Jeff Sessions

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I wish to express my appreciation to Senator McCaskill, who is a person of courage and conviction and made a decision that we need to do better in our country about spending. As she said, is a simple truth. Our amendment is a small but significant step. It is a statement that we are going to take some action that will have some benefit in containing the growth, not requiring cuts but containing the growth of spending in our country. Unfortunately, as we have gotten so close to having it passed, now an organized effort appears to be underway to try to see if they can pull back a growing number of votes that have been cast for it. We started out with 56 votes, then went to 59 votes. Every Republican and 18 Democrats voted for it. We just need one more vote and we will be able to take this significant step of having a statutory cap on spending. The level of spending we are limiting it to is the level in the Democratic budget that passed this year. The amount is not anything other than what the budget already calls for that was passed by a Democratic majority. It is the kind of numbers we probably could do better on and we probably could and should cut some programs. Regardless, what we are saying is, one of our big problems is we do not stick to whatever budget we have. We constantly violate the budget. Republicans have done this too. The debt now is spiraling out of control to a degree we have never ever seen in the history of our country. It is not responsible, and we have to stop it. I say this about my colleague from Arkansas--we were celebrating a bipartisan effort just last night when he and I and others worked on balancing the crack and powder cocaine penalties so they are more fair and more realistic. That was a good bipartisan step. I think we are on the way to a bipartisan bill. I am disappointed we now have what can only be referred to as a cover amendment that does not have the teeth or the strength of the amendment we have offered. It provides an opportunity for people to vote for it and say they have voted to contain spending: I was all for it; I didn't vote on the McCaskill-Sessions amendment, but I voted on this other amendment, and it is just as good. It is not just as good, and it does not have as much ability to contain spending. It does not. It should not be substituted. The American people are frustrated with us. The polling numbers for Congress are perhaps as low as we have ever seen in this country. One of the reasons is, they are tired of us manipulating and maneuvering to try to make ourselves look good and the interest of the country takes the hindmost. People are tired of that and in my view they are correct. Some of our colleagues say that is populist; they are just angry; they will go away. Americans have a right to be concerned about what we are doing and how these activities are occurring on the floor of the Senate. The Democratic leadership obviously decided this amendment might be in a position to pass. They didn't want it to pass. They conjured up what we call a cover amendment. It should not be what we adopt. I note the caps are higher in this amendment than the budget resolution passed by Congress--the Democratic budget resolution just last year. It would allow about $38 billion more in nondefense spending over 3 years than what was in our fiscal year 2010 budget resolution. The side by side, the cover amendment, does not follow the President's proposal to freeze nondefense discretionary spending for 3 years. It waives the fiscal 2012 and 2013 caps. It has only a 51-vote threshold. I wish we could have talked some more about what Senator McCaskill and I have offered. Maybe we could have made some changes to the plan we have. Frankly, this will be the third time we made changes in the legislation to try to assuage concerns Members had that we thought were legitimate and worthy of putting in the bill. I would have liked to have made those changes. The American people are unhappy about this situation. I know polling numbers are not supposed to be the end all in Congress, but we ought to understand we work for our constituents; they do not work for us. That is what I am hearing out there: You work for me, Sessions, and I am concerned about what you are doing up there. We want a better response from you guys. This is a CNN opinion poll: Which of the following comes closer to your view of the budget deficit--the government should run a deficit if necessary when the country is in a recession and at war, or the government should balance the budget even when the country is in a recession and is at war? That is a pretty hard question. I think some people who are very frugal might worry about how to answer that question. But look at the numbers: 67 percent, two-thirds, of the American people said balance the budget. Only 30 percent said run a deficit. I tell you, the American people have it right. The threat to our economy in the long run is one thing: debt--irresponsible, reckless, unsustainable growth in debt. If we would get that under control, the great American entrepreneurial spirit, the work ethic of our people, the exceptional capabilities of our business leaders will allow us to compete with anybody. But if we tax and spend ourselves into debt, we are threatening our future. How big a threat is it? Look at these numbers. This is the debt. In 2008, it was $5.8 trillion. Since the beginning of the American Republic, we had accumulated $5.8 trillion in debt. It was projected by CBO that in 2013, it will be $11.8 trillion. In a little over 3 years, we will be doubling the total American public debt. Finally, by 2019, based on the budget we are operating in today and the laws that are on the books today, it will triple to $17.3 trillion. Consider the interest on that debt--we have to borrow the money. Does anybody understand that? We borrow the money. We are borrowing it on the world market. Interest rates are sure to surge in the years to come. Right now, with the economy shaky, people are willing to buy government bonds, even if they pay low rates. We are getting a bargain on interest rates right now. But this debt isn't going to be a bargain in the future--not a bargain for the good of the country. This chart shows the interest that will be paid. In 2009, last year, we paid $187 billion in interest. In 2020, according to the President's budget analysis that he submitted, it will be $840 billion--$840 billion in interest in 1 year. The Federal highway bill is $40 billion a year. Does that give us some perspective? It is bigger than the defense budget. These are stunning numbers. That is why every economist, Republicans and Democrats, the Heritage Foundation and Brookings Institution, former CBO Directors and OMB Directors of both parties all say repeatedly we are on an unsustainable course. The deficits continue to surge in the outyears. They are not coming down. People say: When are we going to pay it back? We are not paying it back. In these years, in the outyears, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, they are projecting steady but lower growth--but growth every year, no recessions. The deficits are going to be about $1 trillion a year. They are not going down. We are still going into debt $1 trillion a year. I guess what I am saying is, what we need to do is focus on discretionary accounts, and this amendment is it. Some say only the mandatory, only the entitlements count. That is not so. As of this moment, this year, every penny of the surging debt--and this year's deficit will be $1.5 trillion--every penny of that debt will be the result of spending in the discretionary accounts, not Social Security and not Medicare. Some say: Oh, that can't be so. Social Security and Medicare together are now still in net surplus. We take the money, that surplus, and we spend it and we give a bond back to Social Security and Medicare. I guess what I am saying is, don't think the discretionary problem