texans, people who are pursuing their dream. I met an Iraq war veteran named Jordan Chauvette, who went back to school with the help of the Hazlewood Act. The Hazlewood Act is a State law that provides tuition benefits to veterans and their families. His goal was to learn the skills he would need in order to live a better life and earn a better income for his wife and family. He recently graduated from San Jacinto College and now is working at an engineering and construction company based in the city of La Porte. If I might interject, one of the reasons there is so much construction, manufacturing--an economic boom taking place in this part of our State--is because of the shale gas revolution. This is one of the brightest spots in our economy, our energy sector, domestic production producing cleaner natural gas. The President talked about that a little bit last night. It is creating these manufacturing jobs because natural gas happens to be feedstock necessary for the petrochemical industry. Many of the jobs that exist that need these technical skills are the sorts of jobs these young men and women are training for at San Jacinto College. Everything is connected to everything else, but this is how domestic energy production--some of which the President talked about last night--is so important in terms of bringing that manufacturing back on shore. Then we need to have the job training in order to teach people the skills they need in order to qualify for these good, high- paying jobs. Let's look at the case of Deanna Harper, who received a cosmetology degree from San Jacinto and then went back to school and earned a degree in something called process technology. I don't pretend to understand everything that process technology involves, but all I know is she is a wife, a mother, and she is earning a six-figure salary working in the energy industry. It is a terrific story. I remember a few years ago in Amarillo, TX, meeting a young Hispanic woman, a single mother, who had been working as a prison guard--a dangerous, tough job. But thanks to the degree she received from Amarillo College, she was able to go to work on the B-22 Osprey assembly line making in excess of, I believe, $25 an hour and with a great career ahead of her. What it took was the opportunity for her to go back to school, learn those skills, match those skills with the job, and lift herself up by her own bootstraps. So many other Texans--Jordan, Deanna, and this young woman I mentioned from Amarillo--have benefited from the recent surge of private investment into petrochemicals and manufacturing, which I mentioned a moment ago. The skills they acquired and the job training they had at San Jacinto prepared them not only for a good job but for an upwardly mobile career in a fast-growing industry. At a time of stubbornly high national unemployment and people giving up and dropping out of the workforce, we should be doing everything we possibly can to ensure that such jobs and careers are available to all Americans who want them. In that sense we should be doing everything possible to bring this sort of example to Washington, DC, and to spread it nationally. The truth is there are stories such as this occurring everywhere, but there is more we could do. Certainly, one is take up one of the suggestions of our friend from Oklahoma when he talks about the duplication, the waste, the inefficiency built into our job-training programs--to make them more efficient, to deliver it more streamlined, and to deliver better value to the people who need that training so they can qualify for these kinds of good, high-paying jobs. That is a much better idea than the Federal Government trying to make a political fix by fixing wages between an employer and a worker that artificially elevates those wages beyond what the market will bear and, in the process, limit the number of new people whom that employer can hire. These are only some of the ideas I think any reasonable person would say are not completely over the top, are not a crazy ideas, that kind of make sense. But that is exactly the sort of debate we are not having as a result of the restrictive way under which the majority leader is letting us take up consideration of some of this legislation such as the unemployment insurance bill. Soon, I predict, he will bring a minimum-wage increase bill to the floor. The question is, Is he going to allow amendments from this side of the aisle and the Democratic side of the aisle too? When he cuts off amendments from the floor of the Senate, it doesn't only hurt the minority. We don't like it, but it doesn't only hurt us. It hurts our friends on the other side of the aisle because they are not allowed to offer their constructive suggestions for what could improve the legislation. I thought that is why we are in the Senate, to try to produce the best product we can for the American people. We don't do it by writing bills in the majority leader's conference room, bringing them out here, and then trying to shove them on through. That is why we have the debate, the checks, the balances, and the deliberative process we have in the Senate. That is what we have not been having. I wished to raise a few examples of what we could be doing that would be enormously constructive and would help a lot of these struggling workers during a time of high unemployment and low labor participation to help them get back on track. I came away from that experience at San Jacinto College rejuvenated and encouraged that there is a lot we can do. We do know that people don't want to collect unemployment--maybe some do, but most people, the vast majority of people, want a job. Again, to repeat what the President talked about last night, he talked about the dignity of work. That is what the vast majority of people want; they want a good job. If we give them the opportunity to learn the skills and we give them a growing economy that is creating jobs, not fewer jobs, then they will be able to find that. I came away even more committed to adopting progrowth economic policies that will make it easier for all Americans to find work when they finish school. I close on this note. The press leading into the President's speech last night sounded as if it was going to be a whole lot more like he was going to go it alone. But he did at least offer an olive branch of trying to do things more constructively in the legislative branch, recognizing that our Constitution doesn't authorize the executive to do this all by himself. That is what checks and balances are all about, and that is what doesn't happen when he tries to ``go it alone.'' There is danger in trying to go it alone when things are poorly thought out and rammed through without adequate legislation. But there is one area where that President can use that phone and pen he talked about. He could use that pen to sign the authorization for the Keystone XL Pipeline and connect the pipeline to Canadian oil reserves that would extend from Canada all the way through the United States down to Port Arthur, TX, into what we call the Golden Triangle, where we have a lot of refineries that would turn that crude oil into jet fuel and gasoline. In the process a lot of jobs would be created. For those of my friends who say: Oh my gosh, we can't build another pipeline, I would invite them to go on Google or Bing or any other search engine and just type in oil and gas pipelines and see what they get. You will be astonished at the number of pipelines that crisscross this country and that safely transmit their product without our even knowing about it, by and large. I realize occasionally there are accidents, and those are to be deplored and regretted, and we should try to prevent those. But the idea should not be to cut our nose off to spite our face and deny ourselves this safe source of energy from a friendly country such as Canada, so we don't have to get it from dangerous volatile regions of the world and also take with it the jobs that are created as a result of this great renaissance in American and North American energy. So I would say to the President, in conclusion, after listening to him last night, and really trying to listen to his words: Look at the States that actually are the successful laboratories of democracy. That is the phrase Louis Brandeis coined. That is the great thing about our Federal system, where we have 50 States that are sovereign. They conduct their own business, subject to those matters that are delegated to the Federal Government under the Constitution. But the States are a great place to see what works and what doesn't work. I might add that the two lowest unemployment rates in the United States are Bismark, ND, and Midland, TX, and not unrelated to the shale gas renaissance I mentioned a moment ago. We should look at what works, from the Tax Code--making it less burdensome, more logical and more conducive to economic growth--to how we address the unkept promises of things such as ObamaCare, which has created uncertainty, increased cost, and caused a lot of disruption in the lives of Americans, and replacing it with patient-centered reforms that actually reduce the cost, expand quality coverage, and improve access to care. I believe that is the kind of debate we should be having, and that is the type of agenda the American people are asking for and the type of agenda they deserve. Mr. President, I yield floor.

