[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 71 (Thursday, May 17, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3252-S3271]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 THE FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION SAFETY AND INNOVATION ACT--MOTION TO 
                           PROCEED--Continued

  Mr. REID. Madam President, what is the pending business?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The motion to proceed to S. 3187.


                             Cloture Motion

  Mr. REID. Madam President, I have a cloture motion at the desk.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The cloture motion having been presented under 
rule XXII, the Chair directs the clerk to read the motion.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

                             Cloture Motion

       We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the 
     provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, 
     hereby move to bring to a close the debate on the motion to 
     proceed to calendar No. 400, S. 3187, the Food and Drug 
     Administration Safety and Innovation Act.
         Harry Reid, Jeff Bingaman, Joseph I. Lieberman, Amy 
           Klobuchar, Patty Murray, Mark Begich, Richard 
           Blumenthal, Ben Nelson, Patrick J. Leahy, Kent Conrad, 
           Tim Johnson, Sherrod Brown, Benjamin L. Cardin, Sheldon 
           Whitehouse, John F. Kerry, Daniel K. Akaka, Tom Harkin.

  Mr. REID. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the mandatory 
quorum under rule XXII be waived.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. REID. Madam President, I have spoken before about the importance 
of the FDA bill. It is something we have to get done. Literally, 
people's lives depend upon it. It addresses so many things with the FDA 
to make it a better organization. We have to get this done. As I said 
before, if my Republican colleagues don't like the bill, offer an 
amendment--offer an amendment. Take that out. Put something in if you 
don't like it. But I hope we don't have to go through voting on cloture 
on this Monday night. We should be legislating on this on Monday. So I 
am stunned that once again, on a motion to proceed, when there has been 
an agreement that we would proceed to this with relevant amendments--
everybody says that is what they want to do. It is not germane 
amendments, which is very narrow, it is relevant amendments. It gives 
people a lot of opportunity to change this legislation in many 
different ways. So I hope we do not have to have that cloture vote 
Monday night.


                  Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 1905

  Mr. REID. Madam President, I now ask unanimous consent that the 
Foreign Relations Committee be discharged from further consideration of 
H.R. 1905, the Iran Threat Reduction Act, and that the Senate proceed 
to its consideration; that the Reid-Johnson(SD)-Shelby substitute 
amendment, which is at the desk and is the text of Calendar No. 320, 
the Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Human Rights Act, as reported by 
the Banking Committee, be considered; that a Reid-Johnson(SD)-Shelby 
amendment, which is at the desk, be agreed to; that the substitute 
amendment, as amended, be agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be read 
a third time and passed; that the motions to reconsider be laid upon 
the table; that there be no intervening action or debate; and that any 
statements related to this matter be printed in the Record at the 
appropriate place.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. KYL. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I would just 
note that this is a matter--and I appreciate the majority leader's 
desire to bring this to conclusion. It has been worked on now for quite 
some time. Unfortunately, the language that has just been presented to 
our side has not been widely shared. I have not actually read it yet. 
It was apparently brought over at 10:38 this morning. When I came to 
the floor, it was described to me. As described, it would be weaker 
than President Obama's policy.
  Given the fact that this is a matter on which Democrats and 
Republicans and the administration and the Senate have been in pretty 
close accord in dealing with the country of Iran and its nuclear 
ambitions, I would hope we could ensure that the language is agreed to 
by all. There seems to be an important piece missing, and we certainly 
need the time to talk to folks to see why that is so, whether it can be 
put back in or, if it cannot, then to be able to discuss it because we 
certainly do not want something that is weaker than the 
administration's current policy.
  So I would hope we could have some time over the weekend and perhaps 
on Monday, when enough of the Members can be apprised of what has 
actually been proposed here, and see if our colleagues on the other 
side would be willing to make the accommodation that we may need to 
have made here.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
  Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I 
appreciate the leader's desire to get this done. I would like to get it 
done too. In fact, the original Iran sanctions language was drafted in 
my office when I was in the other body.
  This is an issue I have been involved in for a long time. This 
morning I have had a chance to look at it only within the last half 
hour. I suppose I could have been here at 10:38, but even 10:38, for an 
issue such as this--and my view also is that it is not as strong as the 
Presidents's policy. It is not as strong as any other resolution on 
this topic we have ever passed. And the question that would logically 
be asked is, Why not? I would like to think that is an oversight in 
drafting, that we can work this out over the weekend and make this 
reflective of our national policy and the President's policy. But I 
would be very concerned about moving to this language today and would 
hope that we could work with the leader to have language that we could 
bring up as early as Monday and pass and send the message to the world 
that the Senate supports the stated policy of our government on this 
critical issue. Nobody wants Iran to be able to move forward and attain 
nuclear capacity, and I would be very concerned about moving forward on 
this language as it currently appears to me to be stated.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, is there an objection by either Senator Kyl 
or Senator Blunt?
  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, for the reasons noted, I would hope we could 
work with our colleagues to fix the problem. Until we do, I would have 
to object.

