Jeff Sessions

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I think it is a remarkable achievement. Some people think our young people are not willing to work, not willing to discipline themselves, but those two teams played their hearts out. They did not get there working at it a few weeks ago. They worked all year in the weight rooms and studying, preparing themselves to reach this high level of excellence that delivered a thrilling game for us all. Florida State is a terrific team. I think everybody knew Auburn was going to have to be really up to speed to be able to compete--and they were able to. The Senator is right, and I am pleased to note that our Heisman Trophy winner this year is a native of Hueytown, AL. We will claim credit for that too.

Mr. SESSIONS. Auburn drove down the field on that last drive, having to score to win the game, and just pounded away and Tre Mason ran down there and ran over somebody and scored the touchdown. But you are a Heisman Trophy-winning team, and all of you pulled together and came back and won with a few seconds to spare. It was spectacular. You well deserve the right to recognize them by resolution. I certainly will not object. I will add one more thing. Had Auburn won, it would have been the fifth consecutive year Auburn or Alabama had won the national championship. We would have liked to have seen that happen, but congratulations go to Florida State. They deserved to win, and they played well enough to win and did win.

Mr. SESSIONS. Orange and blue. I celebrate them. I did have my Auburn tie on the day of the game. But I love Alabama; it is a fabulous program. I spent 3 years there and remain a big fan. I am maybe one of the few people in the State who really, truly had a divided allegiance about whom to be for. Those are super universities. I would say to Senator Nelson, as I shared with him, I am really impressed with the University of Florida where my grandson had some great surgery done by the finest doctor in the world, I believe, for the condition he had. He has done so well. I know both of us are proud of the great institutions in our State.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when I conclude my remarks, Senator Murkowski of Alaska be recognized.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I have been honored to serve with Senator Levin on the Armed Services Committee. He does an excellent job. He has spent a lot of time and many hours working to try to help us be successful in Iraq and other areas of national defense. I think Generals Dempsey and Austin were right to say we could not keep our troops there unless they had immunity from local prosecutions. But as I recall the net feeling about the President's decision to withdraw from continued negotiations on this contentious issue, the military felt this was not wise--at least many of them did--and they believed that had we continued to pursue negotiations, we may have been able to reach the kind of agreement which would allow us to help the Iraqi Government be stable and successful. Pulling out as we did always seemed to me to be too rapid, too precipitous, and created dangers which could place at risk that which our soldiers fought and died for. I do believe that is what happened. It is a tragic thing. I was in Falluja, not long after that bitter battle. We had hundreds wounded and almost 100 killed. The Marines performed with such valor and courage. It was one of the great, courageous performances of the U.S. Marine Corps. It is sad, sad to me to see that today Al Qaeda is flying its flag in parts of that city. It is a tragedy. It did not maintain the faith that we ought to have maintained with those that we in Congress directed to go out and fight this war and to be successful. Maybe yet something can be done successfully to deal with this situation, which I feel deeply about. unemployment insurance

Mr. SESSIONS. I am here to share some thoughts about the remarks delivered today by President Obama on the growing problem of poverty and our chronic unemployment that has occurred during the 6 years of his Presidency, after he has declared that the recession is over and was over. Just this week the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said that ``the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer and the middle class is under siege.'' Wages are not doing well. Americans in large numbers are not doing well, and they are hurting. Washington Democrats, led by the President, are now proposing increased unemployment insurance and new wage-price controls, wage controls to mandate wages that have to be paid, to treat the consequences of a failed economy--a stagnant, slow-growth economy that is not creating jobs. These words and actions represent an admission that the White House economic agenda has been a disaster for poor and middle class people. It has not worked. I know he believed it would work. I know he has advocated these policies. I know he promised that they would work. But they are not working. Worst still, the President remains fully committed to the policy regime that he has been advocating, and that is not working. These policies have failed, not just for the last 5 years; they have failed for the last 50 years. They will never work. The President and Majority Leader Reid are correct, a nervous American business community is hoarding profits because they don't know what the future is going to be like. Those struggling to get by are feeling the results of corporate cost cutting and the policies that we are seeing executed by the government are impacting this situation negatively. They just are. I know the people proposing these solutions think they are caring about people who are hurting today. But if we care about them, we will use our heads as well as our hearts, and we will think through as to how to make growth occur in our economy, how to help jobs be created, how to have wages rise instead of stagnating or declining. Mr. President, $16 trillion has been spent fighting poverty since the war on poverty began 50 years ago, yet where do we stand today? Mr. President, 47 million Americans are on food stamps, 91.5 million are outside the labor force not working, and 46 million are living in poverty. In low-income communities the pain is especially severe. For example, in the city of Baltimore, 1 in 3 residents receives food stamps. In Chicago, 51 percent of the city's children live in a single- parent family. In Detroit, almost 1 in 3 households had not had a single person working at any time throughout the year--almost 1 in 3 households. The city's violent crime rate is among the worst in the country. More than half of all Detroit children live in poverty. The welfare bureaucracy that the left is determined to defend and expand is failing our fellow Americans. It is just not working. We can do better. We have to do better. No longer can we define compassion by how much money we spend on poverty but by how many people we lift out of poverty. The amount of money State and Federal governments spend on the welfare bureaucracy each year amounts to more than $1 trillion. That is a huge sum. It is twice the Defense Department budget. If all these funds were converted to cash and mailed to every household in poverty, it would equate to $60,000 per household. Yet as the President now admits, chronic poverty and a widening income gap is the new normal. We have huge bureaucracies, huge multiple conflicting programs, and programs that are not working and are not helping the people we are supposed to help. They just are not. Isn't it time that we broke from decades of policies that are proven not to work? Imagine how much better it would be if we combined dozens of overlapping welfare programs into a single credit with better oversight standards focused on the goal of helping people become financially self-sufficient. We need fresh approaches. We have to have fresh approaches. I believe it will happen. The sooner it happens the better off this country will be and the better off poor people will be. But all we get from the White House are the stale policies of yesterday. What is the agenda the President persists in pushing? Consider the cornerstones of the President's economic agenda, the things he has been pushing in the Senate and the Congress and advocating unilaterally through the powers of the executive President-- some beyond all law, it seems to me. These are the things he has consistently advocated for. He wants a government health care takeover, and that is proven to be a job killer. It is killing jobs and two- thirds of the jobs this year that have been created were part-time and in large part that has been a reaction to the Affordable Care Act. What else? He has a hostility, a consistent hostility to the production of American energy, which makes the country more wealthy, to produce our own energy rather than transferring our wealth abroad, to buy energy