Emergency Unemployment Compensation Extension Act -- Continued

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Madam President, I rise today to speak on the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014. But before I make those comments, I wish to associate myself with the remarks of the Senator from California Mrs. Boxer and also the Senator from Rhode Island Mr. Jack Reed and also all of those who voted to move forward where we continue to provide an economic safety net for those people who have lost their job and are actively looking for work, and to continue this economic and social contract which has been part of the way Americans respond to help other Americans at a time when they are down but they shouldn't feel as though they are out. I hope we could put party rancor aside and look at commonsense ways to move this bill forward.

In terms of the so-called pay-fors, I have been here a long time. I have never seen this pay-for before on unemployment compensation, particularly for a 90-day bill. We are talking about 90 days, and we are already in the middle of January. I hope the two leaders can come together and we can resolve this.

On another topic, I wish to report to the Senate some very good news. I rise today as the chair of the Appropriations Committee, and I wish to announce that the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014 has completed all its work in the committee process. We have completed our conference and it has been filed in the House and should be considered in the House and Senate this week. What does that mean?

First of all, our Appropriations Committee has met the test of the Constitution. Article 1, section 9 of the Constitution directs that there be an Appropriations Committee, although it is not referred to by name, and that every year we review the annual spending of the Federal Government and vote upon it.

We also followed the law. By following the law, the law is the bipartisan Budget Act forged by Chairpersons RYAN and MURRAY. We meet the requirements of the Budget Control Act.

The Budget Control Act looks at total spending for the Federal Government--mandatory spending and then discretionary spending. We who are appropriators handle all of the accounts for discretionary spending. Guess what. The Budget Committee puts a cap on us, and that is great. It is a way that we actually have a cap on spending that everybody knows and everybody voted for.

So we have a cap by law on discretionary spending of $1.012 trillion for fiscal year 2014. The work of our 12 committees stayed within that cap, and yet we spent the money to meet certain areas. We met compelling needs. We certainly preserved national security. We looked out for our human capital, particularly our children in terms of education, and also invested in physical capital--improving infrastructure--and also the long-range needs of our country by putting public investments into important research and development by $1 billion more in NIH.

We also met the mandate of the American people who told us: Work together. Be bipartisan. Work across the aisle and work across the dome. And we did it. They also said: When the bill comes up, don't do it with brinkmanship and don't do it with showmanship. Get the job done in a commonsense way which promotes growth in our country but yet at the same time looks at reducing debt.

They said: Don't do showdown politics. And we won't. We will pass it because we have met our deadline.

They said: Don't put government on autopilot with something called those continuing funding resolutions. We don't do that either. Every one of our 12 subcommittees is in this comprehensive bill.

We dealt with difficult and divisive policy issues, but we did it with diligence and determination. And, I must add, we tried to promote an atmosphere of civility as we did it. It was tense and it was intense. But at the end of the day, we did work pinpointing how to do the job rather than finger-pointing at each other. As I said, negotiations were conducted that way.

Our House Appropriations Committee chairman--Mr. Hal Rogers, the gentleman from Kentucky--and I forged this agreement, along with ranking members, my vice chairman Senator Shelby of Alabama and in the House Congresswoman Lowey of New York. We didn't do it alone. There was bipartisan agreement of all the subcommittee chairs and over 50 Members of the House and the Senate.

We met a very stringent deadline. When we left here on December 20, we had to produce a bill by January 15. That is tomorrow. That is when the continuing resolution expires. We are asking for a 72-hour extension, not to finish the job, but so we can do our deliberations on the floor in both the House and the Senate.

We worked day and night. I jokingly said during the deliberations: I wish I were as thin as I am stretched, because we really worked at it. Over the holidays our staffs and our subcommittee chairmen worked. The only time they took off was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. So we thank each and every one of them for their dedication.

As I said, this bill required very difficult choices. It meant give and take. It meant more giving on both sides, because there were no big takes.

We worked under a very tight budget, $1 trillion. It sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But of the $1 trillion, $600 billion was in the Department of Defense. The other $300 billion was in discretionary spending for all of the domestic agencies. It comes out to like 620 and 380, but those are the rough numbers.

So we did meet our national security needs, but we also were very mindful. I was particularly mindful of the social contract with the American people. I wanted to have a bill to help create jobs in this country, not make-work but real work, in rebuilding our physical infrastructure on roads and bridges and clean water. I also wanted to look ahead to the long-range needs of our country, in research and discoveries, and not only win the Nobel prizes but win the markets. We expanded our commercial service office to help us promote exports overseas, accelerating manufacturing institutes where government could work with this new emerging dynamic, small-scale manufacturing. I have lost over 12 percent of manufacturing in my State, so manufacturing is important.

We wanted to make sure that families felt they had a government that is on their side--first of all, helping with school safety--and we have a bipartisan program in here to promote school safety--but at the same time to promote quality childcare and early childhood education. We then made those kinds of investments, all with an eye to getting value for taxpayers.

Our colleagues were very clear, and so were the American people: We have to have a more frugal eye. I instructed my colleagues on the Senate side: Let's look at those programs which are dated, duplicative, or dysfunctional. They get a D: dated, duplicative, and dysfunctional. We were able to eliminate many of them, and we will be back at it next year doing a scrub.

If you notice, there is no atmosphere of crisis.

The other thing that I am proud of in this bill is that we avoided contentious policy riders. I think we have been able to deal with those in a way where they would not be a problem for the other side of the aisle.

However, there was one item wrong or one technical mistake in the Budget Committee that I am proud that we were able to fix. This was really at the very top of our agenda, when Mr. Rogers and I met. We were deeply concerned about the cost-of-living issue related to military retirees of working age who were disabled or survivors. Their COLAs were mistakenly reduced by 1 percent in the recent budget agreement. This bill, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014, fixes that problem.

It is limited in scope. It is limited to disabled military retirees and survivors of departed servicemembers--the neediest of the needy. We hope, as time moves on, there is a Presidential and DOD commission on pension reform at DOD, and we will have a comprehensive approach and do it. But I want our colleagues to know we were very mindful of these veterans. So we did this fix for military retirees of working age who were disabled or survivors of departed servicemembers, but we also did something else.

If you go to the Web site in the House, which has the most detail because it is pending there--it will come up in the Senate when it moves here tomorrow--we really put money into veterans health care. We put money into fixing the veterans disability backlog. I know the Senator from Massachusetts believes that when you are on the front lines you should not have to wait at the back of the line if you are a wounded warrior to get your disability benefits determined. So we pushed for those reforms, and we put the taxpayers' dollars behind them because we knew that is the way they would want us to spend their money.

We also maintained the veterans education budget because many of our young men and women coming back home who served so well over there need to brush up on education here to move them to jobs here.

I hope in voting for this bill people realize it is a vote to support our most vulnerable patriots, to make sure we keep our promises to our veterans, and that we also look at the comprehensive bill that we have moved ahead without rancor, without roar, and we stayed within the budget parameters given to us on a bipartisan agreement.

The House will consider this agreement this week. They have sent us over a 3-day extension so we could complete our work. I hope we pass it. I would like it to pass tonight or certainly tomorrow. We will be on the floor for ample debate on this bill, and I look forward to answering some questions.

But at the end of the day, when all is said and done--in this institution often more is said rather than done--you will know we did get it done. I will have more to say about it when the bill comes to the floor.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source