Jeff Sessions

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Oh, I am sorry. I didn't see that. Well, I should long ago have yielded the floor, because he has something worthwhile to say, I am sure. I close by saying we are not dealing honestly with the crisis we are in. The President is in denial. He is not looking the American people in the eye and telling us what a serious fix we are in, or challenging us all to deal with the reality that we are going to have to change the way we do business. I hate to say it, but I believe that it is true. We have to do better. I thank the Chair and I would be pleased to yield the floor to one of our more talented, insightful new Members, Senator Rubio of Florida.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, we just passed legislation that would raise the debt ceiling. Part of that was an effort to reverse the debt trajectory we are on, but it can only be called, at best, a first step. We can all agree on that. Indeed, there is an article in the Financial Times, written by Professors Rogoff and Reinhart, who wrote a book that has gotten a great deal of attention and is widely respected, describing and analyzing sovereign debt and countries that have gone bankrupt around the world. They commented that much of what occurred in our debate occurred in those other nations. The other nations scramble around when the pressure is on with something like a debt ceiling, and they don't really change anything significantly, but they meet the crisis and tell everybody everything is OK. They say in this article in the Financial Times that everything is not OK. Indeed, the debt will increase over the next 10 years by approximately $13 trillion, and this package would reduce the increase in our debt by $2.1 trillion to $2.4 trillion. That is not much. In addition to that, Larry Lindsey, a former economic adviser to President Bush, has done some analysis of the Congressional Budget Office score of what the budget would look like over 10 years. He points out that they were predicting nearly 3 percent growth the first and second quarter of this year. So now we have re-analyzed first quarter growth. Economic growth wasn't 3 percent, it was 2.4 percent. And the second quarter initially was scored at 1.3--not 3 percent or 2.7 but 1.3 percent. Dr. Lindsey said that loss in GDP alone will mean less economic growth, less tax revenue for the government, and over 10 years it puts the government on a trajectory to lose $750 billion--it would collect $750 billion less, which is about one-third of the savings that were to occur in the bill. Dr. Lindsey says the second, third, and fourth quarters of this year will also be well below that. We may be looking at, in this year alone, enough decline in GDP to wipe out half--maybe more--of the savings estimated in the bill we just passed. I wanted to point out that I believe many in Congress and in the Senate are in denial about how serious the debt threat is and that we are too often, as Rogoff and Reinhart noted, saying the same things other nations said before their economic crises hit. Indeed, the name of their book, ``This Time Is Different,'' refers to what government leaders said in those countries--those other countries that went into default and into debt crises--up until the last minute. They were saying: We have it under control. It is not so bad. This time, they say, it is different. Immediately, there was a crisis, which resulted in a loss of confidence, and they had a serious problem--similar to when people lost confidence in the housing market several years ago, which helped put us in this recession. This is worrisome. We are not facing a little problem; we are facing a problem that will require our steadfast attention for a decade to get this country on the right course. I note that the President had a press conference today. In a way, it rejected everything we have been talking about in this debate. It really did not talk about the nature of the crisis as Rogoff and Reinhart described. He didn't tell the American people that the real problem is spending that is surging out of control. He didn't say we can't continue, as a nation, borrowing 42 cents of every dollar we spend or that we can't continue spending $3.7 trillion when we take in $2.2 trillion. He did not talk to us honestly about that. He did not send a signal; he has not sounded the alarm. Therefore, I think a lot of people--even some in Congress and some outside of Congress--sort of think it must not be so bad. The President hasn't told us it is. More and more people are expressing concerns. There is a growing unease nationwide, as demonstrated in consumer confidence and business investment, and in some bad manufacturing numbers we received yesterday. So things are not looking good. We have to be honest with ourselves that this is a difficult time. He did, however, make repeated statements in his press conference about raising taxes. I don't think that is a good thing to do when the economy is in a fix the way it is. He flatly--and erroneously, I believe--stated that you can't balance the budget with spending cuts. Well, you certainly can. You can argue that you would rather have tax increases and fewer spending cuts, but we can and must balance our budget. It can be done with spending reductions. Quite a number of plans are out there proposing to do just that. The President continues to talk as if the problem was the debt ceiling, but the debt ceiling is really a signal that we have spent too much, and we borrowed all Congress has allowed the President to borrow, and you can't borrow any more unless Congress agrees to raise the debt ceiling. But that is not the problem. The problem, as Rogoff and Reinhart said, is our debt. That is the real problem. It is not going to be easy to fix. I wish it was. If we work together as a nation, we can do it. This country can rise to meet the challenge. I am totally convinced of that. The President said: And since you can't close the deficits with just spending cuts, we'll need a balanced approach. That means we need to balance a cut with tax increases. That is what that means. He went on to say: We can't make it tougher for young people to go to college or ask seniors to pay more for health care. But at some point, when you don't have the money, we might not be able to be as generous as we were just a few years ago when we were in better financial condition. Isn't that common sense? What do you mean you can't make any changes in how we do business? We are going to have to make changes in how we do business. He goes on to talk about investments, as he has often done. This is a quote from the press conference: Yet, it also allows us to keep making key investments in things like education and research. . . . Continuing to make investments in education? Does that mean we will continue our current level in education and that we will try not to cut it if we have to make reductions in spending? Is that what the President means? No. Just last week we saw the spectacle of the Secretary of Education appearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee asking for a 13.5- percent increase in education funding. Also last week, the President talked about investments--more, more, more--including 13.5 percent more for education. You know, 90 percent of education is funded by States, cities, and counties anyway. It is not the Federal Government. It is not our primary role and never has been. We only provide approximately 10 percent of the money that gets spent on education in America. We can't have double-digit increases when we are borrowing 42 cents of every dollar. Every penny of that increase will be borrowed money-- every penny. Doesn't common sense tell us we might not be able to increase spending this year even if we would like to? I point out that before the Budget Committee, on which I am the ranking Republican, we had the Secretary of Energy testify that he wanted a 9.5-percent increase for the Department of Energy--the Department that does more to block energy than create energy. The State Department was asking for 10.5 percent increase in the President's budget, the President's request to us. The Department of Transportation was to get a 60-percent increase in spending in the President's Budget. Last year, it was about $40 billion. I note that this year, interest on our debt will be $240 billion. I say to my colleagues that we are not dealing with reality. Americans know--maybe they are lucky enough to have two wage earners in the family when one loses their job, but do they not change the way they do business? Do they just think they can continue to spend twice as much as their income as if they were both still working? People don't do that. All over, Americans are making tough decisions. No wonder they are upset at us for pursuing this idea that we don't have to make any changes in what we do. It is very, very distressing to me. The President said this about employment: That's part of the reason that people are so frustrated with what's been going on in this town. In the last few months, the economy has already had to absorb an earthquake in Japan, the economic headwinds coming from Europe, the Arab spring, and the [increases] in oil prices, all of which have been very challenging to the recovery. But these are things we couldn't control. I don't know that those are the big problems here. Rising oil prices are. Today, oil prices are just about double--a little more--than what they were when President Obama took office. We have shut down new exploration in the gulf, and we are blocking the production of natural gas and shale formations, which has so much promise for us. We are doing a lot of things to drive up the cost of energy. Then he goes on to say this, which is surprising. He is the one who said the crisis was so large, it was a national problem. Our economy didn't need Washington to come along with a manufactured crisis to make things worse. We had a serious debate over what to do about the debt ceiling that we have reached, and Congress--the Republican House--yielded from $6 trillion in cuts over 10 years, as they proposed in their budget, to taking $1 trillion in cuts up front as part of this debt deal. The President wanted less cuts than that, apparently, and that is not enough. Of course, it could be $2.4 trillion, if the committee functions correctly, and we hope it will.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for an additional 5 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. What I wanted to point out is in this chart. It gives some indication of how we are operating in the Senate and the Congress, driven in substantial part by the President's desires. It is a chart showing the growth in certain programs that are exempt from the automatic cuts that would occur if a budget agreement is not reached as part of the legislation we just passed. These are all programs that we like and wish we could continue to allow to grow every year. Unfortunately, we are not going to have the money to do that. We are going to have to deal with these programs and all spending--Defense and non-Defense programs, no doubt about it. We have first over here the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund. The average annual percentage increase of that fund's cost has been 4.9 percent. The average annual increase in that fund each year-- 2005 through 2010--was 4.9 percent. The average inflation rate during this time was 2.5 percent. So that is about twice the inflation rate. The next fund here--a fund all of us value--is the Military Retirement Fund. It has increased at the average annual rate of 5.4 percent. Inflation is 2.5. Medicaid--a program that is administered by States but has recently been as much as 66 percent funded by the Federal Government--has been increasing at 8.5 percent each year. I think most of us know the rule of seven, where if you have money in the bank and it draws 7 percent interest, that money will double in 10 years. So this means in about 8 or 9 years the entire Medicaid Program will double at that kind of rate of increase. And, remember, inflation is 2.5 percent. The Children's Health Insurance Program--the CHIP program--has been increasing at 9 percent a year, and the SNAP program--the food stamp program--has been increasing at 16.6 percent a year for the last 5 years. It has been increasing at 16.6 percent. So I ask, is this sustainable? We are borrowing 42 cents out of every dollar. The economy is not growing as much as we hoped and expected, and it is not going to bail us out of this so we can sustain these kinds of spending levels. We look at all these programs we value--and we hate to talk about it; we don't want to mention it--and the odd thing about the agreement that was passed earlier today, at the insistence of our Democratic colleagues, is that these programs would receive no reductions if an agreement to cut spending is not reached by the committee. Under the rule, if the committee can't reach an agreement, there will be automatic across the board cuts, except it is not evenly cut across the board because these programs are untouched. They are untouchable because our Democratic colleagues say we can't deal with them. Well, it is time for us to look under the hood of the food stamps program, I have to tell you. How could it be increasing at 16.6 percent a year for 5 years? How could that happen? Don't we need to examine it, take a good look at it? We have had no hearings. We have done nothing this year to confront the surging cost. And what about Medicaid and CHIP? Those are also surging. Maybe we could even save a little on some of those programs that are growing faster than inflation. I would point out that the military is in line, under the bill that passed, if an agreement isn't reached, to take a 10-percent cut. That is from the baseline military budget. It does not include Iraq and Afghanistan, which are coming down and projected to come down dramatically. Forgive me if I am a little bit taken aback here about our priorities and about the unwillingness of Congress to deal with out-of-control spending. That is a good deal of money we are talking about--the Medicaid Program at $270 billion a year. Food stamps have more than doubled. It is now $78 billion a year. By comparison, Alabama's general fund budget is about $2 billion.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Chair. I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