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

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I would also like to address the matter of the President's State of the Union speech tonight. I am sure that, as has been the rule, President Obama will make an eloquent speech. He is very good at that. There is just one problem: The President's credibility has been shattered. Indeed, on issue after issue we see a massive gap between his rhetoric and the reality. You might say that the two biggest challenges the President faces tonight are those two challenges. One is to his credibility, and the other is to his competence and the competence of the Federal Government, actually, to be able to deliver on the promises it makes. The most obvious example is the health care law, which we have heard a lot about and will continue to hear a lot about in this ensuing year. I was visiting with one health insurance company executive who told me that basically the bad news is going to continue to unroll and unravel over the coming months. There will be nowhere to hide. Perhaps what people want most from Washington, DC, is accountability. I hear it all the time. People say what does it take to get fired? Do people promise the Sun and the Moon and deliver nothing without any consequences? How about people who were charged with implementing the policies of the administration, whether it is the Web site contractor or whomever. The Web site contractor finally did get fired and a new one hired, so I assume that sooner or later the Web site will actually work as advertised. But that still leaves us with the flaws in the underlying policy, which will not work. The American people understand that and they are looking to Washington for help, saying please deliver us from this epic failure which is not what we were promised. In the event there is not a response to that that they deem credible, I promise there will be an accounting come November 2014. The President said repeatedly that under his signature health care law, if you liked the coverage you had you could keep it. Public opinion polls then showed that roughly 90 percent of the American people liked their health care coverage. Why in the world did we undermine or did ObamaCare undermine the existing coverage people liked just in order to cover more people, which in fact it did not do. We know ObamaCare has forced millions of Americans to lose their preferred coverage, the coverage they said they liked back in 2009. The President repeatedly said ObamaCare will reduce your premiums, make them lower-- for a family of 4, about $2,500. The stories we see, day after day, of American citizens signing up on the health care exchanges is just the opposite. They are experiencing premium shock, and the fact is it is going to continue to get nothing but worse as people realize that the ones who are signing up for ObamaCare are older, sicker Americans and that young healthy Americans are simply taking a pass, saying I cannot afford it and if I have a problem I will take care of it later. Premiums are going to continue to skyrocket, and Americans who are looking for more affordable health care coverage will find out that indeed it has been priced beyond their ability to pay. Here is the rub. The President said--and I think this was the implicit, underlying promise of ObamaCare: If you pass ObamaCare, Congress, everybody will have coverage. We will have universal coverage. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that ObamaCare, even if it were implemented to perfection, exactly as the proponents and the President had expected, it would still leave 30 million people uninsured--30 million people uninsured. The President said this new law would bring a greater sense of certainty to the U.S. health care system. Instead, we see one of the credit rating agencies actually slashing the credit rating of America's health insurers, citing the uncertainty generated by the implementation of ObamaCare-- the opposite, again, of what was promised. The President also said the Web site, when you plug in your personal information--your Social Security number, your health information that is protected already by Federal law--if you plug it into the ObamaCare Web site it is going to be safe and secure. Cyber experts have testified, particularly in the House of Representatives, that the security of the Web site is worse today than it was several months ago. There is no guarantee that if you put your personal information, your private information, your confidential information into the Web site, it is going to be protected. Here is the real surprise: I remember when Secretary Sebelius appeared before the Senate Finance Committee just a couple of months ago. I asked her about the navigator program. You remember, the navigator program was supposed to get people to help you sign up for ObamaCare. I said: There is no background check, is there, to be a navigator. She said no. I asked: So is it possible that a convicted felon could be a navigator, somebody you are giving your personal information to, to help you sign up for ObamaCare? To her credit she said, in all candor: Yes; that is possible. I nearly fell out of my chair. ObamaCare's broken promises have caused enormous pain and anxiety in millions of Americans in Texas and all around the country. We see from the Wall Street Journal poll that came out this morning, which had to be a wake-up call to the administration and its allies, the American people are anxious, they are dissatisfied, they are wondering what has gone so terribly wrong in Washington, DC, and ObamaCare is exhibit 1. That is why we are committed on this side of the aisle to working with our colleagues, when they are ready to talk to us, and to replacing ObamaCare with patient-centered alternatives that will actually bring down the cost and make it more affordable. What better way to get more people covered than to make it more affordable and to make sure government does not make these private decisions for us and our family when it comes to health care but that we, families, get to make that decision in consultation with their family doctor. When you begin to scrape the surface, the President's problem of credibility and competence--those are the two crises he confronts tonight as he addresses the Nation--all we have to do, beyond ObamaCare, is look at what is happening in the economy. After raising taxes $1.7 trillion, that was about 1 year ago, during the time President Obama has been President of the United States, the national debt has gone up $6.6 trillion. But my friends across the aisle, many of them--I would exclude the present occupant of the Chair who I know is concerned about this--my friends across the aisle think nothing of bringing legislation to the floor that is unpaid for that would add to the national deficit and national debt. That is the reason we now have a national debt in excess of $17 trillion. That is more than any of us can possibly conceive. When President Obama became President, the national debt was about $10 trillion. That is bad enough. But in the last 5 years it has gone up $6.6 trillion--or more than $6.6 trillion. It is no coincidence that he has presided over the weakest recovery and highest unemployment since the Great Depression back in the 1930s. President Obama has this very strange idea that the best way to get the economy going is to raise taxes and spend more money. It is just not working. As a matter of fact, we have great debates in Congress about the role and the size of the Federal Government. But perhaps the best example of why big government does not work has been the lousy economy, the slow economic growth, the high unemployment, and the number of people who have actually dropped out of the workforce. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has this figure that it calculates. It is called the labor participation rate. You can Google Bureau of Labor Statistics or labor participation rate. That will show you that the percentage of people between the ages of 25 and 54 who are actively engaged and looking for work is lower today than it was at the height of the recession in 2008. Another 347,000 people dropped out of the workforce in December alone. I know when we look at the unemployment rates that are released from time to time, we see the rate coming down a little bit, and we say: That is great. The unemployment rate is coming down. The problem is that in December alone almost 350,000 people quit looking for work. They gave up. We know that nearly 4 million people who are still looking for work have been out of a job for more than 6 months. That is not an economy to be proud of. Let me just contrast that with what happened in the 1980s during the Reagan recovery. Typically, what economists will tell you is that when we have a recession, it is sort of a V shape. So when it hits bottom, it actually bounces up pretty quickly because there is nothing but the upside left to go. Yet this recession has been more of a U shape. In other words, we hit bottom, and we are still bouncing along the bottom. We haven't seen the kind of economic growth that we need to get people back to work, to grow our economy, and to get our budget balanced. I think the reason for that is some of the very policies I talked about a moment ago. It is due to the same misguided policies that the President has advocated and will no doubt talk about again tonight in his State of the Union Address. I heard my colleague Senator Barrasso from Wyoming talk about the Keystone XL Pipeline. The President likes to say: I have a pen, I have a phone, and I'm going to go it alone. Of course he can't do that under our Constitution. We all learned in high school about the checks and balances of the three coequal branches of government. The President can't spend a penny without Congress appropriating the money. If we take him at his word, and he really wants to do something about the economy and reduce our dependence on imported oil from dangerous sources abroad, he could use that pen he talked about to authorize the Canadian-American connection of the Keystone XL Pipeline. You would then see a lot of the oil and energy produced in Canada, which is combined with the energy added to that pipeline, make its way down to southeast Texas where the refineries will turn it into gasoline and jet fuel, and in the process create thousands of new jobs. Rather than using that pen to put people back to work and make sure that we have safe sources of energy, his administration is working behind the scenes to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline. Politics is the only explanation. The President should not be surprised at what this Wall Street Journal poll showed this morning--that most of the voters disapprove of how he handled the economy. Likewise, he should not be surprised that trust in the Federal Government has also fallen to historic lows; that is the credibility problem. You can't promise the Sun and the Moon and deliver squat and expect people to trust you next time when you make another promise. Then there is this. The Obama administration has repeatedly ignored or waived laws that prove inconvenient--from ObamaCare to immigration to welfare reform to education, energy, and drug policy. One of the most frequent questions my constituents ask me back home in Texas is: How can the President do that? I thought we were a Nation that believed in the rule of law, that the law applied to everybody in America no matter how humble your station in life or how exalted-- whether you are the commander in chief. I guess we have to revisit that when the President picks and chooses which laws he wants to enforce. Of course, Congress can pass laws. That is what Congress does. The executive branch is the one that is supposed to enforce the law. So unless someone files a lawsuit--not Eric Holder in the Department of Justice, one of the most politicized Departments of Justice I can even remember. When some private organization or individual--such as the one who recently challenged the contraception mandate in ObamaCare that was recently stayed by the Supreme Court of the United States--or some association or business files a lawsuit that culminates in a judgment of a court years later, but for that, there really isn't much of a check on President Obama. But that can change, and the voters know how to do it: By changing who is in charge in the Senate in November. Here is another place where the President overreached and recently had his hands slapped by the courts. This had to do with his claimed authority to do another end run around Congress to make recessed appointments. We all know that under the Constitution the advise and consent function of the Senate is to act on the President's nominees and to vote to confirm them or not. Again, in a case of the President trying to go it alone, the court of appeals slapped down his attempt to do this end run around the Constitution and the advise and consent rule of the Senate. But that didn't stop him. Now he is threatening to take even more unilateral action: I have my phone, I have a pen--he is ready to do it again. That is not how the Federal Government is supposed to operate. For example, after the President made these unconstitutional recess appointments, the DC Circuit of Appeals ruled on them and said: If the President's claim to make that appointment would be upheld, it would ``eviscerate the Constitution's separation of powers''--the three coequal branches of government, checks and balances. What could be more fundamental to our form of government? The court of appeals said that if they upheld the President's claimed power to make those appointments, it would ``eviscerate the Constitution's separation of powers.'' We know how important the role of checks and balances is in our form of government and in our democracy. Indeed, our democracy would not be able to survive without them. The people who founded this great country knew that the greatest threat to their freedom and their individual liberties and their most basic rights was the concentration of power, so that is why they separated power at the Federal and State level in the Tenth Amendment, but they also separated the power at the Federal level between the judicial, executive, and the legislative branches. Yet this President and his administration have shown repeated contempt for the checks and balances that are so essential to our form of government. I have said many times that no President has the authority to disregard or selectively enforce the law based on political expediency. If he or she can, then we are nothing better than a banana republic. We are no longer a Nation that believes in the rule of law, which has really been the competitive edge that this country has had over other countries. People know if you come and do business in the United States, you are going to have access to the courts, your contracts are going to be enforced, and the laws that are written will actually be enforced by an impartial judiciary. That gives us a competitive advantage economically, morally, and otherwise, but it is being undermined. Republicans are not the only ones that are worried about the President's willingness to bypass the normal legislative process. Yesterday my colleague from Maine, a Democratic caucus member, urged the White House not to treat Congress as--what he called--an afterthought. In that spirit, I would like to remind the President of something he said just a few months ago. He said: We've got this Constitution; we've got this whole thing about separation of powers. So there is no shortcut to politics, and there's no shortcut to democracy. That is what the President of the United States said just a few months ago. Yet now he is claiming: I have a phone, I have a pen, and I'm going to go it alone. I would like to remind him of something he also said back in 2006, which is very similar. He said: The Founders designed this system, as frustrating as it is, to make sure that there's a broad consensus before the country moves forward. I couldn't agree more with the Barack Obama of 2006 or the Barack Obama of a few months ago, but I couldn't disagree more with President Barack Obama of today who somehow has this fantasy--it is nothing better than a fantasy--that somehow he can rise above Congress and the Constitution and the separation of powers and don the robe of a virtual dictator, force new laws down our throat or force the country in a direction that it doesn't want to go. It is a fantasy. It ain't gonna happen. Yet on issue after issue the President still likes to tell the American people that he can move forward without any regard to consensus or constitutional checks and balances. It is a terrible mistake, and I wish he would reconsider. In addition to its assault on the separation of powers, this administration has targeted other enemies, such as its intrusive monitoring of journalists' phone records. It has attempted to shake down private companies to get them to fund ObamaCare. It has fostered a culture of intimidation and punished whistleblowers. There have been scandals from Benghazi to Fast and Furious and those responsible for the attempt to intimidate the American people--or some part of the American people--from participating in the political process through the IRS scandal. We know this administration has repeatedly obstructed the investigations and refused to cooperate with the inquiries that would bring the facts out into the light of day so we can all know what happened, make sure that those responsible are held accountable and, more importantly, make sure it never happens again. I am confident that this is not the record President Obama will talk about tonight. Although this is his record, it is not too late to change. His own record is what has destroyed his credibility, as well as caused people to question his competence and the Federal Government's ability to actually deliver on the extravagant promises he has made time and time again. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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).