from abroad. It creates jobs in America, high-paying jobs. We have proposals for more and more taxes and more and more regulations that make it more difficult for U.S. workers to compete in the global marketplace. It makes it harder for their companies to be able to export and therefore create more American jobs. We have a lawless immigration policy that undermines American workers and their wages. It just does. They can say whatever they want to say, but the bill that passed the Senate, the comprehensive immigration bill, would have doubled the number of guest workers. Some say: Well, Jeff, they are just going to be agricultural workers. That is not so. Only a small number are going to be agricultural workers. They are going to be a million-plus workers traveling around the country taking jobs all over America--twice as many lawfully as would be the case under current law. This is supposed to be immigration reform? This is supposed to help American workers find a job or have a pay raise? We have a weak trade policy. We have to stand up for the American workers on the world stage and make sure that our trading partners are accepting our products like we accept their products, and if they do not, we have to defend the interests of the American worker. That is the way to help them have more jobs and better pay. We have a welfare bureaucracy that penalizes work. The President is proposing more massive spending, creating more debt. He has had the greatest debt increases in the history in our country. That is destroying and weakening growth in America. It places a cloud over the American economy, as experts have told us. These policies have been the order of the day for 5 years. That is what we heard. We need to spend more, we need to invest more, and we need to tax more. We have had more regulations than we have ever had in American history. We have had trillion dollar deficits the likes of which we have never seen before, and people wonder why the economy is not doing well. We blocked oil production in the gulf for an inordinate period of time and are only slowly allowing that to occur. We blocked a Canadian pipeline that would create thousands of American jobs. We blocked energy production on Federal lands. We make it harder for energy production on private lands to occur, and we wonder why we cannot create sufficient jobs and growth. We need lower-cost energy, cheaper energy. That is good for the economy. Falling natural gas prices have been a help because of new techniques in the production of natural gas. These statist, leftist policies have been tried in America before, and they have been tried throughout the world for decades, and they will never work. Taxes, regulating, more government, and taking over the health care industry will not create prosperity and jobs in America. It just won't. If it would, we would be doing so much better. Since the President has entered office we have added an incredible $7 trillion to the debt of the United States, and what do we have to show for that? Real wages are lower today than they were in 1999. Take-home pay has fallen for 5 consecutive years. Average household wealth is 60 percent lower today than it was in 2007; 1.3 million fewer people are working today than in 2007. Have we had a recovery? We have fewer people working today than we had 6 years ago, and every month we add 150,000 or more people, basically, to the age cohort of Americans that could be working, because the population is increasing that much. So you have to create real jobs to stay ahead of just normal population growth. There is 1.3 million fewer people working today, even though the population has grown by 14.5 million. There are 1.3 million fewer people who are working today than in 2007, even though the population has grown 14.5 million. That is not good. So the President is right to be worried about the health of the American middle class and lower-income workers in America. It sure has not been going well. I know he thought his statist ideas would work, and he pushed them steadfastly. He had a Senate that rubber stamped for 2 years what he wanted, including a $800 billion stimulus bill that was supposed to create jobs and prosperity in America, every penny of that borrowed. If we continue down this road, I fear we are going to sentence an entire generation of young Americans to poverty, joblessness, and stagnant economic growth in our economy. Majority Leader Reid said this week that, ``We should realize that today there is only one job available for three people seeking a job. Think about it.'' I agree that we absolutely must think about that. We should think seriously about it. My first thought is this. Since three people are looking for every one job that is open, then why has the President embraced an immigration bill that would double the flow of guest workers into America? They will take jobs that would be available for American workers. Why? That is what I think about. As David Cameron, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, said recently: Immigration cannot be a substitute for training our own workforce. Is there something wrong with him saying that? Isn't that an honest, correct statement, speaking for the interest of the average Briton? We need to help struggling Americans get off welfare, off unemployment, and into good-paying jobs. We have a loose labor market. We don't have a tight labor market. Byron York recently wrote an excellent column. He showed that the very same companies that signed letters to the President and the Congress demanding more guest workers are laying off American workers by the thousands. Big companies are signing letters that demand more workers, and they are laying off thousands of workers. It is a fact. He listed them. There were 10 or 15 companies. Some of them laid off thousands of people the very year they wrote to this Congress demanding more foreign workers. So now we have to extend unemployment benefits because people can't find jobs. We have to pass a law to set the wage so the wage can be higher because it is not going up through the natural free market as it should if we had a normal market for labor. Whom do we work for? I know who I work for, and that is the hard- working people of Alabama and the United States. I don't work for the masters of the universe. They are demanding more workers from Congress when millions of Americans are unemployed. America is not an oligarchy. House Republicans need to firmly tell this President that we work for the American people. We reject any immigration plan that puts special interests or corporate interests before working Americans. They need to say: We are going to defend the working people of this country. They are not being defended in the Senate by the Democratic majority, that is for sure, with regard to the immigration policy. A small group of CEOs don't get to set immigration policy for the country, no matter how much money they have. How many ads do they buy? We are not going to enrich the political class at the expense of the middle class, and we will reject the immigration bill that passed the Senate. That is one of the things we could do to help improve job prospects for Americans. It wouldn't cost us a dime. We wouldn't have to borrow money. It would actually get people off welfare and food stamps. It would put them back into the workforce, and put us on a better path. If we want to reverse the middle-class decline, we need a new economic vision. We need concrete steps to restore opportunity to the American people without adding a penny to the national debt. We need policies that work to create prosperity without borrowing and creating more debt. We just have to do that. What are some of the things that we can do? Produce more American energy. We can turn the welfare office into a job-training center. We can do this. We are going to have to do this. We are going to have to move people from dependence to independence. We need to streamline the Tax Code and make it more growth oriented, which will help us to be more competitive worldwide. We need to eliminate every Washington regulation that is not needed. These are regulations that kill jobs and kill competitiveness. We need to enforce trade rules with our partners that defend the legitimate interest of U.S. workers. We need to enforce an immigration policy that serves the national interest--the people's interest--and protects jobs for Americans. We need to make our government leaner and more accountable. Our government needs to do more for less just like good businesses and good corporations and good companies are doing all over America. We need to do that with our government. That will help the economy. We need to balance the Federal budget, restore the confidence of the American people, the world financial community, the vitality and the future of America, and spare our children from a lifetime of debt. These are all positive steps that are