[[Page S3253]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Manchin.) Objection is heard.
  Mr. REID. This is such an interesting conversation here on the floor 
this afternoon. I did not have the papers. Now, I do not blame my 
friend from Arizona for not having the documents. I do not blame my 
friend from Missouri for only having a half hour to look at this. This 
was given to the Republican leader yesterday, midday. The language they 
are objecting to was in the base bill, so unless they did not read the 
base bill, they have a problem here. Now, they said they want to get it 
done--strange way of showing they want to get it done.
  This has been a classic example of rope-a-dope. I try to be a patient 
man. I have been very patient with my staff working with Senator Kirk's 
staff, the minority leader's staff. I have tried to be as patient as I 
can be.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Would my friend yield?
  Mr. REID. No, not right now. This is absolutely untoward, what is 
happening here. We have tried to get this done every day. Oh, it is 
just we have to do a little bit more. We have this agreement that was 
agreed to by all of the parties, but, of course, now there is no 
agreement.
  I am deeply disappointed that my Republican colleagues are preventing 
the Senate from passing additional critical sanctions against Iran. If 
they want to embarrass the President, this is a strange way to do it. 
Two months ago I came to the Senate floor and said we needed to pass 
these sanctions immediately. The fastest way forward was to pass the 
bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Johnson and Shelby, which passed 
out of the Banking Committee unanimously. But Republicans then said no, 
as they are saying today. Republicans said they wanted to include ideas 
from Senator Kirk, Senator Paul, and wished to move forward with S. 
Res. 380 on containment.
  We heard their objections. We have tried mightily to address them, 
with the goal of getting this bill passed and protecting our own 
national security and that of our ally Israel. This deal includes a 
bipartisan managers' package sponsored by Senators Shelby and Johnson, 
with items of importance to Senators Menendez, Kirk, Paul, and Johnson.
  The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has expressed strong 
support for this package to Senator McConnell and to me. In a letter 
today, AIPAC urged us to move forward with this package as quickly as 
possible. I ask unanimous consent that letter be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:
                                               The American Israel


                                     Public Affairs Committee,

                                     Washington, DC, May 17, 2012.
     Hon. Harry Reid,
     Majority Leader, U.S. Senate,
     Washington, DC.
     Hon. Mitch McConnell,
     Minority Leader, U.S. Senate,
     Washington, DC.
       Dear Senators Reid and McConnell: We understand that you 
     are bringing the Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Human 
     Rights Act of 2012 (S. 2101) to the floor for consideration. 
     On behalf of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, we 
     would like to express our support for this critically 
     important bipartisan legislation. We also want to take this 
     opportunity to thank you for your ongoing strong efforts to 
     thwart Iran's nuclear program, and for your overall 
     leadership on behalf of a vibrant U.S.-Israel relationship.
       In our view, this legislation has been further strengthened 
     in important ways by a managers' amendment that reflects the 
     views of a number of senators. We appreciate your leadership, 
     together with that of Senators Johnson, Shelby, Menendez and 
     Kirk in enabling this legislation to move forward to the 
     floor and ultimately to conference with the House.
       We understand that Senators Menendez and Kirk have 
     additional valuable ideas to improve the bill being 
     considered by the Senate but have graciously agreed to defer 
     their amendments at this time to enable the bill to move 
     forward as rapidly as possible. We applaud their efforts and, 
     like them, want to see the strongest possible legislation 
     enacted. We believe that their amendments fall within the 
     scope of the conference committee, and urge you to ensure 
     that they will be given appropriate consideration during the 
     course of the conference deliberations.
       We are deeply appreciative of the role played by the Senate 
     under your leadership to do everything possible to stop Iran 
     from using its nuclear program to further destabilize the 
     Middle East. By its legislation and oversight, Congress has 
     kept this issue in the forefront and forced Iran's leaders to 
     face the choice between compliance with its international 
     obligations and international opprobrium.
       We look forward to working in support of your efforts.
           Sincerely,
     Howard Kohr,
       Executive Director.
     Marvin Feuer,
       Director, Policy & Government Affairs.
     Brad Gordon,
       Director, Policy & Government Affairs.

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, Democrats are ready to move forward and vote 
on an amended S. Res. 380, the bipartisan Graham-Casey-Lieberman 
legislation. This amendment would put the Senate on record, along with 
President Obama, ruling out a policy of containment on Iran. Yet 
Republicans have objected again. We cannot afford to delay these 
sanctions and slow them down any longer. On May 23 there is a round of 
international negotiations taking place with the Iranians on subjects 
related to this resolution we have.
  Democrats are ready to move forward. We are ready to pass both the 
Iran sanctions bill and the containment resolution now--not later, now. 
We cannot afford any more delays. Sanctions are a key tool in our work 
to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, threatening Israel, and 
jeopardizing the national security of the United States.
  I am to the end of my patience. I usually never raise my voice with a 
Senator. I apologize to my friend from Arizona. I did a few minutes 
ago. The conversation was between him and me. But I am really upset 
about this. I feel that I have been jerked around--that is a pretty 
good understanding of the language people have--because we can never 
quite get there. The Republicans have kept us from moving forward on 
this for 2 months. We should have done what Shelby and Johnson told us 
to do. So I hope something will happen on this in the near future, but 
I have to be honest with you, I do not have much faith that it will.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Republican leader.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Do I have the floor now?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. You do.
  Mr. McCONNELL. I would say to my good friend the majority leader, 
this is an outrage I do not understand. My staff tells me we did not 
receive the draft amendment until late last night, and this morning we 
were told it was final. We got the draft late last night, and this 
morning we were told it was final.
  Now, look, we have debates around here about a lot of things, but one 
of the things we have typically not been unable to reach an agreement 
on is the Iran issue. I do not know what the problem is here. A little 
communication ought to be able to bring us together behind something we 
can speak to unanimously, with a goal that I think we all have in this 
body--virtually everyone--which is to do everything we can to prevent 
Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed country.
  So there is no reason in the world why we cannot resolve whatever 
minor differences we have and move forward. We certainly do not want to 
take a step backward. And there are Members on my side of the aisle who 
are concerned that the way the measure is currently crafted could 
actually be a step in the wrong direction. It could have been a 
drafting error. But what is wrong with sitting down on a bipartisan 
basis, looking at the language, and making sure we get it right and 
achieve the goals that I think virtually everybody in the room would 
like to achieve? There is nothing to get angry about. A proper response 
would be to work out our differences and to go forward.

