John Cornyn

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, the American people have spoken, and once again they have given us divided government. In that sense, we can say this was a status quo election. Before the election, just a week or so ago, we had President Obama in the White House, Democrats controlling the Senate, and Republicans controlling the House of Representatives. After the election, we have President Obama in the White House for another 4 years, Democrats controlling the Senate, and Republicans with the majority in the House. What that tells me is the American people do not completely trust either political party to come up with all the answers. They want those kinds of checks and balances that divided government brings; that is, conducive of consultation, deliberation, negotiation, and compromise, not the kind of compromise that violates one's most fundamental principles. That would be wrong. But as one of my colleagues had told me who actually--Senator Enzi, I will use his name, from Wyoming, one of the most conservative Members of the Senate on our side from Wyoming, he worked famously with that--I say this with all due respect--liberal lion of the Senate, Teddy Kennedy, worked very productively to produce a lot of legislation out of the HELP Committee. One time I asked Senator Enzi how was it that he and Teddy Kennedy-- in other words, one of the most conservative Republicans and one of the most liberal Democrats--how did they work together so productively to come together to pass legislation. He said it is easy. It is easy. He said it is the 80-20 rule. I know it sounds simplistic, but there is a lot of wisdom there. If two people are trying to work together in a bipartisan way to try to advance solutions to our Nation's problems, neither side is going to get all they want. The only way perhaps to come up with moving the ball down the road or advancing solutions is to say: You know what. Do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good, and let's take the 80 percent we can agree upon and leave the 20 percent we cannot agree upon for another day and another battle. A lot of wisdom in that it strikes me. The fact is that divided government means that neither Democrats nor Republicans are going to get everything they want. No legislation can pass. It cannot pass, no legislation can, strictly along partisan lines. It means bipartisan compromise is the only avenue to avoid further gridlock. This Congress has kicked a lot of cans down the road. We have punted over into the lameduck session issues that we should have dealt with months ago in the regular order of things without the imminent pressure of the fiscal cliff or other things that threaten to put our country into a recession. But the fact is, divided government has yielded some very positive developments for the American people in the past. In 1986, it produced landmark tax reform when Democrats and Republicans--Ronald Reagan as President, worked together to make our Tax Code more logical, more equitable, and more efficient. Ten years later, divided government produced a sweeping overhaul of our welfare system under then-President Bill Clinton. Conservative Republicans joined with a Democratic President to help millions of lower income people break free of the cycle of dependency and despair. Of course, we know we have divided government. As I said earlier, we had a status quo election in that sense. We have had divided government since January 2011 when Republicans regained the majority in the House of Representatives. The result over the last 2 years sadly is it has produced legislative stalemates and bitter recriminations. Why should anybody think things will be different going forward? I think what is different now from then is that Republicans and Democrats alike recognize we are at a crossroads, that our current fiscal path is unsustainable, and that we are either going to send the economy back into a recession unless we deal with the fiscal cliff and the sequestration or the alternative is--and being an optimist by nature I think we have an opportunity to address some of our Nation's most challenging fiscal issues. But the fact is this. I would love to have someone tell me I am wrong. I would love to understand any reason they would disagree with this. But I would say it should be stipulated by Republicans and Democrats alike that we cannot continue to run trillion-dollar annual deficits. We cannot continue to run the Federal Government borrowing 42 cents out of every $1 the Federal Government spends. We cannot do it. The only reason we can do it now is because interest rates are at historic lows. Because of what is happening in Europe, the American dollar is probably the only safe currency, safe harbor in the world now for people worried about protecting their savings. But we cannot continue along this path. If, for example, interest rates go up, the amount of money we must pay to our creditors such as China simply to keep buying our debt--if it were to go up to historic norms, our national debt would spiral out of control. Right now we see this on our savings, on money market accounts or savings accounts. If we want to save some money, about the best interest rate we can get is less than 1 percent return on our savings because the Federal Reserve has worked to keep interest rates very low in order to help juice the economy and, hopefully, keep us from going into recession again. But we cannot continue down this path. If interest rates were to return to their historic norms, we would spiral out of control and into a recession or worse. Secondly, we cannot continue to put off structural changes in Social Security and Medicare. I would think Republicans and Democrats alike would agree that we want to save and preserve Social Security and Medicare for our seniors. We may have different ideas about how to do that, but I would think we could agree on the goal. So far we have heard nothing from the President to deal with our broken programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Unless we are happy with the Tax Code that wastes economic resources, that stifles job creation, and promotes crony capitalism, we cannot delay genuine tax reform. So we have an opportunity. We do not have to speculate on what bipartisan tax reform looks like. We do not have to speculate. We do not have to start from scratch. That is because in 2010 two separate bipartisan commissions recommended lowering the rates and broadening the base and eliminating a lot of tax expenditure deductions and credits which, in order to get the revenue the Federal Government needs to operate every time we grant a new tax expenditure, deduction or credit, what it means is we need to raise marginal tax rates, the percentage of tax people need to pay out of their net worth. Why is that important? Because the higher we raise marginal tax rates, it operates as a disincentive on small businesses and individuals whom we are depending upon to grow jobs. Many small businesses do not operate as a corporation, a big C corporation, they operate as a subchapter S corporation. They operate as a sole proprietorship or a partnership. The point is they pay business incomes, the people who run those small businesses, they pay flowthrough income on a personal tax return not on a corporate tax return. So higher marginal rates disincentivize these smaller businesses from spending money to hire new staff or to start or expand their existing business. That is why keeping marginal rates down low for as long as we can for everybody is so important. Yet before we get to this important point of dealing with our broken Tax Code, before we can implement this, support this sort of comprehensive tax reform that they did in 1986 with President Reagan and Democrats in Congress, we need to stop America from driving off the fiscal cliff. If we do not act between now and the end of the year, Republicans and Democrats alike, we will see the single largest tax increase in American history. How is that possible? As you know, the so-called Bush tax provisions that were passed are getting ready to expire. Those only lasted for 10 years. In 2010, President Obama agreed with Republicans and our Democratic friends agreed with us. As a matter of fact, the extension of the so- called Bush tax rates was passed with 81 votes in the Senate in 2010. At the time, President Obama made what I thought was a perfectly sensible observation. He said, in 2010, with the economy growing so slowly, with economic growth down around 3 percent, which was producing high unemployment because the economy was not growing fast enough, he said: It make no sense to raise taxes during that kind of fragile economic recovery. That makes me wonder what has changed between now and 2010, except for the fact that economic growth is even slower. The economy is even worse today than it was in 2010. President Obama has said--contrast what he said in 2010. He said: Raising taxes will help solve our long-term debt problems. He says: Raising taxes will help us solve our long-term debt problems. But it is hard to take that argument seriously if we look at it closely. First, according to the President's own Treasury Department, the tax increases he is advocating would generate about $85 billion a year in new net revenue. These tax increases would generate about $85 billion in new net revenue. By comparison, the monthly budget deficit in October was $120 billion. The President says raised taxes would generate $85 billion; Treasury is saying $85 billion doesn't close the gap to $120 billion, which is the current level of monthly deficits. As we know, the Federal Government has run annual deficits in excess of $1 trillion for at least each of the last 4 years, leading to a $16 trillion national debt, roughly the size of our entire economy. These are dangerous waters we are navigating. The President has argued that we need to raise taxes, but he has not provided a prescription for closing the gap between what the Federal Government spends and what we take in, even with these tax increases. He has proposed nothing, absolutely nothing to deal with our unsustainable entitlement programs so we can keep the promise we have made to our seniors that when they qualify for Medicare and Social Security, those programs will be there for them. I don't believe we can tax our way back to budget surpluses and economic prosperity. I am not a Ph.D. in economics, but I do think it is a matter of common sense to say that we cannot tax our way back into prosperity without a major reining in of Federal spending and entitlement reforms, which will continue to run up huge deficits, which cumulatively will add to that $16 trillion of debt. That will happen regardless what we do on the revenue side, which is the only part of that equation the President has addressed so far. That brings me to my second point. Nearly 4 years after President Obama was sworn in--4 years after he was first sworn in--he has not yet given us a realistic plan for dealing with the deficit and debt reduction. You might say: Well, he was unwilling to stick his toe into those difficult waters knowing he was going to have to run for election again because all of this is controversial, no question about it, on both sides of the aisle. I would think now that the President has been reelected for another 4 years and he doesn't have to stand before the voters again, he would feel flexibility, he would feel as though he has the political freedom to try to address this problem in a bipartisan way. Last February Secretary Geithner told the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, ``We're not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to our long-term problem. What we do know is we don't like yours.'' That strikes me as a strange response given the responsibility we all have to protect the interests of our country and the American people when it comes to keeping us on a sound economic path and hopefully putting America back to work. It is easy in a campaign season for the President to talk about the need for a ``balanced approach'' when it comes to the budget. Of course, we all have our own ideas about how that balance should be struck, but a truly balanced approach would include reining in Federal spending and preserving and protecting Social Security and Medicare. As a matter of political reality, it should include revenue, and our side of the aisle has identified ways that additional revenue might be put on the table, but that is simply not enough by itself to address the whole problem and is not a serious proposal in terms of solving the complex economic situation in which we find ourselves. There is nothing balanced, though, about continuing to spend money we don't have and piling up trillions of dollars in new debt. It is irresponsible for our generation to impose on the generation of these young people sitting in front of me the debt they are going to have to pay. We are kidding ourselves if we think there is not a price to be paid for spending money we don't have. We ought to be big enough, we ought to be responsible enough to these young people, to our constituents, and to the American people to deal with this in a responsible way. That doesn't mean threatening America with a recession and almost 1 million people being put out of work if we drive off the fiscal cliff. It strikes me as the height of irresponsibility for the President or anyone else to say: If I don't get what I want, we are going to put America into a recession. Can you believe that? It is completely irresponsible. If the President is going to claim a mandate for governing, then he has a responsibility to offer a genuine solution to America's fiscal challenges. I am not saying he is going to offer a plan that this side of the aisle is going to embrace, but what it does is it begins the negotiations we know we have to engage in between the different sides of the argument to try to come up with that 80/20 proposition, that we can actually address these problems and leave some of our other fights and differences for a future day. Unless the President offers a plan, his posturing over the national debt cannot be taken seriously. And if he threatens that ``if I don't get what I want, we are going to go off the cliff and put America in recession and Americans out of work,'' that is irresponsible and I submit it would be a violation of the oath of office. A few final thoughts. None of us came to Washington to try to play small ball. We came here to try to do important work. I accept the fact that 100 Senators from every part of the country, from all political philosophies came here because they wanted to do the right thing for their constituents and the American people. I would stipulate to that. Granted, we all have different philosophies of government and the role of government that might lead us in different directions. That is what our debate is all about. It is irresponsible for anyone to suggest that we should not tackle these problems in an open, transparent, and responsible sort of way. Why would we want to play small ball? Why would we want to refuse to tackle the Nation's most serious fiscal problems? Why would we want to continue to see 23 million Americans either out of work or underemployed, with people taking part-time jobs because they can't find full-time employment? Of course, more Americans back to work means more people who actually pay taxes, which is part of the solution to closing that gap between what we spend and what we bring in. I realize and I don't want to minimize the importance of the daunting challenges we face. We were sent here to face them, not go hide under our desk, not say: Well, I don't want to do that; I don't want to vote on that issue because I might get an opponent in the next election. I believe these enormous challenges are enormous opportunities in disguise. I admit I come from Texas and we are optimists by nature. We believe that for every challenge, every complication, every problem, somewhere in there is an opportunity for us to deal responsibly and in an accountable sort of way to our constituents to pass the long-overdue reforms that would balance our budget, revitalize our economy, restore American competitiveness, and put Americans back to work. None of us came here to play small ball. We now have a momentous opportunity to maybe swallow a little bit of our pride, to show a little humility, maybe. Something you don't think of when you think about politicians is humility. But I think we all have to realize the hand we have been dealt, not look back and keep pointing the finger of blame. We need to say that this is the hand we have been dealt, this is the job we have volunteered for and gotten a vote of confidence in the election that our constituents have enough confidence in us that we will act responsibly and not kick the can down the road and make the price for our inaction and irresponsibility paid for by the American people or these young people who sit here before me. I hope we seize that opportunity. I want to be part of the solution. I am willing to cast tough votes, and I am willing to stand before my constituents and say: You know what, we had to solve this problem. As long as people are still engaged in campaigning rather than governing, as long as we are playing to the television audiences and the peanut gallery rather than trying to solve these problems, we won't do it. But I hope we will seize it. I am optimistic we will. Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Reserving the right to object.

