The biggest problem I see is that most of the Democrats are not speaking of the details here - maybe thinking that they are "too complicated". The problem is that, if Democrats can not get out that it really is the Republicans blocking anything, then the Republicans win the framing - that the Democrats control both houses of Congress - but are getting nothing done. This feeds their earlier claim that the Democrats have no plans.
Even though I was trying hard to follow what was happening, I thought that things were getting passed when I saw bills passed in both the Senate and the House and was confused why we didn't hear of them going to the President. In some cases, the House and Senate bills were very similar. The thing is that not everyone follows what is happening compulsively - and when the Republicans speak of very few bills getting to Bush, they are disingenuously ignoring that they are the reason why. (Of the ones that do get there, many are ones - like FISA - where they did what Bush wanted.)
My concern is that this could hurt our Senators and congressmen in their re-elections. Some of the freshmen congressmen could be very vulnerable and if the people who worked very very hard to elect them are at the point of saying that they are not doing anything - they may not be as motivated as they were in 2006 when they thought they were voting for real change.
I suspect the reason few are speaking of it is that they do not want to be labeled wonky or boring.
Here is what Kerry said in the Senate on July 26, 2007- he also blogged and emailed a less detailed version - with some of the same strong statements:
Mr. KERRY. Madam President, last November was one of those truly rare moments in the short history of our country and our democracy. Any political science student taking a freshman lecture, of course, will hear how incredibly hard it is to remove entrenched congressional majorities. They know the statistics about how hard it is to defeat incumbents around here. It doesn't happen that often. But sometimes, the American people rise up in one moment, as they did last November, and they make history. Just six times in our 230-year history has one party lost both Houses of Congress, and 2006 was the first time the Republican Party failed to win a single House, Senate, or gubernatorial office previously held by the Democrats.
We Democrats have been in that predicament. In 1994, Democrats woke up to a landslide defeat some people thought would never come. It wasn't always easy, it wasn't always collegial, but we listened and we learned. Together, we reached across the aisle to balance the budget and reform welfare. We wrestled with why we had lost, and we wrestled with what we had to do in order to come together--not just as a party but as a country.
Evidently, some people still haven't wrestled with what happened last November 7.
Last November, Americans were appropriately angry. They saw our young men and women in uniform paying the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq for a failed policy that was stuck on autopilot. They saw the number of Americans without health insurance skyrocket to 45 million, with more hard-working Americans joining them every day. They saw record-high oil prices and global climate change--a reality denied and deferred and no serious national effort to address these issues. They saw staggering corruption and no accountability for the way the people's House had been turned into a refuge for the special interests. Americans saw a politics and a party that was broken, and they rejected the stubbornness, cynicism, corruption, and failed policies that made ``Washington'' a dirty word. They voted for a change.
President Bush seemed to get the message the day after the 2006 election when he said to America:
The message yesterday was clear. The American people want their leaders in Washington to set aside partisan differences, conduct ourselves in an ethical manner, and work together to address the challenges facing our Nation.
The President said he got the message, but the question has to be asked: What have Republicans done since then? Where are they 6 months after their worst electoral defeat in 50 years? What happened to the President's postelection statements when measured against the President's actions and those of the Republican minority in the Senate? Those actions tell a very different story. Before the dust had settled, before defeated Republicans had even cleaned out their offices, this President and his remaining allies in Congress have made a calculation, on issue after issue, that they would just set out to stop everything from happening and then they would turn
around and they would ask: Why is nothing happening under the Democrats? This is a pure political calculation. It is wrong for the country, and I respectfully would suggest, ultimately, it will be wrong for the party. They would rather spend their time attacking Harry Reid than attacking the Nation's problems. Delay is no longer just a former Republican leader; it has become a Republican way of life.
We have been busy debating progress in Iraq around here and measuring benchmarks. I can't help but think as we talk about measuring benchmarks that pretty soon the Iraqi Government is going to wonder whether the Republican caucus is going to meet any of its benchmarks or any of the country's benchmarks.
For 6 months now, the Democratic majority has worked in good faith to deliver on our promises to the American people. Because of the Democratic majority, the minimum wage earner in America now makes 70 cents an hour more than they did under a Republican Congress--and soon they will be making $2 more. The longest streak without a raise in the minimum wage in the history of the minimum wage has ended but not before 4 months of Republican obstruction cost each minimum wage earner in America around $500 in earnings.
