Rand Paul

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I object.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, reserving the right to object, let me make one point very clear. One Senator cannot prevent a vote in this body. The vote can occur at any point in time. One Senator can prevent sort of expedited passage without extensive debate. One of the things our Founding Fathers did with this body, by allowing filibuster and by allowing procedural ways to slow things down, was to allow Senators who are in the minority to try to influence legislation. I am open to a discussion on the language of this treaty, and I am open to a discussion on how we would have the standard promulgated. But I am very aware that when people talk about the criminal aspect of people they want to punish--I am in favor of that as well--you have to be aware that the vast majority of Americans who reside overseas are not criminals, are not tax cheats, and are law-abiding citizens. So I do not think we should agree to a standard that is less than our normal standard here in the country. I also do not think we should agree to a standard that might allow bulk collection of data on everyone who lives overseas. Realize that this can be putting us beholden to other countries as well, accessing records of their citizens who are here as well. So I think we have to be very careful about lessening the standard, and it is very much worth a debate. Therefore, I object.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I think it is important to remember that the vast majority of Americans are law- abiding Americans who reside either here or overseas and that they do have an expectation of privacy and they do have a right to privacy. Those who break the law should be punished, but we can't forget about the innocent Americans who are not breaking the law who do have a right to privacy. We have had treaties such as this for decades, and I am not opposed to the treaties. There are beneficial aspects to the treaties. Past treaties have had a standard which said that one had to be committing tax fraud or that one had to be engaged in fraudulent activity, the same way every American here expects that the government is not going to look at a person's bank account unless they have gone to a judge with evidence that a person is cheating on their taxes. The government can't just look at everybody's information in the bank without probable cause. The previous standard was that there had to be some evidence presented that a person was cheating on their taxes. I think there should be some evidence presented. The new standard is they can look at any of a person's records that may be relevant. This is a much lower standard, and I think it will be injurious to the vast majority, if not the overwhelming majority, of Americans who are actually innocent but just happen to be living abroad. I would be willing to work with whoever is willing to work with me on this to get the treaties passed if we can keep the same standard we have had previously, which is a standard of fraud, not a standard that these may be relevant. So for this reason, I object.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, reserving the right to object, as you know, I have been a critic of these treaties for some time. This discussion has gone on for quite a while. I disagree with many of the implications of where these treaties would take us. But I realize there are some beneficial aspects of the treaties. But because of the critical invasion of privacy that these treaties would allow, I cannot support them. These treaties are an encroachment on our privacy and our constitutional right to privacy. Many of the previous treaties that we have had in the past focused on information specific to tax fraud. I am not opposed to getting the information of those who have committed fraud or broken the law, but you must have an accusation, you must submit some proof. We are going to have bulk collection of records without suspicion. As previously stated in the previous treaties, the information that was exchanged in the past under the current treaties had to show that they were for preventing tax fraud. The new treaty, though, is going to change the standard from looking for tax fraud--which seems to be what everybody is talking about--to saying that we will look for financial information that may be relevant. What we are doing is taking the standard down to something ``may be relevant,'' which could be a dragnet for getting everyone's information. It will be a deterrent to foreign investors both in our country as well as in other countries. I think at the very least every American, whether at home or abroad, deserves the right to the fourth amendment protections guaranteed by the Constitution. I want the record to be very clear. I certainly do not condone Americans who have not followed the letter of the law, but I can't support a law that endangers regular foreign investment and punishes every American regardless of whether there is suspicion that they have committed a crime. While I want the important benefits included in the tax treaties to be ratified, I cannot support a treaty that would pave the way for a law that would permit the IRS to share information of customers at U.S. banks with foreign governments. Imagine, we will be conceivably sharing information about customers here with governments that may well not even be our friends. Also, I cannot support a treaty that may facilitate the bulk collection of private financial data for all U.S. citizens living abroad. For those reasons, I object.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent for 5 minutes.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I rise to oppose the nomination of anyone who advocates for the executive branch killing American citizens not involved in combat without trial. I strongly believe any nominee who rubberstamps and grants such power to a President is not worthy of being placed one step away from the Supreme Court. It isn't about seeing the memos, it is about what they say and how they disrespect the Bill of Rights. Due process can't exist in secret. Checks and balances can't exist in one branch of government. Whether it be upon the advice of one lawyer or 10,000 lawyers, if they all work for one man, the President, how can there be anything but a verdict outside the law, a verdict that could conceivably be subject to the emotions of prejudice and fear, a verdict that could be wrong? The nomination before us is about a nominee who supports killing American citizens not engaged in combat without a trial. These memos don't limit drone executions to one individual, they become historic precedent for killing citizens abroad. Barron's arguments for extrajudicial killing of American citizens challenges over 1,000 years of jurisprudence. It is quite simple; an accusation is different from a conviction, and due process is different from internal deliberations. The executive can accuse, but it cannot try and it cannot convict someone. Critics will argue, but these are evil people who plot against and plan to kill Americans. I understand that. My first instinct is-- similar to most Americans--to immediately want to punish these traitors. The question is, How do we decide guilt? Aren't we, in a way, betraying our country's principles when we relinquish the right to trial by jury? Due process can't exist in secret. Checks and balances can't exist within one branch of government. If we can't defend the right to a trial for the most heinous crimes, then where will the slippery slope lead us? Critics ask how we will try these people overseas. The Constitution holds the answer. They should be tried for treason. If they refuse to return home, they should be tried in absentia and provided a legal defense. If they are found guilty, the method of punishment is not the issue. The issue is, and always has been, the right to a trial, the presumption of innocence, and the guarantee of due process to everyone no matter how heinous the crime. For these reasons I cannot support the nomination of David Barron. I cannot and will not support a lifetime appointment for someone who believes it is OK to kill American citizens not involved in combat without a trial. I yield back my time.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. I rise today in opposition to the killing of American citizens without trials. I rise today to oppose the nomination of anyone who would argue that the President has the power to kill an American citizen not involved in combat and without a trial. I rise today to say that there is no legal precedent for killing American citizens not involved in combat, and that any nominee who rubber stamps and grants such power to a President is not worthy of being placed one step away from the Supreme Court. It isn't about just seeing the Barron memos. Some seem to be placated by the fact that: Oh, they can read these memos. I believe it is about what the memos themselves say. I believe the Barron memos, at their very core, disrespect the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights isn't so much for the American Idol winner, the Bill of Rights isn't so much for the prom queen or the high school football quarterback. The Bill of Rights is especially for the least popular among us. The Bill of Rights is especially for minorities, whether you are a minority by virtue of the color of your skin or the shade of your ideology. The Bill of Rights is especially for unpopular people, unpopular ideas, and unpopular religions. It is easy to argue for trials for prom queens. It is easy to argue for trials for the high school quarterback or the American Idol winner. It is hard to argue for trials for traitors and for people who would wish to harm our fellow Americans. But a mature freedom defends the defenseless, allows trials for the guilty, and protects even speech of the most despicable nature. After 9/11, we all recoiled in horror at the massacre of thousands of innocent Americans. We fought a war to tell other countries we would not put up with this and we would not allow this to happen again. As our soldiers began to return from Afghanistan, I asked them to explain in their own words what they had fought for. To a soldier, they would tell me they fought for the American way. They fought to defend the Constitution, and they fought for our Bill of Rights. It is a disservice to their sacrifice not to have an open and full- throated public debate about whether an American citizen should get a trial before they are killed. Let me be perfectly clear. I am not referring to anybody involved in a battlefield, anybody shooting against our soldiers. Anybody involved in combat gets no due process. What we are talking about is the extraordinary concept of killing American citizens who are overseas but not involved in combat. It doesn't mean that they are not potentially--and probably are--bad people, but we are talking about doing it with no accusation, no trial, no charge, and no jury. The nomination before us is about killing Americans not involved in combat. The nominee, David Barron, has written a defense of executions of American citizens not involved in combat. Make no mistake, these memos do not limit drone executions to one man. These memos become historic precedent for killing Americans abroad. Some have argued that releasing these memos is sufficient for his nomination. This is not a debate about transparency. This is a debate about whether or not American citizens not involved in combat are guaranteed due process. Realize that during the Bush years, most of President Obama's party-- including the President himself--argued against the detention--not the killing--of American citizens without a trial. Yet now the President and the vast majority of his party will vote for a nominee who advocates the killing of American citizens without trial. How far have we come? How far have we gone? We were once talking about detaining American citizens and objecting that they would get no accusation and no trial. Now we are condoning killing American citizens without a trial. During President Obama's first election, he told the Boston Globe: No. I reject the Bush administration's claim that the President has plenary authority under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without charges as unlawful combatants. As President, not only has he signed legislation to detain American citizens without trial, but he has now approved of killing American citizens without a trial. Where has candidate Obama gone? President Obama now puts forward David Barron, whose memos justify killing Americans without a trial. I can't tell you what he wrote in the memos; the President forbids it. I can tell you what Barron did not write. He did not write or cite any legal case to justify killing an American without a trial because no such legal precedent exists. It has never been adjudicated. No court has ever looked at this. There has been no public debate because it has been held secret from the American people. Barron creates out of whole cloth a defense for executing American citizens without trial. The cases he cites--which I am forbidden from talking about, which I am forbidden from citing today--are unrelated to the issues of killing American citizens because no such cases have ever occurred. We have never debated this in public. We are going to allow this to be decided by one branch of government in secret. Yet the argument against the Barron memo, the argument against what Barron proposes should be no secret and should be obvious to anyone who looks at this issue. No court has ever decided such a case. So Barron's secret defense of drone executions relies on cases which, upon critical analysis, have no pertinence to the case at hand. Am I the only one who thinks that something so unprecedented as an assassination of an American citizen should not be discussed, that we should discuss this in the light of day. Am I the only one who thinks that a question of such magnitude should be decided in the open by the Supreme Court? Barron's arguments for the extrajudicial killing of American citizens challenges over 1,000 years of jurisprudence. Trials based on the presumption of innocence are an ancient rite. The Romans wrote that the burden of proof is on he who declares, he who asserts that you are guilty, not on he who denies. The burden is on the government. We describe this principle as the principle of being considered innocent until guilty. This is a profound concept. This