Jeff Sessions

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank my colleague. I serve as the ranking member of the Budget Committee and have worked with Ms. Burwell in her now just 13 months, I think, of service in the tremendously important position of Director of the Office of Management and Budget. I do not believe she has the background, the qualities, and experience--proven managerial leadership--required at that huge Department of Health and Human Services. She has 500 people working in the budget office, and that is an important office. At HHS there are over 70,000. She once served on a board of a local hospital. She simply is not the person whom we need today to bring order out of the disarray we have in the health care system of this country and the total collapse of integrity and consistency in the implementation of ObamaCare. There are a couple things I care about, but I really think it time for this administration to stop moving around insiders, political allies, and put some people in these critical positions capable of operating them at the highest possible level. Ms. Burwell violated the Medicare trigger, for example. If the trustees of Medicare issue a report that it is heading to insolvency, it is a critical matter. The administration by law is required within 2 weeks to submit a plan to fix Medicare. They have been submitting this report for years. As the President's director, under 31 U.S.C. 1105, Ms. Burwell was the person responsible for submitting Medicare legislation to Congress. We asked her about that before she was confirmed. During her hearings, she said she would ``do everything in her power'' to comply with the Federal law. Yet, despite this assurance, she refused to comply with the law and never submitted a plan. Don't we need a plan to fix Medicare? Don't we need the Chief Executive of America, through the budget director, to submit a plan to fix it? She also violated the law and denied Congress needed transparency with respect to the health care law, the ObamaCare law. The Omnibus appropriations bill signed into law in January required HHS to include in its fiscal year 2015 budget a detailed accounting of spending to implement the health law. But neither the budget director, Ms. Burwell, nor the agency she now will head submitted sufficient information to comply with that. My time is up, but I will say that I am very much taken with Ms. Burwell. She is a delightful person. Many of my colleagues think highly of her, and some, like our West Virginia Senators and others, really think she will do a good job. But this is not the right position for her. This government is drifting into disarray in a whole host of ways. We need the strongest possible, capable leader, with proven health care managerial experience for the good of America and for the good of President Obama. This is not the right nominee. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Today I would like to discuss the nomination of Sylvia Burwell to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. I am going to make some criticisms of her performance and the background she lacks in taking on this huge agency. I have met with her, worked with her some as OMB Director. I like her, and she is courteous and capable, so I am not talking personally in any bad way about her, but this is an important agency, one of the most important agencies in our Nation. The Secretary of Health and Human Services oversees several of the largest programs in the entire Federal Government. Crucially, the Secretary is also the person tasked with implementing the President's health care law. It is essential that anyone who fills this position possess great skill, relevant experience, proven managerial experience, and who will act with independence and in the best interests of the American public--one who, at this critical time, puts country over politics. They cannot be a political loyalist, but they must be someone of stature, integrity, and sound judgment who is willing to tell the President no if asked to circumvent the law, provide false information, or otherwise act against the public interest. From the President's own perspective, he needs desperately someone who is able to evaluate these major programs such as ObamaCare with wisdom and tell him and help him--and particularly tell the American people the truth. Ms. Burwell does not have the background one associates with a position of this magnitude. She just does not. Nor does she possess the specific skills critically needed today. The OMB office she now holds has 500 employees. HHS has 72,000. Aside from her short tenure at the Office of Management and Budget, which has just been 13 months, she is just now beginning to find her way around, presumably, that office. She has never run any major department, any major health care department, a department or an agency, a major business, a significant city, or a State. There are many very capable people in this country who would be much more ready to assume the august responsibilities of this job. It appears her most significant health care role prior to this was serving as a board member--part-time board member--of a local university medical center. In fact, 2 months ago in a Budget Committee hearing, Ms. Burwell declined to answer a basic health care question until she said she would seek Secretary Sebelius's expertise on the matter, but she never provided that answer anyway. Her time as Director of the Office of Management and Budget was controversial. The budget plan she submitted to Congress plainly violated the spending caps Congress and the President agreed to and passed into law. She produced a budget plan that would increase spending by nearly $791 billion over 10 years. That is above the Ryan- Murray agreement that passed in Congress that set these spending limits just a few weeks before, including, in that budget, a proposal to increase spending by $56 billion over the budget next year. As the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, I have been involved in this and observing it. To my dismay, she went to enormous lengths during her testimony before the committee to try to conceal this increase in spending. It was very amazing to me. On the day the President's budget was submitted, the Associated Press reported that the plan Ms. Burwell authored ``lays waste to the spending caps that the White House and Congress agreed to late last year.'' Also at the same time The Hill reported the budget this way--Obama's ``$3.9T budget busts spending limits.'' Remember, Ms. Burwell was the Director of Office of Management and Budget. Her staff produces the budget and defended the budget. It goes on to say in the first paragraph the truth of the situation in The Hill. The article is by Erik Wasson. President Obama on Tuesday released a $3.9 trillion election-year budget blueprint that would bust the bipartisan budget ceiling agreed to in December with $56 billion in new stimulus spending. This was 10 weeks after they had agreed to one level of spending. She walks in and produces a budget that is $700-, $800 billion almost more in spending over the budget of 10 years, and $56 billion more the next year. When I asked her about that, apparently it was politically sensitive. Apparently they had decided they didn't want to admit they were spending more money. The Associated Press says they did. Politico said they did. The budget they submitted that was in law--laid before the Budget Committee--plainly demonstrated it spent more than they agreed to spend. I asked her about it. It went something like this. It was a very long exchange. It was frustrating for me. I will quote from some of them, because I think we need to understand these issues. I asked her about the spending excess: Mr. SESSIONS. So you're proposing that we alter Ryan-Murray [that is the law that set new spending limits, allowed more spending than we previously agreed to, but it continued to set some limits] so you can spend $56 billion more next year alone. Yes or no; is that correct? Ms. BURWELL. We propose a paid-for [initiative] . . . Mr. SESSIONS. Can't you answer that question simply? Yes or no? Do you propose to spend $56 billion more than Ryan-Murray allows? Ms. BURWELL. Senator, we do propose a change in the law that would be fully paid for that would invest in things that we believe are necessary for the economic health of the nation. Mr. SESSIONS. Do you want to spend more than the President agreed to when he signed the Ryan-Murray 10 weeks ago? Ms. BURWELL. Senator, we signed Ryan-Murray . . . Mr. SESSIONS. Now, I'm just asking, yes or no; are you [spending] more or less? Ms. BURWELL. Senator, I think there are some questions that are not simply yes or no questions . . . Mr. SESSIONS. This one is a yes or no question. You're refusing to answer it . . . I simply asked a public servant who is paid by the taxpayers: Are you spending more money than the Ryan-Murray budget had agreed to and the President signed? And she refused to answer. It was really frustrating. But I think it is indicative of the fact that they were allowing politics to interject itself here--because the White House didn't want to admit, and she stood up for the White House and wouldn't admit it. But, as Politico says, it plainly was true that they were spending more. So rather than acting as an independent steward of taxpayer dollars and simply telling the plain truth to a simple question, she acted as an extension of the President's campaign arm--advancing their spin without honestly acknowledging the clear and plain facts to the American public asked by a representative of the people of the United States. There was no doubt that they spent more money than Ryan-Murray would allow, but they never acknowledged it because she politically did not want to admit it. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget is more than a political position. The Director serves the President, yes, but it is at bottom an important public servant, and the person who holds that job must act as a disciplined manager of taxpayers' dollars and do so with clarity and openness. The Director is managing the world's largest budget. However, Ms. Burwell submitted a financial plan--a budget--that would have increased spending more than $700 billion above the current, agreed-upon, in-law budget levels while, amazingly, suggesting her plan reduced spending. It was a tax-and-spend budget that would have added $8 trillion to our debt while doing virtually nothing to reform the entitlement programs heading for impending insolvency. It completely busted the budget law the President signed. It was a grossly irresponsible plan. According to Ms. Burwell's own budget submission, the plan would have caused interest payments on the debt to nearly quadruple, from $221 billion in interest paid last year alone to more than $800 billion 10 years from now. So this is really a serious matter. There is no attempt to balance the budget in her plan even over 10 years. Indeed, it flatly rejected the very idea of a balanced budget. Additionally, despite her public commitment during her confirmation that she would deliver the budget in accordance with the legal deadlines, the President's budget was again delivered more than a month late. Importantly, Ms. Burwell failed to comply with Federal law requiring her to submit Medicare improvement legislation after the Medicare trustees issued their funding warning. Medicare is heading to financial ruin. The law says that if Medicare reaches a point where its future is financially in doubt, it must notify the President, and the President, through his Office of Management and Budget Director, is supposed to submit to Congress a plan to get Medicare off the path to disaster. It was submitted to President Bush. He submitted a plan to Congress to fix Medicare. But this President has steadfastly refused to do so, and so did Mrs. Burwell as his Office of Management and Budget Director. It states that within 2 weeks of the budget submission, legislation must be sent to Congress to comply with this so-called Medicare trigger. It requires a plan to fix the program. During her confirmation as OMB Director, she was asked about this duty she was going to have, and she made a commitment to respond and produce the Medicare trigger. Specifically, she said she would ``do everything in her power'' to comply with the Federal law, bringing an end, in effect, to the administration's several-years-long defiance of plain law. As the President's Budget Director, under 31 USC, 1105, Sylvia Burwell was the person responsible for complying with the Federal law. Having willfully violated this requirement, it is ironic now that, if confirmed as Health and Human Services Secretary, she will serve on the board of trustees of the Medicare trust fund, she will be responsible for overseeing their finances, and she will be issuing to her former office--OMB--the same funding warnings that the administration received and ignored while she served as budget director. Ms. Burwell has also violated law and denied Congress needed transparency with respect to the President's troubled health care law. Specifically, the Omnibus appropriations bill signed into law in January required HHS to include in its fiscal year 2015 budget a detailed accounting of spending to implement the health law. Fair enough. But neither the budget Ms. Burwell delivered nor the agency justification that later joined it satisfied the requirements set in law. They should do that. They are public servants. They should tell us how to handle the problems of financing in health care law. As OMB Director--the budget submitted to the Congress by Ms. Burwell reclassified the budgetary treatment of the ObamaCare risk corridor program without statutory authority to do so. Under this approach, it appears HHS attempts to escape congressional accountability for its use of certain funds. So this is a clear violation of the congressional power to appropriate money, and it is pretty clear that to fund this program they are going to have to ask Congress to fund it. But by moving this around, they are attempting to spend money without asking Congress to appropriate it--against the Constitution. Regrettably, it seems Ms. Burwell followed a consistent pattern. Rather than using OMB as the central agency to reform this massive, out-of-control spending government, to stop wasteful spending and tame the debt--as former OMB Directors such as Mitch Daniels and Rob Portman did; now-Senator Portman submitted a balanced budget when he was OMB Director under President Bush--she has not submitted any reforms to bring our government under control in OMB. One of the concerns I had about her appointment was that it is such a critical part of our government, we have to have a strong OMB Director to control this massive government and control wasteful spending. That is the President's right arm. That is the person who brings the Cabinet Secretaries in to say: You are spending money. I hear complaints about waste. I hear about duplication. The President wants you to fix this. We saw none of that under her leadership. Her tenure at OMB evidenced no drive to even tackle the magnitude of our financial challenges. She proposed to bust the spending caps that Congress and the President agreed while trying to suggest otherwise. She ignored the Medicare trigger. She tried to put a positive spin on a dangerous financial plan instead of trying to actually solve the serious financial challenges facing our country today. With ObamaCare in chaos and disarray, threatening the very economy and the health care of Americans by the millions, what we desperately need in this key position is someone who will be independent, forthright, and honest, someone who will resist political pressure from the White House, and someone who knows what they are doing. This position demands that we find one of the best and most respected health care experts in the world. That is what we should be looking for. Ms. Burwell, as nice as she is, sadly, is just not that person. She does not have those skills. ObamaCare was passed into law on a series of egregious falsehoods. The American people intuitively recognized that this was an overreach and would not work, and the American people are now paying the steepest of prices for this complex, failed piece of legislation. One of the falsehoods was that it would not add to the debt--not a dime, the President said. Well, we now know it would add more than $6 trillion to the long-term debt of the United States. That is a huge amount of money. A Secretary of Health and Human Services must tell the American people the truth about the law's finances. If they fail to do so, if the Secretary will not acknowledge the truth and the challenges that our finances face, then the entire future, financially, of America will be at risk. So I believe Ms. Burwell is a good and well-meaning person. Senators Manchin and Rockefeller from West Virginia like her, and Senator Wyden of the Finance Committee and I like her. But I cannot support her bid to control the health care future of millions of hard-working Americans by placing her in charge of this massive agency that so desperately needs mature, aggressive, strong leadership--somebody who understands these issues before they take the job. I will vote no on her nomination as Secretary of Health and Human Services. