Nomination of Gerald J. Pappert to be United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, ever since November 4--this last election, some 3 or so weeks ago--a number of people have speculated as to what a new Republican majority in the Senate will mean for the country. We will be working together with our Republican colleagues in the House and with the President, who has hopefully heard the message the American people sent him on November 4. He was the one who said it was his policies that were on the ballot. I believe the vote by the American people came through pretty loud and clear as to what they thought of those policies. It was pretty clear that they want a new direction.

When people ask me what my constituents expect--my 26.5 million constituents in Texas--I tell them they want us to demonstrate that we can govern. They want us to demonstrate that we can actually solve some of the problems confronting our country. Those problems primarily deal with how we unleash the American economy, get it growing again to create jobs and opportunity so people can find work, provide for their families, and pursue their dreams.

I believe that is what Senator Schumer was saying the other day at the National Press Club. We need to focus on the needs of the middle class and the wage earners. They are seeing stagnant wages. While health care, energy, and other costs go up, their paychecks are shrinking. As a result, they are having to live on less, which is not the American dream most people have bargained for.

The truth is no political party or branch of government can govern on its own. The fact is that even though we have a Republican majority in the House and Senate, we still have a divided government, with President Obama in the White House--and he is not constitutionally irrelevant. In fact, he is critical in terms of actually getting things done.

My hope is that we can find issues we can work on together. I believe Republicans and Democrats can vote to put legislation on the President's desk, but then he has a choice to make--either to sign that legislation into law or veto it. We then have a decision to make as to whether we want to try--and whether we can--override his veto.

The truth is none of us can govern on our own. What has been troubling to me--since the election--is that President Obama seems to think he can govern on his own without regard for the Congress. Now, part of the consequences are the debates going on in the House and here in the Senate about the appropriate response to what has been widely seen as an overreach by the President--particularly when it comes to his Executive action on immigration, which circumvented the Congress. He acted as though he could do this alone without any consequence.

We know one thing for sure, and that is the President cannot appropriate money, which is why we are now having this discussion. But there will be other ramifications and consequences as well. I hope one of those consequences is not that we fall back into the dysfunction we have experienced over the last few years where we find ourselves incapable of working together and getting things done. All we can do is all we can do. As a Senate--as a Congress--we can't make the President do anything he is bound and determined not to do, but we can do our job.

I and others have said: Well, with a new majority in the Senate, we have to show we can govern. The truth is we can't govern by ourselves. The President can't govern by himself, and we can't govern by ourselves. That is the constitutional separation of powers and the division of responsibility that we must embrace together.

I don't know where the President has gotten this idea that he thinks he can govern on his own. For 225 years our constitutional norms have said otherwise, and experience has shown otherwise. If we want to make real progress on improving our broken immigration system--we actually saw a bill passed out of the Senate. The President said he is frustrated with the timetable in the House. But there continues to be a bipartisan desire, I believe, to fix our broken immigration system.

If we want to reform our Tax Code, I think that is something we ought to be getting to work on. The fact of the matter is we have the highest tax rate in the world. That is making America less competitive in terms of attracting investment and jobs. It discourages multinational corporations headquartered in the United States from bringing back the money they have earned overseas because they don't want to have to pay taxes twice--for what they have earned on their income overseas and then pay double again when they bring that money back home. We ought to look at what kind of Tax Code makes sense for us and incentivizes investment and job creation in the United States and not be content with a system that discourages that.

I believe there is bipartisan support for doing what we can to shore up Medicare and Social Security. We have all seen the numbers--the aging baby boomers and more and more people retiring. Unfortunately, these young people are being left holding the bag. We are going to be OK--people my age and my generation--but future generations will not be OK unless we do our job now to deal with Medicare and Social Security and make them sustainable into the future.

What I feel has been most discouraging is health care. Whether you supported the Affordable Care Act or were a skeptic, such as I was, I think by and large the evidence is that it didn't work the way the people who were the biggest cheerleaders thought it would work.

One little factoid that jumped out at me yesterday in the Wall Street Journal is that between 2007 and 2013 the average cost for middle-class families for their health care went up 24 percent. That is part of what has made this wage stagnation even worse because people are actually paying more for items such as health care. If there is one thing we ought to all be able to agree on is that what makes health care more available and accessible to more people is when it is more affordable. Unfortunately, the Affordable Care Act did not do that.

Well, I mentioned my disappointment with some of the President's actions--including his Executive action on immigration, which I think has made our job harder--not easier. More recently there were stories of a pending negotiation on the tax bill that the President said he would veto if it got to him. Why didn't the President say: Mr. Majority Leader, if this isn't in it, I am going to consider vetoing it? In other words, why didn't he use the bully pulpit and the leverage the President has to change the package if he didn't like it and make it more acceptable? That is the kind of compromise and negotiation that needs to occur.

What happens when you say I want everything my way or I want nothing? More often than not, you are going to get nothing. Unfortunately, that is what the taxpayers got--a temporary reprieve from the retroactive taxes and no real long-term solution which creates an opportunity to plan and make investments. That is what encourages job creation and job growth and grows the economy. All of this churning and uncertainty is the antithesis of what we need when it comes to growing our economy, creating jobs, and creating more predictability.

