Biden Administration

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, ahead of the last work period, Senator Schumer, the majority leader, outlined his designed-to-fail agenda. He forecasted a series of votes on legislation that stood zero chance of actually passing--legislation to exploit the cause of pay fairness to line the pockets of trial lawyers, to erode Americans' Second Amendment rights, to force schools and hospitals to comply with ``woke'' social norms, and, of course, the marquee bill, a partisan takeover of our elections.

It was obvious from the outset that this agenda wasn't designed to achieve results. It takes bipartisanship. It takes rolling up your sleeves and working to build bipartisan consensus to get things done in the Senate--especially so in an equally divided Senate as we have now.

Rather than put forward a number of bills that would earn that sort of bipartisan support and actually pass, Senator Schumer chose to spend most of the Senate's time last month putting on a show for the so- called progressive base of his party, and I expect even more political theater this month.

So in the next few weeks, we are told, our Democratic colleagues will put their dual-track legislative approach to the test. One of those tracks will include a heavy dose of bipartisanship, and that is something I applaud.

Contrary to public opinion, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate spend a lot of time working together. So far this year, we have worked together to counter threats from China, support small businesses impacted by the pandemic, and combat the increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans. We have done all of that together in a bipartisan way. Bipartisan solutions are also being crafted to address other major issues, from the border crisis, to drug pricing, to police reform.

In the coming weeks, the Senate is expected to vote on one of those bipartisan agreements; that is, to rebuild and maintain our Nation's infrastructure. The process that brought us to this point certainly has been a roller coaster. After weeks of back-and-forth negotiations, a group of more than 20 Senators reached an agreement with the White House just last month. But here is when things got very strange. Within minutes of the announcement, the President himself put the fate of that agreement into question. He said he wouldn't sign the bill unless Democrats paired it with a multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill that would include a smorgasbord of leftist spending priorities and trillions in higher taxes and more debt for Americans. Talk about whiplash. Both Republicans and Democrats were caught off guard. That hadn't been part of the discussions or negotiation. That isn't what they said they agreed to.

Well, the reversal and unexpected announcement from the President that, even though they were announcing a deal, they didn't have a deal, prompted a weekend press cleanup, and the President issued a lengthy statement clarifying that it was not a veto threat. But we have no reason to suspect that the larger sentiment has changed.

In a letter to his Democratic colleagues last Friday, the majority leader, Senator Schumer, said the Senate will consider both the bipartisan deal on infrastructure and the partisan budget resolution with reconciliation instructions. The bipartisan deal is very much tied to the fate of a completely partisan reconciliation bill, notwithstanding President Biden's cleanup after his unexpected announcement at the White House.

Our Democratic colleagues don't have to listen to me, but I do believe they would be wise to avoid this path. They already went on a nearly $2 trillion spending binge earlier this year and sidelined every single Republican in the Congress during the process.

They tried to bill this ultrapartisan legislation as COVID-19 relief, but we all know that only about 10 percent of the bill was directly related to the pandemic and only 1 percent was tied to vaccinating the American people. The rest, 90 percent, was exactly the type of thing you would expect to see in a bill that has only the support of our Democratic colleagues--funding for climate justice, backdoor money for Planned Parenthood, and more funding for State and local governments than they know what to do with. Blue States are using that money to pay down old debts with the funding. Our Democratic colleagues claim that money was necessary for pandemic relief, but that is not what it is being used for.

So how are we faring after Democrats passed this bill? Did the American Rescue Plan truly rescue America? Well, when it comes to the virus, the answer is clearly no. As I said, only a small portion of this massive spending supported our fight against COVID-19.

When this bill was signed into law, the majority of frontline workers had already been vaccinated, and vaccine makers were working as quickly as possible to supply the rest of the American people who wanted them with shots. Today, two-thirds of adults in America have received at least one dose of the vaccine--two-thirds. That progress came because of the bipartisan work that happened last year, not this year.

