Endless Frontier Act--Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President.

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Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I want to make two points.

First, I want to associate myself with the remarks of some of my colleagues earlier about the fact that we don't know what is in this bill. That is not a criticism of anyone or any party. You can only absorb so much. If you define our job, at least in part, as representing our people and knowing what we are voting on when we vote, I would respectfully suggest we would be better off having our staff vote. Now, I doubt there is more than one or two or, maybe, three staff members who really know or who have a global, macro, picture of what is in the bill, but at least our staffs know more about it than we do. That is not a criticism of anybody or any party. That is just a fact.

I think, if you were to just pick 10 Senators at random and ask them off the record, ``Do you know what is in this bill? Not every word, but do you have a general idea of everything in this bill?'' 9 out of 10 would tell you that they don't, and the 10th is probably lying.

Now, I have said before--and I really think that it is a shame. I have said before--and I meant it--that I know some of my colleagues better than others, but I think I know all of my colleagues in the Senate. These are the most interesting, complex people--that is, in part, why they are interesting--whom I have ever been around. There are some enormously talented people in this body. Let me just pick one at random.

When Senator Scott doesn't have time to understand or Senator Durbin doesn't have time to figure out everything that is in the bill because things are moving so fast, that shortchanges all of us. They are talented people. They may be able to say something: What about this provision? This doesn't make sense. What do you think, Senator Kennedy? What do you think, Senator Murphy?

So that really bothers me. That is not a criticism of my Democratic friends, and that is not a criticism of the majority leader, Senator Schumer. It wasn't any better when the Republicans were in control. I just think that it is so sad, so unfortunate, and it is so avoidable.

I understand that floor time is limited. So we want to do things quickly around here. But there is no law that says we can't start earlier and work later. There is no law that says we can't cooperate in terms of allowing the majority to have more floor time so that all of us have a greater opportunity to understand what we are voting on.

I mean, excuse me, Senator Scott, look at that. I think that is only a portion of the bill. Honestly.

Now, the second point I wanted to make--I learned really quickly when I got here that Senators are like cats: They do what they want. Why is that? Because we have minority rights. Our rules pretty much are written to protect the minority.

So a fair question is, Well, how do we ever get anything done? Well, we do it by consent. We couldn't run this place without consent, and we give our consent automatically to a lot of relatively trivial matters, the day-to-day functioning of the Senate. Yet we don't readily give our consent--or at least not as readily as we should--when we are dealing with more important matters, like the Endless Frontier Act.

Now, I voted to get on this bill because I was told that we were going to have an open amendment process. In my judgment, we didn't have an open amendment process. That is, again, not a criticism of the Democratic majority, and it is not a criticism of Senator Schumer. It wasn't a damn bit better when the Republicans had the majority. It just wasn't.

An open amendment process, to me, means that any Senator should be able to come to this floor, respecting each other so that we allot ourselves time, and offer an amendment for all of us to hear. Now, obviously you can't spend 20 hours on one amendment, but if one wants to present an amendment, I think 5 minutes would be sufficient. We do that all the time in a vote-arama.

When people--some people say, when I raised this issue, they say: Oh, vote-aramas are terrible because we are here all night.

We don't have to be here all night. You can start a vote-arama at 8 in the morning and stop at 5:30 or 6. That is an open amendment process.

An open amendment--I was told we would have an open amendment process. I wouldn't have gotten on this bill otherwise. Now, I don't know how it works on the Democratic side. I suspect it works very similar to the way it works on our side. You have an amendment, but you have to get the permission of other Senators to even offer your amendment. You have to go see the bill manager. You have to see the majority leader. You have to see the committee chairman. You have to see the ranking member. And anybody can say: No, I just don't like your amendment. And I think it works the same way on the Democratic side. That is not an open amendment process--not even close.

You say: Well, why does it matter?