We passed legislation to make college more affordable and cut interest rates in half for millions of Americans with student loans. We stood up to powerful special interests and raised the fuel efficiency of our automobiles by 10 miles per gallon. Twenty years had passed since Washington raised the fuel standards, but Democrats took on the special interests and got it passed. We passed funding for stem cell research. We passed the 9/11 Commission recommendations. We passed ethics and lobbying reforms.
Just yesterday, we passed legislation that will fix many of the shortfalls in our care for injured troops and veterans, and, over yet another White House veto threat, we also passed a 3.5-percent raise for members of the military. Most importantly, we passed legislation demanding that the President face reality and begin redeploying troops from Iraq.
Regrettably, there is, on almost every one of these issues, today as I stand here a gap between how many of those policies that are aimed to help everyday Americans, which enjoy the majority support of the Senate, and how many have actually been signed into law. Why? One simple reason: The President and his allies in Congress have decided to use every means at their disposal just to slow it down and block it, to stand for a policy of obstruction and obstruction and obstruction , not accomplishment for the American people. They have vetoed and filibustered and killed bills in conference. They have wasted days and days with procedural motions and delays that have nothing more to do in their purpose than to waste time and squander the trust and patience of the American people and, ultimately, to hope to be able to blame it on the Democrats.
Just look at what they have blocked. They vetoed a Senate bill demanding a new strategy in Iraq. They vetoed a stem cell research bill, science that could prove crucial to cures for 100 million Americans with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or diabetes or other diseases. Now, another veto is threatened on children's health care--of all things, children's health care--a veto threat on a bill the President hasn't even read, because he was worried about the price tag. Well, we are talking about our children's health, and the bill offered just $7 billion each year for uninsured children, while we spend 1 1/2 times that amount every month in Iraq. Those are just the bills which made it to the President's desk.
Senate Republicans blocked a vote on a bill to allow the
Federal Government to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for 43 million Americans on Medicare. Republicans are blocking the passage of a bill that would provide crucial funding for the intelligence community. They are blocking ethics bills that would mark the most sweeping ethics reform since Watergate.
They don't have the votes to stop it, so they are pulling a procedural maneuver and refusing to appoint conferees in order to hammer out the final details of the bill. The Republicans are now setting records for filibusters and obstruction . The Senate record for filibusters is being set already, and it is only halfway through this term. To paraphrase Winston Churchill: Never, in the field of Senate legislation, was so much progress blocked for so many by so few.
Actually, they have made history, I suppose, because thanks to the Senate Republicans, L.A. is no longer the center of gridlock in America--it is right here. On issue after issue, the Republicans have chosen to filibuster--and to do so just 2 short years after they declared the filibuster, as their then-leader, Bill Frist, said in late 2004, ``nothing less than the tyranny of the minority.'' After expressing outrage at the mere hint of a Democratic filibuster last session, the Republicans have suddenly become the principled champions of so-called minority rights in the Senate, but minority rights apply to legitimate filibusters for legitimate issues, not a policy of obstruction to stop everything that comes along.
After threatening the so-called ``nuclear option'' when Democrats stood up to defend the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, they have introduced a filibuster to stop everyday business in the Senate. Almost everything the majority leader tries to do here now requires us having a cloture vote in order to prevent a filibuster. In fact, the rubberstamp Republicans of the previous 7 years have now become the roadblock Republicans. The party of Abraham Lincoln has become the party of redtape--vetoes, filibusters--any means necessary to deny the will of the majority of the Senate and the vast majority of the American people.
If you don't believe me, listen to what the minority whip, Senator Trent Lott, told a reporter just this April. He said:
The strategy of being obstructionists can work or fail, and so far, it is working for us--
The ``us'' being the Republican Party and the minority in the Senate. Well, I think the Senator is looking at it the wrong way. The question isn't, Is it working for Republicans, is it working for Democrats? The question is, Is it working for the American people? Is it working for the millions of low-income children whose health care funding the President has threatened to veto? Is it making us safer when you block the funding for the intelligence agencies? Is this obstructionist strategy working for the 12 million Americans forced to live in the shadows of American life while our borders stay broken? Is it working for the 554 soldiers who have died in Iraq since Republicans first blocked a measure to redeploy troops last February?