is not something we should quietly acquiesce to having it run roughshod on or diluted and eventually destroyed. In many nations the presumption of innocence is a legal right to the accused, even in the trial. In America we go one step further to protect the accused. We place the burden of proof on the prosecution. We require the government to collect and present enough compelling evidence to a jury--not to one person who works for the President, not to a bunch of people in secret, but to a public jury. The evidence must be presented. But then we go even further to protect the possibility of innocence. We require that the accused be guilty beyond reasonable doubt. If reasonable doubt remains, the accused is to be acquitted. We set a very high bar for conviction and an extremely high bar for execution, and even doing all of the most appropriate things, we still sometimes have done it wrong and have executed people after jury trials mistakenly, erroneously. But now we are talking about not even having the protection of a trial. We are talking about only accusations. Are we comfortable killing American citizens no matter how awful or heinous the crime they are accused of? Are we comfortable killing them based on accusations that no jury has reviewed? Innocent until proven guilty--the concept--is tested. We are being tested. It is being tested when the consensus is that the accused is very likely guilty in this case. The traitor who was killed, in all likelihood, was guilty. The evidence appears to be overwhelming. Yet why can't we do the American thing--have a public trial, accuse them, and convict them in a court? It is more difficult to believe in the concept of innocent until proven guilty when the accused is unpopular or hated. The principle of innocent until proven guilty is more difficult when the accused is charged with treason. The Bill of Rights is easy to defend when we like the speech or sympathize with the defendant. Defending the right of trial for people we fear or dislike is more difficult. It is extremely hard. But we have to defend the Bill of Rights or it will slip away from us. It is easy to support a trial for someone who looks like you, for someone who has the same color skin, or for someone who has the same religion. It is easy. Presumption of innocence is, however, much harder when the citizen practices a minority religion, when the citizen resides in a foreign land or sympathizes with the enemy. Yet our history is replete with examples of heroes who defended the defenseless, who defended the unpopular, who sometimes defended the guilty. We remember John Adams, when he defended the British soldiers--the ones who were guilty of the Boston massacre. We remember fondly people who defend the unpopular, even when they end up being declared guilty, because that is something we take pride in--our system. We remember his son John Quincy Adams when he defended the slaves who took over the Amistad. We remember fondly Henry Selden who defended the unpopular when he represented Susan B. Anthony, who voted illegally as a woman. We remember fondly Eugene Debs who defended himself when he was accused of being against the draft and against World War I and was given 10 years in prison. We defend the unpopular. That is what the Bill of Rights is especially important for. We remember fondly Clarence Darrow who defended the unpopular in the Scopes monkey trial. We remember fondly Thurgood Marshall who defended the unpopular when he convinced the Supreme Court to strike down segregation. Where would we be without these champions? Where would we be without applying the Bill of Rights to those we don't like, to those we don't associate with, to those who we actually think are guilty? Where would the unpopular be without the protection of the Bill of Rights? One can almost argue that the right to trial is more precious the more unpopular the defendant. We cannot and we should not abandon this cherished principle. Critics will argue these are evil people who plot to kill Americans. I don't dispute that. My first instinct is, like most Americans, to recoil in horror and want immediate punishment for traitors. I can't stand the thought of Americans who consort with and advocate violence against Americans. I want to punish those Americans who are traitors. But I am also conscious of what these traitors have betrayed. These traitors are betraying a country that holds dear the precept that we are innocent until proven guilty. Aren't we, in a way, betraying our country's principles when we relinquish this right to a trial by jury? The maxim that we are innocent until proven guilty is in some ways like our First Amendment which presumes that speech is okay. It is easy to protect complimentary speech. It is easy to protect speech you agree with. It is harder to protect speech you abhor. The First Amendment is not so much about protecting speech that is easily agreed to; it is about tolerating speech that is an abomination. Likewise, the Fourth, the Fifth, and the Sixth Amendments are not so much about protecting majorities of thought, religion or ethnicity. Due process is about protecting everyone, especially minorities. Unpopular opinions change from generation to generation. While today it may be burqa-wearing Muslims, it has, at times, been yarmulke- wearing Jews. It has, at times, been African Americans. It has, at times, been Japanese Americans. It is not beyond belief that someday evangelical Christians could be a persecuted minority in our own country. The process of determining guilt or innocence is an incredibly important one and a difficult one. Even with a jury, justice is not always easily discovered. One has only to watch the jurors deliberate in ``Twelve Angry Men'' to understand that finding justice, even with a jury, is not always straightforward. Today, virtually everyone sympathizes with Tom Robinson who was unfairly accused in ``To Kill a Mockingbird'' because the reader knows that Robinson is innocent, because the reader knows his accusation was based on race. It is a slam dunk. It is easy for all of us to believe that he should get a trial. It is easy to object to vigilante justice when you know the accused is innocent. When the mob attempts an extrajudicial execution, we stand with Atticus Finch. We stand for the rule of law. But what of an American citizen who, by all appearances, is guilty; what of an American citizen who, by all appearances, is a traitor, who we all agree deserves punishment? Are we strong enough as a country to believe still that this person should get a trial? Do we have the courage to denounce drone executions as nothing more than sophisticated vigilantism? How can it be anything but vigilantism? Due process can't exist in secret. Checks and balances can't exist in one branch of government. Whether it be upon advice of 1 lawyer or 10,000 lawyers, if they all work for one man--the President--how can it be anything but a verdict outside the law--a verdict that could conceivably be subject to the emotions of prejudice and fear; a verdict that could be wrong? This President, above all other Presidents, should fear allowing so much power to gravitate to one man. It is admittedly hard to defend the right to a trial for an American citizen who becomes a traitor and appears to aid and abet the enemy, but we must. If we cannot defend the right to trial for the most heinous crimes, then where will the slippery slope lead us? The greatness of American jurisprudence is that everyone gets his or her day in court, no matter how despicable the crime they are accused of. Critics say: How would we try these Americans? They are overseas. They won't come home. The Constitution holds the answer. They should be tried for treason. If they refuse to come home, they should be tried in absentia. They should be given the right to a legal defense. It should be provided. There should be an independent legal defense that does not work for the government. If they are found guilty, the method of punishment is not the issue. The issue is, and always has been, the right to a trial, the presumption of innocence, and the guarantee of due process to everyone. For these reasons I cannot support the nomination of David Barron. Even if the administration releases a dozen Barron memos, I cannot support Barron. The debate is not about partisan politics. I have supported many of the President's nominees. The debate is not about transparency. It is about the substance of the memos. I cannot and will not support the lifetime appointment of someone who believes it is OK to kill an American citizen not involved in combat without a trial. Some will argue and say: The President, yesterday, has now changed his mind. He is going to release these memos to the public. Well, if that is true, why don't we wait on the vote and let the public read the memos? Why don't we have a full-throated debate over this? Why don't we actually see what the public thinks about the right to trial by jury? One would think that something we have had for over a thousand years deserves a bit of debate. Wouldn't you think we would at least take the time? Realize, this is not the position of the administration, this is the position of the administration now that it is relenting to the verdict of the Second Circuit Court. They are releasing this memo under duress. My guess is they are releasing this memo because they need a few more votes, and they will get a few more votes by releasing these memos to the public--or promising to release these memos. They will not be released--the memos justifying the killing of an American without a trial--will not be released before the vote takes place. So the question is, Is this transparency good enough for you to cast aside the whole concept of presumption of innocence, the whole concept that an accusation is different than a conviction? There has been much discussion of what due process is, and as we have looked at this debate there are some valid questions and some good writings on this. Conor Friedersdorf has written extensively on this, and he writes about the lawyer who enabled the extrajudicial killing of an American. He asks the question, Should the Constitution be entrusted to a man--and this is essentially what happens; the Constitution will be entrusted to an appellate court judge--should the Constitution be entrusted to a man who thinks Americans can be killed without due process? The Fifth Amendment, Conor Friedersdorf says, is very clear. No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime unless upon the presentment or indictment of a grand jury. It doesn't say except or on presentment of an accusation by the executive branch without a trial. The Fifth Amendment actually says, ``Nor shall any person be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process.'' The question is, What is due process? One would think this would be pretty clear and there wouldn't be much dispute over due process. But listen to some of these descriptions. This is the description Glenn Greenwald writes about in describing both the Bush and the Obama administrations. He says: The core of the distortion on the war on terror under both Bush and Obama is the Orwellian practice of equating government accusation of terrorism with proof of guilt. Realize what we are talking about. There is a big difference between an accusation and a conviction. If we want to realize how important this is, there are Senators on the other side of the aisle who have called Senators on this side of the aisle terrorists on multiple occasions. Who are we potentially going after with these directives toward killing? People who are either senior operatives of Al-Qaeda--of which there are no membership cards, so that is somewhat open to debate--but we are also going after people who are associated with terrorism. The definition of terrorism--since on some occasions we have been accused of terrorism by the other side--can be somewhat loose. The Bureau of Justice put out a memo describing some of the characteristics of people who might be terrorists--which might alarm you, if you are traveling overseas: people who are missing fingers, people who have stains on their clothing, people who have changed the color of their hair, people who have multiple weapons in their house, people who have more than 7 days worth of food in their house. These are people you should be suspicious of, according to the government; these are people who might be terrorists; and these are people you should talk to and inform the government about these people. If these are the definitions of someone who might be a terrorist, wouldn't we kind of want to have a lawyer before the accusation becomes a conviction? When we talk about conviction, we talk about the conviction or the bar for conviction being beyond a reasonable doubt. One can pretty much think--you can be in a jury pool and pretty much think someone killed someone--you have a suspicion, you have an inclination they are probably guilty, but you are supposed to be so convinced that it is beyond a reasonable doubt. In these memos there is a different standard. Realize what the standard is of the person whom we will now be appointing to a lifetime appointment--one step away from the Supreme Court. That standard is an assassination is justified when an informed high-level official of the U.S. Government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States. We are not talking here about beyond a reasonable doubt anymore. That standard is gone. We are talking about an informed, unnamed high-level official in secret deciding an imminent attack is going to occur. The interesting thing about an imminent attack is we don't go much by the plain wording of what one would think would be imminent anymore. The memo expressly states it is inventing--this is also from Glenn Greenwald--the memo expressly states it is inventing a broader concept of innocence that is typically not used. Specifically, the President's assassination power does not require that the United States have clear evidence that a specific attack will take place in the immediate future. So you wonder about a definition of ``imminence'' that no longer includes the word ``immediate.'' The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer, as quoted by Glenn Greenwald, explains that the memo redefines the word ``imminence'' in a way that deprives the word of its ordinary meaning. When we talk about due process, it is important to understand where due process can occur. Due process has to occur in the open. It