  Timeliness is an issue. We need to do this quickly. We can all agree 
to that on both sides of the aisle. I say to my friend, I don't think 
there is anything to be outraged about. Why don't we work out the 
differences and pass the resolution?
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, when my friend indicates, why is there any 
problem, and that they agree--it is just like the issue of student 
loans when they

[[Page S3254]]

say they agree, except they will not let us legislate on that bill. 
They think this is a great thing to do, but we cannot do it. They say 
they need more communication. How about 2 months? How much more do they 
need?
  I will not get into getting anyone in trouble, but the Republicans 
were given this in mid-afternoon. Maybe they were busy, but that 
doesn't matter. The point is we have tried to get something done, and 
we cannot get it done.
  I think it is too bad for this institution. I am not outraged; I am 
upset because I feel I have been used as a tool to try to adversely 
affect the President in some way. I will continue to keep an open mind, 
but I have to say that I am terribly disappointed. It looks as though 
we are going to arrive at May 23--and the Iranians have people around 
who are watching this. They are laughing at us. We cannot even come up 
with a simple resolution. It has no force of law--I should not say 
that; it does have some. But they are laughing at us.
  Here is the U.S. Senate quibbling over a sentence that has been in 
this resolution since it was drafted.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, most people in America work 5 days a 
week. It is 1 o'clock on a Thursday. What is the problem? We have broad 
bipartisan agreement about the approach we ought to take with regard to 
the Iran sanctions issue. The leaders on my side are all standing on 
the floor of the Senate and are anxious to be involved in working out 
the language.
  I say to my friend, he said it is a sentence in the resolution. A 
sentence can sometimes change the entire meaning. How this is crafted 
is not irrelevant. Rather than us standing out here on the Senate floor 
pointing fingers, it is only 1 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon; let's sit 
down and work out the differences and pass something we can agree on 
and try to make a difference.
  Mr. REID. No matter how many times you say it, the language we are 
told they are complaining about was in the initial bill.
  Mr. President, I appreciate my friend saying most people work 5 days 
a week. I work more than 5 days a week, and I have been working the 
last 2 months trying to get this done. Every time we tried to do it in 
the last few weeks--and Senator Kirk is ill, and I gave him every 
benefit of the doubt. Let's try to do what Senator Kirk thinks is a 
good idea. If we can agree, we will do it.
  Mr. President, we have been trying to get this done for a long time. 
It is not just today at 1 o'clock; I wanted to move forward on this a 
long time ago. They say: Let's just give it another day or so and we 
will take care of this. But that is not how it has worked.
  I yield to the Senator from New Jersey.
  Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, I thank the leader for yielding. I want 
to applaud him for asking to bring the legislation that passed 
unanimously out of the Banking Committee to the floor because there is 
no one in this Chamber who has been stronger on pursuing sanctions on 
Iran and trying to defer Iran from achieving nuclear weapons. I support 
and am on Senator Lieberman's resolution.
  But time is of the essence. We must send to the Iranians a clear 
message that they cannot just forestall negotiations and have 
negotiations thinking that they are buying time. We must show them that 
notwithstanding their intentions to buy time, there are consequences.
  The consequences of those sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran that 
are already moving forward and that the administration is fully seeking 
to enforce, and the continued perfecting sanctions that the Banking 
Committee sent out unanimously is incredibly important to send the 
Iranians a message.
  I look at what the legislation will do in part. It, in essence, 
closes loopholes that the Iranians have figured out. It creates 
sanctions on the national Iranian oil company and the national Iranian 
tanker company, making them agents of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard 
and imposes sanctions on financial institutions that would facilitate 
transactions.
  This is important. The Iranians are using this as a way to get around 
it. It has sanctions on satellite companies that impose human rights 
sanctions on those companies that provide satellite services to the 
Iranian regime but fail to prevent jamming by Iran of transmissions by 
others of the same satellite service company. It has sanctions on 
financial messaging services, and even though Swift, the largest of 
them, already pulled the plug on the Iranians, we don't want any other 
messaging service to fill that void. We want to make sure that noose is 
as tight as possible.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, if my friend will yield, I want to make sure 
the record is clear. When I talked about it having no force of law, we 
were talking about the containment resolution.
  I ask this question to my friend from New Jersey: What does he think 
the Iranians are doing watching this performance today? How does he 
think they are feeling about what we are doing today--that we cannot 
pass this resolution?
  Mr. MENENDEZ. Originally, when we sent a 100-to-0 vote out of here, 
they said: We are in trouble. But now they are saying to themselves: 
Well, buying time seems to succeed.
  We cannot allow the Iranians to believe, as they head into these 
negotiations next week, that there is anything but a foot on the head 
of the snake and that we will continue to do that and drive every 
possible sanction and close every possible loophole, which is largely 
what the legislation the leader was seeking to pass accomplishes. That 
is why it passed unanimously out of the Banking Committee.
  Even as we talk about the resolution, there is no reason to stop the 
very essence of what would send a message to the Iranians--that it will 
hurt them in their economy and undermine their ability to continue in 
Iran as a government, and that it is going to be the very strongest set 
of sanctions we can levy from one government to another. It will have a 
multilateral effect, which is when sanctions take place the best.

  I am beside myself. Are there amendments that I might want to offer? 
Of course. But I find it far more important to move now and get passage 
and send this strong set of sanctions so that the Iranians will get the 
message rather than to linger and ultimately have those negotiations 
take place and not send a message.
  I appreciate the majority leader's efforts. I applaud them. I am 
certainly for Senator Lieberman's resolution. I don't believe in 
containment as a policy, but moving the set of sanctions to ensure that 
the Iranians don't do anything but come to the table and say they are 
ready to follow a course of disarmament in terms of their nuclear 
production is incredibly important.
  Sometimes things can wait. This is not one of those times in which 
waiting produces the desired result. On the contrary, it produces a 
negative result because they believe we will not continue to pursue 
tightening the noose and closing every loophole and being of one mind. 
I hope we can achieve that before we leave.
  Mr. REID. Before my friend leaves, I direct a question to him. Is it 
true that he is a member of the Banking Committee?
  Mr. MENENDEZ. Yes.
  Mr. REID. It is true that this resolution came from the Banking 
Committee?
  Mr. MENENDEZ. Yes, the legislation came from the Banking Committee.
  Mr. REID. The matter about which we talk, the Iranian sanctions 
legislation, came from the Banking Committee. It was reported 
unanimously from the committee, right?
  Mr. MENENDEZ. That is correct.
  Mr. REID. During the last 2 months, the Senator from New Jersey and 
his staff have been heavily involved in what is going on during the 
negotiations that have taken place; is that fair?
  Mr. MENENDEZ. It is.
  Mr. REID. Jessica Lewis, who is seated by me, my foreign policy 
adviser--is it true that she worked for the Senator from New Jersey?
  Mr. MENENDEZ. She did until the majority leader took her from me.
  Mr. REID. And it is true that we have worked over this period of 
time--our staffs, working with Republicans--very hard to try to get 
something done. I say to my friend, is it true that each time we were 
there, were not there the next few minutes, the next day--it has taken 
forever, 2 months, right?
  Mr. MENENDEZ. We have thought at various times that we would be on 
the Senate floor and have it passed, and

