Jeff Sessions

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Yes, we would reduce the emissions of mercury since 1990 by 50 percent. Yes, President Bush proposed a very effective, sophisticated plan to further reduce those emissions by 75 percent--75 percent more. But there were problems with it. The courts found a problem with it. But instead of pursuing the matter in the fashion President Bush did, the new regulations call for this dramatic 90- percent reduction of mercury emissions, far more than we are able to do technologically and financially, I believe. That is why I salute Senator Inhofe for this resolution and I will support him. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I thank my colleague for his remarks. I caught part of the President's statement this afternoon and have gotten a transcript of some of the things he said. As ranking member on the Budget Committee, as someone who has wrestled very intensely with these numbers for 2 years, I was shocked, I say to Senator Barrasso, by some of the things he said. I would ask the Senator, based on the world we are in, how he reacts to the summary the Presidential adviser gave to the New York Times before the President's speech today, saying his plan ``focuses on education, energy, innovation, and infrastructure.'' First, does that suggest to the Senator spending?

Mr. SESSIONS. There would have been private growth and private investment--not an increase in our deficit. But it goes on. In their summary of what the President was going to say, it said he favored a ``tax code that creates American jobs and pays down our debt.'' First of all, is the Senator aware that under the President's plan that he submitted to us--his budget--the lowest single year's deficit in the 10-year window is $488 billion--that we never come close to paying down the debt in the plan he submitted to us? And how can the President--this is an unfair question, but I will ask the Senator from Wyoming--how can the President say he has a plan that pays down our debt when the lowest single deficit he proposes is nearly $500 billion?

Mr. SESSIONS. It absolutely is. Let me say this, in his speech--this is a quote from the transcript I have of it--he declared: Both parties have laid out their policies on the table for all to see. Isn't it a fact that the House Republicans passed a long-term budget that would change the debt course of America and three Members of the Republican Senate laid out budgets that would have balanced the budget in the United States of America, and that the Democratic leadership never laid out a plan, refused to lay out a plan, and violated a law-- the Congressional Budget Act--by refusing to lay out a plan? Isn't that true? Or am I missing something?

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank my colleague for those insights because this is a bit disappointing. It is more than disappointing. The President said, again, that he has a plan, and he has a vision ``of how to create strong, sustained growth,'' and ``how to pay down our long-term debt.'' He does not have such a plan. His plan comes nowhere close to balancing the budget. In 10 years, the lowest single deficit he would have is $488 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office--not me, the independent Congressional Budget Office. His statement is not accurate. How can we have a bipartisan discussion on how to solve the sustained debt threat we have in this Nation if the President goes around saying his plan will help pay down our debt? It does not pay down the debt. It does not come close to paying down the debt. He said that last year, and I grilled his Budget Director at a Budget Committee hearing. He could not defend that statement because it is indefensible. Nobody can defend that statement. And I say to any Member of this Congress, this Senate--a Democratic Member--I urge you to come down and tell me if the plan laid out by the President of the United States--the only plan we have seen, his budget--pays down the debt. It does not. He goes on to say in this speech: I've signed a law-- Forgive me if this is distressing to me, but we have been involved in the discussion a good long time. We have the U.S. Congress, including the Senate, and we have the President of the United States, and we all have a role in formulating an economic policy for America that will put our country on a growth path to eliminate the unsustainable debt course we are on. The statement cited so often from President Obama's own debt commission--Simpson-Bowles--is: This Nation has never faced a more predictable financial crisis. Why? Because of the increasing debt, they said. The numbers are relentless. It is unsustainable. That is what it means. At some point, it means there will be a credit reaction, a financial collapse, or a reaction that will put us back into recession and distress. They pleaded with us to get off the path we are on. So the President says: I've signed a law that cuts spending and reduces our deficit by $2 trillion. What does he mean by that? Well, I think most Americans can remember that last August we reached the debt ceiling. We borrowed so much money that we hit the limit of money the U.S. Government can borrow. The President asked Congress to raise that debt limit so he could keep spending and keep borrowing, and basically the Republican House and Members in the Senate--to the extent we had influence--said: Mr. President, we will raise the debt limit, but we want you to reduce spending some. So they agreed, after much debate, in the wee hours of the morning--at the latest possible time--to cut $2.1 trillion in spending. The President went kicking and screaming to that point. The Democrats pretended it was a disaster and Americans were going to sink into the ocean. That is what that was all about. Here we came with this plan, and the President now claims it is his deal, that he cut $2 trillion. I remember how it went down, and that is not a fair thing to say. He signed that law because if he did not sign it, spending would have to be cut 40 percent immediately, because that is how much, out of every dollar we spend, we borrow. We are borrowing 40 cents of every $1 we spend. So if we had not raised the debt ceiling, the U.S. Government would have had to immediately cut all expenditures by 40 percent. That is why we are on an unsustainable course. It is not a little bitty matter. The President suggests, if you listen to his speech: Don't worry about it. I have a plan. We are moving along fine. You do not have to sacrifice. We are going to have more education, energy, innovation, infrastructure. More spending--that is what that means. Investments, they say--that means spending. But we do not have the money. This country is out of money. This is a serious time. We have to make some tough decisions, and we need a Chief Executive telling the American people the truth about where we are, rather than promising some balanced budget and paying down debt when that is nowhere in his plan. He says: My own deficit plan would strengthen Medicare and Medicaid for the long haul by slowing the growth of health care costs. He has steadfastly refused to reform Medicare and Medicaid. Under this $2.1 trillion, the President insisted that Medicaid not receive a dime of cuts. And it did not receive a dime of cuts. The Defense Department gets a big time hammering under the cuts and the sequester. Medicaid--not a dime cut out of it. No reforms in Medicaid that would provide any benefit--anything other than to drive up the cost and increase the cost of Medicaid. So how can he say that? And he has attacked Congressman Ryan, the chairman of the Budget Committee in the House, for actually laying out a vision to try to put Medicare on sound footing, where it can actually be sustainable over time. Congressman Ryan has the support of Senator Wyden, a Democratic Member of the Senate. He has the support of Alice Rivlin who was President Clinton's budget director at OMB. Alice Rivlin basically agreed with the policy that Congressman Ryan laid out to save Medicare. What happened? The President called in Congressman Ryan and attacked him on the spot. They are still accusing him of having a radical scheme to destroy Medicare. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is a plan to strengthen Medicare, to save Medicare, and put it on a sound basis so that people working today can be confident that when they retire and become eligible for it, it will be there. But we cannot create something from nothing. We have to have a plan that provides the funding for it. This is not smoke and mirrors. Nothing comes from nothing, I have to tell you. One more thing. The President said, ``I signed a law that cuts spending and reduces our deficit by $2 trillion.'' Well, he was forced into signing that bill. Did he really want to sign it? No, he did not. We all know that. Anyone could tell that from reading the newspapers and how the negotiations went. Our big spenders resisted that dramatically. How much is $2 trillion over 10 years? We planned to spend $37 trillion over 10 years, increasing the debt by about $10 to $11 trillion. This would have cut it from $37 trillion being spent to $35 trillion being spent. It meant we would have increased the deficit by only $10 to $11 trillion, I guess. Not nearly enough, but at least some step toward reining in soaring spending. So the President bragged on that just a few minutes ago. He is bragging about it. What is the real truth? The budget he submitted eviscerates that agreement. The budget he submitted in February of this year--5 months after the agreement last August--would wipe out the entire sequester, would eliminate $1 trillion in cuts, and add more spending. In fact, he would add, under that plan, $1.5 trillion more in spending than the Budget Control Act agreement he is taking credit for signing would have allowed to be spent. This is not a matter of dispute. This is a fact. The budget he has submitted wiped out more than half of the cuts that were in that agreement, and he had big tax increases, about $1.8 trillion in tax increases. So $1.6 trillion more in spending than we agreed to just last summer, and $1.8 trillion in more taxes. Tax, spend. Tax, spend. That is this President's philosophy. If he wants to stand for that, campaign on that, run on that, well and good. Be honest with the American people. But do not come in and take credit for things he resisted. Do not come in and take credit for budget cuts that he proposed to eliminate. How can we have a bipartisan discussion to try to reach an agreement on what to do about the unsustainable course we are on if the President is going out and saying things that are not connected to reality? I think it is irresponsible. I really do. I do not see how a President of the United States could possibly not spend a great deal of time with the American people explaining to them why we are all going to have to tighten our belts, that we do not have the money we wish we had, that we are going to have to do this. Is there some sort of political fear that big spenders will ultimately get caught if they tell the truth about how much debt their big spending has caused the country, so they just have to pretend it is not so? Well, they said President Bush had big debt. He did spend too much money. I criticized him some on that, and none of us are perfect in this Congress. We all voted for things probably we should not have. The largest annual deficit that President Bush ever had was $470 billion. That is big. It is a lot of money. President Obama's deficits have been $1.2, $1.3 trillion all 4 years he has been in office, more than twice President Bush's deficits. He has been in office now 4 years. In the plan he has laid out, even assuming our economy continues to grow--as we assume in these budget analyses--he does not come close to balancing the budget. Every year we are adding hundreds of billions of dollars more in debt. The lowest single year in his 10-year plan would add $488 billion more to the debt. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the interest on the debt soars. The largest single increase in spending is interest. Interest last year was $225 billion on the debt, and in the 10th year of the President's budget the Congressional Budget Office projects that the interest in that 1 year--10 years from now--will be $743 billion, exceeding virtually every item in the government including the Defense Department. This is not healthy. In May, at a fundraiser--he is going to a lot of those, but sometimes, somebody has to stay home in Washington and bring this wasteful spending under control. He was at a fundraiser in Denver and he said, ``I'm running to pay down our debt.'' He said: I am running to pay down our debt. Do not worry. Let me. I am going to pay down our debt. Well, that is just not what the numbers show. No plan has been laid out other than his budget: to tax, spend, and keep the debt on the same level we were on if he had no changes at all in the budget situation. I am not happy about this. It is very distressing to me that this Nation is facing a financial crisis. We are all going to have to recognize we do not have the money that we would like to have to spend as we would like to spend. I told some people this morning at a breakfast/luncheon, a group from the Air Force Association, that the defense people needed to know we do not have the money. We do not have the money. For years we are going to have to be tightening our belts. But we can work our way through it. We can do the right things. Who knows, by producing efficiencies and encouraging productivity, we could get our country on a healthier course than we can imagine at this point. I actually think we could. But we have to be honest about the situation. We have to have somebody who stays in the office for a while and actually drives the restraints in spending and insists that every Cabinet Member, sub-Cabinet Member, GSA person going to a resort in Las Vegas who is spending the taxpayers' money, that they do it with restraint and that wasteful actions are eliminated. That is the kind of leadership we need, and the American people need to be told, and we all need to understand, we just do not have the money we wished we did. So we will have to alter our spending levels for a few years, get this country on a sound path, and create confidence. That will come when the world knows that we have gotten off the unsustainable debt path and gotten on a path that is sustainable, are set on a sound path, a path that leads to prosperity, not a path that leads to debt crisis and decline, but growth, prosperity and freedom. That is what it is all about. Forgive me if it is irritating to me. But I did conclude, after today's speech, that the President has made a decision that he is going to run to November. He is going to run on the fact that he is reducing the debt. That is what he has apparently said. ``I'm running to pay down the debt'' is what he said in Denver. He repeated that again today. So that has to be confronted. If I am wrong, I ask any Member of the Senate to come forward and show me what in the President's plan leads to any conclusion that he has laid out a plan that would pay down the debt of the United States. I do not see it. I do not think it is close. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, as we deal with the farm bill we have to acknowledge that 80 percent of that bill now is the SNAP program, or the Food Stamp Program. I will repeat that--80 percent of this bill. So we need to not call it the farm bill anymore. It needs to be considered primarily the Food Stamp bill as that's what it is. When we look at the bill, our sponsors are rightly pleased that they have tightened the belt of the farmers, they reduced some of the subsidies and programs, they created a little better policy, I believe, and they deserve some credit for that. But of the $800 billion that will be spent in the next 10 years, under current law--$800 billion compared to $200 billion in the rest of the farm program--for the $800 billion they are only claiming a $4 billion savings. It is quite true that we in America do not want to have people hungry. We do not want to have people malnourished. What we want is to run a Food Stamp Program that has integrity, that creates an incentive for responsible personal behavior and that helps America to be a healthy nation. I do not think we are there yet. In fact, we have Members on the Democratic side who are opposing even this $4 billion reduction in projected spending. This is less than half of 1 percent. And some of them don't even want to have that. Cut the farmers, all right, whack them 10 percent; but don't make real cuts to anything else or deal with any other programs. So our challenge simply is to make sure that people who are truly in need get the benefits. My Republican colleagues and I see this as a program that is temporary, helping people through tough times and creating an incentive for them to move on, be successful, find work and take care of themselves and their dependents. I believe this chart will give some indication of the situation that we are in today. It is an accurate illustration of spending in this bill, the 2013 bill, which begins October 1 of this year. The Food Stamp Program will make up $82 billion out of the spending in this legislation that we are dealing with. In the bill, $6 billion will go to conservation programs--which is not really a farmer's program, and they may get some benefits from it--another $6 billion for commodities, which is the orange in the chart, and $8 billion for crop insurance, which is the new fundamental basis of farm policy. I am not complaining that farmers are being squeezed. Hopefully, this has been done in a smart way that will also make those programs better. However, what I am suggesting is that there is virtually no change in the 80 percent of spending in this bill. We don't have the money to waste especially if it can be done better and smarter. The main farm provisions in the bill experience a $14.7 billion reduction. That is a reduction of nearly 10 percent of spending relative to the baseline. To add some context, if the food stamp portion were to be reduced by 10 percent, it would save the U.S. Treasury $75 billion. Food stamp spending has quadrupled since 2001. It doubled between 2001 and 2006. Some people say the reason food stamp use is up is due to unemployment and recession. Well, that is not the entire story. For example, from 2001 to 2006, under President Bush's time when the economy had a small recession but was moving along very strongly in 2006, it still doubled from 2001 to 2006. At that time unemployment remained at about 5 percent. It is now 8 percent. When food stamps were first expanded nationally, 1 in 50 Americans were on the program. Today that number has increased to 1 in 7. Are we confident that each of those seven Americans need this kind of subsidy? Are we sure that is needed? I believe we need to examine the program. If they need this benefit, let's get it for them. If not, let's not. There are nearly 80 welfare programs provided by the U.S. Government, and 17 are for food and nutrition support. I repeat, 17 programs are for food and nutrition support. The costs now exceed $700 billion annually for all of these Federal programs, food and others too, plus $200 billion in State contributions. So that is almost $1 trillion a year, which is so much money it is difficult to express. For example, an individual on food stamps may have a household that is eligible to receive and may receive $25,000 a year in total welfare support. We have a host of programs for which people can qualify, so we need to keep that in mind as we go forward. There is a patchwork quilt of Federal and State programs that help people in need. This is in addition to charitable and religious support that people can access. The farm bill proposes to permanently elevate food stamps far above prerecession levels. In 2008 we spent less than $40 billion on food stamps. I repeat, in 2008--just a few years ago--less than $40 billion a year. Food stamp spending over the next 10 years is estimated to average almost $80 billion. This is double the prerecession amount. This chart shows how we have grown from a little under $20 billion in 2001 to over $70 billion in 2022. We can see a little decline there between 2013 and 2022. That chart is based on projections from the Congressional Budget Office and assume that the unemployment will begin to drop in the future--we hope this is correct. Even though unemployment is expected to fall below 8 percent, they are not showing that we are going to have a major dropoff in food stamp spending in the future. Hopefully, unemployment will be falling. Hopefully, we will get this economy on the right track. I would suggest the point that is revealed in this chart is that unemployment is not what is driving the food stamp increases. The increases far exceed the unemployment rate increases, and the decline from a projected reduction in unemployment is not very much either. Were food stamp spending returned to prerecession levels those, say, in 2007, and then they were indexed for inflation, it would produce for the U.S. Treasury a $340 billion savings. So I don't think in 2007 the numbers that were spent are totally disproportionate to what we would need today, and I believe if properly managed we could do better. The amendments I have filed--and there are four--address some of the perverse incentives for States to increase food stamp registration rather than an incentive to increase the integrity of the program. For example, one of the things we need to do is to deal with the Federal provision that provides bonuses to States that increase the number of people who are registered. States currently receive bonuses for increasing enrollment and running the Food Stamp Program. They don't get bonuses for efficiently managing the program to reduce fraud, they don't get bonuses for finding people who are on the program illegitimately and selling their benefits in the marketplace or otherwise abusing the program, they get bonuses for seeing how many people they can sign up. That is not a sound policy. The next amendment I have is Restoring the Asset Test for Food Stamps. You would think it is pretty well accepted that if a person has a certain amount of assets, they shouldn't have the government pay for their food. But through a system known as categorical eligibility, 43 States have now provided benefits to individuals whose assets exceed the statutory limit for them. Only 11 States did that in 2007. Why? There are a couple of reasons. I guess one of them is they help get the incentive bonus for signing up more people. If they get around the asset test and sign up more people, maybe they get a bonus. What incentive does the State have to reduce the amount of dollars from Washington? They don't match a dime of it. What incentive do they have to reduce the amount of money--free money in their minds--from Washington going to the State? Not much really. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if passed, this amendment would save $11 billion, and all it would do is to say that SNAP beneficiaries would have to comply with the requirements of the program before they get the food stamps. It is called categorical eligibility. If people qualify for any other welfare program, the States have been given the power to say they qualify for food stamps even though they don't meet the formal qualifications for the food stamp program. Let me say that again--if they qualify for these others, under categorical eligibility they are categorically entitled to food stamps. That is not a good policy. It does not appropriately target the correct population, and we should fix that. Another issue is what has been referred to as the LIHEAP loophole. This reform--and the amendment I have offered, and I hope we get a vote on it--requires households that receive larger food stamp payments on the basis of home energy expense actually provide proof of that expense. This is a real problem. States have been part of this, frankly. They have learned how to manipulate the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program money, and it creates an opportunity to have more people qualify for higher food stamp benefits than they are entitled to. It is not good policy and this abuse should be dealt with. The CBO says if that abuse were eliminated, it would save $9.5 billion over 10 years in addition to the other savings in this bill. Then another amendment, called the SAVE amendment, would simply require that the Federal Government use a program called SAVE--similar to the E-Verify program--to ensure that those adults receiving benefits are, in fact, lawfully in the country. If they are not lawfully here, they should not be getting welfare support from the U.S. government. How basic is that? They just should not. One of the most important things we can do to restore integrity in our immigration system is to quit providing economic benefits for people who violate the law. This is the first thing we need to do. It is an important thing to do. So I think that would be an amendment we should include. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Federal spending is set to increase 50 percent over the next 10 years. I repeat: Federal spending is projected to increase 50 percent over the next 10 years, and this creates a problem for us. Our per-person debt is worse than that of Portugal, Greece, Spain, or Italy. This is a chart that shows that. We didn't make up these numbers, and it is perfectly established that they are accurate. This raises a good question. What is the per capita debt of the United States per person? In other words, what does the U.S. government owe? It is $49,800 per person--man, woman, and child in America. In Spain it is $20,000, in Portugal it is $22,000, in France it is $35,000, in Greece it is $40,000, in Italy it is $40,000, and in Ireland it is $46,000. This level of debt is not healthy for us. So the idea that we have an unlimited ability to throw money at every problem we have and that we don't have to make sure every single dollar we appropriate helps the people truly in need, and is wisely spent, is over. We have to end that concept. This government, this Congress, this administration has been far too blase about managing the people's money. It is like we just want to leave the money out there and maybe it will create a stimulus and somehow it will help the economy and we will give more than we need to give and not worry about it. We don't want to investigate anybody who rightfully qualifies for these benefits. We don't want to cut off anybody who truly deserves these benefits. That would be unkind. However, it is not unkind to insist that people meet the qualifications of the program. The people who don't meet the qualifications don't get the money. That is only common sense, and that is justice as Americans know it. It is amazing that 40 cents of every dollar we spend in our country today is borrowed. The United States is headed for what has been called the most predictable economic crisis in its history. The debt course we are on is unsustainable. We are headed to a debt crisis if we don't change where we are going, as every witness before the Budget Committee, of which I am ranking member, has told us. Yet many Senators in this body are not only unwilling to achieve more than $4 billion