is not a big part of the problem. It is the problem today. In the future, it will be an actuarial challenge of monumental proportions because the expenses of Medicare and Social Security are going up and the revenue is going down and we are going to be in serious trouble. We need to deal with this now. I thank my colleagues for the opportunity to share these remarks. I urge my colleagues to take a good vote. Vote for the Sessions-McCaskill amendment and oppose the Pryor amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I wish to briefly comment about the Pryor amendment that has been offered as an alternate, a side-by-side, or cover amendment to the Sessions-McCaskill amendment that would take the budget limits that were passed by this Congress and make those more difficult to violate by creating a two-thirds vote for it. I would say a couple of things about the Pryor amendment. It is not good and we should not vote for it. It pretends to have good motives, and maybe it does have good motives. But in fact it would allow $62 billion more in spending over 3 years than the McCaskill- Sessions amendment. It would instruct the deficit commission to propose tax increases and entitlement cuts to pay for increases in discretionary spending. The deficit commission was not meant for raising taxes and cutting entitlements to pay for new discretionary spending increases. The whole purpose of that was to figure out a way to deal with the surging entitlements that are growing out of control and to contain their growth. How are we going to do that? We are going to do it two ways, primarily. I suppose they will propose some sort of tax increases, increase in Social Security withholding or increase in Medicare withholding, and they will cut Medicare and Social Security benefits. That is what real life is. But this would instruct the commission to cut entitlement benefits, Medicare, and Social Security, to increase taxes, and use it to fund more discretionary spending. That is not good. People should not vote for an amendment that would do that. We are going to have to wrestle with the entitlement commission. It does not have binding authority, it is a recommendation to us, and maybe they will have some recommendations we can all support. But it is not going to be fun. It is not going to be easy. There is no free lunch. Nothing comes from nothing. Somebody must pay to fix the entitlements. They are at the present time in surplus and the surplus they are producing from the revenue from Social Security withholding and Medicare withholding is being spent for discretionary spending. So to raise their income for those accounts and to cut spending in those accounts to allow even more spending on the discretionary side I think would be very unwise. Perhaps that is not what was intended but that is what appears to me to be pretty plainly what is going on in this amendment. Second, the Republican counsel on the Budget Committee has advised that the amendment would not only abandon the two-thirds requirement that Senator McCaskill and I are proposing to violate the budget, but it actually would eliminate the point of order that currently requires 60 votes to violate the budget. Currently, if somebody proposes a spending amount that violates the budget, any Senator can object and it would take 60 votes to waive the budget to allow this extra spending to occur. The way we are reading this amendment is that it would dramatically weaken the existing law and eliminate this point of order that would even require 60 votes. That has not proven to be a very effective tool. The two-thirds vote would be better. I thank my colleagues for the opportunity to share these remarks and urge my colleagues to resist the Democratic leadership's injunctions and pressures to vote against the Sessions-McCaskill amendment. I know 18 Democrats have already voted for it. It is a bipartisan bill. We worked at it together in a good way. It has the ability to take a significant, though not dramatic, but a solid step in the right direction. I am disappointed we are now proposing an alternative amendment that will not be as effective and that the leadership on the Democratic side is opposing. If Senator Reid and Senator Durbin said: Fine, you can vote for this if you like or: We are going to vote for it, do what you want, Senator, it would pass like that. But it is their leadership decision that has put us in a difficult position and makes it more difficult for us to get 60 votes. I hope we can, but it may not occur. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I was pleased to listen to the remarks by my good friend and most respected Member of the Senate, Senator Carper, about his analysis of the health care reform bill that is before us. I would say I disagree on a number of areas. First, I disagree that we do not have the best medical care in the world. Yes, we have people who are overweight. We have a higher homicide rate. We have other problems that affect health. But if you are treated, you get the best health care all over. Even in rural areas of Alabama you get well-trained physicians and nurses who can give you first-rate care. I reject that. But I do agree we pay too much. I hoped that would have been a basis for our bipartisan agreement as to how we can execute some changes that would help bring down the cost and create a more effective health care system. I certainly think we should go in that direction. I do think it is important that the American people believe the process is legitimate. The President said--I suppose in his interview yesterday; I saw it this morning--basically: I don't care what the process is. Just do it, House. You can deem a piece of legislation that is not a part of the bill, and just make it law by deeming it without actually putting it up for a vote or amendment or a process. That is historic. They say it has been done before. I am hearing from my constituents: I do not care what you have been doing before. We expect you guys to honestly bring up legislation, honestly vote on it, and not sneak it through in the dead of night without people having a chance to read it, without fully knowing what it means. That is a legitimate request and demand from the American people that I am hearing. I think it is true all over the country. Even in Massachusetts, Senator Brown said: This bill is no good, and I am running against it. If you elect me as the Senator from Massachusetts, I am going to vote no. He was elected by a big margin in a stunning development. The American people are unhappy about this. What I wanted to take a minute to talk about, and this is very important, the Speaker today, just a few hours ago, reiterated that this legislation would create a surplus. If it is going to ensure 30 million more Americans, if it is going to close the doughnut hole and is going to do all these things, how can that be? The American people are dubious at best about that claim. But they say the CBO says so. With all due respect to my colleague from Delaware, that is not what CBO said. They have misrepresented the CBO's statement in one of the more dramatic flimflameries in history, I submit. I wrote the CBO. Right before I voted on December 24 I got a letter back that explained the details of how it could appear to be one thing when it is really another. I want to point that out right now. This was a subsequent letter from them on January 22 of this year when asked about how to analyze the cost of this bill. I am quoting from a letter to me, Jeff Sessions, from the Congressional Budget Office, January 22, Doug Elmendorf, the Director--basically hired by the Democratic majority in Congress. He says: Thus, the act's effects on the rest of the budget--other than the cash flows from the HI trust fund, the Medicare trust fund--would amount to a net increase in the federal deficits of $226 billion over the same period. A net increase in the deficit. He goes on to say: Thus, the resources to redeem government bonds in the HI