I know back in 2008 when President Obama was elected, millions of Americans thought President Obama would be the kind of President that would bring the country together on a number of levels--whether it was a matter of race or just getting the government to be responsive to the needs of the middle class. Unfortunately, he seems to have developed this disdain for the very job he was elected to do. This stuff doesn't happen by accident. It happens as a result of hard work. A lot of that hard work happens behind closed doors where Members of both parties sit around the table and say how can we work this out. When we are doing our best work, it does work out, and although it is not perfect, it is a vast improvement over the status quo. That is the sort of thing the President, unfortunately, seems unwilling or unable to do.

The Executive action on immigration is perhaps the freshest demonstration of the President's contempt for the role of Congress and the normal legislative process. What I find hard to understand and believe is that for the weeks and months leading up to the announcement, the President was repeatedly warned that such a decision would provoke a constitutional crisis.

And he was repeatedly warned that what he was getting ready to do was something he did not have the power under the Constitution to do. And not coincidentally, the President--I think on 22 different occasions--admitted publicly that he didn't have the authority to do what he ultimately decided to do with this Executive order, but he did it anyway.

I can't think of many things he could have done that would be more damaging to public confidence and Congress and the Presidency and our ideal of self-government. If the President says ``I don't have the authority to do this without Congress'' but then he proceeds to do it anyway, what are we supposed to think?

As a result of the President's ill-advised action, the coming weeks and months threaten to be dominated by a political fight that was completely unnecessary. Meanwhile, the bipartisan prospects for compromise on everything from immigration to tax reform have been significantly reduced.

The tragedy is that once we get beyond the daily partisan rhetoric, there are more areas of bipartisan agreement in this Senate than people might think.

For example, Members of both parties want to vote on the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Members of both parties want to pass commonsense regulatory reform that will reduce the burdens on families and businesses.

Members of both parties want to improve our patent system in order to discourage the abuse of costly litigation.

Members of both parties want to address America's counterproductive business tax rate to help boost investment and create jobs here at home.

Members of both parties want to take action to restore the 40-hour workweek that was penalized by ObamaCare to get people back on full-time work and off of part-time work. People would like to work full time. And there are Members from both parties who want to repeal the law's medical device tax, falling as it does on the gross receipts of medical device innovators here in America, causing some of my constituents, for example, from Dallas to move their operations to Costa Rica and places where this tax won't be collected. Those are the sorts of incentives and disincentives that tax policy can have--and in this case, very damaging.

Both parties want an immigration system that puts more emphasis on skills and on education. We are a very compassionate country when it comes to immigration. We naturalize almost 1 million people a year in this country. It is part of what makes our country great. But we ought to recognize that we need to use both our heads and our hearts on a lot of these issues. It makes sense to me and I think to a lot of other people to say: What do these immigrants bring to America that will make us better, and not just operate strictly on the basis of compassion, as in, what do they need? This seems to be a system that helps us to continue to attract the best and the brightest people from around the world through a legal immigration system.

Finally, Members of both parties believe we need a permanent solution to our transportation needs in this country. I come from the fast-growing State of Texas, where we simply don't have enough resources to build the mass transits and the highways and deal with the transportation needs we have in order to continue to grow our economy and create jobs. What we have done, sadly--and both parties are complicit in this--is one temporary bandaid after another, making it very hard to plan. We have just put patches on it, and then we come back and--sort of like the movie ``Groundhog Day'' we do it all over again 6 months or a year later.

None of this is going to be easy. Nobody told us it would be easy, but we need to do it anyway. We need to vote, and we need to come up with solutions.

This is only a partial list of some of the bipartisan, smart ideas that could become law pretty quickly with the right leadership. I am hopeful that after the first of the year in the new Congress, we will look for opportunities--and I am confident we will--to work together to put legislation on the President's desk to show we can actually function and hopefully regain some of the public's lost confidence in their government and in self-government itself.

So the question is, What do we do if the President continues to give very little indication that he is going to be a partner in this effort? We need to do our job anyway. His initial reaction in 2014 has been to flout the will of Congress and the will of the American people. I know the temptation is to say we are going to retaliate for the President's action which we consider unlawful. I think we need to make a measured and prudent and appropriate response. There needs to be consequences when one branch usurps its power under the Constitution. But we don't need to fall back into the same sort of dysfunction we were in previously that got us to where we are today.

So governing is not about having the executive branch or the legislative branch see how much they can get away with on their own. That is not our Constitution. That is not our form of government. It is about having the two branches working together to try to find common ground and proposing and negotiating policies that serve the national interests--not the interests of one political party or the other but the interests of the country as a whole.

In January I hope to demonstrate that the newfound confidence voters have in Republicans is well-founded, not in the sense that we receive any mandate--believe me, I don't believe that for a minute, but I do believe people are looking for responsible alternatives to the status quo, and I believe sincerely that, working together, Republicans and Democrats, the Senate and the House and the President can demonstrate that we can actually do our jobs and govern. None of us can do it alone. We can and we must demonstrate that we are able to do our job and function. But, again, in order to move the country forward, in order to find solutions to the problems we have on so many fronts, we are going to have to do this together. I only hope the President reconsiders his record and his attitude about trying to go it alone because we know that is not going to end very well.

Madam President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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