Mr. CORNYN. I thank the majority leader for his courtesy. Labor Force Participation Rate Earlier this month, we received another big job report and along with it a serious disappointment. The numbers speak for themselves. In August, a remarkable 368,000 Americans left the workforce. They gave up, bringing the labor force participation rate, as it is known, to its lowest level in more than three decades. Fewer people are looking for work in America than at any time in the last 30 years. That is a national tragedy. The unemployment rate stayed above 8 percent only because they quit counting the people who have given up. But it had been above 8 percent for the 43rd straight month. If, in fact, the same number of people who were looking for work in January of 2009 are still looking for work today, the unemployment rate would be over 11 percent. That was the date President Obama took office, January 20, 2009. So if the same number were looking today as were looking for work then, it would be over 11 percent, to show you how those numbers don't reveal the true pain and the sacrifice of American citizens who are looking for work. I don't know of anyone who could look at the August job report or the June or July job numbers and feel good about the economy. I also don't know how they could now support a tax increase when the economy is growing at a much slower pace, contrary to their position--including the President's position--in December 2010, when the economy was growing at roughly 3 percent of GDP. Beyond our borders, the Europeans are mired in a debt crisis, the Chinese economy has slowed down dramatically, and the United States continues to face major economic headwinds. We can't afford any self- inflicted wounds. All I am suggesting is that we maintain the current Federal tax rates until we can work together in a bipartisan way and adopt real tax reform. Yet the President occasionally calls that position extreme-- ironically, the same position he, himself, held in December of 2010, as I said just a moment ago. It seems the President does not always understand or appreciate the strong connection between taxes and economic incentives on small businesses and other people we are depending upon to create businesses or to grow existing businesses and create jobs and to put Americans back to work. We need look no further than the 2010 health care law, the law that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Two aspects of it were found unconstitutional but not the tax on middle-class Americans. In addition to that middle-class tax increase, the law contains a new excise tax on medical device manufacturers that will discourage companies from building factories and creating jobs in the United States. That is not just my conclusion. For example, Cook Medical, which has roughly 4,000 employees around Bloomington, IN, recently announced it is canceling five new manufacturing plants it had scheduled to open over the next half decade. A senior official estimated the new medical device tax will cost his firm between $20 million and $30 million extra each year. That is why they are shuttering those additional five plants and killing those potential new jobs. Another medical device company in another part of the country--New York--Welch Allyn, recently announced it will be slashing 10 percent of its global workforce in response to this new tax. All of this is, sadly, predictable and it is common sense. Unfortunately, common sense doesn't seem, to most Americans, to prevail or to be all that common in Washington, DC, these days. But if we raise the taxes on these medical devices, it is only logical, it is only reasonable, it is only common sense to expect that these companies will produce fewer jobs and, in the process, less innovation. The irony of this discussion over taxes is we now have a growing bipartisan consensus in Congress and in Washington, DC, about the need for commonsense tax reform that would broaden the base, lower the rates, and help grow the economy by creating the proper incentives. That was the recommendation of the President's own bipartisan fiscal commission, the Simpson-Bowles Commission in December 2010--the President's own bipartisan fiscal commission--where Republicans and Democrats agreed this is a good place to start in reforming our broken Tax Code, paying down the debt, and getting our country and our economy growing again. It was also the recommendation of the Domenici-Rivlin panel, another bipartisan panel. Both recommended a more logical, more equitable, more growth-oriented Tax Code. Why, we may ask, is tax reform so urgent? Earlier this month the World Economic Forum released its new ``Global Competitiveness Report.'' America is not alone in trying to create jobs and grow our economy. We are competing with other economies and other countries around the world. As recently as 2008, the United States was ranked the most competitive country on the planet. In the latest index, we fell to seventh. We are heading in the wrong direction when it comes to competing in a global economy for the jobs so that Americans can work and provide for their families and put food on their tables and gain the dignity that goes along with working and providing for your family. Harvard Business School also surveyed 10,000 of its alumni to find out their views of America's competitiveness. At Harvard Business School, one of the premier business schools in the country, alarmingly 71 percent of those who responded said America would become less competitive during the next few years. In other words, they were not optimistic about the direction of the country when it came to competitiveness and job creation. One of the biggest reasons for their pessimism is the bewildering complexity of our Tax Code. A large majority said the tax complexity is either ``much worse'' or ``somewhat worse'' in the United States than it was in other developed countries. That is why Americans now spend hundreds of billions of dollars on tax compliance, because of a broken, unnecessarily complex and impenetrable Tax Code--unless you have the money to hire armies of lawyers and accountants to help you figure it out. One more point about our Tax Code. Over time, our Tax Code has become larded with special provisions and tax expenditures that represent what has come to be known as crony capitalism. In other words, the Federal Government just doesn't spend money, the Federal Government has a Tax Code that benefits certain industries and sectors of the economy. Some of them we would largely agree on--such as the mortgage interest deduction or the interest you pay on your home mortgage. There is broad support for that, although everyone realizes we need to get all of these on the table. That is what Simpson-Bowles recommended. Let's get $1 trillion or more of these special tax expenditures on the table and look at the ones that still make sense and the ones we should do away with. As long as the Tax Code is as complicated as ours is, it is a drag on the economy. It promotes a culture of corruption, where people come to Congress and they lobby for special tax provisions that are not available to the broad population that benefit them. It seeks favoritism and rent-seeking, with companies and industries that try to gain competitive advantages through tax subsidies. If we want businesses to spend more time in productive activity and less time begging the government for tax breaks, we need to fix the broken Tax Code with a flatter, fairer, more transparent system which encourages working and saving and investing--not lobbying here in Washington, DC, for special breaks. If we want our tax laws to be respected and understood, they need to be clearer, simpler, and more equitable. Given how much President Obama talks about fairness of the Tax Code, you would think he would be all over this. You might expect he would be an eager champion for tax reform. Instead, the President wants to use the Tax Code as an ATM machine to subsidize particular industries and interest groups while punishing others. We need to get them all on the table, bring them all out into the light of day and address all of these special tax provisions so we can simplify and make more fair our tax system, unleashing the growth potential of the entrepreneurial American economy to create jobs and prosperity that is sadly lacking now in the current environment. Unfortunately, President Obama, rather than attack this issue of crony capitalism, has promoted it. During the long government-run Chrysler bankruptcy process, the company-secured bondholders received less for their loans--29 cents per dollar--than the United Auto Workers pension funds. They got 40 cents on the dollar. The UAW pension funds, mind you, were unsecured creditors, entitled to less priority than the bondholders, who were entitled to the highest priority, but because of the way this was manipulated, the bondholders got 29 cents on the dollar, the union got 40 cents on the dollar. During the automobile bailouts President Obama let politics trump the rule of law. What do I mean by that? I believe that rather than let the rule of law apply, he injected politics and favoritism in the process. In his energy policy, which I alluded to a moment ago, he put politics before his fiduciary responsibility to the American taxpayer. We agree that the Federal Government has a role in funding, through the research and development tax credit and other ways, basic scientific research to promote innovation. But the President and Congress should not be using your tax dollars to make risky, politically motivated investments that benefit specific companies or industries at your expense. Solyndra offers the most conspicuous example. This now bankrupt solar energy firm received a $535 million loan guarantee from the Federal Government. According to the Washington Post, the Obama administration ``remained steadfast in its support for Solyndra,'' even after being ``warned that financial disaster might lie ahead.'' Then, as Solyndra went bankrupt, the administration violated the law by making taxpayers subordinate to private lenders. In other words, even though the taxpayers gave a $535 million loan guarantee to this company that went bankrupt, the ones who ended up taking it in the neck were the taxpayers rather than the private lenders who should have been subordinated to the taxpayers when it comes to getting paid. If President Obama is as concerned as he claims about dicey investments with taxpayer money, he should repudiate these kinds of boondoggles and let the market work to allocate capital. Washington should not be picking economic winners and losers. Speaking of winners and losers, the Department of Health and Human Services granted a series of 1- and 3- year waivers from the annual limit requirements contained in the President's 2010 health care law. These waivers fostered the impression that certain companies, unions, and institutions would be exempted and given preferential treatment. The health-care law thus highlighted an inconvenient truth about big government: Any dramatic increase in federal regulations and bureaucratic authority will lead to a dramatic increase in rent-seeking and crony capitalism. Finally, a word about the 2010 Dodd-Frank law. Democrats argue that Dodd-Frank ended ``too big to fail.'' In fact, it codified too big to fail, because certain companies will now formally be identified as ``systemically important.'' Are we really supposed to believe that ``systemically important'' companies will be allowed to collapse? The more likely scenario is that these firms will be viewed as too big to fail--both by investors and by federal officials--the way Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were. As University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel has written: The companies that are cordoned off as systemically important distort the credit markets, as a result of the Fannie Mae effect. Because these institutions can raise capital more cheaply than financial institutions that do not enjoy implicit government protection, they have a competitive advantage over smaller institutions. This may dampen innovation in the financial system and lead to inefficient allocation of credit to nonfinancial businesses. In short, regardless of what Democrats may think, Dodd-Frank has actually strengthened the nexus between Washington and Wall Street. The rise of crony capitalism under President Obama has led many people to question America's commitment to free markets and the rule of law. Likewise, the President's failure to revive our economy has led to widespread pessimism about America's future. I firmly believe we can turn things around and restore our global reputation, and I firmly reject the notion that our decline is inevitable. There is no reason we can't rejuvenate the Great American Jobs Machine and return to prosperity. But it won't happen until we get much better leadership from the White House. I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, as the distinguished ranking member of the Budget Committee pointed out, it has been more than 3 years since the democratically controlled Senate has passed a budget. That should be a national scandal. During the same time, we have considered the President's proposed budgets, which have been voted down unanimously-- that is, Republicans and Democrats both realize that the President's proposed budgets are unserious attempts to solve some of our most serious challenges. The President could not get a single vote from his own political party for his own plan because it does not include serious efforts to preserve and protect Social Security and Medicare and put us on a sound fiscal path without job-killing tax increases. When Republicans regain the majority in the Senate, we will pass a budget, we will reduce the deficit, we will tackle our long-term debt, and we will help grow the American economy by getting our boot off the neck of the small businesses and the job creators in our country.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I appreciate the courtesy of my colleague from Maryland, and I promise I am going to be just no more than 10 minutes. Tax Hikes and Small Business Two years ago, Members of both parties in this Chamber recognized that America's economic recovery was fragile, too fragile to absorb a tax increase. Since then, obviously, my colleagues across the aisle have changed their minds and experienced a change of heart. Yesterday the Senate voted to raise taxes. I have been amused by some of the headlines I have read that say the Senate voted to cut taxes, which is false. The Senate did not vote to cut taxes; the Senate voted to maintain the tax rates that have been in existence for 12 years for a certain class of taxpayers, while raising taxes on everyone else. I cannot explain the logic behind this vote. I can only assume it is some election-year calculus designed to galvanize the political base of our friends across the aisle. It most definitely is not good economics, and it is not good for job creation. For 3 years, it is no secret America has been living through the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression. We know from history, from economics, and from common sense that the last thing you want to do amid persistently slow economic growth is to dramatically raise taxes on income and investment. If you want more economic activity, if you want growth, then you do not burden it further. You relieve those burdens, which allows it to flourish and grow, which creates prosperity and jobs. Yet our friends across the aisle just voted to raise taxes on nearly 1 million American businesses. Many American businesses do not operate as a corporation. They operate as a sole proprietorship, a partnership--in other words, a mom- and-pop operation--or even as a subchapter S or some other legal entity, which causes business income to be paid on individual tax returns not on a separate corporate tax return. The bottom line is, when we raise taxes on people in the top tax brackets, we inevitably are going to capture, in this instance, 1 million different individuals paying business income on an individual tax return, which is bad for the economy, bad for jobs. We should make no mistake about it: Given our anemic growth rates, given the ongoing debt crisis in Europe, and given the economic slowdown in China and other emerging market countries, raising taxes on so many job creators could easily tip the U.S. economy back into recession. If we take yesterday's vote to increase taxes on so many small businesses together with the unwillingness to deal with the single largest tax increase in American history--which will occur on December 31, 2012, and is something that has been called taxmageddon, when virtually all the tax provisions in the code will expire, the ones passed 12 years ago--if we combine that huge tax increase with the sequestration, $1.2 trillion, which comes disproportionately out of defense spending, without exception the economists I have talked to say we will be in a recession. Why is it that our colleagues across the aisle are willing to risk putting America back into recession just to raise taxes? I cannot understand that, unless they have taken some kind of poll, done some sort of focus group that has laid out some strategy which is not readily apparent to most people. So the idea that this tax increase would solve our fiscal problem is laughable. As my good friend, the Republican leader, said yesterday, the additional revenue generated by the taxes that our Democratic friends voted for yesterday ``[wouldn't] even fund the government for a week.'' A week--and that is before we consider the harmful impact on the economy and jobs. Whenever I talk to business owners back home in Texas, they express utter bewilderment as to why Members of Congress would want to raise taxes during the current economic environment. Don't our friends across the aisle realize how many small businesses are struggling to stay afloat? Don't they realize that our Byzantine Tax Code and misguided regulations are already strangling job creation? Don't they realize our national unemployment rate has been stuck at more than 8 percent for 41 consecutive months? No one here wants to see another recession, but apparently some are willing to risk a recession by putting ideology ahead of sound economic policy. After last night's vote, I thought of all the Texas entrepreneurs--more than 400 of them--who have contacted my office, sending their personal, inspiring American success stories. These stories remind us that the American dream is still alive, and it is inextricably intertwined with our free enterprise system. It is not a gift from government. It is what people earn as a result of hard work and the opportunities given to them in this great country. These stories remind us the American dream is not dependent upon government assistance. It is not about taxing certain people to pay for ideologically driven government projects like Solyndra. It is about offering all Americans the opportunity to earn their success and achieve their dreams. My office has received literally hundreds of entrepreneurial success stories from Texas, stories such as that of Gary Murray, a Vietnam veteran who came home from the war after three tours as a marine in Vietnam, who spent two decades working at IBM and then launched his own fencing club--a fencing club. For more than a quarter century, Gary's Round Rock Fencing Club has been training young Texans and producing world-class talent, including two Olympians, one world champion, and eight national champions. It is a remarkable story about someone deciding this is what they wanted to do, this is where their passion lies, making the most of it, and creating opportunities for other people. Gary started the Round Rock Fencing Club with his own money, without any financial support from the government. What he achieved, he achieved on his own. His story is a testament to hard work and human creativity. As Gary puts it: ``The only support I ever got was from my wife and family.'' There are many other business owners like Gary Murray all across Texas and all across this great country. Before my colleagues advocate higher taxes on these businesses, perhaps they should spend some time talking to the job creators and small business people and the entrepreneurs about the myriad challenges and obstacles government places in their way because of high taxes and overregulation. I suspect my colleagues might learn something. I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

