Jeff Sessions

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, the budget passage that will soon be before us essentially does a number of things. One of the more basic is that it spends a lot more money than the current law allows, and it is done in a way that the new Speaker of the House said ``stinks'' a day or so ago. Once again a massive deal is crafted behind closed doors and is being rushed through Congress under the threat of panic. The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 serves as a reminder that the most important and controversial legislation is still being drafted in secret with little or no input from the Members of this Chamber. We have been cut out of the process. No amendments will be allowed to this massive package, and the cloture vote will be filed immediately after the bill is placed on the floor in order to force a vote, limiting the debate to the shortest possible time under the rules of the Senate. Those who question, object, and want more time, are accused of wanting to shut down the government and disrupt the machinery of the government. They say that President Obama will accuse us of shutting down the government. They say that we should cower under our debt at this great charge he might make against us. As if insisting that we have a right to read and study a bill of this magnitude is out of order. It should not be run through the Congress in the shortest possible time. They can bluster and they can huff and puff, but I say the arguments that I am going to make in opposition to this deal are bricks of truth, and this house will not fall down. They will not be able to sustain a charge that somehow we have bad motives by objecting to what is set about here. At its core, this deal with President Obama provides what the President has demanded throughout. First, it lifts the Federal spending caps for 2 years, including a $40 billion increase in spending on the Federal bureaucracy. A ``yes'' vote affirms that this spending level--the new high spending level--is correct and that we need to spend this much money. Second, it erases the current debt limit we have that stops spending or borrowing money above a certain amount. It erases that debt limit until March of 2017, allowing for approximately $1.5 trillion more to be added to our debt of $18.4 trillion, and it could be more than that. The text states that at that date the debt ceiling shall be raised to whatever level of public debt is at that time. Unlike in the past, when we had a debt ceiling, it was a dollar amount, and we would raise it and approve a certain dollar amount. Suspending this limit is a very unwise process. It was done last time and should not be done in the future--raise it to a date in the future and indicate, in effect, that as much debt as Congress or the President wants to add in that time is approved. We don't even know the amount. This is a covert and clever way of raising the debt ceiling without having to engage in a real discussion of Washington's runaway spending problem. It ensures that no further serious conversation about our debt course or any corresponding action to alter it will take place. The debt ceiling has always been a pivotal point. It is the classic case of the parents calling the young man home from college. He has overrun his credit card, and they have a little prayer meeting about this spending and demand certain reforms in the young man's spending habits if he wants to continue to have a credit card. Congress has the debt ceiling power to call in the President and say: We are on an unsustainable debt course. We need to have reform. That was done in 2011, and that is why we have these numbers in place today that contain spending but are being violated by this act. Finally, the deal submits the unacceptable precedent that every dollar of increased defense spending should be met with a dollar of increased nondefense spending. How silly is this? What possible logical argument can you make for this? This is upside down. If an emergency requires more defense spending--as I think it does-- we could dispute the amount, but we have had the Russians in Crimea since 2011, Russians in Syria, refugees by the millions in the Middle East, ISIS threatening the very government of Iraq, Afghanistan is still a problem, Yemen, Libya, and so forth. All of these have happened in some part due to the inconsistent, incoherent policies of this President. It has happened. We have a lot of problems out there. We need some more money for defense. Common sense says we should seek to identify reductions and not demand spending hikes because we have to spend more money on defense. I think this is a deeply troubling problem that we have. Raising these budget caps, as we go forward now, removes the moral authority of Senators who vote yes and approve this process and reduces our ability to talk with integrity to our friends and voters back home to whom we promised reform and more principled spending decisions in Washington. How can we with a straight face say this is a good policy? If we approve these higher spending levels, those who vote for it are prohibited in many ways from objecting to the levels in the future. If they find some waste and cut it, it does not mean we will reduce spending. Instead, the Congress, lacking the moral authority to decrease spending below these levels, will spend that money up to the higher levels in the future. It is a big decision and I think it is wrong. Furthermore, I would note, as a member of the Armed Service Committee, my concern about defense, but the defense account takes a larger percentage of the budget than does the nondefense account for discretionary spending. By increasing defense and nondefense by the same amount, the nondefense category actually receives a larger percentage of the increase, all to pay for more bureaucracy, employees, and government in Washington. So let's be clear. The spending caps in law today were placed in as a part of the 2011 Budget Control Act agreement which lifted the debt ceiling by $2.1 trillion. We objected. Congress objected to raising the debt ceiling without reform. Senator McConnell stood firm, and the Budget Control Act of 2011 is the reform that came. Then we raised the debt ceiling. We approved a raising of the debt limit on the credit card only after we got a containment of the growth in spending. So supporters are calling this bill sequester relief as if that is OK, but sequester and the Budget Control Act were just simply limits on spending. That is what they were. The fact is, we have never followed the sequester. In 2013 the Congress passed the Ryan-Murray budget deal. That deal raised the discretionary spending $64 billion over 2 years. Now that deal has ended, and instead of returning to regular order and agreed-upon limits, the President wants us to yet again break the Budget Control Act and raise spending an extra $80 billion over the next 2 years. This deal will obliterate future spending restraint, it does do so, destroying our credibility to achieve meaningful spending reform. The Budget Control Act represented a bipartisan commitment to cap spending, limiting it at a fixed amount. It is a good, responsible policy. In fact, I thought it did not limit the spending enough. It was passed by a Republican House, a Democratic Senate, and signed into law by President Obama. He agreed to these limits. This deal shatters that commitment by spending $80 billion more than we promised over the next 2 years. It is problematic because it is filled with gimmicks. They contend, not correctly, that all of this new spending is offset by new revenues or cuts in spending somewhere else. However, I would suggest and would show here that is not accurate. These are a lot of gimmicks we have here. Secondly, if we have wasteful spending, and some of this is wasteful spending, it needs to be eliminated. But the spending cuts ought to be used to reduce the deficit, which was over $400 billion last year, will be $400 billion next year, and will double in the next 10 years according to the Congressional Budget Office. We need to be using this wasteful spending--these low-hanging-fruit problems--to reduce government expenditures and reduce our deficits, not using that opportunity to reduce deficits to instead spend more money somewhere else. So they offset. It appears the deal is built on the same principles as the deal in 2013. It exchanges instant increases in Federal spending for distant promised savings in the future, as much as 20 years, or two decades down the road, many of which are unlikely to occur. It funds increased spending through increased revenues, violating a core budget principle by extracting evermore money from Americans to expand an already-too-large Federal bureaucracy. We need to be reducing the bureaucracy, not adding to it. The deal trades ending spending limits for the promise of new spending limits 10 years from now. We just agreed to limits in 2011. They promised that we are going to have new spending limits in the future. My time in the Senate says promises about the future seldom come to pass in this body. We need to fight tenaciously to hold the spending limits that are in law today and not exchange those limits for a promised limit in the future. This is how a country goes broke. We are heading to financial catastrophe on the path we are going. The deal also uses a common gimmick where alleged savings in an entitlement program--a trust fund--are used to boost unrelated spending in the general discretionary budget. This is a bigger issue than most of our colleagues understand. Any savings found in the entitlement programs faced with insolvency must be used to shore up those programs, those trust funds, not for spending somewhere else. Yet this deal claims illusory savings from disability insurance, part of Social Security. That is the disability trust fund. There are two trust funds of Social Security, disability and a retirement fund. Every American pays into both from their paycheck. So 2.2 percent of your paycheck goes to fund the disability fund, the rest of it funds your Social Security, and then there is additional money that comes out of your paycheck to fund the Medicare trust fund. So this deal claims illusory savings from the disability insurance and increased pension insurance fees in order to boost bureaucratic budgets. Perhaps even worse, the deal attempts to stave off the shortfall in the fraud-ridden Social Security Disability Insurance Program that has a host of problems. We all know and have known for years it is coming into default by the end of 2016. How does it get around the default in the disability program? It raids the Social Security retirement fund to pay for the deficient, ineffective, badly managed disability fund. It weakens Social Security. We need to be looking at ways to strengthen Social Security, not raid it and weaken it. Some $150 billion in funds will be siphoned off from Americans' payroll retirement contributions and taken out of the Social Security fund and transferred to the disability program--four-tenths of a percent each year of the income of an American. This will weaken the Social Security trust fund by $150 billion while politicians all over America continue to promise that what they are doing is acting to strengthen the Social Security trust fund. We have seen the disability trust fund heading for disaster for several years now. Now, ``60 Minutes'' and program after program have shown abuse, fraud, and total mismanagement in Social Security Disability. It has not been reformed. It needs fundamental reform. They made a few changes in the program that I am sure are worthwhile, but none that come close to putting the disability fund on a long-term sound basis. It is basically a gimmick to get past the impending insolvency crisis, to kick it down the road, and then create some money to justify the new spending above the spending limits imposed by the Budget Control Act. People want to end wasteful Washington spending. The people want that. Lifting the budget caps and raising the debt ceiling through 2017 only ensures that our ineffective bureaucracy continues its wasteful ways, while momentum in Washington for deficit reduction stalls out. That is what is happening. We are losing momentum. Several years ago we were in serious discussions about the dangers we faced financially. That conversation has been eroded. It eliminates a powerful opportunity, the debt ceiling, to advance the case for fiscal discipline. What about Social Security? The deal uses the same fraudulent accounting methods our Democratic colleagues used to pass ObamaCare on a straight party-line vote. We just received a letter from the Social Security Actuary, Mr. Goss, who stated that the ``enactment of these provisions [in this proposed legislation] is projected to reduce the long-range 75-year OASDI [the combined Social Security trust funds] actuarial deficit by 0.04 percent of taxable payroll,'' which is a lot. However, the savings going in are being counted as both, creating money that can be spent to increase new spending, and also creating money that can be spent to shore up the retirement insurance program. This is an important concept, colleagues. The funds are used to pay for more government spending outside the retirement and disability funds. Even worse than the promise of saving Social Security, which has been overstated as major entitlement reform, the savings are being counted as money that can be spent on the discretionary account. It basically provides cover to extend the debt of the United States. This is the very same tool the Democrats used to pass the ObamaCare bill, amazingly, and to produce a phony score so the President could say that every penny of it is paid for--saying it would not increase the deficit. Our colleagues used the same tactic in this deal by counting the funds they cut from your retirement account as being able to fund new discretionary spending. During the Obamacare debate, the Democrats reduced payments to hospitals and doctors and others, but Medicare is a trust fund. They claimed some $500 billion would be used both to extend the life of Medicare and to pay for the new ObamaCare spending. They openly and directly claimed that these savings could be used for two different things--$500 billion. It was one of the largest, I contend, misrepresentations of finances--fraudulent activities--in the history of the world. You cannot have money that is used for two different purposes. Mr. Elmendorf, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, has said: You cannot spend the same dollar twice, even though the conventions of accounting might suggest otherwise. So they used an accounting gimmick to make it appear that this money was available to strengthen Medicare and fund ObamaCare. It is the same money. We accepted that kind of improper financial analysis. The bill was passed on the promise it would not add to the debt. It certainly did. The same accounting gimmick lies at the heart of the proposed legislation to waive Federal spending caps and to raise the debt limit by at least $1.5 trillion. Promoters of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 boast of long-term future savings to Social Security disability, but those savings need to extend the life of the disability program, which is nearing insolvency. Instead, they are spent on new discretionary spending, basically adding to the debt. This is not entitlement reform, this is an accounting gimmick. Any savings to be captured in the future from disability insurance cannot be spent today on bureaucratic budgets for Federal departments such as the EPA, the Department of Labor, or the Department of Health and Human Services. A second and no less egregious accounting trick siphons off as much as $150 billion from the Social Security trust fund for retirees and transfers that money to the fraud-ridden disability program. But there is no surplus in the retirement trust fund. We know the Social Security retirement trust fund is heading toward insolvency. Taking this money out and moving it to the disability program shortens the lifespan, the solvency of the retirement program. All this reform accomplishes is advancing the insolvency date of the retirement fund, while bailing out the mismanaged disability fund by taking working Americans' pension contributions and reallocating them to the disability fund. Again, the authors of the bill double count the savings as both increasing the sustainability of Social Security disability and paying for the new spending. So instead of implementing much needed reforms to fix the disability program, which is projected to go broke next year, this deal robs $150 billion from the Social Security trust fund and uses it to pay disability checks through 2022. The Social Security trust fund is never reimbursed. They reduce the amount of dedicated money going to the Social Security retirement fund on everybody's paycheck and redirect it for 3 years to the disability fund, and the Social Security retirement fund is never reimbursed for the money they lost. So Social Security is left in a worse financial situation than it is currently. It is also a violation of the budget law to do that; I am confident. Furthermore, this bailout lasts only 6 years. In 2022, the disability fund runs out of money again, and Congress will have to bail it out once again. This bill removes the incentive to provide serious reform to fix that broken program and put it on a sound basis. It kicks the can down the road once again. In conclusion, I would say to my colleagues that we don't have to pass this bill today. There is no crisis that requires us to pass it today. There are a number of interim steps we could take to allow this bill to be out there for the Members who actually study it, to offer amendments on it, and maybe improve it for the American people to understand just what it is the Members of Congress are doing to their Social Security and to the fiscal debt of America. As I have mentioned, the Budget Control Act of 2011 increased the amount that we can borrow in exchange for $2.1 trillion in spending cuts that we were able to win in 2011. What we did when we faced the debt ceiling issue was that we were able to enforce our new spending law, which limited the growth of spending in the future, saving $2.1 trillion over that period of time. We are still in that time period, and we are ceasing to save money because we are violating the law. We were able to win a concession from the President. We didn't cower under our tables. We didn't retreat from the huffing and puffing of the President on this issue. We stood up as Members of Congress, committed to fiscal integrity in America, and we told the President: You are not going to get an increase in the debt ceiling unless you agree to some spending reforms. That is what happened. We did that when there were only 45 Republicans in the Chamber. Now there are 54 Republicans in the Chamber, and the House has a huge majority. I think we can do better. I don't think this should be rushed through the Congress, and I object to its passage. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, over the past several months, law enforcement officers across our country have been shot, shot at, and killed without provocation, too often simply because they wear a badge. Violent crime and murders have increased across the country at almost alarming rates in some areas. Drug use and overdoses are occurring and dramatically increasing. It is against this backdrop that we are considering a bill, or will be, to cut prison sentences for drug traffickers and even other violent criminals, including those currently in Federal prisons. So we need to be asking about this carefully and with real caution, because as a prosecutor for a number of years, I know there are reasons we have people in jail. One is that it is just desserts. When somebody assaults another person, breaks into their house and robs them, uses weapons to rob a person of a thing of value, steals their automobiles, murders, rapes, and those kinds of things, they have to have a certain punishment or there is no real justice in the world. Just desserts is a legitimate reason to have punishment. It is not all economics. It is not all about whether they might or might not commit another crime. If you do a serious crime, you should do some time for it. Another one is incapacitation. This is too little appreciated, but when you take a person who is committing crimes--and many of them commit many crimes--a study in California of their State prison system showed there was a huge number of those criminals who admitted committing as many as 170 crimes a year. We say that is not possible, but people would break into two or three cars a night. They would break into businesses, break into Coke machines, break into other things and cause all kinds of issues, such as lost time from work, costs to repair, disrupting lives, making people change the very nature of their business affairs because they are afraid of being robbed or burglarized. So those are things that occur. Rehabilitation is a factor. The original idea was that in prison--we called it a penitentiary--where people do penance and hopefully they try to change their lives. So I would just point out that those are some of the things we need to be aware of when we are talking about sentencing and what is appropriate, particularly in a time of rising crime. People want Congress to represent their best interests and to protect them--people who do the right thing. They want their children to be able to play in the streets, walk around the block, see their friends, and not be afraid of some drug dealer or some gang member. Too often that is not possible in America. It got better, but it is getting worse, and we need to be aware of that as we consider legislation to improve our criminal justice system. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the amount of heroin seized at the southwest border has increased nearly 300 percent from 2008 to 2013, and I suspect the numbers are still going up. Heroin overdose deaths have increased 45 percent. That is huge. We went through a period of decline in all of this. It took 20 years. I was there. I worked with the Coalition for a Drug-Free Mobile, the Partnership For Youth. They volunteered hours and hours--teachers, school systems, gave their time and effort. We went from a period when 50 percent of high school seniors in 1980, according to a University of Michigan study, admitted to using an illegal drug, to less than 25 percent. It was cut by half. How many young people's lives stayed on track? How many people's lives were not led astray and destroyed by drug addiction as a result of that significant decline in drug use? I think it needs to be said that the President should never have said smoking marijuana is like smoking cigarettes: Oh, I wish I hadn't done it. That is the kind of message people hear. Now we have States legalizing it, and they are already talking about decriminalizing it. It is a mistake. We have seen that experiment before. Lives are at stake. The Drug Enforcement Administration called me recently and told me that 120 people a day are dying of a drug overdose in America. How many of them have serious brain injuries as a result of those overdoses? Our Presiding Officer, Dr. Cassidy, has been around emergency rooms. How many people are taken to emergency rooms and at what great cost to our communities? How many lives are disrupted? How many children are in broken homes? How many people had to leave their home because one spouse or the other has spent all the family money on drugs to support a habit? How many children have been abandoned, went to bed without food because of addiction in their family? These are serious matters. We made tremendous progress. The murder rate in America dropped by over 50 percent since the 1980s when Ronald Reagan said ``just say no'' and started a War on Drugs. He appointed me as the U.S. attorney in Alabama. I know what we did. And the Federal Government led the way with tough sentencing, eliminating parole, targeting dangerous drugs in effective ways, and States and local governments followed. I am worried about it. It is just tragic to me that we are making the same mistakes we made in the 1960s and 1970s. According to new data, 4.3 million people abuse or are dependent on marijuana. Marijuana is stronger today--several times stronger--than the marijuana of the 1960s, and it does impact people adversely. The American Medical Association has issued a report that is unequivocal about the danger and the ramifications of the use of marijuana. According to the 2014 ``Monitoring the Future'' study, since 2007, lifetime, past year, past month, and daily drug use among 8th, 10th, and 12th graders combined have all increased. Meanwhile, over the last several years, Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission all have taken steps to lessen punishment for, or altogether stop, the enforcement of laws that we passed over the years that led to this decline. They have been eliminated and weakened. I supported one of the big ones in Congress. I worked with Senator Durbin and we passed a bill that I think was justified and would not have done anything other than make the system better, in my opinion, and fairer, but now we need to ask ourselves, what do we do next, if anything? In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the sentencing guidelines that were enacted by Congress were not mandatory. This was a huge thing. In the early 1980s we passed sentencing guidelines and, depending on the severity of the crime and what the aggravating factors were at work, a person got more time or less time. It involved aggravating factors and mitigating factors, and it ended this idea that if you went to one judge, he would give you probation and if you went to another judge for the same crime, you would get 10 years, 15 years in jail. So I think that is to be noted. This is a very significant reduction as a practical matter in the amount of time that a person would serve because of eliminating the mandatory requirement of the sentencing guidelines. Then in 2010--this is a bill I worked on, the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine and made other changes that in many ways reduced sentences overall. It reduced sentences. It was designed because minority groups, particularly the African-American community--the drug of choice too often was crack and that had much higher sentences and it seemed to be unfair, and we fixed that to a large degree. It eliminated the mandatory 5-year minimum sentence--the mandatory 5 years without parole for