This legislation certainly didn't rescue our already sluggish economy. In fact, it has created more hurdles for our economy. Democrats created an incentive for workers to remain on the sidelines of the labor market through the end of September by offering enhanced Federal bonuses to State unemployment.

In Texas, for example, businesses of all types have struggled to find willing workers. For every industry, from hospitality, to retail, to manufacturing, to energy, ``Help Wanted'' signs can be found everywhere across my State, and we are not alone. One restaurant owner said the government has been its biggest competitor when it comes to finding workers.

The labor squeeze has become so tight that half of the States, including Texas, ended the supplemental unemployment benefits early because they were not compensating people who couldn't work or couldn't find work but paying people more than they would earn if they did work when jobs were readily available.

Those are just the problems that have been created with the labor market. Families across the country have felt the sting of inflation as they have paid higher prices on everything from gasoline to groceries. This is exactly the scenario outlined by economists across the country, including those who call themselves Democrats, people like Larry Summers, who served as Treasury Secretary under President Clinton and Director of the National Economic Council under President Obama. He was among the first to warn about inflation or rising costs for consumers, and, boy, you must have thought he was a skunk at the garden party.

You would think this might serve as a lesson to our Democratic colleagues about shoveling money out the door as fast as they can, even when it creates massive debt and the threat of more inflation, but here we are once again. Our Democratic colleagues are preparing to spend trillions more dollars on top of the trillions of dollars we have already spent on a bipartisan basis to combat the virus but then afterwards to spend more money on their chosen political priorities and not on the pandemic. They want to now add additional trillions of dollars to that debt and to that spending, risking even more dangerous and volatile inflation.

The details of what this round of spending might look like are still coming together, but we know that if the chairman of the Budget Committee, Bernie Sanders, has his wish, the price tag could come out as high as $6 trillion more. Six trillion dollars is a quarter of our gross domestic product. If you convert our country's World War II spending to today's dollars, it only comes out to $4.4 trillion. So the Democratic chairman of the Budget Committee wants to spend more money than we spent to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II.

But I want to be clear about another thing. This so-called human infrastructure plan, which is just made-up words indicating that they are trying to mask the reality of what they want to spend money on--it is not about bridges and roads. It is not about broadband, things that we all understand are truly infrastructure. It is about a long list of political spending preferences, and it certainly can't be compared to spending the money we needed in order to win World War II.

For example, they want to spend trillions and trillions of dollars more on Medicare expansion, electric vehicle chargers, home-based care, free college, and a long list of liberal priorities. We are happy to debate those but not to jam them in a $6 trillion spending package.

All of this spending would be in addition to the more than $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that apparently is currently being drafted. I know we have been talking for weeks about a bipartisan infrastructure bill, but I have learned as recently as today that there is no bill text, and the Congressional Budget Office that scores these bills has not done so yet so we can determine whether the so-called pay-fors are, indeed, legitimate and stand up to scrutiny.

Our national debt is at the highest level since World War II. This is not the time to spend and spend and spend until our grandkids are left sitting in a pile of debt so deep that they will have no hope of climbing out of it. And we certainly can't tax and spend our way to prosperity. We need to take a hard look at our spending habits and make some tough choices, like most American families. They have to decide: What are my priorities, and what are the resources I have to spend to fund those priorities? And that is exactly what we need to do here in Congress.

Folks on both sides of the aisle want to rebuild our Nation's infrastructure. Rebuilding resilient roads, bridges, and broadband are top of mind for Republicans and Democrats. I know our colleagues are still working on text, as I said, for the bipartisan infrastructure deal, and I am eager to see the details on how this massive investment is paid for. But, again, this is only one-half of the so-called dual- track process announced by Senator Schumer.

The exorbitant pricetags being floated for the second track have raised serious concerns not just among folks on this side of the aisle but on both sides of the aisle.

I sincerely hope that some of our colleagues on the other side will stand up against irresponsible spending. As we know, it takes just one Democratic Senator to stand in the way of this abuse of the reconciliation process, and I hope one or more of them will have the courage to do so.

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