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, the President's Environmental Protection Agency today--a group that directly reports to him and which reflects his decisions about environmental matters--has issued a new proposed regulation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from existing powerplants by 30 percent by the year 2030. Those are existing plants, and they cannot be operated and have that kind of reduction unless they have carbon capture, and there is no technology feasible with any reasonable--there is technology, but it is not feasible economically to capture carbon. So it is a dramatic hammering of a major portion of the baseload electricity production in America. It just is, and it is going to drive up costs. What I wish to say first and foremost is I am very worried about our economy. This economy is not doing well, and anybody who has paid close attention to it knows we have had one thing--one very important positive factor--over the last half dozen years that has helped our economy bounce back and even caused some industries to bring home production from foreign countries; and that advantage--that positive event--is a decline in energy prices. It is a direct result, primarily, of fracking--our ability to produce more energy from existing wells in a proven-to-be safe and effective way. It is going on over large portions of America. Although this administration and the Environmental Protection Agency have thrown up a host of roadblocks to try to keep it from occurring, it is such a powerful, positive event it is virtually unstoppable. So that is good. That is helping our businesses prosper. I remember in Alabama, north of Mobile where I grew up, there is a group of chemical companies on the river. Those chemical companies are international companies, first-rate companies, that were hammered when natural gas, 10 or 15 years ago, surged in price so much. Many of them reduced their capacity, some have closed and were sold, and we lost a lot of good jobs. It happened in Ohio. Ohio had a devastation among their strong chemical industries. The industry is beginning to come back now because of lower natural gas prices. But other industries too are very energy sensitive such as the steel industry. We are in a life-and-death competition to save America's steel industry. Energy is a huge portion of that. Electricity is a big portion of that. To eliminate nearly 40 percent of our base load, to drive us on a path to drive up those costs unnecessarily above what we can rationally achieve, is a mistake, in my opinion. Looking at Barron's this week--that is a business magazine. It comes out weekly. It has articles that sum up the state of the economy in America. Of course we know that first-quarter economic growth was revised downward, downward to negative 1.0 from positive .1. This is the first negative growth in years, since 2011. It was unexpected. Corporate profits, excluding the depths of the recession, are the lowest in 20 years in America. We have fewer people working today than we had in 2007, although there are 15 million more people in America-- fewer people working and more of them are working part time than want to work part time. We have a surge in part-time employment. That is not good either. Wages are down. Adjusted, probably for inflation, wages are down, median income is down in America per family by $2,300. Your wages are down. Your job prospects are down. Unemployment remains exceedingly high, and we are now going to add, in effect, another tax, a regulatory tax on the price of energy so a person's electric bill and their gas bill are going to go up. That is the inevitable result of this. It just is. We have got to be careful about it. Europe is already regretting the mistakes they have made. Spain has had to abandon their overly ambitious plan for renewable energy. German businesspeople are telling their leaders that if you do not change the energy policy in this country, we are not going to be able to compete and be successful as we have been in the world markets. So this is not a little matter. It is about jobs. It is about middle- income, hard-working Americans. The lower income people in this country pay as much as 25 percent of their income for energy. Oh, the rich people, the people who travel around in big jets and claim to be concerned about the environment, pay much less. For those making over $50,000 a year, you pay about 11 percent of your income on energy. So higher energy costs are direct negatives for poorer, hard-working people in America. Retired seniors have no ability to have an increase in wages, trying to live on Social Security and a little savings. Boom, you have got another $10, $20, $30 a month for the electric bill, the gas bill. It erodes their standard of living. Again, it erodes the ability of American business to be competitive in the world marketplace. We have got to take back more work. In fact, we are beginning to do that if we would do fewer bad things. We had a good result with lower energy prices and this is going to undermine that. It just is. We have got the pipeline. No, we will not do the pipeline either. All that does is provide another source of oil and gas, oil for America, that forces the existing American big oil companies to compete with. It helps to bring down the price. If you do not have another source from Canada, you have got less competition. Competition helps bring down price. I do not believe this administration wants to bring down the price of energy. In fact, I think the opposite is true. In fact, President Obama said, before he was elected, that we could have--if anybody built a coal plant it was going bankrupt. That is not possible, to phase out the entire coal industry so rapidly. We have done so much to clean it up. They have spent billions and billions of dollars reducing the pollutants that come out of smokestacks. It helped a lot. That is why our air is cleaner than it has been in years. We have made a lot of progress. A lot of money has been spent. But this is an excessive action, in my view, focused primarily on CO2, carbon dioxide. We all know about photosynthesis. We know how plants grow. We know they take in carbon dioxide and breath out oxygen. We breathe in oxygen and we let out carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is odorless, it is tasteless, it is not poisonous, it is not harmful. In fact, plants grow faster if there is more carbon dioxide than if there is less carbon dioxide. This is a scientific fact that is not disputable. So what do they say? They say, well, the Clean Air Act gives the responsibility of eliminating pollutants from our atmosphere. It was passed in 1970 before anybody even dreamed of global warming. So carbon dioxide--when the law was passed, the Clean Air Act in the 1970s, they had no thought whatsoever in the Congress that we would be banning carbon dioxide. John Dingell, a long-term Democratic Congressman, one of the longest serving ever, was a Member of Congress who voted on that. He recently said they had no idea we were voting to regulate carbon dioxide. So how did it happen? Well, the environmentalists filed a lawsuit. They said the Congress passed a law in 1970. That law said you should reduce pollutants. You have a responsibility to reduce pollutants and carbon dioxide is a pollutant. Why? Well, the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, said that CO2 creates global warming, this perfectly positive small amount of gas in our massive environment, that makes plants grow better, is increasing. It is. It is increasing in the environment because of burning carbon fuels. They said this increase is going to warm the planet. We are going to have more storms, more tornadoes, and the coasts are going to flood and all of this. Therefore, EPA should regulate it. Must regulate it. By a 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court agreed. Congress has never voted for that. Congress has voted against global warming legislation multiple times. It would never ever pass this Congress if it were brought up for a vote. Never pass. So unelected folks in the Environmental Protection Agency, unelected, lifetime appointed Federal judges, at least five of the nine, concluded that this is a pollutant. So here we are. I do not know whether we have got warming. I have assumed it is. Temperatures, I believe over the last hundred years, have increased about 1 degree. But I do think we need to be a lot more modest about this. It is well below what the alarmists have been telling us. How did it all happen? Why did the Supreme Court decide that this plant food, CO2, is a pollutant? They said it was because these models are saying the planet is warming and all of the scientists agree, which is not true. But the scientists have said the planet is warming, so therefore CO2 is a pollutant. They so ruled. But things are not happening as the experts told us. It is just not happening. I am beginning to wonder what is going on here. This chart, the red line--this is zero. The red line is an average of all of the computer models that projected what the increase in climate--in temperature would be based on steadily increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. Back in dinosaur days, we had a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere than we have today. But it has been reduced. It has been increasing as we go into the ground, get coal and get oil and get natural gas and burn it. That emits more CO2. It is released back into the atmosphere, actually. It was sucked out of the atmosphere through plants and animals. This was the chart. Every single climate change model that is the foundation of the argument for dangerous global warming predicted more than has actually occurred in the last 15 years. This is the chart. You go back to about 2000 here. This green line is the actual result from--I believe that is balloon temperature gauges. It actually has not gone up at all since 2001. That is what, 13 years? This is not the temperatures they were predicting. Besides, the charts looks a little more dramatic than they are. This is zero. This is two- tenths. They were predicting, from 1979 I believe was their key date, that the temperature would increase 1.2 degrees. It has increased about three-tenths of 1 degree. That is in this part. But if you go here, when the chart is going off here, saying it should be accelerating every year, it has been flat. So I do not know. Some people say the Sun is involved in it. Some people have other theories. I do not know. I have assumed we are going to have some warming out there. But it is certainly not coming in at the rate the alarmists have told us. That is indisputable fact. We in Congress need to be asking ourselves how much burden we can afford to put on the American people at this time. The President--I have got to tell you, one of the most frustrating things and disappointing things to me is that the President in the last several years--he has not in over a year now because I have been asking his people before the environment committee to be sure and tell him not to say it anymore. But he has two times said that the temperature is increasing faster than the experts predicted over the last 10 or 15 years. Think about that. The President of the United States, in the face of obvious data to the contrary, is repeatedly going out and saying, it is increasing faster than the red line. That worries me. I believe the President of the United States has a responsibility, when he advocates for policies, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That is not so. It is not increasing faster. It has hardly increased at all in the last 10 or so years. Then they say the storms--the President and his team when Sandy hit go out and say this is all a direct result of global warming. See? Every time there is a storm, every time there is a drought, and every time there is a problem, it is always climate change, global warming. Dr. Roger Pielke laid out the numbers. I don't have the details here, but he testified before the Environment and Public Works Committee and he said: It is not so, hurricanes are not increasing. It is not hard to see how many hurricanes you have. You simply go back each year. They are quite calculating. He went back and calculated the hurricanes--how many category 5's, 4's, 3's, 2's, and 1's. The result is pretty astonishing that we have had fewer of them. This chart is hard to read. I will quote what it says: Hurricanes have not increased in the US in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since at least 1900. He has not been disputed either. They have tried to push back and attack him, but nobody has produced data that dispute what he says because it is easier to calculate that data. This is important. Dr. Pielke recently produced an analysis that said it has been 3,140 days since this country has had a category 3 hurricane. Camille was a 5, and we have had some others in the past. But we have had almost 10 years since we had a category 3. Sandy, this storm which hit the Northeast, which was very rare, happened to miss the southeast, missed Florida, and hit the Northeast. It was not even a hurricane when it hit land. It was below the speed, I understand, of a hurricane. At best, it was a category 1. It just happened to hit the Northeast where