trust fund and thereby pay for Medicare benefits in some future year will have to be generated from taxes or other government income, or government borrowing in that year. He goes on to say: Unified budget accounting shows that the majority of the HI [Medicare] trust fund savings under the PPACA-- That is this health care reform bill-- would be used to pay for other spending and therefore would not enhance the ability of the government to pay for future Medicare benefits. It goes on to say: Therefore, enacting the PPACA-- The health care reform bill-- would increase debt held by government accounts more than it would decrease debt held by the public and would thus increase gross federal debt. Here we have the Speaker of the House taking the floor again, repeating what the President and other colleagues are saying, that somehow this is creating a surplus. It is not. Let me tell you why and how they do it. Hopefully, I can take just a minute to do that. Right before I voted in the Senate on December 21, President Obama said: And Medicare will be stronger and its solvency extended by nearly a decade. Same statement, he says: The Congressional Budget Office now reports that this bill will reduce our deficit by $132 billion over the first decade. That is basically the number they were using this morning; basically the number that has been referred to on the floor earlier today. This is how it is done and why that is a total misrepresentation of the ultimate significance of what we are doing. This chart does it. What happens? With regard to the Medicare account, we are increasing Medicare taxes. That brings more money into Medicare. If this passes, everybody--upper income Medicare payers--will pay more money. So it is going to increase taxes. Second, there has been a substantial reduction in Medicare benefits paid from this account. So, therefore, it creates a saving, right? You increase taxes into Medicare, you cut Medicare expenses, Medicare looks to be in better shape. That is true if we use the money to maintain Medicare, if we use the money paid in by seniors all over this country so when they retire they can have Medicare, and if we use that money to strengthen Medicare. But we are not using it to strengthen Medicare. What are we doing with it? We are shipping it over to the Treasury so the Congress can spend it on a new health care bill. Obviously, we have a problem there. How do we get money out? You heard people refer to the Medicare trust fund--and there really is one--and a Social Security trust fund--and there is one. There are bonds out there that Social Security holds in West Virginia. The surplus in Medicare is given to the Treasury. But something else is not mentioned because it is an internal debt, an IOU to Medicare, a bond back to Medicare. The U.S. Treasury owes Medicare for the money they borrowed, and Medicare is heading into default. So what is going to happen? They are going to call the notes, they are going to call the IOUs, and take this money back. What is going to happen to the U.S. Treasury when that happens?

Mr. SESSIONS. I am entitled to ask the Presiding Officer for it.

Mr. SESSIONS. As a result of the conventions of accounting, it may appear this money can be spent twice, as Mr. Elmendorf said is happening. But the truth is, we cannot spend the money twice. It is increasing the debt, and there is no doubt about it. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and section 4(g)(3) of the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, I move to waive all applicable sections of those acts and applicable budget resolutions for purposes of my amendment and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, how much time is left on this side?

Mr. SESSIONS. I ask unanimous consent to have 2 additional minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, we were within one vote of bipartisan legislation to help constrain the growth in spending and allow for growth but not quite as much. But Senator Pryor's amendment is absolutely the wrong thing. It is a budget-busting amendment. It allows the Congress or the appropriating committees to spend $62 billion more than the present budget allows. It busts the budget. Second, it instructs the deficit commission to propose tax increases and entitlement cuts to fund increases in discretionary spending. That is not what the commission is supposed to be about. It is to try to get our entitlements back on sound footing, not to create money to spend on a new program. I urge colleagues to vote no. It is not the right thing to do. I make a budget point of order that the pending amendment contains matters within the jurisdiction of the Committee on the Budget. Therefore, I raise a point of order against the amendment under section 306 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I offered, along with Senator Clair McCaskill, my Democratic colleague, an amendment that will help contain our tendency in this body--a bipartisan tendency, unfortunately--to bust the budget, to spend more than we state we are going to spend. It is a temptation that is all too real. We are faced with competing choices to spend and spend, and some of our Members just find it hard to say no. We have to be careful about that because each time we do that, the baseline of the budget or the emergency spending goes up, and we have gotten into a habit of it that is surging us on an unsustainable path. Mr. Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve, the Obama administration's leaders, independent economists, and Republicans across-the-board are saying we are on a spending path that is unsustainable, that we cannot keep on. But I have to tell you, a lot of this is bad because we budgeted it; but a lot of it is bad because we break the budget and spend more than the budget says. We have a historical incident in which this Congress passed statutory caps on spending to support the budget. In effect, Congress passed laws that said this is our budget for the next several years. We have actual spending dollar limits in our budget. Let's pass a law that says if we go above that, it takes a supermajority. Our bill says it would take a two-thirds vote to exceed the spending the budget allows. Some say: A two-thirds vote? That is a high vote. But it is based on the budget and the passage of a budget, and the budget is passed by a 50-vote majority. So the budget essentially will be the Democratic colleagues' budget. What they pass is what they expect the levels of spending should be and where we should cap it and where we should not go any further. This legislation would enhance our ability and state with clarity, as a bipartisan act of this Senate and Congress, that this is where we are going to stay and that we are serious about it this time and we are going to do something about spending that is out of control. The simple truth is, we cannot continue to spend as we are. The simple truth is, we are spending into debt, deficit, more than we ever have in our history. Let me just show this chart. I think it is a pretty indicative chart that should cause the average person to lose their appetite--maybe even have their hair stand up. I used this chart a week or so ago. I was meeting later with a Foreign Minister from a European country. He said: I happened to be watching C-SPAN. I saw you yesterday on the floor with this chart. He said: Do you use charts on the floor often? I said: Yes, sir, we do, Mr. Minister. He said: I thought it made a lot of sense. You ought to go all over the country and show that. This is the Congressional Budget Office numbers based on the budget that is out there. It shows what our debt held by the public is. The debt held by the public is the debt where we sell Treasury bills and people give us their money. They loan us their money, and we promise to pay them back--over 10 years or 2 years or 30 years--at a certain rate of interest. Some people say: You should not count the internal debt; that is not exactly accurate. The