has to occur in an adversarial process. If you don't have a lawyer on your side who is your advocate, you can't have due process. Due process cannot occur in secret, but it also can't occur in one branch of government. This is a fundamental misconception of the President. The President, with regard to either privacy in the fourth amendment or killing American citizens with regard to the fifth amendment, believes that if he has some lawyers review this process, that is due process. This is appalling because this has nothing to do with due process and can in no way be seen as due process. Some have said: Well, this is a judicial opinion. Barron has written an opinion; he has justified the President's actions. People have also said with regard to the NSA spying case that 15 judges have approved it. Well, the majority of the judges were in secret in the FISA Court, and that is not due process. But the memo written by David Barron as recounted by Glenn Greenwald is not a judicial opinion. It was not written by anyone independent of the President. On multiple occasions they have justified and the memo argues that due process can be decided by internal deliberations of the executive branch. The comedian Stephen Colbert mocked this and presented: Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do. The current process is apparently, first the president meets with his advisers and decides who he can kill. Then he kills them. It is actually called ``Terror Tuesday'' with flashcards and powerpoint presentation. Noah Feldman, a colleague of David Barron, writes: . . . no precedent for the idea that due process could be satisfied by some secret, internal process within the executive branch. So to those of my colleagues who will come on down here today and just stamp ``approval'' on someone who I believe disrespects the Bill of Rights, realize that other esteemed professors, other esteemed colleagues at Harvard disagree and that you cannot have due process by a secret internal process within the executive branch. To those who say, oh, the memos are now not secret, are we going to be promised that from now on this is going to be a public debate and that there will be some form of due process? No. I suspect it will be done in secret by the executive branch because that is the new norm. You are voting for someone who has made this the historic precedent for how we will kill Americans overseas--in secret, by one branch of the administration, without representation based upon an accusation. We have gone from having to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt to an accusation being enough for an execution. I am horrified that this is where we are. To my colleagues, I would say that to make an honest judgment, you should look at this nomination as if it came from the opposite party. I can promise--and this would absolutely be my opinion, and this isn't the most popular opinion to take in the country--that I would oppose this nomination were it coming from a Republican President. But what I would ask of my Democratic colleagues is to look deeply within their soul, to look deeply within their psyche and say: How would I vote if this were a Bush nominee? If this were a Bush nominee who had written legal opinions justifying torture in 2007, 2006, 2005, how would I have voted? I think 90 percent would have voted against and would now vote against a Bush nominee. This has become partisan and this body has become too partisan. There was a time when there were great believers in the Constitution in this body, and we have degenerated into a body of partisanship. There was a time when the filibuster actually could have stopped this nomination. There was a time when there would have been compromise. There was a time in this body when we would get people more toward the mainstream of legal thought because those on each extreme would be excluded from holding office. The people who have argued so forcefully for majority vote, for not having the filibuster, are the ones who are responsible now for allowing this nomination to go forward. This nomination would not go forward were it not for the elimination of the filibuster. Some say about the filibuster: Oh, that was obstructionism. The filibuster was also in many cases about trying to prevent extremists from getting on the bench. We will now allow someone who has an extreme point of view, someone who has questioned whether guilt must be determined beyond a reasonable doubt, someone who now says that an accusation is enough for the death penalty. Now, that person may say: Only if you are overseas. Well, some consolation if you are a traveler. What I would say is we need to think long and hard and examine this nomination objectively as if this were a nomination from a President of the opposite party. We need to ask ourselves: How precious is the concept of presumption of innocence? How precious are our Bill of Rights? We need to examine--and it is hard when you know someone is guilty, when you have seen the evidence and you feel that this person deserves punishment. I sympathize with that and think that this person did deserve punishment. But I also sympathize so greatly with the concept of having a jury trial, so greatly that an accusation is different from a conviction, that I can't allow this to go forward without some objection. I hope this body will consider this and will reconsider this nomination. At the appropriate time I will offer a unanimous consent request to delay the David Barron nomination until the public has had a chance to read his memo. I will return at an appropriate time, and we will offer that as a unanimous consent. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. I ask unanimous consent that the cloture motion on the nomination of David Barron to be U.S. circuit judge be delayed until such time that the public can review documents that are now being promised to be revealed by the President, that have not yet been revealed. So I ask that we delay until such time that the public can review the text of his memos on the use of targeted force against Americans.

Mr. PAUL

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

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, it is often said that foreign aid from America is to project American power and what America believes in. Unfortunately, over decades, the only thing consistent about foreign aid is that the money continues to flow regardless of the behavior of the recipients. This is extraordinary, and we have seen this decade after decade. Studies will often show that 75 percent of foreign aid throughout many continents is simply stolen, taken in graft. The Mubarak family in Egypt is an example. The point I would like to make today is if we are going to project what America stands for, if we want our money to go to people who are supporting activities that America is for, we should write that into the law. We have made attempts at this in the past. Several years ago Senator Leahy attached an amendment to foreign aid that says that countries need to be evolving towards democracy or showing an ability to go forward towards democracy. The problem is that every time we have restrictions on foreign aid, they are evaded. We always give an out. The President always has an out. This week in Egypt, 683 people were condemned to death in one trial. Yet your money still flows to Egypt without interruption. We have another contingency that says: If a country has a military takeover--if you have an election and then you have a military junta or a military takeover of the government--our aid should end. It didn't happen in Egypt when there was a military takeover. The only consistency about foreign aid is that it flows to all countries regardless of behavior. It is the opposite of what many of the proponents say. Many of the proponents say that we do this so we can modulate behavior and try to improve and make things better around the world. Yet they steadfastly oppose restrictions on foreign aid. I have a bill that I am going to ask--in a few minutes--for the Senate to unanimously approve. This is a bill that should be an easy lift for most Senators. This is a bill to support our ally Israel and to say to the Palestinian Authority that if you wish to continue to take American money--and many people don't realize this, but the American taxpayer gives hundreds of millions of dollars every year to the Palestinian Authority, and we supposedly have restrictions, but there is always an out. Guess what. They always get their money regardless of behavior. What have I have been saying is, let's have some restrictions. If we are going to give money to the Palestinian Authority, shouldn't they agree to recognize the State of Israel? Shouldn't that be part of what goes on with this? We now have a problem--and the reason this has become a more pertinent issue and something that has come to the forefront--because Hamas, a terrorist group in Gaza, is now aligning them with Fatah, the people who run the Palestinian Authority. My question is: Are we now going to send money to a unity government? Part of the charter of Hamas is not only not to recognize Israel, but they are actually for the destruction of Israel. This is what I would ask Americans and those who will object to the bill--because there will be an objection to my bill: How can you object to something that calls for the recognition of Israel as a state? How can you object to this and how can you continue to allow the flow of money to a group that calls for the destruction of Israel? They will say: Well, we have contingencies for that or we will stop it if they become part of or control the West Bank. When I was in Israel a year ago, I asked everybody that question. I met with the Prime Minister of Israel, the President of Israel, the King of Jordan, and with the leader of the West Bank, Abbas. I met with all of these people and asked them: Can there be a separate peace? Can there be peace with the West Bank and peace with Gaza--a separate peace? They all said: No, it has to be one peace. I said to the Israeli side: If they are unified, will you negotiate with Hamas? They said: No. They lob missiles at us. They are at war with us. They don't recognize our right to exist as a state. Not only that, they openly advocate for the destruction of Israel. Realize that in the objection you will hear today, you will hear an objection that despite arguments to the contrary we will allow money to go to a unity government that will include Hamas. I am simply asking that if we are going to send good money after bad--frankly, it is money we don't have. We have $1 trillion in debt. We have bridges falling down in our own country, and your government is sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority-- which is now going to be unified with Hamas, without restrictions or with restrictions that have a hole so big you can drive a truck through them. This always happens. Every contingency and every limitation on foreign aid that you think would be practical and reasonable always has an exception for the President to overcome. The President always does it so the only thing consistent about foreign aid is that money continues to flow. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we pass my bill, S. 2265, Stand With Israel. I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be discharged from further consideration of S. 2265 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask that the bill be read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. PAUL

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

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. William Wilberforce wrote: Having heard all this you can choose to look the other way, but you can never again say, ``I did not know.'' Having heard the stories of sexual assault in the military, we can look away, but we can never say that we have not heard of this problem, that we are going to ignore this problem. I don't think anybody in this body wants to, but the definition of ``insanity'' is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. We have known that sexual assault in the military has been a problem decade after decade. I think it is time we tried something new. When I heard of a young military recruit from my State--a young woman who was raped, attacked, beaten to a pulp, three nerves pinched in her back, her legs and hips bruised such that she couldn't walk, and she considered suicide--when I heard her rape kit was lost and the case was dismissed, I was disheartened. Her assailant is still in the Navy. We have to do something different. We cannot ignore this problem. To me it is as simple as this: Should you have to report your assault to your boss? This is what we are talking about. What if your boss goes drinking with the person who assaulted you, who is friends with them? Wouldn't we want the person you complained to completely outside the chain of command? Wouldn't we want to have lawyers involved whose specialty is this type of situation? I am not saying it is easy. Guilt and justice are sometimes hard to find. But we have evidence that people don't trust the system. They say there are 26,000 episodes of unwanted sexual contact. They say 50 percent of the victims, though, go unreported. There are a lot of reasons for this. Even in the private world, people are afraid or ashamed or don't feel they can talk about this publicly. But we should do everything possible to make sure it is easy to report this because we don't want this to occur. This doesn't mean, for our men and women who serve, it is a problem that overwhelms the military. It is still a small percentage. But for the 26,000 people having this happen to them, we need to come up with a solution. What Senator Gillibrand has done is an idea whose time has come. It is about justice for victims, but it also is about finding due process. Getting this out of the arbitrary nature of a commander making a decision and into a court with judges where there will be arguments on both sides I think protects the innocent as well as finds justice for the accused. I overwhelmingly support this bill and this crusade Senator Gillibrand has led. I suggest to the Senate that we understand the problem goes on, and tweaking this problem or nibbling around the edges and saying: Oh, we are just going to wait and see if what we are doing is better--we have been doing this for 20 years. I think the time is now to make the change. I stand with Senator Gillibrand, and I wholeheartedly support her bill.