true to our constitutional heritage and our legacy of freedom and opportunity. Those are the things we should be doing and we can do. They are all steps that will create more jobs and more growth without borrowing money, and these are all steps that will lift millions out of poverty, and help struggling Americans realize the dream of financial independence. I don't know what the President was thinking when he talked about a few little promise zones--is that what he called them--around the country. This is somehow going to deal with the unemployment problem in America? He announced this today. I haven't had a chance to study it yet, but these are just a few spots on the map of the country. This is not going to have any kind of systemic impact on our declining growth and the weak recovery we are seeing today. If the recovery doesn't exceed 2 percent GDP growth per year, it will not create jobs faster than the population grows. I am afraid we are not in a good position there. We are not seeing the growth that we had, and experts are predicting slow growth in the years to come. We have to get off the path we are on and get on the path to growth, job creation, and prosperity. We have to make sure our American citizens are trained, skilled, and moved into good jobs so they can be independent and take care of their families without being dependent on the government of the United States. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I want to share in some remarks Senator Ayotte had relative to the amendment she submitted that would pay for the unemployment insurance extension and veteran pensions benefits. I will just say her pay-for is an issue that I have had some experience with. I offered several years ago an amendment to fix the same problem, and I was disappointed when the majority leader, Senator Reid, objected to that amendment. Senator Ayotte's amendment would pay for the jobless benefits of unemployed Americans and restore veterans' pensions by cutting off fraudulent tax payments to illegal aliens. This is a very simple concept. There is a clear abuse going on here that needs to be fixed, and it should have been fixed a long time ago. The amendment contains an offset of $20 billion--$20 billion--by closing this loophole and ending this abuse of American tax dollars. Remember, the veterans' retirement benefit reductions in their retirement plans that were voted on recently in this body--part of the Ryan-Murray budget agreement--only saved $6 billion over 10 years by altering the retirement benefits of veterans. So this amendment-- closing the tax loophole--would save $20 billion over 10 years. In 2011--this is when the matter first came to my attention by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Each Department has an inspector general. The inspectors general are part of the Obama administration, but they take pride in their independence, and they are by and large a very valuable part of the American Government. So this Treasury Inspector General made this statement in a report: Millions of people are seeking this tax credit who, we believe, are not entitled to it. We have made recommendations to the IRS as to how they could address this, and they have not taken sufficient action in our view to solve the problem. A clear statement by the Inspector General of the U.S. Treasury Department that there were problems with this policy, and they could be fixed, and the Internal Revenue Service was failing to take steps to fix the problem. One press report that highlighted the abuses occurring within this program reported that an illegal alien admitted that his address was used to file tax returns by four other illegal workers. All were in the country working illegally, and they filed tax returns. Did they file the tax returns to pay taxes? No. They filed the tax returns to get a tax credit back from the government, a check from the government. They claimed 20 dependents living inside their residence, and the Internal Revenue Service sent the illegal tax filers $30,000--direct checks from the U.S. Government, from the U.S. Department of Treasury, went to them. They filed a return, they said they had all these children, and they were given $30,000. According to the report, none of those dependents lived in the United States or had even visited the United States. The illegal alien in the story justified the enormous tax fraud by saying: ``If the opportunity is there and they can give it to me, why not take advantage of it?'' Well, this is an interesting development. Let's go along a little further. As the Treasury Inspector General himself said: ``The payment of Federal funds through this tax benefit appears to provide an additional incentive for aliens to enter, reside, and work in the United States without authorization, which contradicts Federal law and policy to remove such incentives.'' So the inspector general took the obvious position that it is the government's position that people who enter the country illegally ought not to receive tax credit checks from Uncle Sam and that this policy not only encouraged that, it encouraged more people to come to America to claim benefits, as this person who entered the country illegally said: If they can give it to me, why not take advantage of it? Now one of the things I have learned as I have traveled the world is, a lot of people have an exaggerated opinion of the wealth and power of the United States. You meet good people in underdeveloped countries, and they say: Why doesn't the United States do this, that, and the other--as if we had unlimited power, unlimited money, and unlimited ability to solve the problems they face at any given time. So a lot of people, maybe, when they come to the country do not realize we are a nation of limited resources and we cannot be wasting money, we cannot be having people enter our country contrary to the law, undocumented, working, taking jobs that Americans need, and then sending them big checks--$30,000 for children who do not even exist or certainly have never been in the United States. How do they do it? They use an ITIN, an individual tax identification number. They do not have Social Security numbers. They have a tax ID number. Why? That is a tax number that the Treasury Department came up with to allow noncitizens who do not have Social Security numbers to pay taxes to Uncle Sam. That is what it was supposed to be used for. These clever individuals have figured out a way--they do not qualify for a Social Security number, so they get an ITIN number, and then they immediately start filing a tax return, claiming benefits, tax credits for children they may not even have or are not in the country, and they are not entitled to it. It is billions of dollars. According to the best estimates we have, if this loophole were closed--that the Treasury Department themselves has identified--it would save $20 billion over 10 years. Well, that is a lot of money. In fact, in 2011, they claimed--and I do not know why it is not more--that illegal aliens received a staggering $4.2 billion in refundable tax credits in 2010. So in 2010, they received illegally $4.2 billion under this program. Can you imagine that? That is more than the budget of the State of Alabama--the general fund budget of the State. This was in 2010, and it has been growing substantially. It is probably more than that now. So the legislation Senator Ayotte proposes would fix this problem, and it is time we fixed it. I cannot imagine why anyone would oppose it. The House has passed legislation already that would fix this problem and it died in the Senate. Senator Reid refused to bring it up. He obstructed its passage. It should have long since been passed. So I pose a question to my colleagues: Which would you rather do? Would you cut the retirement benefits of men and women who served this country for 20 years or more in the U.S. military, being deployed in harm's way, placing their lives at risk--even those who are disabled as a result of service in the U.S. military in combat zones; they have their retirement cut too--would you choose to cut their pay to save $6 billion, when you could cut out a totally unjustified claim of tax credits of $20 billion? Is it political correctness run amok that we are dealing with here? Why can't we fix this? So I think this is something that needs to be fixed. It is past due to be fixed. Senator Ayotte is correct to raise it as a legitimate pay-for for unemployment compensation and veterans' retirement, and I salute her for it. It is something I pushed for, and I offered a very similar amendment when the Murray-Ryan bill moved through the Senate. I think it is something we need to work on. We are not talking about as much as we should now the chatter has receded a little bit--but our deficit situation is still very grim. We now have a current debt of $17 trillion. That is unprecedented in the history of the United States. It has doubled in recent years. They are the kind of deficits we have never seen before, and it is something we have to address.