only thing that really counts is the public debt. The internal debt, the gross debt is much larger than this, but let's just use these numbers. In 2008 the total public debt of the United States was $5.8 trillion. Since the founding of our Republic--in 1789, I guess, since the Constitution was written. In 2013, according to CBO staff, it will double to $11.8 trillion. That is just 3 years from now--double. Then, in 2019, it is projected to go to $17.3 trillion, more than triple. This is not a little-bitty matter. That is why people are saying we cannot continue this way. That is why Moody's, the debt rating agency, is continuing to discuss whether to downgrade the American debt. There are entities out there that insure debt. Some people are so nervous about debt they want to insure the Federal Government debt and they pay an actual insurance premium to make sure if the government doesn't pay them what they owe, the insurance companies will pay them what they owe. I am not sure that is a smart deal. Maybe it is in a smaller country. At any rate, people pay this. The amount of insurance that has been paid on the American debt has tripled. It is not a lot, but it says something about what independent people are valuing. The debt of Greece amounts to 12.9 percent. The 1-year deficit for Greece amounts to 12.9 percent of their total economy--GDP. We are at 9.9 percent, our debt. This year--the year ending September 30, last year--that deficit was $1.4 trillion, three times the largest debt in the history of the American Republic--three times. Is this year going to be better? No. This year they are projecting when September 30 arrives, our deficit for that one fiscal year will be $1.6 trillion. According to some of the estimates, the debt would drop down to about $600 billion over the next 10 years, through 2019. But now we are seeing numbers that indicate that was too rosy a scenario and we probably will not drop below $700 billion, and then it starts up in 2018, 2019, 2017--almost $1 trillion a year annual deficits. These numbers are low by any estimate. Already this year's deficit was supposed to be a little over $1 trillion, but it is going to be $1.5 trillion; maybe $1.6 trillion. That is a lot of money. We just passed another bill that added another $104 billion to the debt for a jobs bill. What we are saying is, we are on a pathway that is unsustainable. We cannot continue to run trillion-dollar deficits. We are going to average almost $1 trillion a year deficit for the next 10 years-- probably it will average maybe more than that. That is why I think all of us are concerned about it. Senator McCaskill and I, as a first step, offered legislation that said we are going to stick with our budget. If we will just stick with our budget things will be better than they would be if we do not stick with our budget. It is not a cure-all. It does not deal with entitlements and all the things with which we are confronted, but at least our discretionary spending will stick with our budget. The first vote was 56 voted for it. We made some changes to accommodate concerns of some of our colleagues, and 59 voted for it--18 Democrats joined in voting for that amendment. So we need one more vote to make it law, and I am pleased to work with Senator McCaskill because we are serious about this good step. When it was done, similar legislation was passed in the early 1990s and continued throughout the 1990s. That was a factor, no doubt, in going from substantial deficits in the early part of the 1990s and in the 1980s to surpluses in the latter part of the 1990s. That was a big part of it because we stuck to our budget numbers and we made progress. Again, what number are you saying--is it a freeze on spending? Not really. The President talked about a freeze on spending. I will support that aggressively, but we are talking about a 1-percent or 2-percent increase, according to the budget. So it will give us a hard limit on how much increase in spending we will have. It will not require a cut in spending. How does this play out in terms of our economy? Well, what is a $1 trillion? We used to talk about millions, and then billions, now we are talking about trillions. Is that really a lot of money? Yes, it is. One trillion dollars is one thousand billion. In Alabama State, we are almost 1/50 of the American population, and Alabama's general fund budget is about $2 billion. Alabama, counting education, is less than 10. One trillion dollars is an amount of money difficult for us to comprehend. We have never, ever dealt with numbers as dramatic as these numbers. What is wrong with borrowing? Why don't we just borrow? We have to pay interest on it. This is public debt. We do not have any internal surpluses anymore, or very little, from Social Security and Medicare. We have to go out and borrow this money on the marketplace and we pay interest on it. We pay interest every year on what we borrow. Congress passed, over my objection, an $800 billion stimulus package. Every dollar of that was borrowed because we were already in debt, and when we spend $800 billion more we have to borrow it and we pay somebody interest on it. It comes out of our money that we collect in taxes. We have to pay interest first just like you do on your mortgage. The first thing, you pay your house note, otherwise they are coming to foreclose and out in the street you will go. How much interest do we pay? That is a question I think drives home how serious our unsustainable course is. A simple truth is that the interest on the national debt is growing in an incredible rate and will soon surpass defense budgets and everything else in our budgetary items. Look at these numbers. In 2009, last year, we paid $187 billion in interest. What about the highway program? The Federal highway program that we talk so much about and argue and debate about exactly how much that should be is $40 billion a year, just $40 billion. We paid last year $187 billion in interest. This is a lot of money. But as I told you, since we have an unsustainable annual deficit every year, huge deficits on top of the debt we have already accumulated, our interest payment on the public debt will go up. Look at these numbers. In 2020--from 2009 to 2020 the number hits $840 billion in 1 year we will have to pay in interest because we borrowed so much money. That is why we hear people say time and again this is immoral. We are borrowing from our future, from our children and grandchildren, so we can spend today and live well today without worrying about the impact it is going to have in the future. Do not think this will not impact the economy adversely also. This money is all a product of borrowing from the economy, so the government is now crowding out private borrowing by sucking up the money itself. If you are a private person and you needed to borrow money and you say: I promise to pay you back, and the guy said: I think you will pay me back, but the U.S. Government will pay me 5 percent on a T-bill. Why should I loan you money at 5 percent? If I loan to you, you are less secure. I want 7 or 8 percent from you, big boy. That is how things happen. It drives up our wealth and capital for the expansion of businesses and home buyers and that sort of thing. So look at that chart. It is a stunning chart, and it is a chart that has the numbers on President Obama's budget that he submitted to Congress, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office. Well, that is why we have to do something. There are a lot of things we need to do. But I am hopeful that in our debate and discussion in recent days that we have had this vote up, this will be the third time we vote on it. I am hopeful my colleagues will see this as at least one firm step we will take that will help us contain our tendency to not stay with our budget. If we were to stay with spending increases that did not exceed 1 or 2 percent that is in the budget of the next 4 years now, according to the budget passed last year, we would