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, 4\1/2\ years ago the United States went through a terrible recession, what we now know as the great recession. But since that time we have had the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression, and our labor force participation rate, which is a fancy way of saying the number of people, the percentage of people who are actually in the workforce looking for work, is much lower than it was at the height of the recession. So even though the unemployment rate is coming down little by little, the main reason that is true is because people, many people, are simply giving up looking for work. Last month alone 345,000 people dropped out of the workforce. Even when we look exclusively at workers between the age of 25 and 54, their participation rate is significantly lower than it was when President Obama took office. Meanwhile, 4 million people who are still in the workforce have now been jobless for more than 6 months. As I mentioned, if the Obama economic recovery had been as strong as the Reagan recovery in the 1980s, we would currently have millions more private sector jobs. So what is the President's big idea for helping the economy getting back on track? Last night, according to published news reports, he was drinking martinis and plotting his 2014 political strategy with his fellow Democratic Party members. He apparently told the Democrats present--at least reportedly--that he would continue to go it alone if he could not get bipartisan support for his agenda by issuing more Executive orders. He would do that if Republicans did not cave in and give him every single thing he wants on every issue. So rather than talking to Republicans in bipartisan discussions about how we can come together on real solutions to the problems that face our economy and people being out of work, the President instead has defaulted in favor of poll-tested ideas and political gimmicks leading into the runup to the 2014 election. Sipping martinis and plotting politics while millions of Americans are out of work shows how out of touch the President has become, and unfortunately so many of the folks who vote with him on each and every issue that comes before the Senate. But putting last night's party aside for a moment, I would ask my friends across the aisle a few questions about the recent Senate debate about unemployment insurance. The first question: If extending unemployment insurance benefits for the long-term unemployed is so important, why did the majority leader not schedule a vote last month before those benefits expired on December 28? That is the first question. Second question: Why would you want to add $6.4 billion to the national debt, when the national debt is already $17.3 trillion? Why would you want to do that if you knew the bill had no chance of passing, because Republicans were not going to agree to a bill that adds to the national debt? You might ask whether it is hard to find $6.4 billion in an annual spending budget of $3.8 trillion. I will do the math for you. The $6.4 billion is roughly .0017 percent of what the Federal Government spends in a given year. It seems to me that would be relatively easy to do. In fact, Republicans had amendments that would pay for the 3-month extension as well as restore the pension benefits for the military that were cut in the earlier budget deal. But the majority leader refused to allow an open amendment process that would have allowed a vote on either one of those. I would ask the majority leader, rhetorically--he is not here in the Chamber, but I am sure he has people listening--why is it the majority leader refused to allow any progrowth measures to the final bill? Republicans had a number of amendments that would have improved the education and training component of our unemployment compensation system. If you look at the three major causes of long-term unemployment, one is education. We need to deal with that. The other is family choices, harder for government to have an influence on. But the third is jobs and the job environment. But the majority leader blocked every single opportunity to address either education reforms or job training or to deal with progrowth measures which have actually created more jobs so fewer people would have to be on unemployment and more people would be able to find work, as I know they would prefer to do. So if the majority leader and our Democratic friends who joined in blocking every Republican idea to either pay for it or to help improve job training or to improve the private sector's ability to create jobs and allow people to go to work, I would like to hear the answer to those. There is a much better way to fuel job creation, reduce unemployment, and promote upward mobility that does not involve playing politics while millions of Americans are looking for work. For starters, let's pick some of the low-hanging fruit. I bet the Presiding Officer, based on some of the remarks I have seen attributed to her, would agree with this one: The Canadian Government has spent years urging President Obama to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would create thousands of well-paying jobs, middle-class jobs right here in the United States. This administration, this President, actually promised Republicans in a meeting he had with them last year that he would make a decision by the end of last year, 2013. We are still waiting for his decision. All we hear is the sound of crickets when it comes to the Keystone XL Pipeline. But this President and this White House, this administration, could effectively create those jobs with the stroke of a pen approving the Keystone XL Pipeline. It does not get much easier than that. Indeed, even the President's own former National Security Advisor has said publicly he thinks the President ought to do this, because this is not just an economic issue, this is not just a jobs issue. Every barrel of oil we transport on the Keystone XL Pipeline from a friendly country such as Canada means less oil we have to import from volatile regions of the planet such as the Middle East. But beyond the pipeline issue, which is the lowest of the low-hanging fruit in terms of creating jobs and getting the economy moving again, the Obama administration should generally stop hindering our domestic energy production. We have had a renaissance in energy in America thanks to innovation in the private sector, primarily the now some six- decades-old practice of fracking, which has gotten a bad rap in some corners, but also horizontal drilling, pioneered by none other than George Mitchell of Texas who recently passed on. This combination of fracking and horizontal drilling has led to a proliferation of domestic energy supply, natural gas and oil right here at home. Again, every barrel, every MCF of gas we produce here domestically means less energy we have to import from abroad. We all know that nationwide the oil and gas industry represents a rare bright spot in the U.S. economy. According to one study, by 2035, unconventional oil and gas resources alone will be supporting 3.5 million jobs and contributing $475 billion to our economy. Why would not the President and our Democratic friends embrace something like that, that would create so many jobs right here in the United States, instead of playing political games and plotting out the next election? Yet on top of that, to make matters worse, the administration is proposing a proliferation of new regulations on fracking that occurs on Federal lands. I think my friends who perhaps are not familiar with this process should listen. Fracking has been going on for at least 60 years in Texas under the regulatory authority of the Texas Railroad Commission and local jurisdictions. But if you drill a well and you put the casing in and you cement it properly, there is absolutely zero threat to groundwater or drinking water, because the target of the fracking is deep below the surface. So by using good drilling practices and cementing of the casing, there is virtually zero threat to drinking water and the concerns that many people have expressed but which are not grounded in experience. Think of it this way: If the Federal Government has made such a hash out of health care after ObamaCare by taking over one-sixth of the economy and our national health care, what I worry