possession of crack cocaine. I didn't think that was legitimate, Congress agreed, and we eliminated that requirement. It was being gotten around, and not many times were people being sentenced for simple possession of a small amount of cocaine. That was changed, and the Sentencing Commission then implemented an amendment to the sentencing guidelines that applied this retroactively. So people who had been sentenced under the previous procedures had those procedures reversed and then they got out of jail early--and a lot of people did. It resulted in early release of thousands of offenders. In August of 2013, in a dramatic event too little appreciated, Attorney General Eric Holder ordered Federal prosecutors not to charge certain drug offenders with mandatory minimums, regardless of the quantity of drugs involved. He directed the prosecutors not to follow the law. Under the law, if you have a certain amount of drug use, you are supposed to serve at least a minimum mandatory sentence. This is different from the guidelines. This is a statutory requirement. And Attorney General Holder reversed previous attorneys general memoranda which directed that prosecutors should charge the main offense and they should be subject to the main penalty. That further reduced the number of people convicted and the amount of time they served. Then the administration has declined to enforce Federal drug laws regarding marijuana in Colorado, Washington, and Oregon. It is still a Federal offense to deal marijuana in the United States. So even though a State doesn't have that law, the Federal Government does. They said: Well, if you don't enforce it, we won't enforce it--another relaxation of Federal law. Then, according to the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, prosecutions for drug trafficking--the number of people actually tried and prosecuted for drug trafficking under the primary drug law, 21 U.S. Code section 841, has declined over 16 percent since 2009, and since President Obama took office, prosecutions under 21 U.S. Code section 960, the Import-Export Act, have declined by 30 percent over that time period. We haven't had those kinds of reductions in drugs that are imported into the United States. We don't have fewer drug distribution networks. We have more. Those prosecutions shouldn't be declining. We didn't reduce the number of prosecutors working in the U.S. Attorneys' offices. Attorney General Holder ordered Federal prosecutors to refrain from objecting to defendants' requests in court for shorter sentences. He said: Don't object to their requests for shorter sentences. Less than a month later, the Sentencing Commission voted to reduce sentences for an estimated 70 percent of Federal drug trafficking offenders, including those who possessed a firearm, committed a violent crime or had a prior conviction, decreasing their sentence an average of 11 months--almost 1 year. An estimated 6,000 will be released from Federal prison beginning November 1, and about 40,000 will be eligible for early release in the coming years. President Obama has commuted the sentences of 89 Federal drug offenders, including crack cocaine distributors--some convicted of dealing more than 10 pounds of crack, which is hundreds of thousands of dollars in value, while others were convicted of possession of a firearm in relation to a drug offense. One of the things my office always did was it was sure to prosecute drug dealers who used guns while they were doing their nefarious crimes. I think it had an impact on the murder rate in America. Fewer dangerous drug dealers were carrying guns on a regular basis because they knew if they got caught, they would be taken to Federal court and be held another 5 years without parole for carrying a gun on top of their drug offense. The President has announced that he plans to continue to grant clemency to Federal drug offenders through the end of his Presidency. Are we talking about thousands more? All of this has led the Federal prison population to fall. Now you have heard it said that we have this ever-growing number of people in the Federal prisons and that somehow it is wrong--there are about 200,000 people in Federal prisons. We should talk about that. It is OK to talk about it, but we have to be careful. What I would say to you and what is too little appreciated, colleagues, is that we have already seen dramatic reductions in sentences in the last several years, far unlike what we had done in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. So the prison population has now started dropping. It has reached the lowest levels since 2005, 10 years ago. According to the Bureau of Prisons, the prison population of 200,000 has decreased over the last 2 years--by 5,300 in fiscal year 2014, last year. They project the population to ``further drop by 14,987 between FY2015 and FY2016''-- another 15,000 decline--``particularly as a result of the retroactive sentencing guidelines change.'' Admissions to Federal prisons have declined every year since 2011. The number of people being admitted to the Federal prisons is going down, driven, I suspect, by the prosecutorial policies set by Attorney General Holder. They will continue to decline given the President's policy of directing prosecutors not to charge certain criminal offenses. This is a very serious matter. We need to be careful as we analyze the legislation today. Crime is already rising at an alarming rate, so much so that it has prompted an emergency meeting of the Major Cities Chiefs Association in August. The New York Times recently reported that murders have increased sharply in many cities across the country since 2014, including Atlanta, up 32 percent--these are murders--Baltimore, up 56 percent, nearby; Chicago, up 20 percent; Houston, up 44 percent; Los Angeles, up 11 percent; New York, up 9 percent; Milwaukee, up 76 percent; Minneapolis, up 50 percent; New Orleans, up 22 percent; Philadelphia, up 4 percent; Dallas, up 17 percent; and Washington, DC, where we are, up 47 percent--murders. This trend, in my opinion, will continue. Property crimes have also risen sharply throughout the country and even in small cities such as Abilene, Carson City, Portland, Ithaca, and Binghamton, NY. I am afraid we are watching a repeat of history. A couple of generations ago, when we had an indeterminate sentencing system with no guidelines or required minimum sentences, virtually identical defendants received totally different sentences depending on the judge, and many received little or no incarceration. A nationwide crime wave ensued. It was a revolving door. People were arrested. They were released on bail. They came to court, and the case got continued. It got continued again, it got continued again, and the witnesses disappeared. They had a plea bargain, they got a little bit of time, and they served less than a third of the time they got. That is what was happening. People say: Prison makes them worse. Do you remember those arguments? Well, in 1980, one out of four households in the United States had suffered a rape, robbery, burglary, assault, larceny or auto theft in the previous year. Crime was increasing in double-digits per year in the 1960s and 1970s, and we did not respond to it. So then the Congress passed legislation that imposed mandatory minimum sentences on criminals convicted of the most serious Federal crimes and drug crimes to ensure that these perpetrators served at least a fixed amount of time in prison. Every drug dealer knew it and came to know that if they were caught, they were going to serve real time and they were not going to talk their way out of it. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act was passed, and the Armed Career Criminal Act, which had mandatory 15-year penalties. Career criminals carrying guns and committing serious crimes were hammered. It targeted career criminals-- the kind of people who kill people to carry out their crimes. Drug trafficking fell into that category. Congress also established sentencing guidelines that required judges to sentence within certain ranges and calculate factors and create objectivity, so that one poor person got the same sentence as some rich person with a highly paid lawyer. The rationale was and remains three-fold: to deter offenders from engaging in further criminal behavior, to ensure that a meaningful period of time elapsed for the offender to become rehabilitated, and to incapacitate the offender from harming law-abiding citizens. How many people do you know that would rape someone? How many people do you know that would likely take a gun and murder somebody? The more of those that are in jail serving time, the less people are going to get murdered. It is mathematics, and that is really what happened since 1980 with the increasing number of people being incarcerated. This idea worked. According to the FBI statistics, the rate of violent crimes--murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault--was reduced by more than 50 percent from 1991 to 2013. That is when these sentences were beginning to be understood and were impactful. Property crimes, burglary, murder, larceny, and motor vehicle thefts dropped by a similar measure. Over time, prison penalties fairly and systematically applied mean that less crime and fewer innocent people are burglarized, robbed, raped or murdered. Scholars have estimated that the increase in the size of our prison population has driven down crime rates by at least 25 percent. Professor Matt DeLisi of Iowa State University testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that criminal justice research shows that ``releasing 1 percent of the current [Federal prison] population would result in approximately 32,850 additional murders, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, thefts, auto thefts, and incidents of arson.'' Well, we have had more than a 1 percent increase already. The great criminologist and Professor James Q. Wilson said: A high risk of punishment reduces crime. It just does. If you are talking about the classroom or on the football field, if the flag is thrown every time somebody clips, they quit clipping. If it is not thrown, you will still see it. In 2011 the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling in Brown v. Plata, that California was required to reduce its prison population to ease overcrowding. In dissent in that case, Justice Alito recalled a prisoner-release program in Philadelphia in the 1990s: Although efforts were made to release only those prisoners who were least likely to commit violent crimes, that attempt was spectacularly unsuccessful. During an 18-month period, the Philadelphia police arrested thousands of these prisoners for committing 9,732 new crimes. Those defendants were charged with 79 murders, 90 rapes, 1,113 assaults, 959 robberies, 701 burglaries, 2,748 thefts, not to mention thousands of drug offenses. I wish it weren't so. I wish we could have these programs. I have seen them since my time in law enforcement in 1975, as a young prosecutor. Year after year, people have come forward with plans that sound so good, and they have been tried before. But they never work out nearly as well as people promote. Trust me. If there was any quick fix, it would already have been done all over America. People don't--States don't want to spend money on prisons. But the truth is that people who tend to be criminals tend to continue to be criminals and commit crimes. We ignore too often the pain, the destruction and the damage it does to innocent people who are afraid to have their children experience the turmoil of crime. Now is not the time to move too fast to further reduce penalties without careful thought. Before we rush to judgment about undoing Federal sentencing laws, we must consider the results of what has already happened--how much reduction we have already seen. We have a responsibility to the public to examine every aspect of the legislation that may be coming forward and be introduced in committee, which could greatly impact the everyday lives of Americans for years to come. To that end, we must have a good hearing on it. We need to study what experts have told us and what history tells us about crime. It would be so wonderful if we could do a drug treatment program and people would not commit crimes again. It would be so wonderful if we could have an in-prison educational program that people could take and somehow have a significant reduction of crime rates. There are all kinds of ideas that have been tried over the years, and some of them may have a benefit. Some of them have some benefit, but none of them have produced dramatic alterations in the rate of recidivism or repeat of criminal acts. One study a number of years ago concluded that when a person comes out of prison, they make a decision. It is an individual, personal decision about whether they are going to continue with criminal activity or not. Some of them make it because the prison was a bad place and they don't want to go back. Some of them make it because they have had a religious experience. Some of them make it because they took advantage of an online or education course and decided they are going to do something better for their lives. But it is an individual decision, and we have not found it possible to somehow impact the psyche of people in prison so that we can consistently reduce the likelihood that they will return to crime. We have to understand that. If somebody has a plan that shows me that, I would like to see it. Mr. President, I thank the Chair for allowing me to share these thoughts. We are at a very important time in criminal justice, and we need to get it right. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, it is with great pleasure and the highest regards that I speak on the retirement of my long-time friend and valued constituent James Michael Horsley. Mike announced his retirement as president of the Alabama Hospital Association earlier this year and is planning to transition to his next venture in November. Mike has had a long and distinguished career with the Alabama Hospital Association and has represented well the interests of hospitals and the patients they serve. His tremendous knowledge of the health care industry has been a valuable resource for members of the Alabama delegation. This knowledge is grounded not only in his 24 years of service to the association but also in his service to the State as commissioner of both the Alabama Medicaid Agency and the Alabama Department of Mental Health. His knowledge of health policy is unparalleled in the State and his expertise will be sorely missed as we continue to discuss the myriad of issues concerning health care delivery. Not only is Mike well versed in health policy, but he is also a skilled negotiator, who has been able to convene diverse interests and facilitate lasting solutions that benefit all parties. He is respected as a man for his word, with a reputation for being ethical in all of his endeavors. Mike is a strategic thinker who possesses the ability to find innovative solutions for seemingly insurmountable challenges. Under his leadership, Alabama's hospitals have been able to provide extraordinarily good care with very limited resources. In addition, he has been very active in highlighting the inequalities of the current Medicare wage index payment mechanism and advocating for a change of the broken system. I commend Mike's tireless work to reform the Medicare Area Wage Index, and I am proud to have worked with him on many successful endeavors to improve the wage index. In 2003, after leadership by the Alabama Hospital Association, the Congress passed legislation that improved the wage index for several rural States. The action resulted in payment gains for hospitals in Alabama of approximately $1 million per hospital per year. The State of Alabama has been lucky to have him as their champion on this issue. I also want to commend him for his exemplary service to his country as an active member of the U.S. Navy and as a long-time reservist. Mike was a respected intelligence officer who retired at the rank of captain and was responsible for keeping many of our Navy men and women out of harm's way. In addition to this remarkable career and military service, Mike is also a devoted husband, father, and grandfather. He has been married to Wanda for almost 40 years, and together, they have one son and two grandchildren. In light of these and all of his many accomplishments, I want to congratulate him on his outstanding career and to wish him the best in his impending retirement.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I wish to commemorate and celebrate the life and contributions of Dr. William Jefferson Terry of Mobile, AL, who was the first pediatric urologist in the State of Alabama. He was a nationally known and a well-respected physician. Dr. Terry was born in Mobile, AL where he later returned to begin his urology practice. He graduated cum laude from the University of Alabama and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After receiving his M.D. degree from the University of Alabama School of Medicine, he was an intern and resident at the University of Kentucky Medical Center; he then served as a resident and chief resident in urology at the University of Alabama Medical Center in Birmingham, followed by a fellowship in pediatric urology at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston. His valuable contributions to the medical profession have been recognized by his colleagues. He was honored by the University of Alabama Medical Alumni Association with the 2007 Garber Galbraith Medical Political Service Award for outstanding service to the medical profession and the 2010 Distinguished Service Award. He was also honored by the University of South Alabama Department of Internal Medicine as the 2009 John McGehee Excellence as a Teacher Award. The Medical Association of the State of Alabama honored him this year with the Paul W. Burleson Award presented in recognition of a medical career that encompasses not only high ethical and professional standards in patient care, but includes extraordinary service to physician organizations at the county, State, and national levels. Dr. Terry was a delegate to the American Medical Association for 20 years, served on the AMA Council on Medical Service, and was chairman of the Alabama delegation to the AMA for 7 years. He was active in many issues relating directly to the patient-physician relationship and the quality of care being delivered. In addition to being a remarkable physician, Dr. Terry was a fierce advocate for his patients and the medical community. He worked tirelessly and successfully to stop the implementation of ICD-10, which he and the physicians he served believed was not practical and harmful to medicine. He carefully questioned the Affordable Care Act and gave of himself extensively towards advancing quality health care. He was a wonderful friend and adviser to me. As a voice from the real world of medicine, his views impacted my decisions significantly. On a personal note, I knew the quality of his practice firsthand as he provided top quality care to my mother. He placed his patients first and was a tireless worker. Senator Bill Cassidy, a fellow physician and friend of Dr. Terry, recognized Dr. Terry's commitment to his profession, country, and family: Beyond serving his family and community, Dr. Terry genuinely cared about the future of the medical profession. He made his passion for creating more sensible public policy a priority, even testifying before Congress and moderating a discussion between physicians, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid, and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. His contributions to the policy making process are absolutely invaluable. I am privileged to say that Dr. Terry was a fellow American, and a colleague as a physician. He was a blessing to many. Remember his widow and children in prayer. We who were blessed look forward to being reunited in heaven. Dr. Terry was a devoted husband, father, and grandfather, as well as a dedicated member of the Dauphin Way United Methodist Church. He was a man of God. He dearly loved his family, country, and profession. His integrity and work ethic were second to none. Dr. Terry's life represented the highest ideals of the serving physician, and he was held in the highest esteem and affection by the many he served. He leaves surviving him Elizabeth, his wife of 39 years; his three sons, William, Miller, and Gordon; and his four granddaughters, Eleanor, Sally, Lida, and Eloise. I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring Dr. Terry for his dedication and many contributions to the field of medicine.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Chair. This Senator wants to take a few moments to talk about the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which I think is a good piece of legislation. I support it, and I hope my colleagues will allow it to move forward. I think when God speaks, maybe He would speak about that issue too. However, I really want to talk a little bit more about where we are on the funding of Planned Parenthood, the two aspects of it. One is a large--hundreds of millions of dollars--appropriations that goes there through the Medicaid program, and another is $28 million that was directly appropriated last year from the government to this Planned Parenthood agency. I call it an agency, but that is not really correct. It is a nongovernmental entity, a nongovernmental activist group that does some good things and some things I don't think are good. I think we ought to recognize that Congress has certain powers. It is very clear, I would submit, that a majority of the Members of the Senate and a majority of the Members of the House of Representatives do not want to fund this agency--certainly not as it has been funded in the past. What we have, as I understand it now, is at least $28 million of federal money that goes to it unless Congress decides not to fund it. Colleagues, the power of the purse resides in the United States Congress. Not one dollar can be spent by the President, any of his Department heads, or the U.S. military, unless Congress has appropriated the money. That is an ultimate power of Congress. At the end of this fiscal year--September 30--if Congress has not appropriated money for the future, then it can't be spent. That is why we have a so-called shutdown. If you don't fund the whole government, it is blocked in some way and then the government can't expend the money that has not been appropriated by the elected representatives of the people of the United States. Let me just say it this way. I don't believe the American people's money that has been extracted from them by the Internal Revenue Service and other government extractors--I don't believe that money should be spent on any program that is unhealthy or not wise. That is what we are all elected to do; is that not right? Fund programs that are good, worthwhile, and that create value for the American people, and not fund the programs that we don't think are wise and create value, and advocate and promote principles we think are healthy for the American culture, the American people. We don't have to fund any program Congress decides not to fund. The power of the purse resides in the Congress of the United States. A majority of the Congress does not favor advancing funding for Planned Parenthood and certainly not the $28 million that goes through the HHS grant-writing process, so I suggest we don't fund it. That is what I think. Let's not fund it. Why are we funding it? Well, we have to fund it, Sessions. You don't understand. What don't I understand? If it is not funded, you are shutting down the government. So if we do not provide the money for a nongovernmental agency that we think is not spending the taxpayers' money wisely, we are shutting down the entire government of the United States? I suggest that is a ludicrous position, one that goes beyond any rationality, and I am prepared to say so. How did this happen? How could they say that? We are funding the government. We are passing a bill that funds all the government agencies. It just doesn't fund this nongovernmental agency--the money they would like to have to advance their agenda, which isn't my agenda, so I am not for funding it. I got elected. How did this happen? Well, the President says he will veto the bill, and since Congress hasn't passed any of the appropriations bills in series like we should be doing, it is going to be cobbled together in one monumental matter, one monumental omnibus bill or continuing resolution. The President is going to veto the entire Federal funding because he doesn't want us to cut $28 million. He wants it to be spent the way he thinks it should be spent. I think we should tell the President: Mr. President, you have your power. You can sign your agreement--not valid beyond your tenure--with Iran even though we disagree with it. A substantial majority of both Houses opposes it, but apparently, you have the lawful authority to do so. But you don't have the lawful authority to spend money on an entity--not even a government entity--that Congress chooses not to spend money on. This is our business. We are in a bad trend here of Congress just capitulating in favor of the Executive. By any historical standard, I have never seen a more supine Congress. So should we fund this program? I say no. Don't put it in there. And I think we should send a note to the President: Dear Mr. President, we funded the Defense Department, we funded Medicare, we funded Medicaid, we funded other programs, hundreds of them, at $1 trillion. That would be in this bill, basically, around $1 trillion. That is a thousand billion dollars. But we have chosen to cut $28 million of one of the programs we don't think is good. Congress doesn't like it, and Congress chose not to fund it. And somebody told us that you declared that if we do that, you are going to veto the entire funding for the government of the United States, including the Defense Department and all the other programs that aid us, including the Environmental Protection Agency. You are going to veto funding for those agencies and blame the Congress and go on to say Congress caused this. Wow. He is going to say that we who funded the government and he who blocked the funding for the government have a disagreement over this amount of money, and as a result he is going to veto the funding for the government and accuse the Republicans, who passed the bill to fund the government, of shutting down the government. Now, some people are afraid of the President. Oh, he always wins. The President always wins, and Congress always loses. Sessions, don't you understand? But the facts of the case matter. The situation matters. If we follow the budget and we appropriate at a level for the Defense Department that the President wants and Congress wants and we do all these things, but we just choose not to fund this program, I don't believe the President has the moral authority, the political clout to tell the American people that the Congress shut down the government when he vetoes the bill that will fund the government. So I just want to say that it is time for this Congress to do its duty, and we should fund programs that need funding and not fund programs that don't need funding, and we should try wherever possible to reach a compromise the way we have done in the Armed Services Committee. All the members of the committee argued about this, that, and the other, and we created a military bill which we think is a healthy bill and which had overwhelming bipartisan support. Almost all of the appropriations bills that have come out of the committees have had bipartisan support, I think many of them unanimous, Republicans and Democrats--every one of them--supporting them. We get along around here a lot better than people say. But there are certain things Congress should not cede. It should not cede to the Executive the power of the purse. That is all I am saying. At this point in time, we will be dealing directly with the HHS grant programs that are giving money to an entity that I don't think should be funded. I am not voting to fund it. I think that is a reasonable position. And I think it would be extraordinary if the President were to take the view that he will not fund the Department of Defense and other programs of the government because of a disagreement over this issue. Indeed, colleagues, I believe the House has proposed legislation that would have generous funding for women's health. The money that would have gone to Planned Parenthood would instead go through a general plan of community health centers and other quasi-government entities that serve women throughout the country. So I thank the Presiding Officer for allowing me to say that. It is a matter we are going to have to wrestle with as a Congress. In the long run, I truly believe Congress needs to fulfill its constitutional role, and that congressional role calls on it to evaluate every dollar spent by this government, to examine those programs that we think are valid and fund them, and if they need more funding, to give them more funding considering the debt situation the country is in and to not fund programs we do not think should be funded. What other role do we have in the Congress greater than that, the power of the purse. The President is not authorized to demand Congress spend money on every program he desires, a program that sells body parts and other things of that nature that I do not think is decent and good. So I am not for funding it. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, the Iranian deal--this executive agreement dealing with nuclear weapons and their policy in Iran that has been executed between the President of the United States and Iran's leaders--not the Congress, not in a formal treaty that is binding over time but a personal executive agreement--I don't believe is a good one, and I think it is the predictable end, frankly, of a poorly initiated negotiation. I will vote against it based on many of the arguments our colleagues have heard over the last several days and will continue to hear. I do believe it is not the right policy for the United States. I am not going to attempt to restate all of the reasons. I remember distinctly being in the Middle East, meeting with a top official in one of the countries whose name is well known. President Obama decided to intensify these negotiations toward this kind of end. This Middle Eastern official warned that talking could be a trap. He warned that the Iranians are sophisticated negotiators. They have been recognized as such throughout the world and the Middle East for decades. He warned that one could be trapped into these negotiations, and once you get into them, you have to be able to extract yourself as soon as you realize a good result isn't in the offing. I think that warning was not heeded. We have gone on for 6 years now, and we have reached a point where the President had to either agree to what they wanted or walk away and admit defeat, and he decided to reach an agreement. I think that put us in this bad position. He wanted to achieve this before he left office, apparently, and we can only hope that somehow, some way, this turns out to be better than it appears at this time. The Iranian acquisition of and their drive to achieve nuclear weapons is just one aspect of the complex situation that results from the extremism that is arising in the Middle East. It is a part of the extremism that has been arising in the Middle East. I wish to take this opportunity to go further than just discuss Iran today. I think we need to discuss the need for a long-term strategy, bipartisan--Republicans and Democrats--and our Western World allies, the free world allies, for how we are going to deal with the problems of extremism in the Middle East over a long period of time. It is clear that we are seeing a resurgence of militant Islam. This strain of Islam seeks to advance a theological and political approach to the world. It seeks to unify faith and politics, and believers, as such, seek to advance policies they think will honor Allah's religious command. So this strain that has been in Islam for years that advocates conversion by the sword in fact finds much support in the Koran. I wish it wasn't so, but it does. Many--even most--Muslims are certainly truly people of peace, faithful in their daily activities, but there is a sizable minority that oftentimes seeks dominance and achieves dominance that finds a basis in the Koran for their violent jihad against those they describe as infidels. They see the hedonism of the West and other actions that occur in the Western World, for example, as totally destructive and contrary to what they believe is right, and they don't accommodate to it. So we are seeing a spasm and an eruption of aggression that has occurred before over the centuries, but it is certainly reaching a high pitch today, exacerbated by the technology of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, and other dangerous weapons. The nature of this eruption is complex. It is different in every region, in every country, and area, and is different among sects, tribes, and traditions, and is shaped by economic conditions, security conditions, and tribal and human conditions in the various regions of the Middle East, spanning from Afghanistan, Pakistan, to Syria, to Yemen, to Egypt, to Morocco, and into Africa today. This crisis, occasioned by Iran's religious determination to obtain a nuclear weapon, is just one aspect, though a huge one, that has arisen as a result of this extremism. The world is surely presented with a deep and complex problem that requires the most wise and consistent response over years. The surge of terrorism will not end quickly. We are most likely talking about decades. Our response to such violent actions cannot be based on short-term, political, partisan factors. President Bush had in his mind a vision for a good future for the Middle East. I supported him. He believed all people wanted peace, freedom, education, and prosperity. He reached too far, perhaps, and made some tactical errors as he sought to advance his vision, but, by 2011, after much bloodshed and cost, Iraq had achieved stability of a kind and some real political progress. A democratically elected government had been formed and stability and even prosperity seemed possible. Our new President, however, was not impressed. He did not share the depth of this vision. President Obama did not consider the Bush vision as part of an established, bipartisan, long-term strategy of the United States. He thus felt little loyalty to that vision, and he started to execute his different vision in the Middle East. I was with some British parliamentarians recently and noted that someone had said that President Obama's complete withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 was the greatest error of the 21st century to date. One of the experienced Brits responded: Well, some say it was the disbanding of the Iraqi Army after the victory in Iraq. So even when great nations act, things don't usually go smoothly, and failure of great nations to act often has its own consequences. Enemies do not desire to be defeated. They do not desire to be killed. Enemies adjust to whatever tactics are used against them. So the point, colleagues and friends, is that military actions are fraught with danger. Inaction is fraught with danger. The world is very complex. The very best minds who know very well the specific countries that are at risk and in turmoil must be involved when plans are made and evaluated. Long-term--even very long-term consequences of action and inaction must be considered at the beginning. The world is a dicey place indeed. On my heart and mind is the concern that this spasm of Islamic extremism and terrorism will be with us for at least 40 years, perhaps more. Experts have told us this. Dr. Kenneth Pollack, at the Brookings Institute, testified before our Armed Services Committee recently. It came my time to ask a question, and I said: Dr. Pollack, you said that problems that are long in the making will be long in solving. Just briefly, would you say with the spasm of extremism, violence, and sectarianism in the Middle East that we have to have a long-term policy--I mean 30, 50, 60 years--to try to be a positive force in bringing some stability to that region? History tells us those states of violence tend to cool off but often take decades to cool off. And I remember it very distinctly. I got an answer that we do not often get. He looked up at me, and he said: Yes, that is what I am saying. This terrorism, unfortunately, is often focused on the United States that the extremists see as the Great Satan. This represents a direct threat to the security and prosperity of our people. Thus, we should seek to act in a statesmanlike manner, considering the threats and interests of the people we serve in the near and the long term. That means making wise decisions that may not be popular in the 60-second sound bite world. In the late 1940s, the famous George Kennan, a State Department official, penned the ``long telegram'' they called it. It formed the basis for a long-term Cold War policy that became known as the containment doctrine. It was the basis for resisting the expansionism of communism, totalitarianism, and atheism, and it was part of that movement that was clearly contrary to Western values. So his paper became a bipartisan policy of the United States as we confronted the enormous threat of totalitarian communism, that had a goal, as does radical Islam, of world domination. While there were vigorous and usually healthy debates over the years over tactics and techniques and procedures, there was consistent and bipartisan support for the overarching strategy that communism could not be allowed to dominate ever-growing portions of the world, that it must be contained. Our Nation--indeed the entire free world--became united in that goal. This strategy held until the blessed collapse of the Soviet Union. So, once again, we face a totalitarian threat to the free world. This time it is from ideological and apocalyptic Islam. Like communism, its goals are incompatible with the laws, institutions, and freedoms that we see as central to our liberty and prosperity. There can be no compromise with this form of radical Islam. It just will not merge with or accommodate the freedom that we believe is essential in the Western World. Theologically based sharia law fundamentally conflicts with our constitutional order, which separates church and State and considers free debate and dissent in the Senate as a way to a better world. We believe in debate and dissent and disagreement and the right of freedom of religion. Thus, this threat has to be resisted. It just has to be. To do so obviously means that we and our allies have to agree on an effective strategy--not just the tactics for Iran today, ISIS tomorrow, Egypt the next day, Yemen the next day. Seven years into his Presidency, President Obama has failed in this regard. We must accept that fact. The result of that failure is instability, violence, and displaced persons. Would we have had none with a good effective strategy? No, I can't say that, but I believe with confidence that we would have had much less difficulty. Indeed, one wise, very sophisticated, European leader told me recently that the immigration crisis, as a result of refugees from the Middle East, is the greatest challenge to the European Union since World War II. What a dramatic statement. I know many of my Democratic friends are concerned about where we are and are willing to discuss the kind of strategy we need. The question of Iran and its sponsorship of terrorism and its acquisition of nuclear weapons is a dramatic and extremely important development. That is why it has engaged all of our attention lately. I chair an Armed Services subcommittee--and I have been on it for 18 years--that deals with strategic forces--nuclear forces. It has been the unified position of the entire world that there not be a proliferation of nuclear weapons, and particularly not in the Middle East. So the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran is a dangerous event because they have ideological, apocalyptic, theological views that are scary. In addition, we have been told by the best experts accepted worldwide that if Iran has nuclear weapons, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey--who knows what others--maybe Jordan in the future would want those too--and the idea that we will have multiple nations in that volatile region of the world with nuclear weapons has been a fear that has unified the U.N. and unified the nuclear anti-proliferation groups worldwide for decades. But the Middle East presents even broader and more complex issues, in addition to that. Were the people of Syria and the world better off with Assad in power? Was Libya doing better under Qadhafi than it is now? One European official said a million people, mostly Libyans, are on the North African shore seeking to enter Europe or the United States. Is Egypt, under their new military regime, a more secure and positive force for good for the Egyptian people and the whole world and the Middle East than it was under the ousted Muslim Brotherhood and other extreme parties that were a part of that coalition? How would our discussions and actions have been different if our Nation had established a sound, long-term policy to guide our overall approach to this entire region? Our involvement in each of those situations and others was, it seems to me, far too ad hoc, far too reactive to certain events. Our actions have not been consistent; they have not been predictable; they have not advanced a unified strategy; they have not been a part of a coherent strategy designed to reduce tensions and strife, to reduce our direct involvement in the region. Our policies have not resulted in a containment or a reduction of terrorism and extremism. I asked a historian a few weeks ago before the Armed Services Committee about this and how we should be approaching the Middle East-- Professor Walter Russell Mead. I mentioned George Kennan and the containment strategy and asked: Do you think what we need as a nation is people like some of the experts on the last two panels that we have had, seriously analyzing the future of the Middle East, the nature of the extremist ideology that is there, and developing a long-term, sophisticated policy to rebut it and try to diminish it over time? He replied and said a number of things. He said: But what we're also hearing in the background is a kind of a universal confession of failure of strategy. What is our strategy for ISIS? Are we fighting Assad first, then ISIS? ISIS first, then Assad? Neither? Both? Something entirely different? I think--I've rarely in my lifetime--although I certainly have heard moments of strategic incoherence--I've rarely seen American policy on such a wide scale on so many issues in such a vital region seem to be so incoherent. I'm still waiting to see what our strategy is in Libya or why we intervened. . . . He goes on to say: So we--we do, I think, need, as a country, to have the kind of discussion about the Middle East that we had about Soviet expansionism in the 1940s, and to try to work our way toward some kind of general bipartisan agreement or confidence in an analytical approach to really a very vital part of the world. We are not close to that. We have a Presidential election going on, and people are making policies and statements based on the latest developments. It makes me uneasy. Our policies have not resulted in containment and a reduction of extremism. Our policies have not resulted in improvement of conditions for the people in those countries or the security of the American people. Statesmanship, as Henry Kissinger says, requires wisdom, insight, and a willingness of officials to understand the complexity and history and choices the nation faces, and then to provide leadership to the American people first that produces support for policies that may not seem clear or understandable or even positive at the time they are announced because the world is a complex place. So, in conclusion, I am certain that the foreign policy of our Nation is too reactive. I am certain we have not adopted on a bipartisan basis a policy to confront Islamic extremism that provides direction for actions and can build confidence in our people and in our allies. I am certain this is a failure that must be remedied. So let's get together, colleagues, and commit to developing a wise and sound strategy outside of the rush of daily politics, using the great insights and talents of people that are available to us. This Nation is fortunate to have persons of loyalty, experience in the Middle East, judgment, knowledge, and history, who can help us. In its basic form, a good strategy must be simple and understandable to high officials and everyday Americans. This is not an impossible task. A good strategy will provide guidance and produce consistency in our policies over the long run. Importantly it will reduce the adverse impact of politics on our foreign powers. The American people will respond positively. I pledge to do my part in this effort. We have developed such strategies before. Most dramatic was the Kennan containment strategy, but there have been others--the Monroe Doctrine, other policies--and we can do it again. I just think it is important to raise some additional concerns about where we are today. I think the President took unacceptable risks in going deeply into these negotiations. He went beyond the framework that President Bush was using to talk with Iranians. The Iranians were in clear violation of a number of U.N. resolutions that restricted what we would do in our negotiations with them. We refused to participate with them. Both Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and Secretary of State John Kerry have recently testified before Congress that Iran remains the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism in the world, and they do not contend that releasing this money to them, hundreds of billions of dollars, which is being released on some sort of promise that they will cease to do that--they basically have said they are going to continue the same policies they have been advocating. This is a terror-sponsoring State. Our own experts tell us that. Our own officials tell us that. It is very difficult to enter into any kind of negotiation with a person who sees you as a Great Satan, who says that Israel will not exist 25 years from now and must be eradicated from the Earth. So these P5+1 negotiations did reverse cautious activities before, based on the fact that Iran was an outlaw State. I will not continue to discuss this, other than to say that we entered into this, we have gotten down here to the end, and I think it is a mistake. I am going to vote no. It looks as though it may somehow be processed anyway. If that occurs, it will create instability, even more so in the Middle East, and alarmingly will lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in multiple countries in the Middle East, each one of which, if their unstable governments fall, could allow nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of terrorists who can use them at any time or place around the world, creating all kinds of ramifications that are too grim to think about. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I first want to thank Senator Alexander, and I have a few remarks to make about sanctuary cities and how they threaten the safety of our country. I am cosponsoring Senator Cotton's amendment to this bill that would withhold Federal law enforcement funds to sanctuary jurisdictions. The amendment, based largely on the provisions of the Michael Davis, Jr. and Danny Oliver in Honor of State and Local Law Enforcement Act, which we introduced a few weeks ago, ensures that jurisdictions that choose to endanger their communities and the public at large by adopting these reckless policies receive no Federal law enforcement funding. It is a fundamental principle of law enforcement that individuals who are tried in one jurisdiction and who also face charges in other jurisdictions are held and turned over to the next jurisdiction before being released because it becomes an extremely dangerous problem if they are released before charges are disposed of in another jurisdiction. That is being violated deliberately and openly by a number of cities in the country as an act of defiance and disrespect for those traditions of courtesy between Federal and State jurisdictions and even county and city jurisdictions. Congress has an obligation to ensure that limited taxpayer dollars are not given to those cities and counties that refuse to cooperate with basic Federal law enforcement efforts to remove criminal aliens from the country. I would like to take a few moments to talk about the life of Kate Steinle. Kate was a 32-year-old young woman who grew up approximately 40 miles east of San Francisco in Pleasanton, CA. She graduated from Amador Valley High School and California Polytechnic State University. She worked as a sales representative for a medical device equipment company and was precisely the type of person every parent aspires for their child to become. Kate's family described her as ``loving, smart and beautiful.'' Kate's brother said that ``she was the most wonderful, loving, caring person.'' Kate's friends described her as an ``amazing, very compassionate person'' with an infectious smile and the kind of friend who was always there. Last Wednesday, Kate had plans to visit her brother and his wife in Pleasanton with the hopes of learning whether she would soon have a new niece or nephew. Before leaving, she spent some time with her father strolling around San Francisco and taking pictures at Pier 14--one of the busiest and most popular tourist destinations in the city. While on Pier 14 and in broad daylight, Kate was shot to death by an illegal alien. Kate's mother, Liz Sullivan, described the horrific encounter to the San Francisco Chronicle, explaining that Kate just kept saying, ``Dad, help me, help me.'' Kate's father performed CPR until the paramedics arrived and took her to the hospital, where she fought for her life but ultimately passed away. Her death was at the hands of Francisco Sanchez, an illegal alien with seven felony convictions who had been deported to Mexico at least six separate times, most recently in 2009. According to information obtained by my office, this individual's criminal history includes multiple criminal convictions and lengthy Federal and State prison sentences dating back to 1991, including felony heroin possession, felony manufacture of narcotics, revoked probation, and at least four convictions for illegal reentry after deportation, among others. In an interview with local media, this individual admitted to shooting Kate. In the same interview, the individual stated that he repeatedly returned to San Francisco because he knew San Francisco was a sanctuary city where he would not be pursued by immigration officials. Make no mistake--in essence, that is what a sanctuary city is. Not only do they not honor detainers--the basic law enforcement requirement between jurisdictions--but they send a signal that ``No matter whether you are legal or illegal, you are safe in our city, and we will do nothing to facilitate your apprehension for violations of law.'' Despite this extensive criminal history of approximately six prior deportations and no obligation to release this individual to local custody in San Francisco--a jurisdiction that is known to release illegal immigrants back into the public--Federal authorities turned this individual over to San Francisco on March 26. I question whether the Federal Government should have ever turned him over to San Francisco. Perhaps they should have deported him on the spot. But, courtesy says, San Francisco indicated they had another criminal charge and they turned him over. The charge apparently was for distribution of a controlled substance. On April 15, for reasons which at this point are unclear, this individual was released from San Francisco County Jail--an action that led directly to the death of Kate Steinle on July 1. So San Francisco filed a detainer with the Bureau of Prisons, which had this individual in custody, and the Bureau of Prisons dutifully-- according to, it appears, normal procedures--turned him over to San Francisco for processing of San Francisco's criminal charge. Then, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, doing its job, filed their detainer with San Francisco in effect saying: San Francisco, when you finish handling this case, he is ours to be deported. Being a sanctuary city, however, San Francisco did not honor it. Notably, within the same 24-hour period, across the country in another sanctuary jurisdiction--Laredo, TX--Angelica Martinez was brutally murdered with a hammer by her husband, Juan Francisco De Luna Vasquez, an illegal alien. He had been deported from the United States four times. Local police said this was the third violent encounter between this couple and that Vasquez had