Jeff Sessions

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I return again for the fourth time now to ask that the Senate be allowed to vote on my E-verify amendment. That amendment has been refiled to make sure it is applicable to the substituted bill. I do not see any Members from the majority, so I will not ask at this moment to get UC. The bill managers and the majority leader have been ever so nice, as we have discussed, but having been around here a few years, I have to say I am getting a message, and the message is: The answer is going to be no. The fact is that this legislation has been moving in a certain way with a unanimous consent agreement that was obtained late Friday night that is going to make it not possible to get a vote on the amendment without unanimous agreement of the Senate. The people who participated in that should have known and I am sure did know they were eliminating the amendment I desire to offer. I want to ask again for that unanimous consent and will before I give up the floor. E-Verify is being used by over 100,000 businesses across America. It is a free, voluntary system set up by the Department Homeland Security. E-Verify allows any employer who has an interest in making sure they hire legal workers to simply punch in the Social Security number, and within a few minutes it shows whether there is a problem with that number. Ninety-six percent of the persons queried are approved immediately. Employers can feel good, even feel safe in hiring those approved by the system, even though that is not absolute proof of the legal status of that applicant. I simply want to offer in this amendment exactly the same language that was accepted, without a vote, in the House bill. Furthermore, the language that extends the E-Verify program passed the House by a vote of 407 to 2 last July. The amendment simply extends the E-verify program, No. 1, and also says that if a company gets stimulus money, money which is supposed to create jobs for Americans, they ought to take the 2 minutes to check to make sure that the people they are hiring are lawfully here. We want to make sure that only citizens and people who are here legally can be hired. This includes green card holders and temporary workers who are here on valid visas. This amendment would ensure that only people who are illegally here don't get hired. The leadership in the Senate, for some reason, has made up their minds that they are not going to let us vote on it. If we had a vote on it, it would pass. It already passed the House, and if it passes the Senate, it must be a part of the final bill. It cannot be taken out in conference without real sculduggery undertaken, and I think it would be in the final bill. The game here is clearly to subtly and otherwise keep this vote from occurring, let this bill be forced out of here. It will not be in the Senate bill. It will be in the House bill. And the conferees will meet and they will decide to take it out. That is what is happening. If the American people want to know, if the Members of Congress would like to know why people are so upset with us, it is this kind of game playing. All the Members of the House who voted for it can tell their constituents: I voted for it. I don't know why it wasn't in final passage. And people in the Senate could say: I didn't vote on it. I would have been for it if I didn't get to vote. But the net result is it is not part of the law. I cannot imagine why persons would not want this amendment to be in any legislation that would at least take the steps to see that those who are illegally in the country do not get this money.

