Economic Stimulus

Floor Speech

Mr. President, I wish to express my agreement with the wise words of the distinguished Senator from New Hampshire and expand on the theme he spoke to, along with the Senator from Tennessee earlier.

When I was younger and was going to college, I thought I wanted to become a doctor, but that was until I encountered organic chemistry and physics, and that persuaded me that maybe there was something else out there for me to do. But I did learn about the Hippocratic oath which is what the medical profession takes, this oath basically to first do no harm. I think that ought to be something that guides us as we look at how do we deal with this impending challenge with regard to our economic situation.

I do think we have started off in a very strong way, and I express my congratulations to Speaker Pelosi, Republican Leader BOEHNER, and Secretary of Treasury Hank Paulson for the work they have done which met with as close to universal approval on a bipartisan basis as you can get in the House of Representatives for what the Speaker has called a targeted, temporary, and timely economic stimulus. That will hopefully allow us to avoid a recession and, of course, all the fallout that would result from that recession, including people out of work and obviously negatively affecting the quality of life for a lot of Americans, including my constituents in Texas.

We have to look at this as both a short-term issue and a long-term issue. I hope the kind of bipartisan cooperation and the movement we have seen will start a trend. I am encouraged, as my colleagues have already heard, by some of the work that is being done on a long-term basis by Senator KENT CONRAD and Senator JUDD GREGG, both the chairman and the ranking member of the Budget Committee on which I serve, to deal with the impending long-term crisis of entitlement spending. If we do not do anything in the next 30 years, the only programs that we will have money to spend on as part of the Federal Government is Medicaid, Medicare, and other entitlement spending, plus the interest on the national debt. That is it. We will not have any money to spend on national defense, research, innovation, education, and other programs that are very important to the continued prosperity and future of our country.

That is a looming disaster out on the horizon I hope we will respond to. We cannot afford to take the year off in Congress because we know we are in an election cycle. We have a Presidential election coming up in November, and a third of this body will stand for election as well.

But as the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, has pointed out, we have had an election every 2 years since 1788 in this country--we are going to have another one in November--and we can't use that as an excuse for simply sitting back and becoming spectators rather than active participants in trying to solve the challenges on the economic, security, and all other fronts on both a near-term basis and a long-term basis.

Of course, there are other things we need to do to be able to restore public confidence in the U.S. Congress and Government, and one of the things you will be hearing more about is the proposal that we will be making for a 2-year budget, the idea being that, as we saw last year, on an annual budget we basically spend all year in the appropriations process with very little opportunity for oversight of this huge bureaucracy--the executive branch of the Federal Government. And without oversight, we know bad things can happen. Perhaps with oversight bad things can happen, but we cannot be asleep at the switch when it comes to the oversight responsibilities we have for the Federal Government and Federal spending.

One example I wish to point out is something my colleagues have heard me comment on before, and it is a Web site called expectmore.gov. I hope people who are hearing what I am saying here today will take the opportunity to look at this expectmore.gov Web site created to demonstrate the review by the Office of Management and Budget of over 1,000 Federal Government programs. What they found out is that 22 percent of those programs either are ineffective or else--what may be even worse--they weren't able to tell one way or the other whether they were effective, as Congress intended. That is 22 percent of 1,000 different programs. Yet Congress has done virtually nothing to eliminate those ineffective programs or to make sure those that could be improved and could be effective are in fact improved and the problems corrected. I hope we would use this as an opportunity to deal with our budgetary problems both in the near term and the long term.

I have proposed another initiative, based on the sunset commission that exists in my State, and exists in a number of other States, where periodically we would go back and look at the very reason for the existence of Federal programs. In my State, the sunset commission has been very effective in allowing the State legislature to look at programs--government programs--to determine whether they are still needed and to start at a zero-based budget and force these agencies to justify their budget, rather than what happens here in Washington, which is that things tend to grow and grow and grow and develop their own constituency, and then a bureaucracy that has a vested interest in their growth and proliferation, and there is very little impetus, very little pressure on Congress to eliminate ineffective and unnecessary programs.

I hope we will continue this early spirit of bipartisan cooperation on the emergency stimulus package that came out of the House, and we will do more to carry on this trend when it comes to dealing with our mid- and long-term economic problems, not for ourselves but for our children and for our grandchildren.

There are things in the economic stimulus package that came out of the House that I have some questions about. But I do agree it is important for confidence building in the markets and to demonstrate we are actually capable of acting when action is required that we act on a timely basis to pass this House-passed measure. I believe there were only 35 votes against the House stimulus package yesterday, and as I said earlier, that represents overwhelming bipartisan support for this negotiated product.

I know there are Members of the Senate, myself included, who have some other ideas about what we might be able to offer to improve that. The problem is, as we all know, under the rules of the Senate it is basically a free-for-all once that bill comes to the Senate floor, and there can be numerous amendments, there can be filibusters and other delays, which I think are dangerous indeed when a timely response is called for in terms of this targeted, temporary stimulus package.

My conclusion is I think we are better off and the country is better off in the long run showing that we can act on a prompt basis by passing the House version.

Now, that does not mean we can take the rest of the year off or we don't have to be responsive to other concerns that arise, as I have indicated earlier. If there are other things we need to do, then I think there are other opportunities for us to do them. But I do think it is important early on in the year to demonstrate our commitment to working together to solve America's problems.

I saw a poll the other day that said 98 percent of the respondents were sick and tired of the bickering and the partisanship they see in Congress. I am shocked anybody would have to take a poll to conclude that, and why it wasn't 100 percent rather than 98 percent. But here is a chance for us to act, and I hope we will act in the short term to deal with this economic challenge we face in the markets, but then in the long term to make sure that the prosperity we have enjoyed, thanks to our parents and grandparents, will be handed down to our children and grandchildren.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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