Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. COBURN. I have an inquiry of the Chair. It was my understanding that I had 4 minutes remaining on our side and that Senator Rubio had time granted to him by the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. Is that not correct?

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair is unaware of that arrangement.

Mr. COBURN. What I would simply do is ask unanimous consent that I have 7 minutes to make a statement.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?

Ms. MIKULSKI. If the Senator can stick to 7 minutes, we have no objection.

Mr. COBURN. I can stick to 7 minutes. I will hear the gavel come down and I will quit.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, the motion of the Senator from Oklahoma is accepted and the Senator is recognized.

Mr. COBURN. First, I give praise to the chair and the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee for the cooperative nature of the committee this year in terms of inserting good government amendments into appropriations bills. It was a real pleasure to be able to work with them and to put some of the oversight results that we have done over the past few years into appropriations bills.

The bill we have on the floor, even though the chair is supporting the bill, is not her bill. It is a bill that came to her from House Republicans. So any criticism I might have of the bill is certainly not directed toward the chair of the Appropriations Committee. But it is important to be reminded of what the Congress told the American people less than 2 years ago, that we were going to go on a diet, and then 1 year ago when we had the Ryan-Murray agreement.

I will outline where we are with what we are getting ready to vote on, because we are about $47 billion above what we agreed to in the Ryan-Murray budget, and that doesn't include emergency funding.

Appropriators didn't write this bill. This bill came out of the House. We understand the timing of it, we understand the process. But this bill doesn't keep our word to the American public that we said we were going to keep. That is No. 1.

No. 2 is the chair of the Appropriations Committee attempted to put bills on the floor, and she was open to an amendment process. One bill was pulled because there was no agreement to allow any amendments to $3.6 trillion worth of spending--none, zero. That wasn't her desire. She is a fair broker in this body for what needs to be done when it comes to spending.

So I would make the point on the fiscal aspect of this bill.

When criminals in this country hurt other people, judges throughout the country--and Federal judges--impose a penalty, and criminals who are convicted end up paying into a Crime Victims Fund. The Crime Victims Fund isn't Federal tax dollars, it is individual payments by felons to make amens for damage and injury to people upon whom their crime was cast.

In this bill is $20 billion worth of false savings, but the way we calculate it is since we are not going to spend the money that is due to the crime victims, we are going to say that is going to save us money and, so, therefore, we can spend that money somewhere else.

If you did that on your income taxes or if you were a corporation and filed that with the SEC, it wouldn't take long for you to be in jail. But that is what the appropriators in the House did and we just got through doing this last December, the same amount of money on the same fund.

What I want the American people to see is regardless of whether you think we ought to pass this bill, shouldn't there be some clarity about the integrity of our numbers? Shouldn't we, if we can't meet the guidelines, just admit it and say we can't meet it rather than saying we are meeting it and create a false set of numbers? Shouldn't we at least do that? Aren't the American people worth that?

But instead, we have $11.8 billion from the Crime Victims Fund and $6.3 billion from the Children's Health Fund, which are false savings. They are not real savings.

So we are not going to be honest.

Well, I am going to be honest. The American public, the Senate, and the authors of this bill in the House will be lying to you if you believe the numbers in this bill. They are not true.

That is not the chair of the Appropriations Committee who made that decision, it was the House appropriators who made that decision to use false numbers to create a false set of achievements.

Finally, and I think I am about out of time, I would say there is one other aspect that disturbs me about this bill.

We have a mess in the Middle East today. Sitting on the Intelligence Committee and sitting on Homeland Security, I don't disagree we ought to be involved in terms of going after ISIS, but I think we ought to recognize that we created the problem in the first place. We created the vacuum that allowed that to flourish.

I will state my assessment of where we are. We now have recognized this threat and we have a political plan but no real policy plan to confront ISIS.

Having just heard from both the head of the CIA and also the Defense Department in response to the President's plan, what I can tell you is we know that something needs to be done, but your government doesn't yet know what to do.

I know there is authorization for monies in here. We need it. We are going to have to fight it. But let's be very clear, as Members of this body, to ask the important questions so that we don't go down a road that is made even worse. We have the brain power in the Senate, the experience, and the gray hair to do that.

I ask my colleagues to be very careful--not with this; this is going to happen. This CR is going to happen. It is a terrible way to run the government. The appropriations chair doesn't want to run it this way, but let's be very careful on the questions we ask in the future.

I thank the chair of the Appropriations Committee for her kindness in yielding me the time.

I yield the floor.

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