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I yield myself 5 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, if you look at what we are doing, it does not reflect well on the Congress and the Senate. Last fall, we were told by Secretary Paulson that we had to pass a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street. I remember one day they told us we had to pass it before the next day, before the Asian markets opened. Do you remember that? You have to do it before the Asian markets open. We fiddled around and were panicked and pushed and shoved and threatened and everything. Eventually Congress folded up and passed the $700 billion TARP program. Only $350 billion of that has been spent to date, so it obviously was not the most important thing in the world. Furthermore, most economists think it has done very little good. Now we come up with a stimulus. All of that was in addition to our debt. It was classified as emergency spending and went outside of the budget process with very few hearings. Every penny of this bill is now going to the debt. None of this money is going to be returned to the Government. Once we sign the bill, the money goes out of the door and gets spent. That is another $1.1 trillion. It did not go to the authorizing committees and in-depth hearings on all these programs were not held. We know in another few days we are going to have another multibillion, maybe $500 billion plan proposed by the administration for the second part of the Wall Street bailout and maybe additional legislation for housing. I say to my colleagues, somehow all of this is spent outside the budget. We pass a budget and we are supposed to stay within that budget. Yet all of these huge, unprecedented expenditures are spent without any requirement that those expenditures compete with other programs. We want to do hybrid cars, but it doesn't compete with other legitimate efforts to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. We just stick it into this bill without any hearings. I am really worried about it. I think we are losing our discipline. I think Congress has been rubberstamping the Executive. I voted against President Bush's request to give this money to Wall Street, and I am going to vote against this stimulus package unless it is substantially changed. I do believe Senator McCain's legislation is one of the best alternatives proposed thus far. I support it. It is over $400 billion. It has more for roads and highways than this bill. This bill only has $30 billion for highways and bridges. It is supposed to be an infrastructure bill, yet $30 billion is less than 3 percent of the entire package. This funding represents even less than 3 percent if you count the $347 billion in interest the bill would cost. It is a very troubling bill. It is being ramrodded through. It is not going to have the kind of impact on this country's economy that we would like it to have. Indeed, I am afraid that unfortunately the Congressional Budget Office is right. Whereas we might have a temporary boost in the economy for the first 2 or 3 years, over the next 10 years it will be negative, and over the next 10 years after that it will be a flat negative with no benefit whatsoever to the economy. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, all we really have to rely on to help us figure out the arguments about how this stimulus package will work is our Congressional Budget Office. We just chose a new Director, Mr. Elmendorf, who is a very impressive guy. Mr. Elmendorf was really chosen by the Democratic majority in the Congress. They have the majority and this is who they chose. We like the man, and Republicans voted for him too. Mr. Elmendorf produced a report the day before yesterday in which he said that if you take the number of jobs this bill would create, and you take the various numbers that are in the bill, the ranges that are in there would be between $600,000 and $300,000 per job. I do not think any estimate has come in less than $300,000 per job. One argument was it was $900,000 per job. Mr. President, $1.2 trillion at 1.3 million jobs is not that good a deal in terms of a return on jobs. But the fundamental question is: will the thing work? We know one thing. We know it will cost us $1.1 trillion when this bill passes. It will not be like the TARP, which was an investment on which we hope to get some of the money back. Every bit of this is money is spending and it will go right out of the door. The Congressional Budget Office notes that this money will be borrowed and that it will cost us about $40 billion a year to service this borrowed money. The Congressional Budget Office notes, in addition to that, we have to get the money from somewhere. In addition, this borrowing by the federal government crowds out other private companies that are in trouble, and who may want to borrow money to keep going until this recession ends. Yet now they cannot borrow the money to keep their businesses going. The Congressional Budget Office concludes that over the next 10 years we will have less growth than if we had not passed this bill in the first place. Let me say this: It will be worse the second 10 years because all the short-term economic benefit that will come from it will be gone completely 10 years from now, and we will then have a $40- billion-per-year tax burden on the American people. How big is $40 billion? That is the annual road budget, highway budget for the United States of America. That is a lot of money. So the question is, Can we reduce the size of it? Can we have some infrastructure spending that can actually be spent quickly and create jobs and build something important and permanent for America? Can we infuse money into the economy effectively and targeted and temporarily to get us out of this difficult time we are in? I think we can. I think we can do a lot better than this bill at less of a cost and more of a benefit. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I think I have inherited that job from Senator Kyl. I yield such time as Senator Ensign would choose to use.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I will tell you.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to use 2 more minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, there are some fundamental things that are important in America that can't be denied. They are like the law of gravity. They won't go away. One of them is that there is no free lunch. Nothing comes from nothing. Something has to be produced by somebody at a cost, and debts must be paid. If we incur debt, we incur an obligation. Money does not come from the air, and if we were to be irresponsible and print large amounts of money to use to pay our debts, we would inflate the currency and debase the value of every asset held by every American and the value of the dollar, which has very pernicious consequences for us. I would like to take a moment to share some thoughts. This is a quote from Larry Summers, President Obama's No. 1 economic adviser and a very experienced man. I am not quoting Mr. Summers to claim that he has changed his position; I am quoting Mr. Summers because fundamentally these statements are accurate statements. Mr. Summers has said that: As with any potent medicine, stimulus, if misadministered, could do more harm than good by increasing instability and creating long run problems. A stimulus program should be timely, targeted, and temporary. That was in January of last year. I think that is a fundamentally true statement. And one of the things I am worried about in this bill is that it is so diffuse, it is so untargeted and so large that it does not meet any of the standards mentioned by Mr. Summers. Mr. Summers has also said that: Fiscal stimulus, to be maximally effective, must be clearly and credibly targeted . . . with no significant adverse impact on the deficit for more than a year or two after implementation. I believe that the bill before us violates the criteria Mr. Summers outlined in this statement. In January of last year Mr. Summers said: Poorly provided fiscal stimulus can have worse side effects than the disease that is to be cured. Now, that is why I have cited the Congressional Budget Office report of just 2 days ago so often. In this report, Mr. Elmendorf concluded: Over the 10-year period, the growth of the economy would be less if we pass the stimulus than if we had no stimulus at all. I didn't make that up. It is difficult to accept that you can't create something from nothing very easily. We can get a little bump in the economy now by reaching into the future and bringing $1.1 trillion or $2 trillion and spending it now and let our children worry about paying it. You can get that. But it quickly gets away from us. So in 10 years, the Government borrowing $1 trillion-plus from the marketplace crowds out credit and denies small businesses and other people the ability to get loans. So there are costs in this. It is just critically important that every dollar be properly accounted for and that we not stick in a bunch of programs that may be ineffectual and that don't go through the normal committee process. President Clinton's Budget Director, Alice Rivlin, warned a few days ago that: A long term investment plan should not be put together hastily and lumped in with the anti-recession package. The elements of the investment programs must be carefully planned and will not create many jobs right away. To interpret that language, the long-term investment plan means new programs--new health care programs, new environmental programs, and new energy programs. Alice Rivlin warned that these programs shouldn't be lumped in with an antirecession package. She warned that the elements of the investment programs are the things that will continue to be out there for a long time. She says that these programs are not going to create jobs right away. In addition, money could be wasted because the investment elements may not be carefully crafted. We have to be careful in crafting this bill or we will not create jobs; we will create ineffectual programs. Yet we are going to run them through without going through the normal budgetary process and the normal authorization committee process. We have all kinds of bills in here, all kinds of legislation in this bill that would normally be the product of committee hearings and public debate. They have just been stuck in and they are being run through with a few days of debate. The proponents of these programs like them. They think they sound good and they are pushing them forward. I don't dispute their integrity or their goodwill, I am just saying history tells us we have to be careful. I supported ethanol, and I know Senator Grassley did. Some now think we went too far. Senator Grassley doesn't. I don't know where we are on it, but we were all excited at the time. We thought we were going to fix all our problems. I would also like to point out that Senator Conrad, the chairman of the Budget Committee, a Democratic leader in the Senate here, really a fine Senator, has repeatedly expressed his grave concern about a bow wave that is being created with the stimulus. In other words, the stimulus, in perspective, seems to be legislation that will be one- time, temporary, and targeted. But Chairman Conrad says there are at least $120 billion of programmatic changes that are not going to quit, and therefore we are increasing our permanent expenditure baseline by $123 billion. Senator Coburn from Oklahoma believes it is a $300 billion bow wave of permanent spending in this bill that is never going to end. It is very difficult. We are doing it so rapidly that it is troubling. I want to say one more thing. Senator Rockefeller and Senator Grassley have been here longer than I, but if you look at what we are doing--