about is what they would do if the Federal Government decides to take over regulation of fracking. Because it has been handled appropriately at the State and local level. I am afraid they will make a hash out of that as well. In addition to the other regulations I am concerned about, the administration has announced new regulations that would impose massive additional costs and deliver very little in the way of economic or environmental gains. More regulations are never a good idea if they put an additional burden on business and produce no tangible benefit to the environment. But they are especially harmful at a time when our economic recovery is so anemic and our economic recovery remains so fragile. We simply need to stop placing additional burden by additional regulations on the vital sectors of our economy that we need in order to grow and prosper and create new jobs, especially when there is no demonstrable environmental benefit. For that matter, let's eliminate all new regulations that do not pass a simple cost-benefit analysis. One new study shows that the Obama administration has imposed more than $112 billion worth of net regulatory costs on the U.S. economy and added an equivalent of 158 million hours of additional paperwork on American businesses. My colleagues Senator Portman and Senator Roberts have each sponsored new legislation that would introduce safeguards against unnecessary job-killing regulations. This brings me to ObamaCare. One of the things that organized labor, which was one of the biggest supporters of ObamaCare, has now come back to the White House and complained about is the fact of the incentives for employers to take what was full-time work, a40-hour workweek and make it part-time work. Indeed, that is because the President's health care law defines full- time employment as a 30-hour workweek, so people even working part time have to be provided full benefits that those on full-time work ordinarily would qualify for. But as a result, as many of these labor leaders told the President a few short months ago, many Americans have had their full-time jobs reduced from full time to part time. This trend will only get worse as the administration decides to enforce the employer mandates. If the majority leader would allow, we have two bills on our side of the aisle that would address that. Senator Collins of Maine and Senator Scott of South Carolina have proposed defining full-time employment as a 40-hour workweek that would provide some benefit and some relief to people who have seen their hours cut. One more example of low-hanging fruit: Republicans and Democrats both agree that education is a critical need to allowing for upward mobility. With that in mind, we should be doing everything possible to support successful education reform initiatives across the country. Yet the Obama administration has done frequently the opposite. Witness what has happened in Louisiana where the administration is trying to derail Louisiana's school voucher program where parents get to choose where the money goes, not the government. This is all very easy. Some things would be harder, such as major tax reform, although I would point out that until recently Members of both parties agreed that the goal of tax reform would be to lower marginal rates as we eliminate a lot of the tax expenditures or deductions or subsidies or the like. We want to adopt those kinds of progrowth tax reforms, but we are never going to make any real progress as long as our friends across the aisle insist on using this to raise more money for the Federal Government to spend and not reduce marginal rates--in other words, to basically undermine the benefit of progrowth tax reform only in order to get an additional $1 trillion or $2 trillion to spend. The stalemate on tax reform reflects a broader problem in Washington. Despite the long-term unemployment crisis and despite the massive drop of people in the workforce and actually looking for work, the President has still failed to put forth any serious job creation agenda. Sure, he wants the government to take more of your hard-earned tax dollars and spend them, because he thinks the government can do a better job than you can spending your own money, but it hasn't worked. Jobs and the economy remain Americans' top concerns. Yet, unfortunately, the President is already now in full reelection mode, recognizing that in his second term his ability to get things done is going to be highly dependent on the midterm elections in November 2014. Hence, rather than working with Republicans to try to address these problems, there are team meetings at the White House sipping martinis and planning strategy for November 2014. Americans deserve better. They deserve a comprehensive job creation agenda that includes serious tax reform, serious regulatory reform, and serious health care reform, an agenda that makes it easier for business to hire workers and easier for families to pursue the American dream. We have done our best to propose such an agenda but, unfortunately, we are still waiting for the majority leader and the President to take us up on that offer. I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, today the Gallup organization released a new poll that asked the American people a simple question: What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today? The results should not shock anyone. Twenty-one percent of the American people think the Federal Government is the problem. This is a quote from the poll: ``Dissatisfaction with government/Congress/politicians; poor leadership/corruption/abuse of power.'' Eighteen percent of the American people say the economy is the biggest problem facing the country. So 21 percent say it is Washington and the Federal Government, and 18 percent say it is the economy. I would point out that, not coincidentally, Politico has a story this morning that highlights one of the sources of this dissatisfaction. It cites senior White House officials describing the Senate Democrats meeting with the President at the White House this afternoon to talk about their 2014 playbook, and some of it is going to be to cover the themes the President is going to talk about at his State of the Union speech. According to Politico, the aim is to highlight the differences with the GOP and to provide fodder for the Democrats along the campaign trail even though these measures stand little chance of passing in Congress. There is nothing wrong with our Democratic friends having a philosophical difference with the Republicans, or political differences, for that matter, and it is logical that there would be different approaches to solving our Nation's problems. But this calculated effort--starting at the White House with the President of the United States having a team meeting with our Democratic friends to look at how they can contrast their agenda with that of the Republicans--strikes me as a shallow and cynical effort to distract people from the fundamental problems which are facing our country. We know the President has been in office 5 years now. The economic recovery, after 2008, has been anemic. After the Federal Government has paid out almost $\1/4\ billion in deficit spending for unemployment benefits on an extended basis, you would think the kind of meeting the President would want to have--not with just Democrats but with Republicans--is to figure out what we can do together to deal with this anemic economic growth and get America back to work. The President's promises about ObamaCare, one after another, have proven to be untrue. The statements he made about his health care plan--such as if you like what you have, you can keep it; the price of your health care will go down an average of $2,500 a family; if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor--have not proven to be true. None of it has proven to be true. So why in the world can't we work together to try to address the problems? The problem about lack of access to health care isn't going to go away, but it looks as though all of this has been put on the shelf in an effort to try to drive a wedge between Americans for no other reason than to shore up his political base leading up to the 2014 midterm election. Why else would the President use his bully pulpit to stump for legislation that has no chance of passing in Congress? This last