Jeff Sessions

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I notice a real low number of jobs being created this year. And the reports were that 77 percent of those jobs created this year were part-time, not full-time jobs. Allan Meltzer, one of the great economists in the last 50 years, a knowledgeable observer of our economy, just testified in a Budget Committee maybe 3 hours ago that ObamaCare was a factor in that occurring. Would the Senator agree that we have had this extraordinary increase in part-time jobs rather than full-time jobs, and that is hammering working Americans who need full-time work?

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, will the Senator yield for a question without yielding the floor?

Mr. SESSIONS. I know the Senator is aware that the number of people employed in the workforce today has fallen to the lowest level since 1975 and wages have declined. We learned today in our Budget Committee hearing we have had a surge from around 300,000 people working part- time to 1 million. These are bad trends, but one place has avoided that; that is, the Washington, DC, area. It has had more job growth, higher income job growth than any place in America. If this bill becomes entrenched into law, will it not create a huge additional increase of government workers and bureaucrats in and around this city, all riding on the backs of American workers?

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, if the Senator would yield for another question.

Mr. SESSIONS. I know the Senator is aware that Senator Baucus, the chairman of the Finance Committee, a long-time Senator who I believe has announced he is not going to run again but shepherded this legislation through the Senate and worked in many ways to try to make it better--lost some battles in that time--has referred to this as a ``train wreck'' because there are so many things going wrong right now. Did the Senator hear that from him? It seems to me we are at a point where we have to push hard. That is the conclusion I have come to, and I will ask the Senator's opinion. It seems to me we are at a position where we need to push hard to force discussion of this legislation because the majority leader wants to make it even bigger government, to take it even further. He is blocking and going to resist any attempt to have real debate, real amendments being offered. He will not allow votes, and he is going to fill the tree and otherwise dominate the Senate so we can't even have the classic debate and amendments and votes to improve this train wreck of a law. Is that the way the Senator sees the situation we are in today?

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. SESSIONS. I would also observe, and the Senator probably is aware, it does appear there is a budget point of order against this whole continuing resolution. I want to mention a couple of things. I want to thank the Senator for having the courage to stand here and raise the concerns I am hearing all over my State. I had three separate meetings in August, as I traveled the State, with small business groups. It is difficult to overstate the concerns they have with this law. They tell me without a doubt it is impacting their willingness to hire and the uncertainty in the workplace is damaging business in America, and they are passionate about it. They are struggling to get by. They are laying off people and they are not happy about it. They say this law alone is the primary thing that is hammering them in this country. I have given a lot of thought to it. I am beginning to see that we have to use the opportunities we have to confront this issue and talk about it and try to force some changes and improvements. I appreciate the effort, and I am going to support the Senator. I am going to oppose any advancing of the final bill that does not provide some change in ObamaCare. I did not sign the letter, and have some great friends who see it differently than I do who likewise are totally opposed to the health care law. I want to be sure people who are listening need to know good people, I think, can disagree on this. But the Senator stood up and raised the question and forced us to confront it and talk about it and I think it is good. I intend to support him. I am not going to vote to move a bill where we are sure we are going to be blocked from having any meaningful discussion on one of the most historic, damaging laws in maybe the last hundred years that would basically move us to single- payer, government-run socialized medicine. I think that is where we are heading. I thank the Senator for his leadership. Hopefully we can begin to force this Senate to act. The House has already acted. They have repeatedly acted to fix this legislation, because it is so damaging. But the Senate, the Democratic Senate, refuses to act. It refuses to listen. That is the problem I have. One way I have to express that is to support the position the Senator has taken. I thank him very much and wish him good luck.

Mr. SESSIONS. Would the Senator yield?

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Senator. An econometric firm and others have studied what is likely to happen in our economy. As I understand it, they predict that far more people will be dumped from coverage into the exchanges than they have today. So people who are under health care coverage today--it is being paid for by their employer. The employer discovers it would be less expensive to quit providing health care coverage and let those individuals go into the exchange, and they may or may not provide any subsidy to them. So I do think the extent to which we as Senators go into the exchange and are guaranteed the full subsidy we have been getting--that is different from what is going to happen to millions of Americans. I guess the Senator maybe has heard that argument and how it is possible that if businesses decide to drop health care, individuals can then be forced to go into the exchange without any subsidy at all. I would ask Senator Cruz if he understands that is possibly what could happen to large numbers of Americans.