people are not used to it, and it did a lot of damage. How can it be argued, I ask colleagues, that global warming is causing more storms? Moreover, the 2012-2013 tornado season was one of the lowest in the past 50 years. Only 5 out of 50 years have been that low. We are not seeing an increase in tornadoes. We read about them more. We have The Weather Channel, and they talk about them more. But, in truth, the numbers aren't there. Now, if hurricanes are down--and it has been 3,100 days since we have had a category 3 hurricane--it is about the longest in history that we recorded. It is an unusual drought of big hurricanes. It means a lot to me. I live in Mobile, AL, and I remember Hurricane Frederic in 1979 barreling up Mobile Bay. I remember the fear people had who had been there when Camille hit nearby in Mississippi. I know something about hurricanes, and they are very real factors. It surprises me we have had as few as we have had. We have also not seen an increase in tornadoes. What we are proposing is that we have to carry out a policy that would go beyond our technology to produce electricity in a cost- effective manner, and it has the impact of massively closing base-load coal plants. Existing plants are going to be hammered, and new ones will not be built. I am also on the subcommittee of Environment and Public Works that deals with nuclear power. Not a single American since the beginning of nuclear power 50 years ago has been killed as a result of a nuclear power accident. How many die in natural gas pipelines, drilling rigs, coal mines, transportation of coal, and so forth? We basically shut down nuclear power. I am telling us this is a big problem for our country, the erosion of nuclear power. We had four plants close--existing nuclear plants close. They have been hammered with regulations, and they have never been safer. We have never known more about how to operate a nuclear plant safely than we know today. But they know only one or two are being constructed, and this assault on nuclear power has the potential to erode the 20 percent of our electricity that comes from nuclear power. So if we lose the coal and we lose nuclear power--and most of these plants are 30-plus, 40 or 45 years old, and they will soon be at the end of their lifetime. If we don't replace them, where will our energy come from, pray tell? In any finding, anything that we do today to try to impact CO2 is only a drop in the bucket worldwide. They are building coal-fired plants in China, India, the East, the Middle East, other places, and Africa in large numbers. We are a very small part of the overall picture, and our actions are not going to reverse this trend. I don't know and I don't pretend to know all of the answers, but I would say that if we have more CO2 and we have more global warming and global climate change, how do we know it won't result in fewer hurricanes? We have had fewer. How do we know it won't result in fewer tornadoes? We have had fewer tornadoes. Life on the planet has tended to be more healthy and prosperous in times of higher temperatures than lower temperatures. I certainly don't want to see a surging temperature in America and rapidly changing conditions. I think we could have real damage. As I said, I don't know what the full answer is. I am just saying in my judgment, this administration is pushing this beyond what is reasonable. It is going to adversely affect the economy of America. It is going to drive up the cost of every household's electric bill, every household's gasoline bill. Every business in America that hires American workers is going to try to export products, and those products are going to be more expensive because they had to pay more for their energy. The last thing we need to be doing at this point in American history is driving up--artificially--the price of energy. One expert said a number of years ago that the lifespan--the average lifespan of a person in a nation where electricity is readily available--is twice that wherever it is not readily available. I have been in poor places in the world where there is not electricity. You see the difficulty they have with water, you see the difficulty they have with cleanliness and so forth, and cooling and keeping food refrigerated and the disease that comes from that. Energy is a positive force. It has made this world--the western world, the developed world--so much more prosperous. It is creating wealth that we can then use for good causes--to clean up the environment, and to produce healthy foods for billions worldwide. I don't think we should see energy as an evil thing. I think energy is a good thing, and we don't need to drive the price up. It makes life harder for people, especially those of limited income. I thank the Chair for the opportunity to share these thoughts. It means a lot to me. We will keep working on it. We will analyze in detail, as time goes by, the proposal the President has presented. I remain very concerned, as a matter of constitutional order, that this is being done without a vote of the people. This is being done by a 5- to-4 Supreme Court ruling, an aggressive President, and an aggressive EPA. It seems as if there is not enough, and there is an inability in Congress to do anything about it. The average American who disagrees has no voice, apparently, in being able to have their voice heard. So we will continue to talk about it and as time goes by, we will look at the trend and hopefully we can reduce some of the excesses that I think clearly exist. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I am joined by the chair and ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee to discuss section 1051 of the Water Resources Reform and Development Act--WRRDA-- conference report, which we will vote on shortly in the Senate. I thank the chair and ranking member for their leadership on this bipartisan and important legislation. I rise today to discuss a provision within the legislation pertaining to a long-running regional dispute in the Southeastern United States over the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' operations within the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint, ACF and Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa, ACT, river systems. At the heart of the conflict are concerns from downstream stakeholders about the amount of water withdrawals--and the legal authority for those withdrawals--from Lake Allatoona and Lake Lanier. A similar provision was included in the Senate-passed version of this bill, S. 601, which was reported favorably out of the Environment and Public Works Committee after careful consideration. Part of that consideration was a July 22, 2013, hearing focused on this dispute among the Army Corps and other stakeholders in the region. That hearing examined issues related to the withdrawal of water from Lake Allatoona and Lake Lanier; the authorized purposes of those two reservoirs; the Corps' actions in light of the 1958 Water Supply Act; the legislative history of the reservoirs; and the Corps' management of water storage contracts in the river systems. While it highlighted a number of concerns related to Army Corps of Engineers authority under the Water Supply Act, the hearing brought to light a point of agreement that all stakeholders share. The best way to resolve the conflict is through a negotiated interstate water compact. Section 1051 highlights Congress's concerns with the Corps' actions under the Water Supply Act related to the allocation of storage at Corps projects to local water supply without congressional approval. While it notes these concerns, it urges the agreed-upon best resolution to the conflict: an interstate water compact negotiated by the Governors of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. The provision adds that the committees of jurisdiction should consider further legislation on the issue absent such an agreement.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I wish to express my support for the confirmation of my former staffer, Elisebeth Collins Cook, to serve on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Ms. Cook loves her country. She is a true patriot, and a person of character, courage, and integrity. Ms. Cook has had a distinguished legal career. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in 1997 and her law degree from Harvard Law School in 2000. She graduated from both prestigious schools with honors. Following law school, Ms. Cook served as law clerk to Judge Lee Rosenthal of the Southern District of Texas, and Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit. In 2002, she joined the prominent law firm Cooper & Kirk here in Washington, DC. After working for the firm for 3 years, Ms. Cook was appointed Special Counsel to the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice. In 2008, she was confirmed by the Senate without opposition to be assistant attorney general for OLP. In 2009, Ms. Cook joined my staff as chief counsel for the Supreme Court nomination of now-Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Her work was superb. She helped me to examine the important issues raised by that nomination on a high level without resorting to personal attacks on the nominee. In 2010, she returned to private practice as a partner with Freeborn & Peters in Chicago, before returning to Washington, where she is currently counsel at the well-regarded law firm Wilmer Hale. Ms. Cook has had a wide-ranging law practice, including general civil litigation, policy initiatives, and Federal criminal investigations. The quality of her work has not gone unnoticed. Among her more recent accolades are the Intelligence Community Legal Award, multiple attorney general awards, and recognition as one of Legal Times' ``40 Under 40.'' In 2008, she received the Edmund J. Randolph Award for Service to the Department of Justice, the Department's highest award for public service and leadership. Ms. Cook combines a powerful legal mind, broad experience, good judgment, and a strong interest in serving her country. She has excellent people skills and works well with others, even when she disagrees with them. Her tenure on the board thus far proves as much. I have nothing but praise for Ms. Cook's abilities, and am confident she will continue to acquit herself as a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. I am pleased to recommend Ms. Cook to my colleagues and I hope they will support her confirmation to this important position.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank Chairman Murray and join her in commending Mr. Blau for his many years of dedicated and outstanding service to CBO, the Congress, and the American people. We wish him all the best in his well-deserved retirement. We hope our colleagues will join us in thanking Mr. Blau--and really all of the hardworking employees at the Congressional Budget Office-- for his and their service.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I would like to thank Senator Barrasso for his leadership on this issue. As a longtime practicing physician before he came to the Senate, he has provided great leadership and expertise and is able to evaluate and comment so wisely on the important issue of health care. I thank the Senator. Immigration Today, Majority Leader Reid--the leader of the Democratic majority of the Senate--and Senator Chuck Schumer came to the Senate floor to demand that the House of Representatives pass their immigration bill. They labeled Republicans as extremists for not giving in to their demands. And they are correct about one thing: The House is not giving in. At this point in time, the House is refusing to yield to the pressure of special interest groups and political lobbyists and Senate Democrats to pass a bill that would be bad for America. It just will be bad for America. So I think once again the special interests will lose and the voice of the American people will be heard. Senator Schumer said Republicans are xenophobes because they won't pass his plan. Let's talk about what is extreme. A new report just out revealed that this administration has released 36,000 criminal aliens from ICE detention. Our Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers receive them as prisoners from a State or Federal penitentiary where they have been convicted of some criminal offense unrelated to immigration, usually in a State court. 36,000 are now being released into the general population. This report found there were 193 homicide-type convictions, 1,153 sexual offenders, 303 kidnapping convictions, and 1,075 aggravated assault convictions. These are serious crimes. If you will recall, these criminals are the only group this administration says they are the deporting. They don't deny that they are not deporting others who violate our immigration laws. They promised they are faithfully removing people who commit crimes unrelated to immigration. This report proves that claim not to be so. These dangerous offenders should be kept in custody. They should not be released into the general population. We had a study of such releases several years ago. The statistics showed that when a person who entered the country illegally was released on bail, they didn't show up for court. If they are willing to enter the country illegally and a judge has them set for trial and he releases them on bail, we then have an incredibly high number who don't show up for trial. This was called catch and release and was roundly criticized. This is now being done with immigrants who have serious criminal charges and convictions. Do you know what else is extreme? Extreme is trying to pass an immigration bill that would double the flow of guest workers into our country and triple the number of new permanent residents when 50 million working-age Americans are out of work. We have a very serious unemployment problem. Is no one concerned about that? It is not xenophobic, but it is compassionate to say we should focus our attention on struggling and hurting American workers. It is not xenophobic. It is our patriotic duty to defend the integrity of our borders and enforce the long-established laws of the United States. It is the oath we all took as Senators to defend the Constitution of the United States. It is the oath the chief law enforcement officer, President Obama, took. We have a duty to defend our citizens and our people at a time when they are struggling financially. There is just no doubt about it. There was one group of people not referenced when Majority Leader Reid and Senator Schumer talked earlier this morning. Do you know what group it was? Completely omitted from the conversation was the American worker. The American worker is not being discussed by amnesty supporters in this debate. We know the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's view. They would like more workers creating slack labor markets and lower wages. We know certain special interest groups want more immigration. We know certain politicians think this will be good for them politically. According to the Congressional Budget Office--our own professional team that is selected in a nonpartisan way and gives us advice on the ramifications of legislation we pass--has looked at the Reid-Schumer bill that passed the Senate. According to CBO, the Senate Democratic immigration bill--which was supported by a