also had a previous driving- while-intoxicated charge and a charge for evading arrest. As a sanctuary city, Laredo refused to even tell the Department of Homeland Security of the arrest and denied Homeland Security the ability to file a detainer with their jurisdiction. They just denied it. These cases, colleagues, highlight the tragic and completely avoidable consequences of sanctuary jurisdiction policies. Indeed, if not for sanctuary cities and the Obama administration's continued destruction in other areas of immigration enforcement, Kate and others surely would be alive today. Her death could have been prevented, but the extreme open borders ideology that rejects even the deportation of criminals--that is, people who commit crimes other than the crime of entering the country illegally--led to her death, as it has led to the death of many others. Although sanctuary jurisdictions are not a recent development, they have been allowed to flourish under this administration. Let me repeat that. This administration has allowed sanctuary cities to flourish. On a few occasions, officials in the government have complained, once about Chicago, Cook County, but no action was ever taken to pressure Cook County to change. The administration has not only refused to stop cities from acting in this way but has emboldened them with this systematic dismantling of immigration enforcement. In fact, while this administration has taken legal action against State and local jurisdictions that have simply attempted to help the Federal Government enforce our immigration laws, they sued them to block their efforts to enforce the law or help the Federal Government enforce the law--States and counties which have never attempted to deport people, but they have taken efforts when they capture somebody for a crime or for a DUI and find out they are illegally in the country--they would like to be able to turn them over to the Federal Government in some fashion so they can be deported. This has been resisted by the Federal Government, unfortunately. In 2010, the Federal Government openly announced it would not undertake any legal action against sanctuary jurisdictions for refusing to cooperate with the enforcement of our immigration laws. Thus, while it had the time and resources to sue States like Arizona and litigate such cases all the way to the Supreme Court, this administration has not spent a dime to take similar actions against sanctuary jurisdictions around the country, and the administration was well aware of the dangers posed by these policies. Former ICE Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Gary Mead said that sanctuary cities--and in particular Cook County, IL--were ``an accident waiting to happen.'' That was obviously a sound prediction, and we have seen the tragic results. Not only has the government failed to stand up to sanctuary jurisdictions, but two days ago--the White House is now claiming that if Congress had just passed the Gang of 8 bill, the comprehensive amnesty bill, then this would never have happened. But the Gang of 8 bill the President pushed so hard for would have dramatically increased incidents of criminal alien violence, officially legalizing dangerous offenders while handcuffing immigration officers from doing their jobs. Law enforcement professionals told us the Gang of 8 bill would have undermined the rule of law in America, not strengthened it. These are the people who know. Chris Crane and Ken Palinkas, presidents of the National ICE Council that represents all ICE officers, and the USCIS union, respectively-- these two leaders of these two important organizations issued a statement on behalf of their officers--the key officers who enforce immigration law in America. This is what our Federal law officers had to say about the President's idea that the Gang of 8 bill would fix these kinds of problems: The [Gang of Eight] proposal will make Americans less safe and it will ensure more illegal immigration--especially visa overstays--in the future. It provides legalization for thousands of dangerous criminals while making it more difficult for our officers to identify public safety and national security threats. . . . They go on to say: The legislation was guided from the beginning by anti- enforcement special interests and, should it become law, will have the desired effects of these groups: Blocking immigration enforcement. . . . They go on to say: [It is an] anti-public safety bill and an anti-law enforcement bill. Imagine if the country's chief law enforcement officer--that is, the President of the United States--had spent that year trying to end sanctuary cities and deport criminal aliens and enforce the laws of the United States instead of trying to empower open borders activists and fighting against law enforcement and refusing to enforce whole sections of plain law through his Executive amnesty what could have been done to end unlawfulness in this country and turn this country around. Just to show how deep the disagreement was between the Federal law officers and their supervisors--their politically-appointed supervisors--they actually filed a lawsuit in Federal court contending that their superiors were ordering them to violate their oath to enforce the laws of the United States. They sought relief in the Federal court. The district judge found merit in their claims, but ruled against them on a procedural issue. That case is now before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. It is an incredible spectacle that law enforcement officers were suing their supervisors--the political appointees of the President-- because they were being ordered to violate the plain law they had sworn to uphold. It is time to get our priorities straight. We need immigration reform all right but reform that serves the interests of the American people-- not international corporations, not anti-enforcement zealots, not the open borders lobby. They don't get to dictate to America how laws should be enforced. Immigration reform should mean improving immigration controls, not further weakening or eliminating them. Just yesterday it was reported that a six-time deported illegal alien in Arizona was charged in a felony hit-and-run of a mother and her two young children who were seriously injured in the crash--six times deported, he returns. When they return, do they not go to jail? Are we just going to continue to deport them time after time with no real consequence? Mr. President, 121 homicides have been committed by aliens who were released from ICE custody over the last few years. People who were released after being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, illegally here--not deported but were released--have murdered 121 people. So over 170,000 criminal aliens with final orders of removal are walking our streets. ICE releases tens of thousands of criminal aliens every year into our communities. The policies of this administration have effectively nullified law in a host of areas. That is plain fact. I have talked to the officers personally. I know what the policies are. I know the effects of these policies are exactly what the administration wanted, exactly what the special interests wanted, exactly what the ACLU wanted, exactly what La Raza wanted. That is what they have been asking for. That is what this administration has delivered. Now, when a murder occurs which becomes national news, they say that it is not our fault; it is Congress's fault. These actions have effectively nullified plain law. George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley--who supported President Obama's reelection--has documented that. These are facts. The number of acceptable crimes committed by illegal aliens is zero. Congress must take action now to protect all Americans, including the millions of dutiful immigrants who are in our country, many of them in high-crime areas, to protect them from criminal gangs and violent offenders. Just recently, I, along with Senators Vitter, Perdue, Cotton, Inhofe, and Boozman, introduced the Michael Davis, Jr. and Danny Oliver in Honor of State and Local Law Enforcement Act, a bill named for two sheriff's deputies in California who were murdered by an illegal alien with an extensive criminal record, and, I thought, three deportations. Talking to the widows of these officers recently, I am told that he may have been deported four times--and had an extensive criminal record. So this bill is a companion to the House bill introduced earlier this year by the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security Trey Gowdy. It is a good bill. Our bill is similar. In addition to enhancing cooperation with States and local law enforcement and eliminating loopholes that allow criminal aliens to obtain immigration benefits, this bill would constitute a clear, strong, and responsible response to sanctuary jurisdictions and other government actions. Specifically, it would withhold Federal funding from sanctuary jurisdictions that do not cooperate with the enforcement of Federal immigration laws or do not honor Federal immigration detainers, provide immunity to jurisdictions that honor detainers and hold aliens until ICE can pick them up, and provide a general sense of Congress that ``the Department of Homeland Security has probable cause to believe that an alien is inadmissible or deportable when it issues a detainer'' for an alien. That would clear up one of the loopholes being cited here to excuse some of these actions. By the way, I believe it is 300 sanctuary cities and counties in the country out of 17,000 or so law enforcement jurisdictions. Some of them are quite large cities: Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles. The passage of these sections alone could do more to combat sanctuary jurisdictions and protect the people of those communities and really the country from criminal aliens than what this administration has accomplished in the 7 years or so it has been in office. It is time for Congress to make its first item of business the immediate passage of legislation to cut off Federal law enforcement moneys to sanctuary cities. Not one more parent should lose a son or daughter because American cities are harboring criminals. In any State--like mine, I was attorney general of Alabama--one jurisdiction is prosecuting a person for a crime, and when that is completed and another one has a warrant against them, they file a detainer. When you are finished with the criminal, he is sent back, whether he is acquitted or whether he is convicted. This is basic law enforcement. It goes on in every jurisdiction in this country. The Federal Government holds people for State jurisdictions and the State jurisdictions hold people for the Federal Government. I was a Federal prosecutor for 12 years. It is done all the time. It is shocking to me--absolutely shocking--that a great city of the United States of America would not honor a detainer by the U.S. Government. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should not second- guess why it is issued or not. It is up to that jurisdiction to try or acquit or treat responsibly the person they are now prepared to release to them. To ignore that is a breach of the most fundamental relationships between Federal law enforcement, and it is done for political reasons by political mayors, generally, and city councils to try to win votes, I suppose. It has no principle in fact. I am also calling on Congress to move toward a series of measures, whether as stand-alone bills, in appropriations measures or in any other planned legislation, to establish immigration reforms that serve the interests of all lawful residents of the United States living here today. These are some things we need to do: End the release of criminal aliens from Federal custody. We cannot just let them go after having been convicted of a crime. They need to be deported. The law says they shall be deported. It has been ignored. Cut off visas to foreign countries that will not repatriate their aliens. It is an absolute outrage that countries like China refuse to take back people who are lawfully deported by the United States. Yet they want us to give visas to them. We should cut off funding. We should cut off their visas until they agree to promptly take back these individuals. That is the whole basis of international visa law. All nations know that. Most nations take their nationals back promptly. This refusal by these countries backs up our system, costs us millions of dollars in housing, and all kinds of other additional problems. It needs to end. We can end it just like that if the President would take action. The law requires it. The President doesn't really need a law to fix that one. Suspend visas to countries with high overstay rates. Some of these countries have this huge number that get a visa and never return home and they reach these higher rates. We don't have to keep giving visas to countries whose residents don't return like they are supposed to and at the time they are supposed to. We need to close the asylum loopholes and eliminate fraud. This is a huge issue and can be greatly abused. We need to end the catch and release at the border with mandatory detention and repatriation for illegal border crossers. This administration has ended Operation Streamline, which is a very effective policy. It started during the Bush administration and was continued for a while under President Obama. Now they have undermined that. We need to protect the work site with E-Verify. If a person can't establish they are here lawfully with a lawful Social Security number, they don't need to be employed. We need to curtail an oversupply of foreign work visas to protect American jobs first. The only immigration measures politicians should be discussing today are those that protect Americans, that protect American security and safety and American jobs and American communities. More than enough has been done for the special interests. They have had their day. They had their day too long. Whether we are talking about employees at Walt Disney in Florida, unemployed construction workers in California or truck drivers in North Dakota, it is time for the needs of Americans who are out of work to come first. We don't have enough jobs for Americans. We don't need to bring in more foreign workers. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Perdue. The Senator's time has expired.

Mr. SESSIONS. I am sorry, Mr. President. I ask unanimous consent for one additional minute to wrap up.

Mr. SESSIONS. There is no more basic need than ensuring that all Americans live in a safe, secure, and peaceful community. I believe the legislation I have offered will take us in that direction. It is sound. It is responsible. It is consistent with American law. It is well within all of the constitutional requirements. I hope my colleagues will be able to study it as time goes by and pass it into law. 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, I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for up to 1 hour.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Chair.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I believe we are moving to a very important debate in the next week as the Senate moves forward with legislation passed by the House of Representatives today that would advance trade promotion authority. Trade promotion authority is a delegation by the U.S. Congress to the President of the United States, the Chief Executive--power that Congress has--authorizing and directing that the President go forward to negotiate a trade agreement. This trade agreement would then be brought back to the Congress and, through legislation, would be implemented. But the trade agreement would never be subject to full evaluation, full debate under the normal processes of Congress, nor would it be subject to any amendment. Indeed, if the trade promotion authority passes the Senate--maybe next week--this legislation, this trade agreement would be fast-tracked. That is why they call it a fast-track agreement. The fast-track would mean that the treaty--they call it ``agreement'' to avoid the fact that a treaty requires a two-thirds vote--that this trade agreement would be brought up so that Congress--it would be on the floor for 20 hours, it would be subject to no amendment, and it would be voted on, up or down. It would be filed, for example, at 4 o'clock on a Monday afternoon and voted on final passage the next day at noon. That is the kind of situation we are faced with. Fast-track has been used for a number of years, a number of times, but it has always been focused on trade--what the tariff rates might be between trading partners, details of trade agreements and definitions and those kinds of things. But this agreement is far more extensive. It is more extensive in the size and the scope of the trade agreement, the number of nations, and the fact that it would cover--if the Atlantic agreement is also approved--75 percent of the world's economy. But even more significant to me is that it creates something that is a nontrading entity, a commission, a transpacific international commission. This commission will meet regularly. It will be created by legislation with certain rules. But according to the Trade Representative who is negotiating in advance of this legislation on behalf of President Obama and who is advocating for it, it will be a living agreement. That means the entity itself, the commission, will then be entitled to make the TPP say different things, eliminate provisions it does not like, and add provisions it does like. In fact, the commission is required to meet regularly and to hear advice for changes from outside groups and from inside committees of the commission so that they can update the situation to change circumstances. It is a breathtaking event. It says it is designed to promote the international movement of people, services, and products--basically the same language used to start the European Union. In fact, I have referred to it as a nascent European Union. I do not think that is far off base. So we will have 12 Pacific nations come together in this agreement. Well, the trade agreement, I would suggest, colleagues, is not that big of a deal--a part of it. We have free-trade agreements with big nations, such as Canada, Australia, Mexico, Chile. The negotiations-- really have an impact with two nations of significance: Japan and Vietnam. Why we can't negotiate trade agreements with them in a bilateral fashion? I don't know. Why do we have to create a transnational union, an institution that has the power, as I will explain, to impact the laws of the United States of America? It is not necessary. I voted for--it has not worked as well as we were told it would work, but I voted for the last bilateral agreement with South Korea. South Korea, like Japan, is our good friend. We do not have any fundamental disagreements with them. They are part of the civilized world and so forth. But they have a different view of trade than we have. They are mercantile. They have to be approached and considered in a different way. They just approach trade differently. They believe manufacturing and exports mean power. An actual study has shown not too long ago that mercantilism has enhanced their power. A nation with trading deficits like the United States has had their power diminished as their trade deficits have accrued. So some of our colleagues reject mercantilism. It is not healthy to trade for sure. We would like to see it go away. But it is our trading partner's policy. We have to deal with that reality when we negotiate agreements. So what I will say, colleagues, is that this is a significant event. I see no reason that when we are attempting to create a trade agreement, it can't be like South Korea in 2012. Why do we have to create an entirely new transnational union with the power where each nation has one vote? The Sultan of Brunei--Brunei is one of the countries, one of the 12--the Sultan of Brunei gets one vote, and the President of the United States gets one vote it appears, although from my reading of the document it is difficult to fully understand what they mean. I would say, at the most fundamental level, this Congress should not fast-track any transnational union of which we are a part until we understand every word in it, we know exactly what it means, and the President can answer. I have asked questions. I have asked him what it means--the living agreement language--in a letter. No answer. I asked the President of the United States: Do you contend this agreement will reduce the big trade deficit we have or will it increase the trade deficit? They don't answer. The only thing advocates for this treaty say is that it will advance or enhance employment in the exporting industry. That is the only statement they have made. Why are they being careful about that? I have listened to them. No one has ever said much more than that. Well, in 2011, the President of the United States asserted, when he was promoting the trade agreement with South Korea--this was his statement: We don't simply want to be an economy that consumes other country's goods. We want to be building and exporting the goods that create jobs here in America . . . Well, I agree with that. I think we do need to focus on that. We have a sustained trade deficit, we have a sustained decline in American manufacturing, and we have seen the wages of America's middle class decline for over a decade--since 2000. We have not had increases in wages but a decline in wages. Part of that is because of a decline in manufacturing, which is where higher wages are paid. So this is what the President said with regard to the Korea Free Trade Agreement in his announcement back in 2011: ``I'm interested in agreements that increase jobs and exports for the American people.'' Well, I am, too. Well, what do we know about the Korea trade agreement? Did it work? President Obama said this at that announcement. I hate to recall what he said, but this is what the promise was when he made this announcement. This is the President's statement that he personally delivered: ``In short, the tariff reductions in this agreement alone are expected to boost annual exports of American goods by up to $11 billion.'' Annual exports would be increased by $11 billion: ``This would advance my goal of doubling U.S. exports over the next 5 years.'' So what happened after the trade agreement was signed? We have had less than $1 billion in 3 years in export increases to South Korea. They have had a $12 billion increase in imports to the United States, virtually doubling the trade deficit that was already large between our countries. This is a chart which shows how that worked. This black line is when the treaty was signed. This is the trade deficit we have been running with South Korea. This is zero. These are the deficits we have been running. Then when the treaty was signed--the agreement was signed--we had a marked decline in exports. I wish it were not so. I voted for it. I bought into free trade and drank the free trade Kool-Aid. But did it work? I have to say it hasn't worked yet. The reason? Mr. Clyde Prestowitz, who was a trade negotiator for President Reagan with the Pacific and with Japan in the 1980s, said: They have nontariff barriers. They have a mercantilist philosophy, and their philosophy is to buy the least possible from abroad, make everything they can possibly make at home, and export as much as possible, creating jobs in their country, creating surpluses in trade, creating wealth, they believe, and also creating power. So I am concerned about this. I would just contend that we do not need to be listening to Pollyannaish promises that these trade agreements are going to be so great for working Americans. They have not been doing so well, in my opinion. In fact, Mr. Prestowitz, whom I just mentioned, wrote a book on trade. In January of this year, he wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in which he said this. Instead of saying that we are going to have a $10 billion increase annually in exports, let's look at the facts. This is Mr. Prestowitz: Over the last 35 years, the U.S. has brought China into the World Trade Organization and concluded many free-trade agreements, including one with South Korea three years ago. In advance of each, U.S. leaders promised the deals would create high-paying jobs, reduce the trade deficit, increase [gross domestic product] and raise living standards. But none of these came true. In fact, the U.S. non-oil trade deficit continued to grow, millions of jobs are offshored and mean household income has hardly risen since 2000. And economists overwhelmingly agree that rising U.S. income inequality is being driven in part by international trade. That is President Reagan's adviser, a student of these issues who knows the Pacific well, who has written a book on trade and documents-- contrary to what some people say--that for the first 150 years of our country we had high tariffs on products imported. Now, I believe we should eliminate tariffs. I believe we should move to trade, and I have supported that over the years. But I just have to say I am less convinced that in a world where our partners aren't operating on the same policies we operate on, we have to be careful about these agreements. What our trading partners want, in substance, is access to the U.S. market, access so they can sell their products in the U.S. market and bring home wealth to their countries. That is their goal. It just is. That is the way they approach life. We want access to their markets. There is nothing wrong with that. That is just what the world is about, and we are not negotiating very effectively. So many of these countries have nontariff barriers that cause difficult problems in trade. And we reduce our tariff barriers and we have virtually no other barriers to the sale of foreign products in the United States, while we are not able to export competitive products abroad because of their nontariff barriers or even sometimes their tariff barriers. I just wish to say at the beginning that I am not of the view that we have to have a trade agreement passed this week and as part of it that we have to pass some union with 12 countries each having one vote. I don't see that has to be done. If we don't sign a trade agreement that affects Japan or Vietnam today, what, is the world going to collapse? We have been getting along without it for decades, apparently, maybe since the beginning of the history of the Republic. So I would say let's slow down, and I say we have to focus more effectively on what is good for America. Fast-track is a decision by Congress to suspend several of its most