Mr. SESSIONS. As I notice no one else is here.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, we do have a financial crisis in our country. The debt limit we will be considering tomorrow is the thermometer, the canary in the coal mine that tells us we are at a dangerous level. For example, we have reached it faster and at higher levels than we ever have, the result of which is that our debt rise is telling us we have to raise our debt limit. Those things happen periodically, but this one would be the largest debt limit increase in our history. We have never had such a surge. The deficit for this single fiscal year ending is expected to be $1.5 trillion. The largest deficit President Bush ever had, and it was large, was $450 billion. The last 2 years have been $1.2 trillion, $1.3 trillion, and this year it is expected to be $1.5 trillion. Under the President's budget, we will go from interest on our debt this year of $240 billion to $940 billion in the tenth year. That is for a single year. For example, our education and transportation budgets have greatly expanded. Spending $940 billion on interest will crowd out tremendous portions of the good things we would like to do with taxpayers' money. Instead of being able to improve our infrastructure or do other things we think could be good, we will be sending that money to debtholders abroad to pay them back for the money they have loaned us that we have been spending now. As I speak, 42 cents of every dollar we spend will be borrowed. This is a very real situation. I have always felt that we have a responsibility to be honest with our constituents, and we are going to need to raise the debt limit. It places too much risk on our economy not to raise it. But I want to share some thoughts about why I am uneasy about the legislation that is before us and why I will not be able to support it. I have been warning for months now that we are heading to a situation in which we will have a last-minute, eleventh-hour bill; that the Senate will be asked to pass it without adequate time to review it; that other bad items could be included in this debt limit increase. Additionally, it is not the kind of process we need to pursue. Our Democratic leadership decided they did not want to bring up a budget. They instructed the Budget Committee chairman--of which I am the ranking member--not to bring up a budget. When asked about it, the majority leader said it would be foolish to have a budget. We have gone now 824 days without a budget under the Democratic majority in the Senate at a time when we have had the largest deficits in American history. At this extremely important time we do not have a budget. They said it would be foolish to have a budget. My questions is, Why would it be foolish? Because, if you pass a budget--and one can be passed with a mere 50 votes. It is given an expedited procedure. It cannot be filibustered, it is guaranteed a vote in 50 hours, but you have a right to file amendments. When you file and get a vote on amendments, then people are held accountable for their yea or nay. We have had a lot of people say we would like to do more. Maybe if we had a budget we would have had a chance to vote on spending. The problem is a decision was made that it would be too difficult to execute the normal, regular order in the Senate, to bring forth a budget and actually have amendments filed and Senators do what they are paid to do. I think that is particularly problematic in light of what happened in the last election. The American people are not happy with us. They rightly believe that Congress cannot justify a situation in which 42 cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed. Congress cannot justify a $1.5 trillion deficit this year. People are not happy about that. I have been to town meetings and people say: You work for me. I am not happy. You have seen that on television in the last election. It was a shellacking for those who thought that business as usual ought to continue in the United States of America; that money could just be borrowed, borrowed and spent, and when the problems hit we would just raise taxes on the American people and they would have to pay for our spending binge. People are not happy with this. They were demanding, among other things, accountability. They were demanding that we in Congress be responsible for what we do. We should be transparent and willing to answer at home for what we had done. That is a fair request in a great Republic such as ours. I have been critical of the absence of a budget. We will not vote on one. We had the Reid proposal and the Boehner proposal and finally this compromise proposal. Our colleagues, the Democratic majority, brought up the House budget so they could vote it down. It was a historic budget. They did it publicly. They voted on the floor. There were amendments. The House plan reduced spending by as much as $6 trillion. They changed the debt course of America. I would have liked to have seen them go further because even that plan to alter the debt trajectory of America, bringing down our deficits, still did not balance in the 10th year. People say the House was radical and they did strange things. Not so. Read that budget. It was an honest budget based on good numbers. It changed the debt course of America. But even that, as I said, did not go as far as we really need to go. The House did its bit and we did nothing in return. Now we get to the point where the debt limit, August 2, is upon us and we are supposed to vote. This morning at 3 a.m., apparently, legislation was finally put together. It was brought forth to the floor of the Senate. We will vote on it tomorrow morning, maybe noon, after a couple of hours of debate tomorrow. I am really uneasy about that. I am uneasy about what is contained in it. What does it do? The good part is it reduces our spending by about $2.1 trillion, maybe $2.4 trillion. A more solid belief is we will reduce spending if Congress adheres to the guidelines. Over a period of years we tend to figure ways around the limits and constraints that are put on spending, but the plan is to reduce spending by $2.1 trillion. It is a step. It is better than more spending like we have been doing. In the last 2 years under President Obama, when the Democratic majority had 60 Senators in the Senate, nondefense discretionary spending went up 24 percent. The budget that the President submitted this year calls for a 13.5 percent increase in education for next year. Beginning October 1, fiscal year 2012, when we are in the worst financial shape ever, a 13.5 percent increase in spending? Is that common sense? Does that make reasonable judgment? Is that a reasonable judgment for America, when we are in a situation such as this? It proposes a 9.5 percent increase in the Energy Department. It proposes a 10.5 percent increase in the State Department. It proposes a 60-percent increase in the Highway Department. And I'm told there will be a tax. I ask them: Mr. Secretary, what tax? It will not be a gas tax. I say: OK, we agree, it is not a gas tax. What is the tax? We will talk about that. The Congressional Budget Office said that is no income. You cannot say you have income to offset a big increase in high-speed rail and things like that if you do not have a source of revenue. That is the situation in which we find ourselves. We have a deep, philosophical disagreement. The majority in this Senate and the President believe in spending. When I said 24 percent increase, that did not include the almost $1 trillion in the stimulus package. It did not include that, all of which, every penny, was borrowed because we are in debt. When you spend this extra money, you borrow the money. We do not have it to spend. However, we have a disagreement about where we are heading in our country. We should have had a full, glorious debate in the Senate. The Finance Committee should be looking at how to deal with taxes. The Appropriations Committee should be asking how can we reduce expenditures. Every authorizing committee needs to be looking at what they can do to do the job better with less cost and more efficiently. The Budget Committee should be producing a budget that can be adhered to and passed, and that would bind the Senate to change the spending trajectory we have been on. But none of that has happened. Instead, we have a bill to raise the debt limit. We are here because we spent so much money. We are up at the limit and if we do not raise the debt limit there will be substantial reductions in spending occurring pretty quickly. That is where we are. I believe this bill raises serious questions about the Senate and how we do business. As I said, I warned that we would be at the eleventh hour when it all came forward. One thing particularly concerning to me as the ranking member of the Budget Committee is that this bill deems certain budget numbers and in a way gets around, again, the budget process. It is going to give my colleagues, the Democratic majority, additional avenues to avoid producing a budget for the third consecutive year. I do not believe that is a healthy process. Second, I ask my colleagues to think about this, and I will wrap up. I don't need to go into great detail about it. We are being asked to allow our leaders to select up to 12 people, 12 people who will be on a special committee and will have almost complete jurisdiction to work on any issue they choose. After they reach an agreement, if they do, that agreement will be presented to both Houses of Congress. There will be only 30 hours of debate, no opportunity to amend it, and there will be an up-or-down vote. I have to say the chance of an up-or-down vote being successful is very high, because the product that will come out of that committee will be in harmony with what the leaders who appointed the members of the committee desire, because the power to appoint is the power to control. The committee will come back with this leadership proposal. It will be on the floor and it will be for an up-or-down vote and it is very likely to pass. Hopefully, it will have some good things in it. But it is unlikely that it would go past $1.5 trillion in reduced spending over 10 years. That is roughly what they have been given. That on top of the $900 billion that would go into effect immediately with the passage of the legislation would result in about a $2.4 trillion total. I believe that is an insufficient number. It is not close to what we have to do given our expected debt. Over 10 years the debt of the United States will increase an additional $13 trillion. Reducing it $2 trillion is not enough. We have heard the economists and others testify before the Budget Committee. Republicans and Democrats, say those reductions are not sufficient. Many economists said the absolute minimum was $4 trillion, and this will be half that. That legislation will then come before us. We will have an up-or-down vote and presumably it will pass. The great traditions of the Senate, full, free, open debate will not occur to the degree that it ought to occur. The regular order will not be followed. Committees will have only an ability to send over advice if they so desire. As a result, I think we as Members of the Senate need to ask ourselves if we are getting pretty far away from the traditions of this body when you do not have public debate on a budget, you create a committee of limited numbers of people to produce legislation that cannot be amended and will only be up-or-down and no ability to have a supermajority vote, but a 50-vote, contrary to the normal process of this body. For those reasons I believe, as a Senator and a ranking member on the Budget Committee who has wrestled with this for some time, I will not be able to support the legislation, although I truly believe it is a step forward, and I respect my colleagues who worked hard to try to bring it forward. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, the discussion has boiled down to a desire by the President to have the largest debt increase in the history of America at a time when our spending is out of control, and this debt ceiling limit that we have now reached is at a point where it does need to be raised. I thought we had a national consensus that as part of raising the debt ceiling we would begin to change our habits around here; we would do things better; we would not be running up so much debt because every witness who has testified before our Budget Committee has said we are on an unsustainable path. They mean that. We cannot sustain the debt path we are on. We have never been in a deeper fix. The President wants this huge debt increase, but he only wants to have a very modest decrease in spending. The bill that is before us would decrease spending about $927 billion. It might sound like a lot, but over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, we will increase the debt of America by $10 trillion--$10,000 billion, not $927 billion. That will not change the debt trajectory. We have to have more than $927 billion in spending reductions. It appears we are not going to be able to get that. The Democratic majority in the Senate will not allow it and say they are prepared to let the country default if we try to cut any more. So we have to continue the dialogue and the debate about the course we are on. Why is it so important to get a bigger debt ceiling increase? I thought and believed we had an agreement that the debt ceiling should not be increased more than spending is decreased, that spending is decreased over 10 years. We cut it $1 trillion, we raise the debt ceiling $1 trillion. We give 10 years of spending cuts, but immediately we get a $1 trillion increase in the debt ceiling. Why are we in this fix? I hate to say it, but this is why, there is no doubt about it: The President said last week: The only bottom line that I have is that we extend this debt ceiling through the next election, until 2013. Through the next election. It is all about him. It is about politics. It is about his desires, what he wants. That is not correct. This is about America, what is good for our country. The House of Representatives submitted a fabulous budget earlier this year. It reduced spending by as much as $6 trillion over 10 years. This bill would only reduce it $1 trillion. Why would the House of Representatives, after much debate, pleading, hard work, why would they agree to send a bill over here that only does $1 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years? The reason is they love our country. They know this is a dangerous time. They know at this point in history we don't need to create more uncertainty on top of the tremendously dangerous debt path