Mr. SESSIONS. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. SESSIONS. The Senator made an important point about too often what goes on around here is that we have to obscure the reality of what is happening. I think that is important. I wish to ask about it. The Senator asked Senator Durbin--I didn't see exactly how he answered. I think the Senator asked him whether or not he believed in a single payer. I don't think he answered. We know for a fact, though, that Senator Reid in August said, when squarely asked: Do you believe in a single payer, he said: Yes, yes, absolutely yes. What we have learned since then is that others are making the same statement. This spring, Senator Sanders of Vermont, a nice and able Senator in the Budget Committee, said this bill is not going to work; really, in my view, it is not going to work; It needs to be a single payer. Senator Sanders is one of our more liberal Members--and I think it was how he identified himself, as a socialist, but he is an honest, able advocate. He said the truth: this bill, as written, will not work. It has to be a single payer. Only this afternoon in the Budget Committee, one of our esteemed Members of the Democratic Party, when asked--when I made a comment about Senator Reid, that the majority leader of the Senate said he wanted a single payer--he said, this ought to be a single payer system. I don't know how many others have. The President said, in 2003, when he was running, he flat out said he wanted to have a single payer. Then he backed off and began to obscure that position, it seems to me. It seems to me that they realize that the American people were nowhere ready to have their government take over health care. So what did they do? It seemed to me that they obscured what the reality of this legislation was. They began to move away from it, and they began to say that it was something that it wasn't. In the last few days it is almost like they have come out here in the open and begun to say that is what should happen. I understand the Democratic leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, has said that she favors a single-payer system. I think I will say to Senator Cruz that I feel you are doing important work because the American people may not yet fully know how huge an issue it is before this Congress. This is huge. Let me ask again, when we say there is a single payer--hair begins to stand up on my neck--I think I know who the payer is. Who would be the single payer for all health care in America if that kind of agenda took place?

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for one question?

Mr. SESSIONS. When the Senator thinks about those people who have tweeted and e-mailed and called and have written, most know something about the American system. If you were in Illinois or Alabama or Texas or Utah and you talked about this and said: This law has got real problems and it can't work the way it is, wouldn't the Senator think they would think the Senate would be able to take up this legislation and actually discuss it in a grownup way; that amendments could be offered that could fix it and be voted on up or down? Doesn't the Senator think the fact we are in this situation--the Senator called it a steamroller--where the majority leader is blocking all amendments, all ability to attempt to fix this legislation and make something that would actually work, even though the House has passed repeatedly changing this law and ending this law, that the average American would be shocked to think we are incapable in this Senate of bringing up legislation and having it voted on in order to fix this bill?

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, will the Senator yield one more time for a question?

Mr. SESSIONS. I am interested in those tweets. I just wanted to thank the Senator for what he has done, because I think he is alerting all of us to the critical importance of the health care issue. This is a plan, it seems to me, and the Senator has expressed it, I believe, to take over health care by the U.S. Government. We can all disagree. I was here when everybody on the Republican side fought this legislation until Christmas Eve, when it was finally rammed through shortly before Scott Brown from Massachusetts could take office and kill it. That is how close it was. I know people disagree about how to deal with it, and I understand and respect people with differing visions, but I wanted to say the Senator's leadership has served a valuable purpose tonight, and I am pleased to be able to support his effort. I wish him every success in those efforts, and I hope, as the Senator continues tonight, he will drive home the critical importance of this issue as we go forward. It is a matter this entire Nation cannot look away from. It is a matter we need to consider fixing because the legislation, as presently written, will not work. We have two choices, it seems to me. We move forward to a single payer, as Senator Sanders said we must do because this legislation won't work as written or will we move back to the classical American view of insurance and private health care and our own personal physicians. I thank the Senator from Texas and would be pleased to hear some of those great tweets I know he has.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. SESSIONS. I thought that a very gracious question of the author of unanimous consent, that we would vitiate the vote and 30 hours of debate. The Senator asked very little in exchange for it, other than to continue to talk.