basic powers for 6 years, and any treaty that is created in the next 6 years can take advantage of fast-track, be brought directly to the floor, and be passed on a simple majority in the House and the Senate without an amendment. One of my Republican colleagues said: Oh, well, we will have a Republican President, and we can really put up some good trade bills. Who knows who is going to be elected President next year. Who knows if the President, if he is a Republican, will send up a good trade bill. Congress has its duty to respond and study trade agreements and cast a knowledgeable vote on it. I don't think Congress, in this instance, should give up its procedural processes for passing any important legislation. I think a decision of the magnitude we are dealing with deserves the most careful scrutiny. This is not a trade agreement with one friend and ally, South Korea, it includes 12 nations in the Pacific. As soon as that is inked, we have been told--and brought forward for passage in the Congress--and, historically, if we get trade promotion authority, the agreements that are presented have always passed. Once that is said and done, we will begin to debate the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP. This transatlantic agreement, I suppose, will also have some sort of commission, a transatlantic union with powers that discipline and set rules outside the powers of the Congress. Then there is going to be a services agreement that has already been talked about. It has been leaked. Somebody leaked this. The other two are secret and cannot be seen by the American people. So this services agreement has 10 pages on immigration. They are going to fast-track through changes in our immigration law. It is a very serious matter. We have other issues out there like environmental law--that I will mention in a minute--that absolutely the President intends to advance through this trade agreement. So those are three major treaties, and those treaties would impact 75 percent of the GDP of America, but that is not all. For the next 6 years, any other treaty can be advanced in this same way. Presumably, three or four countries could get together and agree on some environmental regulation, and it could be advanced as some trade agreement in a fast-track procedure through Congress. So I think the burden of proof rests on the promoters of fast-track to demonstrate why three-fifths of the Senate shouldn't be required to agree, since this is so akin to a treaty, and/or advance this contrary to the proceedings of Congress. Some of my colleagues have been saying that the trade promotion authority, which the President is so desperately seeking--he has been hammering and bludgeoning his Members in the Senate and the House to get them to not vote their conscience but vote with what he wants--they say we should pass it because it restricts the power of the President. Well, give me a break. If this were true, why would the President want it? If he could do all he wants to do without Congress, why isn't he doing it anyway? The entire purpose of fast-track is for Congress to surrender its power to the executive branch for 6 years. Legislative concessions include control over the content of the legislation. The President negotiates it, he brings it back, we can't amend it. He controls the content on it, the power to fully consider the legislation on the floor. It is filed on one day and voted the next day. The power to keep debate open until Senate cloture is invoked--on any other legislation, you have to get a cloture vote. We couldn't get cloture on the Defense bill today. The Democrats refused to give 60 votes to pass the bill that appropriates the funds to defend America, but the President would be able to bring up this bill with a simple majority and no ability for extended debate that the Senate is famous for, and there is the constitutional requirement that a treaty receives a two-thirds vote. When you are creating an international union, I mean, this crosses the line. May be someone can technically say that somehow this is an agreement and not a treaty. I don't know, lawyers could perhaps disagree, but Congress should assert its power. We should say: Mr. President, we have seen you operate. We are not going to authorize you to enter into the creation of an international union where you get to impose additional powers on us without creating it through the treaty process. The legislation, finally, is not amendable, which is exceedingly unusual. So without fast-track, Congress retains all its legislative powers. Individual Members retain all their procedural tools, and every single line of trade text is publically available before any action is taken to grease the skids for its final passage. I think that is the important issue. What about this union. What kind of powers is it that we are talking about? I am of the belief that the President hasn't been a strong advocate of trade. His supporters, many of them oppose this kind of trade agreement. I am coming to believe the primary part of his understanding of the importance of this legislation, and why he is breaking arms and heads over it, is the union, this international commission that has powers that he believes will allow him to advance agendas. I don't say that conspiratorially. I will explain in a moment that clearly seems to be one of the incentives this President has to advance this legislation. In a Ways and Means House document on a new Pacific union being formed by President Obama, a committee in the House hints at some of this union's power, this international commission on trade: If a proposed change to a trade agreement is contemplated [by the TPP Commission] that would require a change in U.S. law, all of TPA's congressional notification, consultation, and transparency requirements would apply. In other words, Ways and Means is intimating that this new secret Pacific union would function like a third House of Congress, with legislative primacy, the ability to advance legislation, sending changes to the House and Senate under fast-track procedures--receiving less procedure, for example, than post office reform. Further, this legislative fast-track, Ways and Means implies, is a change in U.S. law, meaning that if this President or the next argues it is simply an Executive action, not a legal action, the Executive would have a free hand to implement any agreement the Commission creates without any approval of Congress. Well, he said he wouldn't do that. Did you see where people who were unlawfully in the country were given a photo ID card by the President of the United States, were given a Social Security number, and it says on the card ``work authorization,'' when the law says if you are in the country illegally you cannot have a Social Security number. He did that. He made a recess appointment in blatant violation of a definition of what a recess is. It took 2 or 3 years for the Congress to take it to the Supreme Court, and in a unanimous 9-to-0 ruling, the Supreme Court overturned it. So to say the President will not push his powers is naive indeed. How do you stop it? Do you file a lawsuit to say the President shouldn't have agreed to the Pacific Commission? Now a whole government bureaucracy is carrying out some global warming, some immigration, some trade issues that Congress opposes. Is a President capable of doing something like that, actually carrying out ideas and policies that Congress doesn't approve of. Absolutely. We have seen it time and again. So this is not merely a loophole, it is a purposeful delegation of congressional authority to the Executive and to an international body. We should understand what we are doing. Not enough of our people have read some agreement and fully understand. The fast-track-implementing legislation would have the ability to make these binding delegations binding as a matter of law, it seems to me. Well, maybe not. It probably wouldn't work that way. I don't think it works that way. Look, that is why I wrote the President and I said: Mr. President, make this part of the proposed TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership public. Let's have the lawyers study it. You explain to us exactly what these words mean--which he has refused to do. As a matter of fact, I don't think the American people have fully grasped that this is not a normal trade agreement but that it is the creation of an international entity. Amendments to specify Congress retains exclusive legislative authority and to actively prohibit foreign worker increases were blocked by the fast-track supporters. I offered legislation that would make clear that the President couldn't alter the constitutionally exclusive power of Congress over immigration, and they refused to give us a vote. It is not in the bill. Why not? I said: Well, we are not going to change immigration law. Some administration underlings say that. They don't have the power to bind the President. They are not lawyers, perhaps. They don't know what the words mean. The President of the United States hasn't said it publically, neither has his Trade Representative. He has come close, but if you read his words, you will see that they were clever words, in my opinion, with little meaning. Fast-track supporters have tried to temper concerns about the formation of this transnational union and the subsequent Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP, and the Trade in Services Agreement, TISA, that would be approved through fast-track by adding additional negotiating objectives via a separate Customs bill. However, negotiation objectives are, by design, not explicit or realistically enforceable. They include such vague language as saying it must be the goal of the White House ``to ensure that trade agreements reflect and facilitate the increasingly interrelated, multi- sectoral nature of trade and investment activity.'' Those are the kinds of things in this language. That is not enforceable and has virtually no meaning. One of the vague goals is ``to recognize the growing significance of the Internet as a trading platform in international commerce.'' What does that mean? Under the Ways and Means solution, TPP, TTIP, and TISA would establish broad goals for labor mobility--immigration--allowing Ways and Means to say their negotiating objective, about requiring or obligating certain changes, had not been violated. And the President would then implement those changes through Executive action or as a result of fast-track where the laws have changed. So, together, TPP, TTIP, and TISA--these three trade agreements which we know are going to be advanced under fast-track--represent the goal of advancing the unrestricted global movement of goods and people and services. The European Commission--this is how they started, how they were formed. In explaining TISA--presumably the second major trade agreement that would be submitted after the Pacific agreement and we move to trade in services--this is how the European Commission explains what it means: TISA is open to all WTO members who want to open up trade in services. China and Uruguay have asked to join the talks. The EU supports their applications-- The EU supports their applications because it wants as many countries as possible to join the agreement. TISA, of course, is the services agreement, and it will be worldwide. Anybody--even China--could be admitted to it. And the European Union Commission specifies that this services agreement, TISA, will be modeled on the General Agreement on Trade in Services, GATS. This provides insight into how TISA will affect U.S. immigration procedures. When the United States became a member of the WTO in 1994, it signed on to the GATS and committed to issue certain numbers of work visas each year, immigration visas. Congress's ability to control the U.S. temporary entry programs has therefore been curtailed, as it would open up the United States to foreign lawsuits in an international tribunal. In other words, they made an agreement on immigration visas under work ideas as part of GATS in the WTO, and it violates and complicates our ability to enforce American immigration law. But if we enforce the law the way it is written, then we will get disciplined by the foreign body. So when we sign up to a foreign body, we agree to rules. They say we have to do this. So it is not being enforced. So who wrote the law for the United States of America with regard to immigration? Under the Constitution, it is Congress, but in reality, once you join an international union, they have certain powers to enforce their will over the elected representatives, the accountable representatives of the people of the United States, and some other group does it. TISA--this services agreement--will, as the European Union suggests, require the United States to make additional legislative commitments on a much larger scale. Do we understand that? When people are voting for this trade agreement, this Pacific trade agreement, do we understand that we are opening up a mechanism for the services agreement and for the Atlantic agreement and perhaps another commission for the Atlantic? Will there be a commission set up under the TISA or TTIP bills? Do we know? Do we want to give a fast-track to grease the skids for the President to negotiate such a thing as this? I think not. The preamble to the South Korea Free Trade Agreement, for example, states that a principal goal of the agreement is to ``create new employment opportunities, and improve the general welfare . . . by liberalizing and expanding trade and investment between their territories.'' In announcing that agreement, President Obama said: Because we don't simply want to be an economy that consumes other countries' goods. We want to be building and exporting the goods that create jobs here in America and that keeps the United States competitive in the 21st century. That is what he said at that time. So for too long the United States has entered into trade deals on the promise of economic bounty, only to see workers impoverished, industries disappear, and manufacturing jobs decline. And we have been on a steady decline in manufacturing jobs. Mr. Dan DiMicco, one of the great CEOs in America and chairman emeritus of Nucor Steel, has written about these issues recently. He explains that these deals haven't worked as they have been promised. They haven't been, he says, free-trade deals at all. Instead, they have been ``unilateral trade disarmament,'' where we lower our barriers to foreign imports but they retain their barriers to our exports. Mr. DiMicco calls this the ``enablement of foreign mercantilism.'' So consider this in the context of automobiles. In May, the Wall Street Journal--who is a free-trade entity for sure--published a news story about how the American auto sector could be jeopardized by the TPP. The Wall Street Journal wrote: In the transportation sector, led by cars, the TPP could boost imports by an extra $30.8 billion by 2025, compared with an exports gain to Japan of $7.8 billion, according to a study co-written by Peter Petri, professor of international finance at Brandeis University. I think that is exactly accurate. We are not going to have an increase in sales of automobiles in Japan. They have a 4 million automobile surplus capacity. They want to hire their people and they want to sell automobiles in Japan by producing automobiles in Japan, not by importing them. They are mercantilists in their approach. They have successfully resisted the penetration of their automobile market for decades, and it is not going to happen under this agreement. It is just not. But if we reduce our little 2.5 percent tariff on automobile imports to America, this, on the Japanese, has some sort of balancing effect for their failure to allow their markets to be open, and we will increase imports to the United States. I am not condemning Japan. I am just saying that is how they operate, and we need to understand that and be more effective in defending American interests. So what we hear from the promoters of this deal is ``We believe this trade deal will increase exports.'' Well, surely we will get some additional ability to sell products abroad. Surely the President can honestly say: If you sign the agreement with South Korea, well, we will have increased exports to South Korea. And we did--$800 million instead of the $11 billion he promised. So we got a little increase, but they got a $12 billion increase to the United States. And what did that do? That diminished manufacturing in the United States. Additionally, Clyde Prestowitz, who also served as trade negotiator under President Clinton in addition to President Reagan, offered this warning about the TPP: Two intertwined elements pose a virtually insuperable barrier to mass market auto imports in Japan. First, Japan's capacity for vehicle production is 13 million. Annual domestic sales are 4 million and exports are another 5 million. That leaves 4 million vehicles equivalent of excess capacity that constitutes a heavy cost burden on the Japanese automobile industry. In the face of this, neither the Japanese industry nor the Japanese Government will want to make life easier for imports. The second structural element is auto dealerships. By law U.S. dealers are independent of the automakers and are free to sell any brand they wish. Exporters to the United States thus find it easy to achieve national distribution of their vehicles. Not so in Japan where the automakers effectively control the dealers. And that is the big automobile manufacturing companies. I don't think anybody will dispute that. The essence of what he is saying is that we are really not going to gain market share in Japan, while they are going to gain market share in the United States. So that is why people would like to see tougher, more vigorous negotiation of trade agreements. Then there is the issue of currency manipulation. The President has made clear that he has no intention of enforcing currency manipulation, which can easily dwarf the impact of tariffs. A former Federal Reserve Chairman, a number of years ago--a great Chairman--said currency manipulation can dwarf the impact of tariffs. By manipulating their currency, our trading partners can artificially raise the price of our exports while lowering the price of their imports. This improper practice has resulted in closed plants, shuttered factories, and the shifting of U.S. jobs and wealth overseas. And China is a huge player in that. The middle class has shrunk 10 percentage points in the United States since 1970, and real hourly wages are lower today than they were more than four decades ago. That is hard to believe. The real hourly wages are lower than they were 40 years ago. The percentage of men age 25 to 54 not working was less than 6 percent in the late 1960s; it has nearly tripled to 16.5 percent. The labor force participation rate for women-- the percentage of women in their working years who are actually working--has fallen 3 full percentage points since 2009 alone. We can't keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. So last month, I sent a letter to the President asking how he planned to use fast-track authority and what it would mean for American workers. Those questions should not have been difficult to answer. These negotiators should have been having that on the front of their negotiating minds from the very beginning. They have been working on this agreement for years. Not one of these questions have been answered--not one. Nor have they been answered by anybody promoting fast-track. They won't answer these questions--the questions about the trade pact, the text of which remains confidential, locked downstairs in a secret room. This is a question I asked: Will it increase or reduce the trade deficit, and by how much? Shouldn't we know that? Shouldn't that be discussed? Shouldn't that be the first thing we discuss? Is this going to help the U.S. economy? No. 2, will it increase or reduce manufacturing employment and wages, including the auto sector, and accounting for jobs lost to imports? No answer. Shouldn't we know that? No. 3, will you make the ``living agreement'' section public and explain fully the implications of the new global governance authority known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Commission? Mr. President, shouldn't you tell us before we grease the skids to pass a new international commission? Shouldn't we know what it is about? Congress should just say no on this, colleagues. We don't have to advance fast-track. We ought to insist that at least this new Commission part be fully public. We want to study it before we agree to committing this great Nation to an entity that has very small nations with the same vote as we have. We asked: Will China be added to this Commission? No answer. In fact, they have hinted they could be added, and apparently the Commission can vote in new members without Congress voting on it. That looks to me to be pretty clear, from my reading of it. Will you pledge, we asked further, not to issue any Executive actions or enter into any future agreements impacting the flow of foreign workers into the United States? No answer. Not one of these questions has been answered. Yet they want us to shut off debate, limit congressional procedural power, and advance this legislation with no amendments. I don't see how anyone can say Congress is not entitled to have at least these questions answered. What about the American people? Shouldn't they know before their Members vote on whether it is going to improve their job prospects or reduce their job prospects, whether a new factory will be opened in Alabama or New Hampshire or closed? So we need to know about this. We must know what powers this Commission will have, and how the United States will be represented, how the votes will be counted, how the Commission will impact immigration, environment or patent law, and how Congress can deal with decisions of the Commission it doesn't like. The TPP is the agreement sitting in the basement room that lawmakers can go and read. It is the first secret fast-track agreement that would be put into effect. But the TPP is just the first of three colossal agreements. There are two more. Under what rationale should we in Congress acquiesce to such profound changes involving the global economy? We will be talking about it in light of the rules of a new trade agreement--a new agreement that could impact 70 to 75 percent of the world economy, and we haven't given it sufficient thought. Fast-track is an affirmative decision by the Congress of the United States to suspend several of Congress's most basic powers for the next 6 years and to delegate those powers to the Executive. A decision of this magnitude should only be based upon the most thorough debate, the most complete evidence, and the most compelling data provided by proponents on the key questions at stake. A burden of proof rests on the promoters of fast-track to compel three-fifths of the Senate to agree to give up these powers. Fast-track not only authorizes the President to enter the United States into Trans-Pacific Partnership but into an unlimited group of agreements and partnerships in the future. The President will sign these agreements before Congress votes on them. He will then deliver implementing legislation to Congress that overrides previous law of the United States. This implementing legislation cannot be amended, cannot be filibustered, cannot be debated more than 20 hours, and cannot be subjected to the two-thirds treaty vote in the Senate. Well, I have been analyzing and thinking about this Commission--this transpacific Union, it is fair to call it. This goes far beyond the normal trade agreement. While it appears to give some respect to our domestic law, this respect is undermined by the difference between the trade agreement--the TPP--and the implementing legislation. While a trade agreement alone may not trump U.S. law--although it could--the implementing legislation necessary for the trade agreement would. Indeed, the implementing legislation is law. And as the last-passed law of the United States, it overrules any previous laws with which it might conflict. Then it would appear that, by implementing the trade agreement, the trade agreement itself could have the impact of law. So we pass a law that says: Mr. President, we agree with this treaty. Not a treaty--they call this an agreement. We agree with this agreement, Congress said, and the President implements it. Does it then become superior to any law in the United States? I think a good argument can be made that it does. We need to know that absolutely. Certainly, the implementing law states that the Congress agrees that the United States will be bound by the obligations under the trade agreement. The President signs a trade agreement with 12 nations, and when we ratify that, we then say we agree. The United States is bound by these provisions. As part of the provisions we are bound by is a new commission--one nation, one vote. But there is a further danger. What happens if the Commission uses its living agreement powers--as it will--to alter the obligations under the agreement? The Commission is empowered then to change its rules, clearly, by the powers given it. Is the United States bound by new rules that we never saw but are passed by the 12 nations? What if President Obama or some other President has an agenda, and they all get together and pass it? Is the United States bound by it? Does Congress have no control over it? Well, we don't sufficiently know. That is why we ought not to be fast tracking an international agreement until we have had it made public and it is studied by good lawyers who understand these things. Is the United States bound by the new rules they have changed? Can they add new members to the Commission? There are provisions about how new members should be added in the document itself. Does it say the Congress has to vote to do that? Can China be admitted? How about this. Can this new 12-nation body adopt environmental regulations or adopt liberal immigration laws? We have discussed these things in Congress. Congress has rendered opinions and passed legislation and rejected legislation. Can this Commission pass things that impact and override the powers of Congress? President Obama has said that climate change is one of his--actually, I think he said it is his highest--priority. His Trade Representative has been open and frank about this. The Trade Representative has negotiated this treaty. I am going to talk about that in a minute. But some say: Jeff, you are wrong. But I don't think I am wrong. I think the issues I raised are very real, and I believe the concerns I