James Lankford

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I further ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. Res. 450 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the mandatory quorum calls with respect to the cloture motions filed on the House messages to accompany H.R. 1865 and H.R. 1158 be waived.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I further ask the bill be considered read three times and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 3196 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. I ask unanimous consent that the concurrent resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Con. Res. 31, introduced earlier today.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 9:30 a.m., Thursday, December 19; further, that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, morning business be closed, and following Leader remarks, the Senate resume consideration of the House message to accompany H.R. 1865 with the time until 11 a.m. equally divided between the two leaders or their designees; finally, notwithstanding the provisions of rule XXII, the cloture motion filed during Tuesday's session of the Senate ripen at 11 a.m. tomorrow.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. I now ask for a second reading and, in order to place the bill on the calendar under the provisions of rule XIV, I object to my own request, all en bloc.

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I understand there are three bills at the desk, and I ask for their first reading en bloc.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the committee-reported amendment be agreed to; the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 314, S. 153.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 3105, introduced earlier today.

Mr. LANKFORD. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 551 and all nominations on the secretary's desk in the Air Force and Army; that the nominations be confirmed; the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order; that any statements related to the nominations be printed in the Record; the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action; and the Senate then resume legislative session.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, it is a historic day and busy week in the Senate. The historic day happening is happening just south of us right now. There is debate in the House of Representatives over impeaching the President of the United States. It is only the third time that has ever occurred in our Nation's multicentury history. Current impeachment conversation is an interpretation of a phone call President Trump had with President Zelensky; that if you twist that phone call just the right way, it sounds like he is trying to influence the President of Ukraine, except the President of Ukraine never said he felt influenced by that, and they never took any action President Trump is being accused of. Five different meetings happened in the days after that phone call and none of those meetings ever included any conversation about Rudy Giuliani or Hunter Biden or Joe Biden. The money did go to Ukraine in time. It was the 11th of September, and the deadline for it to arrive was the 30th of December. The whole time the Ukrainians, who apparently were threatened by President Trump according to the Articles of Impeachment, said they never knew they were threatened. I have a feeling that if President Trump wanted to threaten somebody, they would know it, but apparently, in this situation, the House is currently impeaching the President because they perceived the President meant to do something he didn't actually do, when the whole time the President said that, no, that was never his intent. The only one fact witness the House called through the entire process--the one fact witness they called--said they actually talked to the President, and the President said: No, there is not any quid pro quo; of course I don't want to do that. But they are going through impeachment anyway. That will then come to the Senate in January, and all of January will be consumed with walking through the two Articles of Impeachment the House is choosing to send over. It is ironic to me that earlier today, Michael Horowitz, who is the inspector general for the Department of Justice, was in a hearing in the Senate, talking about the process on the Russia investigation. I happened to be on that committee as we went through the process. It was very ironic to me today, in the line of questions and the issues and things that were coming up in the Horowitz report, one of the things that probably the media will never report on, but Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, pulled out through this process, was, in October of 2016, Christopher Steele--famous for the dossier that was an opposition research project from the Democratic National Committee on President Trump leading up to the election that was supposedly all this dirty information about Russia. Christopher Steele was contacted by someone in the State Department, the Obama-led State Department. In October of 2016, Christopher Steele was invited to the State Department where, at that time, State Department officials gave Christopher Steele information that they said was from a Turkish businessman who had been visiting with a Russian member of the FSB that was derogatory to President Trump, and they were encouraging Steele to take that back and then use it before the election. The irony of the day today for me is, while the House is impeaching the President, at the same time that is being debated, Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, is giving testimony about individuals in the Obama-era State Department getting information from foreign individuals, slipping it to individuals working on the Clinton campaign, and literally using foreign sources to fight against Candidate Trump from Hillary Clinton's staff at the State Department. Sometimes the world feels more upside down than others. This is one of those weeks. A year ago today, the Senate was working in a bipartisan fashion to be able to pass the criminal justice reform bill, called the FIRST STEP Act. It was a landmark piece of legislation dealing with helping us in Federal prisons deal with recidivism. That was a good day for us in Congress. We started getting more job training to people who are in prison, more opportunities for faith-based programs in our Federal penitentiaries--just like they are in our State penitentiaries--more opportunities for prisoners to connect with their families because the vast majority of prisoners in our Federal prisons will be released one day, and it would be helpful if they had job training and if they had a faith-based background, if they choose to, and if they have connections to make with their families. It helps us bring down the crime rate in the days ahead. That was a year ago today in the Senate, instead of fighting through the impeachment process that is happening now. There are a lot of people who said to me recently that nothing is getting done. That was true for the past couple of months while we have been waiting on the House to be able to move on other issues, but this week has been a pretty busy week moving through pieces of legislation.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to legislative session for a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the vote scheduled at 1:45 p.m. begin right now.