in savings from the $800 billion program, but some even consider $4 billion too much to reduce from the program. The junior Senator from New York proposes to increase food stamp spending even more than the current growth we have seen, explaining that ``food stamps are an extraordinary investment because for every dollar that you put into the SNAP program [the food stamp program] you get out $1.71.'' I won't repeat that because this is what the director of the program said, or the Secretary of Agriculture, I believe. He said that for every dollar spent on food stamps, you get out $1.71. Under this reasoning, we ought to just increase the food stamp program 10 times. Why not? Under this reasoning we are going to get even more money back. Somehow, it is going to create a stimulus and it is going to bring more money in for the Treasury and make the economy grow. Why don't we just pay for clothes, shoes, and housing? Why not? It is precisely this kind of thinking that has bled our Treasury of money that we need to pay for the demands this country has. I also think it is a moral issue. What is our policy objective? Is it our national goal to place as many people on welfare, food stamp support, as we can possibly put on that program? Is that our goal? Is that a moral vision for the United States of America, just to see how many people we can place in a situation where they are dependent on the Federal Government for their food? I just ask that. I think we should wrestle with that question. Under the current proposal, no fewer than one in nine Americans will be on food stamps at any point during the next 10 years. Which is the better goal--to permanently have one in nine Americans on food stamps or to have as many Americans as possible achieving financial independence? Left unattended, the safety net really can become a restraint, a trap. Welfare reform is guided by the moral principle that welfare support can become damaging not only to the Treasury of the United States but to the recipient. Over time, the trillions of dollars we spend on welfare programs--with the greatest of intentions, with the greatest desire to do good--can replace the normal support role of private family, church, and community. It can become a barrier to self- sufficiency and an incentive not to be engaged in the tough, real world of work and competition. So I think it is not compassionate to increase without limit the size and reach of the Federal Government. The central premise of the American society is that the empowerment of the individual is always preferable to the empowerment of the state. The amendments we have spent a lot of time working on--each one of them is crafted to improve the program. None of them represent major cuts in the amount of spending that is involved in the food stamp program. For each one of them the biggest savings would be about $10 billion, but in each case it is $10 billion that would be saved, that would make the program more efficient, that would improve the integrity of the program, and not reduce any of the benefits that will go to those who would qualify for food stamps under existing law. It would not reduce that. I am concerned that the majority leader has filled the tree on this bill. Senator Reid has basically taken control of the amendment process. So we have a bill moving through the Senate that will spend about $1 trillion over the next 10 years, and 80 percent of the spending in this bill will deal with food nutrition programs, with SNAP programs--80 percent of it--and we have only had one amendment that deals with that program--only one. We have been here for days without voting on anything. Senator Roberts is trying to get amendments from the Republican side to be voted on. The majority leader says: Well, I don't think I will approve that one. No, we don't want to vote on that. We have already voted on something like that. We are not going to vote on that. You have already had a food stamp amendment. We are not going to have any more food stamp amendments. That is the kind of talk that is going on here. This is the U.S. Senate, the greatest deliberative body in the history of the world--something we are exceedingly proud of--where we can have debate, vast, continuous, intense debate. It is part of the glory of this body. So now we have one person--the majority leader-- using a parliamentary technique called filling the tree and basically saying I don't get a vote on any of those amendments I just mentioned. I believe they are responsible amendments. I believe all four should be adopted. I believe it would make the food stamp program better. It would help ensure we have enough money to make sure the people who are in need get help. If we don't get off the debt course we are on, we are going to be in a crisis and all the programs are going to be cut--maybe more than we really need to cut them--because we have to get on the right course. So I am objecting to this. I am not happy about it. I don't think it is healthy. I do believe the majority leader has utilized this technique of filling the tree more than any majority leader in history--far more than any majority leader in history--and it is not a healthy trend for the Senate. We have always had a lot of amendments on the farm bill, and we need to have these amendments. So I hope and believe that--I hope we will get votes on these amendments. I hope that we will be able to debate these amendments and that we will be able to help improve the food stamp program. I want to mention one more thing. Senator Rand Paul offered an amendment earlier that did not pass that would have block-granted the money to the States. I am not sure--different people can disagree on exactly how he would go about that and whether he did it the right way and whether the spending level he chose was appropriate, but let me say this: A system in which the Federal Government gives an unlimited amount of money to the States creates a perverse incentive for the States to make sure they achieve every possible dollar from Washington. This system creates no incentive for the States to enhance the integrity of the program and to stop those who are abusing it, because when we spend State money to investigate and prosecute and stop abuse, we have reduced the treasury of the State. When we reduce the amount of food stamps pouring into the State, we reduce the amount of Federal money coming into a State--an additional adverse consequence economically for that State. So we need to create a situation in which the State is given a certain amount of money--a fair formula--and then they have the responsibility of making sure it goes to the right people. If poor people aren't getting enough money, they will then have an incentive to identify those who are improperly getting the money, cut them off, and direct the money to people in need. We don't have that incentive today. That is one reason the food stamp program is not operating effectively. So I think Senator Paul was correct fundamentally in his approach that block-granting the food stamp program to the States would create the right incentive to make the program more effective, to create more integrity, and to make sure people most in need receive the benefits. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I want to discuss today several amendments I have to the farm bill that is now before the Senate. What might surprise many people to learn is that the overwhelming majority of funds in the farm bill are not spent on anything to do with farmers or even agriculture production. For instance, crop insurance amounts to--which is a big part of the new bill and is progress, I think--the crop insurance provisions amount to just 8 percent of what we will be spending. Horticulture is less than 1 percent. But a full 80 percent of the farm bill spending goes to the Federal food stamp program. Yet only 17 percent of the small savings that are found in this proposal comes from food stamps. Out of the $23 billion in cuts, none of which occurs next year, out of almost $1 trillion in spending over 10 years. So about $23 billion in cuts. Most of that is taken from the farm provisions, but only 20 percent of it goes to that. At the same time, food stamp spending is virtually untouched. I believe they propose $4 billion in savings after 80 percent of the cost of this bill is in the food stamp program. The other $17 billion comes out of the 20 percent-- not the food stamps. Overall, the legislation will spend $82 billion on food stamps next year--$82 billion, and an estimated $770 billion over the next 10 years. To put these figures in perspective--and they are so large it is difficult to comprehend--we will spend, next year, $40 billion on the Federal highway program, but $80 billion on the food stamp program. Food stamp spending has more than quadrupled--four times. It has increased fourfold since the year 2001. It has increased 100 percent since President Obama took office, doubled in that amount of time. There are a number of reasons for this arresting trend. While the poor economy has undeniably increased the number of people who qualify for food stamps, this alone does not explain the extraordinary growth in the program. For instance, between 2001 and 2006, food stamp spending doubled, but the unemployment rate remained around 5 percent. So from 2001 to 2006, we had a doubling of food stamps while unemployment is the same. When the food stamp program was first expanded nationwide, about 1 in 50 Americans received food stamp benefits. Today, nearly one in seven receive food stamp benefits. We need to think about that. This is a very significant event. We need to ask ourselves, is this good policy? Is it good for America? Not only is it a question of, do we have the money, the second thing is, is it going to the right people? Is the money being expended wisely? Is it helping people become independent? Is it encouraging people to look for ways to be productive and be responsible themselves for their families? Or does it create dependency, part of a series of government programs that, in effect, are not beneficial to the people who actually benefit from them in the short term? Three factors help explain this increase. First is that eligibility standards have been significantly loosened over time with a dramatic drop in eligibility standards in the last few years. Second, it has been the explicit policy goal of the Federal bureaucracy to increase the number of people on food stamps. Bonus pay is even offered to States that sign up more people. States administer this program. And, third, the way the system is arranged with States administering the program but the Federal Government providing all of the money, all of it, they do not have--States do not match food stamps. States have an incentive, do you not see, to see their food stamp budget grow, not shrink, because it is more Federal money coming into the State which they pay no part of. That means overlooking, I am afraid, I hate to say, dramatic amounts of fraud and abuse, because the enforcement and supervision is given over to the States. So I filed a modest package of food stamp reforms to the farm bill which will achieve several important goals: save taxpayer dollars, which is a good thing; reduce the deficit; achieve greater accountability in how the program is administered; confront widespread waste; direct food stamps to those who truly need them; and help more Americans achieve financial independence. I guess I am the only person in the Senate who has ever dealt with fraud in the food stamp program. Shortly after law school, when I was a young Federal prosecutor, I prosecuted fraud in the food stamp program. Later I came back as a U.S. attorney, and we saw drug dealers selling food stamps, we saw various other manipulations of it. As attorney general of Alabama for a period, I was involved in enforcing integrity in the program. So I know the benefits food stamps play to people in desperate need. I know it is helpful. But I know, Americans know, they see it every day, that there are abuses in this program. It is the fastest growing entitlement program bar none. We need to look at it. I understand there are some who oppose even saving $4 billion over 10 years out of the food stamp program. We are spending 80 a year. Four years ago, we were spending 40. We cannot do better than that? Food stamps is the second largest Federal welfare program following Medicaid. If food stamp spending were returned next year to the 2007 funding level, and you agreed to increase it for 10 years at the rate of inflation, that would produce an astonishing $340 billion in savings for the U.S. Treasury. And we have to have some savings because we don't have the money to continue spending at the rate we are. Food stamps are 1 of 17 Federal nutritional support programs and 1 of nearly 80 Federal welfare programs. So there is no confusion, these figures count only low-income support programs. They don't include Medicare, Social Security, or unemployment benefits. Collectively, our Federal welfare programs constitute about $700 billion in Federal spending and $200 billion in State contributions to the same programs. That is about $900 billion on the Federal-State combined--most of it Federal--and $900 billion is about one-fourth of the entire Federal budget. An individual on food stamps may receive as much as $25,000 in various forms of financial assistance for their household from the Federal Government--as much as $25,000--in addition to whatever salary they may earn in part- or full-time work, or any support they may receive from their families or communities. In other words, this is not normally the only source of income for the person. Changes in eligibility have also eliminated the asset test