Mr. SESSIONS. I will just speak for about 2 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I would ask the Chair to notify me after 8 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I see my colleague from South Carolina; perhaps he is ahead of me. If he is, I would be pleased to yield to him.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I also have an amendment on the E-Verify system that I believe very strongly should be voted on or perhaps accepted. It is in the House bill. I wonder what kind of confidence Senator Baucus can give us. That would be a matter that would be voted on. It is not in the next group of amendments.

Mr. SESSIONS. I ask to be notified at 7 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be recognized for 7 minutes.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, unemployment is rising, and it was not a good month. We saw those numbers today, but it was not higher than people have been expecting. But it is a very serious thing to have unemployment rising as it is, and we know it will continue to rise. I believe there are things we in Congress can do to help confront this problem. My Democratic colleagues are so committed to this legislation and saying this bill will save and create jobs and it must be passed now and there can be no serious alteration in it. The question really is, for the American people, what is in the national interest? What will serve this country best both now and in the long run? What is the best information we have to make realistic decisions? Finally, will the projections we are hearing here actually work? Just to say the bill will create jobs is not enough for us in Congress. We are not experts in all of this. We do have some experts we rely on, but we need to look at it carefully. According to our Congressional Budget Office, in a letter written to Budget Committee Ranking Member Judd Gregg, whom the President has asked to serve as his Secretary of Commerce--dated February 4-- remember, this is a bipartisan organization, and we rely on it for reliable data. We depend on it for objective advice. The new leader of CBO was selected in a bipartisan way. Our Democratic colleagues clearly have a majority in the Senate, and they would not have approved the nominee if they didn't think he was a qualified person. What did he say just yesterday? This is the truth, I think: The Senate legislation would raise output and lower unemployment for several years. We certainly hope so. We don't want to spend a lot of money and not get any unemployment easing. Then it goes on to say: In the longer run, the legislation would result in a slight decrease in the gross domestic product (GDP), compared with CBO's baseline economic forecast. The baseline economic forecast is without any stimulus package. We don't have any stimulus package under current law. The baseline without the stimulus package indicates it would do better over 10 years than if we passed this bill. I know we are not running for election 10 years from now; we are running for election today, some people seem to think. But I believe we have a responsibility to the long-term interests of this country. It is stunning to me that this report says that over 10 years, it would be a net negative. And GDP means jobs. If GDP is down-- gross domestic product, which is all the goods and services produced in the country--if that is down, jobs are down. If GDP is up, jobs are up. What else does the letter say? It says this: The macroeconomic impact of any economic stimulus program is very uncertain. So we don't know for certain whether we will get any impact at all. It goes on to say: For those reasons, some economists remain skeptical that there would be any significant effects, while others expect very large ones. Quoting from the letter again: According to these estimates, implementing the Senate legislation . . . would also increase employment at that point of time [the fourth quarter of 2010, when we would expect the results to be most pronounced] by 1.3 to 3.9 million jobs. Well, Senator McCain has already explained to us that he has run the numbers on that. This is what it would be. The bill is scored at $1.2 trillion-plus, and with additions, we think it is $1.27 trillion, one and a quarter, which is the largest spending package in the history of this country or any country, in the history of the world, and much larger than anything that has ever been approached. The entire 5-year Iraq war has cost around $500 billion, just to give some perspective. How much would that be per job? It would add 1.3 million jobs, according to CBO. That is on the low end of the estimate. At that number and a $1.2 trillion deficit--remember, the bill is about $888 billion, but with the CBO scoring, the interest on that over the 10- year budget window, that means it would be $1.2 trillion-plus. So Senator McCain worked it out at $1.2 trillion. If you divide that out at 1.3 million jobs, it turns out to be about $765,000 per job. That is just plain mathematics. They say we are going to create jobs and the cost will come out on the lower end to about $765,000 per job. If you assume it creates jobs on the high end, 3.9 million jobs, it would be $255,000 per job. This is just not good legislation, Mr. President.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 1 additional minute.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask the manager if I might have 2 minutes. Just 2 minutes. I would like to respond.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank Senator Baucus. I know he has an incredibly difficult job in working through all of this. I would say, I am uneasy about this. I will not object now, but I do want to have some assurance this very important amendment would at least have a right to have a vote.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. It has to do with the people who get money, contracts under this agreement who would have to use the E-Verify system to make minimal checks that the persons they hire are legally in this country.

