National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I wish to add my voice to Chairman McCain's comments a little bit ago about moving forward on the Defense authorization bill. I have the honor of serving with him and Senator Reed, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee. It is a huge honor, but as Senator McCain mentioned, we also have an enormous obligation and responsibility. The biggest, most important thing we do here is probably our national defense.

The chairman asked a really important and simple question: Why? Why are we not taking up the Defense authorization bill at this time? Why is the minority leader moving forward with a filibuster on this important bill that was voted out of committee almost on a complete bipartisan basis?

We have an enormous obligation to our troops and to the national defense of our country, and that is what this bill is all about. We can debate it, but we need to begin that debate.

My colleague and friend from Arkansas was on the floor here a little bit ago, expressing his frustration about why we are delaying this legislation. I share that frustration, and I share the chairman's frustration.

Why? Why are we filibustering? Why is the minority leader filibustering this important bill?

I remind my colleagues on the floor that this is actually a pattern. If you remember, at this time last year the minority leader led a filibuster of the Defense appropriations bill. It funds the bill so we can support our troops who are, by the way, overseas in combat. Despite the fact that the President and others in the White House want to tell the American people they are not in combat, they are in combat. We all know it. We know it is a fiction.

Last year the minority leader led a filibuster of the Defense authorization bill--spending for our troops--not once, not twice, but three times on the Senate floor. This pattern of procedural delays clearly undermines our troops. There is no doubt about that.

I want to add my voice to my colleague. I believe it is a bipartisan frustration, not just Republicans. Remember, the NDAA came out of committee with huge bipartisan support.

One of the most important things we do here is focus on our national defense, focus on having a strong military, and focus on taking care of our veterans. We should be bringing that bill to the floor, not delaying it any longer, and debating its merits and moving forward. I just don't understand why we are not doing that right now. I certainly don't think the American people understand it. The U.S. Economy

Mr. President, another important topic that we should be talking about on the Senate floor more often is the state of our economy. In my view, national defense and economic opportunity for Americans are the critical things we need to debate in the Senate.

As I have been doing recently, I wanted to come down here and talk about the health of our economy and the importance of getting to a healthy economy because--make no mistake--we have a sick economy right now. We need to bring the U.S. economy, the greatest economic engine of growth the world has ever known, back to life. We need to bring opportunity once again to people who have lost economic hope.

Let me be clear. Americans don't easily give up on hope. We are a country of hope, a country of dreams. Progress is in our DNA. We are always moving forward. But Americans are starting to lose hope because they are not seeing opportunity, they are not seeing progress, and they are not seeing a healthy economy. So what is going on?

I would like to provide a quote from a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled: ``The Secret Shame of the Middle Class.'' I would recommend this article to my colleagues. The author is talking about Americans from all spectrums who, because of the weak economy and because of no economic opportunity, are living paycheck to paycheck. Millions of Americans, as he describes in this article, are living paycheck to paycheck. He says:

It was happening to the soon-to-retire as well as the soon- to-begin. It was happening to college grads as well as high school dropouts. It was happening all across the country, including places where you might least expect to see such problems. I knew that I wouldn't have $400 in an emergency. What I hadn't known, couldn't have conceived, was that so many other Americans wouldn't have that kind of money available to them, either. My friend and local butcher, Brian, who is one of the only men I know who talks openly about his financial struggles, once told me, ``if anyone says he's sailing through, he's lying.''

Then the author goes on to make a very important statement. He says: ``In the 1950s and '60s, American economic growth democratized prosperity.'' Everybody had opportunity with strong economic growth. But, ``in the 2010s,'' he says, ``we have managed to democratize financial insecurity.''

That is what is happening across the country. In my opinion, a big part of the problem--one that is playing out in our politics right now--is the fact that those who are hurting are not being heard. They see their lives. They know their lives. They know the challenges. Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 in a crisis, as this article lays out, and yet it doesn't match up with what their leaders are telling them.

Let me give you an example. In a recent speech, President Obama actually said: ``We are better off today than we were just seven years ago.'' He said that anybody who tells you differently ``is not telling the truth.'' That is the President.

I guarantee you the President is not agreeing with this article. I hate to inform the President, but even former President Bill Clinton recently had this to say about the Obama economy: ``Millions and millions and millions . . . of people look at the pretty picture of America [President Obama] painted, and they cannot find themselves in it . . . ''

That is former President Bill Clinton on the current State of the U.S. economy. It is not hard to see why so many can't find themselves in the picture that the President has painted of our current economy. During nearly 8 years of the Obama administration, the number of Americans participating in the labor force shrank to its lowest level since 1978. What does that mean? It means Americans have just quit looking for jobs. In the last 8 years, more Americans have fallen into poverty, family paychecks have declined, and the number of people on food stamps has skyrocketed by 40 percent--all during the last 8 years. The percentage of Americans who own homes, the marker of the American dream--homeownership--is down by over 5 percent.