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

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I am still trying to wrap my head around President Obama's recent remarks that small business job creators somehow owe their success to the Federal Government. His comment wasn't just wrong, it was actually kind of embarrassing. It showed that the President does not understand the enormous challenges and financial risks entrepreneurs and job creators deal with every day. It also affirmed that the President is going to continue pushing the same misguided big-government economic policies that have helped keep our unemployment rate well above 8 percent for some 41 consecutive months. I wish to highlight a few of the success stories from my home State of Texas that epitomize what the American dream is all about and to reassure my listeners that the American dream is still alive and well and thriving in the great State of Texas. But first I would like to make a brief point about tax policy because as mundane and boring as tax policy may seem to a lot of people, it actually has a very real impact on the people I am talking about. There is now an emerging bipartisan consensus that tax reform should involve lowering rates and broadening the base so that our tax system becomes simpler, fairer, and more conducive to strong economic growth. Don't just take my word for it. Look at the President's own bipartisan fiscal commission, the Simpson-Bowles Commission, which reached that same conclusion. Unfortunately, the President's own fiscal commission's report is inconsistent with the President's current demand that we have to raise taxes. That would mean a large tax increase for many people who are the people we are depending upon to create those jobs. The reason is that many small businesses pay their business income on individual tax returns. They are not major Forbes 500, multinational corporations; they are the mom-and-pop operations that are sole proprietorships, they are partnerships, and they are even sometimes subchapter S corporations. That is just a reference to the Tax Code that means you don't pay corporate taxes, you pay flowthrough business income on your individual tax return. So many people who are small businesses who may reach that threshold of $250,000 or above are businesspeople paying on an individual tax return. If this is an effort to soak the rich, well, the middle class and small businesses are part of the collateral damage. I would like to remind the President that Americans will spend about $350 billion this year alone just to comply with the Tax Code. That means hiring accountants and that means hiring lawyers just to try to figure out what they owe to the Federal Government. Small business owners face a particularly heavy burden because they can't afford the army of lawyers and accountants to help them figure out what their tax obligations are. Yet these are the folks we are depending upon to get America back to work and to get our economy growing again. But we effectively have a tax system that punishes them for their success. We can and we should do better. When it comes to dealing with the IRS, small businesses don't enjoy the same resources that large multinational corporations do. According to the World Bank, it is now more difficult to pay business taxes in the United States than in many Western European countries. When heavily taxed, heavily bureaucratic countries such as France make it easier to comply with their tax code than America does, we know we have a problem. If the President doesn't believe me, perhaps he should spend some time chatting with some of my constituents, people such as Steve Mayo, the owner of Mayo Furniture in Texarkana, TX. Steve's company is a family business that was established about a half century ago. It now employs 130 full-time workers and sells furniture in 25 different States. When I visited with Steve and his employees last year, they were worried about how in the world they were going to comply with the financial burdens of the new health care law, along with other taxes and regulations. They told me it would affect their business and their ability to create jobs and stay competitive. These are the same concerns I have heard about from countless constituents and small business owners all across my State. We are one of the lucky States. About half the jobs in America have been created in my State in the last 5 years or so. We are fortunate because when it comes to small businesses we are depending upon to create jobs, we asked this very simple question: How can we make it easier for them to create jobs? How can we make it easier for them to start a business? Unfortunately, the message emanating from Washington seems to be--in so many words--how can we make it harder? How can we increase the unpredictability of their investment? After talking to Steve Mayo, maybe President Obama would like to talk to Diane LaBleu. Diane is a breast cancer survivor in Austin, TX. Diane was creative enough to invent a clothing accessory to help women recovering from a mastectomy. The accessory is known as a Pink Pocket, and it is now being used by women around the world from Austin to Australia. The story of Pink Pockets demonstrates the power of a great idea. Diane identified a problem facing breast cancer survivors. She came up with a brilliant solution, something nobody else had thought of before. The remarkable success of her invention is a testament to her creativity and her hard work. The government was not responsible for the success of Pink Pockets or Mayo Furniture. Far from it. Many times all these small businesses want is for government to get out of their way, off their back, and out of their pocket so they can do what they do best. The government was also not responsible for the success of STS Coatings, a construction company based in the San Antonio area. The founder of STS Coatings, Cayce Kovacs, reports that she and her husband cashed in their savings to launch their business, which now has annual sales totaling more than $3 million. As Ms. Kovacs recently said: We were the ones sweating bullets over processing orders and paying our bills, making payroll--not the government. The government did nothing to help my business. You know who else can say that? Another extraordinary Texan named Frank Scantlin, who founded Sunbelt Machine Works in Stafford, TX, near Houston, some 34 years ago. Frank tells a story that as a child he was so poor he sometimes couldn't even afford to buy shoes, and he had to quit school in the ninth grade in order to support his family. This is a quintessential American success story. Frank persevered and went on to create a business that now has almost 60,000 square feet of workspace and employs 90 people. All these stories epitomize the American dream that has enticed immigrants from around the world to take a risk, leave everything they had behind, and come and make America their home. We were the one place in the world where they knew if they were willing to work hard and save, that hard work could be rewarded by success. In the meantime, those of us who depend on those small businesses to create those jobs and prosperity could benefit as well. The owners of Sunbelt, STS Coatings, Pink Pockets, and Mayo Furniture understand their success was not inevitable, and it sure was not guaranteed by the Federal Government. They had to take the hard risks, they had to work overtime, and they had to overcome challenges that many times the government put in their way. In the end, as in so many great American success stories, their hard work and ingenuity paid off. They can, not government, declare with confidence that ``I built this.'' My office has received more than 250 of these stories since President Obama gave his speech in Roanoke. They are the type of stories that have made our country the beacon of prosperity and entrepreneurial energy for so many years. As one Texas business owner put it: ``Rugged individualism is alive and well in the United States.'' I hope we remember that, and I hope the President of the United States remembers that as well. I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Responding to the question, I don't have an exact number, but I do know that by one estimate as many as 1 million private sector jobs would be affected if this sequester goes into effect as currently written. We made it clear under the leadership of Senator McCain, ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, that we are willing to work with our colleagues to try to change the structure of this sequester. We all believe Federal spending needs to be cut. But this is something that would, as the Republican leader said and Secretary Panetta admitted, would hollow out our national security and would be disastrous. Why the President won't listen to his own Secretary of Defense is beyond me.

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I yield to the majority whip for a unanimous consent request.

Mr. CORNYN. That is exactly right. The consensus appears to be--I remember that Alice Rivlin, a former budget director under President Clinton, said that if the sequester goes into effect as currently written and this tax increase occurs at the same time, we will be in a recession. This is the part I really don't understand. I think we all have been around politics enough to know that people act in their own self- interest, but how in the world could this be in the President's or his party's self-interest--it is certainly not in the national interest--to see the economy bouncing along from the bottom, with slow growth and the threat of a recession going into a national election? That makes no sense to me whatsoever. I know we have other colleagues from the Armed Services Committee here who have something to say about this. I will reiterate something the Republican leader said. We stand ready to deal with this issue now--sooner rather than later. To ignore this until after the election, creating not only more uncertainty but the inability of our Department of Defense and our military to provide for the protection and the security of the American people, is completely irresponsible.