see a positive impact on spending. Unfortunately, in the last year, we had bills such as Agriculture increased to 10 percent; we had bills such as Interior get about 15 or 20 percent; we had bills such as EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, a 30-percent increase; State Department, a 30-percent increase. A 30-percent increase in a budget, the budget is going to double in about 3 or 4 years. At 7 percent, money will double in 10 years. So I just would say, this is a dangerous thing. This will help us contain that spending. That is why Senator McConnell and I are so interested in seeing if we can be successful with this legislation. I understand Senator Pryor has an alternative; they call it a side by side. ``Vote for mine, do not vote for theirs'' kind of amendment. I am not exactly sure what it says. Hopefully, I can support his too. I understand his may be just a 1-year binding cap. It provides no point of order to waive the cap. It increases spending in a number of accounts. So we will look at that. I would like to be able to support his too. But what I would say to my colleagues is, the advantages of the amendment Senator McCaskill and I are offering are, it is a proven procedure, it requires a two-thirds vote to break the budget, it allows us to tell ourselves, tell our constituents, and the world financial markets that we get it, we are willing to begin to contain this spending and that we can do better and we will do better in the future and there will be other steps we will want to take. But I do believe this amendment will be one of the first things we can do, in a bipartisan way, to help control the growth of spending and put us back on track. In the 1990s, it led to actual surplus. So I urge my colleagues to support the Sessions-McCaskill amendment. I believe it is the right thing for our country. It is a significant step that will work. It is not going to solve all our problems, but it will be a big help. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank Senator Dorgan for his comments and the frustrations we all share. He comes at it from one party's perspective, and I have my party's perspective. We can argue these issues for a lot of time. I have gotten to the point--and I think Senator McCaskill and a lot of Members of the body have as well--that we need to do something that might actually work. I say to Senator Dorgan, the reason I believe we should go forward on this amendment is because the first time we had an amendment with 56 votes and bipartisan support. Then the last time it was 59. We made some more changes to primarily assuage concerns of my Democratic colleagues that Senator McCaskill still believes could put us in a position to pass this legislation. It will make some difference. I was at a townhall meeting. The questioner criticized me for something. I said: I wrote a letter about that to the Cabinet person and complained. He sat there and looked at me. He said: You wrote a letter. Thank you a lot. I didn't have much to say. At some point we have to do something. I have made speeches. Senator Dorgan, one of the most eloquent--Members of this body, has made speeches. But we are not doing anything. Deficits are surging beyond limits. We have a possibility of passage here and that is why I think we should go forward. We have the possibility of reaching this agreement that for 3 years will place in statutory form the budget my Democratic colleagues passed, which is higher than what President Obama is saying we should spend. We could at least have that as a firewall. It would be difficult to go above those amounts, but it would not eliminate or make it even any harder to pass an emergency bill because we amended our amendment to change that part we previously had in there that would have made it harder to declare something an emergency. One thing I would like to share with my colleagues--I see Senator Dorgan is gone--about the allegations, which are not all wrong, that President Bush and Mr. Greenspan were insignificantly concerned about deficit spending after we had a series of surpluses. But first, let me go back. One of the great political efforts in this Congress--and it has had some success and partisan success--is to give President Clinton credit for the balanced budget. Not a dime can be spent by any President that is not appropriated by the U.S. Congress. Republicans took over the Congress in 1994 and shut down the government in a dispute with the President over how much money he ought to be spending. It caused a big controversy. But they fought and fought against spending. People were sleeping in their offices. But the budget got balanced for several years. After 9/11, we slipped into a recession. We were in a war. As a matter of fact I heard Mr. Greenspan, in effect, say he believed the country could take on more debt. Senator Rockefeller probably remembers essentially that. He serves on many of these committees. He said: I think we can take on more debt. What Mr. Greenspan and, I think, Mr. Bush did not realize was that once you start taking on more debt, it gets harder and harder to stop. We started a trend of taking on more debt as if it did not matter. Some people even said deficits don't matter. Some Republicans said deficits don't matter; we can handle it. We got into a bad habit. Both parties got into that habit, and it is roaring away today with spending levels the likes of which we have never seen. We passed a budget that I think has reality in it. I think if we hold to that budget, we might surprise ourselves how much progress we can make. These kinds of statutory caps were part of the success in the nineties. I ask forgiveness of my colleagues for trying to pursue a vote on this amendment. I say to my colleagues, if we get the 60 votes I think it will be an indication that it would not in any way burden the FAA bill. In fact, it might be attractive to some Members of this Senate to vote for the bill if this cap was in it--Members who might not otherwise vote for it. I don't think it would damage the prospects of the bill's passage. This amendment is building up with increased votes each time. We are near to success. I think it would be a great bipartisan statement of commitment to financial responsibility, and I think it is important to go forward. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I have an amendment, No. 3453, at the desk, and ask that it be called up.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, briefly, I will call my colleagues' attention to this serious bipartisan effort with Senator McCaskill of Missouri to contain our penchant in this body to violate or manipulate the budget and spend more money than we intend to spend. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies, and Members of both parties have been guilty of that. I originally offered a very similar amendment that adopted the budget amounts passed by this Congress, our Democratic leadership, and would have made those amounts that we said would be our top spending amounts--the budget maximum. It would have set a statutory cap at those levels and say if we were going to violate those limit, it would take a two-thirds vote to do so. A number of senators were concerned about it, but it received broad bipartisan support. When we voted, 56 people voted for it--4 short of the 60 necessary to be adopted. But I thought it was a positive step, and I know Senator McCaskill felt it was, too. I believe we can dispute how much we ought to spend, but one of the biggest dangers and problems the Senate confronts--and often fails to meet--is breaking our own budget. This amendment would have made it harder to break the budget, and 56 Senators voted for it. Then we listened to our colleagues because people were saying: This year, Jeff, I believe we have to do some things that we may not have to do in the future--and that we do not want to do in the future--but this year our economy is in such a state that we can't be so limited. So Senator McCaskill