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, there is no doubt our employment situation in America is not good. Unemployment remains consistently high long after the administration has told us the recession is over. The growth that has been projected year after year has not been at the level the experts had projected. CBO has missed the growth levels. The Federal Reserve has missed the growth levels. We have come in below that consistently. Growth is not where we need it to be; there is no doubt about it. So we have a serious unemployment situation. Perhaps the most grim concept we need to be well aware of is that workforce participation; that is, the percentage of Americans in the working age group who are actually working is lower today than at any time since the 1970s. That is a stunning statistic. Not since women entered the workforce in large numbers have we seen such low workforce participation numbers. I believe, first and foremost, that an unemployment extension bill is treating the symptoms of the problem. It is an aspirin for a fever, but the fever has been raging for weeks now. Something is causing it, and we need to deal with the cause of it rather than continuing to treat the symptoms. I think that is so important for us to remember. Also, this Nation is struggling economically for a number of reasons. One of them clearly is the size of our debt. Our debt is so large-- $17-plus trillion--now that it is causing uncertainty in the economic markets. We have to get our spending under control. We have to do that. Every time we have a desire to do something good, we cannot continue to borrow the money to pay for it. The unemployment bill that is before us today makes no attempt whatsoever to find spending reductions in other areas of this monstrosity of a government but borrows every penny of it. They say it is $6 billion. Well, it is $6 billion for 90 days--3 months. It is $26 billion over the full year. That is a huge sum of money. We just had a big dispute over cutting retirement pay that our military people have earned, and it was a dispute over $4 billion. That was over 10 years--$4 billion over 10 years. This is $6 billion over 3 months. So this is a lot of money, and effort should have been made to try to find offsetting reductions in wasteful spending that occur throughout here before we go again to treat a symptom of a disease. But the tragedy is--the tragedy is--that the policies of this administration are driving this poor growth record. It just is. First and foremost, the proposals have been to tax, tax, tax--tax more. Taxing the private sector will not create growth, no matter whom you tax. It will not be a growth-producing idea to tax the economy. Experts tell us that. The Congressional Budget Office tells us that. So this is what we have been seeing every year. The budget that passed out of this Senate, the budget that was proposed by the President of the United States--the budget that passed the Senate with I think virtually every single Democratic Senator voting for it and all Republicans opposing it would have increased taxes $1 trillion and increased spending $1 trillion. The taxes were not used to reduce our deficit, as the balanced approach seems to suggest. ``We have a balanced approach to reduce our deficits. We are going to tax some and cut spending some.'' Oh, no, they did not cut spending at all. Their 10-year budget plan called for raising taxes $1 trillion and raising spending $1 trillion. Tax and spend--that is what it was. It was on the floor of the Senate. There is no dispute about that. No one argues about it. But we have agreed to a certain level of spending here to try to bring our economy under control--the Budget Control Act--and we have acknowledged on both sides of the aisle, as have independent experts, that we need to reduce spending and we need to contain the growth of spending and we need to reduce the deficits that are adding to the weakness of our economy and the uncertainty in our economy and creating risks in our economy. So this bill borrows every penny of it--just a total violation of promised fiscal responsibility. It just is. I wish it were not so. I wish we could just do this and it would not cost anything. But it will cost, and it will hamper growth in our country. There are other problems. We need more American energy. Energy produced in America creates jobs in America. It creates wealth in America. It keeps us from exporting large amounts--billions and billions of dollars--to Venezuela and the Middle East and other places around the globe. We could be producing that energy here, creating jobs here, keeping that wealth at home, strengthening our economy, and creating growth. That is what we should be doing. The administration has blocked American energy. They have dragged their feet in every shape, form, and fashion, whether it is moratoriums in the gulf or blocking in Alaska, blocking the pipeline for our neighbors in Canada, or blocking production on public lands. This is not the way to create an economy. We need a tax system that is not always going up but is more growth- oriented, simpler, more focused on creating growth. We need to eliminate every unnecessary regulation that burdens the American competitive marketplace and makes us less competitive globally instead of adding to them, and we have never seen anything like the plethora of new regulations being issued day after day, week after week, month after month, many of them challengeable constitutionally as being beyond the power of bureaucrats to issue because Congress did not pass the law to justify it. It is driving up the cost of energy, and it is driving up the cost of production in widgets in America, making us less able to compete with foreign competitors. We need to stand up for American workers and American manufacturing on the world stage. It is time to tell our trading partners: We are willing to trade with you, big boy, but you have to play by the rules. This idea that you can violate the rules and we are still going to treat you as a great trading partner has to be over. We need to stand up for the American worker on the world stage. It has to be done. Finally, at a time of high unemployment, should we not ask ourselves why the President of the United States and virtually every Democrat and a number of Republicans voted to double the number of workers who were coming to America under this comprehensive immigration bill? We admit a million a year legally. We believe in immigration, we support immigration, but at some point you are bringing in workers to take jobs from unemployed Americans. So now we are here trying to extend unemployment benefits to help unemployed Americans. Is there no common sense in this body? How can this possibly be? But that is the deal. I know Senator Reid and Senator Leahy were on the floor earlier today, and they said we have to pass this comprehensive immigration bill. It would not end the illegality. It would reduce it only by about 40 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office, but it would double the number of guest workers coming in. Guest workers, by definition, are people coming to take jobs. Why are wages down? One reason is--Professor Borjas at Harvard, who has studied this extensively; the Federal Reserve in Atlanta, which has examined this extensively; the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which has examined it--what do they find? They find that for middle- and lower income workers, their wages are significantly adversely impacted by this unprecedented flow of immigrant labor into America. I do not have anything against people who want to come to America and work. They are good people. They want to have a job. I understand that. But any nation has to ask itself: What is the right amount? How many people can you absorb without causing millions of Americans to lose their jobs? And we now have to come to the floor of the Senate to ask what we can do to help them in this period of pain they are going through. So I just want to say a couple things. We can do something now for the unemployed, but we need to be paying for it. We need to be staying within the spending limits we have agreed to. We do not need to pass any more laws that increases the amount of money we borrow. We borrow enough. For heaven's sake, we borrow too much right now, and it threatens our financial future, as expert after expert has told us. They have told us we are running a high risk, and nothing could be worse--nothing could be worse--for working Americans than that we have some other new financial crisis to spring up in the months or years to come because we were irresponsible today. Wouldn't that be a disaster? It certainly would. So I will urge our colleagues to begin to focus on the underlying disease here; that is, the policies