[[Page S3255]]

there has always been an additional desire or objection. I just think 
what we have before us, especially in timing, doesn't mean we cannot 
continue to perfect it as we move to the future, as we are doing in 
this legislation.
  But this legislation, now passed unanimously out of committee, is 
supported by the major advocates of those who share our vision that we 
cannot have a nuclear-powered Iran and an Iran with nuclear weapons, 
and believe that it is important to move now so we can achieve that 
goal and send a message to the Iranians.
  So I think time, in this case, is of the essence. That is why I came 
to the floor to support the leader's efforts.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, this is a classic moment--
unfortunately, too typical--where we all agree on the goal, but we want 
to pass another tier of sanctions against the Iranians to deter them 
from developing nuclear weapons. Our goal has been to get this done 
before the P5+1--five permanent members of the Security Council of the 
U.N., plus Germany--meet again with Iran in Baghdad this time, which is 
next Tuesday.
  I understand the frustration of the majority leader. First, nobody 
has been more consistent and steadfast and sincere in their effort than 
the majority leader to have this body make very clear to everybody in 
the world--particularly the Iranians--that we will not accept them 
becoming a nuclear power, and we are prepared to use economic sanctions 
and, if necessary, certainly now the credible threat of force.
  I also know the majority leader has been pushed and pulled back and 
forth over the last several weeks to get to a point where we can get 
this done before May 23. So I understand his frustration at this 
moment.
  I hear my Republican colleagues, and I have looked at the language 
they are concerned about. They are concerned that in listing the 
economic sanctions as one way that can be used to stop Iran from 
developing nuclear weapons and not listing the credible threat, the 
option of military force, as President Obama and others have said, that 
somehow we are sending a message of weakness.
  Frankly, my original hope was that the more important thing to do is 
to get this done and passed in the Senate by next Tuesday when all 
parties come to Baghdad. But the difference is not only small, it is 
nonexistent. We all agree we ought to try the sanctions, that we ought 
to make them tough, that they ought not be watered down before the 
Iranians agree to stop their nuclear weapons program. And we all agree 
we have to have the credible threat of force being used against the 
Iranian nuclear program if there is any real hope of the sanctions 
working.
  I know the majority leader has to leave the Senate floor. Ideally, I 
wish we could agree on that sentence and get it done and passed today 
by consent, if we can. If we can't, I hope we can do it by Monday so we 
do send a message of unity, which we have, but the words, the 
procedures, the mood is standing in the way of us sending a unified 
message from the Senate to the rest of the world, and particularly to 
the Islamic Republic of Iran in Tehran, that we mean business. Right 
now we are not speaking with one voice.

  I appeal to my colleagues. Let us step back, take a breath. Can we do 
it this afternoon? Maybe. I hope so. If we can't, let us get it done 
over the weekend and adopt it by Monday.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
  Mr. GRAHAM. I wish to echo what my friend from Connecticut, Senator 
Lieberman, has said. I wish to get this done so we can vote and send 
the appropriate signal. It is not so much we act before Tuesday, even 
though that is important, but that we let the Iranians and the world 
know what we mean when we speak.
  I hope they are watching in Tehran. I don't know if they get C SPAN. 
They will probably find it odd that Lindsey Graham is now being easy on 
Iran. Trust me, I am not. Senator Menendez has been a champion, along 
with Senator Kirk, of creating legislation we could all buy into 100 to 
0. We can't agree we should take Sunday off 100 to 0. But what they 
achieved was remarkable.
  I understand Senator Reid has been pulled and torn. I appreciate it. 
I enjoy working with him. He thinks maybe somebody is doing him wrong. 
We are not. He should ask himself this question: Why would Senator 
Graham be on the floor concerned about what we say if he genuinely did 
not believe we are making a mistake? I don't want to embarrass the 
President. I would say to the President: Keep it up with Iran. I hope 
sanctions work. And if you need to use military force to protect this 
Nation, if sanctions fail, I will be your strongest advocate.
  But a couple of things have been said that need to be corrected. The 
managers' amendment is not what was in the base bill or we wouldn't 
need a managers' amendment. Section 102 in the base bill is 
approximately three paragraphs. Section 102 here is approximately 10 
pages. The bottom line for me is that this section was added in the 
managers' amendment that didn't exist in the base bill:

       Nothing in this act or this amendment or the amendments 
     made by this act shall be construed as a declaration of war 
     or an authorization of the use of force against Iran or 
     Syria.

