Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2019--Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, this week marks the continuation of a bipartisan effort to actually do the work we were elected to do.

The New York Times recently published an article that said the Senate got its groove back. I don't know if I would go that far, but certainly we are making some progress when it comes to these important funding bills.

These two appropriation bills are two of the largest ones in the Federal Government. One, of course, is for the Department of Defense which, appropriately, is the No. 1 priority of the Federal Government-- to maintain the peace and keep our Nation safe. The other funds the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education.

After we pass these bills this week, which we will, we will have passed 9 of the 12 appropriations bills, which cover 87 percent of discretionary spending.

I might add that when I mention discretionary spending, it is noteworthy that about 70 percent of what the Federal Government spends is not discretionary spending. It is mandatory spending, which is another story in and of itself.

But insofar as the Congress's responsibility to appropriate the funds in discretionary spending, we will have covered about 87 percent of that.

I want to express my gratitude again to Chairman Shelby and Vice Chairman Leahy for their efforts in facilitating such a relatively smooth process on all of our appropriations bills so far. They have done a good job of managing the bills and, even more importantly, of managing the people and preventing this process from devolving into a quagmire, as it occasionally does.

To give you an idea of how difficult this can be, it bears mentioning that it has been 15 years since the Senate last passed the Labor- Health-Education bill in time for the start of the fiscal year. So hats off to Mr. Shelby and Mr. Leahy. As the majority leader, Senator McConnell, said yesterday, these two bills represent big strides toward avoiding another omnibus, which the President said he wanted to do, and appropriating the taxpayers' money the right way.

The funding bills we are working on this week are important, but they are not the only developments worth noting. Remember, recently we heard that in the second quarter of this year--the second 3-month period of this year--our economy grew at an astounding 4.1 percent after years of economic stagnation and wages that never seemed to go up. We were able to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act at the end of last year, which helped provide a needed stimulus to the economy by putting more money into the pockets of the people who earned it. We were successful in lowering rates across the board and doubled the child tax credit and standard deduction.

Over the last 9 months, my constituents in Texas have been writing to me about the effect it has had on their lives. These are men and women like Virginia Davis, a small business owner who said the changes will help keep expenses down and help her company buy new equipment. Then there is Suzan Casey, a widow in New Braunfels, TX, which is north of San Antonio, who is working part time even when facing health issues. She wrote and said that she appreciated our efforts at reforming our outdated Tax Code and that every little bit helps, especially when she has been saving up the money to go visit her grandson in California.

In Texas, our economy has been robust for a long time now. We heard that last month, more than 23,000 jobs were added--the 25th consecutive month of job growth in my home State. In some places, such as Midland in the Permian Basin, which is the center of the universe when it comes to oil and gas production, it seems, the unemployment rate was as low as 2.2 percent. It is hard to find anybody who will work in the Permian Basin, in the Midland-Odessa area, because the economy is so strong that every able- bodied, willing worker is essentially employed. These are positive signs, although obviously there are stresses and strains that go along with it.

Tax reform and the good economic news are complemented by other legislative victories we have had on behalf of the American people during this Congress.

We funded rebuilding efforts following natural disasters, such as Hurricane Harvey.

We enacted the Fix NICS Act and the STOP School Violence Act to help protect Americans from gun violence.

We delivered real healthcare choices to American veterans with the VA MISSION Act.

We passed occupational licensing reform, as well as banking reform, which helped our small banks, credit unions, and community banks get rid of some of the rules that never should have been applied to them in the first place because they weren't the cause of the huge crisis that led to the great recession just a few short years ago. It wasn't the community banks--it was Wall Street and some of the overreach there-- but community banks in small towns in and around Texas and elsewhere were the collateral damage.

This last year and a half, we fought sex trafficking by passing legislation targeting internet predators, and we have worked hard and I think helped to reduce the rape kit backlog.

We have confirmed a total of 53 judges this Congress, including 26 circuit court judges, 26 district judges, and a Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch. Nomination of Brett Kavanaugh

Mr. President, 2 weeks from today, we will start the confirmation hearing of the next Supreme Court Justice we will consider, and that is Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who has been nominated to succeed Justice Anthony Kennedy as an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

As I said, his hearing is set for the first week of September, and I hope we will move quickly to vote on his confirmation after the hearing. His confirmation process includes the largest production of documents ever in the Senate's consideration of a Supreme Court nominee. I appreciate Chairman Chuck Grassley's spearheading the effort in such a transparent, efficient, and thorough manner.