for food stamp benefits, which brings me to the first of four amendments I have filed. No. 1, let's restore the asset test for food stamps. This change has been quite significant. Through a system known as categorical eligibility, States can provide benefits to those whose assets exceed the statutory asset limit, as long as they receive some other Federal benefit. Why is that? I don't know; it makes no sense to me. If you qualify for another program, you automatically get food stamps. Categorically, you are eligible for them. One State went so far as to determine that individuals were food-stamp eligible solely because they received a brochure for another benefit program in the mail. Well, that meant there is more money from the Federal Government coming into their State, more benefits. I guess they see it as an economic benefit. It didn't cost them any money; the money came from Washington. According to the CBO, the simple process of going back and restricting the categorical eligibility problem that is now springing up would produce $12 billion in savings for taxpayers over the next 10 years and should not eliminate a single person who qualifies for food stamps under the statutory restrictions for the program. All it would mean is that if you qualify for food stamps and fill out the proper form, you get it, like everybody else has to do. Second, there is the heating subsidy loophole. Fifteen States are using a loophole in order to get more food stamp dollars from the Federal Government. They do this by mailing a very small check--get this--often less than a dollar a month--under the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, LIHEAP. Anyone who receives that check, which may be as little as a few dollars a year, becomes eligible to claim a lower income on the basis of home energy expenses--even if they don't pay those expenses. This reform will require households that receive food stamps to provide proof of payment for their heating or cooling in order to qualify for the income deduction. If the government is paying for your heating, you should not say I need food stamps because I have a big heating bill. But this is a clever maneuver designed by States-- frankly, deliberately--to extract more money from Washington--free money for their States, and it is not good policy for America. It is not right that some States get more under the food stamps program by using this technique than others who don't use this abusive practice. Closing this loophole will produce $14 billion in savings over the next 10 years. That is a lot of money. No. 3, let's end the bonus payments going to States for increasing the number of people who sign up. We ought to be giving bonuses to people who identify people who are abusing the problem and bringing those down, if anything. States currently receive bonus payments for enrolling individuals in the food stamp program. Those bonus payments highlight the perverse incentive States have to expand food stamp registration rather than to reduce fraud and help more people achieve financial independence. We need to be focusing on helping people to get work and to be more productive and to bring in more money for their families than food stamps would bring in. That is what the focus of American vitality and growth should be. No. 4, let's implement the SAVE Program for food stamp usage. This amendment would simply require the government to use a very simple SAVE Program, similar to the E-Verify Program, to ensure that adults receiving benefits are in fact lawfully in the country. This is a commonsense thing to do at a time when we have to borrow 40 cents out of every dollar we spend in this government. We spend $3,700 billion and we take in $2,400 billion. We borrow the rest every year. We cannot afford to be providing incentives, benefits, bonuses, and payments to reward people who have entered the country illegally. We just don't have the money. Ultimately, beyond first steps, the best way to achieve integrity in the food stamp program is to block-grant it to the States. Send so much for the program, a fair percentage to each State, and let them distribute it. This will provide States with a strong incentive to make sure each dollar is being properly spent. They don't have that today. It does no damage to a State if somebody is getting the money improperly, or getting more than they are entitled to. If a State is administering the program and some people are getting too much and others are not getting enough, then the State has an incentive to make sure the abuses stop and the aid goes to the people who need it. That is the kind of program we need in America--one that works and has incentives built in to make the program have integrity. The House budget adopts this reform. They like to complain about the House and say the House doesn't know what they are doing. This is a commonsense reform. I am proud of what the House did. They did exactly the right thing. Senate Democrats, of course, have not even written a budget in 3 years. It has become clear that if we had gone through a financial analysis, a budget debate in this Congress, we could save a lot of money by ending the abuses in the Food Stamp Program, and it would help us do other things the government needs to do. It would also become clear that we will run out of money to pay for this program if we don't make changes soon. We are in a financial situation that is so grave that every expert has told us we are on an unsustainable path and we have to get off of it. If we don't, we can have another financial catastrophe, like in 2007, and like they are having in Europe today. That is very possible. So we have to reduce our deficit and our abusive spending. Reforming the way we deliver welfare is the compassionate course. It is not mean-spirited to say that people who are not entitled to the benefits don't need the benefits and should not get them. There is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with having incentives in your program, not to see how many people you can get on food stamps but to see how many we can get to work and be productive and take care of themselves. The result of welfare reform in 1996, if you remember that--and many of you do--was less poverty, more growth, less teen pregnancy, more work, and more people successfully caring for themselves. We have slipped back, in my opinion. We moved back from some of the progress we made from the 1996 provision. Unfortunately, since 1996, Members in both parties have failed to protect these gains. The welfare budget has swelled dramatically. Oversight has diminished. Standards have slipped. We now find ourselves in need of welfare reform for the 21st century. We do. That is the nature of any government, where once programs are established, they go beyond rationality and need to be reformed periodically. It is time to re-engage the national discussion over how the receipt of welfare benefits can become damaging, not merely to the Treasury but also to the recipient. Left unattended, the safety net can become a restraint, permanently removing people from the workforce. And Federal programs, unmonitored, can begin to replace family, church, and community as a source of aid and support. We need to reestablish the moral principle that Federal welfare should be seen as temporary assistance, not permanent support. The goal should be to help people become independent and self-sufficient. Such reforms, made sincerely and with concern for those in need, will improve America's social, fiscal, and economic health. Empowering the individual is more than sound policy; it remains the animating moral idea behind the American experience, our national exceptionalism. We believe in individual responsibility. We believe in helping people in need, but we don't believe in creating circumstances where decent, hard-working people, who work extra and save their money, who give up vacations and going out to eat so they can take care of their family, are also required to support people who are irresponsible. That is not a healthy situation for us to be in. We need to strike the right balance. We can help those people in need and create a government and a social assistance program in America that benefits the people we seek to benefit and benefits the State treasuries at the same time. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I know the Senator is the assistant leader. The majority has a lot of things to do. If he would like to finish now, I would be pleased to yield. The American people are all worried about the direction of our country and for a good reason; they have witnessed a growing disregard for the Constitution and the limits that it places on the federal government. Our Government is a government of limited powers. In essence, I hear my friend and colleague and able advocate Senator Durbin say the question is about medical care. The question is about, he thinks, that it is unfair that some people do not buy insurance and therefore we ought to make them buy insurance. He thinks that is unfair. We had a nearly year-long debate in this Congress, and Senator Durbin prevailed by a single vote, before Senator Brown could be confirmed to kill the health care bill. They were able to pass it through with an interim Senator by a single vote and it passed. But that is not what I and Senator Cornyn and others are here to talk about today. The point today is, Should the Supreme Court of the United States decide this question as a matter of law and principle or should they divine what they think the people want--although the polls show the American people consistently oppose this legislation and never supported it, ever, but it was rammed through anyway. So they want to say: This is important. We think it is unfair--even though the polling data shows people don't want this law--and the Supreme Court should uphold the law and shouldn't worry about a little thing like the Constitution and limited powers. So that is what I want to talk about today. I want to affirm the duty of the Supreme Court of the United States, and that duty is to fairly and objectively interpret the Constitution and to render justice, not based on polling data and not based on congressional desire. Polling data shows that the American people overwhelmingly think the law is an impermissible, unconstitutional regulation, so it is difficult for me to say this is such a matter that the Supreme Court has to acknowledge a minority view and approve it even if the Constitution doesn't agree. I don't think that is an argument that can be sustained, in my view. Since the oral arguments in the case, in my view--and a lot of my colleagues share this view--the President himself, Democrats in the House and the Senate, their friends in the media and liberal government, pro-health care advocates have stepped up undignified and unjustified attacks on the Court, which seems to me to be a pretty transparent effort to try to influence the decision of an independent branch of government. It also seems to me an attempt--since I have been a student of this for some time now--to lay the groundwork and to declare that the Supreme Court is somehow illegitimate if they don't render a verdict in line with one that my colleagues think should be rendered. I will say parenthetically that 2 years ago when this passed 60 to 40, it took 60 votes to pass it. It wouldn't pass today. It wouldn't even come close to having 60 votes today because the American people spoke and sent home a lot of people who voted for this bill when they didn't want them voting for it. That was a big deal in the election, frankly, if you want to talk about that. So this philosophy that we hear advocated is a dangerous philosophy of law and jurisprudence. It is results-oriented. It is political, not law, and it surely is contrary to the great heritage of law that this country has been so blessed with. It may be that my colleagues are concerned because when pressed by the Supreme Court Justices during oral argument, the Solicitor General of the United States seemed to be utterly incapable of identifying any limiting principle on government power. The Solicitor General proffered various reasons why health care is unique, but not one of them was effectively grounded on any constitutional text, principle, or theory--at least in my view. People can disagree. The Justices will have the final word on it. The nonlegal argument that the Court should not overturn a popular law suggested by many is, of course, irrelevant, not only because this health care law is, in fact, unpopular, but because popularity does not translate into constitutionality. Of course, under the popularity theory, it would be wrong for the Court to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, which the administration has decided is unconstitutional and refuses to defend in court, even though the law was so popular that it passed 342 to 67 in the House and 85 to 14 in the Senate. So making the popularity argument revealed the lack of legal argument. It condemns such advocates as advocates against law, not for law. Supporters of the health care law have disdainfully and consistently dismissed the notion, and it was done during the debate, that the legislation raised serious constitutional questions. I remember the debate in the Senate. This disdain was no more starkly demonstrated than when a reporter asked then-Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi what the constitutional basis was for the statute, and she condescendingly replied: Are you serious? Is our time up?

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, how long might the majority leader expect to be, and if it is possible to have consent to speak an additional 5 minutes after the majority leader.