  That wasn't in the base bill. Where the hell did that come from? This 
is not a declaration of war. But when this sentence is in there, and 
the new amendment doesn't say one thing about the use of force to 
control the Iranian behavior--the President's own words are ``all 
options on the table.'' And the reason I am exercised is we are now 
producing a product that backs away from where the President has been 
regarding all options on the table. We end the new managers' package 
with the statement ``nothing here authorizes the use of force against 
Iran or Syria.''
  It is all about sanctions in the bill, and the only time we mention 
force is to say we won't do it or we won't authorize it. All I am 
asking is what Senator Lieberman mentioned. These sanctions are great. 
I hope they will change Iranian behavior. They haven't yet, and I don't 
think they ever will, but I am willing to go down this road. All I am 
asking is when we include in the legislation ideas or concepts that 
will change Iranian behavior that we include ``all options are on the 
table'' in the bill. Because this would be the first piece of 
legislation where that is ominously omitted.
  To end, the whole concept of what we are trying to do with the 
declarative statement ``this is not a declaration of war or the use of 
force against Iran or Syria'' would make the Iranians believe, quite 
frankly, we are all about sanctions and that is it. I am all for 
sanctions, but if you are listening, Tehran, I want more on the table 
to make you change your behavior.
  This summer is going to be tough for the world. The Iranians talk and 
enrich. There is nothing credible I have seen to make me believe they 
are not pursuing a nuclear weapons capability. I hope the talks next 
Tuesday will change their behavior.
  I appreciate what Senator Menendez has done, along with his 
colleagues on the Banking Committee, to give this President more tools, 
to make them even tougher than they are today. But the worst thing we 
could do before next Tuesday is to leave any doubt to anybody who is 
watching this debate that there is nothing more on the table than just 
sanctions; that on the table--and we hope to God we never have to use 
it to stop the Iranian nuclear program--is the use of force, if that is 
required.
  That is all I want to say. I hope we never get there.
  I agree with this last statement--I am not asking for a declaration 
of war against Tehran or Syria--but I will not vote for a document at 
this critical time in our Nation's history, with the existential threat 
we are facing from a rogue regime that denies the right of Israel to 
exist, that has killed over 2,000 Americans in Iraq, that has been a 
proxy for evil throughout the planet, whose own President doesn't 
believe the Holocaust existed. And to my friends at APACS, whom I agree 
with most of the time, if they think this is the right answer, I 
couldn't disagree with you more.
  Add one simple line, that in addition to all the fine work of the 
Banking Committee, and my dear friend Senator Menendez, that we in the 
Senate recognize what the President has been saying for months--that 
military force is also an option.

[[Page S3256]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mr. CORKER. First of all, we have two things on the floor that are 
being discussed right now, and I know this is confusing probably to the 
people in Tehran, but the fact is I agree that Senator Menendez and 
Senator Kirk have done a great job. I am on the Banking Committee, and 
we voted this out unanimously. I do hope, with this managers' package 
being added, that we can work out the details here.
  My sense, by the way, is that we will do that. My sense is we will do 
that by the end of the day. So on the sanctions bill, I hope it goes 
forward.
  Now I wish to move to something called a resolution. As we saw a 
minute ago, Senator Reid talked about something not having the force of 
law. We are not talking about the sanctions bill. It has the force of 
law and, hopefully, will become law soon. What doesn't have the force 
of law is S. Res. 380, and I ask unanimous consent to engage in a 
colloquy, if I may, Mr. President, with the Senator from Connecticut 
and the Senator from South Carolina.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. CORKER. Sometimes what happens around here, Mr. President--and it 
happened in Libya, when we passed a resolution at 9 o'clock one night 
by unanimous consent and somebody over at the State Department decided 
that was an authorization for force. That was not the intent of that 
resolution. Again, we are talking now about the resolution, not about 
the sanctions bill.
  I wish to engage in a colloquy with the cosponsors of S. Res. 380, 
because there is a clause 6 in here that says:

       . . . strongly supports United States policy to prevent the 
     government of the Islamic Republic of Iran from acquiring 
     nuclear weapons capability.