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, listening to the distinguished Republican leader, I am reminded of that quotation from former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who said that our records of predicting when we will use military force since Vietnam is perfect--we have never been right once. We live in a dangerous and unpredictable world. We also know the global economy is in dire straits, in some places worse than others. In Europe, relevant to the national security question, we can no longer necessarily depend on our NATO allies to step up and do what they have done heretofore because they have their own economic and budgetary problems. Talking to some of our counterparts in the United Kingdom, the British Army is being cut by 20 percent because of austerity measures. So at a time when the world continues to be a very dangerous place--and Secretary Gates said we cannot know where the next threat to America or our allies will come from--we are finding the capability to address that threat reduced because of the budgetary cuts and thus increasing the risk to not only the United States but to our allies as well. I wish to make just one point clear. National security is not just one thing on a laundry list of the things the Federal Government can or should do, it is No. 1. It is the ultimate justification for the Federal Government to provide for the safety and security of the American people. When the Federal Government treats national security just like any other expense on the government ledger, I think it denigrates the priority it should be. When I heard the Senator from Washington the other day speaking at the Brookings Institute, she made an amazing speech in which--I am summarizing--she suggested that she and her colleagues will be prepared to trigger a recession unless this side would agree to raise taxes. It is not just the expiring tax provisions on December 31, which would be the single largest tax increase in American history, it is this $1.2 trillion sequester that cuts not only into the muscle but into the bone of our Defense Department and our ability to provide for our national security needs. It also has collateral impact on private sector jobs across the country. By one estimate, it is 90,000 jobs in my State alone. So why we would see our colleagues and the Commander in Chief himself wanting to play a game of chicken with our national security and our economy is beyond me.

Mr. CORNYN. Yes, I will.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, today the Senate will vote on cloture on the motion to proceed to S. 3369, the so-called DISCLOSE Act. Because the bill is designed to protect entrenched Washington special interests from ordinary Americans who want to exercise their first amendment rights, I will oppose cloture. Regulation of speech always raises significant constitutional questions. The first amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy, and the DISCLOSE Act would fundamentally remake the rules governing free speech in American elections. It is intended not to promote transparent, accountable, and fair campaigns, but rather to tilt the playing field in favor of the Democratic Party and its constituencies. Indeed, one of the chief sponsors of this legislation, Senator Charles Schumer, has admitted that his goal is to deter certain Americans from participating in the electoral process. The DISCLOSE Act will make many businesses and organizations ``think twice'' before engaging in political speech, Senator Schumer said in 2010. ``The deterrent effect should not be underestimated.'' In essence, the Democrats have concocted a bill that would silence their critics while letting their special interest allies speak. Nearly every major provision of the DISCLOSE Act was designed to encourage speech that helps the Democratic Party and discourage speech that hurts it. For example, the legislation favors unions over businesses, which belies the notion that it was crafted to prevent conflicts of interest. If the true purpose of this bill were to promote transparency and minimize the influence of political money on government, then unions would face the same restrictions as businesses. But the true purpose of the bill is to help Democrats win elections, and unions overwhelmingly support Democrats, so they are given preferential treatment. It is not the government's job to apportion first amendment rights among Americans. Those rights belong to every citizen, period. I reject any further erosion of a constitutional liberty that has preserved and strengthened our democracy for 223 years. I oppose the DISCLOSE Act and urge my colleagues to oppose this afternoon's cloture motion.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, earlier today our colleague from Washington State indicated that President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress are willing to accept the largest tax increase in American history and a series of crippling defense cuts unless Republicans will agree to raise taxes significantly falling on the very people we are counting on to get our economy going again and to create jobs. I wish to say just a few words in response. First of all, Senators on both sides of the aisle understand that a massive tax increase could well push our economy back into a recession. Senators on both sides of the aisle understand that it would suffocate our investments that are so important to business creation and job growth. Senators on both sides of the aisle understand that middle-class families are already struggling with high unemployment and wage stagnation. And Senators on both sides of the aisle understand that we are living through the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression. Yet President Obama and his party seem obsessed with raising taxes on the very people who are responsible for most of that new job creation. Led by the President, these same people are demonizing business owners and demanding that they be punished, while simultaneously demanding that these same people create jobs. It is no wonder that so many Americans are concerned about the future of the U.S. economy. In the meantime, Democratic leaders such as our colleague from Washington State are apparently ready to stand by and allow truly Draconian across-the-board defense cuts even though the President's own Secretary of Defense has said these cuts would hollow out our military and be catastrophic to our national security. It simply amazes and discourages me that some people are willing to play chicken with our economy and our national security in such a cavalier, calculated sort of way. Given that our country has endured 41 straight months of unemployment above 8 percent and given how devastating these defense cuts would be to our military, I would like to ask our President and my Democratic colleagues a few simple questions. Are you really willing to allow the largest tax increase in American history? Are you really willing to risk the U.S. economy heading backwards into a recession by the combination of these huge tax increases and the $1.2 trillion budget sequestration scheduled for January 2? Are you really willing to tell middle-class families that their needs are less important than the political needs of your party? When it comes to the defense cuts that are part of the sequestration scheduled to go into effect in January of 2013, are you really willing to do what Secretary Panetta said would happen, which is hollowing out the U.S. military? Are you really willing to let Washington gamesmanship compromise our Nation's security? Are you really willing to tell the heroes of Iraq and Afghanistan and our veterans that their needs are less important than the political needs of your party? In short, are you really willing to put election-year politics ahead of the Nation's interests? I can only hope that this is a temporary aberration and that the answer is really no and that cooler heads will ultimately prevail when the price of inaction becomes even more apparent, but I can't say I am at all confident. When I hear President Obama tell the American people that the private sector is doing just fine or tell business owners that the government is responsible for their success, I realize the President simply doesn't understand the challenges facing America's entrepreneurs and job creators or the risks they take every day to create jobs. In short, I wonder whether the President really understands and appreciates the free enterprise system. It is clear he doesn't understand the damaging economic effects of misguided government policies, such as ObamaCare. A small businessman named Grady Payne recently told Congress that his 31- year-old lumber company, Conner Industries, based in Fort Worth, TX, could be ``legislated out of existence'' if the President's health care law is allowed to stand. Whenever I head home to Texas and speak to business owners such as Mr. Payne, I hear the same complaints. People are worried that the primary engine of American job creation is being held back by regulatory overreach, a woefully inefficient and unfair Tax Code, and widespread uncertainty about the future of government policies. These are not Republican concerns or Democratic concerns, these are concerns that affect every man, woman, and child in this country but especially those who own a business, those who want to start a business, and those who are looking for a job. We all know these problems are going to have to be addressed sooner or later. My preference is that we address them sooner and not later if America is going to remain competitive in the global economy and reduce the painfully high unemployment rate. After all, these were the problems we were sent here to solve. I hear time and time again: Well, an election is coming up. This is an election year. We can't do it in an election year. But we have had an election every 2 years since 1788. It would be a gross dereliction of our duty if Congress and the President were to give up on making important decisions in the last 6 months before the next election. Just imagine what the American people must think. I take that back; I know what they think because they are constantly telling me how frustrated they are with Congress and Washington, how dysfunctional it is, how they do not believe their political leaders are listening to them or hearing them when they say they need help to allow this great engine of job creation off the mat and to allow it to get back to work and to allow them to get back to work as well. But it is not going to happen when the President and his party are willing to play chicken with a recession. My constituents, similar to all our constituents, all 320 million or so Americans, have to make important decisions about their families every day, every week, and every month of the year. Why would it be that Congress and the President could have an extended vacation from making those same kinds of hard choices? It does not make any sense. Beyond that, it is an abdication of our responsibility. Nobody has said leadership is easy. But right now, on issues of extraordinary importance to our economy and our national security, leadership is what the American people need and leadership is what they deserve, but so far that leadership is AWOL. But hope remains that cooler heads will prevail and that Congress and the President, working together, will do our job to help put America back to work, to remove the uncertainties in the political process. When my colleague from Washington makes rash statements, threatening our country with a recession unless this side of the aisle agrees to tax increases that would fall disproportionately on the job creators in this country, that is not the kind of cool deliberation or common sense coming together we need when it comes to solving our Nation's biggest economic problems. I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes.