Mr. SESSIONS. I know the majority leader is extremely busy, and I appreciate his courtesy and respect with the difficult duty he has here. She said: Are you serious? Well, when the Solicitor General of the United States was being grilled by the Justices, I have to say it looked serious then. It is axiomatic that the Commerce clause--which is the provision in the Constitution that the law's supporters argue gives the government the power to take over health care--was never understood to grant unlimited power to the Federal Government. The Federal Government, without doubt, is a government of limited powers. It certainly never meant that Congress could regulate noncommerce under the power to regulate commerce. We can't regulate noncommerce when the only power the Federal Government is given is the power to regulate commerce. Give me a break. As distinguished Judge Roger Vinson stated in his opinion in this case when he struck this bill down: It would be a radical departure from existing law to hold that Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce clause. If it has the power to compel an otherwise passive individual into a commercial transaction with a third party merely by asserting--as it was done in the Act--that compelling the actual transaction is itself ``commercial and economic in nature, and substantially affects interstate commerce,'' it is not hyperbolizing to suggest that Congress could do almost anything it wanted . . . If Congress can penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain, for it would be ``difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power'' (Lopez), and we would have a Constitution in name only. Surely this is not what the Founding Fathers could have intended. It is a serious question. The Supreme Court needs to decide it, and they don't need to have Congress trying to pressure them one way or the other. The President of the United States, President Obama, might think that it is, in his words ``unprecedented'' or ``extraordinary'' for the Court to strike down a clearly unconstitutional statute, but it is not. The Supreme Court has a duty under the Constitution and under the powers of the judiciary to speak clearly if Congress passes a law that violates the Constitution, that assumes powers Congress does not have, and that attempts to act in ways on behalf of the Federal Government that the Constitution never gave the government the power to do. They have a duty to strike it down. The Court's reputation would be damaged if it bows to political bullying, but it won't be damaged if it follows the Constitution. I think it is wrong to disparage and threaten the Court during the pendency of a case in order to influence the outcome. I don't have any problem with criticizing a decision if I disagree with it, but to try to politically pressure the Court I think is wrong for us to do. These are important questions of law. I have an opinion, but the Court has a duty. That duty is to decide the case before them impartially, as a neutral umpire, and without regard to the crowd noise. I believe they will do their duty, and we all await the outcome. I thank the Chair, and I thank the majority leader. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, every summer the Congressional Budget Office produces a long-term budget outlook. This is the report they produced yesterday, which is what they do every year. It is a grim document indeed, not a document that should give us comfort but should be a call to action as to what we would need to do about the financial future of our country. It is part of their effort to produce for Congress objective, impartial analyses. We all will complain about this or that from CBO, but they are pretty objective, and they work hard to produce the kind of information we can benefit from as Americans, certainly that we in Congress need as we deal with our challenges at this period in history. They lay out, over 25 years, what we could expect to see if current policy is extended. These are some of the things they find in this report that are certainly disturbing to us. Actually, they are more than disturbing, they are unacceptable. They are absolute proof that we are on an unsustainable debt course, and that means we have to get off it or bad things will happen. The numbers I will give from this report, as Federal Reserve Chairman Mr. Bernanke indicated last year, would not happen--events wouldn't occur because we will have a crisis before that if we continue on this path. This is what they found: 25 years under the current policy, annual deficits would reach $5 trillion a year or 17 percent of GDP and would rise steadily thereafter. In other words, we would have in 1 year a $5 trillion deficit. This year we expect to spend $3.7 trillion total, including defense and Social Security and Medicare. They go on to make this finding: Federal debt would reach approximately 200 percent of GDP; that is, the debt would be twice as large as the entire American economy. Japan has that high a debt. It is the highest in the world. It is financed because of Japan's unusual saving policies--financed mainly internally, but we are not financing our debt that way now. In fact, 60 to 70 percent of our debt now is being financed by the Federal Reserve, by buying Treasuries by the Federal Reserve. That is very dangerous because it is, in effect, printing money. So this is an unsustainable path. They go on to say annual Federal spending would rise to $10 trillion a year or 36 percent of GDP. So 36 percent of the entire economy would be consumed by Federal Government spending. We are now 18 to 20 percent, in that range. This is a historic alteration of the fundamental concept of our government being a government of limited powers. That is a stunning number. They go on to say this: Yearly interest, what we would pay yearly, would reach $2.7 trillion. That is certainly a large number. As I said, this year we spent $3.7 trillion. The Federal debt, according to the report, will be double the size of the entire U.S. economy in 2037, 25 years from now. CBO agrees that higher levels of Federal Government debt will burden American families and destroy economic growth. We have had studies on that. Reinhart and Rogoff reports--I think most economists agree with this principle--that when taxes reach high levels, it pulls down the entire economy's ability to grow. They go on to say each family's share of the Federal debt will climb to $382,000, per family, by 2037 or an additional $287,000 over what today's family's share of the total American debt is. That is, of course, more than twice as much. CBO warns that ``large budget deficits and growing debt would . . . lower the growth of incomes in the United States.'' According to CBO data, over the next 20 years, high debt levels will result in $21 trillion less in economic output. This is a significant reduction in economic growth, and it is out of growth that we hope to be able to close the deficit gap. Without growth, we can't do it. But if we run our debt too high, it pulls down growth and makes it even more difficult for us to maintain the growth levels we need to get our economy and Federal budget under control. They go on to say that government debt will also slow economic growth nearly 1 percent a year, on average, supporting a landmark study done by Reinhart and Rogoff that quantified the effect of debt on advanced economies. I asked Secretary of Treasury Geithner about the Rogoff-Reinhart study. He said it was an excellent study. Then he added: In some ways, it understates our problems. We were talking about this 1 percent factor. When our debt exceeds 90 percent of GDP, we lose 1 percent of growth. He acknowledged the validity of that, and then went on to say that it understates the problem, because when we reach that high debt level, we are vulnerable to an economic shock--another recession, a 2007 debt crisis, a Greek- like problem. Government debt, the report indicates, will also slow economic growth, and that 1 percent of slowing growth, according to numbers released by the Obama administration--and I think they are pretty accurate--1 million jobs is 1 percent of GDP. So if we go from 2 percent to 1 percent GDP growth, 3 percent to 2 percent GDP growth, we lose 1 million jobs. We don't need to be losing jobs. We need to be creating jobs, and debt is a threat to economic growth. The idea some people have that we could continue to borrow, borrow, borrow and spend, spend, spend and this will create a healthy growing economy that could be sustained is absolutely truly false, I believe. CBO gave this ominous warning: Growing debt also would increase the probability of a sudden financial crisis, during which investors would lose confidence in the government's ability to manage its budget and the government would thereby lose its ability to borrow at affordable rates. It seems to me pretty clear, if we look at the numbers, that spending is the primary cause of our long-term fiscal imbalance--that and a lack of growth. Under both the baseline and current policy scenarios set out by CBO, spending will remain well above historical averages. So it is not as if they are assuming we will cut spending and that we will reduce what the government spends each year. They are assuming the spending levels will be well above historical averages. If we return those spending levels to historical averages, I believe we then have a far better chance to get our economy under control, rather than just asking the American people to send more money to Washington. Under current policy, annual Federal spending will exceed $10 trillion--or 36 percent of GDP--by 2037. Twenty-five years used to seem like a long time to me, but as I have gotten older, 25 is a lot shorter period of time. By 2025, the report indicates, mandatory health spending, Social Security spending, and interest costs--Medicare and Medicaid, mandatory health spending--Social Security, and interest costs will consume 100 percent of the revenues this government is expected to receive; the Defense Department, zero; the Education Department, zero; Federal highway bill funds, zero. All of it would just be in those programs. That reveals to us that necessity of looking at those programs, to think that we can deal with our surging deficits without confronting the fact that the largest, most sustained growth areas are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt. What about raising taxes? Why don't we raise taxes? There are problems with raising taxes. It has consequences. It weakens the private sector. It takes more money from the private sector where the money is earned, where growth is generated, and distributes it to the governmental sector--which, I have to tell you, is not as efficient and productive and hasn't proven it is and has not gone through what private business has gone through, which is to make themselves more efficient, more productive, and utilize technology and advanced techniques to produce more widgets for less cost. The Federal Government has not done that. This is what CBO said: To the extent that additional tax revenues were generated by boosting marginal tax rates, those higher rates would discourage people from working and saving, further reducing output and income. There is no doubt about that. This is not some rightwing scenario. If we keep raising taxes on the productive sector, we are going to have less of it. It will discourage people from working and saving, further reducing output and income. That is an economic fact. It is not a scare tactic. So it is not just something we can do. Why don't we just raise taxes? That is the reason. It weakens economic growth. It weakens the private sector. It empowers the government, violates our heritage of limited government, and is not healthy for American families and job creation. The Congressional Budget Office agrees we cannot wait; that we cannot continue to delay action on the deficits. This is what they say in this report: Waiting to address the long-term budgetary imbalance and allowing debt to mount in the meantime would be detrimental to future generations. We don't need to do things that are detrimental to future generations. We are already leaving them with more debt than we ever should, and we need to get off this path. I have told this story, but back in Marion, AL, I was at a house of a World War II veteran just less than 2 years ago. Mr. Wheeler has since passed away, but he was the last person to speak as I was listening to people's views. He said he lived through the Depression and served in World War II, he lived through the inflationary period in the 1970s and 1980s, and the problem we face is not the high cost of living; the problem we face is the cost of living too high. Frankly, that is what has happened. Individually, we have lived too high. We have to deleverage. Individual families are doing it. The government has lived too high. It has assumed too much debt, and there is no way out of it-- no easy way. There is no free lunch. Nothing comes from nothing. Somebody pays. To get this debt under control, we have to manage better than we ever have, in my opinion. I truly believe that, and we can do it. We can manage better. It is going to take leadership of the Chief Executive Officer of the United States, and Congress needs to be involved in the process too. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, before the Senate Budget Committee earlier this year, testified this way: Having a large and increasing level of government debt relative to national income runs the risk of serious economic consequences. Over the longer term, the current trajectory of federal debt threatens to crowd out private capital formation and thus reduce productivity growth. . . . It is growth we need. It is growth we need that will make America more competitive, that will produce more widgets for less cost, that will allow us to export and be competitive, to defeat importers by producing products better and at less cost than the importers can. That is within our grasp. But we are getting away from that and debt is a threat to us. Chairman Bernanke goes on to say: To the extent that increasing debt is financed by borrowing from abroad, a growing share of our future income would be devoted to interest payments on foreign-held federal debt. High levels of debt also impair the ability of policy makers to respond effectively to future economic shocks and adverse events. Adverse events occur periodically, and high levels of debt impairing our ability to react to those make us more vulnerable to serious economic dislocations that would occur in the future. But Mr. Bernanke also knows that on our current course, we will never make it to the years where our debt is three, four, five times the size of our economy. He also stated about the CBO outlook: The CBO projections, by design, ignore the adverse effects that such high debt and deficits would likely have on the economy. But if government debt and deficits were actually to grow at the pace envisioned in this scenario, the economic and financial effects would be severe. In other words, what he is saying is we are not going to get there. It is not going to happen because we will have a financial crisis before then, and we can see that. We had the President's fiscal commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, and they told us, ``We are facing the most predictable financial crisis in our Nation's history.'' Both of them signed a statement to the Budget Committee just last year to that effect, and they said we could have an economic crisis in as little as 2 years. We have not had a budget in the Senate. The Republican House has produced a budget, but the Senate Democrats have determinatively refused to bring up a budget in committee or bring one on the floor. We are now 3 years without a budget, while we have had trips to Las Vegas and conferences and tax credit loopholes for children of illegal aliens. Children who don't even live in the United States are getting a $1,000 tax credit from Uncle Sam and we can't get that fixed. That seems to be too hard to do, costing $4 billion a year. So these are the kinds of things Americans need to be aware of and need to be focused on. If we do so, there are a number of options that would allow us to get the country on a sound path. We can do some things without debt, such as tax simplification that creates more growth, such as eliminating every regulation that does not serve the national interest and benefit the economy but adds cost to our productive capability in America and delays production of energy or delays construction of factories and businesses--eliminate those regulations that don't make sense. We can work hard to produce more American energy, keeping our wealth at home. We can reduce the amount of debt we are running up so we are sending fewer dollars, fewer billions of dollars, abroad every year after year after year just to pay the interest on the debt. There are a lot of things we can do that will create jobs and growth and productivity gains in America that will not add to our debt, and we have to find those things. We have to tighten our belt across the board, in Congress and the White House and down to every agency and department and government entity that exists in this country and around the world. If everybody does that, we will surprise ourselves with how much progress we can make. I think it is not too late for us to reverse the course. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I am on the floor this afternoon to discuss a discovery--really, a stunning discovery for me--and that is important for all of us. As many people know, Congress and the President struck a deal last summer to raise the debt ceiling. That deal set in place discretionary spending caps--not nearly enough to balance our budget over 10 years but a step in the right direction. That legislation said we will raise the debt ceiling $2.1 trillion but we will cut spending $2.1 trillion over 10 years--a promise to cut spending over 10 years. That legislation also required the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee--of which I am the ranking member--by April 15 of this year to file aggregate spending levels--spending limits--based on the Congressional Budget Office's March 2012 financial baseline and to allocate the funds that could be spent under that Budget Control Act legislation to each of the Senate Appropriations Committees. In other words, these levels as submitted tell the appropriators how much they can spend, and the budget chairman has that responsibility and duty to do that. He takes the level agreement that was agreed to and sends that over. These are real dollars that each appropriating committee is therefore allowed to spend. Yet we have learned something that is disappointing-- really astounding to me. The numbers filed by Chairman Conrad, my good friend who is a fair and able chairman, are not, in fact, the spending levels from the CBO baseline as the statute sets forward. Instead, the discretionary outlay total submitted by the chairman to the committees for fiscal year 2013 is derived from the President's budget, not from the CBO baseline. The discretionary spending allocation for the Senate is therefore inflated by about $14 billion more than what was agreed to just last August when we told the American people we would raise the debt ceiling, continue to borrow money, but we were going to reduce spending. So let me repeat that. These allocation levels have been inflated by $14 billion to match the President's budget--not the CBO base line that the BCA Committee was working from. It raises outlay levels over that August agreement. That, I submit, was a solemn agreement between the Members of Congress, both the Senate and the House, the American people, and the President himself who signed that agreement. So I have sent a letter to Chairman Conrad urging my chairman to correct and refile numbers that are proper--numbers that comply with the law. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter that I have written Senator Conrad today. U.S. Senate, Committee on the Budget, Washington, DC, May 22, 2012. Hon. Kent Conrad, Chairman, U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, DC. Dear Chairman Conrad: Section 106 of the Budget Control Act (BCA) requires the Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Budget to file allocations and aggregate spending levels that are consistent with the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO's) March 2012 baseline. On March 20, 2012, you filed such levels in the Senate to be printed in the Congressional Record (at pages S1832 S1833). I was therefore surprised to find that the filed outlay aggregate for fiscal year 2013 is not consistent with CBO's baseline but, instead, appears to reflect the higher outlay level for discretionary spending in the President's budget request (as estimated by CBO). The President's blueprint was voted down unanimously by the Senate. Specifically, the filed outlay aggregate for fiscal year 2013 is approximately $14 billion higher than CBO's baseline figure. The aggregate on-budget outlay level filed with the Senate is $2,944,872 million, but the CBO baseline for on- budget outlays is only $2,931,228 million. The filed figure, therefore, does not satisfy section 106 of the BCA. Furthermore, section 106(b)(2)(B) of the BCA requires that the mandatory spending allocations to Senate authorizing committees be consistent with the CBO baseline. The CBO March 2012 baseline amount for the Committee on Finance for fiscal year 2013 is $1,328,395 million. But the allocation filed on March 20 ($1,328,474 million) is $79 million higher than the CBO baseline figure. Before the Senate takes up appropriation bills for fiscal year 2013, I request that you review your allocations and re- file the enforceable levels and related committee allocations at amounts that are consistent with CBO's March 2012 baseline, as required by the BCA. Very truly yours, Jeff Sessions, Ranking Member.

Mr. SESSIONS. It is unthinkable that we would not only spend more than Congress agreed to but would institute instead the numbers derived from President Obama's budget--which, in this Chamber, when I brought it up a few days ago, was rejected unanimously. This is another example, I am afraid I have to say, of the sleight-of-hand tactics that have been utilized in this Congress for too long that say we have an agreement and we are going to do better and we are going to spend less. But as soon as the ink is dry--before the ink is dry, really, on the agreements, people start manipulating ways around it trying to spend more than the allowed. It seems to me, since I have been in the Senate for 15, 16 years, we have Members of Congress who take it as a personal challenge to see how they can defeat, get around, and spend more money than they are allocated. The American people are being misled in this attempt. We are not following the Budget Control Act, and it is not a partisan matter. It is about honest accounting. It is about safeguarding the American treasury. It is about restoring faith in the Senate Chamber. The American people are right to be angry with us and to not trust us because we haven't honored their trust. We haven't managed their money well. Political elites remain totally disconnected from the financial reality that our country faces. Game the system, spend more. The alarming discovery that the discretionary allocations filed for the Senate are a total of $14 billion higher than we agreed to and the latest in a long line of episodes, this is the latest in a long line of episodes that underscores the financial chaos that is the American Government. These episodes include the GSA scandal in Las Vegas, with hot tubs and skits and magicians; the Solyndra loan, $500 million to cronies for an ideological vision that did not work; the IRS checks I talked about earlier this morning, with Senator Vitter, given to illegal aliens who claim dependents living abroad. These are people here illegally claiming dependents abroad while the U.S. Government is sending them checks based on children who are not in the country. The inspector general from the IRS says this is costing the taxpayers $4 billion a year. It also includes the revelation that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will spend $1 million or more of taxpayer money for a decadent getaway to a beachfront resort and spa in the Hawaiian tropics. And, of course, it includes a 3-year refusal of the Senate majority to produce a budget plan--3 years without a budget. We are badly in need of strong Executive leadership to put our finances in order. We need a President, Cabinet heads, sub-Cabinet heads who understand from the top to the bottom that they are there every day to look for ways to save money. This immigration tax scam costs the American taxpayers $10 million a day. Divide that out, $4 billion over 365 days. The House has passed legislation that would close that gaping loophole. Meanwhile, the Senate is not acting. This chaos cannot continue. Accountability and discipline must be achieved, and the first step to right the ship ought to be actually correcting these allocations. I call on my Senate leadership friends to do that. We need an honest accounting. We need to spend what we agreed to, what was passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the President. These dollars do not belong to us, they belong to the American people. They must be protected. Each one of them is precious. Each one of them was extracted from some hard-working American and sent to Washington on the hope and the prayer that it would be wisely spent. And we do not have enough of them. We do not have enough money. To stealthily increase discretionary outlays by $14 billion in one fell swoop is unacceptable. It must be corrected. I call on my colleagues to do so, else we will continue to lose the confidence of the American people. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank the Chair, and I appreciate the insight the majority leader provided. We will look at that and see where we stand on it, but I would urge that we do not need to wait a great deal of time for this to be fixed. The inspector general for Tax Administration of the U.S. Treasury Department started raising this formally in 2009. The issue actually came up in 2007 when individuals in the Treasury Department thought there was something wrong occurring. So the inspector general did a report, and he has called on us to fix it. In fact, he said in his report: We continue to believe the legislation is needed to ensure compliance with both laws. I would say that is what we need to do. The House has acted and we should act. Four billion dollars a year is a great deal of money. It is about $10 million a day that is going out of the country to individuals who should not be receiving it. According to the inspector general's report, the amount of the child tax credit--and as Senator Vitter said, this is not a tax deduction. This is a $1,000-per-child tax credit that we have for people in the United States who work, who have worked lawfully, and who have children and they get a check. If they owe no income tax at all, and a substantial percentage of the people who work in America end up not paying income tax, but they still get a check from Uncle Sam for $1,000 per child. It was a policy I supported because over the years families had not gained the kind of deductible advantage that had been done 30 years ago when people had children, and it leveled the playing field and helped working families raise children in a decent environment. It is a policy I like, but it is not for somebody here illegally and has children in some foreign country. That is not what it is about. It is for $4 billion. It has surged. In 2005 the inspector general noted that the IRS paid out to these ITIN filers $924 million in 2005. In 2006, it was $1.3 billion. In 2007 it was $1.7 billion. In 2008 it was $2.1 billion. In 2009 it was $2.9 billion. From 2009 to 2010 it went from $2.9 billion to $4.2 billion. It has been surging every year. As a matter of protecting the Treasury of the United States from abuse, the IG says we need legislation. The Senator from Louisiana has drafted legislation that will do the job precisely as it should. Would the Senator agree that Congress should not wait around another year? It is something that the House already passed, and if we passed it, it would become law in perhaps a matter of days.