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

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, 2019 is almost over, but there is a lot that still has to be done on this floor. A lot of bills have moved through this year. In fact, we have had 78 bills that have been signed into law so far this year. This year, as we worked through the process, we have had quite a few judges and nominations that the Senate has actually worked through. In fact, by the end of this week, we will have confirmed our 50th circuit court judge. There is a lot of engagement, but with a week and a half left on this floor, we still have issues like the United States-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement. That agreement, which is called the USMCA, has been sitting over in the House for 14 months. It looks like the House is now going to take it up this week or next week after 14 months of its being there. We are pleased to see some movement there. We have to see the final implementing language on that. We hope to move the national defense authorization bill. That has been waiting for months and months and months under the capable leadership of Senator Inhofe, who is trying to negotiate with the House to get that done. Hopefully that will get done either this week or next week, but it is cramming into the end of the year. We have 12 appropriations bills that are still unfinished, and we face a deadline of December 20, or we will run into another government shutdown, which brings me to a bill that Senator Hassan and I are dropping today, something we have negotiated for months across party lines to be able to have a nonpartisan solution to how we can never ever again discuss government shutdowns. This past week when I was flying back to DC from home, on the plane as I was coming up, there was a Federal employee who caught me in the aisle of the plane and said: Hey, I hear you are working on stopping government shutdowns. Thank you. Her next comment surprised me, though. She said she has worked for a Federal agency for years, but she is retiring in January because she is so tired of constantly having to prepare for, get set for a government shutdown that may be pending in the days ahead. It has worn her out. Someone who has great wisdom and experience and is serving in one of our Federal agencies is retiring in January, and we will lose those years of experience because she is tired of dealing with shutdowns. I don't blame her, quite frankly, although I wish she wouldn't leave. I don't blame her because year after year we end up in this same conversation: Are we going to have another shutdown? It seems like every year, as we approach Christmas, Federal families across the country wonder if they are about to be furloughed and won't get a check soon. Federal agency leaders--those who are Senate confirmed all the way through the process of leadership--aren't spending their time on vision-setting and on oversight; they are spending their time in their office having to figure out what to do in case there is a government shutdown or working through the process of a continuing resolution because they only get funding a few days at a time. All of us know this is bad, but for years, we have discussed ending government shutdowns but have never done it. Senator Hassan and I have put together a nonpartisan bill that is a very straightforward approach that we bring to this body and to the House to say: Let's take government shutdowns off the table forever. Let's make this so that in the decades ahead, we will talk about the way back days long ago when we used to have government shutdowns. In this body now, we have had 21 government shutdowns in the last 40 years. Let's talk about the days that used to happen but never happens again. We have a very straightforward, simple solution. Our simple solution is, if we get to the end of the funding cycle--at this point, it would be December 20--we will have an automatic continuing resolution that kicks in so that Federal families don't feel the effect of that across the country. They are not on furlough, but Members of Congress and our staff work 7 days a week. We have session here 7 days a week, and we can't move to bills other than appropriations for 30 days so that we are locked into settling the appropriations issue. The simple resolution is, if we get to the end of the fiscal year and our work is not done, we keep working until it is done. It is not that hard, but we have never made the commitment to each other that we will stay here and continue to work until it is done. What we have done instead is one of two things. We just punt a CR, a continuing resolution, for months at a time and say ``OK. Let's get back to this in 8 weeks,'' which is what we did before, and then before that, there was a 4-week continuing resolution. So we just punt it out and say, ``We will keep going, and we will try to figure this out later,'' which puts a lot of chaos in agencies, or we do a government shutdown while we argue. We go home, and Federal workers are on furlough. Let's commit to each other that we will never do that again. We will never put Federal workers on furlough because we can't resolve our differences. Let's also commit to each other that when we get to the end of the fiscal year, we will resolve the problem right then. There is nothing different this week than there was 7 weeks ago when we first started a continuing resolution. There is nothing different about it other than we have just decided to go ahead and get it resolved. When we get to the end of the problem, this Congress needs a deadline to resolve it. Let's make it, and let's make it very simple and straightforward: We will stay at it until we solve it--that is our commitment--and we will hold Federal workers harmless through that process. Senator Hassan and I have worked on this for months. We have three Republicans and three Democrats as we are putting this in front of this body today. We have multiple folks who have already contacted us and said they want to be added as cosponsors as soon as we drop it. Well, today is the day we have introduced that bill, and we would welcome any of the 100 of us to join us in a nonpartisan bill to end government shutdowns forever. Let's keep working until we solve the problem.