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I have listened to some of my friends across the aisle talking about the vote in the House to repeal what has now come to be known as ObamaCare, which the official title is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. But I think history has now demonstrated it is not the Affordable Care Act; it is the ``Unaffordable Care Act.'' My colleagues suggest the only way we can possibly protect people from preexisting disease exclusions under their insurance policy or make sure young adults up to 26 years old can remain covered under their parent's coverage is to pass this $2.5 trillion monstrosity. That is not the case. We could easily address these other issues as well as affordability if we were to take a step-by-step approach to try to make sure the patient-physician decisionmaking process is preserved, while making health coverage more affordable for more Americans. But unfortunately that was not the approach taken under ObamaCare. In fact, under ObamaCare, there was almost no attention paid to trying to make coverage more affordable. The focus was on expanding coverage, an admirable goal but one that ignored affordability almost entirely. We now know ObamaCare was based, the vote in favor of and the public support, such as it is for ObamaCare, was based on a litany of what has now proven to be broken promises. The promise that if someone likes what they have, they can keep it, we know that is not true. More and more employers are dropping their employer-provided coverage for their employees. The President himself said a family of four would actually see their premiums reduced an average of $2,500 a year. What has happened? Premiums continue to go up, roughly at the rate of 10 percent a year. The President said, and I heard my colleague from Maryland just say, ObamaCare cuts the deficit. How they can spend $2.5 trillion and take $\1/2\ trillion more from Medicare, an already fragile, unsustainable program--unless we fix it--and that cuts the deficit is, I think, beyond the understanding of most Americans. Certainly, it is beyond mine. I would like to ask my colleague this question: What we know is that now the Supreme Court has decided the constitutionality of ObamaCare. The Supreme Court has said--and under our system of government it is the Supreme Court that is the final word on these matters. It said the only way ObamaCare could be constitutional is for the individual mandate to be considered a tax--a tax. Indeed, it is a tax, a broad- based tax on the middle class. I want to know how many votes in the House, how many of our colleagues in the Senate would have voted for ObamaCare if it had been called what it is, a middle-class tax increase--a middle-class tax increase. I think it is important to have a vote in the House today, and I think it is important to have a vote in the Senate, as Senator McConnell has proposed to do, to see whether, based on the fact that the Supreme Court has finally decided this is a tax on the middle class, whether it would enjoy the support across the aisle it did in 2009 and 2010. But I wish to talk a moment more about taxes and indeed the challenges that face small businesses and working families across the country and the need for the Senate to stop contributing to the class warfare rhetoric and gamesmanship that seems to encompass us 118 days now before the general election and the importance of actually addressing taxes in a constructive manner, in a way that will helpfully get our economy growing again. To that end, it is my sincere hope that the majority leader will allow an open amendment process on this piece of legislation and allow it to go forward and give Senators the opportunity to offer ideas about how to improve this legislation and help small business job creation. What we do know for a fact is that unless Congress and the President act before December 31, 2012, American taxpayers will face the single largest tax increase in American history. Why is that? Because the tax provisions we passed in 2001 and 2003 and then again in 2010, under President Obama, will expire at the end of this year. For example, in less than 6 months, the highest individual tax bracket will rise from 35 percent to just under 40 percent. I think it is important for everyone to realize we are just talking about Federal taxes. We are not talking about State taxes or local taxes. Many States--thank goodness not Texas but many States--have a State income tax which is added to the Federal tax burden. Of course, virtually everyone in the country pays some form of sales tax. We need to think about, when we add to the tax burden of the American people, what that means in terms of their cumulative tax burden, including Federal, State, and local taxes. Unless Congress acts, people in the lowest tax bracket will see a 50- percent tax increase. Indeed, the marriage penalty will increase, the child credit will be cut in half, and taxes on capital gains and dividends will increase. Why are lower taxes on capital gains and dividends important? Well, on capital gains it is important because we want to incentivize people to make long-term investments, to create jobs. Why is the lower dividend rate important? Many seniors who are retired depend on dividend income from their retirement funds in order to help pay their cost of living. The bottom line is unless Congress and the President act before December 31--and I submit it is important to act sooner rather than later to send a signal to the markets and job creators about their tax burden on January 1--every taxpayer in the country will pay higher taxes. Unfortunately, instead of engaging in a serious manner on this issue, the President earlier this week reverted to his old playbook of class warfare and gamesmanship. He advocated again another policy which has failed to pass the laugh test, if you think about it. The President previously proposed the so-called Buffet rule--named for Warren Buffet--and said if we pass the Buffet rule and raise taxes, our problems would all be solved. Do you know how much revenue would be generated by the Buffet rule if it passed? It would be enough revenues to run the Federal Government for 11 hours--less than half a day. Well, I have to admit the President's recent announcement that he wants to raise taxes on small businesses has left me scratching my head. I remember back in 2010, when President Obama said raising taxes during a fragile economic recovery ``would have been a blow to our economy.'' That is what President Obama said in 2010. But in 2012, he seems to be singing an entirely different tune. At the time, in 2010, economic growth was roughly 3.1 percent. That is when President Obama said raising taxes would be a blow to our economy. Do you know what the economic growth numbers are today? Our economy is growing at roughly 2 percent of GDP, gross domestic product. Instead of 3.1 percent, it is growing even slower right now. Of course, as I mentioned, this tax increase the President and the majority leader are proposing is on top of the ObamaCare taxes. It is not just the individual mandate I alluded to earlier that will penalize people who don't buy government-approved health care, but that is on top of approximately 20 different other tax increases that are part of the ObamaCare legislation. Not only do these new taxes break the President's own pledge not to raise taxes on individuals who make less than $200,000 a year or families making less than $250,000 a year, but it also creates barriers to new investment and job creation. Recently I attended a meeting downstairs with Bob Zoellick, head of the World Bank, and the president of the New York Federal Reserve office--a gentleman whose name escapes me. The president of the Federal Reserve in New York said: When talking with business people across the country, I ask them what is your attitude, your mood? Are you going to invest or sit back on the sidelines? He said almost universally the message is: We are done. We are not doing anything else until Washington--in other words, Congress and the President--figure this out. Who in their right mind would want to start a new business with the uncertainty as far as taxes are concerned, or the burdens that are imposed upon individuals and small businesses because of ObamaCare? I mentioned that in addition to what the Supreme Court found to be a tax--the individual mandate--ObamaCare includes a new 3.8-percent surtax on capital gains, dividends, rents, and interest earned by many taxpayers. This new surtax goes into effect next year, in 2013. Another thing I found amazing in terms of the audacity of those who supported ObamaCare in 2009 and early 2010 is that a lot of the taxes that were included in the bill didn't go into effect until after this next election. Isn't that an amazing coincidence? Enacting this permanent tax hike was a mistake then, and it continues to be a mistake now. It will discourage savings and investment, reduce productivity, and it will depress wages and the standard of living for millions of Americans. According to one nonprofit economic policy research and educational organization, a 2.9-percent tax increase would depress economic growth by 1.3 percent. You heard me a moment ago say our economy is growing roughly at 2 percent. This think tank says they estimate a 2.9-percent tax increase would depress economic growth by 1.3 percent, and it would reduce capital formation by 3.4 percent. Those are numbers that come out of, obviously, a think tank, but that means fewer jobs and a lower standard of living for many Americans. The damage to job creation and economic growth would be even greater from a 3.8-percent investment tax. You don't have to be an economist or a rocket scientist to figure out that higher taxes are going to depress economic activity. Indeed, it is all about incentives. If we create incentives for people to be productive, work hard, and make investments, then they will respond. If we raise the bar and make it more expensive and harder, they are going to do less of it. It is that simple. Taxpayers, including small businesses, are already scheduled to get hit with the largest tax increase in history at the end of the year, as I have already mentioned. I will close on this, as far as this subject is concerned: We know the key to job creation is to grow the economy and allow small businesses to flourish, invest, and create jobs. That is what we are missing now. Government has grown and grown and grown. It has spent money it didn't have under the stimulus bill passed early in the Obama administration. Do you know what the projection was at that time that unemployment would be today if we passed this spending bill using borrowed money? The President's administration said unemployment would be at 5.6 percent. Yet it continues to persist at over 8 percent. So we know that obviously didn't work. I believe it is important that we put into place an insurance policy against any Senate effort to increase taxes on small businesses. For that reason, I have offered time after time a proposal that would require a supermajority to raise taxes on small businesses. The last time I raised this proposal, when we considered the 2010 budget--which is actually the last time the Senate passed a budget, but that is another subject altogether--the amendment passed with the support of 82 Senators, including 42 Democrats, many of whom still serve in the Senate. Raising taxes on small businesses that represent the primary engine of job growth in this country is not the answer to getting our economy back on track. I know about 400,000 small businesses in Texas that employ 4 million people especially cannot afford to pay higher taxes, particularly at this time. We know it is small businesses that create the vast majority of new jobs. Given that the administration has said it is committed to creating jobs, I am left wondering why they would want to increase taxes on those we are depending upon to do just that. I know the millions of Americans who remain out of work are wondering the same thing today. Voter Identification Mr. President, I want to make a brief comment about the voter identification debate. This is particularly important in my State, but it is important across the country, because many States have passed commonsense voter identification laws to protect the integrity of the ballot and prevent dilution of the vote for majority and minority members and everyone across the board, and to protect against voter fraud. Yesterday Attorney General Holder spoke in Houston, TX, at a gathering of the NAACP. I am sorry to say his remarks were completely inappropriate and misleading. Mr. Holder knows--or he should know--that the Texas law that requires a photo ID in order to cast a ballot will be issued free of charge to any voter who asks for one--free of charge. He conveniently ignores the fact that the Supreme Court of the United States has previously--in an Indiana case--dispositively held that voter ID laws are constitutional and necessary to protect the integrity of the vote. This is the low point of the Attorney General's remarks. He once again defamed my State and our State legislature by equating our commonsense voter ID law with a poll tax. By invoking the specter of Jim Crow racism, the Attorney General is playing the lowest form of identity politics. Mr. Holder knows better. This rhetoric is irresponsible and a disgrace to the office of the Attorney General. Shame on him. Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, the Senate is not in order.