Mr. SESSIONS. Well, I thank the majority leader. I am very uneasy about it. I am afraid this amendment, which I am confident would have an overwhelming vote, there may be some objections somewhere from having a chance to vote on it. So I withdraw my objection at this time and hope we can work on it.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask a question of the majority leader. I had an amendment that would simply require those who get contracts to build infrastructure, that they would use the E-Verify system to determine whether a person is using a valid Social Security number. It is a proven system; 2,000 businesses are voluntarily signing up each week. So I would hope we get a vote on that. Am I now being told we will not be able to vote on that amendment? I hate to object.

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Washington who is committed to improving our environment and our energy efficiency. I have great hopes for hybrid automobiles. However, I urge my colleagues on this day when we are passing so much on this bill and going around our committees to not support the amendment. I note that I wrote earlier in the year and hope to receive a response soon from the Department of Energy to do a study on hybrids, diesel, ethanol, and other methods for both environment and efficiency. Our committees have been having hearings. This would choose one technology. It would have a cost of about $8 billion for the subsidies which are 10 percent of a vehicle's cost. I would say I favor moving forward, but I think it is premature. So I raise a point of order that the pending amendment violates section 201 of S. Con. Res. 21, the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2008.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the majority leader. I know he has a million things to worry about. But it is an important matter. I would be very disappointed if we did not get a chance to vote on this.

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I hope I did not miss something, but I asked earlier several times today about an amendment, I believe 239, the E-Verify amendment that I think has broad support. But it keeps not getting on the list. So I am wondering what kind of assurance the leader could have, that if we are not on this list, what opportunity there will be to get a vote, and if there is a decided intention to deny a vote on this, it is something I feel very strongly about and would have to resist, if I could.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank Senator McCain for his leadership. Actually, I felt strongly that his combination of substantial infrastructure and targeted tax relief would have injected more strength into this economy than the present bill, and with a cost of half of that. As we know, this bill cost over $1.1 trillion. The bill itself is $827 billion, but when you add the $300 billion plus in interest, which the Congressional Budget Office adds to it for the 10-year budget window, you end up with an unprecedented amount of money--with far too little impact. In fact, if you look at what our own Congressional Budget Office tells us--and who else can we rely on--hired by the Democratic majority, they conclude that over a 10-year period--shouldn't we be thinking at least 10 years ahead? Senator Coburn says it will be on our children and grandchildren. But they conclude that the bill will have a negative impact on the economy. Yes, it will help some in the short term. Over the 10-year period, the drain of the interest and capital taken out of the economy to fund this effort will actually weaken the economy, and the total gross domestic product over that period of time will be less than if we had no bill at all. That doesn't mean we should not have a bill. What we should have is a bill from which we can get some results. I hope and I do believe the American people will continue to talk to their Congressmen and Senators; they will be sharing their thoughts with them. My phones are ringing off the hook. They know you cannot get something for nothing and that debts have to be repaid. There is nothing mysterious about these fundamental principles. We act like they are not a reality. The CBO score points out what happens is when you take money out of the future to put into today--or when you borrow it and put it into the economy today, it crowds out about a third of a dollar's worth of private domestic capital. That is the kind of thing that weakens our potential to bounce back from this problem we are in. It is real and it is serious and I certainly favor taking action. Madam President, I thank the Chair. I am grieving tonight. Hopefully, there will be an opportunity to do better than the bill before us now. I yield the floor.