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Alexander and Cornyn Call on Congress to Get to Work
January 25, 2008 - “Republicans are ready to change the way we do business in Washington; the people of this country are ready for that too,” says Alexander.
WASHINGTON – Senate Republican Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Vice Chairman John Cornyn (R-Texas) today went to the floor of the Senate to say that Republicans are ready to work on issues important to the nation and called on Congress to make good use of the legislative year.
Alexander said the Senate should expect a steady stream of Republican solutions that either have bipartisan support or should earn bipartisan support and are based on principles that unite Republicans. These include:
o Enacting Rockefeller-Bond legislation to protect us from terrorist attacks
o Taking quick action on an economic growth package that grows the economy and not the government
o Promoting universal access to quality, affordable health care for all Americans
o Creating a two-year budgeting process that would allow Congress to spend more time reviewing, revising, and repealing outdated laws, regulations, and programs
o Supporting a bipartisan task force that would force Congress to vote on how to control entitlement spending
o Preventing the federal government from suing companies that require employees to speak English on the job
Included below are excerpts from Senator Cornyn’s speech and the text of Senator Alexander’s speech.
Cornyn
We’ve got a lot of important issues that we need to address—and we will.… Our constituents expect us to work together when we can without sacrificing our basic principles.
The American people don’t expect us to come up here and split the difference on everything in order to come up with an agreement if they believe that that outcome is devoid of principle or sacrifices our fundamental values. There are differences between the political parties on our approaches to government. And those differences ought to be reflected in a dignified and civil and respectful debate, which highlights those differences, and then we have a vote on those different points of views and we’ll either pass legislation or not pass legislation based on it.
[At our retreat] what we saw is a recommitment to try to solve problems, to avoid the partisan bickering and the divisiveness that has resulted in an historically low approval rating of congress and which turns so many of our constituents off.
Doing your job means standing on your principles but looking for common ground consistent with those principles to solve problems. And there’s plenty of common ground for us to find if we’ll just work a little bit harder and a little bit more in earnest to try and find it.
Alexander
Sometimes the American people say that they don't like to see us engage in partisan bickering. I am going to say something about that in just a minute, but what I think they do like to see us do, if I may say so, is what the senator from Connecticut was doing just then and what the senator from Arizona did on Friday. They were debating the balance of each American individual's right to liberty versus each American individual's right to security, coming to different conclusions but having a serious discussion about an issue that affects every single American in this country. That's what the people expect of the United States Senate.
I come to a different conclusion than he does. We’re moving to vote on a bill on Monday on cloture that has come out of the Intelligence Committee by a bipartisan majority of 13-2, but this is the kind of debate the United States Senate ought to have, and I'm glad I got to hear his speech, even though I disagree with much of it.
Mr. President, the Republican senators gathered in a retreat at the Library of Congress on Wednesday. This is something we do each year and the Democratic side does each year. We think about our responsibilities and we look forward to the future. Many of our members have said to me, this was one of our best days of retreat. In the first place, it was very well attended. 44 out of 49 of us were there and three of those absent were in -- were campaigning in Florida. One was ill, so we had virtually perfect attendance.
Most of those attending spoke and participated and made proposals. And every single Republican senator with whom I've talked since that meeting on Wednesday has told me that they felt rejuvenated and looked forward to this year. I believe the reason for that is because of the way we conducted the day. And it takes me back to what I just said a moment ago. Unless we are tone deaf, I think we can hear what the American people are saying to us, especially through the presidential campaign, is that they're tired of the way we're doing business in Washington, D.C., and they want us to take the playpen politics and move it off the Senate floor and put it in the national committees or in the nurseries where it belongs, and spend our time on big issues that affect our country, maybe in vigorous debates of the kind Senator Dodd and Senator Kyl would have on the intelligence bill, but spend our time on the serious issues facing our country and then, after we've had our debate, work across the aisle to get a result.