of an administration that has produced the slowest postrecession recovery maybe the Nation has ever had, except for the Great Depression, because it is tax more, regulate more, borrow more. That is all it is, and it will not work systemically to put us on the right path. I know this is a tough challenge for us, but I am convinced that if this Congress puts its mind to it, there are more than a few places we can find waste, fraud, and abuse to help pay for and to assist those who have been unemployed for a long time. I believe we can absolutely do better than we are today about that, and I hope we will do so. It is not right to just say the only people who care about American workers and care about those who are unemployed are those of us who are willing to forget our budget limitations, to forget our financial responsibilities, and just borrow more and spend more, and somehow this is going to fix the problem we are facing. It will not. It will not fix the problem. In fact, it is creating the very disease that is causing workers to be suffering today. Madam President, I appreciate the opportunity to share these remarks. I will repeat again, we are seeing very tough times for the American worker. Particularly, the lower income workers are having a difficult time, and there are many causes for that. But just taxing more, spending more, and borrowing more is one of the big causes of the problems we have today, and we are not going to fix that problem by even more of the same policies that got us into the situation we are in today. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 10 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, there has been considerable controversy in recent days over a provision in the recently passed spending package that became known as the Bipartisan Budget Act which cuts pensions for military members, including wounded warriors. There was bipartisan agreement. People on both sides of the aisle believe that it ought to be fixed, that it was an error and should not go forward, and that there were better ways to find the money--if you have to have money to spend somewhere else--than taking it from military retirees. But Majority Leader Reid and every single Member of his conference save one stood together to block an effort which I proposed to restore the pensions for the military and also find better offsets. They blocked us from making any alteration to this spending package that was before the Senate, including my amendment to close an egregious tax welfare loophole--a tax credit, a payment directly from the United States of America to illegal aliens--that could pay for these cuts itself. Indeed, the inspector general of President Obama's Treasury Department has said this loophole needs to be closed and would save a substantial sum of money. It is an open gate, allowing massive fraud and illegality. So we simply wanted to close that loophole. We asked to pay for this new spending by closing this loophole that the Treasury Department asked us to close instead of reducing the retirement benefits by as much as $70,000 for a sergeant who served to age 42 in the U.S. military. How can this blockade be defended? How did it happen? Why would we be in such a position? Is there any Member in the majority who would really defend the practice we are now undertaking where legislation that clearly needs an amendment to fix a problem in it is not allowed to have amendments, and the legislation is rammed through the Senate? This has been the pattern around here for far too long. The majority leader is eroding the Senate's historic role as the great Chamber where the issues are debated and changes and amendments are voted on, and he is being enabled and supported by his conference. Consistently, time and again, when objections are made to try to stop this practice and get amendments and votes on important bills, his conference has stood with him. In other words, his conference is saying: We choose to stand with Majority Leader Reid and his procedural actions which block other colleagues; we choose to stand against even our own Members having amendments and against the right of individual Americans to have their Senator be held accountable--to stand up and be able to offer amendments to legislation to improve it. And if you don't do that, you are accountable for voting for the final bill--which is imperfect and should be fixed. That is the way the voters hold us accountable. They need to be able to see us vote and look at our voting records and decide whether we are serving their interests, some Wall Street interest, some special interest, or some political group instead of the national interest. That is what this whole system is about. Now we have before us the Defense bill that is so important for America. I serve on the Armed Services Committee. I have been on that committee for nearly 17 years. We moved this bill out with a big majority. I voted for it in committee, although I expressed great concern about its budgetary problems that needed to be fixed. Unfortunately these problems have not been fixed. But I wanted to see the bill move forward, and I tried to be cooperative. The bill moved to the floor. The budget problem hasn't been fixed, and there are other problems with the legislation that need to be refined. The bill before us, the Defense bill, spends approximately $500 billion--for the largest single agency in the U.S. Government. Are we to accept that it should pass in this body without a single person having a single idea that ought to be made a part of that bill? Can it not be made better? The majority admits it is not a perfect piece of legislation. We certainly know that. The American system is designed so that when an imperfect bill moves forward, a Senator can offer an amendment. Maybe it is not a good amendment. Maybe it will be voted down. Maybe it is a good amendment and will be accepted. But no more, not with what is happening here today. What is happening here today is when Republicans want to offer an amendment, Senator Reid basically says no. He doesn't want any amendments. He then uses a device called ``filling the tree''--because he gets to be recognized first--filling it with a series of amendments, leaving no place, then, for any other Member of the Senate to call up an amendment. And the majority leader won't remove the amendments from the tree unless he decides he wants to. On this Defense bill, we had two votes on amendments when the bill was up for an entire week. We could have easily had 30 or 40 votes that week had we chosen to do so. So only two votes were held, and none now, and we are moving to final passage. The tree is filled, and we have not been able to force even a single vote to fix matters. Senator Cornyn offered an amendment this afternoon. He filed a motion to table some of the amendments Senator Reid had placed on the tree, and it was voted down by the supporters of Senator Reid on the other side of the aisle. We have been talking about this for a long time. This is contrary to the history of the Senate. Senator Cornyn laid out how year after year for 51 years we moved a defense bill through the Senate, and there have been multiple amendments nearly every time but this one. It is unthinkable that the great Senate of the United States would not allow amendments to a bill as significant as a defense bill. So what does the majority leader do after he fills the tree? Republicans said: Wait a minute, Senator Reid. There were no amendments allowed on the bill. We have amendments. He said: Oh, you are being obstructionist. I am going to file for cloture. I am going to file a motion to shut off debate, and we are not going to have any amendments. And then if the Republicans resist and say, we are not going to vote to end debate because we haven't had any amendments, he says, you are obstructionist. This is the pattern that has been going on. He files cloture virtually immediately with the filing of the bill, and he claims that is a filibuster by the Republicans. So by filing cloture immediately, he contends that Republicans are filibustering a bill; he counts up these filibusters and says: There are too many filibusters in the Senate. You are obstructing the business of the Senate. In truth, Majority Leader Reid is the one who is obstructing the Senate. He is the one who is blocking debate and amendments. If you ask a schoolchild somewhere in America, if you ask a senior citizen, a World War II veteran who loves this country and has studied the great principles of America, you say there is a piece of legislation on the floor of the Senate and there is something in it that is wrong--they want to cut benefits for wounded warriors, veterans who served and have been wounded in combat and disabled--and you do not want that to happen, what would you do? Why, they would all answer, you would file an amendment to the bill to fix this problem. But not in the Senate