we are on. By not raising the debt limit we don't know for sure what will happen. Bad things could happen, so they have made a tremendous compromise in what they proposed and sent it over here. It seems the only thing the President cares about is not having to talk about this again until after he gets reelected. I think we need to understand something. This is not enough reduction in spending. It will not change the debt trajectory we are on now, which is on a path to do $9 trillion to $13 trillion more in debt added to our Nation's books in 10 years. It is just not enough. We raise the debt ceiling, and we get out of this immediate crisis, and in doing so we send a message to the world, the American people and the financial markets that we are still working on it. We are still going to bring down the numbers. We know we cannot continue on this rate of spending. We know that so we are going to work to get the numbers down, and we are not going to wait 2 years after some convenient or inconvenient election. We are going to start early next year or late this year, and we will stay on it until we make the kind of changes that put us on a path to growth and prosperity. I feel strongly about that. I know people don't want to hear us talking about this bill or that bill or who is for this and how many votes it has. They are tired of hearing that. They want us to make changes. I do not think the American people just want a deal. That is how the media spins it and politicians spin it: Is there a deal? Is there not a deal? The American people want us to change our debt course. They want us to get off the path that is taking us to financial destruction. It really is. I don't know when it will happen, but everybody says we cannot continue, and in a period of years we will be in a situation like Greece, and the numbers are pretty clear in that regard. There is no doubt about it. It doesn't have to happen, so we can do something about it. Republicans have passed a good budget that would reduce the debt and put us on a path to prosperity. That was rejected by our Democratic leaders. Indeed, they brought it up and mocked it. President Obama called for a conference at the White House. He put Congressman Ryan, the brilliant young budget chairman in the House right in front of him, and then he mocked and attacked the budget that the House did that would actually do something for America and make us better. I don't appreciate that. We have to do something. I am prepared to compromise. I feel deeply that we need to cut more spending than this, but we are at a point in history where we need to pass a debt ceiling increase. We just have to. We don't need to quit talking about the problem. We need to continue the dialogue, continue the debate, and continue to look for and find ways to reduce spending. The House passed a cap-and-balance bill that would have capped spending and created a permanent constitutional amendment to balance the budget, and then they passed the Boehner legislation that was voted down last night. That legislation would have cut all spending at just about the amount that Senator Reid wants, the $900-or-so billion. Speaker Boehner didn't exaggerate how much it was. He agreed to that amount and agreed to raise the debt ceiling immediately by an amount equal to the amount of spending we reduced over 10 years. It was a very generous, significant compromise from the position they believed was correct and that they took openly and publicly through the normal legislative process when they passed their budget. Now our Democrats in the Senate have not passed anything. They didn't even bring up a budget. Now it has been 822 days since Congress has passed a budget. A budget was not passed here when my Democratic colleagues had 60 Democratic Senators. Senator Reid said it would be foolish to pass a budget. Why is that? Well, he meant it would be foolish to have his Members actually have to vote. When you move a budget, it has priority. It cannot be filibustered. It can be passed with a 50-vote margin, but people get to offer amendments and people would have to vote on amendments. The people who produced the budget would have to say how much taxes they were increasing, how much spending they were cutting, and how much debt was still going to be out there, and they did not want to expose themselves. They did not want to come before the American people and show where they stood. They preferred to bring up the House budget and vote it down and mock it while the leadership didn't have the courage or the responsibility to pass a budget themselves. They would show where they wanted to go with the future of America. It is just that simple. We need to go back to the regular order in the Senate, and that means presenting a budget, bringing up bills, having votes, having amendments, having people be accountable to their constituents. If you were sitting back home, you would want to see government reduce some of this reckless spending. Wouldn't you want to know how your elected officials, the people representing you, voted? Well, we have had no votes, and that has been the plan--to shield the Members from votes so their constituents could not hold them accountable. For heaven's sake, we don't want to have a vote in January or February when we have an election in November. Why, that is too close. People would see what we did. They might remember it when election day came up. They might not like it that they don't have a plan to do a better job of changing the unconscionable debt course this country is on. That is the way they think in Washington, and it is not acceptable. We are borrowing 40 cents of everything we spend. Mr. President, do we have a time agreement at this point?

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Chair. Well, it is a big deal, and we need to get this done. There are just not enough votes to pass the Reid bill, and there are not enough votes to pass the Boehner bill. That is just obvious, even though Speaker Boehner drew down dramatically the amount of spending cuts the House believes should be achieved. We have to get our folks busy while we are continuing to debate into the night instead of actually recognizing that the Reid bill doesn't have the votes to pass the Senate, and it absolutely doesn't have the votes to pass the House. It just doesn't. At this last desperate moment, hopefully, our leaders will get busy, quit worrying about those things, and actually begin to suggest something we can work on. We really should not be in this position. As I have explained at some length--and I will not repeat it--but I don't like it. I do not like it. I don't think it is right that we have a couple of Senators and a couple of House Members, our leaders, go off and somehow plop down on the Senate their solution to our problem, and if we don't pass it, the government is damaged and the economy is damaged because they have waited until the absolute eleventh hour-plus to produce it. It should have never happened that way. It is irresponsible, and it undermines the integrity of the entire congressional process. We have seen this coming all year long. We should not have allowed it to happen in this way. Well, let me talk a bit more technically about the Reid bill. It purports to reduce spending and savings by $2.4 trillion. That is not correct. Actually, it reduces the debt that would be increasing by only $927 billion, and we have done our best with the Budget Committee staff to be honest and fair about it. That is about the same number Speaker Boehner has in his, but Majority Leader Reid insists his saves $2.4 trillion. Why? Because if it is $2.4 trillion, he can justify that the next time we address this, which will be after the next election, will be 2 years away. He doesn't cut that much. What he claims is not accurate. Why? Well, they are working into the night to see how they can make the accounting look better. They didn't like the 927 figure, so what do they do? They look at the budget projections where it was projected war costs would be coming down. Actually, we will have a $40 billion reduction this year in the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan. Those costs are coming down. The President had projected they would come down to $50 billion soon and would stay at that for the rest of the year, which would mean $1 trillion less spending. Remember, we are going to increase the debt by $9 to $13 trillion, but $1 trillion would have been--by reducing the war cost, we save $1 trillion. But that was already in the books. That is already accounted for. So how did they do it? Well, they came in and they put in a bill that mandated the come-down because, oddly enough, the Congressional Budget Office doesn't assume war costs will come down. The Congressional Budget Office assumes that it will stay up and we will spend this $1 trillion more on the war when there is no intent to do that. Therefore, they put it in the legislation and require it to come down, these numbers, and all of a sudden CBO scores $1 trillion in extra savings without any change in spending projections or reality at all. Speaker Boehner didn't count his bill as reducing spending by that $1 trillion when he took the same numbers, same assumptions that spending on the war would come down. But they did that to try to make it look as though they were reducing spending more; therefore, they could extend the debt limit more, they would make it past the election, and they could get the political result they want. That is really what it is. Another way they get another $300 billion gimmick is that if we assume a $1 trillion reduction in the war, then we are not paying interest on that money because we would have to borrow it because we are already in debt, and every amount we can reduce means we borrow less money. Every less-spending provision saves money, and it also saves interest on that money. Well, it would be $300 billion in interest saved under the theory--the gimmick--that is being used here. So that really amounts to $1.3 trillion in overestimating right there on the amount of savings in the Reid plan. I thank the Chair. I hope we will reject the Reid proposal, and I hope our leaders can achieve in short order a change in our plans for managing our money, raise the debt ceiling, and begin to put this country on a sound path. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I think it has become very clear that our Democratic colleagues want to raise taxes. They use the phrase revenues--revenues--and we need a shared sacrifice. That means people need to pay more taxes, as if that doesn't have an impact on the economy. We have had a recent study by one of the international groups which found the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world--among the developed nations. This is all the European nations. The wealthy pay more in the United States than in those countries, according to an independent, international study. We have heard the numbers. A substantial percentage of the income taxes are paid by the top 10 percent in America. How much more do you do this? I thought we had an agreement last December with the President in which we agreed that raising taxes at a time of economic danger is not the right thing to do. Not doing something to fix this debt limit now is not a good thing. We need to raise the debt limit. I don't know what would happen if we don't. I don't think it would be good. I think we run a risk. But the real danger we have is not the debt limit; the real danger we have is the extraordinary surging debt this Nation has, which is unlike anything we have ever had before. It is systemic. It is part of the structure of the American economy right now that we are spending 42 percent more than we take in. We cannot keep doing that. The projections for the future are not better. So it is a very dangerous trend, and we have to get off of it. We had a talk about that in the last election. The American people were engaged in that. They weren't happy with their Congress. They didn't think Congress was managing their affairs very well. They believed they weren't listening to them when they were asking questions such as: How can you keep doing this? You are putting our grandchildren in the poorhouse. You are risking the economy of the United States. All you want to do is spend money, buy votes, and say you are spreading the wealth around and that is going to make things better. So we had an election, and it was a shellacking for the big spenders. Wasn't that what it was all about? Was there a single candidate I know of who won last time--at least a new candidate who was elected for the first time--who didn't talk about the need to constrain spending in Washington? That was the theme throughout the election. That was the meaning of the election. So now my colleagues are saying: Oh, we can't. Oh, you want to cut spending? Oh, they say, they have these extremists in the House. Oh, they do not want to play ball. They haven't served in the Congress long enough. They do not know better. They think we can actually cut spending. Of course, we can't cut spending. Oh, that is not the way you do it. No, you just reduce growth a little bit and spending and say you are cutting spending, even though it is still going up. That is what has been going on here. That is why we are increasing the debt at the most extraordinary rate and over a systemic period of time to the degree that every economist who has appeared before the Budget Committee--and I am the ranking Republican on that committee--has testified that we have to stop; that this is unsustainable-- unsustainable. They have said: You cannot keep doing this. Do you know, colleagues, that in the last 2 years, when the Democratic majority in this Senate had 60 votes, that spending for nondefense discretionary spending, not counting the stimulus, just the basic budgetary spending on all our accounts--nonwar, nondefense, nonSocial Security--went up 24 percent? This at a time when we are running the biggest deficits in history; 24 percent increases? We can't cut spending? There was an article in the Washington Times yesterday or the day before where my colleague, Senator Shelby from Alabama, asked the Secretary of Education how he could explain that the Secretary of Education and the President were proposing the Department of Education get a 13\1/2\-percent increase for the next fiscal year, beginning October 1--13\1/2\ percent. But he defended that. He said it was justified; that it was an investment. But when you don't have money, you have to change business. You