There are only two reasons to work across the aisle to get a result, Mr. President. One is, it's the right thing to do for our country. That's our job. That's why they pay our salaries. And, number two, if you can count it takes 60 votes to get anything meaningful done in the United States Senate, and so if you want to get a result, you have to work across party lines because neither side has more than 60 votes. So what we Republicans did on Wednesday was say this: we have heard the talk that this is a presidential year and we may get nothing done in Congress and we reject that. Our leaders said – Mitch McConnell on Tuesday when he spoke, “Republicans are tearing [to] get to work on the unfinished business from last year. We're determined to address the issues. We’ve had a presidential election every four years since 1788. We won't use this one as an excuse to put off the people’s business for another day.”
So, Mr. President, there’s no excuse for Congress to take this year off, given the serious issues facing our country. We want to change the way Washington does business, and we know how to do it. And that’s get down to work on serious issues facing our country, propose specific solutions that solve problems and then work across the aisle to get a result. We’re not here to do bad things to Democrats. We’re here to try to do good things for our country. That’s the spirit of our retreat. … I believe that's the way most members of the other side feel, and the more that do the better. And I would submit, the approval rating of the Congress and of Washington, D.C., will gradually go up if we were to do that.
Let me say a word about exactly what we talked about on Wednesday, the kind of approach that one could expect from Republican senators this year. First, of course, is that we're here and ready to go to work on these specific solutions, based on Republican principles, and we are either looking for bipartisan support or already have bipartisan support on many issues.
Of course, to begin with we know that Americans are hurting and anxious because of the housing slump, because of gasoline prices, because of rising health care costs, and we're ready to work with the House and the president across the aisle to find the appropriate action to take to try to avoid an economic slowdown. I imagine that the Senate will have some of its own views about its proposals when the House brings its proposal here. But we want a result.
I, for one, would like to see – and I believe most of my colleagues on this side of the aisle would like to see – a proposal that grows the economy and not the government. But we'll have a debate about that and that's not partisan bickering, Mr. President. That's the Senate addressing an issue that is central to every single family in this country. We know that we need to intercept the communications of terrorists so that we can keep our country safe from attack. And we know when we do that that we have to carefully balance each of our rights to liberty versus each of our rights to security.
Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor, once wrote that most of our politics is about conflicts between principles or among principles with which almost all of us agree. That's important to Americans because what unifies us other than our common language are these few principles, security and liberty being two.
But the Republicans support the Rockefeller-Bond bipartisan proposal passed 13-2 by the Intelligence Committee. We want to make sure that those companies who help us defend ourselves aren't penalized for helping to make the country secure while at the same time protecting individual liberties.
Mr. President, we know that there are 47 million Americans who don't have health insurance and Republican senators said in our retreat on Wednesday that we're ready to go to work this year to make sure that every American is insured. Some say, put it off a year. Well, perhaps we can't get it all done in 2008, but we can surely start. Senator Burr and Senator DeMint and Senator Bennett and Senator Corker, among others, spoke at our retreat on this issue. We’d like to get going now.
We could begin with the Small Business Health Insurance Act which would permit small companies to pool their re resources and offer more health insurance at a lower cost to their employees. That would be a beginning. Many of us on the Republican side have sponsored a bipartisan bill, one of two or three that … same general approach to reform the tax code, to put cash in the hands of American families and individuals so they can afford to buy their own private insurance.
Putting together four words that usually don't go together – universal access and private insurance. Those are based on principles which we Republicans agree with – free market and equal opportunity. We know on this side of the aisle, and I suspect many there know as well -- I no many know as well -- that if we don't do something about the runaway growth of Medicare and Medicaid, the entitlement spending, in other words, we'll bankrupt our country.
Every year we wait to deal with that is a year that makes the solution harder. So Senator Gregg at our retreat talked about his proposal with Senator Conrad, a Democratic senator, to create a base-closing task force for the sole purpose of recommending to the Congress a way to control entitlement spending and force an up-or-down vote on that. That’s the principle of limited government. That is a principle that most Republicans and a proposal that many Republicans can support.