small number of Republicans, but it is overwhelmingly a Democratic bill--would increase unemployment while reducing wages. It would increase unemployment while reducing wages of American workers for the next 12 years, and it will reduce the per person wealth or GNP for the next 17 years. If we bring in 30 million people over the next 10 years--as this bill would do--it will triple the number that normally would be given legal status in America. It will bring down the per person wealth and it will bring down wages. Surely the U.S. Chamber of Commerce understands the free market, do they not? Surely Senator Reid understands that, does he not? We were on a conference call yesterday regarding the American steel industry. A large amount of steel is being dumped into America. What is the impact of that? What is the concern? If we bring in more steel, there will be lower prices for steel. If we bring in more cotton, there will be lower prices for cotton. If we bring in more labor, it will result in lower wages for American workers. CBO told us that. There is no dispute about it. Yet we have Senators who come to the floor and repeatedly say this is going to increase wages. Give me a break. You can't just say something and think it is going to make it reality when it is the opposite of reality. Under current law, we are admitting more than 600,000 guest workers each year. Guest workers come to America not to be citizens but just to take jobs that someone contends we don't have enough workers. We grant permanent residence to 1 million immigrants each year and perhaps ultimately become citizens. That is the current law. Right now wages are falling and it is serious, but this is the law that has been established and that is what the nation has agreed to. The bill Senator Reid maneuvered through this Senate would admit more than 1.2 million guest workers each year, thereby doubling the number of guest workers, and it will give permanent residency to 30 million immigrants over the next 10 years and that is triple the normal rate. Research from Harvard professor Dr. George Borjas--perhaps the most preeminent student of labor, wages, and immigration in America--shows that American workers lose more than $400 billion in wages each year due to competition from low-cost workers from abroad. That is $400 billion in wages each year--not million but billion. Dr. Borjas's research also shows that from 1980 to 2000--he did an empirical study using the census, the Department of Labor, and other official data--wages declined 7.4 percent for lower skilled working Americans. These are the people who go out and work every day. These are not people who have a college degree. I am talking about the working people in this country. Their wages declined from 1980 to 2000 by 7.4 percent as a result of this very large flow of legal and illegal immigration. There is no doubt--and my colleagues have to understand this--a vote for the Reid-Schumer immigration bill is a vote to lower the wages of American workers. Not only that, it will make it harder for Americans to get a job, period. It appears the people who are hurt worst by the Democratic immigration policies are young Americans, low-income Americans, and minority workers. According to Dr. Borjas's studies--and others--minority workers are particularly damaged by high levels of immigration. This includes Hispanics who have lawfully come to America. They are trying to get started so they can make their way up. They would like to have a pay raise, but their wages are also being pulled down by an extraordinary, unjustified flow of labor that the economy can't absorb effectively. We don't have jobs for them now. That is the problem. I don't dislike people who want to come here. I know most of them are good people who would like to advance themselves. But, as Senators we have a responsibility to the citizens of our country and we need to ask: Is this good for America? Can we absorb this number of people and maintain decent wages or are we in a long term trend that will allow lower and middle-income workers' wages to continue to erode? I think it is a serious issue that we need to be honest about and I hope we will do so. Young and low-income Americans are also hurt. Senator Schumer says we should do the bidding of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--buddying up with them now. He says there is a hijacking out here, but it seems Mr. Schumer's party has been the one that has been hijacked by special interests, and they have lost sight of whom they claim to represent--working Americans. That is my charge and that is what I say. We have a generous immigration policy, and we need to make sure it is enforced correctly and lawfully carried out. That is what the American people have asked of us. They have demanded this from us. They want a lawful system that we can be proud of and treats people fairly, where a person fills out an application and lays out their qualifications. Those qualifications are then evaluated on an objective basis, and the best qualified person, the one who is most deserving, is then admitted to the country. What is wrong with that? That is what Canada does. That is what the UK does. That is what Australia does. There is nothing wrong with such a policy. That is what we should be doing. We should decide how many people the country can absorb and in what wage categories before we admit huge numbers of people and certainly before we double the number we presently bring in. A number of Senators have complained on the floor of the Senate that the tech industries can't find qualified Americans. We have all heard that charge. I sort of accepted it at first, but in fact the data shows something different and it is rather surprising. In fact, we have twice as many STEM graduates each year as there are STEM jobs--science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Here is a recent paper by Professor Hal Salzman from Rutgers University. He carefully analyzed data from the Department of Education and the Department of Labor. He concluded that we first need to get accurate data to truly inform policy decisions. If we are going to make a policy decision about how large our immigration flow should be--not to end it but how large it should be--shouldn't we have good data? He says: The first data to consider is the broad notion of a supply crisis in which the United States does not produce enough STEM graduates to meet industry demand. In fact, the nation graduates more than two times as many STEM students each year as find jobs in STEM fields. For the 180,000 or so annual openings, U.S. Colleges and Universities supply 500,000 graduates. They supply more than twice the number of graduates as we have jobs for now, so I am a little dubious about these big business types claiming they can't get enough people. What about IT specifically? We hear some of our Silicon Valley executives promoting any kind of immigration as long as they get more IT workers. Mr. Salzman says: The only clear impact of the large IT guest worker inflows over this decade can be seen in salary levels, which have remained at their late-1990s levels and which dampens incentives for domestic students to pursue STEM degrees. Did you know that? IT graduates' salaries are stuck at 1990 levels. It is causing students in college to wonder if this is such a great field to go into. In fact, the author says there are other fields that do better. If that is true, does that change Senator Reid's view of the legislation he jammed through the Senate and he is so proud of and he is demanding the House pass? If that is true, if Mr. Salzman is correct, will Senator Reid change his mind? Then he goes on to say--and I agree with this line. He is talking about all STEM graduates now: If there is a [talent] shortage, where are the market indicators (namely wage increases) . . . ? So Mr. Donohue and friends at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who believe in the free market: Why are wages down if we have a shortage of workers? Why aren't wages going up? Another businessman said recently: There are 600,000 jobs in manufacturing going unfilled today. This immigration bill can go a long way toward helping us fill these positions. Well, great Scott. I have seen instances where thousands of people apply for just a few jobs. Does he have any interest, first of all, in promoting sound national goals? Our goal as policymakers for the United States of America should be to say: Wait a minute. You have jobs at your manufacturing plant and we have to get unemployed people ready to take them. Americans are on welfare and on dependency who need to go to work. Give us a chance to get our people into those jobs first before we start bringing in more foreign workers to take a limited number of jobs. From 2000 to 2013, the grim fact is that all net job gains went to immigrant workers. Can you imagine that? That is what the numbers show. Under the Democratic plan, this bill, if it were to pass the House, job decline will accelerate. From 2000 to 2013, the number of working-age Americans increased by 16 million. Yet the jobs for American workers--the number of American workers actually working--fell by 1.3 million. That is why the unemployment rate and the workforce dropout rate is so high. But during that same period, 2000 to 2013, the number of working-age immigrants increased by 8.8 million while 5.3 million immigrants got jobs. So all the jobs created during this period of time have been, in effect, mathematically speaking, taken by foreign workers. Is this healthy? Isn't this one of the reasons why people are having a hard time today? There are 50 million working-age Americans who are not working today. Wages are lower today than they were in 1999. Median household incomes, adjusted for inflation, have dropped nearly $2,300 since 2009. We have the smallest workforce participation in 36 years. So I say to Mr. Reid and Mr. Schumer, I am glad to talk about this issue. I am glad to talk about immigration, but we are going to talk about what is in the interests of the American people. We are not going to talk about your politics and your ideology and your special interests. We are going to talk about what is good for America and what is good for America is to get more of our unemployed working, to get wages going up rather than down. I am not surprised they didn't talk about workers and wages in their remarks when they demeaned people who disagree with them and who oppose their great bill they drafted that will not work. We are not going to be scared off. We are not going to be intimidated into handing over control of our immigration laws to a small group of special interests who are meeting in politicians' offices and maybe promising support. I feel strongly about this. I don't feel there is anything wrong, morally or public policy-wise, to say we need to have a lawful system of immigration we can be proud of. That is what the American people have asked of us for over 30 years and Congress refuses to give. Congress is not listening to the people. And we can do it. It is possible. I have been in law enforcement almost as long as I have been in the Senate. I know this can be done, if we have a leader who wants to see it done. But if the President doesn't want to enforce the law and says he is only going to enforce it against people who commit serious crimes, and we now find out even those criminals aren't deported when they are caught, then I think we have a deep problem. I think we can do better. Let's don't go down this road of pushing, pushing, pushing, just pass a bill, any bill--oh, we have to do it fast. That has been the message all along. We have to ram it through, but this thing has been out there in the public now for a long time. The mackerel has been in the sunshine for a long time and it doesn't smell so good when it is examined, and the American people are not prepared to eat it and they shouldn't. I thank the Chair and the Senate for giving me a chance to express these concerns. I believe we need to put American interests first, and when we do we will draft an immigration bill that is far different from the one being promoted today. I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, on rollcall vote 140, I voted aye and it was my intention to vote nay. Therefore, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to change my vote, since it will not affect the outcome.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Chair. I would note that the issues revolving around judicial confirmations in which we are routinely voting on cloture after the execution of the nuclear option, we are having more of these votes than we used to have.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank Senator Hoeven. The Senator is exactly right; it will do all of those things. It is a step in the right direction in every area. I appreciate my leader on the Judiciary Committee and ranking member, Senator Grassley. I would ask a rather simple question of Senator Grassley which ought not to be forgotten in this process. If a pipeline is built and an additional source of gasoline is brought into the Midwest or other areas, if it is not cheaper than the gas that is already being supplied, isn't it true that nobody will buy it? So won't this mean an opportunity for people in the whole country to be able to have another source of fuel which would be less costly and help bring down costs?

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Senator. I thank Senator Hoeven for his steadfast, consistent, principled leadership on this important issue. He has been there consistently. I don't think there is any Senator in this body who understands the details of this issue more than he does. It is just a positive thing for America. It just is, and I thank the Senator for his efforts. We have been reviewing this for 5 years. Legally, as I see this situation, it is this: There is no Federal law at this time dealing with this issue. Presidents have issued Executive orders that created a mechanism to allow the State Department to review a request for a pipeline like Keystone XL. But clearly there is no doubt that Congress has every right to legislate on this issue. Just because we haven't yet, that doesn't mean we never will or never should, and I strongly believe that with the failed leadership of President Obama on this question, we are going to have to pass legislation. It is just that critical. The Secretary of State has essentially asserted that under these Executive orders the State Department must evaluate the environmental issue. They have dealt with that, and they have satisfied that environmental process. There is the question left of the national interest. So if we don't have a serious environmental issue--which I don't think we do, and pretty clearly we don't--then the question is: What is in the national interest? Senator Hoeven represents a state on the border with Canada, and we have good relations with Canada. First, I don't think there is any nation in the world with which we need to maintain and enhance our relationship more than with our good partner, Canada. Second, let me ask the Senator this. The Senator is close to Canada. He knows the situation. If this pipeline is not approved, will it weaken and harm our relationship with our good neighbor, Canada, or will it make it better?