exercise--actually a very sad exercise--started about a week ago when the majority leader brought a bill to the floor that would extend long-term unemployment benefits. It wasn't paid for. In other words, it would add $6 billion to the national debt, and it would be for 3 months. Well, on Monday of last week when we had a vote--the Presiding Officer will remember we had a lot of bad weather--17 Senators were not able to be here for that vote. It was as if the majority leader intended to go forward knowing 17 Members of the Senate were not going to be here, because he really wanted the bill to fail, not to succeed. Well, I and others encouraged him to reconsider, and thankfully he did. So we had that vote on Tuesday a week ago, and we got on the bill. The President ought to be bringing Americans together, not pitting them against one another. Of course, the President isn't the only one to blame for the people's dissatisfaction with government. I am sure there is plenty of blame to go around, but Majority Leader Reid has to accept a major part of the responsibility for the dysfunction of the Senate and for the failure of the unemployment insurance extension bill. Republicans, in an act of good faith, filed 36 amendments that we believe would have made that bill a better bill. The majority leader said, no, there will be no amendments, no votes. Take it or leave it. He then came back later on and said: We will make these other changes, but these are the only changes we are going to make, and we are not going to have an open amendment process and vote. So instead of allowing the Senate to function, the majority leader filled the amendment tree and blocked every single Member of the Senate--Democrats and Republicans alike--from offering even the most reasonable amendments. Senator Coburn, for example--Senator Toomey was down here talking about this today--had an amendment which would have ended unemployment compensation for millionaires and billionaires. What could be more common sense than that? Why can't the Senate--Republicans and Democrats alike--come together to vote on such amendments? Well, you will have to ask the majority leader about that because the Senate voted on a similar amendment in 2011 and voted 100 to 0, but the majority leader still decided to block this amendment on this bill even though it would have improved the integrity of the Unemployment Insurance Program. Many other colleagues worked in good faith with the majority leader through the weekend to try to come up with another option. Senators Collins, Hatch, Inhofe, Paul, Scott, Thune, and Portman all filed amendments which would have created jobs in a variety of ways and help grow the economy. What better way to deal with the problem of unemployment than to help grow the economy and create jobs? The alternative seems to be: Let's just give them unemployment compensation and they will be happy. I daresay there are very few people who are unemployed who are happy accepting unemployment compensation. They would much prefer the dignity and self-respect that comes along with working if they could simply find a job to do. Irrespective of this demonstration of good faith by Republicans to try to improve the bill and help grow the economy and get people back to work, the majority leader's response was to block every single vote. He instead chose politics over commonsense proposals that would help get Americans back to work. I must say this is in stark contrast with what we have seen happening in the House of Representatives. This is a shocking figure, but the House of Representatives has passed 170 pieces of legislation--many of which deal with the poor growth of the economy and the need to create jobs--that the majority leader has ignored. One hundred seventy pieces of legislation have passed the House. Basically all of them passed on a bipartisan basis, but the majority leader of the Senate has ignored them. These include the Northern Route Approval Act, which approves the Keystone XL Pipeline. By the way, the President said he would announce his decision on whether to approve the connection of this pipeline which would connect the pipeline from Canada all the way down to Port Arthur, TX, where refineries exist that would make this into gasoline and jet fuel and other byproducts. The House passed a piece of legislation called the Keep the IRS Off Your Health Care Act, which prohibits the IRS from implementing ObamaCare. I understand that is controversial. The majority leader wants to try to protect ObamaCare, with all of its flaws, which are becoming apparent on a bipartisan basis. Here is another one that should have enjoyed bipartisan support in the Senate. It is something called the SKILLS Act, which eliminates and consolidates Federal job training programs. There are over 40 different job training programs in the Federal Government. Can you imagine what might happen if those programs were consolidated so the money that is now used for overhead and administration could be used to actually train people and provide them the skills they need in order to qualify for many high-paying jobs that go without trained workers? If Senator Reid were serious about that, he would have taken up that bill and allowed Democrats and Republicans to improve it with their amendments. Yet he refused to allow it to even be considered. Then there is the REINS Act, which allows Congress to vote on major regulations that cost the economy over $100 million a year. One big frustration back where I come from in Texas, when I go home every weekend, is people ask: How come nobody seems to be held accountable? When things don't work, how come nobody gets fired? How come Congress and the President kick the can down the road? Well, of course, one of the biggest challenges we have when it comes to accountability is the regulatory state--the bureaucracy, the people who are appointed by the President who have the authority to issue regulations. As the Presiding Officer knows, this isn't legislation that people vote on. These are regulations that are promulgated by administrative agencies. But when they have an impact of over $100 million on the economy a year, doesn't it make sense that Congress--the only people the American people can hold accountable--would get a chance to actually vote on whether they should be approved and have a discussion on the cost-benefit analysis rather than have the regulatory agencies run amok and have litigation as our only recourse? Well, you get my point. The majority leader has shut down every effort by the House of Representatives to pass legislation and have it come over here to the Senate to try to improve our anemic economic recovery since the great recession of 2008. That is the reason economists say this is an atypical, an unusual recovery from a recession, because usually it is kind of V-shaped. Once you hit bottom, you bounce back pretty quickly. What we have is a U-shaped recovery that is almost flat-lined with an economic growth that is not fast enough to keep up with the population increase. So not only do we have 7 percent or higher unemployment, we have--at least for the last 30 years--a historically lower percentage of Americans actually participating in the workforce. One of the reasons the unemployment figures are coming down is not necessarily because the economy is getting that much better, but because people are giving up. They quit looking for work. That is an American tragedy. The House is acting not only to try to earn the American people's trust and confidence but to get the government out of the way and to let the private sector create more jobs. Conversely, the Senate, under the iron rule--and some might say the dictatorship--of the majority leader, is neither afforded the opportunity to actually consider this legislation that has passed in the House nor to offer amendments and improve legislation that is on the floor of the Senate, such as the long-term unemployment insurance bill that was on the floor this last week. That is one reason why I think Gallup says that 21 percent of the American people cite that as the biggest problem facing the American people today: dissatisfaction with government, poor leadership, and abuse of power. It doesn't have to be that way, and it won't be if the American people give our side of the aisle the majority in November. It will be