and I proposed another amendment that we voted on, which would have exempted this year and made it a shorter bill. We would remain under the normal budget rules for this year and would therefore not be creating the power to block additional stimulus legislation a number of Senators were concerned about. Frankly, I felt that was a compromise we could make. I would have preferred to have had it apply to this year, but I understand that concern and we made that change. So 59 Senators voted for it--1 short of the necessary vote to make it a part of the legislation. So now, we listened again to some of the concerns we have heard from our colleagues. Senator McCaskill and I believe this bill, with the additional changes we made, will be the kind of legislation that could garner perhaps very broad bipartisan support and could actually make it into law. It would significantly help us honor the budget process. It would send a positive message to the world markets and our financial world because some rightly think we have lost our spending bearings and we are spending crazily here. We could send them a message that we have a budget out there that you may or may not like, but at least we are not going to bust it wide open and we will be more faithful to those limits. It would suggest less of a danger of massive deficits than we have had over the last 2 years. What were the changes we made? Well, we exempted emergencies. In other words, some people felt we may need to pass emergency legislation and that a two-thirds vote--67 votes--is too much, and they would prefer to be able to pass emergencies by 60 votes. So we have acquiesced and put that in there. If a Senator is proposing extraordinary spending, they would have to openly state that it was an emergency, advocate for that, and the current law would still be in effect then. It would only take 60 votes to declare an emergency. We made another change, one that I kind of hate to do but I am not unwilling to do. We would exempt year 2014, so it would only be a 3- year statutory cap on spending. Some people said: Well, we don't know what will happen in 2014. We may be in better financial condition. We won't have to contain our spending to the budget levels we passed last year, and we could do it in that fashion. I think that is all right. I really accept that if it helps us get the votes necessary. So now we have 3-year legislation that does not change the law with regard to what is an emergency. We could violate the budget if it is an emergency, and we would have the votes to do it, but I still think it would be a good deal harder to take basic spending levels and break the budget on those. Technically, you could declare it an emergency. Most anything with 60 votes could be an emergency, but I think most Senators have some conviction that we shouldn't abuse the emergency spending level. We will leave the emergency spending definition with the same number of votes, but the basic spending of our country needs to be within the budget caps. Remember, this is the level of spending a Democratic majority voted to pass last year. I voted against it. I thought it had too much spending in it, particularly last year. This year's spending was also too much, but the outyears had pretty tight budgets with 1 or 2 percent spending increases. The Congress and the Senate voted for it, and I think if we live with that, we might surprise ourselves to see that it would create a positive impact on the size of our deficit. I am confident we are moving in the right direction. Again, it is a statement to ourselves if we pass this legislation. It is also a statement to the world markets that we are going to be less likely to violate our budgets in the future and more likely to contain our spending increases to levels that are acceptable. I would note one more thing. President Obama, in his State of the Union, announced a freeze over the next 3 years, and he believes that in our discretionary spending accounts--which is what this essentially covers--we should actually have a freeze. I intend to support him on that. But this bill does not call for a freeze. It allows for a modest increase of 1 to 2 percent consistent with last year's budget. I will just say that we should and hopefully we will pass a budget this year that has a freeze in the discretionary accounts. But if we don't or if people attempt to break it and go above it, at least we would have a stronger high ground from which to defend budget-busting legislation. This is a bill that deserves bipartisan consideration, and I think it has gotten bipartisan consideration. I know 18 Democrats and every Republican voted for it last time. We have listened to the concerns of some of our Members, and we amended the legislation to be more amenable to those concerns. I hope we can pass it. Let me say one thing that is an obvious matter of law. If 60 of my colleagues feel as though this is too restrictive, then they can pass a piece of legislation with 60 votes that wipes this out entirely from the books. It is mostly a self-imposed discipline. But it would be harder to pass legislation to wipe out the two-thirds vote level just because somebody has hard feelings that they didn't get enough spending in this or that bill as part of the normal governmental process. So I think it would be an effective tool. But as a matter of power in the Senate, make no mistake, this is not a two-thirds rule that would keep the Senate from doing anything. The Senate can pass legislation promptly to eliminate this statute any time we want to. I believe it will work. It worked before. In the early 1990s, such legislation was passed, and it was extended periodically, up through 2002. From sizable deficits in the early 1990s, the spending was contained to much lower levels than we have adopted in recent years and it resulted in a budget surplus at the end of the 1990s. I am absolutely convinced a significant tool in the effective effort to contain spending and put our budget back in balance was the statutory limit on spending, consistent with what we voted for in a budget. That is what we are doing today. This is not new legislation, really, but we are fundamentally reestablishing the kind of legislation we previously had. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, we earlier had a cloture vote on, what I guess is called the jobs bill. It has some things in it that I think might be helpful to this economy. Continuing certain tax cuts is important. But I have to say, it is very much a disappointment that the legislation spends $100 billion more than we have. In other words, it will add $100 billion to the debt of the United States. It was a few weeks ago that this Senate voted for a pay-go idea that asserted we were not going to spend money we didn't have and we were going to pay for what we spent. In other words, if we increase spending, we are either going to raise taxes or cut spending somewhere else to keep us on the right track. But we have not done that. This is actually a $140 billion bill. This bill has $40 billion in costs assumed by the CBO for continuing the tax credits that have been in place, some of them, for 10 years. Those are to be continued, and they score that as costing $40-some-odd billion. But that is paid for. Our Democratic colleagues are prepared to pay for allowing the American people to keep money that is theirs; money that the government hasn't assessed against them and extracted from them over a 10-year period. That is paid for through other increases in taxes and other activities which, so far, offset that. But the $104 billion of new spending is not paid for. Regardless, the bill is a bill that adds $104 billion to the debt. I don't see how that is a responsible action for our Congress. Because last year, in February, Congress passed an $800 billion stimulus package--the largest spending bill in the history of America, and every penny of it was added to the debt of the United States. It was the kind of bill the likes of