Mr. PAUL

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

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I rise today in opposition to secrecy, in opposition to the veil of secrecy that cloaks the money changing hands that takes place in the temple of the Federal Reserve. While the money changes hands, the monied class gets richer and the middle class gets shortchanged. It is more than time to part the curtain that hides the trillions of dollars that changes hands. There is a revolving door from Wall Street to the Treasury to the Fed and back again. We have former Secretaries of the Treasury who go from government to Wall Street pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars. I have called repeatedly for transparency at the Federal Reserve so Americans can see what is being done with their money supply. Every time I call for transparency, people from both sides have said transparency would undermine Fed independence. The problem is that Congress created the Fed and Congress was intended to have oversight over the Fed, and as time has gone on we have lost that oversight, so independence has really led to abuse. Some say: Well, the Fed is audited each year. The investigator general who is responsible for auditing the Fed came to Congress in 2009, and here is what she had to say during a question- and-answer session in a House committee. A Congressman asked: What have you done to investigate the off-balance sheet transactions conducted by the Federal Reserve which, according to Bloomberg, now total $9 trillion in 8 months? She fumbled, she repeated herself, she looked silly, and then she said: You know, I think it may be important at this point to-- Yadda, yadda, yadda, and then several yaddas later, this bombshell from the auditor: We do not have jurisdiction to directly go out and audit Reserve Bank activities specifically. So, really, there is no audit of the Federal Reserve, so don't let anybody say that we have an audit. No meaningful audit exists, and when the primary auditor and overseer of the Fed was asked about $9 trillion, the inspector general had no clue what had been purchased with the money. Is there a chance the Fed only has our best interests at heart? Sure. But when trillions of dollars change hands, wouldn't one want to know who got the money and whether anyone enriched themselves in the process? We know $9 trillion is over half of our entire national debt. This is money that ultimately becomes debt for all of us. It is being doled out, in secret, by our central bank. This is, in a sense, laundering money from the American people to bail out big banks and Wall Street. This month we learned that the Fed's official balance sheet has reached an astounding $4 trillion. To put that in perspective, the balance sheet of the Fed is now larger than the fourth largest economy in the world--Germany. Transparency at the Fed would not hurt the Fed, but a complete lack of transparency continues to hurt and cheat the rest of us. At the very least the American middle class deserves to know what goes on behind the curtain, what decisions are made, and how they benefit Wall Street and the monied class. Being secret and reckless with trillions of dollars is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the problems associated with the Fed. The history of the Federal Reserve has also been the history of the devaluation of the dollar. There was a time when the dollar was as good as gold. When the people grew restless or concerned that the government was debasing the currency, the people would simply express their displeasure by exchanging their paper for gold. Convertibility was a check and balance against Kings and Queens and any form of government that chose to spend money it did not have. When the government ``borrowed'' from the currency by diluting its value, the people had recourse to protect themselves. Now, the great American dollar that was once backed by gold is backed by promises. For many decades the dollar was said to be backed by the full faith and credit of the Federal Government. Trust lingered from the historical evolution, from barter to a medium that people valued such as gold or silver. The trust that still exists today lingers from the thousand-year history when currency had inherent value and that if paper substitutes were used, they could always be exchanged for something of real value. After World War II we instituted a partial gold standard that allowed foreign countries to exchange their paper for gold--and exchange they did. During the 1960s, as the United States inflated and borrowed to pay for the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam, foreign countries became skittish and turned in their dollars by the millions. Nearly half of the gold reserves were removed by foreign countries in the space of a few years. President Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, and that was that. The last link to gold was severed. But make no mistake--the trust that remained in the dollar was derived from the historic trust engendered by convertibility of paper to gold. For decades the full faith and credit promise allowed the Fed to continue to inflate, and still the people remained relatively passive in their acceptance of an unbacked, completely discretionary paper currency--but not without hiccups. Inflation nearly got the better of us in the 1970s, and now debt threatens to do the same. Something profound, though, occurred in the past few years beginning with the panic of 2008. The Fed began to back the dollar with not just promises but perhaps really bad promises. Since early 2008 the Fed has added nearly $3 trillion to its asset sheet, and included among these ``assets'' is stuff that nobody else seems to want, such as bad car loans and nonperforming mortgages. According to Mauldin and Tepper's book ``Code Red,'' at $4 trillion, and roughly $55 billion in equity, the Fed is leveraged at about 77 to 1. Think about that. That is an insane amount of leverage for any bank. The Fed is more leveraged than the balance sheets of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Freddie or Fannie, before those institutions essentially failed. Jim Rickards, author of ``Currency Wars,'' notes: The Fed is insolvent on a mark-to-market basis. . . . The Fed has wiped out its capital on a mark-to-market basis. Of course, the Fed carries those notes on its balance sheet ``at cost'' and does not mark them down to market, but if they did, they would be broke. The insolvency of the Fed will become a major issue in the years ahead and may necessitate a financial bailout of the Fed by the taxpayers. So the once-proud dollar that was once backed by gold, then backed by the full faith and credit of the world's greatest economy, is now backed by used car loans and underwater mortgages. But those who trust in paper say: Look. For 50 years now we have had no convertibility, and amazing improvements in productivity and wealth have occurred. Perhaps. But one might also argue that we are living on the borrowed plumage of the past, that our current acceptance of a paper currency rests on the glory of our industrial and monetary past. No one can tell for sure what the future holds, but I for one am concerned that the panic of 2008 may not have been an anomaly but a harbinger of something far worse. I am concerned we have papered over our problems in a sea of new currency. That quantitative easing has created an illusion of safety and security, but beneath the surface lurks a bigger and more malevolent future. Don't take my word for it. Listen to some of the economists who predicted the financial crisis of 2008. Economist Jim Grant recently said: From the United States to Europe and Asia, the world's central banks are flooding markets with liquidity and pushing deeper into unknown monetary policy territory and I feel this journey will not end well. Nassim Taleb, author of the ``Black Swan,'' writes: Someone made a mistake lending and someone made a mistake borrowing . . . and it is a mistake to transform private problems into public debt. We are facing an environment with a huge amount of debt. The next mistake is going to be to overprint, which is going to be the way out for them, which is why I fear hyperinflation. Yale University housing expert and recent Nobel Prize winner Robert Schiller: This financial crisis that we've been going through in the last 5 years has been one that seems to reveal the failure to understand price movement . . . Not shying away from his concerns that the Fed is simply inflating the housing bubble in America's largest cities, he argues: [Housing prices] are up 12 percent in the last year. That is a very rapid rise in prices, and I believe it is accelerated somewhat by Fed policies . . . the housing market, it has its own momentum right now as people see it coming back. We're sort of in the beginnings of another housing bubble. Since we abandoned the sequester budgetary caps, any pretense of fiscal discipline is gone. Politicians can attempt to obfuscate the truth with promises of spending restraint in the outyears, but everybody knows that the promise to cut in the outyears is a pipe dream and that all that really counts is the first 2 years of the Ryan-Murray plan that will add over $60 billion in new spending. What really causes China concern is not the new spending we are incurring but that the total new debt added over 10 years will be $7 trillion. China's response to our fiscal lack of discipline was to downgrade our debt. Our $17 trillion debt is manageable only with the Fed buying it and only with low interest rates. China's Dagong Global Credit Rating said in their statement on the downgrade: The deal means only an escape from a debt default for the time being, but hasn't changed the fact that the growth of government borrowing has largely outpaced overall economic growth and fiscal revenues. These are facts, and both sides--Republicans and Democrats--are ignoring the facts. China, when they downgraded us, said it, and we cannot escape this fact: The growth of government borrowing has largely outpaced economic growth and fiscal revenues. It is sad when the Chinese Government can see major economic problems for us that Washington continues to ignore. At current rates, we pay about $237 billion in interest payments. If interest rates rise by 1 percent, interest spending will increase by $1.2 trillion. If interest rates return to the norms of the 1980s, the taxpayer will be on the hook for an additional $6.17 trillion. If interest rates go to 10 percent, ``Katy, bar the door.'' The panic will be upon us. Most conservatives would be aghast if we talked about price controls. Conservatives realize, as most economists now do, that price controls lead to a glut if the price is too high and to bare shelves if the price is too low. The Soviet Union was brought low for that very reason. No one, no matter how wise, can determine the correct price of bread without a marketplace. Anytime a government tries to set prices, the consequence is disastrous. But many leaders who are quite aware of the destructive nature of price controls nevertheless advocate for allowing the Fed to set the price of money, for that is what interest rates are--simply the price of money. Like any other price, though, setting interest rates lower than the market rate of interest encourages more use of the money and more economic activity. But if the rates are kept below the market rate, we interrupt the feedback loop that informs producers that they are overproducing, and the bubble expands until overproduction has reached such a point that the correction is a catastrophe. That is what happened with the housing bubble. We kept interest rates too low for too long and the bubble grew and grew and grew and we are still suffering from that. And what are we doing now? Exactly the same thing. Jim Rickards explains this phenomenon: Market participants and policymakers rely on market prices to make decisions about economic policy. What happens when the price signals upon which policymakers rely are themselves distorted by prior policy manipulation? First you distort the price signal by market manipulation, but then you rely on the ``price'' to guide your policy going forward. This is the blind leading the blind. Politicians have been complacent in letting the Fed manipulate interest rates for many reasons. Many politicians are reticent to get involved in monetary policy. They are worried of being blamed if the economy sours with monetary reforms. Many politicians believe the economy is better off with the Fed than with the panics that occurred before the Fed. But perhaps the variations in the economy of late indicate just as much instability with the Fed as before the Fed. There is some truth to the fact that big debt and deficit financing in all likelihood require a central bank to pay the debt with inflated dollars, and there is some truth to this. John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper's new book, ``Code Red,'' highlights this very point: In 2011, the Federal Reserve financed about three-quarters of the U.S. deficit; in 2012, it financed over half of it; and in 2013, it will finance most of it. We are on course to finance the entire U.S. debt in 2014. Now, for anyone imagining a day without a Fed, they would have to propose a government that would balance its budgets annually. Without fiscal restraint you cannot ever have monetary restraint. The opposite is where we are now. With fiscal irresponsibility, borrowing over $1 million a minute, you need a compliant monetary policy, and that is exactly what we have. But there are consequences to massive debts and corresponding massive purchases by the Fed. The consequences can be gradual or abrupt. The gradual bankrupting of America is proceeding apace. We pay for it with new money created by the Fed. The result is a gradual loss of purchasing power. Over the past 100 years, the dollar has lost 96 percent of its value. A nation can survive this gradual loss we have, but some would argue that the people hurt most are those who are least able to absorb rising prices--the poor and the elderly on fixed incomes. The other possible outcome is an abrupt loss of confidence in the currency. The panic of 2008 approached mass fear that the system was unsound. Reports