Making Continuing Appropriations During a Government Shutdown

Floor Speech

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Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I appreciate the work of my colleagues on this legislation. They have accomplished some very good things. We need legislation to pass to help our veterans. The needs are real, and recent revelations of substantially substandard care--and too often no care at all--at our VA medical centers are shocking. There is and has been a long-term problem with the management of that agency. It is heartbreaking. It is an embarrassment. We owe our veterans better care than they have been given.

One of the keys to improve that care is improving accountability, ensuring money is being properly spent, not simply wasted by government bureaucrats. The money needs to get to our veterans.

Our national debt now is $17 trillion. It is growing rapidly. We cannot be lighthearted or cavalier about our responsibility to follow our agreement to honor the budget limitations we have. There are a lot of budgetary freedoms we have and a lot of ability we have and duties we have to set priorities in our spending. Veterans clearly are a priority. I fought hard against the recent push to cut veterans pensions and led an effort to restore those pensions payments.

In this case we are dealing with an issue of bureaucratic accountability. What happens so often is that in the crush and press of business, we are unable to reach agreements on finding money somewhere else in this monstrous bureaucracy and government of ours, and we simply break the budget and add to the debt. Our veterans deserve better than that.

I am the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee. We wrestle with these issues--the chairman of the committee, Senator Murray--and the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office indicate that this legislation, as drafted, violates the Budget Act.

Indeed, the entire bill, the way the language is written, has been declared an ``emergency'' which allows its authors to avoid finding the efficiencies and the accountabilities needed to stay within the Federal budget limits both parties agreed to. There is plenty of wasteful spending to be cut elsewhere in government, and much we can do to increase accountability at the VA.

Even more concerning is the new open-ended entitlement legislation in the bill. The bill would authorize emergency spending but sets no limits on that spending. Section 801 says ``such sums as necessary.'' Well, how much is necessary? This is an important conversation to have, to wrestle with, and to develop solutions. But by simply not developing these solutions, we invite more of the same kind of accountability problems we have seen that brought us here.

I feel strongly that we have to do the right thing for our veterans, but history suggests a blank check for the bureaucracy, an unlimited entitlement program, will not have the desired results--indeed, may even yield the opposite results from what we hope to achieve.

We need to resist the temptation to create more entitlements and more entitlements, which is one of the reasons we are heading recklessly toward fiscal crisis, as our own Congressional Budget Office has indicated, and instead focus on creating reforms and solutions that improve that quality of service and the effectiveness that is delivered. Isn't that our job? Isn't that what our veterans deserve from us--the very best we can give them? As many hours as it takes for us to get this right, instead of simply avoiding the difficult issues we must tackle to solve this calamity long-term?

There are also 3 years of emergency spending under the legislation, which I think is an unwise precedent for us to set. Again: it leads to the kind of unaccountability, the lack of oversight that helped create this crisis in the first place. We should designate--maybe if we have to do this--2014 money this year where the crisis is. We have already appropriated money. If we need some more, that could be perhaps justified as emergency spending, but a 3-year bill goes beyond what I think is proper. It fails to establish the oversight that Congress has a solemn duty to deliver. We can't just write a blank check and think it will solve these problems. We have to ask the tougher, deeper questions about the changes needed in Washington to do right by our veterans. Details matter. Every line of legislation matters. We need to get this right.

The Appropriations Committee has already reported out the 2015 VA-HUD bill. It is already on the floor and could be here as early as next week. The Senate could easily attach a bipartisan amendment to that that provides the spending called for in this bill with offsets, cuts, efficiencies, and reductions in other spending to pay for it. There are places we could do this.

So I have to tell you, there are some good things in the bill. I think there are. It improves the situation. I like the idea of giving veterans more choice to go to the doctor who is close to them. It is something Senator McCain and Senator Sanders have agreed on. I think that is progress, very much so, but I have to say I cannot suggest to my colleagues that the budget violation now before us should be waived. It should not. Ignoring this requirement will not help our veterans in the long run, but will lead to the same kind of problems we are confronting today. We should adhere to the agreement we reached on spending by finding offsets. If we don't adhere to our spending limits, other programs will crowd out the budget for veterans and mean we have less money in the future not more, to fund these programs. If we ignore our debt, we do a disservice to our veterans. Unfortunately, the bill does not do what the law we agreed to requires. It is not paid for. We all agree veterans are our priority. So then is it not our duty to them to fulfill this priority by reducing wasteful spending elsewhere so that money can be spent on veterans instead? Can we not deliver for these veterans that most basic level of responsibility on our part as lawmakers?

Finally, colleagues, a vote to sustain the budget point of order is a vote that tells the committee to find appropriate money for the bill and does not kill the bill. It does not knock down the bill. It allows it to continue to be alive and a piece of legislation before us. It would just require us to fix the funding. It would require us to fix the bill. So that is what we should be doing. That is why I feel I must raise the budget point of order.

In summary, the bill has mandatory spending that violates the limits we have agreed to in the Budget Act, and the bill also abuses the emergency designation to circumvent the requirement for offsets and the need for accountability.

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