Mr. CORNYN

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

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, this morning's decision by the Supreme Court has clarified some things and has made other things more muddled. One, it has clarified the importance of the upcoming election on November 6, 2012. The only way to stop the overreaching by the Federal Government, including the President's flawed health care bill, is to elect a new President and a Congress that will repeal and replace this fundamentally flawed law. Before the health care bill became law, the President repeatedly assured the American people he would not raise taxes on the middle class. He declared emphatically that the individual mandate was ``absolutely not a tax increase.'' But the Supreme Court has made absolutely clear the only way ObamaCare can be upheld as within the constitutional power of Congress is for it to be considered a tax increase, and a tax increase on every single American, regardless of income. The President told us his health care law would reduce premiums by $2,500 for the average family. That was another broken promise. Last year, the average American family, with employer-sponsored insurance, saw their premiums rise by $1,200. The case against this health care legislation is very simple: It relies on massive tax increases, job-killing regulations, and government coercion. It will place Washington bureaucrats between patients and their doctors and it will cause millions of Americans to lose their current insurance coverage. So much for ``if you like it, you can keep it.'' And as we now know, ObamaCare has made the problem of rising health care costs worse, not better. For these reasons and more, we need to repeal this entire piece of legislation and start over. We all share the goal of expanding health care coverage, but there are good ways and bad ways to do it. The authors of ObamaCare chose a fundamentally flawed way: Yet another government takeover. Perhaps one of the most telling things Congress has done in the last 2 years is pass a bill under Medicare for prescription drug coverage for seniors. Rather than a government-run program, we created a marketplace for competition, where prescription providers can compete for consumers' favor by improved or lower cost and better service. Indeed, by using the cost discipline of a consumer-oriented approach to health care, that government program came in 40 percent under projected cost. That is the only time I know of in the health care field where the government has actually created a program that people like and that has come in significantly under cost. We cannot continue to cut health care payments to providers because, quite simply, fewer and fewer providers are going to provide that service. We know that is true in Medicare, where many seniors can't find a doctor to take them as a patient because providers won't accept Medicare's low reimbursement rates. We know it is even worse for Medicaid patients, because that government program pays providers a fraction of what they would be paid if they were simply covered by private insurance. All Americans should have access to high-quality coverage and high- quality care. The best way to make quality coverage and care more accessible is to reduce the cost. ObamaCare increases the cost. We need to reduce the cost and make it more affordable, and the best way to reduce cost is through patient-driven reforms that increase transparency, eliminate government distortions, and boost private competition. Those are the reforms Americans want, and those are the reforms they deserve. Unfortunately, President Obama has made clear he views health care reform as a vehicle for expanding the size of government and its intrusion into the decisions that should be reserved for patients in consultation with their private doctors. Time and time again the President has put ideology ahead of basic logic and sound economics. Therefore, to ensure future health care reforms empower patients and reduce cost and make it more affordable, we need to put a new President in the White House. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I come to the floor to join my colleagues from Alaska, from Oklahoma, and others to express my disapproval. I intend to vote in favor of the resolution of disapproval of the Environmental Protection Agency's mercury and air toxins standards rule, also known as Utility MACT. Now, of course, sometimes the debate, when we talk about pollution, when we talk about the byproducts of coal-fired powerplants, is cast in apocalyptic-like terms that have no real bearing on reality or in terms of the science and in terms of the economic impact of the rule or the health benefits supposedly to be derived. I want to talk about that just briefly. While this rule claims to be about public safety, it is a job- killing, ideologically driven attempt to cripple the coal industry in the United States, an industry that employs an awful lot of people, feeds a lot of families. This administration, unfortunately, is using the EPA to destroy a major source of reliable, affordable, base-lode electricity that we sorely need. The President talks about being for an all-of-the-above energy policy. Yet his administration, through this regulation we seek to disapprove today, is going to effectively take one of those most abundant, low-cost sources of energy off the table for the American people. Of course, Congress would never pass such a law in our own right, so the administration is using a ruling from an unelected group of bureaucrats who are not subject to political accountability. This is another example of executive overreach, and it is bad news for consumers and job creators alike. Power companies have confirmed that Utility MACT standards for new power sources are so stringent that no new coal-fired powerplant will be built in the United States. No new coal-fired powerplant will be built in the United States, no matter how modern and how clean the technology will allow that powerplant to operate. So the consequences will be that Utility MACT will damage grid reliability. It will destroy jobs, and it will raise electricity prices--not a small matter when many of our seniors are on fixed incomes and are going to suffer as a result of this rule that does not do what its advocates tout it for. The costs of Utility MACT will exceed the benefits by roughly 1,600 to 1. Some claim that does not matter, that benefits are benefits no matter what the cost, no matter how much, how many jobs it kills, no matter how much it raises the price of electricity on seniors in my State who are living in very hot summers. If we have another year like we had last year--I hope we do not. We had 100-degree temperatures more than 70 days--and I think it was even more than that--it will threaten the capacity of the power grid to even produce the electricity so people can run their air conditioners. The detriment to our seniors in terms of public health and in terms of cost, being on a fixed income, is quite evident. According to the EPA, more than 99 percent of the health benefits from Utility MACT will not even come from mercury reductions but, rather, from reductions in particulate matter that are already regulated to safe levels under the Clean Air Act. So either the EPA will be double-counting existing benefits or else it will be setting new levels for other byproducts that are not justified by public health concerns. In short, the benefits of this regulation are dubious, but the costs are real. They are already harming the U.S. economy with existing powerplants being shut down and others being scrapped. The United States currently has more than 1,400 coal-fired electricity-generating units operating at more than 600 plants. Together, these powerplants generate almost half of the electricity produced in our country. Again, we are not talking about taking wind energy off the table. We are not talking about other ways to generate electricity. But this is one of the cheapest, most abundant sources of energy in our country, and we are simply killing it. So sponsors of Utility MACT repeatedly tout its health benefits. But those are overstated. However, they understate the impact this will have on jobs. It will kill jobs. People will lose their jobs in a tough economy. I urge my colleagues to pull back the curtain on the EPA and see Utility MACT for what it is, an economic disaster shrouded in false claims about public health. Americans deserve smart regulation based on logic and sound science. Utility MACT is the exact opposite and deserves to be rejected. I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, this morning during a hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Attorney General appeared, and in an exchange I had with him, it culminated with my call upon him to resign his position as Attorney General. That is a very serious matter. I wish to take a few minutes to explain why, after long deliberation, I have come to this conclusion. I do believe it is the right decision and it is long overdue. I served as an attorney general of my State--an elected attorney general, not an appointed attorney general. I believe strongly the American people deserve a chief law enforcement officer who will be independent of political influence, who will be accountable to the law, and who will be transparent, particularly in his dealings with the Congress. Unfortunately, Attorney General Holder has failed on all of these counts. At his confirmation hearing in 2009 in front of the Judiciary Committee, Eric Holder said his Department of Justice would ``serve justice, not the fleeting interests of any political party.'' He also said he would seek to achieve a ``full partnership with this Committee and with Congress as a whole.'' I wish he had kept his word. Regrettably, he has not. In the past few weeks I have joined my colleagues on both sides of the aisle in our shock at news articles that have disclosed some of the most sensitive classified programs of our national security apparatus. These were reportedly covert operations aimed at thwarting terrorist attacks as well as defeating Iran's nuclear aspirations. The leaks, according to the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Feinstein--I am paraphrasing here, but I believe she says these are some of the worst she has seen in her tenure on the Intelligence Committee. Others have suggested these are some of the most damaging potential leaks in our history--certainly recent history. According to the very stories that reported these programs, the sources come from the highest reaches of the executive branch of our government; namely, the White House. As Democrats and Republicans have both made clear, the unauthorized release of classified information is a crime--it is a crime--because it threatens our national security and puts the lives of those who are sworn to defend our Nation in jeopardy. As many have hastened to point out, it also jeopardizes the cooperation of our allies. Who would be motivated to be a source of classified, highly sensitive information that would be provided to our intelligence community if they knew they were likely to be on the front page of the Washington Post or The New York Times? The news articles containing the leaked information paint the President in a flattering light. The concern is that they appear just as his reelection campaign is getting into full swing. Let me be clear. These facts raise legitimate concerns about the motives behind what everyone agrees is criminal conduct. That is why it is so important to have an investigation of these leaks that is independent, nonpartisan, and thorough. Unfortunately, Attorney General Holder has demonstrated, at least to me, that he is incapable of delivering that kind of investigation. Just hours before Senator McCain and Senator Chambliss called for a special prosecutor or, in the parlance of the statute now, a special counsel, Holder's Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole told me he didn't think an independent investigation was warranted because the leaks didn't come from the White House or this administration. Amazingly, he hadn't, apparently, done an investigation before he reached that conclusion. Attorney General Holder apparently takes the same view. He has already decided who is not to blame, and he has excluded the administration and the White House and the reported sources of the information--although not named, they were named by category--he has already written them off and suggested that they could not possibly be the source of any of these leaks. I looked into the special counsel law which says that a special prosecutor is called for when an investigation would present a conflict of interest for the Justice Department. I concede the Attorney General has a very tough job. He is a member of the President's Cabinet, but he has a special and independent responsibility as the chief law enforcement officer of the country and he can't be confused about those roles. There have been some reports that some of these leaks may have even emanated from the Justice Department itself. In fact, this morning, the Attorney General acknowledged that some of the Department of Justice's National Security Division had recused itself from an ongoing leak investigation. We don't know the details of that, but he did concede that his own National Security Division at the Department of Justice--some members of that division had already recused themselves. These leaks in the New York Times--I am talking specifically about the drone program and about the cyber attacks on Iran's nuclear capability--quoted senior administration officials and quoted members of the President's national security team. Now, that is not a large number of people to question or to identify. In fact, that is the very source given in these stories that reported the leaks--``senior administration officials'' and ``members of the president's national security team.'' This is the same story that said that on the President's so-called kill list that he personally goes over with his national security team identifying targets of drone attacks, that also David Axelrod, his chief political adviser, sat in, apparently, on at least one, maybe more meetings. But instead of an independent prosecutor, Attorney General Holder has chosen to appoint two U.S. attorneys who are in his chain of command and who will report to him and who are directly under his personal supervision. One of those is U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Ronald Machen, who volunteered on the Obama campaign in 2008 and who has given thousands of dollars to the President's political campaigns over the years. I do not have any issue with that. That is his right as an American citizen. But it does raise legitimate questions about his ability to be independent and conduct the kind of investigation I am talking about. Oh, by the way, Mr. Machen also got his start as a Federal prosecutor when he went to work for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. That is not an independent investigation--that is the point-- and it helps to demonstrate why it is that Attorney General Holder has a conflict of interest himself that requires the appointment of a special counsel, not the appointment of two U.S. attorneys who are directly responsible to him and through whom he can control the flow of information to Congress and others. Reasonable people will wonder, where does the Attorney General's loyalty lie--to the President of the United States to try to help him get reelected or his duty to enforce the laws of the U.S. Government? This would be troubling enough to me if this were an isolated event, but what has brought me to this serious conclusion that Attorney General Holder should, in fact, resign goes back much further because this is only a symptom of the Department of Justice's complete lack of accountability, independence, and transparency. Take the tragedy known as Operation Fast and Furious. And we know, under Attorney General Holder's watch, the Department of Justice ordered the transfer of more than 2,000 high-caliber firearms to some of the most dangerous drug cartels operating in Mexico. The Attorney General disingenuously tried to confuse this with an operation known as Wide Receiver, which was done in consultation with the Mexican Government and where the point was not to let the guns walk without surveillance but to track them. It was ended when it became very difficult to track them and thus gave rise to the operation known as Fast and Furious, which had an altogether different mode of operation. Instead of tracking these firearms and arresting cartel agents trafficking them, under Operation Fast and Furious, Department of Justice officials ordered law enforcement agents to break off direct surveillance and to allow these guns to ``walk''--apparently under the mistaken belief that they could somehow find them at a later time and, through alternative means of surveillance, discover the nature of the organization and the distribution of these guns and help them bring down some of these cartels. Unfortunately, and quite predictably, the weapons from this flawed operation have been used to commit numerous violent crimes on both sides of the southern border, including