that the emperor had no clothes were taken seriously, as even the soundness of money market funds was questioned. Our system of paper currency now backed by the promises of politicians, a $17 trillion debt, and used car loans and bad home mortgages is always one panic away from dissolution. When that day comes is uncertain. Can the Fed continue the legerdemain; can the Fed continue the illusion of wealth that comes with freshly inked money? Time will tell. But I, for one, want to know what the Fed is doing. Are individuals enriching themselves at the expense of the public? Does Fed policy enrich one group of individuals at the expense of another? What assets does the Fed hold? What informs their decision-making process? I, for one, want answers. I, for one, want transparency. President Obama's choice of Janet Yellen as the new head of the Federal Reserve is concerning due to the policies Ms. Yellen has promoted in her history at the Fed. The Federal Reserve's answer to economic crisis has long been simply to print more money, or what they call ``quantitative easing.'' It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that printing money out of thin air is not sound long-term economic policy. But Ms. Yellen has been a major cheerleader for it. The Washington Post's Neil Irwin wrote that ``Yellen has been not merely an engineer of the Fed's policies of `quantitative easing' and `forward guidance,' but a consistent voice within the central bank to go further.'' Quantitative easing is not enough. She wants more. Will she go further? Will the same policies continue unabated? Those of us who think quantitative easing has gotten out of hand are now being asked to confirm a nominee who thinks the Fed has not done enough along these lines. The vote was overwhelming to confirm Janet Yellen, but I think we will rue the day that we endorsed quantitative easing. I believe the Federal Reserve is structurally flawed. I believe we need to be able to prevent or restrict any Chairman today or in the future from aiding and abetting the allies of banks and big government. As monetary historian Peter Bernholz wrote in his famous book ``Monetary Regimes and Inflation'': `` . . . we draw the conclusion that the creation of money to finance a public budget deficit has been the reason for hyperinflations.'' I see nothing in Yellen's past performance at the Fed that would indicate that her policies will be any different than what we see today. In fact, I see evidence that things may well get worse. I have introduced a bipartisan bill called Federal Reserve Transparency Act, known also as Audit the Fed. The purpose of my bill is to eliminate the current restrictions on GAO audits of the Fed, along with mandating that the Federal Reserve's credit facilities, securities purchases, and quantitative easing activities become subject to congressional oversight. Looking into what the Federal Reserve does with our money has significant support from both parties, many Members of which have heard the same concerns back home in their States and districts. Audit the Fed passed overwhelmingly in the House with 350 votes. Every Republican and 100 Democrats voted for it. The Federal Reserve is one of the most secretive institutions in our history. For decades, the people in charge at the Fed, politicians, and various ``experts'' have insisted that such secrecy was integral to its independence and effectiveness. But the results of complete secrecy have been Fed policies that are questionable at the least. This idea that the Federal Reserve is at the root of some of our economic problems is brandnew to many Americans precisely because we are not allowed to know what this powerful institution does behind closed doors--despite the fact that it has a direct impact on our lives. I can see no reason why the American public should not be allowed to see behind the veil of secrecy at the Fed. I will continue to do what I can to part that veil. I will continue to fight for a full and persistent audit of the Fed. Audit the Fed passed the House overwhelmingly, but we have been unable to get a vote in the Senate. I will continue to fight for that vote. Although I was delayed by the weather, I am here today to oppose Janet Yellen's nomination for two reasons. I believe she will continue the gradual destruction of the dollar's value and because I believe the time is now for a full audit of the Fed. Thank you, Mr. President. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, as we enter into the Christmas season, I think it is a good time to talk about stories to describe sort of pastorally where the Senate is. So I have a story today I would like to tell about how the Senate works--or doesn't work. So it came to pass that the filibuster was dismembered, dishonored, and indefinitely detained. With the end of the filibuster came the end of any semblance of comity and compromise on Capitol Hill. The party that never cared much for the rule of law broke the rules of the Senate to change the rules. Senate rules for nearly 2 centuries allowed the filibuster. The filibuster was simply a requirement that 60 percent of Senators must approve nominations and legislation. This super majority requirement actually fostered more centrist solutions and compromises. In order to change the rules, though, and kill the filibuster, it required a two-thirds majority to change the rules. However, the party which doesn't and hasn't concerned themselves with the rule of law simply broke the rules. When the Chair said: That is against the rules, they said: We don't care if it's against the rules. The rules are whatever we say the rules are. The best way to put this in perspective: You are watching a tennis match. The ball is clearly a foot out of bounds. The umpire says, ``Out of bounds.'' Instead of going by the rules, you have everyone vote. So the audience at Wimbledon votes that it was in bounds when it was really out of bounds. That is what we have here: We have no more rules and we have no more comity. We have no more compromise. What we have is poison--poison that has been given to us by people who have no concern for the rules. Historically, it has always required two thirds of the Senate to change the rules. But, for the first time, we break the rules to change the rules. So when the parliamentarian rules to Senate Democrats that: You're breaking the rules, they say: No, it really wasn't out of bounds. It was in bounds or we don't care that it was out of bounds. We don't care what the rules say. We want our way. We are impatient. We want our nominations, and we want them now. We don't care about the history of the Senate. We don't care about the history of the Congress. We want our way or we will pick up our toys and we will go home. We want it now. We want it now. We want all of it. We don't want to talk with the other side. We don't want compromise. We don't want discussion. We don't want negotiation. We want our way or the highway. The rules, it seems, aren't binding upon the Senate Democrats. To them, the rules are living, breathing, evolving, and apparently optional. We shouldn't be surprised, though. We shouldn't be surprised that a party that believes in a living, breathing, ever-evolving, whatever- you-want-it-to-be Constitution, might not think the rules of the Senate are important. We shouldn't be surprised that the party that believes that morality is unfixed, unhinged, unchanged, unchained to any constants, that all ethics are a situation that this party might break the rules--we shouldn't be surprised. Is anyone really surprised that such a party with no apparent concern for the burden of debt they are placing on every American family would break the rules to get their way? We are told they are upset because the Senate just takes too long. They want their way, and they want it now. They want their people confirmed. They don't want to talk to the other side. They won the election. They want their way. So now they have it. They have bullied and brayed, and they have won the day. The iron-fisted rule of the rule-breakers has now begun. There will be no return. Are they going to return to the rules halfway, partway? No. I predict they will only go further. If they don't get their way, if they don't get it quickly enough, I predict they will break the rules further. What passed for gridlock before this will pale in comparison to the poison that seeps from the hands of those who are careless and reckless with the law. Where the filibuster once created conversation, the iron-fisted rule of the rule-breakers will stifle it. For you see, contrary to popular belief, the filibuster actually fostered compromise, dialogue, and often results. In exchange for the release of nominations, in exchange for the cooperation of the minority party with the majority party, often there were votes on legislation that not everybody wanted. There were discussions, there were amendments, there was dialogue, because we were forced to talk to each other because one side couldn't always get what they wanted. They couldn't slam their fists down in angry tantrum and say: My way or the highway. We want what we want. We don't care what 50 percent of America wants or what 47 percent of America wants. We want our way, and we want it now. The tantrum used to not work. But now we will live in an era where the iron-fisted rule-breakers will throw their tantrum and they will get whatever they want. Contrary to popular belief, the filibuster led to dialogue. Every week, the majority party talked to the minority party. There was a meeting each week in which the agenda for the week was set through dialogue and discussion and compromise, behind the scenes, not always out in public. But there was discussion and compromise every week, because the majority party could not rule with an iron fist. But now, in the era of the iron fist, in the era of the iron-fisted rule-breakers, why will there be any discussion? Why not just roll over the opposition? Why allow debate? Why have debate? Why have discussion? Why have dialogue? Why have votes? It has been getting less and less-- as the grip gets tighter and tighter, there is less debate. There is less voting. There are less amendments. I don't think the American public likes that. I think the American public disavows this place and is unhappy with Congress in general because of a lack of dialogue. But that is where we are headed. We are headed towards less dialogue, not more. In the past, Republicans and Democrats would come together. They would agree to votes. They would schedule them for the week. They would agree to dialogue; they would agree to nominations; and they would agree to quick and easy votes for noncontroversial nominees. But if there is to be no rules, what incentive is there for cooperation? If it is to be my way or the highway--if the majority party is simply to roll over, if they are to beat their iron fists upon the table and say: My way or the highway; we don't need you; we don't care that half the country disagrees with our policy, it is our way or the highway; that is the way it is going to be, then I think there will be less dialogue and less compromise. Historically, the filibuster encouraged a reluctant President to cooperate with oversight from the Congress. This isn't a Republican or Democrat thing. This is about the separation of powers. This is about the checks and balances to power. This is about a President who might say--or not say--whether or not he would kill Americans with a drone. This is about using the filibuster to get information from a reluctant President. This is about a filibuster that allowed Congress to get information and to force a President to say: I will not kill Americans with drones. This is about a reluctant President being asked: Will you detain Americans? Can you put an American in jail without a trial? Can you send an American to Guantanamo Bay? How do we get those answers from a President who is reluctant to answer? Through the filibuster. The filibuster is an empowerment of Congress. It really isn't Republican versus Democrat. The filibuster is about Congress having power to counterbalance a Presidency. Information about malfeasance or transparency can be pried from a President in exchange for nominations. Quite typically, holds on nominations were used to get information, were used to force people to testify. Recently, I had questions for the nominee for Homeland Security. I asked him: Does the Fourth Amendment apply to third-party records? This is a big constitutional question, and there are answers. I might not have agreed with his answer. He said he had no legal opinion on the Fourth Amendment. I asked him: Can one warrant from a secret court apply to all telephone records? Can every American who has their records with a phone company have their records looked at through one warrant? Is that consistent with the Fourth Amendment? And this nominee said: I really don't have an opinion on the Fourth Amendment. I really haven't thought that much about the Constitution. But he is going to lead one of the largest agencies in our government that may well have to do with spying on Americans, and yet has no opinion on the Fourth Amendment. So what would the filibuster do? Historically, the filibuster would stop his nomination. What would a hold do? Would it be petulant? Maybe at times. But for the most part, holds were placed on nominees who wouldn't answer questions. So if you wanted answers from nominees and you didn't want them to get up there and say I don't recall, 49 times, I can't remember, I don't have an opinion today, sir, on the Constitution; then you would hold their nomination. You would hold their feet to the fire. The filibuster, holds, about slowing things down--this is about the separation of powers. This is about the checks and balances. Currently we have a President who apparently thinks he is more than a President. He thinks he has a few monarchial powers. He believes more he is a monarch than he is a President because he thinks he can amend legislation. More than 20 times ObamaCare has been amended after the fact. They do not come back to Congress. So what would the filibuster do? What would a hold do? It would say to that President: You will obey the Constitution. We have no way to get him in court on these matters. It is very