Senate Accomplishments
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, we are on the downward trajectory of this year's Congress, the 114th Congress, and I thought it would be appropriate to take a few minutes to talk about what this Chamber has been able to accomplish since we convened in January. I know there is a lot of cynicism and indeed outright fear about the way the Federal Government has been operating, and unfortunately I think a lot of that is attributable to the fact that this President has shown a complete unwillingness to work with Congress in many areas; for example, such as immigration reform. So when people see the President acting unilaterally--thank goodness the courts have stopped it, but it causes them to lose confidence in the Federal Government's ability to address the problems they live with day in and day out and which they have a right to see us do our very best to address.
I can't help but think about this time last year and how, with great anticipation and high expectations, the American people decided to give our side of the aisle, the Republican side, the opportunity to serve in the majority. Our task was a daunting one. The Senate had basically been ground to a halt, and I think Members on both sides of the aisle came back in January ready to change the way we do things around here. I think some of our friends across the aisle found that the do-nothing strategy didn't work for them either, even though they were in the majority, because a number of Senate incumbents--having to face the voters without anything to show--ended up being defeated in last November's election. It didn't work for the American people. So it didn't work for the American people, and it didn't work for those Senators. As I said, the American people deserve better.
We tried to do better, and I think we have made some progress. We have been getting a few things done, delivering on promises made to the American people and working to find real solutions to the problems faced by those whom we are honored to represent. One of those areas that has been particularly important to me is doing something about an issue that plagues every State in our country; that is, human trafficking. At the beginning of last year, I was honored to lead a bipartisan effort to pass legislation designed to help victims of human trafficking get a helping hand and hopefully find a path to healing.
The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, which is now the law of the land, will help these victims, who are too often children, be treated like the victims they are instead of common criminals. After about a month on the floor of the Senate, that bill ultimately ended up passing, 99 to 0, and it was signed into law by the President. It points out that the Congress can work with the President on a bipartisan basis to fight some of the most tragic and troubling issues that face our Nation.
There are other examples. In the fall we passed a major cyber security bill that will help protect the American people from cyber attacks. The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act fosters information sharing to help address the growing cyber threats we face. Of course we read about them in the news, if we haven't experienced them in person ourselves. The need for this legislation couldn't have been more pressing because over the summer the administration confirmed that hackers had accessed sensitive background information of more than 21 million people on the computer systems of the Office of Personnel Management--21 million Americans. That followed a similar breach at the Internal Revenue Service in which the personal data of more than 100,000 taxpayers was stolen. So passage of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act was the right thing to do, and it was done on a bipartisan basis. We are now engaged in a conference discussion with the House to try to reconcile the differences between those bills before it goes to the President.
That is the way we ought to be doing business around here--trying to find solutions that make America stronger and make our cyber infrastructure more resilient.
Another example was from last week. Last week we passed a multiyear highway bill for the first time in more than a decade. My State is blessed to be a fast-growing State, and of course that has encouraged a lot of people to move there--voting with their feet, as I like to say, and coming from places where jobs aren't being produced because the economy is not growing.
This bill helps Texas on the State and local level to prepare for those growing infrastructure needs that come with this increased growth. Just as significantly, it will help the rest of the country as well by creating jobs to build and maintain that infrastructure as well as the commerce that travels on that infrastructure and the environment which will be served by avoiding unnecessary congestion.
This bill also specifically grants States like Texas the flexibility to invest in infrastructure projects--in our case, along the border. We have a 1,200-mile common border with Mexico. It is a unique part of our country. I like to kid my constituents back home. I say: What most of my colleagues in Washington know about the border they read in novels or saw in a movie somewhere. It is a unique and wonderful part of our State, but it is also one that deserves our undivided attention because of the security threats, drug trafficking, and other illegal activity. It is no small thing for the Nation's top exporting State, one that shares almost 1,200 miles with Mexico, to be able to direct some of these funds to help build and maintain that infrastructure.