different. I thought the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, gave a really important speech last week, saying if the voters give us the responsibility for leading in the Senate, we will return the Senate to its prior reputation as the world's greatest deliberative body. Whether a person is a Democrat or a Republican, whether I like an amendment or not, we will all have an opportunity to offer our ideas, and we will have a chance to vote them up or down. That is the way the Senate used to work. That is the way I think most Americans think it should work, and that is the way it will work if we are given that opportunity. On the topic of the health care exchanges that opened on October 1 under ObamaCare, we learned that the first reports about the composition of the pool of people who signed up for ObamaCare has caused reasons for grave concern. The vast majority of people who signed up under the exchanges are older and sicker. That, of course, is their right. But many young people--necessary to provide the actuarial stability and success of these exchanges--have chosen to take a pass. We have asked for those numbers to be released on a weekly basis. As a matter of fact, the House is going to take up a bill that will increase transparency in these insurance exchanges so Congress and the American people can be better informed about what is exactly happening with the implementation of ObamaCare. I remember 5 years ago I was out on the Capitol steps when the President, in his inaugural speech, told the American people--he said these words: ``Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this Presidency.'' Those are stirring words. As an advocate of open government, transparent government, and freedom of information, I thought that was a very positive statement by the President. But, today, in light of what has happened since that time, they seem to be a bad joke. ObamaCare is the most recent example. It has been 3\1/2\ months since these Federal exchanges officially came online, and the administration still won't provide the American people with reliable, detailed information on exchange enrollment numbers and the problems with the Web site. I don't have any doubt that the Web site problems are going to be and have been substantially repaired. One problem the House has pointed out is there is still no guarantee that if a person puts their personal information into the Web site, that it will be protected against cyber attacks and identity theft--something that ought to concern everybody. One would think that the majority leader was concerned about that too, that he would give us a chance to vote on the legislation that passed the House earlier this week. In order to help Americans get better information about ObamaCare, Senator Alexander, the senior Senator from Tennessee, has introduced legislation that would require the administration to provide weekly updates on exchange enrollment and Medicaid enrollment, as well as Web site problems and other issues. The cost of this legislation, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which is the gold standard when it comes to scoring the cost of legislation, is zero. It is a big goose egg. I am proud to be a cosponsor of that legislation. Unfortunately, the White House has already issued a statement saying it would veto the legislation if it passed because it would be ``too costly.'' The majority leader and the President have been pursuing legislation this last week that would have increased the deficit and the debt by $6 billion, but they are unwilling to consider this transparency legislation that would cost zero because they say it is too costly. It is true the problems with ObamaCare go well beyond just a lack of transparency, as we all know. For starters, the President continues to treat ObamaCare as a law that means whatever he wants it to mean, whenever it is convenient for him, because he continues to change the law by executive waiver. This is another common question I get back home. People say: How can the President delay the employer mandate while the penalty against me as an individual--the individual mandate-- remains the law of the land? How can he carve out or exempt certain parts of the population from the application of the law? How can he claim executive privilege when it comes to cooperating with oversight investigations by the Congress? How can he do all of these things in a country that is founded on the rule of law and where no man and no woman is above the law, and no man and no woman is below the law? We are all entitled to equal protection of laws. How can the President choose which laws to enforce and which laws to ignore? Sadly, I don't have a good answer for that. Congress has the authority to pass the law, but the executive branch, under our Constitution, is the one that is supposed to enforce the law. But when the executive branch refuses to enforce the law or ignores the law or purports to waive the law, there isn't a lot of recourse, other than private litigation which takes months and years to conclude. From my perspective, these waivers reflect an utter disregard for the constitutional duties of the executive branch of government. If the President feels as though certain aspects of ObamaCare have become unworkable, it is his duty to come to Congress and say: Work with me to change it. But he refuses to do that. I think some of the most popular words out of his mouth are: I will go it alone. I will issue an Executive order. I will ignore Congress and the constitutional coequal branches of government, and I will do it alone. The President knows just how unpopular his signature legislative achievement, ObamaCare, has become, even among many Democrats. I talked about accountability a little earlier. Many Democrats who walked the plank with him on ObamaCare and actually believed and, indeed, repeated the promises he himself made about how the law would work are going to be up for election in 2014. He won't be on the ballot. He has been through his last election. There is no way to hold President Obama accountable for his broken promises on ObamaCare. But there is a way to hold the people who supported the President accountable and who repeated statements which have proven to be false about how ObamaCare would work. But if the President feels as though the law isn't working the way it should or if our Democratic colleagues feel as though-- notwithstanding their hopes and their aspirations for how it might work--it didn't turn out that way, then what we ought to be doing is working together in order to fix the problem, not perpetuate it. We know the President is acting as if he is above the law. He is acting as if he can selectively enforce the law based on political expediency. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that this behavior is undermining our democracy and making the American people even more cynical about Washington, DC. Again, I don't think it is any coincidence that the Gallup poll cites the government as the single biggest problem in America today, according to the people polled in this Gallup poll published January 15, 2014. This administration was supposed to be defined by transparency and the rule of law. That is not what I said; those aren't my words. Those are the President's words. In reality, it has become an administration defined by obstruction, deception, and partisan power grabs, and that is a sad development. One of these power grabs, of course, is ObamaCare itself, which passed on a party-line vote in 2010. But, amazingly, it wasn't really implemented until 2013, starting in October, and people are just now beginning to see what ObamaCare is really like. We know, as a historical fact, that it was muscled through on a party-line vote, despite major public opposition. Thus far, it has been a complete disaster on just about every level. First, the administration wanted us to believe it was all about the Web site: Yes, we have a bad Web site contractor, but we are going to fix it. These are glitches that can be repaired, and everything will turn out just fine. But the reality is far different. Much of the regulatory confusion surrounding the President's health care law is a result of conscious decisions and politically motivated delays. People don't have to take my word for it. The Washington Post reported last month that