Mr. SESSIONS. To follow up on that then, it seems to me that what the Senator was saying would be an offer that most everyone here would be pleased to receive and accept, unless they have some surreptitious motive. In addition, I think the Senator's continued request to be allowed to continue to speak is reasonable. I think the Senator has earned the right to ask that. The Senator has now spoken. The American people are watching the fourth longest time any filibuster or floor time has been held by a Senator. I think that is a perfectly reasonable request. It will allow the Senator to continue to express the concerns that he has expressed. I am somewhat taken aback that it wasn't agreed to. Again, to make clear, it would seem to me little if any reason that they would object to that, the majority would object to that.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, we have had, I think, a national discussion and the American people have begun to focus on what is imminent and that is that the implementation of the ObamaCare legislation is going to be a disaster. It is not prepared. As Senator Baucus, the chairman of the Finance Committee, said: It would be a train wreck. That is where we are headed. The Democratic majority has absolutely refused to allow any serious negotiation, amendments, legislative reform to fix the problems with the legislation. That is the fundamental problem we have here. Senator McConnell recalled how this bill was first passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve nearly three years ago--and it was against the will of the majority of the American people. I remember Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts ran against the health care to fill the vacant seat, Senator Kennedy's seat. He campaigned and said: Elect me in liberal Massachusetts and I am going to kill the health care bill. Republicans hadn't been elected to the Senate in Massachusetts in decades--and he won. He was prepared to kill the legislation, providing that single vote that would deny them the 60 votes they had to have for passage. They were able to rush it through before he could take office and move it in that fashion. It had problems that could not have been fixed otherwise and they were able to do that. I want to recall to the American people the power, the force that was used to pass this bill despite the consistent pleas of the American people not to do it. I have not forgotten that. I don't think the American people have. What has happened now? The Senate refuses to discuss it. They do not want to discuss it because they do not want to enter into a legislative process that you would think would be perfectly sensible. The bill was passed, what, in 2009? It is now about to hammer us and the negative impacts are quite clear. It is about to hammer us and they refuse to bring it to the floor. So the House funded the U.S. Government. They sent a bill to the Senate that funds the U.S. Government except it does not fund the ObamaCare part, requiring us to confront this issue once again. What does the majority say? What does the President say? They are saying we will shut down the government. We will never pass anything that allows us--that makes changes in this bill. We will not send back a compromise. We will not agree to have hearings and discuss how to fix it and make it better. No. Absolutely. We are going to use the brute power of the majority party in the Senate to deny that process. I do not think that is right. Let me say it is not a little bitty matter. My friend here has the toughest job in Washington, being majority leader of the Senate. I respect Senator Reid. But recently in Nevada he was asked: Do you believe in a single payer for health care America? And the quote I saw was: Yes, yes, absolutely yes. Yesterday in the Budget Committee the ranking Republican on that committee--one of our esteemed Democratic colleagues when this matter came up, said: ``I support single payer system.'' In the Budget Committee--earlier in the year Senator Sanders said this bill is not going to work. The only thing that is going to work is a single payer. Senator Sanders, as we know, is known, at least in the past, as a Socialist and has run as a Socialist. The leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, has said she believed in a single payer. But President Obama, in 2003, clearly said he favored a single-payer health care policy for America. What does that mean? Who is that payer? I asked Senator Cruz that. He said: Of course the payer is the U.S. Government. What they are proposing, what they desire, what they intend to impose on the American people--because they had a brief shining moment, they had 60 Senators in this body and they rammed through a fundamental change in the health care policy of this country--and the American people do not want it. Senator Cruz did not waste time. Senator Cruz raised this issue in a way I hope resonates throughout this country, just how serious it is, the health care question facing our country. It is fundamentally the biggest change in government and the size of government we have had in decades, I guess at least since Medicare; maybe bigger than Medicare. And they say it is paid for. Don't worry, it is all paid for. The American people know this cannot be so. How can you do all that and not cost money? We have a score from the Congressional Budget Office over the life of this bill. They have gimmicked it up to make it look as though there is an advantage in the short term, but it is not. Over the long term, the Government Accountability Office told us that it is going to add at least $6 trillion to the debt of the United States over the next 75 years. That is close to how much our unstable Social Security will add to the deficit of America. So we have Social Security, we have Medicare that is even a larger unfunded mandate than Social Security over the next 75 years, and we are adding another $6 trillion to it? And the American people do not want it. This was a recent paper from the University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan who found that by 2015, a little over a year from now, the work disincentives in ObamaCare will have essentially erased all gains in labor productivity over the last decade. We know this legislation is hammering the American economy. Do you not listen to colleagues? I traveled my State in August. I had several meetings with small businesses. It just pours out. Business are trying to keep their number of employees below 50 so they will not be impacted. They are putting people on part time. Let me say we have never seen this in America. It has never happened to us before in our history, in my knowledge, nothing close to it. We have had marginal job gains since January, hampered fundamentally by a lot of things, but ObamaCare being one of them--clearly one of them. But more dramatically, 77 percent of the jobs that were created in this country since January were part time, caused many ways by the ObamaCare matter. Clearly, we have been told repeatedly that businesses are hiring