Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructre Act of 2021--Motion to

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I bring news back from Oklahoma to this body and a request for dialogue. The COVID bill that was passed a little over a month ago--that bill provided all kinds of relief. As this body knows, we were deeply divided on that bill and some of the issues within it.

One of the issues stretched out the debate all the way to the last moment, and it was the additional unemployment assistance. The conversation about the additional unemployment assistance is this: The economy is reopening. Is this the time to extend additional money above and beyond State unemployment assistance, what we normally do? With unemployment rates going down, should we add more money on top of it?

No one really knew what would happen when that occurred, but we had some suspicions. The 2 weeks I spent traveling around the State, the week before Easter and after Easter, in town after town after town after town after town, I heard the same thing from employees and employers.

Employees would tell me that somebody who used to work next to them is now at home because they are making as much money at home on unemployment assistance as they would when working. So the person standing there working at the factory, the person standing there working at the restaurant is ticked off at the person who is at home watching TV, making as much money as they are.

The employer is just as frustrated or more because they have all kinds of orders coming into their business, saying: Can you send us more of this? And they could, except they don't have enough labor.

An additional $300 a week was added on top of the unemployment assistance and extended out all the way to the first week of September. At the same time, checks were sent out to every individual. Then they were told they would get a $10,000 tax break. The combination of those three things together has caused some folks to do what people do in a free market: They look to see where they are going to work based on where they can make the most money at that moment. That is what a free market is like. That is why employers continue to pay a little more to get good employees. But the problem is, in Oklahoma, where there is a low cost of living, many of our employers are struggling to find workers because they are competing against this body.

The employees are ticked because they are at work working, paying taxes, and the person who used to work next to them and probably will return this October got several months off and is making the same, except for the person working is paying for the person not working, and they are a little ticked off about it.

I bring this to you because this is not hypothetical. In Oklahoma, our unemployment rate dropped again to 4.2, but we still have 100,000 people. Our rates continue to rise for people filing first-time claims, but I promise there is not a town you can go to in Oklahoma that doesn't have ``help wanted'' signs all over town. I heard it from every single town that I went to, from employers in every single place that they cannot compete with what the government is just mailing to people for staying at home.

The very first day I was out a couple of weeks ago, I was in Tulsa at a business there that does manufacturing. He told me that for the first time ever--and he has owned the business a long time--for the first time ever, one of his managers came to him and said: You are not going to believe what just happened.

They had an employee who came up to them and said: I would like for you to fire me.

He said: Well, why in the world would I do that?

He said: Well, I just figured out, with the tax break and what I would get on unemployment assistance, I could make as much staying at home as I could working. But I need you to fire me so I can go file for unemployment.

He literally said to him: I am not going do that. Go back to work.

So the next day, the guy showed up 30 minutes late to work, and at lunchtime, he took an hour and a half off. He did the same thing the next day. The third day, according to protocol in their company, they called him in, talked to him, and wrote it all up. The fourth day, they did the same thing again--called him in, wrote it up. By the fifth day, they fired him.

His exact words to his manager on the floor: What took you so long?

There is a restaurant in Oklahoma City that told us they were preparing to reopen. Finally, the pandemic is over. We have a very high percentage of folks in Oklahoma who have received the vaccine. We are one of the top 10 States in the country for distributing the vaccines.

Our State, our county, our local offices, our hospitals, and our Tribal areas have done a fantastic job getting the vaccine out. We are open.

One of the restaurants trying to reopen in the Plaza District of Oklahoma City, a beautiful cultural district, couldn't reopen because they couldn't hire people because they got larger unemployment benefits, and they remain closed.

The mayor of Muskogee told me that most employers in their town are struggling to be able to get employees to get back to work.

In Northern Oklahoma, in Perry, there is a restaurant that was talking to one of my staff this week that said they are having to close early because they can't get enough business.

I would tell you, a couple of Sundays ago, my wife and I drove to go eat lunch after church, and we went to two restaurants before we had to go to a third to find a restaurant that was open. The second restaurant literally had a sign on their door: ``Closed Due to Labor Shortage.''

This is a real issue that was created in this room that is impacting my State trying to reopen. I have no idea if my Democratic colleagues will acknowledge this as a real problem or will just say: That is a hypothetical issue; it is not real. But this is going to continue all the way through September, and my State is not going to be able to reopen. This will get even worse in the days ahead when additional money will start being shipped out to families in the change in the child tax credit, when people will literally start getting checks in August on top of the other checks they are receiving.