Instead of the Senate's highest shared principles of consensus and bipartisan accomplishment,
the Republicans have chosen the lowest common denominator--a zero sum game in which they are willing to gamble the American people's loss for Republican gain. The Republican strategy seems to be to slash the tires of the Senate and then wonder why we are still stuck on the side of the road and blame somebody else for that problem. Let me be clear what I am criticizing here. I support the right of the minority to filibuster. In fact, I have done so myself. Every Senator in this body has that right.
I support that right. But when filibustering not for the principle of the issue at hand but for the generic, broad strategy of stopping what happens here so you can blame the party in charge for not being able to finish the work, that is unacceptable. The rights of the minority in the Senate ought to be protected, but they also ought to be used responsibly too. Do I have a problem with time?
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. SAlazar). Yes.
Mr. KERRY. I ask unanimous consent for a few more minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, obstruction for obstruction's sake is not in the best traditions of this great institution. It is the worst kind of cynical political calculation. I think all of us on our side would join in voting to protect the right of the minority to be able to filibuster. We all understand that what goes around comes around, and the time may come when we again may be in the minority. We Democrats don't want to use the nuclear option. We are
not even talking about it. We want to pass bills. We want to pass bills that are supported by a majority of people in the Senate, including Republicans, and certainly supported by the majority of Americans.
I say to my Republican colleagues that there is a better way to do business. We can work together and actually do something positive for the American people. All of us know this is a uniquely challenging moment for this country. We face new threats and hurdles no generation has faced before. We ought to be working together to solve those problems. The only chance this Senate has to make a real contribution to history is to make a bipartisan contribution. That is the only way the Senate meets its own expectations.
Some of the great legislative accomplishments in recent memory came under mixed Government, when both sides of the aisle came together.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan saw that Social Security was in danger of going bankrupt and placed a call to the Democratic speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill. They realized that at the end of the day, nobody would solve it if they didn't. So they got together and took the politics out of a tough and unpopular vote. The deal they struck kept Social Security afloat. Neither man could have done it without the other. Neither party could have done it without the other.
We all know the limits of a politics of division, of partisan sectarianism. A politics of division can rush our country into war, but it cannot sustain our trust or the war itself. A politics of division has no answer for 12 million undocumented workers in our houses, fields, and factories. It has no answer for 45 million Americans with no health insurance, no answer for icecaps that are melting or a failed policy in Iraq. The politics of division is bad for America--from the Parkinson's patient to the undocumented immigrant to the soldier in Iraq. Nobody is benefiting from Republican obstructionism.
It is also bad for the Senate. This Senate has been known as the greatest deliberative body in the world. But there is nothing deliberative about partisan sabotage. There is nothing deliberative about blind obstructionism.
The ongoing debate we have here is about much more than Senate procedure. At its core is a debate, really, about where we are headed in our relationship with each other, Republicans and Democrats. All of us go home and hear from our constituents about how they have lost faith in Washington. All of us want to do right by the people who elected us and try to make life better for the American people.
Any Senator who has been here for a period of time has watched the decline of the quality of the exchange on both sides of the aisle in this institution. I have seen colleagues stand up against it. I remember when Senator Gordon Smith, in the middle a painful debate on Iraq, said:
My soul cries out for something more dignified.
I think a lot of Senators on both sides of the aisle are concerned for the Senate. Voters want a debate over ideas, not a war of words; a choice of direction, not a clash of cloture votes. The stalemate we have now is not what the Senate is renowned for. This is called, as I said, the greatest deliberative body in the world, a place where people on both sides can find common ground and get good things done for other people.
Ultimately, we are accountable to the American people--accountable for false promises, accountable for failure to address issues we promised to address, whether it is energy independence or military families who lose their benefits. We are accountable.
Mr. President, a filibuster to stop all progress, then claim Democrats aren't doing anything, is a failed strategy. It is a failure because it doesn't put the American people first. I believe the American people will hold a party of obstruction accountable. I hope that will change.
I yield the floor.
Link to video on Kerryvision.net
http://www.kerryvision.net/2007/08/special_encore_presentation_jk.html#more
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