today. That is the classical understanding of the way this body ought to operate. That is what James Madison, I am sure, conceived and the way it has worked for so many years. But not any longer. This bipartisan Budget Act is just like the Defense bill-- no amendments. No matter how important the bill is, no matter how many problems there are in it, no amendments. Oh, you want to go back to that old Senate where people could actually debate and have amendments and offer changes and improve it? No longer. That is obstructionist. That is delaying tactics. We won't have it anymore. You are slowing us down. It is unacceptable. When I vote not to end debate on this Defense bill that is before us, I am not voting to not have a defense bill. That is so obviously wrong it is hard to believe you have to explain it. But we are not voting to do that. We are voting to maintain the classical principle of the Senate where individual Senators from whatever State there is can come to the floor and make a contribution to the country. They were elected by their people. There are almost 5 million Alabamians who elected me. Do I not get to offer an amendment to the Defense bill of the United States? It diminishes my role. It diminishes the role of every single Senator. So I am asking my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who have been lemming-like, I call it, defending this abuse of power, to begin to consider what this may mean to them and whether this is the right way the Senate should operate. There will be some tough votes. We will all have to take tough votes. Probably most people can explain their votes if they know what they are doing. Maybe some cannot and they will be voted out and sent home. So be it. If you cannot defend your vote and you are not casting good votes on bills and you cannot respond effectively as to why you voted for or against a certain amendment, then you ought to be sent home. We are not entitled to these jobs. We have to be elected to them. I am concerned about it. I believe it goes even beyond the significance of this important Defense bill. I think it goes beyond this grave error in which we are reducing the pay of military retirees when we are not reducing other retirees' pay. This is not a belt-tightening across the board. It seems to me to be a targeting of one group of Americans, perhaps those who served more than any other group. Majority Leader Reid continues to complain that the trains are not running on time, not running with enough ruthless efficiency to suit his ideas. So he then uses a filling-the-tree tactic. But that is not all. Although President Obama has had judge after judge after judge confirmed, and Cabinet people and sub-Cabinet people confirmed in large numbers, the Senate refused to approve one appointment recently and refused to fill three Federal judgeships at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit because they were not needed. The average caseload for those judges was 149. Of the 8 judges who are there now, there are authorized 11 judges. So the 8 judges there now have 149 cases per judge, whereas my circuit, the 11th Circuit, sitting in Atlanta, has over 700 cases per judge. The national average is around 350 cases per judge. We do not need to fill three judgeships for which the caseload is not there. The caseload for the DC Circuit is almost half that of the next lowest circuit in the country. So we do not need these judges. The caseload continues to decline. So the Senate refused to give cloture, refused to confirm those judges. So in an act of pique or calculation or deliberateness, the majority leader altered the rule of the Senate about how we ought to conduct business here. He did so by breaking the rules of the Senate. This is what happened. U.S. Senate rule XXII says in order to bring debate to a close, three-fifths of the Senators duly sworn would need to vote to end the debate. There were not sufficient votes to end the debate on the DC judges because they were not needed. This irritated the majority leader. So he petitioned to the Presiding Officer and the Parliamentarian and he asserted that it only takes 51 Senators to vote to end debate. But rule XXII explicitly says it takes three-fifths, 60 Senators, to end debate. It goes on to say, except when you change the rules of the Senate, and that takes two-thirds, 67. So it takes 67 votes to change the rules of the Senate and 60 votes to end debate. What did Senator Reid do? He asked the Parliamentarian to say it only took 51. The Presiding Officer, the President pro tempore of the Senate, Senator Leahy, our longest serving Member, and the Parliamentarian said no, Senator Reid, the rule is it takes 60 votes to shut off debate. So what did Senator Reid do? He used the ability to appeal the ruling of the Chair and he asked his colleagues to overrule the ruling of the Chair, which by any plain reading of the rules of the Senate would be without dispute requiring 60 votes to shut off debate, but he wanted it to be 51 and his colleagues supported him. His colleagues supported him, they supported him and he overruled the Chair, his own Parliamentarian whom he selected and the Presiding Officer that he put in the Chair. They voted to change the rules of the Senate. It is in plain language--with 51 votes, not 67. This is dangerous, colleagues. This is the kind of thing you see in Third World republics or would-be republics. This is the kind of lawlessness that will endanger the American system of government at its most fundamental basis. It is endangering us. The President says whatever he wants to--you can keep your doctor, the President says your plan is going to save you $2,000 a year, the President says all these things and he gets his bill passed and none of it is true. I don't see any Members on the floor who voted for this bill, ObamaCare, down here apologizing to the American people, saying I am sorry, the bill I voted for did not do any of the things I promised you it would do and I am willing to have an amendment process on the floor to fix it. No, we are not going to get a vote on ObamaCare. They are going to block that too. If any attempt is ever made, he will fill the tree and block that vote. So we are not able to bring it to the Senate floor and require Senators to vote on serious issues involving health care for millions of Americans because Senator Reid doesn't believe in it and he is backed by his colleagues. I guess the President probably says, oh, don't let them vote on ObamaCare, they might change some of it. You know, they are finding out what is in it. We don't want them to actually think they have enough muscle to actually pass a law to fix it or change it or alter it. That would be terrible. Who do they think they are? Do they think this is a democracy or something? That is where we are. This is huge and significant. We have to confront what is happening. It is very important that we cool down and we get some sort of work going on, but I am not confident at all on that. This effort should result in a retreat from this breaking the rules to change the rules, this nuclear option. The reason a nuclear option was called that is because once you do that, it blows up the entire Senate. Senator Levin explained the problem very succinctly, one of two Democrats who voted against Senator Reid's attempt to execute the nuclear option and to change the rules of the Senate. He said if a majority can change the rules of the Senate, there are no rules. It is simply what the majority says. There are no standards, there are no rules, there are no procedures. If we can change them whenever we are frustrated by a majority vote in the Senate, there are no rules, there are no protections. That is so true. That is why what has happened here is so significant. I believe this late-night work and this process to consider nominations is healthy, because it requires us to go through a painful period of introspection as to what is happening to us and how we ought to conduct this great Senate. This afternoon we did not have the support for Senator Cornyn's resolution. Yesterday, when I made the motion to clear a place off of the tree so my amendment could be heard and voted on, my colleagues, a majority of them, voted no. Only one broke with Senator Reid, actually; one Democrat did. Every Republican voted to allow amendments to go forward, allow my amendment to be heard. The rights of all the Senators in this body to defend their State, to defend equal representation, was undermined. The two Independents in our Senate, delightful individuals for sure who caucus with the Democrats and vote with the Democrats, maybe sometime they will be willing to prove that the letter ``I'', independent, means something and maybe they will help us stand and defend the heritage of the Senate. We need to make this thing change. We cannot continue to aggregate more and more power into the majority leader where no longer--where