the White House ``systematically delayed''-- those are their words--``key provisions of ObamaCare''--and this again is another quote from the Washington Post--``to prevent them from becoming points of contention before the 2012 election.'' There was a conscious decision to delay the implementation of ObamaCare until after the President ran for reelection, and now we have seen many aspects of ObamaCare unilaterally delayed until after the 2014 midterm elections. What about accountability? While the White House is trumpeting a recent increase in signups for ObamaCare--as I said, they are unwilling to release on a real-time basis what the facts are--the number of signups is still dwarfed by the number of people who have had their health coverage canceled because of ObamaCare. If we look back to 2010, it was the very regulation that would result in the estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that tens of millions of Americans would lose their existing coverage under ObamaCare, primarily because of the mandate in terms of the coverage. For example, a person has grandparents who are required to buy health insurance that includes maternity coverage they don't need and they don't want, so why should they have to pay for it? Well, because ObamaCare says they have to. Why should young people have to pay more for their health insurance when it doesn't really cost that much for them to get the medical care they need? Because they have to subsidize the older generation. Perhaps no one other than the President has maneuvered more to cover up ObamaCare's shortfalls than the person at the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius. My colleagues will recall that back in 2010, Secretary Sebelius threatened to ban certain insurance providers from ObamaCare if they communicated with their own customers. They wanted to tell their customers what would happen to their existing insurance coverage if this law passed, and they were threatened by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who said: If you communicate with your own customers, you are going to be punished. Last year, it came out that Secretary Sebelius later on was shaking down private insurance companies to help fund ObamaCare's implementation. For that matter, when Americans began to lose their existing coverage because of ObamaCare regulations, the President initially blamed it on what he called ``bad apple insurers,'' even though this administration knew years ago that the law would force millions of people to forfeit their existing coverage. Yet the President--I think it was almost 30 times; certainly more than 20 times--said: ``If you like what you have, you can keep it.'' But he said that knowing that tens of millions of Americans would lose their existing coverage, and many of them would lose the ability to continue to be treated by a doctor of their own choosing because they would no longer be part of their plan. I submit that what I have just recited has contributed a lot to this poll which has said people think government is the biggest problem facing the country today. I have just a few final thoughts--I see the Senator from Missouri here--before I yield the floor. I conclude by saying that the core conceit of ObamaCare, indeed, the most offensive part of it, is that the folks who supported it--from the President to those who voted it into law--understand that the health insurance needs of individuals are better decided by those individuals and their families and the doctor they trust. But as a result of this arrogance, millions of health plans have been canceled, and millions more will be in the future. The premiums and the cost of health care coverage have skyrocketed, together with huge deductibles, which essentially would leave people self-insured. Many people have been forced into ObamaCare plans that have $5,000 deductibles. So for all practical purposes, people are self-insured. We know that health care providers have also been forced to deal with enormous uncertainty. I hear it every day from the physicians and hospitals and health care providers in Texas. We also know that America's already weak recovery has been made even weaker. As I said earlier, historically, a rebound after a recession is sort of V-shaped. After you hit the bottom, you bounce back, and you get a spurt of economic growth. But not this time, not with the ObamaCare recovery or lack thereof. The National Bureau of Economic Research has said that ObamaCare may eventually ``cause substantial declines in . . . employment,'' and that seems very intuitive in what we are seeing happening today. It did not have to turn out this way. How was ObamaCare sold to the American people? Well, under false pretenses. We know that because 90 percent of people polled said they liked their current coverage. That is why the President said: If you like what you have, you can keep it-- which has proven to be false. But the premise of ObamaCare was everybody gets covered. But even under the Congressional Budget Office estimate, ObamaCare will leave 31 million people uninsured by 2023. So not even the underlying premise of universal coverage under ObamaCare is true. Republicans believe that expanding health care choice and health care portability are important ways to reduce costs across the board, and really the reason why people are uninsured is because they cannot afford it. We need to bring down the cost, not to raise the cost, which has happened under ObamaCare. I believe, and I believe my colleagues believe, that by adopting sensible, targeted reforms--not to undermine the coverage for 90 percent of the people who like what they have but to deal with the 10 percent who do not like what they have or do not have coverage they can afford--we need those kinds of targeted reforms to help the uninsured and help those with preexisting conditions, without disrupting everyone else's existing coverage, without throwing out the baby with the bath water. We believe families understand better than the bureaucracy what the health care needs are in each family. If given the opportunity, we will start over, once ObamaCare collapses of its own weight or when finally there is a universal recognition in the halls of Congress that we have to start over and do better, but do it better by replacing ObamaCare with patient-centered reforms that I know the American people want and they deserve. 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. Mr. President, regular order.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Chambliss) 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 Oklahoma (Mr. Inhofe), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran), and the Senator from Kentucky (Mr. Paul).

Mr. CORNYN

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

Mr. CORNYN

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

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

Mr. CORNYN. Is the majority leader aware there are 24 Republican amendments on file, almost all of which deal with the underlying bill in an attempt to either improve workforce education and training, provide other reforms to the unemployment compensation system, or otherwise help the economy recover so that people won't have to depend on unemployment insurance and they can get a job? Is the majority leader aware that there are those amendments and those ideas on this side of the aisle?

Mr. CORNYN. I would ask the distinguished majority leader one more question.

Mr. CORNYN. What I just said.

Mr. CORNYN. Isn't that right?

Mr. CORNYN. I would further ask the majority leader, it is my understanding that the amendment of the distinguished Senator from Ohio would discontinue the simultaneous collection of disability and unemployment benefits. But the majority leader objects to that amendment and instead is blocking that amendment and other amendments by the Republican side of the aisle by one which changes the effective date of the bill 1 day. In other words, it is purely a blocker amendment, has zero substance whatsoever, and does nothing to improve the underlying bill.

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I ask the distinguished majority leader whether it is the position of his caucus and his position personally that people ought to be able to collect unemployment compensation and disability benefits simultaneously?