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, we have a debt issue in America. For some reason, we are losing track of that. The economy is so good right now. Unemployment is at historic numbers. The inflation numbers have stayed down. More Americans are bringing home more take-home pay, which means they can buy more stuff. More job opportunities are out there. In fact, we literally have 1.5 million more job openings in America than we have people looking for work in America. With the economy going so well right now, everyone is losing track of the debt and deficit, which are not going well right now. Last year, the Federal Treasury received more tax revenues than it has ever received in the history of the United States, which is surprising to some folks I have talked to who said that there was a big tax cut in 2017, so that would mean tax revenue would go down. It didn't. It went up. When that tax cut occurred, more people were able to bring home more money and to spend more, which created more jobs. There was more investment, and the economy charged up. So we actually have more revenue coming in now than we used to have, but we still have a trillion-dollar deficit. That is the amount of overspending in a single year. We have the highest amount of revenue we have ever had. Yet we have epic levels of deficit spending, adding to $23 trillion in total debt as a nation--$23 trillion. It is a number none of us can even fathom. We are approaching a time when it would take the income of every single American for the entire year to be collected as taxes to pay off our debt. We are at 95 percent total debt to GDP. These kinds of numbers can't be sustained, and everyone quietly knows it in the back of their mind, but dealing with debt and deficit seem to be something we will deal with in the future--someday, someday, someday. I am here to encourage this body to say that we should be taking on the issues of debt and deficit now. The two things that have to occur in order to get on top of our debt and deficit are to get a growing economy with growing revenues--we have that now--and then we have to deal with Federal spending. What would it take to manage Federal spending? We are so far out of balance. A trillion dollars--literally we could shut down the entire Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the State Department--we could close down every single one of those, and we still wouldn't balance in a year. And no one would propose doing that. There is no 1-year fix to trying to get on top of our deficit; this will be a multiyear process. Just to state how bad it has become, if we chipped away at our deficit for the next 10 years--for 10 years, chipped away at our deficit to get us back to just balance--and then we had a $100 billion surplus the next year, which would be an enormous surplus, with a $100 billion surplus--it would take us 230 years in a row of having a $100 billion surplus in our Treasury just to deal with our debt. It would take 230 years in a row of $100 billion surpluses. Again, we are not just out of balance; we are way out of balance. There is no one secret thing we can do to get us back on track, but we do need to get started. That is why our team puts out something we call ``Federal Fumbles.'' The ``Federal Fumbles'' guide is something we put out every single year. It is just a group of ideas. It is no magic bullet. It is just something our office puts out that looks at areas of inefficiency across the Federal Government and ask: Why is this happening the way it is happening, and what would happen if we continue doing the same things we are doing? Are there areas where we can save money and that we would be OK with as a group? We are not trying to put out partisan ideas; we are just putting out ideas. Quite frankly, the ``Federal Fumbles'' guide is not a confrontation for this body; it is the opening salvo in a conversation. We are bringing our ideas. You may have different ideas. Great. Bring yours. Let's try to figure out how to solve this together because this last year, we paid $371 billion just in interest payments on our debt. This fiscal year, we paid $423 billion just in interest. That is $423 billion that is not going to healthcare, transportation, the basic structure of our government, or the national defense. It is $423 billion spent on interest payments, and it just goes away. We are asking questions as we put out this Federal Fumbles guide. How do we solve this? What are some ideas? We have simple questions such as, why did the Social Security office pay $11.6 million to deceased beneficiaries in Puerto Rico? We ask questions such as, why did the government pay almost half a billion dollars last year on temporary tents--not buying