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I would point out to my colleagues how much $4 billion is. It is a matter that we deal with on a regular basis around here. It is a number that has come up several times recently. For example, we had a shortfall in our plans to fund the Federal highway program--a deeply disappointing event that we couldn't get that bill passed. It started out as a $4 billion shortfall. They worked that number down, but it is still not fully paid for. We would like just a few billion dollars to pay for the bill, and it hasn't been passed. The student loan fixed rate where the interest rates would be dropped--if I am not mistaken, that was $4 billion. We need it to reduce interest rates on student loans. That is $4 billion, according to the IG, going out of our country wrongfully every year that we could save. The President spent a lot of time traveling around the country saying we should raise taxes on the rich and we should pass the Buffett tax. He had a proposal for the Buffett tax. How much would the Buffett tax raise? It would raise $4 billion. That is how much closing this loophole would raise. Frankly, I am a little disappointed that the Treasury Department officials and the administration itself haven't immediately seized upon this loophole that is costing the taxpayers large amounts of money and responded themselves by sending legislation over and asking us to pass it. Why aren't they asking us to pass it to begin with? Well, the inspector general, who is an independent--who gets a little independence within the Department of Treasury but, in fact, is an employee of the Secretary of the Treasury--he says we need this legislation. Quoting his report: Clarification to the law is needed to address whether or not refundable tax credits such as ACTC may be paid to those who are not authorized to work in the United States. Well, of course they ought not to be getting a check from the U.S. taxpayers if they are not authorized to be working here. So as the ranking member on the Budget Committee, knowing how tight our budget is, I salute Senator Vitter for doing it this year as well as last year when he saw this problem and attempted to get it passed. I am pleased the House has passed it. I think if we keep working at it, I say to Senator Vitter, maybe we can get it done in the Senate, remembering that $10 million a day is going out of the country for every day we fail to act.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, to conclude, I think the American people are unhappy with their leaders. They feel as though the money they have sent here is not being well spent, is not being watched closely enough. We have a big judicial conference for the second year--since 2010, the second time--to go spend $1 million on a resort conference in Maui. We have the Solyndra loans going out to cronies that are not being paid back in any way. We have the General Services Administration having a big party out in Las Vegas with hot tubs and magicians and so forth. We have no budget for three consecutive years in the U.S. Senate. And what are we hearing from many of our leaders here in Washington? Well, we have a problem, American people. We have too big a debt. Send us more money. Send more money. We don't have enough. We are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend. Send more money. I think the American people are tired of hearing that. I think they have a right to be tired of hearing that. Until this country is willing to face up to saving $10 million a day on this kind of manipulation that has been going on since 2007, at least, and has been raised by the inspector general since 2009, until those kinds of things are stopped, I don't think they should send any more money to Washington. We need to honor the money they are sending. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, the fundamental question we as a Nation have to ask is: What are we going to do now? What are we going to do for the future? What is our plan for the future? The problem we have in this Senate is that the Democratic majority steadfastly and adamantly refuses to lay out their vision for the future while investing a considerable amount of time and effort in attacking anybody who does. They even voted down their own President's budget, as bad as it is--the most irresponsible budget ever submitted here, in my opinion. This is an odd situation we are in, and I will say that our country has never been in more danger financially. Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson--Senator Conrad served on their committee--came before the Budget Committee, of which I am the ranking member, and told us in a signed statement--that this Nation has never faced a more predictable financial crisis. In other words, the course we are on today is unsustainable. They told us that. They told us it could happen within as little as 2 years, and that was over a year ago that they gave that testimony. We are in the danger zone financially. I know a lot of people would like to say it is not so, but it is so. Look at this chart. This chart shows the total debt of the eurozone, including the U.K., and the United States. Our debt exceeds that of the eurozone. We have a larger debt than they do. My good friend Senator Conrad, who is such a fine person, noted that President Bush presided over a period in which our debt increased, and it did increase. The largest debt President Bush ever had was $480 billion in 1 year, which was too large. President Obama has never had a budget that was less than a $1,200 billion deficit, and next year it will be over $1,000 billion again, according to expert testimony. We are on an unsustainable path. So I would note that our $15.5 trillion debt for the United States is greater than the eurozone and the eurozone has a larger population than we do. Let's look at this chart, which drives that number home again, in case anybody is worried about it. I am. It shows the average debt per person in the countries we have been reading about that are in financial trouble, and it hits them sometimes surprisingly, and we never know quite how it is going to hit. But look at this: The debt in Spain, which we know is in a rocky financial position, is $18,000 per person; Portugal, $19,000; France, $33,000; Greece, $38,000--Greece's debt per person is $38,000, whereas the United States is $44,000. Yes, we have a little larger economy, but this is the danger zone. A few people were saying we could have a financial problem in 2007 as a result of the bubble in housing. They warned us that might happen. A lot of people said: Oh, no, not this time; it is different; we have it under control. Yet we had a financial crisis that we haven't recovered from yet. So I would say we do need to take action. We do not have a budget. If we have a budget, why did President Obama comply with the United States Code and submit a budget this year? If we have a budget, why did the House pass a budget? If we have a budget, why did four different Democratic Congressmen and groups of Congressmen submit budgets in the House? If we have a budget, why did Senator Conrad seek to have a budget markup in the committee? He basically said: Well, we may not bring it up on the floor, but the law says we should have a budget and I am going to bring one up in committee. The day before the committee met, the Democrats met in conference and told him not to do it. So we were expecting to have an actual markup of a budget presented by the Democratic leadership and we didn't get it. Why? Senator Reid said it would be foolish to have a budget--foolish. What did he mean by that? Why would the Democratic leader, attacking Republicans this morning, say it is foolish for us to produce a budget? Well, he said that because he meant it would be foolish politically. It would be not smart politically because the Democratic leadership in the Senate would have to lay out a vision for the future and the vision they wanted to sell and could agree on was one the American people wouldn't like. It wouldn't be smart. They would reject it. We would add the numbers up and see how much they actually want to increase taxes, how much they are going to increase the debt, how much spending is going to increase. That is not leadership. It is an utter failure of leadership. In contrast, the Republican House produced a budget that changes the debt course of America. It puts us on a sound financial path. One can agree with it or disagree with it. We will have other budgets offered today from the Republican side that will have substantial support, that will change the debt course we are on, balance the budget in a certain number of years, and put us on a sound financial path. I expect every one of those budgets to be opposed by every Member on the other side of the aisle. Again, it appears they will unanimously vote down President Obama's budget and not offer one of their own, directly contrary to the law. I know the majority leader this morning said: Well, filibuster is our problem. But we can't filibuster a budget. The Congressional Budget Act is designed to ensure that a budget will be passed. The Congressional Budget Act does not allow a filibuster. Only 51 votes are needed to pass a budget, so why is it being mentioned? Because they prefer to hide under the table and not stand up and be counted and not address the greatest trouble this Nation has, which is our debt. I see some of my colleagues here today, and I ask unanimous consent to participate in a colloquy with my colleagues for up to 20 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. Right. I believe Senator Toomey is here and would be prepared to go next after Senator Alexander.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I will yield 4 minutes to the Senator from our side.

Mr. SESSIONS. He will have a flat 8 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I would share something that was in last week's Wall Street Journal, because it deals with an issue that is important and not to be dismissed, and that is should we begin to make reductions in spending today. I think Mr. Barro provides some real valuable insight to that. With regard to Senator Lieberman, I do think that the budget process can work. It should be able to work. But it will not work if we do not try to make it work. Under certain circumstances, it is hard to get a bipartisan budget if you do not have everybody together. So maybe it is worth examining whether we can make improvements there. But Mr. Barro deals with this question. He writes: The weak economic recovery in the U.S. and the even weaker performance in much of Europe have renewed calls for ending budget austerity and returning to larger fiscal deficits. Curiously, this plea for more fiscal expansion fails to offer any proof that Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries that chose more budget stimulus have performed better than those that opted for more austerity. He continues. These are the developed countries in the world, OECD countries. He goes on: Two interesting European cases are Germany and Sweden, each of which moved toward rough budget balance between 2009 and 2011-- That is after the financial crisis-- while sustaining comparatively strong growth--the average growth rate per year for real GDP for 2010 and 2011 was 3.6% growth for Germany and 4.9% for Sweden. If austerity is so terrible, how come these two countries have done so well? The OECD countries most clearly in or near renewed recession--Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain and perhaps Ireland and the Netherlands--are among those with relatively large fiscal deficits. The deficits for these six countries for 2010 and 2011 were 7.9 percent of GDP. Germany and Sweden did not raise taxes but cut spending. He goes on to say: Every time heightened fiscal deficits fail to produce desirable outcomes, the policy advice is to choose still larger deficits-- Borrow, tax, and spend. He goes on to say: If, as I believe to be true, fiscal deficits have only a short-run expansionary impact on growth and then become negative, the results from following this policy are persistently low economic growth and an exploding ratio of debt to GDP. Japan, he goes on to note, ``once a comparatively low public-debt nation, apparently bought into the Keynesian message many years ago.'' That is the ``spend'' message. ``The consequences for today is a ratio of government debt to GDP around 210 percent, the largest in the world.'' I ask unanimous consent to have that article printed in the Record because I think it helps give us some guidance that at some point bringing spending under control and tightening our deficit clearly would achieve more financial benefit than continuing to borrow and spend or create new taxes that depress the economy.