difficult to prove or disprove the constitutionality by a challenge. The beauty of our Founding Fathers is they separated the powers. One of the powers of Congress is the filibuster. It is placing holds. By doing that we check a rebellious or an adventurous President who thinks he can take this power upon himself. Montesquieu, who is one of the people we look to about the separation of powers, once wrote: When you allow the legislative power to gravitate to the President, when you allow the President to take this power and he can legislate or do whatever he wants, you are allowing a tyranny. That is why Montesquieu wrote you have to separate these powers so no one body of people, no one grouping within government would assume or absorb too much power. That is what is happening here, by giving up our power for petty partisan reasons. Let's be very frank with each other. The Senate Democrats have, for petty partisan reasons, taken away the power of Congress, taken away one of the checks and balances on a rogue Presidency. These checks and balances are not something we should stoop to the level of petty partisanship over. By allowing us to do so, what has happened is we have allowed ourselves to give up one of the great checks and balances that was one of the beauties of our Constitution. The loss of the filibuster truly weakens Congress and it makes the executive, regardless of party, more powerful and less likely to be transparent and less likely to compromise. In short, when you give power to the party in the minority, when you have that power in the party that is in the minority, it works to coax compromise out of people. In the era of filibusters and holds, someone such as myself who is new to the Senate could place a hold on the Federal Reserve Chairman and release it in exchange for a vote auditing the Fed. Auditing the Fed passed through years ago in the House. It is a transparency bill. We should know what decision happened. Congress created the Fed. People are getting personally wealthy off the policies of the Fed. There is a revolving door between the Fed and the Treasury and the people who sell the Treasury bonds. There are Treasury Secretaries who leave employment in government and make $160 million a year buying and selling the securities that are bought from a bank that we are not overseeing properly. There are all kinds of reasons why we should audit the Fed. Every Republican in the House voted for it, 100 Democrats voted for it. You rarely have a bill that 350 out of 435 Representatives voted to audit the Fed. It has been over here for 3 years. It has been held hostage by the Senate majority. The only way the minority party ever gets any votes on anything is by using their leverage, by using the leverage of the filibuster, by using the leverage of a hold--I think often to get something good. There are a lot of things that need to be discussed that are never discussed in this body. Whether your phone calls, the records of your phone calls, the records of your e-mail should be looked at by your government without a warrant, without an individualized warrant, is something that should have a debate here. We are, in the next week, supposed to go back on the Defense authorization bill. The Defense authorization bill, in 2011, allowed for the first time in our history an American citizen to be held indefinitely. It allowed for the first time an American citizen to be sent from America to Guantanamo Bay and held in a foreign prison in a foreign land, forever, without charge, without trial, without lawyer, without accusation. When I had the debate on the floor with another Senator over this in 2011, I said, incredulously, you mean an American citizen could be sent to Guantanamo Bay without a jury trial, without a trial by a jury of his peers? He said, yes, if they are dangerous. Who gets to decide who is dangerous and who is not? Are these questions we would want debated on the floor? One year ago we voted to get rid of indefinite detention; 67 Senators voted to get rid of indefinite detention. Then, secretly in conference committee, it was stripped out by a minority of one or two Senators. So this year we have been prepared for 6 months to have a vote on whether an American can be detained in prison without a trial. We will get no vote because of the iron-fisted rule of the rule breakers. The rule breakers have decided no debate, no dialog, no compromise, no discussion of questions until we tell you it is time--and it never seems to be time. You have to think about this because there have been times in our history when we have detained Americans unjustly. You have to think about how important a jury trial is for everyone and you do not have to go far back in our history to see times when we made mistakes. Remember Richard Jewel, falsely accused, unfairly accused of being the Olympic bomber in Atlanta about a decade ago. If he had been a Black man in 1920 in the South, he might not have survived a day. Fortunately, he lived in an era when we believed in trial by jury, when we believed that no one should be detained without a trial by jury, no one should be kept in prison without a trial. For goodness' sake, can there be anything more American than that? Yet the law of the land says that is no longer true. Anybody in our society who ever thinks they have been treated unfairly, whether one is an African American or Japanese American who can remember what happened to the Japanese Americans in World War II, should be horrified that our current law says an individual, an American citizen, can be detained. The President says: I am a good man and I will never use it. He signs into law the authority for all Presidents for all time to indefinitely detain American citizens without a trial. Yet he says: I am not going to do it. That is not a lot of comfort to those of us who believe in the law. I believe the appropriateness or the ability for us to get to dialog and discussion is important; that the American people want it and that the filibuster actually aided that. I think it aided it. It forced us to have discussion. Without the filibuster, I do not think there will be discussion. I do not think compromise will occur. It was infrequent before. I don't think it is going to occur without the threat of filibuster. The Senate will now be run with an iron fist, a fist clenched so tightly, a power wound so closely that dissent will no longer be heard. Debate will be stifled and amendments to legislation will become nonexistent. They are already rare. Washington described the Senate as the saucer that cools the tea that boils over from the cup of the House of Representatives. The Senate was that saucer that cooled the tea, deliberating, gave review and time for calmer minds to prevail. The Senate was one of those items that our Founders established to separate our Republic from the whims of an unrestrained majority, from the headlong dash of an unrestrained mobocracy. I think the public will be burned more often as the Senate becomes less saucer and more boiling caldron. The loss of the filibuster will lead to more enmity and less compromise. The death of the filibuster is the death of negotiation. Why negotiate if you do not have to? Through brute force and a disregard for the rule of law, Senate Democrats have found temporary victory--but at what cost? We will now become the other House of Representatives. Will debate and amendment then become a thing of the past? Will an iron fist smash the saucer that once cooled the tea? Make no mistake about it, the death of the filibuster is the death of dialog. All power that is taken from the minority party is a leverage that is taken from possible compromise. One day I believe those who have seen fit to break the rules to change the rules will regret their actions. The question is, When cooler heads prevail, will there be anybody left with the spirit of compromise? All one has to do, to see what happens when there is no debate, when there is no dialog, when there is no compromise--all one has to do is look at the health care fiasco. It was passed without any discussion with Republicans--no input, zero input from Republicans. Why? Because at the time, even though we still had the filibuster, Senate Democrats were 60 and Republicans were 40. They did not have to talk to us. When the majority party does not have to talk to the minority party, they will not. So with ObamaCare, with the unaffordable health care plan he has given us, there was no discussion, no debate--60 Democrats, 40 Republicans. We got a bill that is completely and entirely their baby--no compromise. The same thing in the House. It passed by brute force by a majority of Democrats and no Republicans. What we have now is something that is completely unworkable and does not represent the American people. I will be the first to admit we are divided. Not everybody is Republican, not everybody is a Democrat. But the interesting thing is it is about 50-50. It is not 80-20. It is not that everybody or the vast majority in the country want it one way or the other, it is almost 50-50. But instead of having 50-50 solutions come out of here, what is coming out of here is my way or the highway. You look back, about 1 month ago when the government was shut down, we were trying to open the government. Every day we tried to open the government. We said what about just delaying ObamaCare a little bit? What about delaying just the individual mandate? No way. We will not negotiate with a gun to our head, the President said. The President bellowed: I will not negotiate. You can't make me negotiate. I will not compromise. Immediately after the government opened back up he did exactly the same thing we were asking for, he delayed the individual mandate. Of course he did it unconstitutionally and illegally because he did it without the approval of Congress. That is the way it has been from the beginning. This is something that we as Americans should be extremely worried about. This is the stuff of kings, this is the stuff of monarchs, and this is the stuff of tyrants because he thinks he can do the legislation by himself. But if there is no recourse to come back to Congress, what happens? ObamaCare is a story of favoritism, it is a story of dispensing favors to your contributors, your friends. Should not we have a government where your campaign contribution buys you a different sort of scrutiny? It is no longer equal protection under the law, it is protection based on contribution history. We have given waiver after waiver to special interest groups. You can see them with a big smile plastered on their face when they come out of the White House. There are special interest groups that have been to the White House hundreds of times. Meanwhile, the Secretary in charge of putting up ObamaCare and getting it started was there once. But hundreds of times special interests came. They paid first. They gave their campaign contributions. They paid, they got access to the White House, and they got a waiver. Why would McDonald's get a waiver and not Burger King? Why would one business get a waiver and not another? Why would a union get a waiver and not another business that is not union? Is that equal protection under the law? Is that the way we are going to live? That is the way you will live if you allow all the power to gravitate to one person who has no checks and balances. That is why we are supposed to have a separation of powers. That is why we are supposed to live under a rule of law. Legislation is messy and it takes a while. They no longer have the 60 votes to have his way or the highway. They cannot get everything they want so they do it by executive fiat. But realize that an executive can dictate for good and for harm or does one person always know what is best for the country? So we have been dictated to, all of these changes with ObamaCare, but the bottom line is more people are now losing their health insurance than are gaining it. Those who are gaining it, those who have been forced into ObamaCare, will recognize a few things. They are losing their freedom of choice and they are being forced to pay more. There are two things that are irrefutable about ObamaCare: You have lost your freedom of choice and you are being dictated four plans. Where there was once hundreds of plans you could purchase for insurance, there are four plans left in America you can choose from, and they are more expensive. Why? Because you are told your kids have to have pediatric dental coverage. What if you don't have any kids? You are being told you have to have infertility coverage. What if you are not married? You are told you have to have pregnancy coverage. What if you are not married? The thing is that what has been outlawed is cheaper insurance policies. Let's think back to the original problem. Eighty-five percent of Americans had health insurance, right? Fifteen percent of Americans didn't. Of the 15 percent who didn't have health insurance, one-third of them were eligible for Medicaid, and we could have helped them by fixing some eligibility with Medicaid or actually trying to help people sign up. One-third of the 15 percent who were uninsured, some reports said, were not here in the country legally, and then one-third of the 15 percent made between $50,000 and $75,000, but they did not buy insurance because they were young and healthy and decided to roll the dice and they perceived health insurance as being too expensive. The main impediment to the body of people we could have gotten insured was expense. What have we done to help them? We made health insurance more expensive for them. If you are young and healthy, you should want a high deductible with few mandates. That is very cheap. What does ObamaCare give you? It gives you a high deductible and gives you a million and one things you don't need or don't want and it is very expensive. Really what we have done is taken away freedom of choice and given you something you don't want and made it more expensive. This is the danger of having one-sided, one-party rule. There is no debate and no discussion. And that is what happened with ObamaCare--a lopsided result, a misbegotten legislation that doesn't work, can't work, and is leading to disaster. Some have said: How can we fix it? Can we make ObamaCare less bad? I am not positive we can. Some