To see how a judge will behave once elevated to the Supreme Court, the best evidence of how they will perform their job is how they have performed as a lower court judge, as Judge Kavanaugh has been over the last 12 years in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. The best way to find out about his judicial philosophy, his temperament, and how he actually handles cases is to look at how he has done each of those things during the 12 years he has served on the DC Circuit. Yet we have heard some of our colleagues on the other side, including the minority leader and the former Judiciary chairman, Senator Leahy, who actually used to agree with us that the best way to evaluate a nominee--for example, during Justice Sotomayor's hearing--was by looking at their judicial record, but now they have changed their tune.

In Judge Kavanaugh's case, what the rulings show consistently is that he is a diligent and thoughtful judge. His rulings are clear, they are impartial, and he strives to achieve justice in each one.

Yesterday, I mentioned some of the cases in which Judge Kavanaugh's opinions, whether written as part of the majority opinion or the dissent, were vindicated by an adoption of that position and that opinion, essentially, by the Supreme Court on a 9-to-0 basis, but I would like to talk about another couple of arguments that have now started to bubble up.

As I like to say, a false charge unrebutted is sometimes a charge believed, so we have to work hard to remind people that just because someone says something about Judge Kavanaugh's record, it is not necessarily true.

The first claim that has now popped up is that he is somehow an ``anti-worker radical.'' This is a phrase coined by the pundit Paul Krugman of the New York Times. It sounds pretty ugly. I guess it means that the judge is predisposed, when deciding cases, to find against employees and hard-working men and women in favor of management and big business. But the fact is, Judge Kavanaugh's record indicates exactly the opposite.

In one case, a pro se litigant had been terminated after filing a discrimination complaint. Judge Kavanaugh joined the majority in a ruling for the employee, finding that a reasonable jury could have found unlawful discrimination, harassment, and retaliation against the plaintiff. That doesn't sound like an anti-worker radical to me.

Judge Kavanaugh wrote a separate concurrence that a racial epithet that may have been used could create a hostile work environment, even if uttered a single time.

In another case, involving a terrible accident involving a trainer of a killer whale at a theme park, Judge Kavanaugh did not simply defer to large corporate interests. In fact, the strict question of liability, which would have implicated State and Federal tort law, was not even before him, nor was the question of whether the work environment at the theme park was unreasonably dangerous. Instead, the question before the court and before Judge Kavanaugh was one of administrative law.

Judge Kavanaugh argued persuasively that a Federal agency had ignored congressional intent when interpreting a statute in self-serving ways to give itself, the Federal agency, authority that Congress had not conferred. He argued that this agency had made arbitrary distinctions between different kinds of sporting and entertainment events and departed from longstanding agency precedent. That actually was the crux of his decision, despite the mischaracterization from some of the critics.

We can count on Judge Kavanaugh to appropriately consider overreach by the administrative state and to enforce the rule of law that protects both corporations and individual workers. I think we have plenty evidence of that.

One additional line of attack is that the judge has somehow been insufficiently protective of Fourth Amendment privacy rights, but one expert at the libertarian Cato Institute who has analyzed the judge's record in detail found that Judge Kavanaugh is a ``big step forward for constitutional liberty.'' Among other things, this expert noted that Judge Kavanaugh had been a leading advocate of interpreting statutes to include robust mens rea protection. In other words, in criminal statutes, before you can be convicted of a crime, you have to have criminal intent. That is mens rea.

Judge Kavanaugh has authored 307 opinions on the DC Circuit and has attracted praise from across the ideological spectrum for the clarity of his thought and expression and the precision of his legal reasoning. He respects the roles and responsibilities that are assigned to the different branches of our government by the Constitution, and he sees the proper role of the judiciary as a narrow one, albeit an important one. It does not make policy. It interprets the law and applies it to individual cases, one at a time, impartially, with no eye toward the outcome or the politics of the case.

The truth is, I believe that after the hearing we will have the week of September 4, the American people will conclude, as I have concluded based on my knowledge of Judge Kavanaugh for the last 18 years, that he is an eminently qualified and well-respected jurist by all those who know him and are familiar with his work. I look forward to confirming him as a Justice early this fall, hopefully in time for the October term of the Supreme Court, the first Monday in October.

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