raised may in fact be what this new treaty requires. I believe this is a plausible scenario. But if you don't agree, bring the thing out, lay it out, bring lawyers in here, bring trade people, and explain every provision of it. Before I am going to vote to fast-track it, count that down. Congress should never fast-track any agreement for any transnational union that has the power to bind this Nation. Goodness gracious, every word should be studied, and all consequences understood. A vote for fast-track is a vote to erase valuable procedural and substantive powers of Congress concerning a matter of utmost importance involving the very sovereignty of this Nation. Without any doubt, the creation of this living Commission, with all its powers, will erode the power of the American people to directly elect or dismiss from office the people who impact their lives. Do you remember that in England they woke up one morning and somebody in the European Union in Brussels had outlawed fox hunting? How did this happen? They said: Well, it started just like this. Well, you say: Jeff, this is an exaggeration. They wouldn't use the Pacific union to advance political agendas outside of trade, tariffs, and those kinds of things. Well, let's look. This is an article in the American Thinker, ``Fast Tracking an International EPA,'' by Howard Richman, Raymond Richman, and Jesse Richman. They are professors, I think, all three. But this is on the Web site. This is a statement by Mr. Froman, President Obama's Trade Representative. He laid out environmental protection as President Obama's bottom line in trade negotiations--environmental protection. This is a quote from the Trade Representative: The United States' position on the environment in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations is this: Environment stewardship is a core American value, and we will insist on a robust, fully enforceable environment chapter in the TPP or we will not come to agreement. If they reach an agreement on the environmental issues that Congress won't pass, what happens then? The President signs off on it, votes for it, and then we will be disciplined by this Commission for failure to abide by the rules of the Commission. His Trade Representative--I believe this is Mr. Froman--continues: Our proposals in the TPP are centered around the enforcement of environmental laws. . . . Let me repeat that: Our proposals in the TPP are centered around the enforcement of environmental laws, including those implementing multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) in TPP partner countries, and also around trailblazing, first- ever conservation proposals that will raise standards across the region. Furthermore, our proposals would enhance international cooperation and create new opportunities for public participation in environmental governance and enforcement. Well, that is a powerful statement. So there is no doubt that this President is intent on utilizing this agreement to drive his environmental agenda, whether the Congress or the American people agree with it or not. He is not bringing it up to the floor of the Senate, because Democrats and Republicans have no intention of passing his environmental agenda. I am not worried. This is the President's top negotiator on this trade agreement. Mr. Joshua Meltzer at the Brookings Institute said this: As a twenty-first-century trade agreement, the Trans- Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) presents an important opportunity to address a range of environment issues, from illegal logging to climate change and to craft rules that strike an appropriate balance between supporting open trade and ensuring governments can respond to pressing environmental issues. Ensuring that governments respond to pressing environmental issues. Who is going to ensure? Who has the power to ensure that the United States meets some environmental standard somebody somewhere has set or even the President would like to see set? That is a serious matter. I don't think we should treat it lightly. I do believe that the American people are correct to be dubious about this trade agreement. Polling data, as I understand it, clearly shows that it is not supported by the American people. Yet forces are at work, breaking arms and breaking hands and bludgeoning people into acquiescence to vote for this thing. It cleared the House by the narrowest of margins. We had 62 votes when it passed through the Senate. They needed 60, and they got 62. The President was working, the Republican leaders were working, the chamber of commerce was working, Big Business was working, money was working and wheeling and dealing, and pork projects were promised, I am sure, to get the votes to pass this, to put it on a fast-track skid. I am against it. I believe I am speaking on behalf of the working people of the United States of America. I don't believe their interests are being properly considered. I am confident that if this agreement goes into effect, the trade deficit we have with Japan and with Vietnam will increase. Vietnam has 100 million people. We will not be much different with places such as Canada or Australia or Mexico because we basically have a free-trade agreement with them. So it is not necessary that we create some 12-nation entity, some commission. Why don't we just negotiate trade agreements that serve the interests of the American people with Japan and Vietnam and ensure exactly that they comply with what they say, that their markets are open to ours, as well as our markets are open to theirs? And we should have some reasonable expectation that if we enter into this agreement, it will be good for American workers, not just Japanese workers or workers in Vietnam. I don't say we shouldn't have a trade agreement. I am saying let's be more careful about it. Let's negotiate some trade agreements for a change that advance the interests of the United States. We need to reduce our trade deficits, not increase them. They are weakening our GDP. The deficit subtracts from the current account trade deficit, subtracts from our gross domestic product. It is not healthy for America to have this kind of deficit. One of the reports that was done lays out the argument that power comes from this mercantilist approach. The Richmans' and the American Thinker--I will quote a study, and it says this: To see if mercantilism works-- This is the exporting drive of our trading partners and competitors-- [the Richmans'] conducted a statistical study of 11,623 country-year observations for 186 countries from 1870 through 2007 using panel data models. The results: a strong statistically-significant correlation between balance of trade and national power. A favorable balance of trade is associated with an increase in power (national material capabilities), an unfavorable balance with a decrease. This is what China believes to the core. This is what most of the Asian countries believe and act on. And apparently the Richmans' conclude--an objective study--that it is accurate. I don't know. But those are the kinds of things we need to be careful about. They have two scenarios they have laid out based on this scenario. The first envisions 20 years of trade deficits at the rate of the trade deficit we ran in 2007. The second scenario envisions balanced trade, where we don't have a trade deficit. Under trade deficit, their definition of ``national power'' declined 28 percent. So the national power declined 28 percent. Under a balanced trade, our national power remains basically stable, increasing by one-half of 1 percent. I think balanced trade is certainly preferable. It is certainly preferable for working Americans. Mr. President, I thank the Chair for your patience and allowing me to share these remarks. It could be that I am wrong. Maybe trade deficits make no difference. Maybe the loss of manufacturing is offset by the fact that we get cheaper goods. That is what some of our people in the United States say. When somebody sends subsidized goods here and that closes the U.S. factory and people can purchase their goods for below cost, we should send those countries a thank-you note--no concern about the people who got laid off and the jobs lost. I am not sure that model is now appropriate. Maybe it was 20 years ago. I sort of believe that cheaper products was the ultimate goal and voted that way, but I am reevaluating it. I think this country needs to go through a serious evaluation of that, No. 1. Secondly, we absolutely--colleagues, we absolutely should not fast-track a movement to the establishment of an international commission or international union and maybe creating two more of them as part of two more trade agreements--the three trade agreements that will be part of fast-track if it passes. And, of course, any number of other trade agreements for the next 6 years could be accelerated through this fast-track process, if it passes. I yield the floor. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I rise to speak on my amendment No. 1706. This amendment addresses the contributions of the member states to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in relation to their commitment towards their defense budgets within their economy. At the 2006 NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, which I was honored to be able to attend, NATO member countries committed to spend a minimum of 2 percent of their national income, GDP, on defense. Furthermore, at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales, NATO member countries agreed again that ``allies currently meeting the NATO guideline to spend a minimum of 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense will aim to continue to do so''. They went on to state that ``allies whose current proportion of GDP spent on defense is below this level will: halt any decline in defense expenditure; aim to increase defense expenditure in real terms as GDP grows; aim to move towards the 2 percent guideline within a decade with a view to meeting their NATO Capability Targets and filling NATO's capability shortfall.'' Well, I suggest that is a pretty weak commitment, but it remains a commitment. It certainly can be stretched out, and they are already failing too often to meet those commitments. So, in 2015, only 4 this year--only 4 out of the 28 NATO-member countries, including the United States, meet the 2-percent target. That is 4 out of the 28. Regrettably, European NATO allies averaged just 1.33 percent of their GDP on defense, even though NATO countries have made numerous, unbinding, unfulfilled agreements to spend 2 percent. The United States currently spends 3.8 percent of its GDP on defense--a large portion of it defending Europe. So, in contrast, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data shows that European-NATO allies averaged 24 percent of their GDP on social welfare programs, contrasting to 19 percent in the United States. So they spend more in-country on their programs while we are spending more to defend them. Unfortunately, reductions in military spending are a common theme across Europe. Just 5 years ago, according to the NATO figures, France's military budget amounted to 2.4 percent of GDP. This past year, it stood at 1.9 percent, and France's budget law orders no increases before 2019. As for Germany, Europe's economic powerhouse, it spends only 1.3 percent of its GDP on defense. By the way, the European economy, as a whole, is as large or slightly larger than the U.S. economy as a whole. So in 1990, NATO's European member states spent, on average, about 2.3 percent GDP on defense--well above today's average of 1.3. America's share of NATO military expenditures--get this, colleagues--is 75 percent. The U.S. share of the NATO military expenditures is 75 percent and has grown an additional 5 percent since 2007. This is a rather dramatic figure. I had the privilege to be able to travel to Eastern Europe recently, and it was raised to us, by individuals in those countries, that they were somewhat embarrassed about this. But the reality is, they are taking no substantial steps to deal with it. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates--who is one of the most wise people in the world, I believe, in terms of U.S. policy and international policy, served in multiple administrations over the years in the White House and as Secretary of Defense under President Obama and President Bush--in his last speech as Secretary of Defense had the following to say on this matter: Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders--those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me--may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost. What I've sketched out is the real possibility for a dim, if not dismal future for the transatlantic alliance. Such a future is possible, but it is not inevitable. The good news is that the members of NATO--individually and collectively-- have it well within their means to halt and reverse these trends, and instead produce a very different future. This was his last speech. He made a speech on a subject he considered to be extraordinarily important. It is a statement he has made previously at other times, but it reflected, I think, something akin to Washington's Farewell Address as he raised and discussed one of the most important problems facing the world today; that is, the developed world, other than the United States, is not conducting itself financially in an effective way to defend themselves. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for decades one of the world's wisest world leaders and commentators, has repeatedly questioned Europe's will. It gets down to that level: To what extent is Europe willing to pay a modest price to maintain their security? There was a book out a number of years ago, referred to as ``Of Paradise and Power,'' and Robert Kagan's book notes that the Europeans are living in the paradise provided by American power. So when the Russians took this aggressive step to invade the Ukraine, a nation we have considered for admission into NATO, took Crimea and otherwise acted in violation of international law, we announced a European reassurance initiative, $1 billion. This $1 billion was to be utilized in a way that would reassure our allies and reaffirm our commitment to Europe, even in the face of this dangerous and provocative action by Russia. Well, colleagues, after having been to Europe and Eastern Europe on a number of occasions, I would say I am getting to the point where I want to be reassured. I want to have confidence in Europe's commitments. At this volatile time in world history, this lack of commitment on the part of our European allies must end. We need to ensure that NATO members are spending at least what is needed and certainly the minimum 2 percent of GDP they repeatedly committed to spend. The dangers in this world are much closer to Europe than they are to the United States, and our European allies are right to be concerned. They are anxious to have our presence. The requests for more and numerous military support, action from the United States, are even urgent in some of those countries. They want us there. But, great danger arises from Europe living in an unreal comfort zone, living in the paradise of American power. Unless the history of the world has been dramatically altered, and it has not, threats to Europe will remain. Who will resist the dangerous pressures on Europe? Will our European partners just rest on American power? That is what the reality suggests is, in fact, occurring now. Europeans now insist Greece must take painful financial steps for the good of the European Union to be a good team player, they say. I think it is right and appropriate for the United States to call on our NATO allies to do their part for this great alliance that has done so much for stability, prosperity, and peace for Europe and for the entire world. This amendment before the Senate has overwhelming support, I believe. I think it will be accepted as part of the managers' package. The call it makes on NATO members is the absolute minimum, I think, that can be expected of them. Let's consider the plain facts. The deployment of U.S. military forces to any nation in the world, for the purpose of defending that nation and a region, is an august thing. Obviously, the military might of the United States is unsurpassed. The United States cannot and must not take these commitments lightly. The ramifications of our commitment to the defense of a foreign nation are significant--grave indeed. This Nation has every right and a duty to our citizens to ensure that those with whom we partner do their share. The idea that a small nation can simply send an email to the United States calling for more forces whenever they become nervous--while taking only limited steps to fund and defend their own country--suggests a disconnect with reality. This Senate, by this amendment, is sending a clear call for NATO to do more. It is not too late to maintain this alliance as the force for good it has always been. But everyone on both sides of the Atlantic who understands these issues realizes we are in a precarious situation if a miscalculation occurs, and miscalculations can lead to violence and war. So it is time to make clear the strength of our commitment to each other and to ensure there is no miscalculation. To do that, more is required of our NATO allies. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask that I be notified after 7 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I start by saying Commander Pilcher is a fabulous naval officer. He is doing great work in our office as we deal with the defense issues in this country, and he has been of real assistance to us. I have to say that I am proud of him. He reflects well on the Navy and the people who defend this country every day. Amendment No. 1521 Mr. President, what is happening now is unfortunate. On the Defense bill that came out of the Armed Services Committee, of which I am a member, that ranking member Senator Reed and Senator McCain worked on, we have had virtually no significant disagreements except this one. What our Democratic colleagues are insisting upon, driven by the President and political interests, is that defense gets no increase in funding unless nondefense gets an increase in funding over the budget cap established by the Budget Control Act. In 2011, we passed the Budget Control Act. A part of that was the sequester, and it was not something that was never intended to occur, as some of my colleagues have claimed. It was in the law. They always say: Well, we never intended this to occur. Not so--we passed it into law. It said there would be a commission and the commission could look at entitlements and other things with the hope that we would come up with some way to save more money and put us on a sound financial path. They said if they did not come up with that agreement, then what we put in the law would take effect as limits on defense and nondefense discretionary spending. Under the Budget Control Act, next year will be the last year it holds those limits. It will be basically flat spending again this year, but it will increase thereafter at 2.5 percent a year. We are not destroying nondefense discretionary spending. Remember, this legislation was passed in 2011. That is the year President Obama said: Iraq is settled; we are going to pull all the troops out. Senator McCain pleaded with him not to do that. He said we could have danger in the future. He warned that if we did that, chaos could occur. But no, the President, to comply with his campaign promise, said we were pulling them all out. Unfortunately, Senator McCain was correct. We have ISIS. Iraq is in turmoil. The Syrian turmoil has gotten worse. Since 2011, Russia invaded Crimea. Yemen is in trouble. Iran is hardening its position with regard to nuclear weapons. Libya is experiencing serious problems. All of this, I suggest, was the result of an unwise, unclear, and weak foreign policy. Every one of those situations could be better today had we had clearer leadership and people that listened to someone such as Chairman McCain, who knew what he was talking about. But that is all water over the dam at this point. What do we do now? We have to have more money for defense. I am a budget hawk. I was ranking member on the budget when we did the 2011 cap and limit on spending. I defended it consistently. But I have to tell you, colleagues, both the President, our Democratic Members, and Republican Members believe we are going to have to increase our defense budget. What is the problem? The problem is our colleagues are saying: Well, you cannot increase defense unless you increase nondefense by the same amount. How silly is that? Imagine, you have a tight budget at home, and a tree falls on your house. Emergency--you have to go out and find money, borrow money to fix the roof. Does that mean now that you are going to spend twice as much on your vacation? Are you going to go out and buy a new car that you did not plan to buy because you had to spend more money to fix the house? How irresponsible is that? It is unbelievable to me. This is exactly what has occurred. They are demanding that we will not get a defense budget until we give more money for the nondefense account and spend above what we agreed to spend in the Budget Control Act. Remember, it will soon begin to grow at 2.5 percent a year. We have saved money through the Budget Control Act. It was a successful thing. We do not need to destroy it and give it up. I want to say that I wish we had not had these dangerous conditions erupt throughout much of the world. I wish it had not happened. Senator McCain warned that the foreign policy we were executing was going to result in just this kind of problem. But it has resulted, and we are going to have to defend our country. These are overseas contingency operations that we will be funding. If we do this, it does not mean we have to increase equally nondefense spending. Let me just repeat the bad news I think most of us know. Every penny increased on the defense budget is borrowed money. If we increase nondefense spending, that is going to be borrowed, too. We do not need to borrow more money than necessary. Just because we have to spend more on defense does not mean we have to spend more on nondefense. That is all I am saying. I think it is a mistake for our colleagues on the Democratic side to try to use the security of America as a leverage to demand more nondefense spending. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that CDR Eddie Pilcher, the defense legislative fellow assigned to my office, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the calendar year.