are saying--and the President came back unilaterally and said: OK, I will give you another year. Look at it from the perspective of the insurance company. They can offer the cheaper policies for 1 more year. What incentive do they have? You are being told that within a year you have to buy more expensive insurance. Does the insurance company have any incentive to sell insurance that is less expensive again? If you are mandated to buy something more expensive, why would they do something less expensive? Now everybody in the country will be forced to buy something more expensive. A lot of young people will say: Well, it is more expensive, and the penalty is not that bad for my income. Maybe I would be better off without insurance. Besides, now I can buy it anytime I get sick. Other than the penalty--there is no incentive to buy health insurance when you are healthy other than the penalty. Many people may say: I will just wait until I have chest pain, when I am rolling into the emergency room, or until I get in an auto accident, and then I will buy my insurance. This is about choice versus coercion. We have one party that has decided they know what is best for you. They feel you are not smart enough to take care of yourself. They feel they should be--in a benevolent way--your parents. So you have a party that has decided they will take care of you from cradle to grave, but don't worry, it is free. No big deal. It is free. We are going to give you free health care. Mark my words. There is nothing free about this. You will pay for this. If you had insurance before, you will pay for this with more expensive insurance premiums. If you didn't have insurance before, you will pay for this with more expensive insurance than you could have bought before. The question is, How do you make it work? It only works now--if it is going to work at all--through coercion. You are forced to buy something. To me, that is antithetical to what the American Republic was founded upon. We were founded upon freedom of choice. You have freedom of choice every day in the things you purchase. Why is the one thing you are not allowed to have is the freedom of choosing your health insurance? Realize what this stems from. This stems from allowing government to get so completely in one hand that there are no checks and balances. There are checks and balances between the branches of government, and there are checks and balances between the parties. If you let one party get too strong of a hold in Congress, you will get something that is not the product of compromise and not the product of discussion. Also, if you weaken the body of the Senate--which was intended to slow down legislation--by taking away the ability to filibuster or to place holds on nominees, once you do that, you are going to get away from compromise. I think it is important that people know, when they look at this and say: Well, that is just obstruction; Republicans with their filibusters and holds are just obstructing the process, if the process is to run headlong away from the Constitution or to run head over heels and trample the Bill of Rights, you would want things to cool off. You would want that saucer the Senate was that allowed the tea to boil over and cool off. So the question we really have is, Do we want checks and balances? That is a big question. We have gotten to the point in our history where so much power has gravitated to the President--not just this President; Republican Presidents also. This is not a 4- or 8-year evolution; this is a 100-year evolution toward a stronger Presidency. We have now allowed Presidents to go to war without congressional authority. We have allowed them to trample over civil liberties without congressional authority. We now allow regulatory regimes to write so many rules that your elected officials have little to say over what laws you live under. For example, we complained that ObamaCare was 2,000 pages. The Democratic leader in the House of Representatives said: Don't worry; you can read about it after we pass it. That was a mistake, and that is why so many people still don't understand this piece of legislation. To top it off, this was a 2,000-page bill, but then 20,000 pages of rules were written. Unelected bureaucrats are writing most of the rules. For example, when ObamaCare passed, believe it or not, I think the original legislation would have let you keep your doctor, period. There was a regulation written 3 months after the bill was passed that changed it and said: You can keep your doctor, but you have to pay more, and it has to obey this rule. Let's just say you can maybe keep your doctor if President Obama likes your doctor. This rule was not written by Congress. It wasn't part of the legislation. This is a rule that was written afterward. About 3 months later, as they are writing 20,000 pages of rules, a rule comes up that says: If your insurance ever changes, it is not grandfathered in and you will lose your insurance. It will be canceled. You will be forced to be canceled. The reason millions of people are having their insurance canceled is because the President authorized this through his bureaucracy without the permission of the Senate. However, it gets more interesting. Occasionally, when a regulation is passed, we can try to stop it. So 3 months after ObamaCare was passed, they passed this regulation that says: You will be canceled. Millions of people were being canceled because President Obama and his team wrote this regulation. One Republican Senator, Mr. Enzi from Wyoming, stood up and said: No, we will vote on this. We will vote on whether your policy can be canceled. So what happened? It came back. And guess what. The regulation that says your policy can be canceled if it ever changed-- the regulation that is allowing millions of people to be canceled-- every Democrat in the body voted for it, including a few of them who are running headlong away from the President. They can't get away from the President fast enough. They are running headlong away from the President and saying: Oh, I didn't know that rule was going to be there. I really thought you could keep your doctor. Bunk. They all knew it. They all voted directly on it. Not only did they vote for ObamaCare, 3 months later they voted for the rule that is allowing millions of people to have their insurance canceled. So these Senators who are saying: Mr. President, we might need to fix this, and I have a solution, all voted for the rule. We had a direct vote in the Senate on the rule that says: If you like your doctor, you can't keep your doctor. The whole idea when the President said: If you like your doctor, you can keep him, period--which we have now found to be false--we had a chance to fix it. We had a vote in this body. Every Senate Democrat voted to allow your insurance to be canceled. So if you are one of the millions of Americans who have had your insurance canceled, you can thank the Senate Democrats. Every Senate Republican voted to say you should not have your insurance canceled. Every Senate Democrat voted to allow your insurance to be canceled if it ever changes. While some people have been wondering how many people are going to lose their insurance because of ObamaCare, the answer is everyone because insurance changes gradually over time. So within a few years everybody's insurance policy will change and you will be canceled. Everyone in America will lose their insurance. They will be canceled eventually, and they will have to buy ObamaCare. So people went from having hundreds of choices for insurance to having four choices in America. Really what this debate is about is whether you believe in freedom of choice, whether you think you are smart enough to rule over your own destiny or whether you want a paternalistic government that makes these decisions for you. Are we so insecure as a people that we need the nanny state? Do we need the nanny state to take care of us? Do we not want choice? Why don't we extend it to all things? Health care is important, but so is food. Why don't we have the government decide what type of food we eat? Why don't we have the government decide how much we can charge? God forbid we charge too much for food. Shouldn't food be cheap and economical and affordable? Maybe the government should own the farms. If the government can distribute health care and health care is so important, so is food and water. How can we let anybody in the private marketplace determine water? How can we let private people control water? Shouldn't we let the government be in charge of everything? The bottom line is this: We shouldn't let the government be in charge of anything that can't be handled by the private marketplace, which means very little should be handled by the government. The reason you want minimal government is that government is not very good at stuff. I tell people that it is not that government is inherently stupid-- although that is a debatable point--it is that the government doesn't get the same signals we get. In the private marketplace, you get signals. You have to make a profit or you have to meet a payroll. So there are different signals that come. As far as health care and the government running it, there is no signal. They get no feedback. Right now they have a Web site that would have sent any private business into bankruptcy. This would have been a failed initiation, and the company would have gone bankrupt. No company could roll out something as bad as this, but no private company would. The private company is influenced by the marketplace, and they have to make good decisions. The government doesn't make good decisions because it is not required to. That is why when you have a choice on whether something should be done by government or the private marketplace, you want the private marketplace. Milton Friedman often talked about this. This is a truism of all government: Nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as they spend their own. The private marketplace will inevitably make better decisions because it is a cruel master. In the marketplace, you have to please consumers all the time, every day. They vote. You have heard the term ``democratic capitalism.'' There is nothing more democratic than consumer and capitalism voting every day, and the people who are rewarded are those who give a product that people want to buy, and they do it in an efficient manner, so people are forced to be efficient. They are forced to have good consumer service. The consumer is king only in the private marketplace. The consumer is treated as a stepchild if it is government. You are treated with reckless abandon by government. As a physician, I dealt with the government for decades and decades. You know what. It takes at least an hour to get someone on the phone. When you get them on the phone, they tell you they can only answer two questions. If they are not in a good mood, you have to call again. You have to get on the phone again and wait an hour to talk to another bureaucrat who may be surly and may have had a bad day and will probably get a bonus anyway. If you want government to take over your health care, think of the case of Jonathan Beal. He worked for the EPA for 11 years. He told his boss that he was a spy and that he worked for the CIA. He took 6 months off at a time for years and years. He always got bonuses for good employment, good behavior, and good productivity for 11 years. This is what goes in government. Would that happen for a week or 2 weeks in a private industry? No way would that happen. The government is so big and vast, they have no idea who all is even working in government. We are going to turn that over, our health care system. The bottom line is it will not be efficient, it will not try to save money; it will try to spend money, and it will not lead to us having lower premiums, it will lead to having higher premiums. Thomas Payne said that government is a necessary evil, and he was right. That sounds kind of harsh, but the thing is we need to have government, but because government is inefficient, we should keep what government does to a minimum. There are certain things we probably can't have private industry do, including a national defense, an Army, a Navy, an Air Force. Government needs to be in place for that. We have decided with most of our infrastructure to have government involved. We have some private entities involved as well. But do we want government involved in every one of our affairs? Do we think government is going to be distributing goods very well? Think of it this way: Tomorrow we nationalize grocery shopping. We nationalize and everybody gets insurance and it will be subsidized. When people go to Walmart, they will just pay a $20 copay. Do my colleagues think they will buy less or more there? People will empty the shelves. The other day--my colleagues may have heard that food stamp cards stopped working and they didn't have any limits; people just kept loading up thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of stuff. They trashed the whole place, carts were everywhere, and then someone turned the cards back on and there were limits and people had to leave the store. When there are no limits, people will spend without limit. The same goes with health care. So when government gives us something for free, the tendency is to use it. So what we find, for example, with Medicaid--a big part of ObamaCare is the expansion of Medicaid. I wish to help people who can't help themselves. There are a lot of people who are missing both legs and on dialysis and they have $10,000-a-month insurance. I think we can find a way to help these people. But we have now added able-bodied people to this, generation after generation of able-bodied people, so instead of a temporary hand up, a helping hand, we have turned it into something permanent. But it is also the most rapidly rising cost in State governments, so State governments, I believe, will ultimately succumb to this burden. In our State it will be a 50-percent increase in Medicaid. In fact, for most of the people signing up around the country, three-fourths of them in my State are signing up for prehealth care. It is not truly free. We are going to pay for it. Anybody who is working will pay for it. But the thing is that what they are signing up for is free. I think