America's Small Business Tax Relief Act of 2015--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, as you know, we have been back home in our States for the last couple of weeks or traveling, listening to our constituents. It was great to be back home and to spend some time talking to the people who I work for about the challenges facing our country and what we have been doing in the U.S. Senate to try to address those challenges. While it is always true that people wish there would be more consensus building and more solutions offered, I would say that, by and large, people feel we had a pretty productive 2015 and are hoping we can continue that sort of productivity here in the Senate in 2016, even though this is a Presidential election year.

Yesterday was a good example of that productivity. We passed a trademark enforcement piece of legislation basically without--it was unanimous, to the best of my knowledge. All the Senators here in the Chamber voted for it without going through the official procedural hoops that are required in order to process legislation here in the Senate.

Previously we passed legislation--recently the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act--to deal with the crisis involving opioid or prescription drug painkillers that are being abused around the country, and people are unfortunately falling into that trap, and then the cheap heroin that sometimes is used as a substitute if people can't find the opioid prescription drugs.

So Congress actually has been doing the people's business here. Of course, we are in the type of profession where people will sometimes say: Well, we think you are doing a great job. And others will say: Well, we don't think you are doing quite so great a job. But that is the nature of the beast. Either way, it is always good to be back home.

As I was talking to my constituents back home, I was glad to hear one thing. No matter what part of the State I was traveling in, there was appreciation for the decision we made to give the voters a voice on who makes the next lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Texans want to have a say in who replaces Justice Scalia on our Nation's highest Court, and I believe their voice should be heard.

We are already engaged in the Presidential primaries process. Today is the Wisconsin primary. It will not be that long before we have a new President who will make that appointment. I simply believe it is important--particularly in something that could extend for the next 25 or 30 years and really affect the balance of power on the Supreme Court--that this be left to the voters.

We all know we did not end up in this position overnight. In fact, there is a lot of history. I remember that back when I came to the Senate, I was frustrated by the fact that there was so much politics at play in the judicial confirmation process. Having served as a State court judge for 13 years, I had some pretty strong views about that. But the problem is, there has been a lot that has transpired in the interim. Everything from the Biden rule to the Reid statement in 2005 was really a threat saying that if President George W. Bush were to appoint a judge to the Supreme Court, it was within the authority of the U.S. Senate not to hold a vote on that appointment. That was in 2005. That was the Democratic leader. And then in 2007 when George W. Bush was still President, 18 months before he left office, Senator Schumer, the next Democratic leader, said there should be a presumption against confirmation. This is something that is nearly unprecedented. Then we know that in the interim there has been this development of filibusters or the requirement of 60 votes in order to get judges confirmed brought to us by our Democratic friends, as well as something we didn't think would ever happen but, in fact, did happen under Democratic leadership: the so- called nuclear option--in other words, breaking the Senate rules in order to confirm judges mainly to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals--what some call the second most powerful court in the Nation--in order to pack that court with judges who are more likely to affirm President Obama's constitutional overreach.

So, as I said, much to my chagrin and I bet to a lot of people's chagrin, we have seen the playbook torn up by our Democratic colleagues and rewritten. The question is, Are we going to be operating under a different set of rules than they would if the roles were reversed? Frankly, my constituents back home think the rules ought to be the same no matter who happens to be in the majority and who happens to be in the White House.

Even more significantly, the Supreme Court is the final authority for many of the most pressing issues that face our country. The Court often acts as a constitutional counterweight to the passions of both the legislative and executive branches. We have seen the Supreme Court operate time and time again as a check on the Obama administration's lawless actions. We saw this in the recess-appointment case. We have seen it in a number of different cases where the Court has said to the Obama administration: You have simply overextended your reach beyond legitimate boundaries.

I am thankful for that important counterbalance in our government and the give-and-take that the Founding Fathers intended for us to have with three coequal branches of government. But, as I said, the next Supreme Court Justice could well change the ideological direction of the Court for a generation.

Rightly or wrongly, the Supreme Court has the final word on issues as varied as the scope of the President's power, the ability of the States to make their own decisions about self-government, and questions of personal liberty and the like. The Court can and has made all the difference in the world, and one Justice can affect that for a long time.

We recall Justice Scalia as somebody who believed that the words of the Constitution mattered greatly, and he served on the Court for 30 years. Justice Scalia was what was sometimes called an originalist. In other words, he believed the Court had an obligation to apply the Constitution and the law as written, not based on some substituted value judgment for what perhaps the unelected, lifetime-tenured judges would have preferred in terms of policy. That is not their role. They don't stand for election. It is our role as the policymakers in the political branches who do stand for election--and thus give the American people a chance to voice their pleasure or displeasure, as the case may be, with the direction that we perhaps take the country when it comes to policy. But that is not a role the Supreme Court should play.

We need to approach filling this seat with great care. The administration and their liberal allies are now trying to basically throw everything but the kitchen sink at stopping the American people from getting a voice in this matter. In other words, they are trying to force Congress's hand or the Senate's hand to confirm the Presidential nominee at this time. They are spending millions of dollars on TV advertising. They have hired consultants, and they found some sympathetic allies in the media to criticize us.

I don't begrudge anybody who has a different point of view than I do about this, but I simply cannot in good conscience vote to confirm another Obama nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court in the waning days of this President's term in office. I happen to believe we should not process this nomination. We should exercise the power we have under the Constitution to grant or withhold consent, and in this case to withhold consent.

But here we are, several weeks after the President announced his nominee, and nothing has really changed. All the money and the consultants in the world are not going to change the fact that the American people are going to have their say. We don't know exactly how that will turn out, but that is because this is based not on the personality of the nominee but on the principle that the American people should have their voice heard.

As I said, the President has the authority to nominate anybody he chooses, but that doesn't change our responsibility or our authority under that same Constitution. We remain committed to the idea that this vacancy should be filled by the next President.

I want to be clear that the American people do deserve a voice here, and we will make sure they are heard. In the meantime, as I started out saying, there are a lot of things we can do working together. Just because we disagree about this one item doesn't mean we have to disagree about everything or that Congress needs to lapse into dysfunction.

We currently have a bill pending before us involving the Federal Aviation Administration and the very important topic of safe and secure air travel. We can disagree about how to proceed with the President's nominee to the Supreme Court and still work together to pass other good consensus legislation. So I hope all of us, our colleagues across the aisle and on this side of the aisle, will continue to work together to do things I think would help the country a lot, things such as criminal justice reform--a bill that has been voted out of the Judiciary Committee, that enjoys broad bipartisan support, and that the President of the United States has said he supports.

There is also other important legislation that I am very concerned about and interested in involving the intersection of mental illness with our criminal justice system and the fact that our jails have become the de facto warehouses for people with mental illness who are going untreated and obviously the homeless who are living on our streets, many of whom are suffering from mental illness.

I hope we can continue to work together on these other consensus matters even though we disagree about this one very important matter. I am confident that we can and we will.

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