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I want to express my appreciation to Senator McCain and Senator Jack Reed for their leadership on the Armed Services Committee. It is unusual, indeed, and good for the Republic that both of them are Academy graduates--though, the Navy and Army Academies sometimes can be quite competitive. They get along very well and respect each other, and the committee has done a very good job. I understand there is some concern by some of our Members concerning the desire to spend more on nondefense money and perhaps use this bill as a hostage to force the Congress to spend more money on other pieces of legislation. I think that would be a very grievous mistake. I have served on the Armed Services Committee now for 18 years, for quite a long time on the Budget Committee. I have spent a lot of time looking at the challenges we face. I think the world has changed since the Budget Control Act was passed in 2011. In 2011, the President told us: Don't worry. We are pulling everybody out of Iraq and there are not going to be any more problems in Iraq. He did not mention ISIS. In 2011, we did not have the Russian invasion of Crimea. We did not have the continued vicious, violent fight in Syria. We did not have the chaos that is happening in Libya. We did not have the threat to the Iraqi Government's existence--we thought it was on the right path. We did not have the problem in Yemen. So this is just a different world. Unfortunately, we are going to have to spend some more money for national defense. That is just the way it is. I am a budget hawk. I have looked at the numbers. We are going to have to spend some more money. However, what kind of argument can be made, that if you have to spend more on national defense--and we do have to make some tough choices on national defense--we have to spend more on nondefense? What kind of an argument is that, just for commonsense sake? If you were in a household budget and you had to spend more money on one item, you would probably spend less on the other items. So I would just say that the nondefense discretionary spending that some of my colleagues are insisting need more money before they would vote for the Defense bill, basically has flat funding this year. There is not a cut in nondefense spending. It grows the next 4, 5 years at 2.5 percent growth a year, which is faster than the economy has been growing, frankly. Last quarter the economy was negative. So we just have to understand that we cannot hold this bill hostage to that kind of argument. I believe we are on the right track with a good armed services bill, with very strong bipartisan support. Apparently, over this budget issue, we lost a few votes in the Committee, but it was a strong bipartisan vote for the bill. As far as I can tell, there are few, if any, big differences on any provisions that are in the bill. So that is good. I think America is going to be pleased that our committee was able to work effectively. So we will spend about $612 billion for Department of Defense and Department of Energy defense issues. That is a large sum of money. It includes a base budget of $497 billion and $89 billion in the Overseas Contingency Operations fund. It is an increase in OCO over last year, but it is still well below the peak of OCO's funding that we had in years past. I just have to say, the world is a more dangerous place than it has been. The legislation authorizes $135 billion for military personnel, including pay, allowances, bonuses, death benefits, and permanent change of station moves. It authorizes an across-the-board pay increase of 1.3 percent for uniformed servicemembers in grades O-6, colonel and below. The legislation authorizes $32.2 billion for the defense and health programs, authorizes fiscal year 2016 Active-Duty strength for the Army--475,000. Some are saying we are going to have to go to 450,000. Maybe we will have to go to 450,000. But right now, we need to slow that reduction based on the world situation. The Navy forces will be 329,000; Marine Corps, 184,000; Air Force, 317,000. So this is a good markup. I think it moves us in the right direction. The strategic forces provisions contained in the 2016 authorization bill are important. As chairman of the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, I am pleased to inform my colleagues that the bill before them represents a bipartisan consensus in support of the President's plans and the Congress's plans to modernize nuclear forces and improve and expand U.S. missile defense capability. I want to express my particular appreciation to the ranking member, Senator Donnelly of Indiana, who approaches these sometimes difficult and controversial issues in a nonpartisan, constructive manner. He has been closely involved in every aspect of the work of the subcommittee, from the hearings we have held to the bill's final markup. This year, the portion of the budget request falling under the subcommittee's jurisdiction for missile defense, nuclear forces, military space, and the Department of Energy atomic defense activities included a total of $70.5 billion, including $22.5 billion for procurement, $27.8 billion for research and development, $1.4 billion for operations and maintenance, and $18.7 billion for the Department of Energy. The Missile Defense Agency. In the area of missile defense, the bill fully funds the President's request of $8.2 billion for the Missile Defense Agency. I think we agree with that. It recommends an increase of $330 million for Israeli cooperative missile programs, including U.S. coproduction of the David's Sling and Arrow systems of Israel, and recommends an increase of $50 million to support modernization of the interceptor used for the U.S. ground-based midcourse defense system that would protect the homeland. So this needs to be done. We have to get our interceptor systems at the highest level, and there are some difficulties we face now with that system. I think some of the criticisms or concerns are overstated, but it is not where we want it to be, and we need to be moving in that direction. It can be fixed. We know that. And there are just some things we need to work on there. The bill recommends an increase to facilitate MDA's ongoing development of laser programs, which is a new system. It is different from what it has been in the past. And I am proud--I believe it has real potential and a lot of other things. The nuclear forces issue is significant. The bill would fully fund the President's budget request to operate, maintain, and modernize the nuclear triad and associated systems. This is essential. We must modernize these weapons, many of which are 40 years old and utilize vacuum tubes in their systems. The bill includes an additional $1 billion in 2016 to support the recommendations of the nuclear enterprise review completed in 2014. We need to listen to those review systems and respond appropriately. I believe this mark does. To ensure that the Department is planning for the full range of nuclear conflict scenarios, the bill includes a provision that would direct the Department of Defense to conduct a net assessment of the global nuclear security environment, including the range of contingencies and scenarios where U.S. nuclear forces might have to be used. I would just say personally that I think it is time for us, in this dangerous world, to quit talking about nuclear zero--people who doubt our resolve sometimes doubt that we are willing to follow through. I wish zero would happen. It is not going to happen anytime soon, that is for sure, so we are going to have to maintain a nuclear arsenal. We need to talk about maintaining it, modernizing it, making it safer, and making it more reliable and more accurate. Maybe we can reduce the numbers some more, but we need to be talking less about reducing numbers and more about assuring the world that we have the best nuclear capabilities anywhere on the planet and that they are ready to be deployed and can be deployed, Heaven forbid that would be necessary. That is just why we have these forces. The bill includes a provision that would require the Secretary of Defense to develop options to respond to the Russian violation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, including countervailing, counterforce, and active defense programs. We have violations going on; those can't just be accepted. The Department of Energy gets funding for its defense nuclear capabilities, and we continue rigorous oversight of the warhead life extension and construction program that would support a reliable and modernized nuclear stockpile. I think we are on the right track there for sure. The bill includes a number of provisions to improve congressional oversight of NNSA activities and track the recommendations of the Congressional Advisory Panel on the Governance of NNSA. We need better coordination with the Department of Energy. I think we are moving in that direction. Over the last several years, I have pushed for it aggressively, and I think progress is being made. More needs to be done. Military Space. Our whole Defense Department depends more than most people realize on our ability to maintain space capabilities, and I think this bill funds those programs effectively. The bill would require the Secretary of Defense, in a new idea, to designate one individual to serve as the principal space control adviser who shall act as the principal adviser to the Secretary of Defense on space control activities. I think that will help. With respect to program oversight, the bill would prohibit the use of funds for the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program or the launch of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellite number 20 until the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs provide a certification that nonmaterial or lower cost solutions are insufficient. Senator McCain has challenged us all to maintain oversight of these programs and to contain costs. I think this can help do that. In conclusion, I restate my belief that our committee has worked in a positive way. We have taken the advice of the President and of the Defense Department. We have examined it in an appropriate way and produced this bill that I believe will strengthen our national defense, with strong backing to modernize and expand our missile defense capabilities and to strengthen our deployed forces, allies, and partners. So I hope we don't have a fuss over demands to increase spending for nondefense when we are supposed to be funding the Defense Department. If there are arguments to be made in that regard, they should be made on another bill when those bills come up and ought to be brought forth in that fashion. I think it would be wrong and a big mistake to use the Defense appropriations and authorization bills in any way as some sort of a hostage to force spending in other areas. The bill is a good bill. It puts us on the right course. It has broad bipartisan support. If we can avoid those kinds of political gymnastics, I think we will be in a good position to properly take care of the people we have deployed to defend our country and to maintain the security of our homeland. 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, we will be talking about the PATRIOT Act and the USA FREEDOM Act that has been offered, and I think it is an important issue. I believe the PATRIOT Act provides critical tools that have helped protect America, and I believe it does so without any infringement on constitutional rights. Some say we have to compromise rights or balance rights against the threats. Maybe sometimes we have to do that. But when we wrote the PATRIOT Act in the Judiciary Committee--of which I am a member, Senator Leahy is a strong libertarian, Senator Hatch is a strong libertarian, Senator Hatch was chairman, Senator Leahy was ranking member, I had been a Federal prosecutor for 15 years; people like Jon Kyl and Dianne Feinstein and so many others worked on it for months--it wasn't passed in a few days without thought. People talked about it. It was on the radio and television, we got letters, we had hearings with professors and constitutional scholars, law enforcement officers, some public and some classified briefings, and we tried to write a bill, and I believe did, that provided the Federal Government an expedited method to access phone call data, metadata as it is called, under section 215 of the act. Now, this data has no content--no phone communications at all. It is just phone numbers, even less than you get on your telephone bill when it comes to you in the mail every month. That data is maintained at the telephone companies in their records. Everybody who makes a phone call should know that, if they are alert to the world. So that record is not your personal record. That record is the telephone company's record. Now, if you have documents at home, if you have records in your desk, records anywhere in your house, if you have a gun or drugs that are illegal in your house, nobody can come in your house, they can't go into your car, can't go into your glove compartment or trunk without a court order because it is within your custody and you have a right, under the Fourth Amendment, to be free from an unreasonable search. The law enforcement officer has to get a court order, backed up by facts, before they can breach that Fourth Amendment. Of course, the Fourth Amendment simply says that your right is against unreasonable search and seizure. It doesn't say the government can never conduct a search. An unreasonable search and seizure is what the Constitution talks about. I would say, first and foremost, it is reasonable the government be able to identify certain matters of evidence that could prevent a 9/11-type attack on America that could cause the deaths of thousands of Americans. So what is it that is provided for under this act? I am raising this because I think my colleagues have misunderstood it, and they are more worried about it than they should be. In fact, I think many of their worries are based on a false understanding of how the system works and a false understanding of how law enforcement is conducted in America every day. So these telephone companies all maintain these records and they are accessible by law enforcement. And it does not take a court order, colleagues; it takes a subpoena. A subpoena is an order for production issued by an entity empowered to issue subpoenas. The basic standard for a Drug Enforcement Administration agent to get people's telephone records that are in the possession of a telephone company is the administrative subpoena. They do not have to go to a judge, they do not have to go to the U.S. attorney or any Federal prosecutor. They are empowered if the documents are relevant to an investigation they are conducting because they are not an individual's possession; they are the phone company's records. This is done every day. Now, oddly, the FBI doesn't have that power. The FBI is the Agency charged with the responsibility of investigating and stopping terrorist attacks, but they have never been given this power. They have to issue their subpoenas simply by calling the Federal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office. I was a U.S. attorney for 12 years, an assistant U.S. attorney for 2\1/2\. I approved hundreds and hundreds, thousands of subpoenas. In almost every major investigation you want telephone toll records. You are investigating a drug dealer and you capture somebody and he starts providing evidence. He says: I talked to the main drug dealer. How many times? Hundreds. Did you use a phone? Yes. So you immediately subpoena the telephone records. Those come right in, and they can prove he is telling you the truth. He has made 50 or 100 phone calls to the main drug dealer. That corroborates his testimony and builds truth and power in the prosecution's case that this person is indeed a drug dealer and this witness is telling the truth. Now, there are all sorts of reasons for getting documents. That is just one of them, but it is done every day by a subpoena. As I said, a subpoena does not require a judge's approval. So this all got stirred up in the PATRIOT Act, and we set up this procedure with judicial oversight where the phone companies' phone data--metadata--is simply put in one secure system that is accessible by the Federal Government. I don't believe that violates any constitutional rights. It is just a mechanism by which to further the system. And before they can access it, the FBI, the National Security Agency, has to have more proof and put out more evidence and go through more hoops than the drug enforcement agent does to get your telephone records. Remember, these records have no names. They have nothing but a telephone number, the date the number was called, and how long the conversation was. Nobody is accessing those records for personal gain. Only 30-some people in the United States have the ability to access this system. That is the way it works, and so I believe, colleagues, this does not in any way impact the integrity of the constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure under the Constitution. Somebody may say: Well, they could abuse that. Well, they could abuse it, that is true. But I have to tell you, I have seen this system. I have seen the people who operate it. They are not out there trying to corruptly spy on politicians or anyone else. I don't know how they could use the system to do that anyway. Anybody who works at the telephone company can access your telephone toll records now. So how much security do you have in your telephone toll records, pray tell? But these people aren't doing that. They are intensely focused. If they have information connecting a phone number to a foreign terrorist or terrorist organization and they can see other people have called that number. They can do some preliminary investigations and if there is a hit and some information that coincides with other data they have, they may be able to investigate it. That may lead to other information that may stop an attack on the United States of America. These people are not after drug dealers, they are not after bank cheats, fraudsters or armed robbers; they are after terrorists. That is all they are authorized to use the system for. I just have difficulty having the words to express how I feel about this. So this system can save this country from massive attacks. We know, and our officials are telling us, there are more threats out there than before. A lot of people watch these television programs, these CSI shows and things, and they get the false impression of the power of the American Government to conduct surveillance and the extent to which it is limited. I have worked with FBI agents, DEA and IRS agents. They are not risking their careers. They are not signing false statements. You see that sometimes on television. Even the heroes do things that violate the rules. In my experience, none of the Federal officers I dealt with violated the rules. If criminals walked, they walked. Even though they desperately needed some information, the agents do not lie, defraud or cheat. I will tell you, these people at the NSA aren't doing that. They are patriots. They are the best kind of people you want to have serving in America. So I think this is an exaggerated thing. I hope, colleagues, we will spend more time identifying and looking through the challenges we face, the threats we face in America, and that we will examine this program and be sure we fully understand what is at stake and the advantages that it brings. The President has given us examples of what will happen. Director Comey of the FBI said that losing these authorities would be a big problem as the Agency uses section 215, the key section, in about 200 cases a year to get records through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. By the way, colleagues, the Internal Revenue Service can issue an administrative subpoena to get your bank records. I think they have the power to issue telephone toll records too--but, no, not here in this system. You have to go through the court process. We talk about the roving wiretap authority that would expire if we do not reauthorize these programs. That is used in counterespionage and counterterrorism investigations and it allows the FBI to conduct surveillance on a person who may be using a burner phone. In other words, using a telephone and then throwing it away and switching to a new phone so they maintain their ability to communicate without interception. This is important when you actually do get a warrant that allows a title III wiretap of a terrorist phone. You get this ability when you go to court. In the affidavits I have seen--in all 12 years as a U.S. attorney, I think I had one or two wiretaps approved--they were hundreds of pages of affidavits. You have to monitor it all. It takes tremendous time, but if you are after a terrorist, a wiretap can be a decisive and important matter. Then, you face the problem of, well, you have a wiretap and it names the phone and the number of it, but he throws that phone down and picks up another one. How do you deal with that? So this allows a roving wiretap and provides a mechanism for a person who changes phones, and it is consistent with the fundamental principle we use in drug cases and organized crime cases. In a Washington Times article published today, the President of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund and former Assistant Director of the FBI, Ron Hosko, said: ISIS is singing a siren song calling people to their death to crash on the rocks--and it's the rocks that ISIS will take credit for. They're looking for those who are disaffected, disconnected and willing to commit murder. So if we're willing to take away tools, OK, congressman, stand behind it [and] take the credit by putting the FBI in the dark. In other words, be sure we will be taking credit for shutting off the ability of our investigators to protect America. President Obama said it is indeed helping protect America. Last year, he said: The program grew out of a desire to address a gap identified after 9/11. One of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar, made a phone call from San Diego to a known al-Qaida safehouse in Yemen. NSA [the National Security Agency] saw that call, but could not see that the call was coming from an individual already in the United States. They didn't have the legal ability or a system at that time that could do it. The President went on to say of the telephone metadata program: Section 215 was designed to map the communications of terrorists, so we can see who they may be in contact with as quickly as possible. Speed is critical. The President went on to say: This capability could also provide valuable information in a crisis. For example, if a bomb goes off in one of our cities and law enforcement is racing to determine whether a network is poised to conduct additional attacks, time is of the essence. Being able to quickly review telephone connections to assess whether a network exists is critical to that effort. I think the President is right about that. We don't have superhuman abilities in this country. We don't monitor everybody's phone calls. There is no way humanly possible Federal agents can do that. But once they identify someone who is being connected to a terrorist group, they can at least follow their phone number and whom they may be calling. Passing the House bill I believe is not the right thing. The bill would eliminate entirely the database through which our intelligence analysts are able to quickly access information to connect the dots. The bill ends these programs. It just does. It ends the metadata program, replacing it with a nonexistent, untested system. It relies on the hope that private telephone companies will agree to retain this data. But these companies have made it clear they will not commit, and flatly refuse to commit, to retaining this telephone data in their computer systems for any period of time as contemplated by the House- passed bill, unless they are legally required to do so--and the bill does not require them to do so. One provider said the following: [We are] not prepared to commit to voluntarily retain documents for any particular period of time pursuant to the proposed [House bill] if not otherwise required by law. The House has refused to put that in. Colleagues, when I was prosecuting, phone companies kept the data 3 years, some phone companies more. One rural phone company never got rid of their data. It was amazing how often older phone calls helped connect the dots, improved facts that are critical in a prosecution. For example, somebody says: I never called John Jones, and then you find 50 calls from their phone document to John Jones. These things have tremendous importance. When we are looking to prevent an attack on America, trying to produce intelligence to prevent enemy attacks on this country, just the fact that one individual is calling another individual who is known to be a terrorist is exceedingly valuable information. My goodness, maybe it is an innocent call, but it is worthy of looking at and investigating. That is how investigation work. That is how crimes are solved. That is how attacks are stopped. One shred of evidence, one bit can lead to new bits that can lead to more and more evidence and reveals an entire organization poised to attack our country. Let me repeat. I don't believe we have a violation of the Constitution. I am absolutely convinced the procedures utilized in this process are utterly consistent with the policies approved by thousands of court cases nationwide that law enforcement uses on a daily basis to investigate tax cheats and drug dealers. And we can't use these same tactics against terrorists who are enemies of the United States and seek to perhaps blow up and kill thousands of people? I think this is a mistake. I urge my colleagues to be careful about it. Yesterday, we received a letter from the Sergeants Benevolent Association. It pleads with us to do a short-term extension of the program: Congress, do your duty. The letter says: With provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act set to expire in less than two weeks, the responsible course is to pass a short-term extension of the expiring authorities--including section 215. This will allow time for the Senate to undertake the kind of serious deliberative process critical national security issues demand and that the American people expect of ``the world's greatest deliberative body.'' I think we are doing that now. That is my opinion. I was present when the law was drafted, and we tried to be sure we did that and I believe we did. Some of the concerns are real. A lot of good people are concerned about it. So I think it is time for us to slow down, go back to the basics, lay out this program, see what the complaints are, and then see if they are justified. If they are, the program will have to end. But I don't believe it needs to end, and right now we are heading on a path that will end it. I thank the Presiding Officer and I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I appreciate the opportunity to share some remarks and show my support for the Portman-Stabenow currency amendment. I think we are at a point in world history and world trade where our mercantilist trading partners have gotten to be very clever. On occasion, they use a variety of tools, some of which are used all of the time. Among these, we are seeing that we are unfairly subjecting American manufacturing to currency manipulation, and this is not free trade. It is not free trade. Currency manipulation and other trade barriers are just as much of an obstacle to free and fair trade as are tariffs. That is one of the things that we have to get a handle on if we are going to protect our workers here in America. After the Korea trade agreement, which I voted for, the numbers did not materialize that were promised. In 2010, before the trade agreement passed, President Obama's Web site said: . . . the U.S.-Korea trade agreement . . . [would] add an estimated 70,000 jobs from increased goods exports alone, with additional job potential from the further opening of Korea's large services market to American firms, and other measures. Well, that is what I had hoped would happen. He said it was an advancement of the idea of free and fair trade and so forth. His own Web site said that the U.S.