I bring this to this body because I would like for us to have a conversation about it and for somebody in this body to acknowledge that a mistake was made and we need to fix this.

We all agreed last year to be able to help during the time of the pandemic. People needed help. Everyone was out of work, and there were no options for work. That is not true anymore; yet these larger benefits are still coming out.

This needs to be addressed. For the sake of getting our economy going again, this needs to be addressed. I would hope we could have a reasonable, rational, fact-based conversation about it. U.S. Supreme Court

Madam President, for most of the history of the United States, we have had nine Supreme Court Justices--nine. Now, we started out originally with six, and then it dropped for just a little while to five and then went right back to six again.

When we added a seventh circuit court in 1807, it popped from six to seven, and there was some discussion about whether it would just continue based on the number of circuit courts. It was determined that, no, that was a bad idea.

Then it went to nine in 1837. Lincoln actually added 1 to make it 10, and they determined that was really too many and brought it back down to 7, actually.

In 1869, we went back to nine again, where we were most of the time before that and where we have remained, nine Supreme Court Justices. That is not just a random number; it seems to be a pretty good number-- nine--to be able to open up debate.

I don't just think it is a pretty good number. There is a rather famous and some would say ``notorious'' Justice named Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She made this statement in 2019 when asked about Court- packing and asked about increasing the size of the Court. In 2019, Ruth Bader Ginsburg said:

Nine seems to be a good number. It's been that way for a long time. . . . I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court. . . . If anything [it] would make the court look partisan.

That is not just one Justice. Early in April this year, Justice Breyer was speaking at the Harvard Law School, and he addressed this issue of Court-packing while this body is in the middle of a conversation about Court-packing--extremely rare for that to occur. Justice Breyer stated:

I'm an optimist. The rule of law has weathered many threats, but it remains sturdy. I hope and expect that the Court will retain its authority, an authority that my stories have shown was hard-won. But that authority, like the rule of law, depends on trust, a trust that the Court is guided by legal principle, not politics. . . . Structural alteration motivated by the perception of political influence can only feed that latter perception, further eroding that trust . . . There is no shortcut. Trust in the courts, without which our system cannot function, requires knowledge, it requires understanding, it requires engagement. In a word, it requires work. Work on the part of all citizens. And we must undertake that work together. . . . What I'm trying to do is to make those whose initial instincts may favor important structural change or other similar institutional changes--such as forms of court-packing--think long and hard before they embody those changes in law.

That was so well received, by Justice Breyer, that progressive activists started calling for him to take early retirement.

Court-packing is not a new conversation in this body, but it has not been well received in the past.

The Court has always ebbed and flowed in its liberal or conservative bents. President Obama spoke openly when he was President about the Court in the 1960s. That was a very progressive Court in the 1960s that drove conservatives crazy with some of the decisions they made, but there was no packing of the Court to try to change the direction of the Court in the 1960s and 1970s. There was a frustration but a realization that nine was the right number.

Over time, the Court, as it does, as it ebbs and flows over the decades, has flowed to be more conservative. In the days ahead, at some point, it will flow to be more liberal. It just will. But the rule of law is important. It is not a new concept that is being addressed, but it is one this body should think long and hard about.

Quite frankly, I agree with Joe Biden on this concept, but not the President Joe Biden, the Senator Joe Biden.

With this body's permission, let me read Joe Biden's speeches when he was in the U.S. Senate and he stood right over there and spoke on this floor or spoke in committee hearings when he was in the Judiciary Committee, speaking often about this issue.

Joe Biden, once speaking, made this statement. He said:

President Roosevelt clearly had the right to send to the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Congress a proposal to pack the Court. It was totally within his right to do that. He violated no law; he was legalistically absolutely correct. But it was a bonehead idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make. And it put in question, for an entire decade, the independence of the most significant body-- including the Congress, in my view--

The most significant body in this country-- --the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

The President had the right to do that. He was totally within his power, and his objective was seen clearly.

Well, the President clearly has the right to do what he is doing, in my view.

But he also called it ``bonehead.''

