From the Office of Senator Kerry

Thursday, December 20, 2001

Mr. President, at a time when so many Americans are out of work, with our nation at war and with, appropriately, calls for national unity, I regret to say I have to come to the floor to address what I feel is the ultimate breakdown of unity, a poorly conceived device to avoid doing anything for workers hurting in today’s economy. Mr. President, rather than deliver relief for workers, rather than do what Ronald Reagan did and extend unemployment benefits during tough economic times, rather than say that no working family will go without health care while laid off, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have been working overtime to turn a legitimate policy debate into a personal exercise in demonization. They’ve worked hard to turn a battle of ideas into a battle of name calling. And their focus has been our leader Tom Daschle. They’ve called him obstructionist – partisan – divisive – and worse. Now let me make clear for the record, I’m not worried about Tom Daschle. He’s tough and resilient like the South Dakota prairie. He won’t buckle, he won’t shrink from their charges, and Tom Daschle knows that truth wins out in the end. He knows that what a different wartime leader, Abraham Lincoln, said is still true: "If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference."By that measure, Tom Daschle will do just fine. But let’s be honest. This really isn’t about Tom Daschle. It’s about a Republican Party that knows their agenda won’t stand up to the light of day and so they need to make the debate about something else. Can’t pass drilling in an Arctic Refuge on its merits? Then do it because you’re patriotic. Can’t do that? Attach it to a ban on human cloning. Have that cynical effort rejected almost unanimously, then just blame the Democratic Leader. Can’t ram backloaded, retroactive corporate tax giveaways through Congress while ignoring workers? Well, that must be because Tom Daschle is a partisan. Better to demonize the Democratic leader than acknowledge that your stimulus bill is unacceptable because it won’t stimulate the economy. Better to attack Tom Daschle than admit that your bill is an insult to the working, everyday Americans who’ve been honored in words countless times since September 11th but insulted by the so-called stimulus bill the Republican House passed by one vote. Now the House is set to vote on a supposed "bipartisan compromise" – "bipartisan" because it may likely get 51 or 52 votes here in the Senate. But Mr. President, this is not a stimulus bill. It’s a tax cut bill that will spend $211 billion over the next five years, with mrore than half of that cost coming after 2002, when the Administration believes that the economy will have already recovered. Mr. President, a "bipartisan" bill is not one that barely gets enough votes for passage. A bipartisan bill is one like the education bill we passed yesterday, which received 87 votes in the U.S. Senate. We were statesmen when we passed – almost unanimously – an emergency spending bill, a use-of-force resolution, a counterterrorism bill, an airline industry bailout, and an airport security bill that will make the skies safer for millions of Americans. But in a Senate as closely divided as this one, to call a bill "bipartisan" that gets two or three Democrats to vote for it is laughable. There are still other ways in which statesmanship can be exercised. Statesmanship can be resisting bad ideas that take advantage of national emotion to do unacceptable special interest favors for a favored political constituency. That, regrettably, is what the Republican stimulus bill is all about. And so we find ourselves divided – not because Tom Daschle is an obstructionist, but because a decades old partisan agenda which was on its last legs before September 11th has been revived under the guise of economic security. And to advance that agenda they’re withholding economic relief from those who need it most – a whole stimulus package is held hostage to their ideology. Average Americans are being denied unemployment insurance and health care because they want to hold out for more for those who are doing fine as it is. So we have an impasse – we’re fighting for everyone to be treated fairly – they’re fighting to reward those already rewarded with no guarantee it will be spent or invested in a way that has any immediate stimulative impact on an economy that needs it. Now wonder they’d rather just attack Tom Daschle - it’s easier than dealing in the truth and moving this economy forward and helping America’s workers. Mr. President, it doesn’t need to be this way. In early October, three weeks after the terrorist attacks, Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate agreed to a list of bipartisan principles for stimulus. These included the belief that the package should be temporary, help those most vulnerable, impact the economy quickly, be broad-based, and include out-year offsets. The Republican leader of the Ways and Means Committee in the House abandoned those bipartisan negotiations in order to push through his own partisan package by one vote. It is his truculence, and the insistence of the Republicans that we eliminate the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax and reduce individual tax rates even more than we did in June, that have led directly to the situation we find ourselves in today. Mr. President, 700,000 Americans lost their jobs in October and November alone. The unemployment rate is now at 5.7 percent. The country is at war, we have rising unemployment and an economy in negative growth, and we are on the verge of returning to an era of deficits after finally putting our fiscal house in order after more than a decade of mismanagement. We should not be passing large, permanent tax cuts unless we can be certain that the cuts will have a stimulative impact. The tax cuts proposed by most Republicans would not have that effect, since most of the costs occur after 2002.

I still hope that the Senate can work to develop a bipartisan agreement, and I commend my leader for his continued efforts. We owe it to working Americans everywhere to pass a responsible bill. We know that a real stimulus bill should contain some tax relief for businesses, provided that it will help spur new investment or address temporary cash flow concerns. We know that we should provide some temporary tax relief to those families who are likely to spend the money, thus helping generate some additional demand. We know that we need to help unemployed workers make ends meet, and make sure that they don’t lose their health insurance as a result of the ripple effects from the terrorist attacks of September 11th. And we know that we need to temporarily offset some of the impact of the current downturn on the states, by increasing the federal Medicaid matching rate, or FMAP. Let’s be clear: Workers laid-off, workers unable to afford health care for their families cannot contribute to economic recovery. The answer is not to sit back and wait for economic benefits to trickle down to workers already thrown off the job. Instead we must invest in health care, unemployment insurance, and worker retraining to help put money in their pockets and bring dislocated workers back into the economic mainstream of this country. We need to do that even if we can’t agree on how to boost the economy through tax cuts. That’s why I introduced the Putting Americans First Act, to take these worker protections out of the stimulus debate and provide a guarantee of immediate relief for those who have been hurt by the economic recession. The legislation would empower the states to expand unemployment compensation and health insurance coverage and provide help to states in which welfare caseloads are sharply increasing. But even that bill -- common sense relief for workers -- is being held in limbo. Mr. President, we simply cannot adjourn for the year without delivering unemployment benefits and health care. We cannot lift the burden of the terrorist attacks from the shoulders of the airline and insurance industries and not do the same for American workers -- and if we could just get a vote on the Putting Americans First Act we wouldn’t need to. Let’s break that impasse and do right by those workers who are hurting today. Common sense and common decency tells us now is not the time for a corporate grab-bag of tax cuts, or for revisiting a debate about future marginal tax rates – particularly when these rate cuts would do nothing for more than three-quarters of the population. It is incumbent upon us to act in the best interests of our country as a whole, not in the interests of a select few. All Americans want to see this economy get moving again, and no Americans want to see this country begin a new chapter in our history where we hold back health insurance and unemployment benefits in tough times. And we don’t need to. Mr. President, let’s put things straight and meet the objectives of the American people and not the objectives of an ideological minority, and let’s stop demonizing those who disagree with us. We owe the American people better than what they’ve been given at one of the most important times in our nation’s history, and it’s time the Congress delivered.