-Korea trade agreement would increase exports of American goods by $10 billion to $11 billion and that the agreement would help create 70,000. Well, I guess 4 or 5 years have passed now. Have we achieved a $10 billion increase in exports to our ally, our friend, our tough, smart trading partner Korea? Did we get that kind of improvement? The answer is no. We are at $0.8 billion, less than $1 billion. But what about Korea's imports to the United States? Did they go up or down? Korea's imports to the United States during this time have increased by $12 billion. It almost doubled the trade deficit between our countries. I am saying this because it raises a fundamental question: What is happening here? In this trade agreement, people have been pretty careful--the promoters of it. They have not promised it would reduce the trade deficit, they have not promised it would create new jobs, and they have not promised it would increase wages. They suggest it. They say things like it will increase job prospects or wages in export industries. Well, we only export 13 percent of what we make. So this has been the only promise that they made. I have asked the President--written him--and asked other colleagues: Tell me if you believe this agreement is going to increase jobs. Tell me what studies and documents you have that say it will increase wages. Tell me or show me any reports or data that would suggest this trade agreement we now have before us would in some way reduce our surging trade deficits, which hit a virtual record last month--or at least in March. They are not going give an answer, and I have to tell you why-- because jobs are going down, not up, and the trade deficit is going up and not down, and that is not good. Well, why do they persist in this? I suggest that it is an ideology. I have suggested that it is almost a religion. We are for any trade agreement or any file or stack of papers that has ``trade agreement'' on it. Why? Well, I recall that back in the late 1990s, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was before I believe the Budget Committee, which I was a member of, and I asked him a question. The question was this: Mr. Greenspan, if we are trading with a country and they stop buying all products from the United States and block our sales to them but want to sell products to the United States and want us to buy their products, should we buy them or not buy them? That is a pretty simple question, and I remember it well. Should we buy from them? What do you think his answer was? Yes. I believe that is an extreme idea. I think that is an idea that in theory could have some validity, but you have to know, colleagues and friends, it is out there. It is a fundamental part of the movement for trade agreements that people don't really care whether they are reciprocal or not, and they are not worried about whether they shut down plants and facilities in your community, whether people lose their jobs, because their theory is that you are getting a better product at a cheaper price, and that is the only thing that counts, that is the most important thing, and somehow this is going to all work out. The Wall Street guys who manage capital can move their capital to anyplace in the world, and they think they will do fine. But nobody is thinking about what it is like in the real world where people's jobs are at stake, where our steel industry is under stress and we are facing competition that is not fair. I just feel strongly about that. I am reversing, in a way, my position on trade. I believe it is time for this country and this Congress to begin to ask tougher questions about why we continue to have huge trade deficits, why we continue to have a decline in wages, a decline in median family income--$3,000 since 2009--and why all of these things are happening. Part of it is that we have been unwilling--unlike our trading competitors--to ask these kinds of questions. I think we are operating on a religious view of trade. How do you deal with that? Mr. Dan DiMicco wrote a very important article in Forbes magazine a few months ago. The title of it is `` `Fast Track' To Nowhere: Congress Shouldn't Give Obama Power To Ram Through TPP.'' He is a former CEO-- actually, CEO emeritus, I think--of Nucor Steel. They have steel plants all over America, and they are in one of our most vibrant, competitive industries. They deal with foreign competition every day. He lives with it. Currency and issues like that are critical to him and anybody in the steel industry, automobile industry, or manufacturing industry. These things are real. It is not academic. It is not theory. It is real. He said a number of things in this very important article. He talked about the cheerleaders for trade and said they make a big mistake. That's net trade--not gross trade. In other words, net exports increase our economic size while net imports shrink it. This is not a liberal plot, or a Tea Party plot, or a protectionist plot. It is basic and uncontroversial economic math that the TPP cheerleaders either don't understand or don't want to. He goes on to say: In 2013, the U.S. economy amounted to $16.8 trillion. Consumption was 68% of GDP. Investment was about 16%. Government procurement was about 19%. But net trade subtracted about 3% from our economy (because imports exceeded exports.) This shrinkage is cumulative, compounding year after year. America is the picture of an unbalanced economy, disproportionately relying upon unsustainable consumption. Investment is too small. . . . Stated another way, we need to produce more of what we consume. Isn't that true? So this theory--it doesn't make any difference where products are made as long as they are cheaper? This is comparative advantage? People can manipulate their currency, they can subsidize their industry so they can have more exports, more people working, and it makes no difference to us, and we can allow American businesses to fail? Then he talks about mercantilism. This is the strategy of most of our competitors. He said: ``Free trade was crafted as an antidote to mercantilism, not an enabler of it.'' So he says our trade policies have not confronted our competitors' mercantilism and therefore we have enabled them and have allowed them to continue. Then he quotes President Reagan. I know a lot of people say President Reagan believed in total free trade. He did not. He was a realist. This is what Mr. DiMicco says: President Reagan gave a speech that established the principle of ``free and fair trade with free trade and fair traders.'' More specifically, he established the 3 R's: Rules, Reciprocity, and Results. ``Rules'' mean that the trade must be rules based and every nation should follow them. ``Reciprocity'' meant that there will be reciprocal reduction in tariffs, quotas and other barriers rather than one-sized reduction. ``Results,'' the point forgotten most, meant that America must gain a net benefit from trade arrangements rather than being taken advantage of. I believe it. My father always taught me that a good trading agreement, a good contract, a good business deal was when both parties received advantages. Another person who knew Ronald Reagan well was Clyde Prestowitz. Clyde was the President's counselor to the Secretary of Commerce in President Reagan's administration and Vice Chairman of President Clinton's Commission on Trade. He negotiated Asia trade agreements with Japan and others. He was there. In his article he makes a very harsh statement about President Obama's statements. He said: Will the Japanese be driving Chevys in Tokyo? The President suggested we want to see more American-made cars being driven in Tokyo. He quoted the President as saying: Why wouldn't we want to rewrite those rules so there is some reciprocity and we can start opening up the Japanese market? That would be good for American workers. Mr. Prestowitz responded to the President's statement saying: Hearing that amazingly ignorant statement one could only wonder if there is no one in the White House to prevent the President from embarrassing himself. Apparently he is unaware of the endless efforts of U.S. trade negotiators over the past 50 years to open up the Japanese market. As one of the Reagan administration's lead negotiators with Japan and as the Vice Chairman of President Clinton's Commission on Trade and Investment in the Asia-Pacific Region, I can assure the President that reciprocity in trade with Japan has been the aim of every agreement signed by both Republican and Democratic administrations for half a century. I can also say that virtually no former U.S. negotiator believes the TPP will achieve reciprocity with Japan. They have nontrade barriers that Mr. DiMicco lays out in his article; he names them. These are not allowing for free trade, reciprocal trade that produces results that are beneficial to America. We can do better. We absolutely need more trade. We need to continue to negotiate good trade agreements, but this creates a situation that is dangerous. What kind of numbers do we have about this agreement? Do we have any studies, anybody who says anything other than what I believe, which is that it is going to be a net negative to our balance of trade? Well, the Wall Street Journal, that usually support trade agreements, had an article by Mr. Mauldin that examines a study by Mr. Peter Petri, professor of international finance at Brandeis University. This was just released this week, May 18--or at least this article was. He talks about the auto sector. Mr. Petri has done this study--the only study I know of that has dealt with the question. The article says: In the transportation sector, led by cars, the TPP could boost imports to the United States from Japan by $30.8 billion by 2025, compared with export gains to Japan of $7.8 billion, according to Mr. Petri. That sounds like the Korea agreement. So we would export $7.8 billion more, but Japan would export $30.8 billion more to us. The result is what? Less American manufacturing on net, more cars being bought from abroad, and a greater detriment to our trade balance. That is just the way it is. So I believe we need to get away from the religious view of trade and we need to do what President Reagan said, which is to look at the results. Don't tell me some theory. Let's live in the real world. It is our duty to see our manufacturers, our workers get a fair chance to compete in the world marketplace. We are not sufficiently there now. A part of this trade agreement that I have mentioned before and that I am very concerned about and that has gotten very little discussion and that needs to be discussed, I will take a minute to discuss it. According to the Congressional Research Service--our own group--the TPP's ``living agreement'' provision is ``unprecedented.'' Indeed, I am one of the few, I think, who went to the secret room to read the secret document, and when it described the living agreement, it said it was unprecedented. I presume I will not be arrested for making that quote from the secret document. The United States Trade Representative's Web site is very candid about the purpose of this living agreement provision. It is to ``enable the updating of the agreement as appropriate to address trade issues that emerge in the future as well as new issues that arise with the expansion of the agreement to include new countries.'' It creates a commission--another commission--consisting of representatives from each member nation, which has vast powers to govern the agreement and govern, to some degree, the countries that participate in it. Among the powers given to the Commission is the authority to consider any matter relating to implementation and operation of the agreement and to consider amendments and modifications. What we have to understand is that this is a new entity, an international entity, of which we are a member, and it gets to meet and vote and set new behaviors unlike what we approved in the Senate. But it can be amended as time goes by. It is unprecedented. This has not been done before. While the TPP states that those amendments must be agreed to ``in accordance with the applicable legal procedures of each party,'' that phrase is not defined. The TPP ``Chapter Summary''--a book that is provided to Members when we go to the secret room--states that this amendment process would occur similar to the process that occurs under the WTO, the World Trade Organization. So it says how the--the procedure is being handled like WTO. But under WTO and its implementing legislation, changes to the agreement and the addition of new parties are not to be approved by Congress, and, more importantly, not by consensus or a unanimous vote. The ``Chapter Summary'' states that this process will be similar to the WTO under which the WTO can be--members can be added and certain amendments adopted by a two-thirds vote. So it gives the appearance of having consensus as the basis. In addition, new member nations under WTO can be added by only a two- thirds majority vote--that is pretty clear--and apparently would be cleared under this agreement. So we have asked the President: What does this mean? Can China be added by a simple majority vote? We vote no and it happens anyway? We asked the U.S. Trade Representative staff about this situation. They didn't have an answer. This is a staff of the administration pushing for the bill. They simply asserted that changes to the TPP affecting U.S. law would require congressional approval. We asked whether USTR would agree to make that explicit in the TPP so we didn't have--wouldn't have any ambiguity, and they have declined to give us a reply. So if it is true that congressional approval is required, then why shouldn't they be willing to have it explicitly in the TPA and the TPP? In fact, there are already examples in the TPP of other countries making clear that certain procedures must comply with their domestic law. Why don't we make it ours? I have offered an amendment to that effect. I am disappointed that it is apparently not going to be given a vote. While the TPA states no standard trade agreement that has not been legislatively implemented can trump existing Federal, State or local law or prevent any Federal, State or local government from amending or modifying its law, the implementing legislation of a trade agreement would do these things and could--and certainly will--in many areas. It will delegate congressional authority when we pass it to the new TPP Commission. So by voting for it, we have delegated authority, it will be contended and probably correctly, that we gave it to them to amend the law. This is especially important because the whole purpose of fast- track is to implement and expedite this legislation. So I think these trade agreements need to be considered carefully by Congress and the American people before the United States cedes one iota more of American authority and sovereignty, and Congress must retain the power to carefully review and vote on all future changes to these trade agreements. So I have offered this amendment. As Mr. Mark Hendrickson recently wrote in Forbes magazine, discussing what I had said about this: TPP cannot be an ``open-ended document'' lest ``the rule of law and republican government itself be lost.'' That is why TPA must provide strong and enforceable protections against this kind of overreach. We just have to be careful. The normal process for treaties is a rigorous one. It requires, in the end, a two-thirds vote. So they have written this not as a treaty but as an agreement. It will be moved forward in a way so that when the final agreement hits the floor, it will be unamendable, it will be not subject to a 60-vote threshold to move forward, and it can be passed within 20 hours, without a single amendment, on a simple up-or-down vote. I really believe it is time for us, colleagues, to move away from a religious view of trade to ask what is happening in the real world. If our businesses, our manufacturers, and our American workers are not being treated fairly on the world stage, we should take action to ensure they are. I believe in trade, and I have supported it over the years. But I think it is time for us, in light of declining wages, a declining middle class, surging trade deficits, to ask ourselves: Can't we do better with our trade agreements? Here we have this huge one, representing 40 percent of the world economy, creating a new commission with all kinds of powers to be able to add new members that we may not approve of, and we are just going to pass it, hardly without reading it. Very few Senators have been to the secret room to see what is in the document. Mr. President, I thank the Chair and yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Perdue. The Senator from Florida. Issues Before the Senate

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Presiding Officer for giving me the opportunity to share some remarks. I do believe Senator Hatch and Senator Wyden allowed a good debate in the committee. Unfortunately, we have not been able to have the kinds of amendments here on the floor that they allowed in the committee, so we are moving to this massive bill with very little debate, even on the fast-track policy. If that is adopted and TPP appears before us here on the floor, there will be no amendments on it. In a few moments, we will vote on whether to shut off debate on the fast-track authority legislation. I see no reason that we have to rush this. I will just note that we have the highway bill expiring, and we have the PATRIOT Act expiring. Those are crises which need to be dealt with this week. This bill does not have to be done in that fashion. This will be a crucial vote. Fast-track is an affirmative decision by Congress to suspend several of its most basic powers for the next 6 years and to delegate those powers to the Chief Executive. Under the fast-track procedure, the President, not Congress, writes implementing legislation for any yet-unseen global trade pact. That legislation, no matter its contents, cannot be amended in any fashion. No individual Member of Congress can alter any line of text or remove a single provision that violates the will of Congress. That legislation, once called up, is guaranteed a speedy path forward--only 20 hours of debate--and the vote threshold is lowered to a simple majority. No matter how far-reaching the global trade agreement, Congress cannot subject it to the 60 votes applied to important legislation before the Senate or the 67 votes applied to treaties, as it really should be. Congress will have preapproved swift consideration of sweeping global pacts before the text has been made available and seen by a single Member of this body or the American people. As usual through these processes--and too often--amendments are being constricted and blocked through one maneuver or another. The net result is we are coming down to a cloture vote without any amendments having been voted on. Mr. President, 2 weeks ago, I sent a letter to the President of the United States asking how fast-track and the vast Trans-Pacific Partnership would impact the jobs and wages of American workers. It is a simple question. Would it increase or reduce manufacturing jobs and wages in the United States? Shouldn't we know that? Is that an improper question to ask? He has refused to answer. I think the reason he has refused to answer is because the answer is not good and will not be well received. They want us to shut off debate and move forward without having these fundamental questions answered. For too long, the United States has entered into trade deals on the promise of economic bounty, only to see workers impoverished and businesses disappear. Dan DiMicco, the chairman Emeritus of Nucor Steel, explains that this is because these free-trade deals have not been free-trade deals at all. Instead, they have been ``unilateral trade disarmament,'' where we lower our barriers to foreign imports but they retain their barriers to our exports to those countries. This is what is fundamentally at stake here. A lot of people, in their religious view of free trade, don't care whether other countries have barriers. Their view is that we should welcome more imports. Mr. DiMicco has called this the ``enablement of foreign mercantilism,'' a philosophy of trade that is too often present around the world and certainly in the Asian sector. Consider this in the context of automobiles. The Wall Street Journal published a story 2 days ago about how the American auto sector could be jeopardized by TPP. The Journal wrote: In the transportation sector, led by cars, the TPP could boost imports by an extra $30.8 billion by 2025, compared with an exports gain of $7.8 billion. So the imports of automobiles would increase by $30.8 billion and our exports would increase by only $7.8 billion. That was a study written by Peter Petri, professor of international finance at Brandeis University. Well, having dramatically more imports than exports is not going to add jobs. Perhaps that is why we cannot get an answer. In other words, job-killing imports would vastly exceed any growth in foreign exports, thereby putting more Americans out of work. We have seen this story before. The South Korea trade deal--and I supported that. I have great respect for the South Korean and the Japanese business acumen. But the South Korean trade deal, which was supposed to boost our exports by more than $10 billion, actually ended up increasing our exports less than $1 billion. If truth be known, it was $0.8 billion. Instead, the deal boosted South Korean imports to our country by more than $12 billion and nearly doubled the trade gap between our two nations, which was already large. They say: Well, this time it is different. Trust us. Give us 6 more years of executive authority to pass any global deal we like under fast-track. No deal has ever been blocked. Well, respectfully, the American people don't trust you. Here is what the Pew Poll reported recently: Twenty percent of Americans think these trade agreements create jobs and 50 percent say it destroys jobs. Have we been adding jobs in manufacturing or losing jobs in manufacturing? We have been losing jobs in manufacturing. Are the American people so wrong in that conclusion? Forty-five percent of Americans think trade reduces wages; only 17 percent say it increases them. By contrast, 72 percent of Vietnamese believe this trade agreement would increase their salaries. Because TPP is a living agreement, it can be changed after adoption. It says in the language of the agreement where it has this living agreement language that this is unprecedented. This is the first time this has been put in a trade agreement. The Congressional Research Service tells us that, too. We are now creating a foreign international entity--one more international entity--with a commission that meets and votes and makes decisions that are binding on the United States of America. Frankly, I think this great Nation is exposing itself to too many of these agreements. Tying down the ability of the world's greatest power and economic engine, the United States, is weakening our ability to function in a way that sovereignty should allow us to function. Dangerously, this agreement creates a new governing global authority that would add new members of their choice, change the terms of the agreement, and even subject U.S. citizens to its ruling--adjudicated in an international tribunal. It is time for Congress to defend its shareholders--our shareholders--the American people. It is time to return to the regular order and to the principles of sound governance and to assert, not surrender, the power of Congress to the overreaching Chief Executive. I am therefore going to oppose shutting off debate that actually has not even begun. I am frustrated that two of my reasonable amendments that I think would have had a very good chance of passing have been blocked and apparently will not get a vote. I don't think we have any need to shut off the debate today and to advance to a bill where we have had too few amendments and where we have had a steadfast refusal by the President of the United States, who is pushing every way he can to get this agreement adopted, until he answers the question: Will it improve manufacturing or further reduce manufacturing, as our previous agreement with South Korea did? It reduced manufacturing. Will it increase jobs or reduce jobs? All they promised--and they promised this repeatedly--is that it will increase jobs in the export sector. They don't say what it will do on net, when we have three, four times as many imports as we do exports, on net. As in the past, it appears this agreement will clearly reduce jobs and reduce wages as well, and reduce manufacturing. We can't have a strong nation without a manufacturing sector--we just cannot. We can't be a strong nation without a steel industry--we just cannot. We need to ensure in these trade agreements--when we open our markets, what these countries want so desperately is access to the U.S. market. That is something of great value. We should not give it away until they agree to open their markets. That is what a good deal is. That is not what is in this deal, and it will not be in the agreement. It will be like previous agreements. Mr. President, how much time is left on this side?

Mr. SESSIONS. I don't see any others here. I will just discuss this a little bit more. When Mr. Damico, who has been involved in world trade competition for years, said we are enabling mercantilism, what he is saying is that our trading partners have a goal that we don't seem to have, and that is to maximize their exports and minimize their imports. They want access to the U.S. market. They have a mercantilist philosophy, and that is what it is, really. That philosophy allows them to put up nontrade barriers, nontariff barriers, to use currency manipulation and other tactics to make it difficult for the United States to penetrate their market. They say they have signed a trade agreement, and they will agree on tariffs, for example, but they still, on net, don't open their market as effectively as we open our markets. That is the reality. As a result, we have had a continual decline in manufacturing. We have seen a surge in our trade deficits. March was the highest trade deficit in almost a decade. The whole first quarter was horrible. Our trade deficits are increasing. If this agreement is passed, will it increase or decrease our trade deficits? Isn't that a fair question to ask? Will it increase or decrease our trade deficits? They will not answer. Unfortunately, the answer is it is going to increase our trade deficits. We know that. If it were not true, they would be hollering about how it is going to greatly reduce our trade deficits. They would be saying, on net, we are going to have more jobs. They would say wages would go up. The truth is we are not negotiating these agreements effectively, and the net result is it is going to weaken manufacturing, allow a reduction in jobs, and really put downward pressure on wages. I hate to have to oppose this legislation at this time, but I have come to that conclusion. I have supported most of the trade agreements in the past. I understand that we are in a global economy, and we have trading partners around the world. There is no way we are going to reverse that. Globalism is here to stay. We need to be a part of it. But it is time for our Nation to protect our manufacturing and our workers from unfair competition. We cannot take the view, as some do and say openly, that if our competitors manipulate their currency to make their products cheaper and they penetrate our market and close American businesses as a result--we cannot say: That is all right; we have cheaper products. Don't worry about it. In the long run, somewhere along the way, it will all work out. That is a guiding principle for the people pushing this legislation. They won't admit it, at least the politicians won't, publicly, but we know that is the guiding principle. I say that is a mistake. I say that is an extreme position. I say that we do have an interest in protecting our jobs, our manufacturing, and the ability of the American people to have a good job, to have a retirement plan, to have an insurance policy. I think that is important. So I urge that we back off this agreement now. Let's reevaluate it and have the President of the United States answer the question: Will we create higher wages or lower wages? Will we increase manufacturing or reduce manufacturing? Will we increase wages or not? I thank the Chair, and I reserve the remainder of the time on this side.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, as we continue to debate and file amendments to the trade promotion authority, the fast-track legislation, I ask unanimous consent to make two amendments pending and ask that the pending amendment be set aside and call up my amendment No. 1233 and amendment No. 1234.