them, renting temporary tents--along our southern border? Was there a better way that could have been done other than half a billion dollars in cost? We have some questions about the 21 government shutdowns that have occurred in the last 40 years, including the one earlier this year. That shutdown cost the Federal taxpayer over $4 billion. We ask straightforward questions about things like tax credits. If you like the Tesla that you pull up next to at a stoplight and you gaze at its beauty and think that is a beautiful car, well, great, I am glad you like it because you helped pay for it. All of those Teslas that are on the road--$7,500 of the cost of that Tesla was paid by you, the Federal taxpayer. So what you should do at a stoplight is roll down your window and say to the person driving the Tesla: It is my turn. I helped pay for the car. Why don't you let me drive it for the rest of the day? We ask questions about grants for such things as sea lions in Russia because the U.S. taxpayer gave almost $2 million to study sea lions in Russia last year. We spent $600,000 doing a documentary on Joseph Stalin. We spent a big chunk of money actually studying the Russian flu in 1889. Why did we do that? Some of these things are small, and some of them are large. We laid out a proposal dealing with prescription drugs because the way the tiering is done on prescription drugs now costs the Federal taxpayer $22 billion. That is because generic drugs were placed on a higher cost branded tier, so the Federal taxpayer and the consumer end up paying not the generic price but the more expensive branded price when they could have paid the lower price. That is a cost of $22 billion for just that one piece. We laid out a whole set of ideas and said: Let's just look at them together. This Congress passed $380 million that was sent out to the States to help with election security. After the Russians were clearly trying to interfere with our elections in 2016, we decided to do something about it to help our States. So $380 million was sent out to the States to do the work that was needed to be done to upgrade election security equipment and to be prepared for 2020. As of this last July, of the $380 million sent to the States, the States have only spent a little over $100 million. They have literally banked the other $250 million and just saved it and said: We will use it sometime. The 2020 elections are coming. The money was allocated, but it has not actually been spent and used for election security. We want to highlight issues and find ways to solve them. We didn't try to bring partisan ideas; we just brought ideas. This is our fifth volume. We have had other editions that dealt with other issues that need to be resolved. In the back of the book, we actually put out what we call the ``Touchdowns'' and the forward progress. These are some of the things we listed in previous versions that we actually looked at and can say we have made some progress on these things in trying to actually solve them. That is because at times we complain about what is happening in government, but we don't identify the good things, and there are a lot of good things that are actually happening. This Senate passed the GREAT Act. The GREAT Act dramatically increases the way we handle data on grants. About $600 billion a year in the Federal Government is spent just on grants. We think there needs to be greater oversight on that, and this Senate has agreed. This Senate has sent the GREAT Act over to the House and has said: Let's try to resolve how we can be more effective in how we do grants and be more transparent in the process and streamline the data itself to make it easier on those requesting a grant, as well as allowing for more transparency in where the Federal dollars are going. We don't want to just complain about the way grants are done; we want to try to actually fix it. We highlight multiple other areas where we have made real progress in the past year tackling some of the things we have listed in previous versions of ``Federal Fumbles.'' But I do want to remind this body that while we talk about some of these hard issues, we often break into Republican-Democratic fights over hard issues. America is more than an economy, and while the economy is extremely important, we are Americans. We are Americans together. While we struggle to deal with hard issues, such as debt and deficit and what is going to be done to resolve this, we just can't conveniently go into our corners and make speeches and say that we have tried; we have to sit down and do hard things and do hard things together. That is why we are opening this conversation. That is why we keep this conversation going, because I do believe that while the economy is important, who we are and how we value each other is just as important because we have the responsibility to solve this. Again, other offices may have other ideas on how to resolve it. Great. Let's bring all those ideas together. Let's get 100 books like this, and everyone bring their ideas. Then let's actually do the work to solve this in the future. We are Americans. We do hard things. This one is going to be hard, and it is going to take a long time, but it doesn't get easier if we don't start, and it doesn't get done until we begin. So I am challenging us today to begin. Let's deal with the ways we have fumbled the ball in the past, and let's solve our debt and deficit together over the years into the future. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.