which Congress has never, ever seen before. We did that. And that was not long after the $700 billion financial bailout package--the TARP bill. The one thing about the TARP bill is that we always understood we were to get some of it back. And we would have gotten a lot more of it if they had spent it to buy toxic assets, instead of giving billions of dollars to one insurance company; giving a huge amount of money to General Motors, which is unlikely ever to be paid back by that company. Now the government basically owns an automobile company and an insurance company. And that is not anything like what we were told when that TARP bill came before the Senate. I believed at the time, it was so unprincipled and such a dangerous piece of legislation that I opposed it vigorously. But Congress said we had to pass it and it passed. Then we came back in January after the new President was in office. We had to stimulate the economy, and many of us warned that the legislation was not stimulative in nature and it was not going to create the kind of jobs we needed to create. It just was not. I remember quoting from a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize economics winner. He warned the bill was not stimulative enough. But we had to pass it. It was supposed to be for crumbling bridges and infrastructure. Yet less than 4 percent of the money went to crumbling bridges and infrastructure. Most of it went to social programs, bail out a State, Medicaid--not job-creating things. Mr. Becker told us in his op-ed shortly before the vote, giving his best judgment about what would happen, he said that it was not going to be a job-creating bill; that you should look for well above $1 growth out of an investment of $1 in stimulus funds. Their impression was, he and his team, it was going to be well below $1. Now we come back this year, we want another stimulus, another jobs bill because the first one did not work. But now we are in a position where we are surging the debt of this country to a degree it has never been done before. This, in many ways, exceeds World War II, when we were in a life-and-death struggle. These are just the basic numbers. In 2008, the total American public debt was $5.8 trillion. In 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office, our own experts, based on the 10-year budget the President has submitted that would double to $12.3 trillion. Congress actually ended up passing a 5-year budget very similar to his first 5 years, but this shows the track the President has proposed the country move on. I am not making this up. Then, in 2019, it would go up to $17.5 trillion. CBO is stating that next year's deficit will exceed this year's deficit. The deficit of the year ending September 30 of last year was $1.4 trillion. They are estimating our next year will be about $1.5 trillion. So, blithely, our leadership walks in today and says we have to extend unemployment insurance, we have to do a number of other things, and we have not figured out a way to raise the money for it or reduce spending on programs that do not work so we will just borrow it too. That is not calculated in these numbers. That was not legislation that was on the agenda or on the books before the Congressional Budget Office made this scoring. There are other things we know are going to be part of this. I will talk about a few of them. One of the things that is in the legislation before us is what we have come to refer to as the doctor fix. I feel strongly about that. We had passed the Balanced Budget Act in the late 1990s, and it contained the growth of Medicare spending on payments of physicians. As the years went by, we realized pretty quickly that the cuts were too large or at least Congress did not have the will to let them go into effect, so we wiped it out. We did not let the cuts come in. We have been doing it now for over a decade, Republicans and Democrats--each one had a majority. Instead of facing up to the shortfall in the physicians' reimbursement, we have allowed this problem to grow. What it amounts to is, if Congress does not act, the doctors who are taking care of our parents and grandparents on Medicare will have their payments cut 21 percent. A lot of physicians are losing money on Medicare today. If this were to happen, there would be a massive quitting of taking care of Medicare patients. They would not do it anymore. It is not right. You cannot justify, from any logical approach to medicine, that we should cut physicians by that kind of amount. I think fundamentally we need to restore it and put it on a path that is sustainable and a growth rate instead of a 21-percent cut. We need to wrestle with how to do it. If you fix the doctor fix, and you allow a modest growth instead of a 21-percent cut over the next 10 years, it will cost the U.S. Treasury $250 billion. That is a lot of money, even by Federal Government standards. Our annual highway bill has been about $40 billion. The annual budget of my State of Alabama is less than $10 billion--$7 or $8 billion for the whole State, including education. That $250 billion is a lot of money. But millions of American seniors are treated every day by physicians and they paid into the Medicare Program for 40 years. They have been told that when they get to be seniors at retirement age, they will get basically free physician services. It is a commitment we made. Maybe it was improvident at the time. Maybe we could have been smarter about the way it was done, but that is what we told them, and I believe we have to honor that in principle today. This bill attempts to deal with it by extending it, as we have done each time, 1 year. That is what I call a budget gimmick. It is a misrepresentation of the true state of our finances because what will occur is, we will put the money in for this year. It is going to cost $7.3 billion to fix this year's doctors' payments. But you know what the CBO scores when they estimate what our debt will be? They assumed the law will go back into effect next year, and there will be a 21- or maybe then 22-percent or 23-percent cut in physician payments. They will assume that is going to be true for 9 years, leaving about $240 billion extra money that we in Congress can spend--except it is going to be paid. We cannot cut the physicians by that much money. We know we are going to fix it, 1 year at a time. It appears we do not have the courage or the will to fix it permanently like we should, so we will just fix it and we will use that and then they can make the deficit look better than that. This budget, this number CBO has scored, does not assume the doctors' payments are going to be increased 21 percent. They assume doctors' fees are going to be cut because that is what the law is, unless we act to change it. They make an estimate based on what the law is today, so we can fix the doctors' payments for 1 year, but for the next 9 years they assume we have a lot more money than we have because we are going to fix it every year. This kind of gimmickry is what put us in this fix. Let me say this: An attempt was made earlier this year to do a doctor fix outside the health care reform bill. That was a very duplicitous act, in my opinion. I have to be frank with my colleagues. Why? What was wrong about that? The President has always said that in health care reform, in fixing our health care problem, what we need to do was deal with physician payments, the SGR. But when they sat in that secret room around here, moving the money around to try to figure out how to present a bill and plop it out on the floor and ask us all to vote for it, they had a problem. They had promised the bill would be deficit neutral. But if they fix the doctor fix, it was going to cost $250 billion. They could not make the numbers work. Do you know what the Democratic leadership tried to do? They brought it up separately. We are going to pass a bill in the Congress that would have funded the fix of the doctors. Every penny of it goes straight to the debt. But