Joe Biden, as Senator, also continued with this statement. He was discussing the same issue. He said: ``The Senate again stood''--by the way, this was two decades later, after Joe Biden made that statement I just read. Two decades later, Joe Biden still has the same passion. He stated this:

The Senate again stood firm in the 1937 court-packing plan by President Franklin Roosevelt. This particular example of Senate resolve is instructive for today's debates, so let me describe it in some detail. It was the summer of 1937. President Roosevelt had just come off a landslide victory over Alf Landon, and he had a Congress made up of solid New Dealers. But the ``nine old men'' of the Supreme Court were thwarting his economic agenda, overturning law after law overwhelmingly passed by the Congress and from statehouses across the country.

In this environment, President Roosevelt unveiled his court-packing plan--he wanted to increase the number of Justices on the Court to 15, allowing himself to nominate these additional judges. In an act of great courage, Roosevelt's own party stood up against his institutional power grab. They did not agree with the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, but they believed that Roosevelt was wrong to seek to defy established traditions as a way of stopping that activism.

In May 1937, the Senate Judiciary Committee--a committee controlled by the Democrats and supportive of his political ends--issued a stinging rebuke. They put out a report condemning Roosevelt's plan, arguing it was an effort ``to punish the Justices'' and that executive branch attempts to dominate the Judiciary lead inevitably to an autocratic dominance, ``the very thing against which the American Colonies revolted, and to prevent which the Constitution was in every particular framed.''

Our predecessors in the Senate showed courage that day and stood up to their President as a coequal institution. And they did so not to thwart the agenda of the President, which in fact many agreed with; they did it to preserve our system's checks and balances; they did it to ensure the integrity of the system. When the Founders created a ``different kind of legislative body'' in the Senate, they envisioned a bulwark against unilateral power--it worked back then and I hope it works now.

Said Joe Biden during that time.

The noted historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.--

Joe Biden, continuing as Senator-- has argued that in a parliamentary system President Roosevelt's efforts to pack the Court would have succeeded. Schlesinger writes: ``The Court bill couldn't have failed if we had a parliamentary system in 1937.'' A parliamentary legislature would have gone ahead with their President, that's what they do, but the Founders envisioned a different kind of legislature, an independent institution that would think for itself. In the end, Roosevelt's plan failed because Democrats in Congress thought court-packing was dangerous, even if they would have supported the newly-constituted Court rulings. The institution acted as an institution.

In summary, then, what do the Senate's action of 1795, 1805, and 1937 share in common? I believe they are examples of this body acting at its finest, demonstrating its constitutional role as an independent check on the President, even popularly elected Presidents of the same party.

That was from Senator Joe Biden. His challenge to this body was to think long and hard before they destroyed an institution of our government. It was right then; it is right now.

In a final statement from Joe Biden, he spoke about the filibuster-- often, actually, about the filibuster. Senator Biden stated this:

The Framers created the Senate as a unique legislative body designed to protect against the excesses of temporary majority, including with respect to judicial nominations; and they left us all the responsibility of guaranteeing an independent Federal judiciary, one price of which is that it sometimes reaches results Senators don't like.

It is up to us to preserve these precious guarantees. Our history, our American sense of fair play, and our Constitution demand it.

Joe Biden continued. As Senator, he said:

I would ask my colleagues who are considering supporting the ``nuclear option''--those who propose to ``jump off the precipice''--whether they believe that history will judge them favorably. In so many instances throughout this esteemed body's past, our forefathers . . . stepped back from the cliff. In each case, the actions of those statesmen preserved and strengthened the Senate, to the betterment of the health of our constitutional republic and to all of our advantage.

Our careers in the Senate will one day end--as we are only the Senate's temporary officeholders--but the Senate itself will go on. Will historians studying the actions taken in the spring of 2005--

When Joe Biden stated this in the Senate-- [Will they] look upon the current Members of this Senate as statesmen who placed the institution of the United States Senate above party and politics? Or will historians see us as politicians bending to the will of the Executive and to political exigency? I, for one, am comfortable with the role I will play in this upcoming historic moment.

Then he stated this, from Senator Joe Biden:

I hope . . . my colleagues [will] feel the same.

So do I. Less than the days ahead, history will look at the unwinding of the judiciary based on a season in the Supreme Court, as we have had seasons and cycles before. Don't unwind the judiciary for a season.

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