the right to demand 60 votes to shut off debate could be further eroded, where we will continue to see bill after bill brought up with no amendments being allowed. They say oh, well, we are at the end of a year. We must do that. We do not have time. But the Defense bill has been on the floor since June. That is awful. There have been huge amounts of time for us to bring it to the floor. It has been out of committee since June and it should long ago have been brought up and, in fact, it could have been voted on last week with full amendments and we would already be through with that and be gone today. The Armed Services bill, the Defense bill is an important bill. I am very disappointed we are at a period of impasse, very disappointed that I cannot support going forward with it to final passage because there is no ability to amend it and fix some of the obvious flaws that are in it. It is outside the budget spending limits we agreed to. The Bipartisan Budget Act was also rammed through the Senate with no ability to offer amendments. This legislation will not allow us to prevent the cut of veterans retirement pay and disabled wounded warriors retirement and benefit pay. It is a disappointment for me to be in this position. I have tried to be supportive of the Defense bill every year. I worked in committee to do so. I believe last year we got a unanimous vote, Republicans and Democrats, quite a number of times in the committee. A lot of that is due to Senator Levin and Senator Inhofe's leadership. This time we have a problem, and it is not going well, and I am deeply disappointed. I believe we can do better, we must do better, and I will not be able to vote to support this bill tonight. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that CDR Joe Carrigan, the defense legislative fellow assigned to my office, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the 113th Congress.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, we all have various people from other departments and agencies in our government on occasion who help us in our offices. Being a member of the Armed Services Committee, I have had the pleasure to have a number of fine defense fellows serve in my office and help us prepare the Defense bill and deal with other issues of importance. Commander Joe Carrigan is another one of these very fine fellows. He is one of the best we have ever had. He has a good strategic mind, he works extremely hard, he is always thoughtful, and he is a delight to have in the office. We have been talking about our military personnel and their retirement benefits. Remember, unlike other government employees, they are on call anytime, any day, to be sent anyplace in the world at the very risk to their lives and physical well-being. In addition, they work long hours. They have no thought to object to being asked to work a weekend or a night or 24 hours without sleep to do some task they are called upon to do, and they get no overtime for it. It is just the way it is done in the military because when a challenge is out there, they act. I know some point out the weaknesses in this large entity, the Defense Department, and some of the management problems that arise. But I have to say without any doubt whatsoever that the institution has quality people--people of integrity, men and women who love their country and serve their country and do whatever you ask them to do. I see that every day when we work with people such as Commander Carrigan. And he will be successful in whatever he does and in whatever his next assignment will be. So as we wrap up this Defense bill, I would like to thank him for his service and to thank all of our men and women in uniform who do their work, and I hope that we in the Congress can be worthy of their trust. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, will the Senator from South Carolina yield?

Mr. SESSIONS. I say to Senator Graham, he has served in the House. I know the powers that be would just like to see this bill rubber stamped, passed, done with, rah, rah, rah. But if this legislation were to be amended, and this problem were fixed, doesn't the Senator think the House would have ample time to pass it before the January 15 date for the CR, or, really, they could, as we have done many times, extend the CR a week or so, if needed? But I do not really think it would be needed. I think they would pass it promptly.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, when I first came to Washington, considering running for the Senate, I went to a Republican luncheon, and they asked me to say just a thing or two, not that long, and I said: I could think of no greater honor than to represent the people of Alabama in the greatest deliberative body in the history of the world. This is a great deliberative body. That is our heritage, and it is being eroded. It is not disputable that it is being eroded. It is being eroded in a way that is faster and more significant than any of us seem to understand. Like the frog in the warming water, we do not realize we are being cooked and that the freedoms of Americans are being cooked. This bill contains another provision that constricts the ability of a minority in the Senate--it could be Democrats or Republicans or just a bipartisan group who do not represent a majority but have a concern--to have those concerns heard and dealt with, and it is very significant. I wish it were not so. I was shocked it was in the bill. I had no idea it would be in the bill. As Senator Graham just indicated, this started out as a bipartisan, bicameral conference, and Senator Ayotte and Senator Graham and Senator Wicker and I were members of the conference. We met and had a couple of public meetings where everybody talked, but no legislation, no language was laid out. The next thing we heard: The conference leaders are drafting a bill--I would say affectionately, a gang of two this time. So this is the bill that was their product. I know they were trying to work out an important solution to America's financial problems. I know the differences between the parties are so great that it is difficult to bridge those disagreements, and we were not expecting a great solution to the long-term financial state of America--that needs to be dealt with, must be dealt with, and every year we wait makes it harder to fix that challenge we face. But I did not expect some of the damage we have seen in the legislation. I have to talk about a certain point because it changed the rules of the Senate. I am not sure the House Members understood how significant it was. But three times I have made objections to budget violations--three times--and we contended that the bill before the Senate was spending and would spend more money than the Budget Control Act allowed to be spent. If that is so--the Budget Control Act being in law, having certain limits on spending--then the Senate would have to recognize we were busting the budget and we would have to have 60 votes, a super majority, to approve busting the budget, a pretty good matter. It does not make any difference if there are taxes and fees used to pay for that. It still spends more than the amount of money we agreed to spend. It allowed us to contain spending. There were three different votes in the last year or so in which the Senate was stopped from spending more than the Budget Control Act limit required because 60 Senators would not vote for it. There were not 60 who would support waiving the budget, breaking the budget, spending above the budget. So that is the issue at stake. I am sure the spenders were deeply disappointed. They got over 50. Under this bill now, it only takes 50. They got over 50, but they did not get 60, so they were not able to continue that spending. This agreement, this bill that is before us today, would significantly weaken the ability of Senators in this body to enforce the spending and revenue limits under our budget resolution and in future budgets. The Ryan-Murray agreement that is before us today includes an egregious number of deficit-neutral reserve funds--57, to be exact. Operationally a reserve fund allows the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee to adjust the spending limits in a budget resolution prior to Senate consideration of a bill that busts the budget. This allows the proposed legislation to avoid most spending points of order. A reserve fund can be a useful tool when used in the context of a true budget resolution, one that is properly negotiated in public by a conference committee rather than a backroom deal. Reserve funds can shepherd legislation with common policy goals through the House and Senate by accommodating minor differences between the budget plan and the final legislation. So that makes sense. Reserve funds are not a total fraud. Congress does not want legislation they agreed to in concept to get tripped by scoring differences. That is why reserve funds were