can't continue to be in denial and pretend this is normal; that we can just continue to increase the Education Department by 13.5 percent. By the way, the Department of Energy, the President, and their Secretary of Defense proposes a 9.5-percent increase for the Department of Energy, which does more to restrict the production of energy than produce the source of energy in America; the Department of State, 10.5 percent. I am talking about their proposal for next year, beginning October 1 of this year, the fiscal year. Sixty percent they propose for transportation, and they propose a tax for that but will not say what it is. When I asked, they will not say it is a gas tax because that is not popular. So I asked Secretary LaHood. So it is a not-gas-tax tax. Is that right, Mr. Secretary? Well, we will talk with Congress about what that tax is. But I can just tell you, Mr. LaHood, Congress is not going to pass a big fat tax so you can increase spending on your budget 60 percent because we don't have that kind of money. We don't need to be hammering this fragile economy with another big tax increase. Besides, what we need to do first and foremost is rein in this surging spending spree we have been on. That is what we need to do. That is just a fact. That is what the American people understand. I am offended, frankly, by the suggestion that the people in the House, who swept out a lot of the buddies of the big spenders in the Senate--a lot of the big spenders in the House are back home figuratively pushing up daisies because they were held to account, finally, many of them, after many years in the Congress. They were voted out of office. So the people who beat them are extremists, you see. That is what they like to say: They will not negotiate. They will not deal. They are irresponsible. They actually think they can come up here and change the trajectory of debt in this country. So they passed a budget in the House of Representatives. A brilliant, fine, young Congressman, Paul Ryan, chairman of the Budget Committee in the House, the Republican majority in the House passed a budget that cut spending $5 trillion, and it would change the debt trajectory of America. It didn't quite pass, even at 10 years that I would like to have seen, but we are in such a hole it is hard to get out, and it would have made a big change in the way we are going and put us on the right path. Senator Reid called it up, mocked it, had his members all vote against it. So we said: What about your budget, Mr. Reid? Well, we don't have one. Well, what about your budget? You have the majority in the Senate. You can pass a budget with just 50 votes. Why don't you pass a budget? It is foolish to pass a budget, he said. Foolish to pass a budget. At a time when this country has never, ever, ever been in a more serious financial condition than we are today, we are borrowing 42 cents out of every dollar we spend. That is a deep hole, and it is not the war. We spent $150 billion-plus on the war this year. Next year it will be $118 billion. The deficit this year will be $1,500 billion. It is about 10 percent. If we put every bit of the war costs as part of our debt, it is only 10 percent. It is other spending that is putting us in this hole. We do have long-term problems with our entitlement programs. Shouldn't we talk about them or should we do as the President did: bring Congressman Ryan over to the White House for a speech, sit him right down there in front of him and then launch into an attack on what he and his Members of the House have tried to do to make America a better place. So they say: Those new guys and women over there who were elected, they are not reasonable enough. They will not work with us. Well, let me tell you. They proposed a $6 trillion reduction. Even that didn't balance it in 10 years, but it sure was a big step forward. Do you know what they have done now. The House passed a bill at the insistence of the Senate and the President to try to pass a bill--and they passed it--that would raise the debt ceiling and cut spending only $1 trillion. Is that an extremist thing to do? They sent it over here, much of it very similar to what Senator Reid has proposed, and they called it up within minutes and tabled it--without debate, without discussion. Then they continued to say, as if nothing happened: These are extremists over there. They won't listen to reason. These tea party people are not good for America. Well, I am going to tell you one thing. The tea party people understand an important fact. This Congress is spending too much money. They are exactly correct in that regard. No Member of the United States Congress can, with a clear conscience, look their constituents in the eye and say we have managed their money wisely. We are in such a shape we can't even see when we will balance the budget because we have mismanaged their economy so badly. The only idea that anybody seems to have around here is, spend more money and stimulate the economy. If we spend more money, where does it come from? It is borrowed. We are already in debt, and every new dime we spend is borrowed. There is only one way to move out of this; that is, to reduce spending. It just is. The American people understand that. I recently had the honor to be in Estonia near Russia, one of the Baltic nations that is so proud to be free and independent. When the recession hit, they suffered more than we. They had a 15-percent reduction in their economy. Do you know what they did. The Cabinet members took a 40-percent pay cut. Every employee in Estonia took a 10- to 20-percent pay cut. One of the members told me: I will tell you who is really mad is my wife. She is a doctor, and the medical system got cut. Do you know what. They had 5 percent growth the first quarter, and their debt-to-GDP is 7 percent. Our debt-to-GDP is 95 percent. They are going to come out of this, and they are not going to have a debt so heavy that it pulls down the economy. Mr. President, I don't know what the agreement timewise is at this point. Can the Chair advise me?

Mr. SESSIONS. I see my colleague from California, and I will yield. I would just note that the idea that the Republicans don't want to vote is not correct. We are prepared to vote. We are prepared to vote on the standard procedural manner in the Senate of 60 votes that is done on every significant matter around here, and that is perfectly normal. I am rather amazed, surprised, and almost amused that my colleagues would feign such great pain and anguish that this would occur. They would do exactly the same. That is the way the Senate operates. That is the way they have operated when they were in the minority, and that is the way we operate today. On matters of significance it takes 60 votes. Mr. President, I thank the Chair for the opportunity to speak and raise some political points. We have been jousting politically, some of which is good and some of which is not. I do say we need to reach an agreement soon and pass legislation that will raise the debt limit and will reduce our spending trajectory so we can get this country on a sound path. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, the challenges we face are difficult. I am proud of the work the House of Representatives has done. I do not appreciate it being suggested that somehow they are unreasonable because I don't believe that is fair to say about them. They worked very hard. They complied with the congressionally mandated statutory requirement to pass a budget. They passed a 10-year budget that was honest and open. It was publicly debated in the House of Representatives. They passed it, and it would have fundamentally altered the debt trajectory of America. It would put us on a sound path. It could have gone a little farther, frankly, but it goes farther than anything else we have seen and puts us on the path to a sound economic future. What happened in the Senate? I am ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. We are required to mark up a budget in the Senate by law. It doesn't say you go to jail if you don't follow the law. It doesn't have any penalty, I will acknowledge. It is a law, but we don't have to follow it, except we certainly have an obligation to do so. Certainly we would want, I think, to have a budget in the Senate. We have not had one now for over 800 days, over 2 years. We were within a week--less than that--of commencing hearings to mark up a budget that would be moved by the Democratic majority. When they do so, it is not even subject to a filibuster. It can be passed with 50 votes, and there are 53 Democrats in the Senate. The majority party always has that obligation to move a budget. Senator Reid, the Democratic leadership, decided they wouldn't do it. He said it would be foolish to have a budget so we haven't passed a budget. The House has said it would reduce spending by up to $5 trillion or $6 trillion. Because of the Senate's objection and the President's objection, they have agreed to raise the debt limit by $1 trillion, and they have agreed to cut spending in America by $1 trillion. They have tried to reach an agreement so we wouldn't have a shutdown. Then, all of a sudden, my Democratic colleagues now come forward and say they don't want to accept that. They want the Reid amendment. The Reid amendment has the same actual savings. We have looked at the numbers and we have seen how they have done it. There is about a $1 trillion savings in the Reid bill with a reduction in spending of about $1 trillion. He claims it is $2.7 trillion. That is almost three times what it actually achieves. Therefore, they want to continue to raise the debt limit by almost $3 trillion, the largest amount it has ever been raised. Why? Because the President said so. This is what the President said a week ago: The only bottom line that I have is that we extend this debt ceiling through the next election, into 2013. The President thinks this is about him. It is all about him. This is about America and what is good for this country. It is not about the President. It is not about politics. If it were about politics, I wouldn't vote for the Boehner amendment and neither would a lot of those patriotic Members of the House because it is not enough. It does not do what we need to do. We need to do $4 trillion, $5 trillion, $6 trillion over 10 years. The debt is going to increase over the next 10 years from $9 trillion to $13 trillion, and $1 trillion is not enough. It can only be seen as a step in the right direction. So forgive me if I am a little frustrated about that. I want to talk about something that is problematic and needs to be known. It is not being focused on, and this is Senator Reid's amendment and his solution to the deficit problem. He wants to raise the debt ceiling so we can keep borrowing money and spending more than we take in. We are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend. The President this morning said he liked the Reid amendment and is what he wishes to see. He doesn't like the House version. I think there are some things we all ought to think about and know that are in the Reid amendment. As I have said, we have gone 821 days without a budget. The law requires us to have a budget. A lack of a congressional budget contributes to our fiscal nightmare. Since we last passed a budget, we have spent $7 trillion. The reason we don't have a budget is because it is carefully and deliberately orchestrated that we not have one by the leadership of this Senate. They have planned for just the eventuality that is occurring. I have warned for weeks and months on the floor of the Senate that we would be at the eleventh hour with people scurrying around in secret, plotting deals to try to figure out how to deal with the crisis this Nation faces. That is exactly what is happening. Today it was announced that the second quarter economic growth was 1.3 percent. That is anemic and well below what we were hoping to see and thought we might. We have had expert testimony that the debt we have pulls down economic growth. Had the Senate adopted a budget in a timely manner this year, as the House did, we would not be at this last-minute crisis. It was deliberately orchestrated because it gives maximum leverage to the President and the press. The question becomes not what is in the deal, but do you have a deal? Just do anything. We are going to be in a crisis if you don't pass something. We want a deal. The House has come up with a very reasonable compromise. It looks as though some people want to have this fuss and put us through the crisis even when they get basically what they have asked for. The Reid amendment to increase the debt limit deems two consecutive budget resolutions for fiscal years 2012 and 2013. In other words, it basically takes over the budget process and sets the basic spending numbers. Does the President think the Senate should go 2 more years without crafting or passing a budget? We have already gone 2 years. The Reid amendment sets spending allocations for most Senate committees at the Congressional Budget Office's rising baseline. These are bureaucratic members. They work hard, but they are not elected. They are not constitutionally accountable. It says we are going to deem the amount we spend by what CBO has projected our growth in spending to be, and CBO projects growth in spending. They don't set that as right for America, but they project that is what will occur under the current circumstances. This deems those higher growing numbers as what should be. Without hearings or debates on these allocations, this provision would provide a further excuse for avoiding a budget and increase the likelihood that the Congressional Budget Act will be violated for the third straight year. This is an abrogation of the responsibilities of the Senate and of the Budget Committee of the Senate. We are not elected to the Senate and chosen to sit on the Budget Committee to see most of the budget levels automatically raised based on a set of spending growth projections by the CBO. They are not empowered to do that. They don't claim to, actually. I should not demean them. They do what their duty is. It is this kind of process that has placed the country in a financial crisis. We keep locking in spending levels that are going up. When we reduce the growth in spending a little bit, you know what we say we are doing? We are cutting spending, and it is spending more. That is the way the budget is. When they say we are going to save $1 trillion through the House plan----

Mr. SESSIONS. I would ask for 2 additional minutes to wrap up.