Mr. SESSIONS. The Senator is so correct. In my time here in the Senate, this is one of the most inexplicable actions by a President I have ever seen. He has persisted in this after months and years have gone by and when the facts continue to come forward that justify this pipeline--for jobs in America, for lower energy costs in America, for importing oil from our ally Canada, where the people buy a great deal from us. Any wealth that goes to Canada, we can be sure a lot of that will come back to the United States because they purchase a great deal from us. But does Venezuela or Saudi Arabia or other countries that we buy oil from buy a lot from us? No. So this is a partnership and relationship which benefits both parties. I just am astounded that it has not been approved to date. The Washington Post editorial board wrote last week that the President's decision to delay the Keystone Pipeline was ``absurd.'' This is an independent, liberal-leaning newspaper that cares about the environment. So it seems the President is clearly acquiescing in favor of special interests. Senator Thune is familiar with Mr. Tom Steyer, who a recent Associated Press article characterized as ``a former hedge fund manager and environmentalist, who says he will spend $100 million--$50 million of his own money and $50 million from other donors''--to defeat Republicans to promote environmental issues. He asked for some things if he is going to put up $100 million. I am not happy about it. I believe the interests of the people of this country have been subordinated to either an extreme environmentalist agenda or to plain money. There is no other rational basis for the position we find ourselves in. It is really tragic. We need jobs in this country. We have the fewest percentage of people working in America today in the working age group since 1975. Median income has dropped over $2,000 to $2,600. We are not doing well. These are high-paying jobs. It keeps growth and creativity here in the United States and in North America through our partner, Canada. I am grateful to see others who are so interested in this issue. I feel really strongly we should move forward with this. It is the right thing to do. It is not politics. It is the right thing. A lot of Democratic members favor this pipeline. Union groups, who tend to be Democrats, favor this pipeline. It is not a Republican- Democratic issue. This is an extremist issue against a commonsense issue. Sixty-two Senators voted for a budget amendment last year during the Senate budget debate that was supportive of the Keystone pipeline. My good staffer Jeff Wood found a Charles Dickens quote about the fictional ``Circumlocution Office,'' of which Dickens wrote: Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving--how not to do it. . . . [W]ith projects for the general welfare . . . , which in slow lapse of time and agony had passed safely through other public departments . . . got referred at last to the Circumlocution Office, and never reappeared in the light of day. Boards sat upon them, secretaries minuted upon them, commissioners gabbled about them, clerks registered, entered, checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away. In short, all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office, except the business that never came out of it . . . (Chapter 10 of Charles Dickens' ``Little Dorrit,'' 1855). In my opinion, this bill would create thousands of good jobs if it is passed and this pipeline is built. It would strengthen, not weaken, our relationship with Canada. It would bring a new flow of oil into the United States and the Midwest which will provide competition and which would reduce costs. It would be a competitive source of energy for America. Canada is a good trading partner. They buy a lot from us. The oil will be sold somewhere else if it is not sold in the United States. By the way, pipelines are everywhere in this country. In my State of Alabama, pipelines crisscross the State. We don't have any problems with this. The idea that we can't build another pipeline in this country is about as ludicrous as one can imagine. So I thank Senator Hoeven for the great leadership he has provided. I appreciate the opportunity to join with him. It is the right thing for the people of this country, and we need to get this done. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. I wish to share with my colleagues some recent developments that I believe are important on the immigration front. My office did a report and an analysis recently that pointed out that this administration, unlike what had been done historically, has been counting border apprehensions as ICE deportations from the United States. Classically, before that ICE officers--the Immigration Customs Enforcement officers--apprehended people inside the border and did removal proceedings and that was what was counted. So they have used those numbers to create the impression that a great deal more removals are occurring than actually are. That is not good. The administration should not be doing that, and it has created confusion. It is just one more example of this administration's willingness, unfortunately, to misrepresent and twist numbers to advance an agenda they believe ought to be advanced. We are a nation of immigrants. We believe in immigration, but we believe in a lawful system of immigration. Most Americans believe the lawlessness should end and we should have a system that creates a mechanism by which people apply and they are admitted based on a fair evaluation of the people most likely to be prosperous in America and do well and contribute to the Nation and should be given priority--and we are just not doing that. So the administration contends and says openly that we will not deport people, except those who commit serious crimes, which apparently does not include DUI's. The crimes almost always have to be a felony, it appears, in order for people to be deported, according to the administration. We will ignore the law for that company down the street in a high unemployment area which has five employees working illegally. They would not be removed. They will be allowed to stay and continue to work unlawfully, while Americans who cannot get a job are drawing unemployment insurance and other subsidies. This is happening all over America. So getting to this fundamental point: Government is not being operated in ways that it should, conducted by a President who is charged to see that the laws of the United States are faithfully executed. He has issued prosecutorial removal policies that go beyond creating a mechanism to enforce the law but in fact wipe out the law, eliminate the law. There has never been a requirement in the law that if someone is in the country illegally, they can stay as long as they don't get convicted of some other felony unrelated to an immigration violation. Indeed, under the policy as it is being executed, if an individual has false documents, which is a felony for an American citizen, that doesn't count as a deportable crime. It is only drug dealing or a crime of violence or robbery under the policies that we are carrying out. They say they are faithfully executing that policy in part, deporting the individuals who are convicted of serious crimes. A study came out from CIS, Center for Immigration Studies, that found 1 in 3 criminal alien encounters last year resulted in a release. They are being released, in one form or another, and are remaining in the country. We have so much going on that is very troubling to me. Former ICE Director John Sandweg said recently: If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero--it's just highly unlikely to happen. Now that is the truth. I was a Federal prosecutor. I know how the system works and I have worked with ICE officers and Border Patrol officers and prosecuted their cases. This is what the reality is, and it is not right. It should not be. When we have the Vice President of the United States saying recently he considers the 11 million people here illegally as citizens anyway, what message does that send, colleagues, to an individual who would like to come to America permanently but has a visa to work so many months or be a student for so many months and the visa is over? What does the statement of the Vice President mean to him? It means he doesn't have to go home. All he has to do is just stay in the country. If he is in the interior and not caught at the border and came in by airplane, flew into Philadelphia or Denver, he gets to stay. As long as he doesn't get convicted of a felony, nobody is ever going to bother him. So this is an open border. If they get past the border, get into the interior, go to St. Louis, go to Salt Lake City, go to Little Rock, Arkansas, then they can stay. That cannot be the policy of the United States of America. It cannot be the policy of a nation that expects its laws to be respected that if someone can get past the border or they can get a visa into the country and overstay, nobody will have any intention of removing them or enforcing the agreement they made or enforcing the law. I feel strongly about this issue. People are unaware of how this is happening. I see in addition to the fanciful claims about who is being deported or removed, this was on the front page of the Washington Times today. Steven Dinan says the projections of the Washington Times show that Federal agents are `` . . . on pace this year to remove the fewest number of immigrants of President Obama's tenure.'' It goes on to say: That slower pace contrasts with the President's argument that he is enforcing the laws to the fullest extent possible by targeting criminals and recent border crossers. The article goes on to say that the ICE officers are fully funded to remove at least 400,000 people, and at this rate they will be well below that figure. Why? Because it is the policy not to enforce the law. This is what is going on in this country. On the same page there is the headline of an article that ``Sheriffs warn of violence from Mexican cartels deep into interior of U.S.'' It goes on to say: Outmanned and outgunned, local law enforcement officers are alarmed by the drug and human trafficking, prostitution, kidnapping and money laundering that Mexican drug cartels are conducting in the U.S. far from the border. Not just at the border but away from the border. It goes on: U.S. sheriffs say that securing the border is a growing concern to law enforcement agencies throughout the country, not just near the U.S.-Mexico boundary. ``If we fail to secure our borders, then every sheriff in America will become a border sheriff,'' said Sam Paige, sheriff of Rockingham County, NC. ``We're only a two-day drive from the border and have already seen the death and violence that illegal crossings brings into our community.'' Other sheriffs joined in expressing that similar concern. We are not where we need to be. Since the President took office, interior removals have been cut nearly in half. They have dropped by 44 percent. More than half of the ICE removals since 2009 are the border apprehensions, where they just caught them at the border and sent them back. These are not interior deportations as the statistics used to be focused on. Two-thirds of all ICE removals last year were border apprehensions. So--I said ``half'' earlier--it is two-thirds of the numbers that they are counting as deportations and removal are border deportations that weren't previously counted as such. Ninty-four percent of the people removed last year--get this--were either apprehended at the border, which is not attributable to apprehension, or were convicted of a crime while in the United States. Do you hear that, colleagues? Ninety-four percent of the people who were removed were either people captured at the border or committing a serious crime, and even those who commit serious crimes are not deported. Most of the rest were repeat violators or fugitives. So 99.9 percent of the 12 million illegal immigrants and visa overstays, without known crimes on their record, including those fleeing from authority, did not face removal last year. So if someone was here as a visa overstay or an illegal entrant inside the country and did not commit a crime, 99 percent of that--99.92 percent of the 12 million here were not involved or no action was taken to remove them. It just goes to show our law enforcement system is in a state of collapse. It is a deliberate plan by the President of the United States, and it is wrong. People need to be aware of it and need to stand up to it and I think the American people are beginning to do so. This administration has effectively declared that anyone in the world who illegally gains access to the interior of the United States through a border, through an airport, through a seaport, is free to illegally remain in the United States, free to claim certain tax benefits, free to work and take jobs that unemployed Americans need. This deprives millions of Americans of their jobs, wages and represents a dramatic, breathtaking nullification of Federal law. This law enforcement collapse is evident everywhere--872,000 aliens have been ordered removed but haven't left. So we order people removed. They get released on bail or get released in order to remove themselves or show up for removal. How many are showing up? Not many. It is called a catch and release, as has been referred to. There are 872,000--almost 1 million--who at one time or another have been ordered removed but haven't left, and 68,000 potentially deportable aliens deemed criminal by type were released by immigration officials last year. These were people who were charged with crimes and still didn't leave. The chief of the Border Patrol--this is the guy who runs the border effort with his team--predicted a tenfold increase in the presence of illegal youth crossing the border between 2011 and 2014. They have been told: Come on down, nothing is going to happen, and it has created more people coming, this lack of enforcement. The Los Angeles Times reports that the number of asylum claims at the borders have increased sevenfold since 2009. Well, the administration developed a policy of stopping everything. All someone has to do is say, I am claiming asylum, and the whole process stops. Time goes by. Often the individuals who claim asylum are released on bail and then they don't leave. We don't know where they go. This is in effect a postmodern view of challenging the very idea that we are a nation-state with real borders. Attorney General Holder and Cecilia Munoz, who is the President's Assistant and Director of the Domestic Policy Council, who used to be with La Raza, described amnesty as a civil right. If you come into the country illegally, the Attorney General of the United States declares that these individuals have a civil right to amnesty. How can this possibly be? This is the chief law enforcement officer in America? Vice President Biden recently said: You know, eleven million people live in the shadows. I believe they're already American citizens . . . eleven million undocumented aliens are already Americans. Goodness. The Vice President of the United States would make such a statement. It is stunning beyond belief. Apparently, if somebody is supposed to get on an airplane to leave this country because their visa is up and then they read the Vice President's statement, they could just say: Well, I will just stay. Why should I go back? I would rather stay now. I kind of like this place. If I go back, I will have to wait in line. I will have to compete within the system like everybody else who comes lawfully. Since I am here, I am not going to leave. Is it any wonder we have more people staying, as the border patrol chief said? President Obama made a series of nominations--Mr. Jeh Johnson, the head of Homeland Security, a lawyer at the Department of Defense and a political campaigner. He heads the Department of Homeland Security, which is a huge department. He can be counted on to know one thing: He is very close to the President, and he is to carry out the President's wishes. He doesn't know anything else about running a big, major law enforcement operation such as this. Mr. Perez, the former Assistant Attorney General at the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, was very active with the pro-amnesty group in Maryland before this. Mr. Rodriguez, who has been nominated to be the Director of USCIS--they were installed not to be good and smart law enforcement officers but to effectuate the President's agenda. You want to know the truth? That is the truth. They were put in there to carry out the agenda, not to carry out law enforcement. The morale at Homeland Security is the lowest of any major entity in the U.S. Government. They have actually sued supervisors because they are being blocked from enforcing the law as they have taken oath to do. I see my colleagues are here, and I will yield the floor. First, I will conclude by saying that I hope my colleagues will look at this. These facts are not disputed. This is not acceptable. It cannot be that the U.S. Government would carry on its business in this way. It is dangerous not only on immigration law but any other law that might come up in the future. Presidents cannot, Attorneys General cannot, and Homeland Security people cannot fail to enforce plain law without creating serious damage to the great American constitutional legal system that has protected us and produced our prosperity. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I wish to discuss S. Res. 414. I am pleased the Senate has unanimously declared April as National Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Awareness Month for the second consecutive year. I thank my friend and able colleague, Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, for joining me in this legislation. This resolution is very important to me and my family, as my grandson, Jim Beau, is a CDH survivor. CDH is a birth defect that occurs when the fetal diaphragm fails to fully develop. The lungs develop at the same time as the diaphragm and the digestive system. When a diaphragmatic hernia occurs, the abdominal organs move into and develop in the chest instead of remaining in the abdomen. With the heart, lungs, and abdominal organs all taking up space in the chest, the lungs do not have space to develop properly. This may cause the lungs to be small and underdeveloped. A diaphragmatic hernia is a life-threatening condition. When the lungs do not develop properly during pregnancy, it can be difficult for the baby to breathe after birth or the baby is unable to take in enough oxygen to stay healthy. CDH will normally be diagnosed by a prenatal ultrasound, as early as the 16th week of pregnancy. If undiagnosed before birth, the baby may be born in a facility that is not equipped to treat its compromised system because many CDH babies will need to be placed on a heart-lung bypass machine, which is not available in many hospitals. All babies born with CDH will need to be cared for in a neonatal intensive care unit, NICU, and most will need extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, ECMO. Babies born with CDH will have difficulty breathing as their lungs are often too small, biochemically and structurally immature. As a result, the babies are intubated as soon as they are born, and parents are often unable to hold their babies for weeks or even months at a time. Most diaphragmatic hernias are repaired with surgery 1 to 5 days after birth, usually with a GORE-TEX patch. The abdominal organs that have migrated into the chest are put back where they are supposed to be and the hole in the diaphragm is closed, hopefully allowing the affected lungs to expand. Hospitalization often ranges from 3 weeks to 10 weeks following the procedure, depending on the severity of the condition. Survivors often have difficulty feeding, some require a second surgery to control reflux, others require a feeding tube, and a few will reherniate and require additional repair. Awareness, good prenatal care, early diagnosis, and skilled treatment are the keys to a greater survival rate in these babies. That is why this resolution is so important. Within the last year, researchers identified a specific gene that may contribute to CDH. The research found that an abnormality in a gene, Ndst1, could lead to the development of CDH. This study was conducted on mice, so more research is needed to determine the role of this gene in humans. However, it certainly is a step in the right direction toward identifying the cause of this defect. Congenital diaphragmatic hernia is a birth defect that occurs in 1 out of every 3,817 live births worldwide. The CDC estimates that CDH affects 1,088 babies in the U.S. each year. Every 10 minutes a baby is born with CDH, adding up to more than 600,000 babies with CDH since just 2000. CDH is a severe, sometimes fatal defect that occurs nearly as often as cystic fibrosis and spina bifida. Yet, most people have never heard of CDH. The cause of CDH is unknown. Most cases of diaphragmatic hernia are believed to be multi- factorial in origin, meaning both genetic and environmental are involved. It is thought that multiple genes from both parents, as well as a number of environmental factors that scientists do not yet fully understand, contribute to the development of a diaphragmatic hernia. Up to 20 percent of cases of CDH have a genetic cause due to a chromosome defect or genetic syndrome. According to the CDC, babies born with CDH experience a high mortality rate ranging from 20 percent to 60 percent depending on the severity of the defect and the treatments available at delivery. The mortality rate has remained stable since 1999. Approximately 40 percent of babies born with CDH will have other birth defects in addition to CDH. The most common is a congenital heart defect. Babies born with CDH today have a better chance of survival due to early detection and research on treatment options. Researchers are making great progress to determine the cause of this birth defect and to identify optimal treatment methods for babies born with CDH. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, NCBDDD and the National Birth Defects Prevention Network, NBDPN, collaborate to identify risk factors for birth defects and to assess the effect of these birth defects on children, families, and the healthcare system. NBDPN investigators are currently working to examine risk factors for CDH and predictors of long-term survival for infants born with CDH, with analysis planned in 2014 and publication anticipated by 2015. In addition, investigators at the National Birth Defects Prevention Study, NBDPS, have proposed conducting specific research to better understand risk factors for CDH, as well as factors that predict improved survival rates for infants born with CDH. In fiscal year 2013, NIH funded approximately $2,560,000 in CDH research. The Developmental Biology and Structural Variations Branch, DBSVB, at the NIH is currently supporting a collaboration between basic scientists who study CDH and clinicians who work with CDH patients and their families by working with the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Children's Hospital of Boston. The researchers then use the genetic information and biological samples obtained from patients and their families to identify specific genes that could be involved in the defect. In 2009, my grandson Jim Beau was diagnosed with CDH during my daughter Mary Abigail's 34th week of pregnancy. At that time, no one in my family had heard of CDH before. Fortunately, she was referred to Dr. David Kays at Shands Children's Hospital in Gainesville, FL, who is a premier surgeon and expert on CDH. Jim Beau was born on November 30, 2009. My daughter and her husband Paul heard their son cry out twice after he was born, right before they intubated him, but they were not allowed to hold him. The doctors let his little lungs get strong before they did the surgery to correct the hernia when he was 4 days old. It turned out that the hole in the hernia was large. His intestines, spleen and one kidney were up in his chest. The skilled surgeon was able to close the hole and properly arrange the organs. Thankfully, Jim Beau did not have to go on a heart/lung bypass machine, but he was on a ventilator for 12 days and on oxygen for 36 days. In total, he was in the NICU for 43 days before he was able to go home. He is now a healthy, high-spirited 4-year-old and a delight to be around. Fortunately for my family and thousands of similar families across the United States, a number of physicians are doing incredible work to combat CDH. The CDH survival rate at Shands Children's Hospital in Gainesville, FL, where my grandson was treated, is one of those fine centers. The survival rate of CDH babies born at Shands is between 80 percent and 90 percent. Dr. David Kays, the head physician and who performed my grandson's surgeries, uses gentle ventilation therapy as opposed to hyperventilation. Gentle ventilation therapy is less aggressive and therefore protects the underdeveloped lungs. Dr. Kays published a paper in the Annals of Surgery in October 2013 regarding his work with CDH babies. He and his colleagues reviewed 208 CDH patients to analyze the impact of the timing of the hernia repair on babies born with CDH. This study found that those with more severe CDH may benefit from repair before ECMO, while those with a less severe hernia have higher survival rates and reduced need of ECMO if the repair surgery is delayed at least 48 hours after birth, as was the case with Jim Beau. This conclusion is a vital step in the development of a risk-specific treatment strategy for management of CDH. The final line of Dr. Kays' paper should be noted: [T]he survival attained in this large and inclusive series of patients with CDH should be reassuring to physicians and parents faced with a new prenatal diagnosis of CDH. My family was very lucky that Jim Beau's defect was caught before he was born, and that he was in the right place to receive excellent care for his CDH. The resolution Senator Cardin and I introduced is important because it will bring awareness to this birth defect, and this awareness will save lives. Although hundreds of thousands of babies have been diagnosed with this defect, the causes are still unknown and more research is needed. Every year more is learned and there are more successes. We are making good progress and we must continue our efforts. I hope my colleagues will join me in supporting this legislation to bring awareness to CDH.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I come to the floor today to address the unemployment benefits legislation. This legislation is, frankly, an admission that after 5 years of spending more money for costly government stimulus--all of it borrowed--to try to increase employment in America, we still have an unemployment crisis. Not long ago at the White House, Mr. Sperling said that there are three applicants for every job in America and wages are down. In effect, this legislation is an admission that taxing, spending, regulating, and borrowing has not worked. Indeed, those policies will never work. More regulation, more taxing, more borrowing, and more debt will not improve the economy. We know that. Despite what some so-called experts say, we know that is not a policy that will work, but urgent action is needed. According to testimony we heard this week in the Budget Committee, if you adjust for the retirement of the baby boomers, the labor force is still short 4.5 million people, the equivalent of $500 billion in national income lost each year. But the majority has circled their wagons around this spend-and-borrow agenda. For instance, our friends are blocking a Republican amendment requiring companies to hire legal workers, not unlawful workers. The E- Verify system should be required nationwide. It would simply check the Social Security number of applicants, which would identify many people who have no right to be employed in America because they are not here lawfully. In a time of high unemployment, we ought not to be filling our jobs with people who are not lawful and not lawfully able to work in America, while at the same time financially supporting people who are unemployed in the country. At the same time, congressional Democrats have pushed for a bill that would more than double the future H-1B guest worker visas that are frequently used for offshore jobs. As ranking member of the Budget Committee, I have to inform my colleagues that this unemployment bill is not honestly paid for, and that it violates the Ryan-Murray budget agreement that was signed into law just over 3 months ago. We said we were not going to spend above a certain amount. Actually, Ryan-Murray raised the amount the Budget Control Act had limited spending to when we were in a tight fix. I think this year in particular was probably the toughest year under the Budget Control Act, so relief was provided and it raised the spending limits for a fifth year and it helped. Just 3 months ago we reaffirmed those spending limits and said we were not going to go above them. Yet just this past Monday, the Senate passed the so-called doc fix which exceeded the Ryan-Murray spending limits by $6.1 billion this year alone. We adopted a limit, and what do we do? We want to help our doctors, but instead of reducing spending somewhere else in this massive government, we come up with a gimmick argument to say we are paying for it and add, in effect, $6.1 billion to the expenditures this year. We objected to that, but people voted to waive the budget with an up-or-down vote. Do you want to stick by the agreement we reached 3 months ago or do you want to raise it and spend more? The majority in the Senate voted to spend more, and this is why we have such an extreme debt threat in America today. The bill that is before us now is the unemployment insurance legislation, which exceeds the 2014 limit on spending by another $9.9 billion. Our Federal budget is $3.5 trillion--$3,500 billion--and we can't find some other reductions if we want to fund a new expenditure, such as unemployment compensation? We can't find someplace that we can tighten our belts and pay for it? My colleagues say that while spending increases this year, the bill is paid for over the next decade. They promised that although we will spend more this year, a decade later--10 years--we are going to get around to paying for it. There are three major problems with this contention, and we just have to address them so there is no mistake about it. This is not legitimate, and it threatens the financial integrity of the country. The Ryan-Murray budget deal established spending limits. You cannot get out of those spending limits by raising fees and taxes. Taxing more to spend more was not the deal. The deal in the Budget Control Act said that we are going to reduce the growth in spending. We were on track-- over 10 years--to grow spending $10 trillion. Under the Budget Control Act, we were going to allow spending to increase, but it would only increase $8 trillion, not $10 trillion. Now we are told that the Budget Control Act, which includes the sequester--we can't live with it. Growing and spending $8 trillion is not enough; we have to grow spending even more. Every time some worthy cause is brought before the Senate, we take the easy way out. We come up with a gimmick pay-for or we just violate the budget and spend the money anyway. What good is it to have a Ryan-Murray budget agreement or a Budget Control Act if nobody adheres to it? Second, one of the big reasons our country is going broke is the philosophy of ``spend today and promise to pay for it tomorrow.'' Here is what a new Bloomberg analysis--an independent group--concluded: Since December 2013 [three months ago] the Republican House and the Democratic Senate have approved more than $40 billion worth of spending ``offsets'' in the form of cuts that would take place in 2023 at the earliest or timing shifts in policy to bring savings into the 10-year window . . . Both of these gimmicks are not legitimate, will not work, and have been criticized by independent groups that are concerned about the future of the Republic. Third, the promised revenue offsets are phony savings. The offsets come from something called ``pension smoothing''--wow, what is ``pension smoothing''?