because they took it out of health care reform and sat it over here, they were going to say the health care reform did not cost any money. I can dispute that and it is not accurate, but that is what they did. But do you know what happened? Thirteen Democrats said no. To their great credit, under, I am sure, pressure, they decided: I am not going to vote for another big debt increase on a bill that is not paid for. We ought to make this paid for. They were listening to their constituents back home and they are concerned about it. I know colleagues on both sides of the aisle are definitely concerned about this deficit. But I just wish to say if it had passed and it would have been another hiding of the debt by doing it in that fashion. Since that failed, we now have it in this bill for 1 year. It is going to be unpaid for and it will go straight to the debt. I think people who voted against the last doctor fix because it was not paid for and added to the debt should vote against this legislation because it continues to take us in that direction. Finally, I will say the entire debt process we are on is dangerous to our economy in the long run. This much money being poured into the economy and being unwisely spent--as Mr. Becker warned us a year ago-- has to have some positive impact. For heaven's sake, you borrow $800 billion from the future and you pump it into this economy today and now we are talking about another $100 billion we borrow from the future and pump into the economy today--those kinds of actions have to have some positive impact, at least in the short run. But nothing comes from nothing. There is no free lunch. We know somebody will pay. Can anybody dispute that--that anything we take in today and distribute among ourselves and enjoy today somebody paid for? Who is going to pay for this? Let me tell you. Last year, the interest on the debt of the United States was $187 billion. That is a lot of money. The Federal highway bill is $40 billion. Interest on the debt was $187 billion. Alabama, an average size State of 4 million people, has a general fund budget of less than $10 billion. $187 billion. But because we are tripling the debt in 10 years, in 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in that year alone people still alive and well in the United States and making some money and trying to feed their families will pay $800 billion on the debt in interest--in that year alone, $800 billion. This is a burden that our economy will be carrying for years. By the way, there is no plan to pay it down. In fact, in 2019, it is projected the deficit will be almost $1 trillion that year. The debt, the deficit, and the shortfall in income over expenditures in 2019 will still be growing. The debt will still be surging. Greece is in such a terrible fix today; their deficit amounts to about 12.7 percent of the entire gross domestic product of the nation of Greece. They are considered to be very unstable. The economy is thoroughly in danger. They are going through some significant reforms to try to work their way out of it. Our deficit-to-GDP ratio this year is 9.7 percent. This is one of the highest ratios in the world, and it is a danger that we face. So to get down to the nub of the matter, I am not going to vote for this bill. I am sure some of my colleagues will say: That is because you do not like the unemployed, and you do not want to help them. I do want to help them. I am sure it is going to be because some of my colleagues will say: You do not want to pay the doctors. You do not like doctors so you are mean and cold-hearted. And: Do not worry about the debt, Sessions. But at some point we have to bring our house under control. Just like a family budget, we cannot continue to spend dramatically more than we take in. We passed a resolution. This Senate passed a bill that is supposed to limit expenditures through a pay-go mechanism. It was predicted then that people were not serious when they were passing it. This would be the second time we voted in a matter of weeks to break through pay-go, and this is $100 billion. I would suggest there are a number of things that can be done. One of them is, we can go back and look at the unspent stimulus money. There is about $170 billion not only unspent but unobligated at this point. That money can be utilized to take care of some of these needs we have, and there is no doubt we could do that. We could find other mechanisms to deal with this, and one of the things we are going to have to face up to is that there are a lot of programs in this government that are not returning value for the taxpayers. We are extracting money from taxpayers. We are sending it out to programs that are not producing any legitimate return, and they should be eliminated. When is the last time we have ever eliminated any expenditure in this country where we can see that it has not been effective? Well, a lot of our reports show that a lot of our government programs are ineffective. There are a lot of things we can do to enhance our productivity as a national government to eliminate this surge in debt and get us off the path we are on that I think leads to financial problems in the future. A witness before the Budget Committee testified that studies show that this kind of debt with the high interest payments, will pull down our economic growth. Most people think economic growth is going to get us out of this fix. But if we are burdened with high interest rates, if the U.S. Government is going out in the marketplace and competing with private business to get people to loan you money, it tends to drive up interest rates. It tends to reduce the amount of money available in the marketplace for private business. They predict it would at least reduce the growth by 1 percentage point in the future. When you are talking about 2 percent annual growth, and you drop to 1 percent growth, or 3 percent and you drop to 2 percent growth, this is serious. So it is no doubt this kind of debt will crowd out spending when we have $800 billion in the tenth year just to pay interest. It will be the biggest expenditure the government has on any account. That is a problem. So I would say it is time to take this bill back. Let's look at it. Let's see if we cannot contain some of the spending that is in it, and let's see if we cannot pay for the rest of it and produce a bill that we can be proud of that will help people in need without socking it to the debt of America. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Senator.

Mr. SESSIONS. I value the Senator's views on these issues so much. I recall when the Senator chaired the Joint Economic Committee, the Select Committee of the House and Senate. He was our chairman. Since then he has been known as one of the authoritative voices on our economy, as well as Senate business. I guess I would first say that I am very intrigued by your legislation. It sounds as though it is something that is exactly what we need. I don't, I guess, want to be in a political tit for tat, but I remember and recall the Senator from Utah opposing the stimulus package that was on the floor and voting against that and raising concerns about it. I think the general concern most often raised was one that Nobel Prize Laureate Gary Becker raised: It wasn't one that creates jobs. I guess I would ask, based on the Senator's experience in the Senate, the amount of money that went into that bill--the purpose was supposed to be to create jobs--give us your honest evaluation of how well it has performed.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Senator from Utah for those thoughts. What a tragedy that is. I don't think people realize how much $800 billion is. So the Senator's legislation would be far less expensive and would immediately help small businesses create jobs without a government bureaucracy telling them what to do. Is that fair to say?

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

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Senator.