Mr. SESSIONS. The provision that takes over that and sets us on an automatic growth course is not the right one. Both the Reid amendment and the House bill say we save about $1 trillion over the next 10 years. I would note that the difference between the two is how long or how much is achieved by that. Senator Reid wants almost 2 years and the House Members would do it based on a dollar-per-dollar manner. That $1 trillion in the Reid amendment does not reduce spending. It only reduces the growth in spending, and that is one of the reasons Congress is able to hide the amount of money we are spending every year. That is one reason debt is so high. The Budget Committee should be allowed to fulfill its duties. The Budget Committee should be allowed to mark up in fiscal year 2012. It will begin October 1 of this year. We need a budget now. We are past due. Once a budget is adopted by the committee, it should be taken to the full Senate and allowed to be amended as the law provides. I am disappointed that the President doesn't seem to agree with that. He seems to have bought into the idea that the regular processes of the Senate should not be followed. He agrees with Senator Reid, apparently, that if they can keep it all bottled up to an end and we come up on a crisis, they can all maneuver in secret and cut a deal. They feel that is the way we serve the American people. I feel strongly that we are undermining the great power and responsibility of the Senate as that place where the great issues are discussed publicly and openly and where we are accountable and cast votes. Let me say again, the reason the majority leader did not want a budget to come up is because when you bring a budget up, you have to vote, people have alternatives, they offer amendments, and the Members go on record. He is protecting his Members from having to do the primary responsibility of Senators who are before the world to cast their vote and to be accountable to the people who sent them there. It is not good for this body. This body should be engaged in a historic debate about the threat the debt poses to our future, and we have been unengaged. The discussions are being taken in secret without the American people being able to hold their representatives accountable. I object. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Senator for recalling that event. I know the Senator continued working across the aisle on another proposal that has the potential to be more effective than even the one we worked on together last year. So I thank the Senator for being willing to work in a way that could be effective to do better.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, there are currently two bills headed for a vote to raise the debt ceiling and to reduce spending. One of those two bills from the House, Speaker Boehner's, cuts about $1 trillion in spending and raises the debt ceiling by $1 trillion until the end of the year, approximately. That is about how long it would take to run up another $1 trillion in debt. The other bill from Senate Majority Leader Reid cuts about $1 trillion and raises the debt ceiling about $3 trillion--or past the 2012 election. This is because the President said emphatically just a few days ago at a press conference: The only bottom line I have is that we have to extend this debt ceiling through the next election, into 2013. So it is really quite simple. Speaker Boehner's bill lives up to the principle that I thought we had all agreed to: that every $1 in debt ceiling increase should be tied to a $1 reduction in spending. The spenders get an advantage since the spending reductions occur over 10 years, whereas the debt ceiling would increase immediately. But that is the principle on which we have been operating. Senator Reid's bill is a hoax. It uses Washington gimmicks designed to make it look three times as large as it is. In reality, it hikes the debt ceiling $3 for every $1 in spending cuts over 10 years. The House bill is 1 to 1, the Senate bill is 3 to 1. We have demonstrated this exhaustively in a Budget Committee analysis that I don't think people would dispute. And the House approach--one of the primary ways this is accomplished is to count the reduction in spending over the war in Iraq and Afghanistan that is projected to occur and has already been projected to occur and count that as a spending cut. Speaker Boehner didn't do that. His would look $1 trillion better also if he used those numbers. The House approach is honest, it is straightforward, and it achieves $1 in cuts for every $1 in debt ceiling increase. It allows us to return to the table in a few months to assess our progress, see what is happening in the economy, and begin working toward the greater cuts that are needed. Senator Reid's bill relies on accounting tricks, takes the debt limit off the table until after the election, and exchanges a record $3 trillion in debt hike for only one-third as much in debt cuts. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle signed a letter vowing to defeat the Boehner plan. I find this a little shocking, frankly, and surprising. Is it the position of the Senate Democratic majority that $1 trillion in cuts over 10 years is all we need to achieve between now and 2013? Is it their view that $1 in cuts for every $1 in debt limit increase is too steep or is it a political effort to protect the President by pushing the debt limit ceiling past the next election, creating the highest increase in debt ceiling, I think, in history, except for perhaps the one that the super Democratic majority in the Senate slipped through during the passage of the health care bill? Is it this election issue that Democrats would turn down an agreement on and put us at risk of financial disruption of our economy? So let's step back for a moment and look at the wider context. Washington is often consumed by political fights and blame games. It can be hard to differentiate between facts and talking points. But I would like to provide as honest an assessment as I can as to why we find ourselves in this unfortunate situation at the eleventh hour. We have a process, a statutory and legal process to arrive at a budget deal every single year. It is written into the law of the United States. The President is required to submit a budget, by law, each year, and each Chamber is required to pass one separately and then agree on one together. If the year had begun with a serious budget proposal from the President, we wouldn't be in this mess today. But he submitted a budget that would double our debt in 10 years, while he claimed it would not add to the debt and he claimed it would cause us to live within our means. Indeed, he had a substantial tax increase, very real tax increases of significant amounts, but his spending increased even more than that. So the net total of the President's budget was to make the debt trajectory we are on not better but worse, even with the tax increase. Indeed, his budget next year that he submitted proposed increases for the Education Department, the Energy Department, the State Department, and the Transportation Department--those double-digit increases at a time when we are running the biggest deficit the Nation has ever sustained. Senate Democrats have refused to pass, meanwhile, in this body--pass or bring up a budget for 820 days, 2 years. The majority leader said it would be foolish to pass a budget. Foolish to not pass a budget? So these are facts. Our colleagues who run the Senate here have defied the law and sound policy all year long, and now we are paying the price--a last-minute, take-it-or-leave-it, panic vote. Nobody yet knows what is going to be in the legislation finally because of the rejection of any bill that seems to be out there at this time. If the White House or Senate Democrats had taken the budget process seriously last year and if they had presented a single credible plan to cut spending, we wouldn't be here at this eleventh hour. Indeed, our Democratic colleagues have insisted on secret meetings that shielded them from making any of their budget plans public, that shielded them from any real votes on spending and debt, and it appears those meetings have failed. Democrats have campaigned and sought control and a majority in the Senate, and they chose, in this time of fiscal crisis, not to engage in the budget process in a serious way. In fact, they are apparently so determined to avoid the public budget process that the Reid bill even includes language designed to circumvent the process for 2 more years. So you will forgive me if I am a little concerned by all these attacks on the tea party. They didn't start this fire; they sounded the alarm. Before the last election, when Democrats controlled both Chambers of Congress by substantial majorities, every conversation was about increasing spending, more, more, more. Congress passed a stimulus bill--the largest single onetime expenditure ever passed by any Congress or any nation in history, every penny of that borrowed. We were already hugely in debt. We are now borrowing 40 cents of every dollar. It passed. The Congress also passed the President's massive new health care entitlement. It passed the President's request for extraordinary increases in discretionary spending. Nondefense discretionary spending has gone up 24 percent at a time of record deficits in the last 2 years. We have added $4 trillion to our gross debt since the President took office. Just in the time since the Senate Democrats last passed a budget, we have spent more than $7 trillion without a budget. These are the facts. But after the 2010 election and the emergence of the tea party and commonsense American people who knew better about what is going on in Washington, we have finally begun to look at Washington's spending problems. Now, instead of just raising the debt ceiling with no spending cuts, as the White House initially and repeatedly demanded, we are talking about how to cut some spending. People in the tea party and those who share their concerns should not be the ones vilified. They are good, decent, patriotic Americans whose only crime is rightly fearing for the future of their Nation. Are they wrong to be concerned when this Congress spends money willy-nilly every day, 40 cents of it borrowed? They know this is not right, and that is the kind of message they have sent to us. We need to listen to the heart of America speaking. The last point I would like to make is about the issue of compromise. There have been suggestions that the Republicans have simply been unwilling to budge from their position. But the Boehner proposal represents only a small portion of the cuts the Republicans have advocated and that they believe should be achieved. This is truly a critical point and one the White House will not acknowledge. The House budget that they passed, a long-term 10-year budget that would change the debt trajectory of America and put us on a sound financial course in a responsible way, cuts $6 trillion in comparison to the President's request. The Toomey budget the Senate voted on cuts about $8 trillion. The House passed a plan, which I cosponsored, that not only cuts and caps spending but that requires the passage of a constitutional balanced budget amendment. In fact, all 47 Republican Senators have cosponsored a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. The $1 trillion in cuts Speaker Boehner is asking for would be, indeed, a modest first step, an effort to compromise and reach a number that had a realistic chance of passing this body. But under his plan we will return to the table after that $1 trillion increase in the debt ceiling has been used. This is far from the level of savings I wish to see, or the Republican House wishes to see. One trillion dollars is a bitter pill for a lot of those Members who know it is not enough. The economists and others and bondholders are telling us we need at least $4 trillion. That just reduces the crisis nature we are in. That would not come close to putting us on a path to a balanced budget over 10 years. Reducing deficits by $4 trillion over 10 years when our deficits are going to increase by $9 trillion to $13 trillion over 10 years obviously does not solve our debt crisis. But $1 trillion is even much smaller. That was a figure that was believed that this Senate might accept, so the House Members, in order to avoid a debt crisis and a financial crisis over the debt ceiling, are apparently working hard and maybe they will send it over here, I don't know. They are working hard to try to do that. I think that is a reasonable compromise and a fair approach to this Congress. We are going to spend around $45 trillion over the next 10 years. That will add as much as $13 trillion to the gross debt. It is clear we have a lot more work to do. We are going to be fighting for cuts in spending bills, omnibus bills, continuing resolutions, and in every other place we can to impose fiscal discipline on this country. We must control spending. We must control and conquer the debt. The President said he wants a balanced approach to the deficit--a balanced approach. But a balance is not a tax hike that bails out the big spenders who surged our spending with stimulus bills and surging 24-percent increases in discretionary spending. He is going to bail them out by raising taxes. We should never have run up that kind of spending. But balance is not a tax hike of that kind. Creating real balance, the right balance, means shifting power away from Washington, placing it in the safe hands of the American people. That is what the voters said last year when they gave a shellacking to the big spenders and that is what we should do now, and that is what I will be working for and I believe a lot of other people in the Congress on both sides of the aisle will be working for. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the majority leader, and I appreciate his courtesy, as always, in so many issues that come before the Senate. I wish to say a couple of things. One is fundamental, and that is that the crisis we face--and I think my Senate colleague from Tennessee would agree--is not the debt limit, it is the debt. It is the surging debt. The debt limit is Congress's power, and it says to the administration: You can't borrow any more money. We only authorize so much money to be borrowed. Like a 102-degree mark in our thermometer, it is not the thermometer that is the problem. It is the underlying fever that the thermometer indicates. So reaching the debt limit so soon after we raised it is an indication we have something unhealthy in our system that needs to be dealt with. Senator Reid has very difficult challenges before him. It is not easy. But as I like to remind him, he asked for the job and, hopefully, he can make progress at this point in time. But to raise the debt ceiling, the majority leader knows a couple of things must be done. He knows, one, the Republican Congress and the American people want to see changes in our spending. It is on a reckless path. We cannot continue on this path. So the idea is, shouldn't we change what we are doing that has put us in a situation in which 40 cents of every $1 we spend today is borrowed? This year we will pay $240 billion in interest on our national debt. Under the budget the President submitted to us--which was voted down, I will acknowledge, 97 to 0 in the Senate; but it indicates the debt path we are on--it would cause in the tenth year interest to be paid in 1 year of $940 billion--a stunning figure. The Federal road program is about $40 billion. Federal aid to education is about $100 billion. We would be surging from $240 billion to $940 billion in interest on this rising debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office, our experts. I would note also that President Bush's last year was an extraordinary deficit of $450 billion--but President Obama's deficits have been $1,200 billion, $1,300 billion, and it is expected this year to be $1.5 trillion--$1,500 billion--in 1 year. These are the 3 years. In the first 2 years of President Obama's administration, his nondefense discretionary spending surged 24 percent. This does not count the stimulus of almost $900 billion that we sent out the door that was supposed to stimulate the economy. Speaker Boehner, and I think with the support of the American people, has said: Well, we can do a long time. We can do a fairly large increase in our debt ceiling to allow the country to continue to borrow or we can do a short one, but we in the House, in the Republican House, believe we have to confront our problems. So I would propose, and he has stated, that the House would vote to raise the debt ceiling but only to the extent to which spending has been reduced an equal amount. If you reduce spending enough over 10 years, you get an immediate increase in the debt ceiling of an equal amount now. If you reduce spending over 10 years a larger amount, you could increase the debt limit a larger amount. It has become a vehicle, an opportunity for the American people to understand how we are spiraling out of control, and how it is Congress that needs to figure out a way to rein this in. It is unsustainable, the path we are on. So this $1 increase in the debt ceiling for $1 reduction in spending kind of caught on. People seem to be going along with that. It seems to be fairly reasonable. Senator Reid claims he has a plan that would reduce spending $2.7 trillion over 10 years and this would allow him to raise the debt ceiling about that amount, and this would allow us to, in effect, raise it enough that we would not have to talk about this again for almost 2 years--about 22 months. Well, OK. That sort of seemed to meet what Speaker Boehner had suggested. But I am the ranking member of the Budget Committee. I have been a real critic of what has been going on. I have been predicting we were going to end up at the last minute and a bill was going to be thrown on the floor, and I was concerned it was going to be filled with gimmicks. It was not going to be honest, and we were going to be told if we do not pass it, the Republic is going to fall, and no matter what is in it, we have to pass it. And do not worry about it, trust us on these numbers. Unfortunately, that is where we are getting. Senator Reid, in his $2.7 trillion in claimed deficit reduction--about $1.2 trillion of that is savings from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, that has not ever been projected to stay at the current level of $158 billion a year for 10 years. Speaker Boehner, when he proposes to reduce spending for a shorter term, does not count savings from the declining war expenditure because that is not a baseline expenditure and we have never extended and planned to do that. We never planned to spend $158 billion a year in the next 10 years. This is inevitably going to drop. Some say it could go to zero, some say to $50 billion, saving $100 billion or a little more a year for the next decade. So the Budget Committee Republican staff calculates this is over $1 trillion in inaccurate estimations of spending reductions. It just is. It should not be counted. Speaker Boehner does not count it in his numbers. Senator Reid also claims $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction from spending caps by capping discretionary spending. Well, those caps are counted from a baseline that ignores the savings that were enacted in the full year CR that we did the year we are in. What happened was, we had a higher level of spending. There was an election last fall. A new Republican House was elected--huge numbers of people who were elected who said: We have to do something about spending. So we had a fuss over what our spending levels should be this year because we were operating not under authorization of appropriations bills but a continuing resolution, and that number was reduced. So the spending level for this year now is not the same as it was when the year began. The current level of spending is the number we ought to be talking about when we say we are going to save money. Correct? It should not be the number that was higher but has been abandoned and been reduced. That reduces the amount of legitimate claims in discretionary savings to less than $800 billion. Then he claims $100 billion in mandatory savings. But it is likely--from our staff looking at them--it would amount to no more than $60 billion. The bottom line is, we have looked at this a lot of different ways. I believe the numbers I am going to repeat to you today will be sustained in any competitive argument about it. I believe these are honest and true numbers. The bottom line is that the total real savings that are proposed by the Reid plan are not $2.7 trillion but $1 trillion. If you do $1 trillion in savings, and you raise the debt limit by $1 trillion, then that would extend to 6 or 8 months or so into early next year, which is, I suggest, where we ought to be. Because this amount of savings--$1 trillion--is nowhere near what we need to do to get off the debt course we are on. As Senator Corker indicated, most of the financial experts tell us we need at least $4 trillion in savings, not $1 trillion. So if we are just going to get $1 trillion so we can vote in this crisis period to raise the debt limit before August 2 so the checks can go out and everybody can be paid and the government can operate--and I hope we can do that; we need to do that--but if all we are going to get is $1 trillion, this is just an interim step. This is not a real fix at all, but it is an interim step. If so, we need to be right back on this issue soon. That gives us an opportunity to do so early next year or late this year because we have not solved the problem. Mr. President, $1 trillion is not enough. Madam President, $4 trillion is not enough. Depending on how you calculate the debt that has been projected to accrue over the next 10 years, it is somewhere between $9 and $13 trillion. So $1 trillion is not going to do anything to change the disastrous debt course we are on. By the way, the President--I want to say this because he was pretty tough last night blaming Republicans for all kinds of problems. Let me say, the Republican House passed--and I voted for in the Senate--a budget for 10 years that changes the debt course of this Republic. It puts us on a sound financial path. It reduced spending by as much as $6 trillion over 10 years. It even reduced taxes to create more economic growth and make us more competitive in the world marketplace. It was a thoughtful, long-term, serious budget that would do real, positive things for America. The Senate has not passed a budget, not had one marked up in the Budget Committee. The leadership here in the Senate refused to allow it to happen. Senator Reid said it would be foolish to pass a budget. We have gone now over 2 years without a budget. It is unthinkable in the debt course we are on--how disastrous it is, how unsustainable it is, how unlike anything that has ever happened in our history--to have this kind of debt path and we do not have a budget. The President said a few weeks ago: Well, I have a plan that cuts $3 trillion. Is it like Senator Reid's $2.7 trillion plan? It was never made public. It was never spelled out. If he has a $3 trillion plan to cut spending, well, let's see it. Maybe we could extend the debt limit more, if he is going to cut $3 trillion in honest numbers. If he has those numbers, as he says he has--in between attacking Republicans for causing all the problems--let's see them. Maybe that would be a basis for something. But I suspect it is no more accurate than this plan because when the President proposed his budget, as the law required him to do, early in the year, he said: My budget calls on us as Americans to live within our means and to not increase the debt, when according to the Congressional Budget Office, the lowest single budget deficit that would occur under his 10-year budget would be $750 billion--nowhere close to a balanced budget--and in the out years that deficit would be going up. So I will challenge the President, if he has a $3 trillion plan, let's see it. Some people say we need to raise the debt limit for a longer period of time and we cannot afford to have a short term increase. They say this is somehow a wrong thing to do, and so forth. I would point out to my colleagues, it is not unusual at all. A $2.7 trillion increase in the debt--if that were to occur--would be very high. It would be a 19- percent increase in the current debt limit, putting the debt limit 50- percent higher than when President Obama took office. It would be the largest debt increase in history, the fourth debt limit increase during President Obama's tenure in office, the fourth time it has been raised. So this is not unusual. I warned from the beginning that if we skirted the legislative process in favor of closed-door White House meetings and so forth, we would find ourselves in the eleventh hour with gimmick-filled legislation being rushed through a panic-driven Senate. This is not responsible governance from our leadership here in the Senate. As I feared and as I have just described, the majority leader's bill has not achieved close to the promised savings he says it would. From the $2.7 trillion in cuts claimed, the troop-spending cuts in the proposal are closer to $1 trillion over 10 years--less than a third of what was advertised--while he is asking for a nearly $3 trillion increase in the debt limit. Spending cuts next year would be only $3 billion less than the enacted amount for 2011. This falls short of the idea that a dollar in cuts should accompany a dollar in debt limit increase. Senator Reid's proposal is structured in a way that is clearly designed to further degrade and undermine the budgetary process of the Senate, and it allows the majority not to have to come forward and produce a budget plan. Given the late hour, rather than rush through legislation to the President--the largest debt ceiling increase in history--we should pursue a more responsible approach, a short-term extension with real cuts through the immediate time period the extension covers, not 10 years down the road. Then, using the extra time we have, Congress should pursue a binding framework, such as the cut, cap, and balance plan, to bring these gimmicks to an end and to alter our debt course. We should try the one thing we refused to do from the beginning: open hearings, regular order, and a real legislative process and public participation. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I know we have talked about having an opportunity to digest and analyze and score any kind of proposal. I understand this afternoon the majority leader, Senator Reid, said he would propose legislation tonight and file cloture tonight, and that would, according to the rules of the Senate, move this vote up to early Wednesday morning. That would give us only tomorrow, 1 day, to digest a bill that would impact our spending trajectory for the next decade. I would ask my experienced colleague, who was a distinguished Member of the House and now in the Senate, does that cause him concern?