people part time to avoid the mandates of this terrible, disastrous legislation. So they have decided: In for a penny, in for a pound, as James Carville said, I guess. We are going to stick and we are not going to allow it to come up for improvement, we are not going to allow it to come up for debate. I know Republicans have all indicated they support a way to deal with preexisting illnesses in America. We can work on that. We can do a deal, legislation so that young people can stay on parents' policies longer. Those things are all possible. What about people not getting jobs? What about people getting part-time jobs with no health insurance? This is not a waste of time. Write it down: This is just the beginning. As John Paul Jones said: We have just begun to fight. We are not going to allow this country to socialize medicine. That is what the goal is, and we are not going to allow it. We are going to fight it, fight it, fight it, and we are going to demand that this legislation come back so it can be improved and made to work. It is not working now. It is a train wreck, and it is hampering this economy. Allan Meltzer, the famed economist, testified yesterday at the Budget Committee. Mr. Meltzer said he first testified before Congress in 1949. He was so good and so clear. I think he is 91 years old. There is no doubt that he is one of the most distinguished economists over the last 50 years. He has written a number of books. He said 77 percent of workers being hired part time is directly attributable to ObamaCare. He said it is bringing down employment rates. It is creating uncertainty in the economy, of which there is no doubt. I don't think anybody can deny that. People are losing jobs, and they are working at part-time jobs, and it is hammering the economy, creating uncertainty, lack of growth, and it is going to continue to do so, and rates have gone up. We can improve the current system of health care. There is no doubt about that. But I am telling you, we do not need to have a system of health care in America that is run by the U.S. Government. We do not need to do that. We can all disagree about the right procedures to move forward in this body. Senator Cruz stood courageously in order to highlight this issue, and it has served a valuable national purpose. I thank him for it. It is time for all of us to confront the reality that this is not working. It is hurting America. It has to be fixed, and we are going to insist on it as time goes by. I thank the Chair and 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, we have a very serious problem with the new health care law. Costs are surging. We now have a projection from the Government Accountability Office. Under a realistic set of assumptions, the health care law will add over $6 trillion to the unfunded liabilities of the United States of America. Private health insurance premiums are going up. Unions are in full rebellion. Congress is in rebellion with regard to our staff. Doctors are rebelling. Many of them are giving up practices. They didn't get the one thing they really needed, which is a fix to their Medicare reimbursement. The President has had to delay the employer mandate. This law is nowhere close to workable. It is not good. There are many more bad things I could say about the status we are in today. The only person who apparently is stuck with this, who doesn't have power to influence the process, is John Q. Citizen. Businesses are getting their employer mandate delayed because it just won't work. In fact, this law is clearly, indisputably savaging job creation and economic growth. Seventy-seven percent of the people who got jobs this year got part-time jobs, and every expert says ObamaCare is a big part of the reason--a big part of that. Businesses are staying below 50 employees so they feel as though they are not so bound. Wages are down again this year. Unemployment is high. The percentage of the American people who are actually working is down--the workplace rate--and it is at the lowest point since 1975. This health care law is a big part of it. It just is, and everybody knows it. Talk to any businessperson, and they will say that the uncertainty, the costs, the problems that are entailed with it are impacting what they do. That is just a fact. So this year the Senate has done nothing--absolutely nothing. Every attempt to confront the serious problems with this law has been blocked by the Senate Democratic majority led by Senator Reid. That is just a fact. The House has passed repeated bills to confront this problem, and they have now sent over a bill from the House that funds the Government of the United States but defunds this unworkable health care law. Republicans in the House and Senate have put forward serious proposals to improve health care in America. We ought to understand the posture we are in here. The Senate Democrats have refused to consider any reform. The House has passed a number of bills to deal with this in a responsible way, and they have now passed a bill--a continuing resolution--to fund the Government of the United States, but defund the President's health care law. What does he say? He says: Well, I will talk with Putin, negotiate with him. I will negotiate with Assad. I will negotiate with Iran. But I will not even talk to anyone in the U.S. Congress about this health care law that is clearly unworkable and, as one of our Democratic Members said, a train wreck. No chance. Not one jot, not one tittle of my health care law will be changed. What is he saying there? I will shut down the government before I allow a change in my ``perfect'' health care law. So I want to raise the question, Who is causing the problem in this country? Who is the one who is refusing to fix an obviously failed health care law that needs major reform? It is the President of the United States and a majority in the Senate. I express my deepest concern about it, as a member of the Budget Committee, and we will talk more about it in the days to come, but this law is financially unsustainable. It is not what it was sold to be. The American people have never believed you can have a huge expansion of health care and not have an impact on the U.S. budget. They are absolutely right, as the GAO has already told us. I know others are prepared to talk. I just want to say that we need to understand what has happened. It is time for us to make some fundamental changes to this law, and all we are hearing from the White House is this: No, sir. Not one change will they accept. We will not even have serious negotiations about it. That is unacceptable. It needs to change. I hope in the next few days the American people will become engaged, and perhaps our colleagues will see it differently. I thank the Chair and yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Would the Senator yield for a question? Do I understand the Senator does not oppose the bill as passed in the House that would have authorized this program to go forward, but the concern is new revenue has been generated that is being spent for other programs?