--and ``prepayment of premiums to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.'' These are two popular schemes--double counting and timing shifts--that allow companies to prepay their payments for up to 5 years. In good times companies can pay ahead to the PBGC trust fund and Congress can take the money out the backdoor and spend it on--in this case--unemployment. In bad times this will leave the taxpayer further on the hook if PBGC has to take over a failed pension plan. It is taking money out of the plan that was supposed to be set up to guarantee and insure pensions. I realize some of this sounds complex, but that is the problem: the big spenders in Washington have turned bilking taxpayers into an art form. Some spend their whole time trying to come up with a gimmick to get around the actual requirement, which is for us to set priorities and to recognize we cannot fund everything we would like to fund. If we have a new idea for a new program, the Budget Control Act says: OK, do it, but you have to do it within the spending limits. You have to find some spending reduction to justify a new spending increase. That is what we agreed to, and that is what the President of the United States signed into law. He also signed Ryan-Murray into law. Is he here advocating responsible action? No, he is here supporting the Democratic leadership to push these budget-busting provisions and is not properly paying for them. Frankly, that is a disappointment. The President of the United States is the chief person who talks to the American people. He has yet to look them in the eye and tell them we are on an unsustainable course, and we are going to have to tighten our belts. Instead, every time he talks, he talks about a new spending. A new program that spends more, in essence, is borrowing more and increasing our debt even further. In the few months since Ryan-Murray was passed, the Senate--driven by a Democratic majority--has passed five bills that busted through the Ryan-Murray limits. There have been five bills that busted the budget. We just agreed to it, and they just voted for it 3 months ago. They say these are all important measures and we have to pass them, so we should disregard those prior promises we made to the American people. The whole point of a spending limit is to make Congress set priorities. If you feel you have legislation that needs to pass, it is your duty to find a way to pay for it within the limits of spending we agreed to. This is not a radical concept. This is responsible governance. It is done in cities and States all over America. They are living within their means. They are tightening up their efficiencies in productivity. People holler and wail whenever they make those cuts, but those cities, counties, and States are still standing. They have not been sucked into the ocean. They are still operating. They are going to be leaner, more efficient, and more productive as the result of going through a tight budget time. As money rises, and hopefully the economy bounces back, they will be in a better position in the future to serve the taxpayers of their communities efficiently. Here are the budget violations in the pending bill, and these budget violations were all confirmed. I am the ranking Republican of the Budget Committee, and the Democratic chairman, Senator Murray, is a fine and fair chairman of the committee. Her team has acknowledged these violations of the budget, and as a result, it is subject to a budget point of order. There is not a dispute about what I am saying today. There is $9.9 billion in spending in excess of the top-line outlays for fiscal year 2014 set by the Ryan-Murray spending agreement. There is also another violation of the Budget Control Act because there is $9.9 billion of spending in excess of the Finance Committee's allocations. The committees have certain allocations. The Finance Committee has a certain allocation, and now it is spending $9.9 billion more. How much is $9.9 billion? Well, in Alabama we have a lean State government, and I am proud of it. My State's budget is about $2 billion. This is $9.9 billion, and it is in violation of our agreement. Also, there is a $10.7 billion increase in long-term deficits in the decade beyond the budget window that is subject to a budget point of order, and that is in violation of the budget. Ordinarily, we would be able to raise a point of order to enforce all three of these violations. However, two of these points of order were wiped away by a loophole created in the language of the Ryan-Murray legislation. I warned them that it was in there, and I urged my colleagues not to adopt it, but it was adopted anyway. Two of the budget points of order I just mentioned are not subject to floor action and have been eliminated, basically, through the use of the deficit- neutral reserve fund. At the time of the Ryan-Murray deal's consideration, the Budget Committee staff--my staff--did the work and we warned that the 57 deficit-neutral reserve funds in the Ryan-Murray bill would be used to increase spending above the spending limits. We warned that would happen. The way that works is the majority can get around the budget rules that limit spending if they propose to offset new spending with new higher taxes. So we are witnessing today exactly what I warned would happen: The minority has lost the procedural tool to block spending increases as long as they pay for it with more taxes. What we agreed to under the Budget Control Act was that we couldn't spend above this limit, and if we raised taxes, it would be used to reduce the deficit. So now we have been able to switch that around so the raising of taxes is allowed to increase new spending. These deficit reserve funds have been used by Senator Reid and the majority to pass a proposed additional $13 billion in spending above the caps already. However, the unemployment bill still triggers a long- term deficit point of order because it uses revenue timing shifts to conceal long-term deficit impact. So it is still in violation of the budget, even though two of the points of order are gone. We do need to look at the long-term deficit picture. It is good that we still at least have that point of order we can raise. We can't just spend today because it fits within the 10-year window and somehow looks OK, when we know in the outyears it is going to add to the deficit of the United States. So the budget drafters and the BCA people have language in to prohibit that, rightly so. The problem is we won't adhere to it. Last year, we paid our creditors $221 billion in interest payments-- $221 billion on our roughly $17 trillion debt. That is a huge amount of money. The Federal highway bill is $40 billion. Aid to education--a whole bunch of programs we have--$100 billion in total. The Defense budget is $500 billion. We paid our creditors last year $221 billion in interest alone on the debt. That is enough to pay for 172 weeks of unemployment benefits for everyone collecting at the end of last year. Over the course of the next 10 years, according to CBO, we will spend a cumulative $5.8 trillion in interest payments on our debt. Over the next 10 years, CBO--our accounting firm that tries to do the right thing every day and tells us what is going to happen with our budget-- tells us we are going to spend over $5 trillion, almost $6 trillion, in interest in the next 10 years--money that could be used to help people, to rebuild our infrastructure, to fix crumbling roads and bridges. At today's levels, that $5.8 trillion could pay for a great amount of great things. The CBO also told us that 10 years from today, the 1-year annual interest payment will not be $221 billion, it will be $880 billion-- $880 billion, an increase of over $650 billion in interest payments each year--not one time, but that year alone we will pay $600 billion more in interest. So how can we fund programs? Isn't it going to crowd out spending we need? Washington is squandering our national inheritance. We are a nation deeply in debt. I would say to my colleagues that every time you violate our budget limits--because I am not voting for it--every time you add more to the Nation's credit card, you are increasing the interest burden that is crushing America, and you reduce the amount of money that will be available to spend on whatever program you would like to spend it on as the years go by. Interest costs represent the fastest growing item in our budget. How much money will there be left over for your chosen government projects when our interest payment reaches almost $1 trillion a year? CBO says that by 2024, it will hit $880 billion. How many more years will it take, 2 or 3, to reach $1 trillion? We must help the unemployed, no doubt about it. We need to help them get better jobs, more jobs, and better pay, and we have to do so without adding more to the debt. That is what is placing a wet blanket over the American economy. We need to produce more American energy. We can do that. We need to streamline our Tax Code to lower rates, close loopholes, and boost economic growth. We need to eliminate regulations that are reducing productive activities and sending jobs overseas. We need to endorse a trade policy that defends the American worker from unfair trade practices. Too much of that is occurring. We don't need to lose a single job to unfair trade practices. We need an immigration policy that serves the interests of the American worker. At a time of high unemployment, the very idea the Senate would pass a bill that would permanently double the number of guest workers who can enter the country boggles the mind. That, in addition to the fact they would legalize 11 million and increase the annual flow of immigrants into the country from 1 million a year--the most generous of any Nation in the world--to 1.5 million. In effect, under the bill that passed this Senate, we would be providing permanent legal status to about 30 million people in the next 10 years. Our current law allows for 1 million a year--about 10 million over the next 10 years. Is it any wonder people are having a hard time getting a job today? There is not a tight labor market out there; there is a loose labor market. How do I know? Because wages are going down. If employers are desperate and need more workers and can't find them, why aren't they having to pay higher wages to get good workers? We have to stand up. The American people need to know what is happening to them. What is the solution, our colleagues say? Well, unemployment is too high and wages are not going up; let's borrow more money and spend it by sending out unemployment checks to people who are unemployed because somebody illegally here took a job they could have taken. There is no doubt about this: We need to create and transform the welfare office into an office that transforms the lives of people who are struggling today. We have 40 job programs, at least. We have more than 80 different means-tested social programs. Those all need to be consolidated. There needs to be one central place where an American who is hurting, who is out of work and needs help, may be given financial help, but also counseled and provided training in the things they might need to get a job. Maybe instead of a subsidy while they're unemployed, individuals need help with transportation to go to work. Maybe they need help relocating to another town where the jobs are readily available. This idea that we just continue to spend more and more on attempting to help people by giving them money without helping them transform their lives and become productive has to end. In fact, all the means- tested programs all added up amount to more than $750 billion, which is more than all the other individual programs we spend money on--more than Social Security, more than Medicare, more than Medicaid, more than the Defense Department. This country has some challenges in front of it. If we would respond with classic American values of hard work, individual responsibility, and our technology and training, we could turn this country around. But we don't have any leadership in that regard. Any change, any suggestions that we would reduce a subsidy program in order to fund job training or even fund unemployment compensation is a nonstarter around here, it appears. I am worried about where we are. This unemployment insurance violates the budget. We should not pass it. We should do it within the budget and we need to analyze it carefully to make sure we are doing it in a way that actually helps those we intend to help. I thank the Chair. I yield the floor, and I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I will be making a point of order in a moment against the bill before us because it violates the budget we agreed to. I will share briefly for a few moments--the order is that we are to commence voting at 2:30. I believe that is correct. I think I was approved for 5 minutes. If the Chair would notify me when my time is up, because others I see here might want to speak. In August of 2001, this Congress--House and Senate, Republicans and Democrats--along with the President of the United States, agreed on the Budget Control Act. It limited spending--the growth of spending only. How much did it limit the growth? Well, at that time we were projected to spend $10 trillion more over the next 10 years than we were currently spending. So the Budget Control Act didn't cut the budget, really, although a few agencies in the short term have had reductions, Defense being the primary one. But over the 10 years, under the Budget Control Act we would grow spending $8 trillion instead of $10 trillion--not enough of a reduction in spending, I say to my colleagues, to cause this country to sink into the ocean; that is for sure. Really, not enough, because our deficits are so high. In December of last year, this Congress passed the Ryan-Murray Budget Act which amended the spending agreement we struck in the Budget Control Act. The Ryan-Murray bill broke the budget agreement and allowed more money to be spent than we had agreed to in the BCA, but it capped overall spending for the next 8 years. So that was the agreement. It passed, and the President signed it 3 months ago. It is now the law of the land. What I would say to my colleagues is this--today is the third or fourth time we will vote on legislation, since the Ryan-Murray spending agreement passed, that busts the budget--that busts the spending limits we agreed to. There are multiple budget violations against this bill. Two of them are voided by loophole language in the Ryan-Murray legislation that people didn't fully understand at that time. That loophole language allows the use of a deficit-neutral reserve fund to, in effect, erase budget points of order. So two of the budget points of order that lie against this bill cannot be raised because a deficit-neutral reserve fund--which I think is a gimmick--essentially erases them. But one of the violations still remains, because this bill will add to the debt outside the 10-year window. One of the things we have learned is that when we pass laws today that sound good--and sometimes those laws, even if they are within the budget window, they may, indeed, in the out years add to the debt of the United States. Kent Conrad, a Democrat and former chairman of the Budget Committee--it was his language that created this long term point of order, because he was concerned we were passing things that might be OK within the budget window but were adding to the debt in the long term. So that is why we have this point of order. The cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office clearly shows that this UI bill violates that principle of the budget, and lays out the numbers that so say. Our chairman of the Budget Committee, Senator Murray, has acknowledged that this bill does, in fact, violate the budget. But we need to stay within our budget. Violating the budget agreement is simply a refusal to make tough choices. We spend $3,700 billion a year, and we can't find $8 billion or $9 billion in savings to fund a program that we think needs to be funded today like unemployment insurance? People want to deal with that and help people who are unemployed, and I understand that desire. But if we do so, we should do it by finding offsets, not spending more than we agreed. People say we can raise taxes to pay for the new spending. Well, that violates the budget too, because our agreement says we can spend only so much. And if my colleagues want to raise taxes, I believe we ought to use that money to pay down the deficit, not grow the government. This past year, we spent $233 billion on interest on the debt, an amount that is virtually half the Defense budget. The highway bill is $40 billion. In 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office--Dr. Elmendorf testified before the Budget Committee a few weeks ago--says that in 10 years, 1 year's interest payment on the debt of the United States of America would be $880 billion. That is over $650 billion more in 1 year on interest than we are paying today. So you can see why we have to adhere to our promises to contain spending. We cannot continue to vote time and time again to violate the spending limits we agreed to. It just adds to the debt and to our interest payments on the debt. No wonder the American people are unhappy with us. This is irresponsible. I am confident we can find the $9 billion or whatever we need to fund any program in this bloated government of ours. But, no, it won't even be discussed. There is no discussion about finding honest reductions in spending from places where money is wasted. Instead, we just come up with a plan that gimmicks the spending and adds to the long-term debt of the United States. In conclusion, I would say it is quite clear that this legislation-- the unemployment extension--will add to the long-term debt of the United States.