You know, we have seniority, and we elect our leaders, and I get all of that, but nobody is infallible. I will give you a specific example. We are giving, in this bill, I am told--it could have changed overnight--but about $56 billion to the semiconductor industry. We are told we need to do that because the semiconductor industry--private semiconductor industry--is essential to our ability to compete with China.

So far, so good. There are a lot of companies that are essential to competing in the global economy--the finance industry, the energy industry, the banking industry. We have to eat. Farmers--you could marshal a pretty persuasive argument that they are essential too. But this bill singles out the semiconductor industry for $56 billion, and I believe--I am not sure because it could have changed--that we are giving President Biden the authority to give up to $3 billion to each private company. So we are picking winners and losers. Some people like that; some people don't. I get it. That is why God made votes. We will have a vote on it, but the fact is that we are doing it.

Senator Sanders had a very interesting idea. In fact, it is an idea that I had on my side as well. He said: Look, if we are taking taxpayer money and we are giving it to private companies, why don't we let the taxpayers participate in the upside? Why don't we give taxpayers--you can't give individual taxpayers, but you can certainly give, say, the Department of Treasury on behalf of taxpayers warrants or stock options.

So if President Biden--if this bill passes and President Biden exercises his authority to give $3 billion to XYZ Semiconductor Company, and the semiconductor company uses that capital wisely and triples its profits, and its stock goes up 233 percent, the American taxpayer has warrants or stock options.

Now, I am not speaking for Senator Sanders. I haven't really had a chance to talk to Bernie about his idea; I am just intrigued by it.

I had a similar idea. I wanted to use stock options on my side. By ``my side,'' I mean the Republican side. I offered it up, and it is still floating around. It is probably in a black hole somewhere. None of the powers that be on my side that--they said: We are not going to let you do that.

That is not an open amendment process. It is honestly not.

And I hear this business about regular order, and I am not arguing that we are not following regular order. It is just that regular order is irregular.

I mean, this is an incredibly talented group of people, and we ought to be able to design a parliamentary procedure that looks like somebody designed it on purpose so that every single Member in this body has a chance to offer input and to have his or her ideas seriously considered. And it won't be an unwieldy process. We do it all the time with the vote-arama.

Now, vote-aramas--I am going to come back to a point I made earlier, but I want to emphasize it. Vote-aramas can be painful. Nobody likes to stay up all night. But we don't have to stay up all night. We can start at a reasonable hour and end at a reasonable hour.

And I dare say that if you took all the time that we have spent collectively over the last week or so in the back rooms making deals, making side deals, saying ``You can't have your amendment''; ``Yeah, I like your amendment''; ``No, that is a dumb idea,'' none of which is transparent, until we come up, finally, with some kind of package that makes probably 75 percent of the folks mad and mostly 100 percent don't know what is in it--if we took all the time that we spent on that and instead spent it by saying ``OK. Here is the bill. You have a reasonable amount of time to understand what is in it, and now we are going to start the amendment process. There is going to be 5 minutes to present your amendment, and there will be 5 minutes to argue it by an opponent. We are going to really have 20-minute votes. We are going to start at a reasonable hour, and we are going to end at a reasonable hour, and then we will come back and do it the next day,'' yes, we will burn maybe 5, 6 days of floor time, but the minority party is going to cooperate with the majority party in terms of helping it preserve floor time that it has to have to do other things that the majority party needs to do.

Again, I am not criticizing Senator Schumer. The Republicans did the same thing when we had the majority. But I just think we are wasting an enormous amount of talent in this body by, A, not giving them a voice-- witness Senator Sanders' warrant idea. I don't know what happened on his side of the aisle. On my side of the aisle, when I brought it up, they killed it deader than a doornail, and that is not an open amendment process.

We are also wasting an enormous amount of talent because we are not-- in offering these ideas to each other, we are not getting the benefit of the wisdom of our colleagues.

So I wanted to get that off my chest, and that is about all I have to say, and I appreciate your attention.

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