Mr. SESSIONS. I would just say this. We need to get in our heads in this body that just because you raise revenue and pay for a new spending program, that doesn't have implications for the Federal Treasury and the budget. In fact, we have rules that guard against it. I thank Senator Cruz for raising and highlighting that. We need to consider it. Because the idea that you can just do that is dangerous and it creates more taxing and more spending, more revenue and more spending. The Senator from Texas raised the point, just because you raised revenue doesn't mean the people who raise the revenue get to spend it on what they want. He is perfectly correct to say I think it should be used for deficit reduction. I thank the Senator for raising the issue. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, let me say to the Senators who have worked on ending the Federal Government's involvement in this program that this is a great accomplishment, and I thank them for that. I do think there is technically not a budget point of order for the process they have used in funding this bill, although I think Senator Cruz is raising a valid concern. I guess if we could do $50 million on deficit reduction, we could do more. But I did want to say that I am proud of the thrust of the legislation. I think it is good legislation. I thank them for it. And it does not, I am informed, violate the Budget Act. Mr. President, I have directed my staff on the Budget Committee to conduct a detailed analysis of the economic conditions facing working Americans--their wages, their employment conditions, and their household finances. I will give a series of talks over the coming weeks looking at that financial situation and the state of our Nation as a whole economically. I will also attempt to look at the causes leading to our current financial difficulties and suggest some steps to restore America's financial future. This topic is very important. The sad fact is that the state of middle and lower-income Americans is worsening on virtually every front. The slow growth of the economy (and this has been the slowest recovery from a recession since World War II or the Great Depression) is restraining the normal upward movement of income that previous generations have experienced. It has accelerated in the last several years, but it has been going on--we have to be honest with ourselves-- for a much longer period of time. If you don't have a job now, you are twice as likely to only find a part-time job as full-time work, if you can find one at all. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, middle-class incomes have declined for 18 years. That has happened with different parties, different Presidents, and different majorities in the House and Senate. That decline means that savings for college and retirement are growing at alltime lows. Young people are not marrying as early as they want, sometimes due to bad economic prospects. That means families are launching later in life, which gives couples less years to pay down a mortgage or raise children. Perhaps the greatest single source of our economic anxiety, however, is the fear of losing a job or that our children won't be able to get a job or our grandchildren won't be able to get a good job. It is not just the unemployment rates that remain too high--at 7.3 percent as of August 2013--it is the number of people we all know who are working well below their potential because nothing is available that uses their job skills. It is the number of people we know who have given up looking for work or who are working part time because nothing full time is available to them. Fewer people are working today than in 2007. Almost 4 million fewer people are working today than in 2007, but during that time our population has increased and the number of workers of working age has increased. Just before the recession hit in December 2007, about 62.7 percent of the working-age population was working--62.7. If that same percentage was working today, we would have 154 million jobs. But we don't have 154 million, we have 144 million. And only 58.6 percent of the population is working, which is a marked decline. In short, we are missing 9.9 million jobs when we compare this economy to the one in 2007. Here is another way to look at the job problem. In 2007 we had 363,000 discouraged workers--people who had given up looking for work because they couldn't find a job but still had not disappeared from the rolls of employment security offices. Today we have 866,000. That is an increase of 140 percent in discouraged workers. Here is another barometer of the middle-class difficulties. We have 1,988,000 fewer full-time jobs today than in December 2007; however, we have 3,627,000 more part-time jobs. How we calculate this is important. People with part-time jobs, according to the jobs people at the Department of Labor, are not counted as unemployed, they are counted as employed, although they may want a full-time job, and most do. So our economy is producing part-time jobs rather than full-time jobs. That has been going on for a long time, and it is not acceptable. These jobs often have no health care program or retirement plan. A very high percentage of all jobs created this year are not full- time jobs, and workforce participation--the percentage of people who are actually working today--is the lowest since 1975. That is not acceptable. And these trends have been going on for some time. Let's take a look at median family income. The