Volume 155, No. 64 covering the 1st Session of the 111th Congress (2009 - 2010) was published by the Congressional Record.
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY” mentioning the Environmental Protection Agency was published in the Senate section on pages S4835-S4836 on April 29, 2009.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, in the early 1800s, a perceptive young Frenchman came to America, Alexis de Tocqueville. He marveled at our new democracy. He wrote a classic book about it. He warned more than anything about something he called ``the tyranny of the majority.'' That was his worry about the American democracy.
We now have finished 100 days for a popular new President. He has presented a blueprint for the country that is dramatically different from what we had before.
Yesterday, a member of our Republican side moved his desk to the other side potentially giving that side of the aisle 60 votes and raising the prospect that we would have no check and balance on one-
party rule, the genuine risk of what de Tocqueville called the tyranny of the majority. So the question arises, what is the blueprint for this popular new President, and is it the kind of change we really want?
All of us can point to something, as the Republican leader did, to Afghanistan and Iraq, of which we approve. I could point to the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan and his focus on paying teachers more for teaching well and encouraging charter schools, something I greatly support. But both the Senator from Arizona and the Senator from Kentucky have pointed out that the blueprint presented by our new President has too much spending, too much taxing, and too much debt.
Especially striking to me is the idea that we would have, in the 10th year of the President's budget proposal, $800 billion in interest to pay, which is more than we would be spending on defense that year, eight times as much as the Federal Government would spend on education that year, and eight times as much as it would spend on housing, $800 billion of interest to pay just on the debt.
Yet there is another part of this blueprint that worries me, and that is too much government. We read that now our Government, through taxpayers, owns half of our largest automobile companies.
In an interview I heard the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator say automakers are waiting for the Government to tell them what kind of car they ought to build. Already the President has fired the President of our largest auto company and our Government is telling the company who should be on the boards. I suppose it will be saying also what plants should be kept open or closed and what people should be paid. That is quite a bit of government. Or banks, instead of asking the Congress at the beginning of January for a $1 trillion line of credit so we could get the toxic assets out of banks and get credit flowing again, so jobs would come back and housing prices would stabilize, this new administration spent $1 trillion, a breathtaking, unimaginable amount of money, adding it to the debt. What about the banks? Well, we are going to own the banks or at least be the major shareholder in many of the biggest banks in the world. Again, that means politicians and regulators in Washington will be deciding who will be the bank president, who will be on the boards, who will get the loans, perhaps, and for what purposes the loans could be used.
Isn't that the kind of thing that got us into trouble in the first place, politicians in Washington telling banks to loan money to people who could not afford to pay it back? This too much government in the first 100 days is not just the result of the recession in which we find ourselves. This is not a crowd that believes if you can find it in the yellow pages, the Government should not be doing it. This is a deliberate choice of more Government.
As in the case of student loans, the first proposal from the President was that we take the amount of Pell grants and add that to the automatic spending in the budget, adding another $117 billion to the automatic spending over 10 years. This is something that could bankrupt our country and it didn't fly. But there is another proposal, which is still out there. That would take the entire student loan program and cancel the choices that students have, create a big new bank, a half-trillion-dollar bank, and have the Department of Education make all the loans. That is a massive takeover by the Government.
Twelve million students today choose to get their loans from private lenders. There are 2,000 of those loaning money to students who choose to attend Nashville Auto Diesel College or Harvard or Princeton, where the Senator from Missouri was an outstanding student. There are 4,400 campuses that offer this choice. The proposal would be to create a big, new, half-trillion-dollar bank that would take all of that over, that would make $75 billion of loans in a year. It would make the promising new Education Secretary a candidate for banker of the year instead of Secretary of the year. It would cause Andrew Jackson, who fought against the national bank in his day, to roll over in his grave at what his party is doing. It would be Congressmen playing a trick on students because the end result would be saying: We are going to borrow the money, the U.S. Department of Education, at one-quarter of 1 percent, and we are going to lend it to you at 6.8 percent. Then we will turn around and give aid to other people that you students are paying for, and we Congressmen will take the credit.
I don't think students will like that. It is all in the name of $94 billion in savings, but that is exaggerated because the Government already admits that it will cost $25 or $30 billion at least for the Government to manage the program, and I can't believe the Government is a better manager of a bank making 15 million loans a year than banks that are set up to do that.
If the subsidy is too high, lower it; don't cancel the program. That is the direction in which we are going. This is an administration with a blueprint for a different kind of American future. But it is not the kind of American future that Abraham Lincoln saw for the Federal Government. In the first years of President Lincoln's administration, he not only was involved in the Civil War, but he and the Congress passed the Homestead Act and the Land Grant Colleges Act and the Transcontinental Railroad Act. They conferred opportunities on Americans everywhere, and then the Americans used their own elbow grease to make things happen.
This administration, this 100 days, is a command-and-control type of administration, with regulators and politicians running the banks, running the auto companies, and nationalizing student loans. It is an opportunity to have a new blueprint of a kind we haven't seen before, not one that confers opportunities but a planned America with less freedom, with fewer choices, fewer opportunities, a society planned and run by Washington regulators and politicians that our children and grandchildren cannot afford, not a society that confers opportunities and choices for the people.
In addition, there is the prospect of no check and balance on one-
party rule which risks what the perceptive young Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, said in the early 1800s was the greatest threat to the new American democracy when he warned about the tyranny of the majority.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Missouri.
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