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, the pending measure, amendment No. 2874 to H.R. 3979, the vehicle for the unemployment insurance extension, violates section 311(b) of the fiscal year 2009 budget resolution by causing a net increase in the deficit over $5 billion in the 10-year period from 2024 to 2033. Therefore, I raise a point of order against this measure pursuant to section 311(b) of S. Con. Res. 70, the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for fiscal year 2009.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, the Judiciary Committee, of which I am a member, voted out the nomination of Leon Rodriguez to be Director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, also known as USCIS. This agency has been at the center of the collapse of immigration enforcement in America, and Mr. Rodriguez, if confirmed, will--it seems certain--continue to accelerate that collapse. I think it is an important issue for all of us to talk about. It is not so much about him personally, but it is what he is going to be asked to do. This is about what has been happening at Homeland Security--and USCIS is an important part of that--and how it is impacting the rule of law in America and immigration enforcement in America--or nonenforcement. It is a very serious matter. What I am going to say today is based on my best judgment of how and why it is happening and why this Congress needs to speak up about it. I have an article from the Washington Post, which is dated December 18, a few months ago. The article in the Washington Post is headlined ``Federal Workers' Job Satisfaction Falls, with Homeland Security Depart. Ranking Lowest Again.'' It goes on to say: Federal employees who deal with homeland security matters remain some of the government's least-satisfied, as overall workforce morale hit its lowest point in a decade, according to a report that began ranking agencies on such issues in 2003. It goes on to say: The Department of Homeland Security, a perennial bottom- dweller in the ``Best Places to Work in the Federal Government'' rankings, marked its third consecutive year of decline and its second straight year of being last among the 19 largest agencies. This is not acceptable, and I raised that issue with Secretary Napolitano repeatedly at the hearings. I will remind my colleagues that the officers association of another one of the three core immigration agencies--the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service--unanimously voted no confidence in their then- Director John Norton mainly because he refused to allow them to comply with their duty under the law to enforce immigration laws in America. We had the Director of ICE and--you will learn--the Director of USCIS, and I suggest the Homeland Security Director, investing their time and effort in seeing that the laws of the United States were not enforced rather than being enforced. This gentleman is not prepared to lead this job if he were to be supported in his activity, but, in fact, he was sent here because he will not rock the boat. He will be given this position to continue this policy of nonenforcement, even against the will of the officers who serve under him. The last thing we should do is put someone in a critical law enforcement position, as these are, who doesn't know anything about it, No. 1, and who is going to carry out President Obama's policies, which is fundamentally not to enforce the law. I know there are people who think that is an exaggeration, but I am going to talk about it, and we are going to keep talking about it, and we are going to show what the facts are. This is a serious matter. Mr. Rodriguez is not a trained administrator. He has never led a police department. He has never led and managed a real law enforcement agency. He has been a prosecutor of white-collar crime cases. He served for several years in the civil rights part of Homeland Security, but he has not managed the officers out there on the ground who are trying to deal with violent criminal aliens and get them deported and all the gimmicks that they use to get around that. He was a chief of staff to Mr. Perez, the head of the civil rights division in the Department of Justice. Mr. Perez is nearly a radical pro-amnesty nonenforcement leader himself. They were both members of CASA de Maryland, which is very much a pro-amnesty activist group that proposes ideas that are outside the mainstream. I assume Majority Leader Reid will bring this nomination up for a vote in the Senate, and it will be an important moment. Will the Senators vote to defend the integrity of the immigration laws we passed or will they help install someone to one of the most important positions in government who will further erode and undermine those laws? This is the question we are dealing with. We need to be honest about it. I don't think there is any mystery here. First, Mr. Rodriguez lacks the normal background and experience for a position such as this. He doesn't have it. I am not saying he is not a good civil rights lawyer or white-collar crime lawyer, but he doesn't have the leadership experience to lead an agency such as this. His only apparent encounter with immigration was his service on the board of CASA de Maryland, which encourages illegal immigrants to defy law enforcement. It has been a very active group. Tellingly, Mr. Rodriguez refused to answer questions regarding whether he believes an illegal immigrant who is ordered deported or convicted of a felony criminal offense or convicted of multiple misdemeanors or convicted of a single sex-related offense or convicted of a single drunk driving offense or known to be a gang member should be eligible for legal status in America. That is a pretty fair question to ask a nominee to this important position because USCIS evaluates people as to whether they have the requisites to be given legal status and a pathway to citizenship in America. Mr. Rodriguez would not even say whether someone who has been denied legal status should be deported. So they come in and ask for legal status, and it is turned down, and he was asked: Should that person get to stay in the country or should that person be deported? There is only one answer to that question. If you are not eligible to be in the country and you had your hearing and you have been denied legal status, there is only one answer, and that is you should be deported. These should not be difficult questions for someone who wants to head an agency that is charged with ensuring the integrity of our system. The President has summarily suspended entire portions of immigration law, granting unilateral reprieve to people based on everything from family connection to age of illegal entry, and criminal record. He just issues an order. The Los Angeles Times reported earlier this week on the collapse of interior enforcement. They reported that ``immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came into office.'' Boy, that is an understatement. That is an absolute fact. It went on to state: Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009. It is really a lot more than 40 percent. They went on to quote the former Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, John Sandweg, who left a little over a month ago. He was a top official in the Obama administration. He said: ``If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero.'' This is a guy who held an important position in the Department of Homeland Security. His duty was to identify people who are here illegally. In effect, the administration's policy is that unless you commit a felony or other serious crime, you are free to illegally work here, claim certain tax benefits, and obtain fraudulent documents so you can get a job. Apparently having a fraudulent document to get a job you are not lawfully entitled to get is not something that gets you deported in this administration. Not apparently, that is the policy if truth be known. It is an open invitation to every would-be illegal immigrant to come to the United States unlawfully and to every visa holder who is here lawfully on a visa for a limited time to ignore the expiration date of their visa and remain unlawfully in the country. That is the law the President has set. If the immigration laws are not enforceable by virtue of the plain fact that they are duly passed laws by the Congress of the United States, then there is no real immigration law. Anyone who wishes is free to come on visa, let the visa expire and never leave. If you can get past the border in some fashion unlawfully, they can stay and nobody is going to impact you. Yet, on March 13, after meeting with representatives of various amnesty groups, the Homeland Security Secretary--the top man, Mr. Johnson--reaffirmed that he is working to fulfill the President's request to reduce enforcement even further. It is astonishing that the President would order a review of enforcement policies, not for the purpose of repairing enforcement flaws but to weaken it even more. According to a March 14, 2014, Los Angeles Times article quoting administrative officials: The changes under review would effectively stop most deportations of [illegal immigrants] with no criminal convictions other than violations. So any fraudulent documents that are used to come here and violate immigration laws or get a job or get into the country unlawfully don't count. You can do this all day. Come on down. This means that even fugitive aliens, and those who have committed immigration felonies would now be exempt from enforcement. It would represent a total evisceration of immigration law, including those laws designed to protect the wages and jobs of working Americans. I will say parenthetically--we just had a vote on unemployment insurance because we continue to have a very high unemployment rate. We extended the normal limit on unemployment benefits to people who don't have a job, and now we are doing nothing to protect American workers from people who are illegally here and taking jobs they need for their families. In addition to that, the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration bill that would double the number of guest workers--the people who come here just to work--at a time of high unemployment. We have a bill that will be coming up soon, I suppose, to raise the minimum wage. Why? Because wages have not risen sufficiently. We are not happy about that. In fact, wages have been declining for over a decade. This is a serious trend. Dr. Borjas at Harvard attributes a good deal of that to the large flow of immigration, particularly in lower income Americans who are being hammered by this large flow of lower skilled foreign workers. It is supply and demand. Why are wages not going up, colleagues? Do you believe in the free market? They are not going up because we have more workers than we have jobs. Mr. Sperling, the President's former top economic adviser, admitted a few weeks ago that there are three applicants for every job in America. The last thing we need to be doing is doubling the number of foreign workers brought into the country and not enforcing the law with regard to people who have entered illegally, isn't that correct? I mean, can't we agree on issues such as that? In 2012--go back to this, the problems--and people need to know this. The mainstream media does not want to talk about it. They don't tend to report it, but it has been out there for months--years. It is the reality. This is what a 2012 inspector general report of the Department of Homeland Security--this is their own inspector general, who serves at the pleasure of the Homeland Security Secretary. They issued a report which found that senior officials at USCIS--that is the Citizenship and Immigration Services, where this individual will be the head--they found that senior officials at USCIS have been pressuring employees to rubberstamp applications for immigration benefits despite obvious signs of fraud. Kenneth Palinkas, president of the National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council--the union representing 12,000 adjudicators, officers, and staff--issued a statement in May of 2013 that echoed the findings of the report. This is what Mr. Palinkas's group said: USCIS adjudications officers are pressured to rubberstamp applications instead of conducting diligent case review and investigations. The culture at USCIS encourages all applications to be approved, discouraging proper investigation into red flags and discouraging denial of applications. USCIS has been turned into an approval machine. This is not acceptable. What are we paying 18,000 officers to do? Don't the American people expect that they are supposed to be reviewing applications, not rubberstamping them; identifying people who may be terrorists or criminals or have no likelihood of producing anything worthwhile in America, who are not going to be successful in America, and who may be otherwise unlawfully eligible to enter, while we turn people down who have the lawful right to enter and put them on a backlog? It doesn't make any sense. According to Mr. Palinkas: USCIS has created an almost insurmountable bureaucracy which often prevents USCIS adjudications officers from contacting and coordinating with ICE agents and officers in cases that should have their involvement. Look, the ICE officers are kind of like the criminal investigators. They deal with people who are apprehended inside the country. They deal with people who have been arrested or in jail on one cause or another-- assaults, drugs, violence, criminality. So USCIS is evaluating paperwork to see if somebody is qualified, and they have some red flag, and they would like to call the ICE officers to see if this is the same guy who committed an assault or an armed robbery a few years ago, and they are being discouraged from doing that. What is this? It is exactly the opposite of what we are paying them to do. Mr. Palinkas continues: USCIS officers are pressured to approve visa applications for individuals that ICE agents have determined should be placed into deportation proceedings. So they are pressuring them to approve these individuals who have not been approved. I see Senator Warren is here, and I will wrap up. I didn't realize she had been approved to speak at this time, and I will wrap up briefly. We need to put an end to this lawlessness, and the next Director of USCIS must ensure the integrity of our immigration system--it is just that simple--as his mission statement calls for him to do. They must be independent and able to stand up for the rule of law under what undoubtedly will be tremendous political pressure from an administration and pro-amnesty activist groups who seem to be dominating the agenda and who have little interest in seeing the great classical American rule of law enforced. Mr. Rodriguez, unfortunately, I am convinced is not that person. He would not be the right person if he really had the support of his leadership. He just doesn't have the background. He has never managed a major agency with 18,000 employees or anything like it. He does not have any experience on the frontlines of what they do every day and how they do it. But it is even worse because--look, why didn't they choose somebody who is experienced in DHS? Why didn't they choose a police chief or a military officer, someone who knows how to lead and manage a big agency such as this one, somebody with independence and integrity? Why? Because they don't want somebody with independence and integrity committed to the enforcement of law. They have already decided they are not enforcing the law, and they want somebody such as this Casa de Maryland protege to go into that agency who is not going to enforce the law. It is a serious statement I make, and I think it is fundamentally accurate. I am just buffaloed that this is the fact. Mr. Jonathan Turley, a constitutional lawyer who has written about government issues and constitutional issues for quite a number of years--Professor Turley has written recently and participated in a discussion where he said that what the President is doing with regard to immigration is beyond any justifiable utilization of prosecutorial discretion, that it amounts to a nullification of law by the President, who takes an oath and is constitutionally required to see that the laws of this country are faithfully carried out. This is a very serious matter. We need to talk about it. This nomination sort of provides us an opportunity to recognize what is happening, and the American people are going to need to speak up. We need to be able to change what is happening to restore the great American heritage of law. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

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