Census Bureau published new estimates of household income on Tuesday, August 17. They report that the median income of American households is lower than last year, lower than the year before, and, in fact, is lower than at any time since 1995, adjusted for inflation. This is a very serious trend. While we have done a lot of things to make this economy better, few benefits are going to main-line, hard- working American people. They are struggling out there. You have to go back to 1995 to find median household income that is lower than today's household income. Even if we take broad measures of income, we get similar results. If we divide all of the income by the population to come up with a per- capita income concept, per-person income is lower today than at any time since 1997. This is an unacceptable trend. It is clear it is not a short-term phenomenon. It is now a negative trend for almost 18 years, and it cannot continue. While the stock market has rebounded and corporate profits have remained strong, that should not and cannot be used to obscure these trends, trends that have accelerated after we emerged from the recession of 2008 and 2009. Many are concerned that the Federal Reserve is furthering the Nation's economic problems with a growing wealth gap. Their quantitative easing has boosted the wealth of the investor class but has not benefited the working class. This is not the way our policies should work. People who know what to do with low-interest money seem to be coming out ahead. But the people who don't have money, don't have jobs, who are working part time instead of full time, are slipping. Our civil society, the great foundation of the our economy, today has certain weaknesses that we have to talk about. I will address more in a separate speech, but let me give a few thoughts. Few social institutions are more important in helping us through difficult economic times than marriage. However, marriage is disappearing in the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution. Many people stay too long in low-income unemployment situations, and it is not healthy. And too often, the fathers are not in those households. If you are in the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution and give birth, there is a greater than 50-percent chance that the father will not be living with you when the child comes home from the hospital. Perhaps, as many suggest, our welfare policies are exacerbating these trends. We need to look at that. Also worrying is the decline of charitable giving since 2007. Like the overall economy, this vital part of our social and economic system has not recovered effectively. Total charitable giving fell in 2008 to $303 billion from $326 billion. As of the end of 2012, total giving was only $316 billion--still 3 percent below what it was 6 years ago. I would conclude and note that the road we are on is leading to the continued erosion of the middle-class civil society, the quality of life for hard-working Americans is not improving financially, and the continued expansion of the welfare state and the permanent entrenchment of a political class that profits from the growth of government. It is time we recognize both the disastrous conditions facing working Americans and the moral obligation we have to replace dependency on government with the freedom and dignity that comes from work and independence. That has got to be our goal. There are things that can be done to improve these conditions. It is time for us to defend working Americans and their undeniably legitimate concerns about current trends. I will talk about that as we go forward. It is something we need to seriously consider. Relevant here is this question, can we bring into our country more people than we have jobs for? Won't that pull down wages and make it harder for people to get work? And this question, shouldn't we defend more effectively our workers against unfair trade and competition from around the world? Both of those policies are ones I hope we could have bipartisan support on, although I am worried. The Senate's immigration bill would increase permanent immigration by 50 percent, would increase guest workers--people who come and take jobs--by double, all in addition to the 11 million who would be given legal status here. I do think our colleagues are correct to say we should do more about trade and have fair competition on the world stage for our workers. I think we have got to convert more of this welfare spending, the 80- some-odd programs that are fundamentally geared to lower income Americans, that spend $750 billion a year--which is larger than Social Security, larger than defense, and larger than Medicare--we need to convert some of that to better use. For example, for every $100 spent on these programs, only $1 goes to job training. Shouldn't we focus more on getting our unemployed, our people who need more training, trained, ready to move into the workforce, to take jobs? Can we afford to bring in millions of people to take jobs and to leave our people on welfare and the unemployment rolls? Those are some of the fundamental questions we as Americans need to be asking. But first and foremost, colleagues, we are not able to deny the unassailable fact that we have had a slide in the financial well- being of millions of Americans, and that this has been going on for well over a decade. I thank the Chair and I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

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