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I would share a few thoughts in general about where we are. Our colleagues on the Democratic side have said they want more taxes. They have not told us what taxes, how much, and where they would be. But they have told us that. Senator Conrad has said that. He has also been open and bold about the need to cut spending. So he wants more tax increases than I would like and he wants substantial spending cuts, but that is his view. He stated it publicly. But I will have to say, that is not the position of the Democratic majority in the Senate because they have refused to put it on paper. Senator Conrad was going to have a Budget Committee mark up. We were going to mark up a budget. He was going to lay out a plan. I guess it would be somewhat ``Simpson-Bowlesish.'' But it was not offered because the leadership and I suppose the members of the Democratic Conference agreed that they do not want to be on record. They would rather do like last year. And what happened last year? They voted against the Toomey budget; they voted against the Ryan budget; they voted against the Rand Paul budget; and voted against the President's budget. They wiped their hands. They did not vote for anything to cause any pain to anybody. And presumably they thought that was better than actually being engaged in leading and telling the American people what they planned to do to change the debt course we are on. That is the deal. Well, I would say a couple of things. If I were talking to a group of American citizens today, I would say this: Do not send one more dime to Washington, DC until they show you a budget, how they are going to spend it. I mean, why should they? We get in trouble; we overspend; we place the Nation at risk. And all we want to say is: Send more money. You cannot cut, we are going to throw people into the streets, and push older people off the cliff in a wheelchair. No, I do not think so. I think the American people need to hold this Congress, this government, to account. They need to say, we are not sending you any more money until you get your house in order. And we are not paying for hot tubs in Las Vegas. We are not throwing away $500 million on a Solyndra loan project that never had a chance to succeed and was benefiting cronies of the White House. We are not going to pay for the TSA to have warehouses filled with millions of dollars in equipment not being used. You do not have your act together. We want you to get your act together. We want to see some management. We want to see some leadership. Who is the top manager in America? It is not the chairman of the Budget Committee, or the ranking member of the Budget Committee, it is the Chief Executive. The President heads the executive branch. Every Cabinet member, subcabinet member, sub-sub-sub cabinet member works for the President. We had a situation where it has become clear that for over a year, people illegally in the country earning money are filing income tax returns and gaining as much as $4 billion a year in child tax credit money, a direct payment from the United States for children who do not even live in the country. The Inspector General for the U.S. Treasury Department said this should have been ended, and the IRS is not ending it. Congress ought to pass a law about it. The House has done so. This Senate has not acted. Those are the kinds of things that are happening. I would think the President of the United States, as soon as he learned that, would say: Stop it today. If you care about the money of the American people, if you care about the fact that we are now spending about $3.6 trillion dollars a year, taking in $2.3 trillion a year, so a deficit of $1.3 trillion. Oh, they say that President Bush increased the deficit. And he did. But the highest deficit he ever had was about $450-some-odd billion. The last 3 years under President Obama, the deficits have averaged over $1.3 trillion a year. Next year, beginning September 30, the next fiscal year, it is projected to be over $1 trillion again. This is an unsustainable course. We are looking here for some reality and leadership. I think it is a stunning, amazing development when we have the President of the United States at a time of financial systemic crisis and danger who has the opportunity to lead, who does not lead, who has an opportunity to tell the American people why we need to change the course we are on, the fact that it is going to take some belt tightening and some pain and some sacrifice--not so much, but some. We are going to have to do it. And if we do it, the country will be on a good path. We can save this country. We can avoid a debt crisis that could happen to us, because indeed our debt per person in America is higher than that of Greece, higher than that of any other country in Europe. We are in a dangerous area. We need to get off of it. I am amazed the President has not led. I think it is a development of the most stunning nature that he would, as the law requires, submit the budget he submitted. It is irresponsible. It did not get a single vote in the Senate last year. It went down 97 to 0. It was voted down 414 to 0 in the House this year. I suspect in an hour or so it will go down again on the floor of the Senate by unanimous vote. That speaks a lot. That says a lot, indicates the sad state of affairs which we are in. It is deeply disappointing. I see Senator Lee from Utah here, who is a new Member of the Senate. If Senator Conrad doesn't have an objection, I will yield to him and note that Senator Lee campaigned throughout his State. He talked to thousands of people. He was elected in this last cycle. He felt the mood of the people of his State and America, their concern about the debt course we are on. He has worked extremely hard and has laid out a proposal that he would like to explain and ask us to support. I thank the Senator for his leadership and his commitment and his hard work since he has been in the Senate.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, the Budget Control Act is not a budget, it is just a containment of spending. A clever attempt was made to make it look like a budget, but it is not a budget. If it was a budget, why did the President submit a budget this year? Why did the House pass a budget? Why were four budgets produced in the House by Democratic House Members? In today's Politico, an article quotes Senator Lieberman, who just spoke and who caucuses with the Democrats. I don't think [Democrats] will offer their own budget and I'm disappointed in that. Senator Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, said he would have been ``impeached'' if he had failed to produce a budget as West Virginia's Governor, though he conceded there are differences with the State budget process. Sure I have a problem with [failing to offer a budget]. As a former governor, my responsibility was to put a budget forward and balance it, so anyone who comes from the executive mindset has a problem with that. I don't care if you're Democrat or Republican. ``A problem with that'' means a problem with not having a budget. Senator Mark Pryor, a Democrat from Arkansas: The budget process is just not working around here. We've had three years with President Obama where we're not able to get a budget resolution passed. That 3 years includes this one. So we don't have a budget, we have a spending cap. And our Democratic colleagues--bless their hearts--have been whining that the House proposed a budget that came below the Senate's Budget Control Act caps in some areas, so they say that was breaking the budget. I would just advise them that when they vote on the President's budget--and I assume they will all vote against it; they did last year--the President's budget wipes out half the savings in the Budget Control Act. The President signed the Budget Control Act last August to raise the debt ceiling. We agreed to cut spending $2.1 trillion--not nearly enough, but we cut that and it was a decent step forward in the right direction, and the President proposes a budget this year that takes half of it out. Give me a break. There is no sense of wanting to have a budget, to adhere to one, and to contain spending. What do they want? More taxes. The President said, ``The Buffett rule will help stabilize the debt.'' That is what the President said; that is, tax increases on the rich would help stabilize the debt. Well, the Buffett tax would raise about $4 billion a year. This year the deficit will be $1,200 billion, not $4 billion. That is not going to fix it. It will be $1,200 billion, and the Buffett rule would raise about $4 billion a year. What kind of responsible leadership is that, for the President of the United States to be traveling this country at a time when we have never faced a more significant financial threat to America--we never, ever have been on a debt course as dangerous as the one we are on today. It is systemic. It is deep. We have to make serious changes, and he goes around saying the Buffett rule is going to stabilize the debt? He also said his budget last year would lead us to balance when the lowest single deficit year in 10 would be a deficit of $748 billion. So I don't know what kind of leadership we are getting. It is not good leadership. It is worse than no leadership because when a budget is prepared with great effort by Congressman Paul Ryan in the House, and his budget will actually change the debt course of America and minimize the pain we all have to suffer and create some growth and prosperity, the President invites him over to a conference, sits him down there, and then attacks it, and he has been attacking the budget ever since. Why is this? Why will not our colleagues support any budget? I fully expect my Democratic colleagues to vote against all of these budgets and not vote for one. Think about that. They will vote against four, not vote for one. Well, because you don't have the fingerprints on anything that results in cutting spending, nobody that benefits from spending is going to be mad with you. Everybody who wants more money and doesn't want to have a dime reduced in the take they get from the taxpayers' trough and the debt we borrow--they don't have any reduction in that, and then they can't be mad at me. But that is not a responsible course. This is not a little matter. This is what Admiral Mullen, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said just 2 years ago: The biggest threat we have to our national security is our debt. In an important statement by 10 former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers, who served in Republican and Democratic administrations, they wrote in March of 2011: At some point, bond markets are likely to turn on the United States, leading to a crisis that could dwarf 2008. Bond markets will turn. That is what they have done on Greece. The Simpson-Bowles Commission's Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, in testimony to our committee, said: This nation has never faced a more predictable financial crisis. The same thing as the Council of Economic Advisors said: You are on a debt path that is unsustainable. Chairman Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve--always cautious about what he says--talking about the Congressional Budget Office's projections of surging debt year after year, says: The CBO projections, by design, ignore the adverse effects that such high debt and deficits would likely have on our economy. But if government debt and deficits were actually to grow at the pace envisioned by this scenario, the economic and financial effects would be severe. And I recall at one point he said in his testimony: You see these debts being projected out there year after year, surging at this high level? You are never going to get there. What he meant was that we would have a financial crisis before that happened. I would say to my colleagues, this is a time of challenge for the Senate and the Congress of the United States. Will we rise to the challenge and actually do something? We can talk about it. We can have secret meetings and secret meetings and secret meetings. That is not fixing it. We can have these last-minute decisions, like last summer when the government was about to virtually shut down because the debt limit had been reached, and reach some secret agreement that is brought up on the floor for a vote and is not very well written. Or we can do what the law requires. In the United States Code, the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. It requires that we pass a budget. We can't guarantee exactly how it will all come out, but we ought to attempt to comply with the law, at least. We haven't attempted to do that. I am worried about our future. I am worried about where we are heading. And I do think the American people have a right to be upset with us. They are not happy with us. They should not be happy with us. When their Congress has allowed this country to reach a state where we are taking in $2.3 trillion and spending $3.6 trillion, when 35, 40 percent of what we spend is borrowed money, the American people have a right to be unhappy about that. They absolutely do. We are not protecting their interests, their children's interests, their future, or the economy. And it is stunning to me that the leader of the free world, the President of the United States, the Chief Executive, isn't pounding away at the Congress to bring spending under control and to reduce the debt we have. Instead, he seems to never want to talk about it. He only talks about investments--more investments. In fact, that budget he produced this year, what did it do to the spending levels we agreed to last August? Before the budget control agreement of last August, the U.S. Government was on path to spend $47 trillion over 10 years. What it effectively did was it reduced that spending to $45 trillion--still substantially more each year than we are spending now. There is growth every year under that proposal--too much growth, too much debt. But it was a step. So this year when he proposed his budget, he proposed spending another $1.4 or $1.5 trillion, new, on top of that. After he signed the agreement that we would cap spending at $45 trillion, this would take spending up to $46.6 trillion again, almost $47 trillion, where we were before the agreement was reached. Now, that is not responsible leadership. And he had a big tax increase. Tax and spend--that is what that budget is. And the American people shouldn't be happy with us. It was noted also that Senator Harkin said, well, this isn't the President's budget, that Senator Sessions offered some joke, or something to that matter. But it is the President's budget. It has the numbers in it that the President had. They directly reflect the President's request. If any Senator wants to come forward and show any number we put in there that is different from the President's numbers when he laid out his budget, then I would like to see it. Maybe we could correct it. But I don't think there is an error. I think we scrupulously followed the President's budget proposal request, and when people vote on it, they can know they are voting exactly on what he proposed. I don't think anybody will dispute the numbers we have in the budget. Also, I note that some of our Democratic colleagues are not happy about having no budget produced by the Democratic side. They feel bad about it, and I understand that. But I would have thought we would have had some Members come down and complain about it, to say that they didn't think the Democratic leadership, the Democratic conference should have blocked Senator Conrad and the Budget Committee from having a budget, that they should be handling this differently. But we haven't had that, so I guess everybody is basically happy on the Democratic side not to have to cast any tough votes. Mr. President, how much time is remaining on this side?