  There are some wise people over at the State Department who could use 
that statement as a declaration of war, and I think they acknowledge 
that. But I don't think the authors of this resolution want that to be 
the case. So I wish to clarify that in the resolution--not in the 
sanctions bill--none of the language included in S. Res. 380 may be 
interpreted as congressional support for military operations in Iran.
  I hope that should the administration decide kinetic activities are 
the only avenue available--we all hope that doesn't happen, but believe 
it can--that if kinetic activities are the only option available to 
achieve our policy objectives, they will come to Congress for 
authorization. This is not intended as an authorization of war.
  I think these two cosponsors of the resolution agree, and if the 
President does want to go to war with Iran, it is his responsibility to 
come to Congress. Is that the agreement, I ask my colleagues?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to respond to my friend 
from Tennessee. I am actually very glad he raises the question, because 
I know at least one other Member of the Senate has similar concerns.
  The interpretation of my friend from Tennessee of our intention in 
this resolution is exactly right, which is that there is nothing in 
this resolution that is intended to be an authorization for the use of 
military force in Iran by the President or government, military, of the 
United States of America.
  This resolution's main focus is to essentially back up with a 
congressional statement the position President Obama has articulated; 
that no matter what happens, containment of a nuclear Iran is not an 
acceptable policy from the point of view of the security of the United 
States; that our policy is to prevent the government of the Islamic 
Republic of Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. That is 
exactly why clause 6 was put in there, to say we do not accept 
containment; that our policy is prevention of the Islamic Republic of 
Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.
  But I want to be clear there is nothing in that language that Senator 
Graham or I or Senator Casey see as the authorization of the use of 
military force. If at any point circumstances in Iran require, in the 
judgment of the Commander in Chief, military action, then I expect--
particularly if it lasts a period of time that would bring it within 
the purview of the war powers understandings--the President would come 
to Congress seeking explicit authorization for the use of military 
force.
  This resolution supports the negotiations going on now between the 
P5+1 and Iran. It expresses our hope that it succeed so that the option 
of military force is not necessary. It is very significant in that it 
essentially says--and I will paraphrase it--we ought not to dial down 
the economic sanctions against Iran just because they have come to the 
table and maybe accepted one part of what we want them to do. They have 
got to show they have made a commitment for a verifiable end of their 
nuclear weapons program before we lift the economic sanctions. That is 
the real goal. And if they do not, they will face our policy of 
prevention, not containment. But this is not the authorization of the 
use of military force.
  I thank my friend from Tennessee for raising the question and giving 
us the opportunity to respond, and I hope it reassures anyone else in 
the Senate who may have had that same concern.
  With that, I yield for my friend from South Carolina.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Senator Corker asked a very good question, and I will 
answer it directly, as Senator Lieberman did. The resolution is not 
designed to authorize the use of force where anybody in the State 
Department administration could say, we have the green light to go into 
Iran from Congress. That is not what we are intending to do. We are 
intending to echo a policy statement made by President Obama that the 
policy of the United States will be--if you are listening in Tehran--
not to contain Iran if they obtain a nuclear capability.
  I want to lodge an objection to my own resolution by my colleague 
Rand Paul, who could not be here, so I am going to object on his 
behalf. He wants to strike two provisions of the resolution, although I 
don't think we can get there from here.
  But in response to Senator Corker, if he wanted to add a line into 
this resolution that it is not an authorization to use force, I will 
gladly do that so that nobody can mistake that. But here is what 
Senator Paul suggested to me. What if they get a nuclear weapon. You 
know, we don't want to contain them. That is our policy. But what if we 
wake up one day and they explode a bomb out in the desert and they have 
already got it? What would we do then? Does that mean we would go after 
their nuclear program or would we try to contain them? It means, from 
my point of view, we should go after their program. So we have a 
difference.
  If the Iranians think they can sneak through and get a nuclear 
weapon, and then we are going to contain them, it doesn't work that 
way. They need to know their regime survival is at stake if they go 
down this road. If by some accident of our intelligence being wrong--if 
that could be even conceivable, which I think it could be given this 
closed environment--they need to know we are not going to allow a 
nuclear-capable Iran, period.
  But to this resolution not being an authorization to use force, I 
would say to Senator Menendez that this last statement--which wasn't in 
the base bill--I don't object to that. This is not a declaration of 
war. I don't know why someone added Syria. We are not talking about 
Syria, but there are some people out there who want to limit the 
ability of the United States sometimes to defend itself. I want to put 
a sentence in your sanctions bill that all options are on the table, as 
they have been for months, if not years.
  Mr. CORKER. To sort of end this colloquy--and I know Senator McCain 
and Senator Menendez wish to speak--I fully support every comment that 
has been made by the Senators from Connecticut and South Carolina. I am 
not associating myself with the comments of the Senator from Kentucky, 
which the Senator from South Carolina alluded to.
  I would love for the Senator from South Carolina to insert that 
language into it, regarding the fact this is not an authorization for 
the use of force. But I want to say that is not because I don't support 
exactly the sentiments being laid out here. I do. I just want us to 
continue. I want the Senate to be a part of any action that might take 
place. Hopefully it won't. But if we end

[[Page S3257]]

up with kinetic activity, I want us involved in that so as a Nation we 
go forward--if that occurs--in a unified way. What I don't want is for 
us to end up where we have in the past, having partisan disputes.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  Mr. McCAIN. Would the Senator yield for a question?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. McCAIN. Isn't it true that the President of the United States 
said that it was ``unacceptable'' for the Iranians to have a nuclear 
weapon?
  I have a series of questions.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Yes.
  Mr. McCAIN. So doesn't that mean the United States of America would 
reserve all options in case of an unacceptable situation where the 
Iranians continued--and we have seen no deviation from that path--
toward the acquisition of a nuclear weapon?
  Mr. GRAHAM. The Senator is correct.
  Here is what President Obama said: All options are on the table when 
it comes to the Iranian nuclear program. Israel, I have your back. 
Containment is not an option.
  I agree with the President. I think he has made the right statements, 
and I am just trying to reinforce them.
  Mr. McCAIN. So isn't it true that we are having this debate about 
whether this amendment or this legislation could be construed as an 
authorization or opening the door for military action; that the 
administration's policy is already very clear that it is unacceptable 
for Iran to have a nuclear weapon? And I am sure that, over time, the 
three of us could talk for a long time about the implications for the 
entire region of Iran, not just the threat to Israel but the entire 
region of an Iranian government which is, quote, going to wipe Israel 
off the map, which then, of course, would force other nations in the 
region to develop nuclear weapons.
  Isn't it true that it has been a matter of national policy--both 
Republican and Democratic--that it is unacceptable? And that does not 
mean we automatically would use military force, but it does mean we 
would have to react to the development on the part of the Iranians of a 
nuclear weapon.
  So this resolution we are considering is no different in any way--in 
fact, it is less specific than what the President of the United States 
has said and what I believe most every Member of the U.S. Senate is on 
record one way or the other saying: that the development of a nuclear 
weapon by Iran would be an unacceptable situation.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Well, let me try to answer that.
  Senator Menendez and a group of us--Senators Lieberman and Casey and 
Hoeven and myself--did the resolution in question today to echo the 
President's statement that we are not going to have containment as a 
policy.
  There are some people--even Republicans, I might add, some very 
prominent Republicans--who believe you could contain a nuclear-armed 
Iran if you told them: If you ever use a nuclear weapon, we would wipe 
you off the face of the Earth.
  President Clinton gave a very good answer to that situation. He said 
that the biggest fear he has is not that the Iranians would put a 
nuclear weapon on the top of a missile and hit Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. 
That is a concern. His biggest fear is that they would share the 
technology with a terrorist organization. So that is why you can't ever 
let them get this capability.
  So the resolution is basically echoing the statement of the President 
that containment is not an option. And it has 78 cosponsors.
  Senator Paul has the right to object, and he did. I don't think we 
can get there from here. I think he has a different view of what we are 
trying to do--honestly held, a good man, just an honest difference of 
opinion.
  Back to the sanctions bill. Senator Menendez did a great job, as he 
always does on things like this. The reason I found out about this and 
got so concerned is that section 603 is something that wasn't in the 
base bill. Again, it says: Nothing in this act or the amendments made 
by this act shall be construed as a declaration of war or an 
authorization for use of force against Iran or Syria.
  One, nothing in here has anything to do with Syria, and I am OK with 
saying that. I don't want this to be a declaration of war or an 
authorization to use force; I want it to be a good sanctions bill. But 
if you don't have the other means available to stop the Iranian 
programs--as the President has indicated, all options on the table--
that has to be said because we would be leaving a gap in our policy.
  So to Senator Menendez and Senator Reid, all I am asking is that we 
insert a provision that basically echoes what the policy of this 
country is--all options are on the table, not just sanctions. And we 
will get a lot of votes for this.