the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in December 2010. Far from being apologetic, Attorney General Holder's conduct during the congressional investigation into this flawed program has been nothing short of misleading and obstructionist, having complete disregard for Congress's independent constitutional responsibility to conduct oversight and investigations of the Department of Justice and other Federal agencies. For example, Attorney General Holder has stonewalled the investigation, turning over less than 10 percent of the documents subpoenaed by a congressional committee. Attorney General Holder's Department misled Congress in a February 2011 letter where they claimed that Operation Fast and Furious did not even exist--there was no program to allow guns to walk into the hands of the cartels and to lose direct surveillance of them. We now know that is false but only because Lanny Breuer, 9 months later, in November 2011, came before the Senate Judiciary Committee and said: You know, that letter we wrote in February 2011 saying there was not any gun-walking program known as Fast and Furious--that was false. That was not true. So for all that period of time, Attorney General Holder and his Department misled Congress by claiming falsely that Fast and Furious did not exist. Then, in addition, Attorney General Holder misled Representative Issa, who has led the investigation in the House of Representatives, by testifying that he only learned of Operation Fast and Furious ``over the last few weeks.'' That was in May 2011. He said he only learned about it in ``the last few weeks.'' Brian Terry was murdered in December 2010, yet Eric Holder said he only learned in ``the last few weeks'' about Operation Fast and Furious, and that was in May 2011. We now know that is false. Attorney General Holder also misled the public at a September 2011 press conference by claiming that Operation Fast and Furious did not reach into the upper levels of the Justice Department. We now know that is false. I personally reviewed some of the wiretaps that were produced as a result of a whistleblower through the House investigating committee, and it makes clear that the rationale for securing a wiretap was because they did not expect to be able to keep track of the weapons directly by direct surveillance, describing, in essence, the tactics of Operation Fast and Furious. Those required the authorization of high- level Department of Justice employees, including those in Lanny Breuer's office. Again, Attorney General Holder and his staff misled the public, claiming Operation Fast and Furious was unknown at the upper reaches of the Justice Department. Attorney General Holder misled the Senate Judiciary Committee last November by testifying that he did not believe that these wiretap applications approved by senior deputies included detailed discussion of gunwalking. As I said, we know that to be false. I read them with my own eyes yesterday, although they remain under seal. And Attorney General Holder has refused to take any step to ask the court to modify that seal so we can then review those and compare his story with what is revealed in the affidavits. So as long as these documents remain under seal, we are left with the ``he said, she said'' that he could resolve if he would agree to go to the court and ask that they be unsealed for purposes of the congressional investigation. Then, when there were reports of gunwalking operations in Houston, TX, at a sports dealer known as Carter's Country, I asked Attorney General Holder whether there were gunwalking operations in my State. When you had a legitimate seller of firearms say: Hey, I think there is something suspicious going on, you have people making bulk purchases of firearms, and I am worried they may be going to the cartels or other sources, they were told: Do not do anything about it. Let them go. But when I asked Attorney General Holder to confirm or deny that there was an Operation Fast and Furious look-alike or that Fast and Furious itself was operating in my State, again, I got no reply. I have no idea what else the Attorney General and his Department are concealing from the American people or, more importantly, the Brian Terry family, who deserve to know what happened and how this operation went terribly awry. Perhaps worst of all has been the lack of accountability, starting at the top. In the last 16 months since Operation Fast and Furious was uncovered, Eric Holder has not fired a single person in his Department for supplying 2,000 high-caliber firearms to drug cartels in Mexico. That is really astonishing. I have to ask, if no one has been held accountable, what does it take to get fired at the Holder Justice Department? Attorney General Holder's litany of failure does not end there, again, putting politics ahead of his job as the chief law enforcement officer of the country and, indeed, putting what appears to be a political agenda ahead of the law. For example--another example--Attorney General Holder has targeted commonsense voter ID legislation passed by the Texas Legislature and the South Carolina Legislature, which the Supreme Court of the United States has overwhelmingly upheld the constitutionality of since 2008. So here is the Texas Legislature, the South Carolina Legislature--and others perhaps sitting in the wings--trying to take steps to protect the integrity of the vote of qualified voters in their State. And who is the chief obstructionist to that goal? It is the Attorney General and the Department of Justice. So now we find ourselves--my State, South Carolina, and others find themselves in litigation asking the courts to do what the Attorney General will not and acknowledge that the Supreme Court decision in 2008 is the law of the land. These voter identification laws are designed to require citizens to produce a valid photo identification. If you do not have a valid photo identification, you can get one for free. In my State, you can show up without any ID and vote provisionally as long as you come back within a period of time and produce one. So it is no impediment to participation in votes. You know what. The American people are accustomed to presenting a photo ID because every time you get on an airplane, every time you want to buy a pack of cigarettes or a beer, you have to, if you are of a certain age, produce a photo ID to prove you are of a certain age. But Mr. Holder has been so outrageous as to compare these voter ID laws to Jim Crow poll taxes--it is outrageous--a charge that is defamatory and an insult to the people of my State and anyone with common sense. You know what. You have to show a photo ID to get into Eric Holder's office building in Washington, DC. Yet it is discriminatory somehow? It discourages qualified voters from casting their ballot? It is ridiculous. While Attorney General Holder is blocking State efforts to prevent voter fraud, he neglects the voting rights of the men and women in uniform who serve in our country's Armed Forces. In 2010--actually before that--on a bipartisan basis, we introduced legislation and passed it overwhelmingly, something called the MOVE Act. It is a military voting act. But after its passage, which was designed to make it easier for troops who are deployed abroad or civilians deployed abroad to cast a ballot in U.S. elections, the Attorney General failed to adequately enforce this legislation, which was designed to guarantee our Active-Duty military and their families the right to vote. If Mr. Holder had spent as much time and effort enforcing this law as he recently spent attempting to get convicted felons and illegal aliens back on the voter rolls in Florida, thousands of military voters might have gotten their ballots on time rather than be disenfranchised in 2010. These are not the only duly enacted laws the Attorney General has failed to enforce in order to carry out the political agenda that apparently he believes is more important. The Attorney General has announced he will refuse to defend the bipartisan Defense of Marriage Act that was signed by President Bill Clinton, despite the fact that has been the law of the land for more than 15 years. It is, in fact, the duty of the Department of Justice to defend laws passed by Congress that are lawful and constitutional. Yet he refuses to even do so, and the litany goes on. In addition to using the Justice Department as a political arm of the Obama campaign, he has also moved the Department in a dangerously ideological direction in the war on terror. Attorney General Holder has failed to grasp the most important lesson of 9/11 and the 9/11 Commission, that there is a difference between criminal law enforcement for violating crimes and the laws of war that are destined to get actionable intelligence and prevent attacks against the American people, not just punish them once they have occurred, which is the function of the criminal law. His actions have demonstrated that he believes terrorism is a traditional law enforcement problem warranting the same old traditional law enforcement solutions. But they, by definition, occur after the fact, after innocent people have been murdered, rather than designed to prevent those attacks. For example, Attorney General Holder attempted to hold trials for master minds of the 9/11 attack, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in civilian court in Manhattan. He wanted to do so in spite of the outcry of local communities and the fact that civilian trials would give terrorists legal protections they are not entitled to under our Constitution and laws and which they do not deserve. Attorney General Holder attempted to transfer terrorists from Guantanamo Bay Cuba to prisons in the United States over the repeated objection of local communities and the Congress. What is more, when Federal agents detained, thankfully, the Christmas Day Bomber in Chicago who was trying to blow up an airplane with a bomb he had smuggled and that was undetectable to law enforcement agents, he insisted that instead of being treated as a terrorist, an enemy combatant, he be read his Miranda rights. That is right. Attorney General Holder insisted this terrorist be told: You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to a lawyer. This is the sort of muddled thinking that I think has created such potential for harm, treating a war and terrorists as if they were conventional criminals who ought to be handled through our civilian courts. While Attorney General Holder was worrying about the rights of people such as the Christmas Day Bomber, he was targeting some of the very Americans who risked their lives to keep America safe. In fact, he appointed a special prosecutor--he thought this was sufficient to appoint a special prosecutor, not to investigate these classified leaks but to investigate U.S. intelligence officials in conducting their duties--he appointed a special prosecutor to investigate CIA interrogators during the prior administration, men and perhaps women who did what they did based on legal advice from the Department of Justice and based on the belief that what they were doing was important to the safety and security of U.S. citizens, and I think they were right. Attorney General Holder has also seen fit to release top secret memos detailing interrogation methods, information which, of course, quickly found its way into the hands of America's enemies and which they could use to train to resist our intelligence-gathering efforts. Attorney General Holder's failure to grasp the most important lesson of the last decade, that we are at war against al-Qaida, demonstrates more than just a willingness to carry a political agenda for this administration. It is a sad result of an ideological blindness to the law. It has moved the Department of Justice, and unfortunately this country, in a dangerous direction. I would continue on with examples of Eric Holder's litany of failure, but I believe the case is clear-cut. The American people deserve an Attorney General who is independent of politics, who is accountable to the oversight of Congress, and who is transparent. Mr. Holder has proven that he is none of these things. It is with regret, not with anger but with regret and sadness I say it is time for him to resign. I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, would the Chair advise me when 5 minutes have elapsed. I wish to add a few more words to what has already been said by some of our most distinguished lawyers in the Senate; that is, it is not controversial that, since 1803, the doctrine of judicial review, as decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, has held in essence that it is the responsibility of the judiciary, the Supreme Court, to say what the law is. Congress has its role and the Court has its role and they are different. We can tell one reason they are different is because Congress is elected every 6 years in the Senate, every 2 years in the House. We are accountable to the people for our decisions, for the policies we vote for and against. That is why we are called the political branches of government, as is the executive branch. The President stands for election. In essence, every Presidential election, every congressional election is a referendum on the people and the policies they embrace. The role of the Supreme Court and Federal courts is very different, as we all know. It is kind of remarkable to me that we are having this conversation, but it is necessitated by the fact that the President and the distinguished chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee have--at different times and different places--questioned the legitimacy of the Supreme Court performing this function, which Chief Justice John Marshall wrote about in 1803 in Marbury v. Madison, that it is the role, the emphatic duty of the Court to say what the law is. If it is Congress's responsibility to write the policies and to write legislation, how is it different from the judiciary? Sometimes the judiciary interprets that legislation, trying to figure out what Congress intended. But in the area of constitutional review, more fundamentally they want to make sure Congress has stayed within the limits imposed upon it by the American people when they ratified the U.S. Constitution. Of course, that is the big decision in the health care case. It is almost unprecedented. We probably have to go back to the 19th century to find where the Supreme Court gave so much time for advocates to argue a Supreme Court case. Ordinarily, it is very strict time limits. But here the Court set 3 days' worth of arguments down because of the importance of the case and importance of the issues that the Court will be called upon to decide. My colleagues have already talked about the fact that the individual mandate has been the focus of so much attention. It is not the only issue. There is another very important issue in terms of whether the Congress and the Federal Government can commandeer State resources through a huge expansion in Medicaid, which is then forced down on the States that they then have to accommodate within their State balanced budget requirements. But on the individual mandate, certainly we saw how the Solicitor General of the United States stumbled, not because he is inarticulate or incapable--he is very articulate, he is a very capable lawyer--but he simply did not have a good argument to make when he was asked what is the principle limitation on the Federal Government's authority under the commerce clause if the Federal Government can do this. Stated another way, what is it that the Congress cannot do, the Federal Government cannot do, if they can force us to buy a government-approved product and then fine us if we do not do that, which is the individual mandated argument. I don't think it is a controversial topic, and I am surprised we even find ourselves here, responding to the Congress's remarks and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee's remarks questioning the authority that existed since 1810 in Marbury v. Madison, the doctrine of judicial review and the role of the judiciary to say what the fundamental law of the land allows and does not allow in terms of Federal power. There is another argument being made; that is, that if the Supreme Court comes out and disagrees with Congress on the health care law, that somehow its legitimacy will be jeopardized. I do not think public opinion polls have or should have anything to do with the way the Supreme Court decides an issue because their focus should be on the Constitution and not on the policy arguments. In other words, they should not interfere with our role to make policy because, of course, we are then held accountable to the voters while they are given life tenure and they are given the protection of no reduction in their salary during their service on the bench-- exactly for the reason they need to be protected from public opinion because their role is to focus on the Constitution. I close by saying, according to a recent poll, 74 percent of Americans want the Court to strike down the individual mandate. Were the Court to do that, it would hardly undermine the legitimacy of the Court if the Court happened to, by coincidence, render a decision that the majority of Americans would agree with. I yield the floor.