Let me give you another number that, although many Americans aren't familiar with, impacts them deeply. A few weeks ago it was announced by the Commerce Department that the economy essentially stopped growing. Last quarter we grew at 0.5 percent of GDP, or gross domestic product. That is an indicator of progress, an indicator of the health of our economy, of our country, of opportunity. It was stagnant. It didn't grow.

Let me put this in perspective. In the past 200 years, American real GDP growth through Democratic or Republican Presidents--it doesn't matter; we have had ups and downs--has been about 4 percent, or 3.7 percent. This is what has made our country great. This is what has fueled the engine of the middle class of America. Under this administration, the average has been an anemic 1.5 percent of GDP growth. We have never had even one quarter of 3 percent of GDP growth. Now the administration doesn't talk about that. In fact, very few do. We need to talk about it more on the Senate floor. But the American people feel it.

This article describes it. They see it again and again when one of their neighbors or loved ones loses a job, when they see their paychecks stagnant for 8 years, when they see another small business in their community closing, or when they start wondering how they are going to put their children through college. They see it in the long road ahead of them that shows no promise of a brighter future because of the lack of economic opportunity. They see it, and, as this article describes, they feel the stinging shame.

The bottom line is that we have had a lost decade of economic growth and opportunity in the last 10 years. We need to get serious about this problem. We need to focus on this problem almost above any other issue.

My colleagues a lot of times come down here and talk about a moral imperative. This is a moral imperative--to create a healthy economy for the entire country--but we are not doing that.

Now, what are the solutions? Well, we ask the experts: How do you grow the economy? How can we create articles that talk about opportunity and not the shame of the middle class? One idea certainly is that we have to reform a Federal Government that tries to overregulate every aspect of our economy, especially the small businesses. When asking the experts or politicians, they all agree. A number of us had an opportunity to talk to former Chairman of the Fed Alan Greenspan yesterday. This clearly is one of the issues where he thinks we need to ignite traditional levels of economic growth-- regulatory reform.

Again, Bill Clinton, in a Newsweek cover article in 2011 said that the No. 1 thing we need to do is to move forward on regulatory reform to get projects moving, to build this country again.

Even President Obama, in his State of the Union Address this year, said we have to cut redtape and we have to lessen the regulatory burden on Americans. So there seems to be widespread agreement, but it is all talk.

When we actually try to act, when we actually try to do just minimal reforms to this explosion in the growth of Federal rules and regulations over the last several decades--when we try to do just a little of this--we are stopped, stymied, and caught up in politics.

Let me give you just two recent examples. I introduced a bill called the RED Tape Act, a very simple bill debated on the Senate floor that essentially would put a cap on Federal regulations--a ``one in, one out'' rule. If a Federal agency is putting more regs on the U.S. economy, then we have to look at our big portfolio of regulations and sunset the equivalent economic burden in terms of regs. It is a very simple idea. It is a 4-page bill. The UK is doing this, Canada is doing this, and it is working.

Some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle certainly thought it was a good idea, but when we brought it to the floor--the simple idea that would help our economy--there was a party-line vote. It goes down.

Just last week, as we were debating the Transportation appropriations bill, we wanted to move on another simple reg idea. The idea is simple. If there is a bridge in a neighborhood and it is structurally deficient--and by the way, the United States has 61,000 structurally deficient bridges--and the bridge is not going to be expanded but is just going to receive maintenance or be reconstructed, the permit can be expedited so that it doesn't take 5 years to build or reconstruct the bridge. Again, it was a very simple amendment that used common sense on regs. We were told: No, the other side viewed it as a poison pill. We even heard that the White House was thinking about threatening to veto the bill if that amendment was attached to it. These are simple, commonsense ideas that the American people fully support to keep them safe and to grow our economy.

We need to grow our economy. We need to take action on the Senate floor to help grow our economy. We need to bring this sick economy back to health, but we are not doing it right now. Instead, we see articles such as the one I just mentioned about middle-class Americans living paycheck to paycheck because they don't have opportunity.

What we need to do, in addition to focusing on the defense of our Nation and taking care of our troops, is to get this anemic economy-- this lost decade of economic growth that we have seen over the last 10 years--roaring again, to provide opportunity and hope for Americans. That is what we should be focused on.

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