 =========================== NOTE =========================== 

  
  On page S3257, May 17, 2012, the Record reads: . . . So to 
Senator Menendez and Senator Reed, all I am . . .
  
  The online Record has been corrected to read: . . . So to 
Senator Menendez and Senator Reid, all I am . . .


 ========================= END NOTE ========================= 

  Mr. McCAIN. I know our friend Senator Menendez is going to speak, but 
this is not any change in American policy toward Iran, both Republican 
and Democratic, and that is that there is an existential threat to the 
State of Israel and other countries in the region, other Arab countries 
in the region, that would be posed if the Iranians continued on their 
development of nuclear weapons.
  So this resolution is an important statement on the part of the 
Senate and Congress, but to somehow say this is a major change in 
policy of any kind obviously flies in the face of the record of this 
President and previous Presidents as regards this issue.
  I also would like to thank the Senator from New Jersey for his 
continued contributions to these national security issues.
  Mr. GRAHAM. I would just close and yield the floor to Senator 
Menendez. The Senator is right about the resolution. We are not coming 
up with a new idea; we are just reinforcing an idea put on the table by 
our own President--we are not going to contain a nuclear-capable Iran 
as a policy. It is not a declaration of war. It is not authorization of 
force. It is restating the policy at a time when it may matter.
  Mr. McCAIN. And if there were a need for military action, it is the 
view of all of us that we would come back to the Congress of the United 
States before any such action were contemplated.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Well, here is my view about that. I think the President 
would be wise to include the Congress.
  I am a conservative who thinks the War Powers Act is 
unconstitutional. I find it odd that our party for all of these years 
has railed against the War Powers Act until President Obama is in 
office, and all of a sudden we are great champions of the War Powers 
Act.
  But what I would say is that it would be wise for the President to 
consult with the Congress and for us to be united. And if you do 
believe in the War Powers Act, he has to, within a period of time, come 
back to get our approval to continue. I think whatever the President 
needs to do to defend us against a nuclear-capable Iran is best made by 
the Commander in Chief consulting with the Congress. But you can't have 
535 commanders in chief.
  Back to the sanctions bill. The problem I have is that it is silent 
on a concept on which we all agree, and I don't want to create a 
document before the negotiations Tuesday that doesn't include something 
beyond sanctions to change the Iranian behavior that we all want to 
avoid. And this says: It is the sense of the Congress that the goal of 
compelling Iran to abandon efforts to acquire nuclear weapons 
capability and other threatening activities can be effectively achieved 
through--it goes through 10 pages talking about sanctions, and not once 
does it mention the possibility of military force, and that is what I 
want to add, that concept.
  With that, I will yield the floor. I hope we can work this out.
  To the Senator from New Jersey, I think he is a great guy, and I am 
sorry we are having this problem. But it is very important to me that 
we get this part of it right.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
  Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, I appreciate the comments of both my 
colleague from South Carolina and my colleague from Arizona. They are 
leaders in this regard in terms of the national defense. And if I ever 
had a case, I would want Senator Graham to argue it for me because he 
is a fine lawyer. I have seen that on the floor and I have seen it in 
his role as a reservist in part of, as I understand, the Judge Advocate 
General program. So he does a fantastic job.
  Let me make some observations that I think are critically important.

[[Page S3258]]