Mr. CORNYN

Mr. CORNYN. This amendment I have offered in conjunction with Senator Vitter, Senator McConnell, Senator Michael Bennet from Colorado, and others is a bipartisan amendment which will make sure that more of the money contained in the funds the Congress appropriates to the Department of Justice will be used to test backlogged rape kit evidence that has not been tested. I know the jargon may be a little confusing, but basically what happens is when the law enforcement officials investigate a sexual assault, they take a rape kit to collect physical evidence and bodily fluids for DNA testing, among other types of tests. It is a national scandal that we don't know how many untested rape kits there may be. In other words, criminal investigations take place where this critical evidence is acquired, but it never goes to a laboratory to be tested to identify the perpetrator of that sexual assault. It is estimated that there are as many as 400,000 untested rape kits across the country sitting either in laboratories or in police lockers, evidence lockers, that have not yet been forwarded for testing at a laboratory--400,000. I heard a chilling statistic this morning from a young woman, Camille Cooper, who is the legislative director of an organization called PROTECT out of Knoxville, TN. This is an organization that commits itself to combating child sex crimes and to helping those victims get justice. She said this morning in my presence that before law enforcement identifies a child sex crime perpetrator, on average they project as many as 27 children have already been sexually assaulted by this same person before law enforcement gets them on their radar. I mention that number--I can't vouch for the number, but I do trust her--I mention that because the reason these 400,000 estimated rape kits--critical evidence in a child or in an adult sexual assault case--if they are untested, that evidence cannot be used to then match up against the DNA data bank to get a hit to identify the perpetrator of the crime. By the nature of the crime, these are not one-time events. These are people who for some unknown reason tend to commit serial assaults against children and women. So it is even more necessary, more compelling, to identify them early because if we wait too long, we may either run into a statute of limitations and not be able to prosecute them for that crime but, even worse, in the interim, they are committing additional sexual assaults against other victims. So it is absolutely critical that we get these rape kits tested--this physical evidence from sexual assault cases--as soon as we can and match it up against the DNA in these DNA data banks that are maintained by the FBI so we can identify the people who are committing these heinous crimes and get them off the streets sooner, so that future victims will be protected from those assaults. It is also important that a person who is suspected of one of these heinous crimes be exonerated if, in fact, the physical evidence will rule them out from having committed the crime. My amendment to the underlying bill is included in the Hutchison- Grassley version. But in the event the Hutchison-Grassley version does not prevail today, I offer my amendment that will redirect more of the money--the $100 million that is appropriated by Congress under the Debbie Smith Act--to make sure this critical evidence is tested on a timely basis for the reasons I mentioned. My amendment requires that at least 75 percent of the funds given out through grant programs by the Department of Justice be used for the core purpose of testing those rape kits. Also, 7 percent of those funds would be used to inventory the backlog. To me, it is a scandal that we don't even know what the backlog consists of because there are actually two kinds of backlog cases: One is the case where the kit is already at the laboratory and it is a part of the backlog of the laboratory. But the hidden backlog consists of the rape test kits that are maintained in police lockers and have never been forwarded to the laboratory in the first place. Those are not typically part of this estimate of the backlog. The experts--the people who watch this area closely--estimate that if we count all of the untested kits that are evidence waiting for a laboratory to test them to match up with a perpetrator of these crimes, there could be as many as 400,000 of them untested by the labs in the backlog. I know my colleague, Senator Klobuchar, will be offering an alternative to my amendment. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at the end of my present remarks a letter from the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network on those two competing amendments.

Mr. CORNYN. I ask unanimous consent to reserve 15 minutes for my remarks out of the 24 available, and if I could get some notice from the chair when we approach that. I may not use that much; I may yield it back.

Mr. CORNYN. I ask for the yeas and nays.