originally created. But there is virtually nothing policywise in common between the House and Senate budget resolution that we are seeing today. They are quite different. The House Ryan budget is a historic budget that alters the debt course of America and puts us on a sound path. The Senate budget that cleared this body, over my objection, would raise taxes $1 trillion, but instead of using those takes revenues to pay down the debt, it would have funded $1 trillion in more spending above the Budget Control Act limit we agreed to in August of 2011. So that is the situation. These are different budgets. With 57 different reserve funds, the Murray-Ryan spending bill that is before us now will allow Senator Reid and Chairman Murray to bring to the floor a practically unlimited number of big tax-and-spend bills. It will not be subject to the 60-vote limit. Normally the minority party would be able to raise a point of order under section 302(f) of the Budget Act. The 302(f) is known as the tax-and-spend point of order, because it is the one we deploy when Congress tries to spend more money than it promised to spend, and offsets that new spending with some fee or tax increase. It is the point of order we deploy when Democrats, on these occasions I have mentioned, with some Republicans supporting it, want to grow the size of government. It takes 60 votes to get around a 302(f) point of order and it forces colleagues to go on record and say: Yes, I know my legislation will bust the budget, but we ask that we do it anyway. What I found as we have looked at it, when you shine light on these votes, and votes on the floor of the Senate, and ask: Senator, do you really want to spend more than we agreed to spend? You just agreed in August of 2011 to the Budget Control Act. It said, we are not going to spend over this level. A bill hits the floor that spends over that level. They say: Do not worry about it, it is paid for by taxes. Do you really want to do that when it is raised as a budget point of order? Well, Senators kind of get shy and many of them back off what they might otherwise have agreed to if that issue were not raised. As I said, there were three successive votes in which this Congress refused to bust the budget and spend more than was agreed to. It rankled some of our Members who like to spend. They did not like that. But the sheer number of reserve funds in the legislation before us, 57, would essentially take that point of order away. There are so many reserve funds in this bill that Senator Reid and Chairman Murray can bring an endless number of tax-and-spend bills to the floor, and my colleagues and I would be unable to shine light on that and be able to have a clean vote on one question--not whether we favored the idea they want to spend money on. That was not the question. The question, when you raise a budget point of order, is: Do you believe we should break the spending limits that we agreed to? If you can fund your bill and your cause that you believe in by finding savings elsewhere in the budget, then we might support that. But we are not going to support spending more than we agreed to. That is what this budget point of order has allowed us to do on a series of occasions. I believe it is causing a lot of people to come to me and Chairman Murray when they offer legislation to make sure they are within the budget. They go back and try to draft it in a way that does not violate the budget. But eliminating this budget point of order will reduce the number of people who are concerned about that. We will see less discipline, in my opinion. In summary, the reserve fund would allow the Senate majority or a number of Senators who have got legislation on the floor to avoid this tough vote in the light of day so people can see what has occurred. Moreover, there is a little-understood danger in this legislation that goes beyond spending. It really does. This bill can allow legislation that would carry measures that are disproportionately policy heavy with very little budgetary effect. We believe, as we have analyzed the bill, that it could allow reserve funds to be used to increase the minimum wage, to change voter registration laws, to extend unemployment insurance and offset it with some tax increase somewhere, regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and more. There is little that can be done in the Congress to stop that which could have been done previously. This will allow this to go forward in a way heretofore not done. So I urge my colleagues not to sit idly by and watch the rights of the Senate get pounded into the dirt. It is better to have their individual authorities from whatever State and whatever party they come from to be able to highlight these problems. So I will ask unanimous consent today to offer an amendment that would strike the reserve funds from this legislation that is before us. I encourage my colleagues to support that effort. If you care about this Senate as an institution, if you care about the right of free debate and the ability to actually amend legislation, if you care about the heritage of the Senate and the importance of constraining spending, then I would urge support of my unanimous consent request. Mr. President, I would formally ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending motion so that I may offer a motion to concur with the amendment numbered 2573 which is filed at the desk which would accomplish what I have described.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, these provisions that allow the objections to the abuse of reserve funds have been in law since 1985, 30 years almost. This has been the law that we have. I raised objections to the tax-and-spend point of order and it has been sustained on the floor of the Senate. The Senate budget resolution that Senator Murray referred to is the one that would increase spending $1 trillion over what was agreed to in 2011, August of 2011, and would add $1 trillion in taxes. Then they changed this rule. This legislation alters that from the past. The budget resolution she referred to did pass the Senate with Democratic votes only. It was a simple majority. But this is legislation that changes the Budget Act. I feel strongly we have to absolutely understand what has happened here. The rule has been changed. Power that Senators had to block tax-and-spend legislation that breaks spending limits has been eroded significantly. It should not have been a part of any legislation that purports to be legislation that puts this Nation on a financial path of soundness. In fact, it does the opposite. It weakens the ability of Senators who want to hold this Congress to its own spending limits agreed to in law. It weakens their ability to stop breaking those spending limits. There is no doubt about that. I am really upset about it. I think it is historic. I understand that the House maybe did not fully understand what was meant here. Maybe we can somehow revive this. But in truth we should do it now. We should not pass this bill that contains this legislation. Had we had a normal conference committee--and I had been a member of it and other Senators had been a member of that conference committee and had a chance to talk about it, it would not have been in there. Maybe that is why they chose not to have a public, open discussion of it, because they wanted to slip this through in the dead of night, up next to Christmas. Oh, you have got to pass this bill just as it is. There can be no amendments. The government will shut down. We will all have to stay here until Christmas Eve, as we had to, to try to stop ObamaCare that they passed on Christmas Eve. So this is the kind of thing that is not healthy for America. It is not healthy for the Senate. Reserve funds are a function of policy. There is no common policy between the House and the Senate on budget resolutions. Budget resolutions are passed by each House, but we do not have common policies there about how it is processed. Never have we adopted the volume of reserve funds that will hereafter be longstanding parts of our law. I believe we have a time to begin our wrapup now. Let me say Senator Murray is a good, strong advocate. She is effective in her leadership role. I respect her and enjoy working with her. We sometimes disagree. I wish to say, as we move to conclude this legislation, that I respect the Senator, and we move forward.

Mr. SESSIONS. Yes.

Mr. SESSIONS. Ten minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. I would ask that the unanimous consent be equally divided.

Mr. SESSIONS. What time is the vote?

Mr. SESSIONS. How did it get to be at 4:27 p.m. instead of 4:30? I ask unanimous consent the vote be held at 4:30, and I will wrap up in the time remaining.

Mr. SESSIONS. I would object if it is counted against my time.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thought we were voting at 4:30 and there would be 5 minutes left for me.