We know that there is a great force in Washington, D.C., to spend more money, issue more regulations, issue more rules, and there are almost no countervailing forces, those that would spend less money, repeal rules, and revise regulations. So Senator Domenici and Senator Isakson and Senator Sessions, among others, have proposed an idea to change the budgeting and appropriations process from one year to two years. That might help us to get the appropriations bills done on time to save a lot of money in our contracting in the Defense Department and Transportation Department as one example. But more important to me and I think to many of us on this side of the aisle it would create a countervailing force of oversight so that every other year we would spend more of our time, most of our time on oversight, meaning we could review, repeal, and change and improve laws, regulations, and rules, which have been in place for a long time.
We want to keep jobs from going overseas, and we believe we know how to do it. Last year we worked with Senator Bingaman to pass the America COMPETES Act. This is an extraordinary response to our challenge to keep our brain power advantage so we can keep our jobs in competition with China and India. Senator Hutchison, of Texas, has been a leader in this for a long time. She with Senator Bingaman on the other side of the aisle began the effort to fully fund Advanced Placement courses so that more children could take those courses. So we’re ready, many on this side of the aisle, to implement the Advanced Placement provisions in the America COMPETES Act that will help a million and a half children have those opportunities. We’re ready to implement the provision that would put 10,000 more math and science teachers in our classrooms and many of us are ready to implement the recommendation that we pin a green card to every single foreign student who is legally here and who graduates from an American college or university with a graduate degree in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics.
There are some proposals, Mr. President, that ought to be bipartisan that aren’t, or at least weren’t. I made one, for example, and we talked about this for a while on Wednesday, that in order to encourage unity in this country, we need a common language. That seems to be common sense. And therefore we ought to pass a law making it clear that the federal government shouldn’t be suing the Salvation Army, telling them they can’t require their employees to speak English on the job. We got it through the Senate. We got it through the House last year, and the speaker stopped it. That was a partisan approach for awhile. Except now Senator Conrad has joined in support, Senator McConnell, Senator Landrieu, and now we have a bipartisan approach on another important issue.
And we talked about the idea and the problem of the number of rural women in this country who are pregnant who can’t get the proper prenatal health care. OB/GYN doctors are leaving rural areas because malpractice lawsuits are running the malpractice insurance up over $100,000 a year and so the pregnant women are having to drive to Memphis to see a doctor to get prenatal health care to have their babies. We have proposals to stop it. Stop it the way that Texas did and stop it the way that Mississippi did.
So, Mr. President, the Republican agenda will emerge over time, but what I would like to say to our colleagues on the other side of the aisle and to the American people is we're ready to go to work. We want to change the way that Washington does business, and we believe we know how. That is to stand up every single day and every single week, have a debate where a debate is needed. Let Senator Dodd and Senator Kyl have a principled argument. But cut out the playpen politics. Let’s don’t have that anymore. Let’s earn the confidence of the American people by dealing with specific solutions, that’s what you’re going to be hearing from the Republican senators.
Now, no sooner had I said that than I heard some encouraging remarks from the majority leader and others on the other side than out comes the press release from Senate Democratic communications, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid discussing President Bush’s legacy of broken promises. This is playpen politics, Mr. President. I'm sure that we do it over here sometimes, but I’m going to do my best as a Republican Conference chairman to make the political reward for such playpen politics so low that this kind of release, this kind of activity is moved into the nursery school where it belongs, is moved over to the National Committee where it belongs, whether it is the Democratic playpen or Republican playpen, and we devote ourselves to the real issues facing our country.
How can we help our economy? How can we help every American to be insured? How can we stop the terrorists? How can we help the America Competes Act? I hope that's clear to the American people and to our colleagues. We’re looking forward to this year. Republicans are ready to change the way we do business in Washington; the people of this country are ready for that too.I look forward to it. I thank the chair. And I yield the floor to my colleague from Texas.
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