if we expand our safety net beyond sort of those who are not able-bodied or we expand it to make it permanent for people, what it becomes is a drag on the economy and a drag on everything and it disallows or prevents us from growing as an economy. We have been having this debate for a while. The President has decided that people who are working just have too much money and he has to take from those who are working to give to those who aren't working. That is not how we get more jobs; that is how we make the pie smaller. If we keep dividing up the pie and shifting the pie from those working to those nonworking, it doesn't help anybody. It divides the pie smaller. There have been times in our country where we have greatly grown the pie, but we have to get beyond these petty things. The President preaches fear and envy, class warfare. He preaches that if your neighbor has three cars, send me and I will take one of their cars. I will get some of your neighbor's stuff and I will give it to you. The problem is it doesn't make us rich as a nation. There has been a discussion for thousands of years about whether it is good or bad to spend time coveting your neighbor's wealth. It isn't healthy personally or spiritually for our country. If I labor my whole day saying my neighbor has a Mercedes and I don't--I should instead be saying maybe my son or daughter will be working at the Mercedes dealer selling to somebody who is buying a Mercedes. Instead of feeling jealous and envious of others, I should be saying we are all interconnected and we want more people to rise and be part of the top 1 percent. Instead of taking a meat-ax to those who are successful in our society and trying to drive them down, we should try--in the 1920s, Coolidge took the top rate from 70 percent down to 23 percent. We had a boom. Employment thrived. He balanced the budget. We did it again under Kennedy in the 1960s. Unemployment was once again cut in half. By the time we get to Reagan, the rates had risen to 70 percent again, and Reagan said our economy will boom if we lower rates on everybody, and he did. He lowered rates from 70 percent at the top rate--the top 1 percent. He lowered their rates. He didn't raise their rates. He didn't say covet thy neighbor. He didn't say I will get you one of your neighbor's cars. He said lower the rates and the economy will boom, and it did. We lowered the rates from 70 on the wealthy to 50 to 28 and we had a decade-long boom with millions of jobs created. We have to have this debate as a country. We can't say the debate is over. If we say the debate is over and that what we need to do is just divide it up, pass the money around, we are going to be talking about a shrinking pie that we pass around. We also have a pie right now that has millions of people unemployed. So how are we going to grow this economy? Are we going to grow our economy by saying let's tax people more? It is exactly the opposite. I was in Detroit last week talking about how we could help Detroit. We can't send money from Houston to Detroit and bail them out. It doesn't work. One, because it is just like when the President did his government stimulus. When the President chose to pick winners and losers, he wound up with a bunch of losers because no central planner knows who is going to win and who is going to lose. Nine out of ten businesses fail. That is why we don't want government choosing the winners and losers. When they do that, they choose people such as Solyndra. One, it was a little bit unfair on the face of it. The guy who ran the company was the 20th richest man in the country. What business does the middle class--that the President says he is so proud of--what business does the middle class have giving money to the 20th richest man in the country? It turned out people didn't want his solar panels. But that is the government picking winners and losers, many times based on campaign history and based on environmental politics. It is picking winners and losers and it doesn't work. Why? Because the marketplace, when it winnows out and finds who will be successful in business, who is a harsh task master, but it asks all of you--it asks 300 million Americans every day to vote on which businesses will succeed. So you get to vote every day. So there is a big difference between reducing taxes for those who are in business and trying to stimulate the economy and taxing people in Houston, bringing it up here, and then passing it out to people I think might be good at business in Detroit. No one knows that. No one has that knowledge. Only the marketplace can decide who is a good risk and who is a bad risk. Banks are part of that, but the consumer votes every day on which businesses are good and should receive more money. So my plan is basically economic freedom zones. Let's lower the taxes in impoverished areas. Let's don't tax Houston and bring a bunch of money up to Detroit and say: Here, you are going to succeed. The same thing will happen to that money that happened to the last 50 years' worth of money; that is, it was stolen, some of it was misappropriated, some of it was given to the wrong people. But if we are to lower the taxes for the people in Detroit, I think we could truly help them. My plan would lower the personal income tax to 5 percent for everybody in Detroit. It would lower the corporate tax to 5 percent. We might find people in the suburbs who want to move back into Detroit if their income tax is 5 percent. That is a good thing. People would pay those taxes. Instead of being envious of these people, instead of saying they might buy another car, I might be saying they might buy that car from somebody selling it in Detroit. The thing is that economic freedom zones and reducing taxes I think would help spur the economy. There are 20 counties in eastern Kentucky that have unemployment 1.5 times the national rate. A large degree of our unemployment is due to the President and his war on coal. He always talks about a balanced solution, but he doesn't balance his hatred for the coal industry with jobs. He doesn't balance his so-called like for the environment with jobs. When we look at regulations, we should preserve the environment, and we have many Federal regulations that I do agree with on the environment. We shouldn't be able to dump chemicals in a stream. I agree completely with that. The Clean Water Act says you cannot discharge pollutants into navigable waters of the United States. I agree completely. But do we know what they have done over the last 30 years? They have taken that commonsense regulation, which we can probably all agree to, and they now say dirt is a pollutant and your backyard is a navigable stream. So we have actually put people in prison for putting clean dirt on dry land. As a consequence, I think we spend less time protecting the Ohio River and more time meddling with some property owner. We have gone crazy with regulations because they are now written by unelected bureaucrats. They are not written by people we can unelect; they are written by bureaucrats. We have to get back to some common sense with these issues. We have to look at how injurious this is. Even things that are well-intended, we think, well, gosh we have to protect the bald eagle and we have to have endangered species protected. I agree. I have two bald eagles in my backyard. They have come for the second year and they are fascinating. They live on the pond behind my house and it is fascinating to see them. But what we have done in the name of protection for the environment and protection for certain species is we have gone nuts with it. In my State, we are protecting the Indiana bat. I had a guy come up to me and he said: The Indiana bat? They came up to my property and they took a survey and they found one bat. It was already tagged as a brown bat. The scientists had a big fight. Two of them said it was an Indiana bat and the other two said a brown bat, but did they tell me I had to do anything to help the bat? No. They just charged me money to cut down trees on my own land. So it isn't about the bat; it is about money. They charge $2,400 per acre to chop down your own trees. Another city in my State, Grand Rivers, when it rained, the sewage was flowing into the river overflowing and they were overcapacity and wanted to have a new sewage plant. They couldn't do it because the EPA was saying we need to know how many pocketbook muscles there are. Are we going to stop the building on the planet? No. What it does is cause hundreds of thousands of dollars to be spent looking at this. The bottom line is, remember, separation of powers is important, and the loss of the filibuster I think is leading toward a one-sided party rule and leaning toward less power here and more power in the executive branch, I think all to the detriment of the voter. At this point, I see my colleague from Oklahoma has arrived, and I yield the floor.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the mandatory quorum be waived.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. The President promised the American people that if you like your doctor, you can keep him or her. He promised that if you like your insurance, you can keep it. But he needs to tell Andy Mangione and his family why they can't keep their insurance. They had an individual policy they were happy with. They paid $333 per month, and they are now going to be asked to pay $965 per month for things they don't want and didn't choose to have. This isn't only about health care; this is about freedom of choice. This is about whether one can choose what type of insurance they want. The next question is, What is next? What choices will be taken from us? I am going to be signing up for ObamaCare. Yesterday I tried 15 times. I wasn't able to get beyond ``create an account'' because every time I pushed ``create an account,'' nothing happened. This is a real problem--5 million people without insurance. The President said: If you can keep your insurance, you should be allowed to. You can keep your doctor. Something has to be done because the Mangione family is going to have to pay three times as much for an insurance policy they don't want. We are taking their freedom of choice away. I, for one, say enough is enough. Let's get rid of this. Let's give back freedom to the consumer. Give back freedom to Kentucky families. In Kentucky, 10 times more families have been canceled than have actually accessed the Web site. Something has to give. Mr. President, if you said ``you can keep your doctor,'' come forward and tell us why we can't keep our doctor. I yield the floor.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, on Friday, October 19, 2013, the 2 Not 1 Annual Fatherhood Conference is being held in Louisville, KY. The motto of the non-profit is ``Changing the Lives of Children, One Father at a Time!'' The group's purpose is to educate low-income individuals and communities on the subject of fatherhood and the barriers that impede the successful interaction of father and child. Shawn Gardner, the President and Founder of 2 Not 1, has put together the conference which is expected to be a big success. Private groups such as 2 Not 1 are doing some excellent work to help disadvantaged kids. I have been provided the names of the winners to be announced at the event and want to recognize these individuals for their good work. The following people are receiving awards on Friday night: Ebony O'Rea, Female Supporter of Fatherhood; John Marshal, Community Dad; and Mike Warner, Father of the Year. The mission of the group is to promote the safety and wellbeing of children by implementing strategies to keep fathers involved and families together. Cheers to those receiving awards and to all the good people working to improve the lives of kids who are missing male guidance in their lives. I share the belief that fathers matter in the lives of their children and am encouraged that this organization is helping to strengthen families by equipping fathers with parenting strategies. I am grateful to be a parent of three sons. My own family life is pretty challenging right now as I work hard to serve our Nation in Washington and fly home on the weekends to spend time with the boys or answer homework questions over the phone. We know that life is not perfect, and that some children will still grow up without fathers. Sometimes, our best efforts fall short but with persistence, determination, and grace toward one another, we can make a huge difference in the lives of children by mentoring fathers.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. I will suffer longer.

Mr. PAUL. Is there objection to the original--the modification of my motion? I object.

Mr. PAUL. Part of the answer is it was divided government. The interesting thing about divided government is divided government can work better, and with more conversation, I think we could get beyond this impasse. I think if we would negotiate--and here is the problem. I know now there are some in your party saying you will negotiate but the President said at least, oh, 20, maybe 30, maybe 40 times on national television he will not negotiate until he gets his way and that is still essentially what you guys are saying. You will negotiate after you get your way. The problem is, we think you will not negotiate unless there is a deadline, because the thing is, when you finally did negotiate--and here is my question to the Senator from Illinois through the Presiding Officer--did you vote for the sequester? The sequester was not a Republican bill, it was voted on by many Members of your party. The numbers are yours.

Mr. PAUL. Could I ask for a germane question?

Mr. PAUL. Sure.

Mr. PAUL. I am offering a new modification to your modification and asking unanimous consent that the Senator accept as a new top-line number, where 988 appears, that $988 billion appears throughout the continuing resolution, that if your objective is to have a clean CR, let's have a clean CR. I am happy to do it. But we need to do it and restrain the growth of spending in our government because your party has added so much our country is drowning in a sea of debt. If you will agree to a top-line number of $940 billion to replace $988 billion throughout the continuing resolution where appropriate, I would agree to your consent request.