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Senator. I appreciate that. The point the Senator made is tremendously important. All year we have conducted Senate business, with regard to the financial future of our country, in the most troubling way. It is unlike anything we have done in our history. I would say from a structural, systemic circumstance, this Nation has never had a more serious debt problem. We are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend. Yes, we do have a war going on that is costing $150 billion this year. But the deficit this year will be $1.5 trillion. It is not the war. That is only about 10 percent of our deficit, unfortunately. Back in World War II, we could see our way out of the war and into our victory, and we saw great growth in the future. But the deficits we are now accruing every day, every week, every month are significant because they are going to be hard to change. We are spending more than we take in and we have got to change. We can change. If we do change we will get this country back on a growth path. I have repeatedly warned against avoiding the normal budget process this year, a process required by law but that this Senate under the Democratic leadership explicitly refused to do--the majority leader said it would be foolish to produce a budget. We are now about 820 days or so without a budget. For over 2 years we have not had a budget for the United States of America, and they never even attempted to move a budget even though a law says we should pass one by April 15. Well, it doesn't put anybody in jail. Maybe that is what it should have done. Maybe a bunch of people would be in jail today. Maybe we would have a budget if we had some teeth in the axe. It is the statute of the United States that requires we have a budget and we do not have one. Then we begin to hear the warnings 6 months ago that we would reach a point where we would need to raise the debt limit, the debt ceiling we have. Congress has said: Mr. President, you can borrow money, but only so much. You cannot borrow more than the amount, $14-some-odd trillion, that is all. If you need to borrow more, Congress will have to approve it. We have the power of the purse under the Constitution. This has been brewing for some time. I have been warning about this, since we have not done our job, since the Budget Committee has not met about these issues, the Appropriations Committee has not met about these issues, the Finance Committee has not met about the tax and mandatory entitlement programs that are under their jurisdiction. No work has been done all year. None. We are told not to worry, our leaders are going to meet a few times in secret. This little group failed, and this group with the Vice President met and that didn't work. Then they are going to meet with the President, and that didn't work. Finally, last night, as Senator Wicker said, it did appear an agreement was reached between the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership on a bill that at least would get us past this debt crisis. They had the leadership agreement. I have not read it. I do not know what is in it. I am going to know what is in the bill. I have a constitutional responsibility, as do the other 99 Senators here, to make a good judgment on it. It is odd that after all of that a bipartisan agreement was reached, and the President walked away from it. Now he is going to blame Speaker Boehner, who produced a budget. The Republican House produced a far- reaching, historic budget that would actually change the debt trajectory of our country and put us on the right path, the path to restoring prosperity and the creation of jobs. This debt is so large it is a wet blanket, as Speaker Boehner said. I called it an anchor, a weight that is pulling down the economy, as expert economists have told us. Not just me. Experts tell us that when you have this much debt, you lose 1 million jobs a year that would otherwise be created. We have a serious problem, and I am not pleased about it. I felt all along that this is exactly what was going to happen. Somewhere in the back of the minds of the President or the leaders or somebody was the idea that they would bring up a plan at the eleventh hour, fiftieth minute, bring it to the floor of the Senate, and say: If you don't vote it, Members of the Senate, if you don't vote for it, Members of the House, we are going to have a debt crisis and it will all be your fault. Well, I am not interested in that. I am not going to vote for any kind of significant legislation, as this is, until I have had a chance to read it and think about it. Majority Leader Reid told us of his plan this afternoon and he told us not to worry, he has a 1-page summary. Trust us. He is going to introduce legislation tonight and we will vote Wednesday morning, and it will be good for America. Just do what I tell you and go along and mind your manners and we will get this thing taken care of. Trust me. Well, the American people have been trusting Washington too long. The American people know there is no justification whatsoever in this country for spending so much money that 40 percent of every dollar we spend has to be borrowed. They know better. They know we have no business spending $3,700 billion when we take in only $2,200 billion. That is what happened in this last election. They said: Oh, these tea party people, they are not good Americans. They are angry. They are mad. That is not good. You are bad people. Well, give me a break. Why shouldn't they be? If we had a recall election, we all ought to be voted out of office, I suppose. There is no way we should ever have been in this situation. Now under the pressure of the American people and fear of the next election, why did the President reject this bipartisan agreement? Well, it would require us to meet again next year. We will need to talk about more cuts because the cuts they are talking about are clearly insufficient to meet the challenge we are facing today--clearly insufficient. We have to do more. So if a person runs up their credit card too much and they hit the limit and they want the limit raised, the person who is loaning the money--the American people--would like to know, have you changed your habits? Are you going to do better? Let's see a plan--a budget--a plan that gets us out of this fix. That has been steadfastly rejected by the leadership in this Senate all year, and we knew we were heading to this date. So Senator Reid is throwing something out there. Let's talk a little bit about what appears to be in it. The President has had a friendly press on most of the things he has proposed. He proposed a budget--the Democratic Senate never produced one, but by law the President has to produce one. Every President has to produce one every year. So the President produced one this year. The lowest annual deficit in that budget would be $740 billion. The highest deficit President Bush ever had was $450 billion, and he was criticized for that. The lowest he would have in 10 years was $750 billion, and in the 10th year it was back over $1 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of his budget. So that is where we are heading. That is the kind of thing the President has submitted to us. Do my colleagues know what he said about it? He said: I am proud of my budget. It will have America living within its means. Can we believe the President of the United States said that--that a budget with a lowest annual deficit of over $700 billion was living within our means? He also said, ``It would add no more to our debt.'' And his budget director, Mr. Jack Lew, said the same thing. He actually testified to that effect before the Budget Committee. It was breathtaking. So forgive me if I am not buying into a proposal based on one page. It was produced this afternoon. It said we are going to reduce the deficit by $2.7 trillion. Forgive me if I am not buying into that until I see it and it has been scored. That is what I think ought to happen here today. By the way, we have heard the debates--and Speaker Boehner used this phrase and others have used it: we want to have dollar for dollar spending reduction to debt limit increase. What that means is that if we increase the debt ceiling and allow the government to borrow another $1 trillion, we should cut spending by $1 trillion. That is just a rough idea. I don't know how they came up with that. That is what they came up with. Remember, the debt is still going up every year because we are still spending more than we take in. This is like Wimpy in the old ``Popeye'' cartoon. Wimpy said: Give me a hamburger today, and I will pay you tomorrow. So we are going to get the immediate ability to borrow $1 trillion, $2 trillion more, raising the debt limit that much, on a promise that we will reduce spending by that amount over 10 years--not 1 year but 10 years. This is a dangerous process. This is the kind of rhetoric that has put us in the position we are in today, which is that 40 cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed. It is what is threatening the financial future of our country, this kind of thinking in Washington, and we have to change that. We have to be honest about our numbers. As the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, I feel an obligation. And our staff is eager to see the legislative language, not a one-page outline, about what will actually happen with our spending. We want to be sure the promises made with this bill are more accurate than the ones President Obama made when he said his budget would call for us to live within our means when it plainly does not. I will mention a couple of things at this point that jump out at me from the one-page outline we have seen. Majority Leader Reid says his plan would produce savings of $2.7 trillion, but really it appears to represent a $1.2 trillion or so reduction in discretionary spending, and the rest of it is accrued in other ways. Speaker Boehner's proposal has discretionary spending reductions of about the same, but what is obvious is that Speaker Boehner's commission would reduce spending more and has a target, a goal to reach an additional $1.8 trillion. The one produced by Senator Reid, on the other hand, mentions a commission, but has no reduction in spending as a requirement of that commission. They don't have any obligation to produce a reduction in spending. What else is in there? Another factor is that we are now drawing down the cost of our military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last year, we spent a little over $150 billion. This year, we will spend a little over $100 billion. The plan is to at least be down to $50 billion in 2 or 3 years. So over the 10-year period, there will be about 8 years, nearly, at $50 billion or so spent on the war instead of $150 billion. That is part of the plan we have been operating on for a long time. So $150 billion for the war is not a baseline projection of the United States. It was never projected to continue at that level. So hopefully we can bring it below $50 billion. Maybe we won't get to $50 billion; I don't know. But what is the reasonable estimate? I think the House Republicans and the President said it would drop to $50 billion, so that should be the baseline projection for the rest of the time. That is $1 trillion total. So if we take $1 trillion out of the $2.7 trillion in savings, we are down to $1.7 trillion in savings. Another thing is that since the $1 trillion is war-related spending, as Mr. Reid wants it, it is not a real reduction from baseline spending. It is always considered to be extra, war-related emergency spending. And he claims interest savings on this money as another $200 billion. So now we have about $1.2 trillion right there, overstating his cuts through the elimination of the war. Speaker Boehner does not do that. His numbers are far more accurate and honest and realistic. I also would like to point out that when we talk about spending and how we measure it, we have to know what the baseline is. One reason this country is broke and is in financial crisis is because we claim we are cutting spending when we are actually increasing spending. The way it works is the Congressional Budget Office produces an assumption that we will increase spending at the rate of inflation or some other rate over a period of years. Then, if we reduce that rate of spending increase a little bit, politicians claim they have produced savings, that they have cut spending. But spending is not really reduced. Spending is still going up. There are various baselines out there that are used to calculate this, and it is very significant over 10 years and even more so over 20 years. So we hear people saying: We are cutting spending under this plan. So for Speaker Boehner or Senator Reid, either one of those plans, I am confident will show we are spending a good bit more money in the 10th year than we are spending today. This is confusing to the American people. I am really convinced the only way we can honestly compare the plans is to go back to basics--the way families do it: Do you increase your spending or not, based on what you spent last year? You take a flat level, and how much do you increase it over the next year, 2 years, 10 years? How much does it go up? That is the way to do it. Then we can compare plans. Then we can see what Speaker Boehner has, what Congressman Ryan has in his budget plan for 10 years. Senator Toomey proposed a very thoughtful 10- year budget plan that balanced our budget in 10 years. That was not easy to do, but he did it. We need to be thinking like that and get away from this confusing mishmash, which we use to claim that we are saving $1 trillion when really nobody plans for us to be spending $150- plus billion on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan for the next 10 years. That money has never been projected to be spent in that fashion. So we are in a situation where it is important for the country to reach an agreement and we need to pass something that raises the debt ceiling for America. I hate to say that, but it is a fact. It would be too disruptive not to do that. But, in exchange for that, as a part of that process, we truly need to start bringing our house into financial order. We are in disarray and discord, but if we were to do that, we could leave this a better country for our children and grandchildren. I know some just want to increase spending and then raise taxes to pay for it. The Defense Department last year got about a 2-percent increase, a 3-percent increase. Next year, there is projected to be a 2-percent increase in some of the budget numbers. It might not happen because we don't have even that much money. But we know how much nondefense discretionary spending increased during this time of record deficits under President Obama's leadership, not counting the almost $900 billion in stimulus money. Baseline, nondefense discretionary spending increased 24 percent between 2008 and 2010, and now we are seeing the biggest deficits ever. President Bush never had any increases in baseline spending like that--never. It is just stunning. There was a huge Democratic majority in the Senate and in the House, and the President wanted his investments, and he got these huge increases, and now they want to raise taxes to pay for it and keep it up there and maintain it. We can't afford to maintain that level. We have to bring it back down to 2009, 2008, 2007 levels. The country is not going to go bankrupt--broke--and people are not going to be thrown into the streets if we return to those levels of spending. If we make some tough choices, the same way cities and counties and families are doing all over America, we can get this house in order. That is what we are going to have to do. I look forward to studying plans put forward by the majority leader and to studying the plan put forward by Speaker Boehner. The American people need time to know what is in them and what they mean to us in terms of taxing and spending, deficits, and interest payments. And then Congress needs to have time to vote on it. Again, I repeat my deep frustration that we have not conducted this in open, public debate for months now, utilizing the established Senate procedure of regular order. Instead, we have attempted to solve this big problem in secret, behind closed doors, with just a few people. I believe that is contrary to the historical understanding of the role of Congress, and I am not happy about it. I oppose it, I object to it, and I expect to have an appropriate amount of time to consider whatever plan comes forward. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, one of the things that frustrates the American people about Washington is how hard it is to get reliable information and straightforward answers. We in the Senate and Congress have that same difficulty. It is hard to know sometimes what numbers and statements and plans mean and what they will cost. Politicians offer a budget proposal and they say it cuts taxes even though taxes go up. They even come up with new names to disguise tax hikes, like revenue enhancements or reduced spending in the Tax Code. It doesn't mean eliminating the earned income tax credit; it usually means some deductions somebody is allowed to take, and that has been renamed as spending. We hear people come to the floor and blame our massive deficit on anything and everything but our out-of-control spending, whether it is the war in Iraq or it is a tax cut passed a decade ago, or it is special preferences for private yachts or Lear jets. We can't have an honest budget if we can't talk honestly and factually about it, and I hope to be able to contribute in some way to clarifying the issues. I will do my best today to plainly state some of the things I think are plainly true. First, I wish to address the myth that the President has a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan. Some believe that the President has a plan to reduce spending by $4 trillion, but the only plan the President has put on paper and allowed anybody to see is his February budget, which doubles the national debt. The President has never put a single spending cut plan on paper that actually reduces spending, and he has no program that would substantially reduce the deficit. If he does, it is a closely guarded secret. His budget, which he submitted earlier this year, increases taxes significantly but has greater increases in spending. By the Congressional Budget Office analysis, it would increase the deficit more over the next 10 years than if the budget were not passed at all. Indeed, it would increase the gross debt of the United States by $13 trillion, doubling the entire debt of the United States again in the next 10 years. If there is a secret plan that does exist somewhere, it should be made public this afternoon. Let's see it. I would like to. I think millions of Americans would feel the same way. Summaries don't work. The President summarized his budget, which I just described, as calling on Americans to live within our means and will not add more to the debt. That sounds pretty good, because this year our deficit is projected to be $1,500 billion. So we want to be living within our means again and we do not want to add more to the debt. But even by the President's own analysis, the plan didn't do this. The Congressional Budget Office, Congress's independent agency, analyzed the President's budget and found that in 10 years, the lowest single annual deficit that would occur would be $740 billion. The highest budget deficit under President Bush was $450 billion. But under the President's budget, the lowest deficit that would be accrued would be $740 billion. It goes up in the outyears until it goes over $1 trillion, over $1,000 billion in the tenth year of his budget. How can that be living within your means? It will not add more to the debt? Every single year would be adding to the debt. So we can't deal with summaries and spin statements about a plan until that plan has been put in legislative language and scored. We also have received no plan from our Senate Democratic colleagues. For a time there a couple of months ago, the Democrats were on the path of producing a budget in the Budget Committee as required by statutory law. I, as ranking Republican, was very anxious to see it. We were told we would get it the morning of the hearing, not a bit sooner. I grumbled about that. I wanted to have a little more time to see it. But we never received a budget. I think the majority leader and the Democratic leadership, not our committee chairman, decided they didn't want to have a budget. One of the committee folks said it would put a target on your back. Senator Reid said it would be foolish to have a budget. Why would it be foolish to have a budget? Well, you can't say your budget calls on you to live within your means if you actually put it out there. People can score it and find out whether it is true. We haven't had a budget this Senate in 813 days. As of now, there is only one debt limit plan on paper, only one plan available for public scrutiny and review, and that is the one we are considering today, cut, cap, and balance. It cuts spending immediately, it caps it so it won't go up, and it requires the passage of a balanced budget amendment to ensure that Washington ends deficit spending once and for all. The American people do not support a Washington plan to pass some grand deal with tax hikes that never go away and with spending cuts that are talked about but never materialize. They are wise to the gimmicks and accounting of Washington. They are not happy with us. At this very moment the people's Representatives in Congress preside over a country that borrows 40 percent of every dollar its government spends. People in the Tea Party are angry. And why shouldn't they be angry when this kind of leadership has occurred in the Congress of the United States of America? It is utterly, totally indefensible. It should never, ever have happened. Yet, it has. It threatens our financial future. It threatens our economy and our economic growth. So the American people are not happy about it. That is why I introduced a piece of legislation that would require 7 days to review any bill that would increase the debt limit, because this is going to be complex. People want to bring it up at the 11th hour under a panic mode. Some warn that if we don't pass it tomorrow, the world markets are going to be destabilized, interest could go up. I don't know, some of those things could happen. So we absolutely should do something. But we ought to not wait until the last minute and have plopped down in the Senate some big complex bill that has got to be passed before the sun rises the next day and nobody has time to analyze it or score it to find out what it means. But our Democratic colleagues here in Washington are resisting the cut, cap, and balance bill because there is no gimmick in it. There is no accounting trick to get around if this becomes law. They know it will work. And for the big spenders, the only thing you don't want to pass is a piece of legislation that will work to contain spending. You see, they want to spend more. They think if they continue to spend more, then they can go and demand you raise taxes to pay for it. Washington is going to have to end this spending spree. These kinds of difficult choices are the responsible choices families, cities, States, and county commissions are making every day, every year. In Alabama, Governor Robert Bentley oversaw an across-the-board cut of 15 percent from the general fund in the current year because of the constitutional prohibition on deficit spending. Alabama is not going to run up debt. For next year, he has taken a cautious approach. Hopefully we will have more revenue, but he is cautiously approaching next year and he has proposed cuts of up to 45 percent for some agencies that he felt would be appropriate places to reduce spending. Those are tough choices. But unlike Alabama, the Federal Government is not required to live within its means. Another myth I wish to address is the idea that our current budget crisis is the result of two wars and a tax cut. We have heard that over and over again. The wars cost money, a good bit of money. Over the entire decade, the cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is about $1.3 trillion. That is a lot of money. Again, that is over 10 years, over a decade. This year alone, the deficit is expected to be $1,400 billion, or $1.4 trillion. The deficit this year will be larger than the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over 10 years. So the driving force behind our deficit is not the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not. War costs represent only 4 percent of total outlays over the last 10 years. The total amount of money spent since President Obama took office is $8.5 trillion. By the end of his first 3 years in office, we will have added $5 trillion to our gross Federal debt. These are stunning numbers. As I said, President Bush had a widely criticized--in many ways rightly criticized--$450 billion deficit. Since President Obama has been in office, the deficits have been 1.2, 1.3, looks like this year it will be $1.4 trillion, each year, more than double the deficit under President Bush. We are borrowing close to half of what we are spending every single day. In 2 years, nondefense discretionary spending increased 24 percent, 12 percent a year on average. This is our discretionary spending. This isn't Social Security and Medicare, which increase more than that. The stimulus package alone added into law the largest expenditure bill in the history of the American Republic. It cost more than the entire war in Iraq has cost. In a single day in 2009 we passed it on this floor, over my objection, and every penny of it was borrowed. We were in debt, but they said: The economy needs to be stimulated so we are going to spend 850 or so billion dollars. The spending when President Bush took office was less than $2 trillion. Today, it is almost $4 trillion. It will be almost $6 trillion by the end of the decade. There is only one honest answer to the question of why our debt is rising so fast, and that is out-of- control domestic spending. Another myth that is circulating, which I wish to address, concerns the outline from our colleagues and friends who participated and worked hard on the Gang of 6 proposal. I give them a lot of credit and respect for the hard work they put into it. I wish it had been produced a month ago so we could have actually had legislative language and know what it would mean today. The authors of the summary, though, that they just produced for us, claimed the approach would reduce the deficit by $3.7 trillion over 10 years. That is a little over one-third or so of the deficit we projected to see in the next 10 years. But my staff on the Budget Committee, taking the summary pages they produced for us, can only find $1.2 trillion in reduced spending in that outline, along with what is a very clear $1 trillion tax increase. Where does the other $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction claimed in the outline come from? Chairman Conrad, one of the members of the Gang of 6 and our chairman on the Budget Committee, a man I respect and have enjoyed working with, even said the outline has a $1.5 trillion tax cut. But this is compared--this is how these numbers get bandied about--it is compared against a baseline which assumes more than $3.5 trillion in tax increases would occur. So they are only going to increase taxes, I guess, by $2 trillion, and you can get savings by not having them go up as much. But based on the current tax rates that are in existence in America today, as we read their outline--and I think they would agree--it increases taxes by $1 trillion over 10 years. That is a large amount. The real cost of the tax changes, some who have looked at these numbers say, is not $1 trillion but $2 trillion. That remains to be seen. Hopefully we will get the legislative language that can actually be analyzed, and we would know how much our taxes would actually go up. The last myth I would like to address is perhaps the most important of all, and this is the myth that we only need about $2 trillion in actual spending cuts over the next 10 years. That has basically been what our colleagues are saying. They float the idea of $4 trillion in savings. What they mean is that you save $2 trillion by reducing spending and you increase taxes $2 trillion and you have saved $4 billion over 10 years. I am not sure that is what the American people are expecting of us when we say we are saving money. By taking it from them? It is not saving the American people more. It is not saving the private economy more, to take another $2 trillion from them. There is no free lunch. Somebody pays. Our Democratic colleagues have said, although no plan has ever been made public to this effect, that they could get behind the budget deal that reduces the deficit $4 trillion over the next 10 years, half of it composed of spending cuts. This is not even close, frankly, to what is needed to ultimately balance our budget. We are projected to spend $46 trillion over the next 10 years. A $2 trillion reduction is only about a 4-percent reduction in spending, and that is set to increase by almost 60 percent. Remember, we will say we are reducing spending. We are not reducing spending, we are reducing the rate of growth in spending by $2 trillion on a $46 trillion plan. Think about it. We are not talking about reducing spending. This budget would have the expenditures go up significantly in the next 10 years to $46 trillion. The $2 trillion means we are just reducing the growth of spending by $2 trillion. The $2 trillion in tax increases would mean we would still spend the same $46 trillion, but we just would borrow $2 trillion less because we have extracted more from the American people. In just a little over 2 months, our debt will reach 100 percent of our economy--100 percent of GDP. That is the gross debt. That would match the size of our economy. It costs us 1 million jobs or more a year when gross debt reaches this level. We have the Rogoff-Reinhart study that shows that when a country's gross debt climbs as high as ours has, it starts pulling down economic growth. Secretary Geithner said it is an excellent study. He said in some ways it understates the problem we have. Secretary Geithner knows this debt is a real problem for America. We expected 3 percent growth the first quarter. It came in at 1.8 percent. Could that be because we have crossed the 90-percent debt-to- GDP threshold, and that debt is now a burden on the economy that is reducing growth? The experts have also downgraded the projected growth for the third and fourth quarters of this calendar year. It is very serious. Christina Romer, who used to be in President Obama's White House on economic matters, said 1 percent growth means you will add 1 million jobs. So if our economy grows at 2 percent instead of 3 percent we will fail to add 1 million jobs we could have added. And I truly believe the debt is the reason we are having surprisingly low growth rates, below projected rates. Maybe I am wrong, but we certainly have a study that seems to say that exactly, and it has been widely praised by economists all over the country. The honest truth is that this President and his Democratic Senate are not going to agree to the level of spending cuts in a debt deal that is necessary to put our country on a sound path. I think that is a fact. We have been negotiating and talking all year. The House laid out a budget plan. The Senate has refused--813 days without a budget. They are determined not to reduce spending after increasing domestic spending, nondefense, by 24 percent. They say they will freeze spending--freeze spending at levels that have jumped 24 percent? We do not have the money. We are borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar we spend. Unfortunately, we're in a battle over the vision for the future of America. It is a big-government vision a lot of our Members have, and they are going to work as hard as they possibly can to preserve that vision, preserve that spending. After running up this huge debt by a 24-percent baseline increase--that does not count the stimulus package of almost $900 billion that is thrown on top of that-- now they want to go to the American people and say: We are not going to cut spending; you have to pay more in taxes. I don't think that is what the American people want, so we have a national debate here. This is the great debate of our time. It is not going to be settled in 2 weeks. A few people are not going to meet in secret and work out some grand and glorious deal. I wish they could, but I don't think they will. I would be pleased if they do. I am confident that the good sense and wisdom of the American people will ultimately prevail. I am confident we will eventually get our spending under control. We will restore the American principles of limited government and build a better, freer future for our children. We will raise the debt limit, but we will also put this country on a sound path. If we get our debt under control, I think our economic growth will rise quickly, and I believe we will see the progress we have always seen in this great, productive, dynamic country. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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