By the way, I know people frequently talk about Mexico and our relationship with Mexico in a negative way, but we also understand there are enormous benefits to our proximity to Mexico and our shared border. There are about 6 million jobs in America that depend on binational trade with Mexico. While Mexico has its problems--and they certainly have serious problems--we are working with them on their security and corruption issues and the like. It will take all of our efforts in order to address them. By promoting better border infrastructure, Texas can build on our strong trade record, which already includes the export of more than $100 billion in goods to Mexico each year and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs--6 million jobs nationwide.
This multiyear highway bill will also give Texas and other States across the country more certainty. Before this we had been looking at temporary patches, which makes it impossible to plan, and it also makes the expenditure of those dollars enormously inefficient. This bill gives us greater certainty to make sure our States can deliver projects to facilitate greater volumes of trade and travel along interstates and other critical transportation corridors.
An area where we have not yet achieved success but where I think there is great promise--there are other areas, such as criminal justice reform, where I believe we can in the months ahead register another success, again for the benefit of the people we represent.
Last week, at the President's invitation, I joined a bipartisan, bicameral group of legislators to come to the White House to discuss a way forward for bringing substantive criminal justice reform to our country.
For too long, in my State we learned that we treated prisons like warehouses, warehousing people and ignoring the fact--or perhaps just not recognizing the significance of the fact--that sooner or later most of them were going to get out of prison. So what we decided to do in Texas in 2007 was to get smart on crime, not just tough on crime. Nobody doubted how tough we were on crime. But what we realized is that some of the money we spent on corrections could be plowed back into educational programs that would help willing inmates actually learn job skills, deal with their drug and alcohol problems, if they had those, and, in short, better prepare for life on the outside so they didn't end up a frequent flyer or in that turnstile, going from prison to the outside and then back again.
So we have been working on this issue for some time, based on the success we enjoyed in Texas and in other States. The product is a bill called the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, which passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee 15 to 5. I know Chairman Goodlatte in the House of Representatives is working on a bipartisan bill in that Chamber as well. So I think this is one of those pivotal moments where folks across the political spectrum see the advantage of working together in favor of bringing real progress that will benefit the American people by making our criminal justice system more effective and our communities safer. By the way, we can save money at the same time.
On another matter where we have seen significant progress, this week we will be voting on the conference report that accompanies the Every Child Achieves Act. This is the bill that actually fixes No Child Left Behind. This legislation was passed here in the Senate by wide margins over the summer. Chairman Alexander and the conference committee and Ranking Member Murray were able to achieve an amazing thing in this divided, polarized political environment we are in, with, I believe, a 39-to-1 vote in the conference committee for a bill that combines both the House and the Senate product. This is really landmark education legislation that will help parents and local communities take control of their children's education instead of ceding to the Federal Government. Certainly, this bill is another win for the American people.
Where I come from, people like the fact that we essentially have repealed the common core mandate, that we have eliminated the Federal Government as a national school board, and that we have sent the power back where it belongs, which is to parents and teachers and local school districts, and ceded more of that authority from here in Washington, DC, back to them.
I could continue with this list of legislative accomplishments by noting that the Chamber has also passed legislation that replaced the flawed Medicare payment system for physicians. This is the notorious doc fix. This is another example where for years and years we passed temporary patches and never solved the underlying problem. But Congress did, and I think that is another thing we can be proud of, along with the first budget passed since 2009, and there is more I could add to the list. But my point is there is a difference in the new 114th Congress, and elections do make a difference. We have worked together on a bipartisan basis where we can to make progress to solve problems for the American people during this first year of the 114th Congress. A lot of this is due to the steady leadership of the majority leader, the Senator from Kentucky, and all the hard work our colleagues have put in to make this such a productive year.
So we are on track to continue with this momentum into the new year, and with just another week or so of work to do before we break for the holidays, I think we can take some pride in these accomplishments but yet know that there is a lot more we have to do, not only for the remainder of this year but into next year as well.
Madam President, I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source