  No. 1 is that I share Senator Graham's and Senator Lieberman's 
concern and the desire to have the Senate on record as saying we do not 
and cannot accept an Iran that has nuclear power and nuclear weapons. 
That is why I signed on to their resolution. And I think their 
resolution moving exactly in tandem, parallel with the sanctions 
legislation that I played a significant role with the chairman of the 
Banking Committee, Chairman Johnson, and others to bring to the floor 
is incredibly important.
  But let me make some observations.
  First of all, in the committee itself, when it passed unanimously, 
all of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle had the opportunity to 
offer an amendment and/or language that would have done exactly what 
the Senator wants, and no one on either side of the aisle sought to do 
it because the focus was on the jurisdiction of the committee, which is 
economic sanctions--economic sanctions that have proven in their first 
iteration to begin to have real consequences to the Iranians: devaluing 
the rial by over 50 percent; creating challenges in their economy; 
closing the financial institutions they can deal with in the world; 
looking at their oil, having major discounts on their oil and finding 
it increasingly difficult to sell. And we have the opportunity to 
perfect that, to make it even stronger, even more viable before they 
head into negotiations and think they can buy time.
  Now, it was silent when it came out of the Banking Committee. And, 
yes, in the managers' amendment there is that provision because, in 
fact, in order to deal with one of the objections of our colleague on 
the other side of the aisle, Senator Paul, provisions saying that this 
was not a direct military authorization were included so that we could 
ultimately find the opportunity to pass it on the floor with unanimous 
consent--the same unanimity the Banking Committee had, the same 
unanimity we had when we passed the sanctions on the Central Bank of 
Iran. That unanimity sends an incredibly strong and powerful message to 
the Iranians.
  So it was in the process of accommodating that Senator Reid talked 
about over the last 2 months to try to get us to a point that we could 
pass legislation, that in the process of accommodating that, that 
language comes forward.
  The concern is ultimately taken care of by Senator Lieberman and 
Senator Graham's resolution; that, in fact, the President has said, as 
the Commander in Chief of the country, that a nuclear-armed Iran is not 
an option; that containment of a nuclear-powered Iran is not an option.
  This President has put all of the military assets that are necessary 
that did not exist before in the Persian Gulf to both respond to any 
incident or to initiate any action he thinks may be necessary. 
Therefore, those actions more than any words have made it very clear to 
the Iranians that is a real possibility if the national interests and 
security of the United States are ultimately challenged.
  So I really think that insisting on the sanctions part of the 
legislation, that has the full force and effect of law and real 
consequences to the Iranians in their economy--which is the most 
significant way that we undermine their march toward nuclear weapons--
is important to move, while you move independently the legislation that 
Senator Lieberman and Senator Graham have talked about, which is making 
the intentions or amplifying the intentions of the President crystal 
clear. But you should not hold hostage the sanctions legislation in 
order to accomplish a goal that should be taken care of by the 
Lieberman-Graham resolution, and you shouldn't hold it hostage when, in 
fact, you have a powerful tool to exercise before the next round of 
negotiations.
  The Iranians must know that we are one of purpose, and that oneness 
comes by passing the sanctions unanimously through this Chamber and 
achieving, ultimately, their effects.
  So that is the only point of disagreement with us. Don't hold the 
sanctions legislation hostage. None of our colleagues sought to include 
that language. And the language that is included is in response to a 
colleague from the other side of the aisle in order to be able to move 
the legislation. So you can't have your cake and eat it too. But we do 
need to have our ability to move the sanction before the Senate 
adjourns this week, and I think that will meet our collective interests 
as a nation.
  There is only one piece of turf we should be fighting for; that is, 
the collective turf that is our country. That is what we can do by 
passing the sanctions legislation.
  I hope Senator Reid will have the opportunity to clear the way and to 
move it by unanimous consent and in doing so send a very powerful 
message on behalf of the Senate.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask consent the Senator from 
Delaware, Senator Coons, and I could have a colloquy for up to 15 
minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                          Student Immigration

  Mr. ALEXANDER. The Senator from Delaware is not yet on the floor but 
I know he is coming. Because I know other Senators wish to speak at 2 
o'clock, I am going to go ahead with my remarks. When he comes I will 
let him go ahead with his.
  Each year, approximately 50,000 foreign students receive advanced 
degrees from universities in this country in the areas of science, 
technology, engineering, and mathematics. We call those in shorthand 
STEM degrees--science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
  Of those 50,000 students, at least 17,000 go home to other parts of 
the world. These are some of the brightest men and women in the world. 
They are attracted to the best universities in the world. I always say 
our universities, our great research universities especially, are our 
secret weapons for job growth. Since World War II, many estimates by 
the National Academy of Sciences suggest that more than half of our new 
jobs have come from increases in technology. It is very hard to think 
of any important new innovation in biology or in the sciences that has 
not had some sort of government-sponsored research over that time. So 
our research universities are job factories and our advanced degree 
holders are the ones who come up with the great ideas.
  As a former president of the University of Tennessee, which is a fine 
research university, I know that increasingly in the science, 
technology, engineering, and math programs in those universities many 
of the students are from other countries. These students line up in 
India and compete, hoping they will get a chance to come to the United 
States. They have done the same in China. They do this everywhere in 
the world. About 17,000 of those 50,000 who come for advanced degrees 
go home each year.
  Yesterday, Senator Coons and I introduced legislation that would help 
those 17,000 students, and we hope more who may come, to come to the 
United States, get their advanced degrees in science, technology, 
engineering, and math, and then stay here and create jobs in our 
country instead of going home and creating them in other countries.
  I will have to admit there is a value to students who go home. It is 
probably our best foreign diplomacy, to have someone come from another 
country, live here, learn our values, go home and explain those at 
home. But we want the next Google to be created here, not in China. We 
want the brightest people in the world. If we are going to attract them 
here and provide education for them, we want to give them every 
opportunity to come here. And today we make them go home because of our 
immigration policy.
  The legislation Senator Coons and I introduced yesterday now has the 
support already of at least two other Senators, Senator Lugar and 
Senator Isakson, who have asked to cosponsor. It would, No. 1, create a 
new student visa for citizens of other nations who want to come here 
and pursue a master's or doctoral degree in science, technology, 
engineering, and math. No. 2, once they get that degree, the new visa 
created in this bill would allow them to remain here for 12 months, to 
look for a job. And, No. 3, once they are employed, the bill 
establishes a procedure to allow students to change their immigration 
status and to receive a green card. Finally, these new green cards 
would not count toward any existing green card limit.

[[Page S3259]]

  This idea is not new. It has as much support outside of the Senate 
Chamber as any idea I know about--from companies such as Microsoft, 
which tells us they have 2,600 jobs available that require computer 
science degrees that start at $104,000 a year. They would like to have 
these students work here and create jobs for us. We know from our own 
experience the importance of these green-card holders.
  The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN, is probably the 
greatest engineering laboratory in the world. Who runs it? Dr. Jeffrey 
Wadsworth ran it. He had a green card from the United Kingdom. Dr. Thom 
Mason, who is there now, had a green card from Canada. Thomas Zacharia, 
the current Deputy Director at ORNL and the father of supercomputing, 
has a green card from India.
  We want them here, not in India, not in the United Kingdom, not in 
Canada.
  I greatly appreciate the leadership of Senator Coons of Delaware on 
this issue. He has worked hard on it. He has been a leader on it.
  I only have one more thing to say about it before I step aside and 
let him talk about his ideas. In 2005, we began to work on something 
called the America COMPETES Act in this body. In 2007 we passed it. It 
was sponsored by the Democratic leader and the Republican leader. It 
had 35 Democratic sponsors and 35 Republican sponsors. It passed the 
House. It was reauthorized last year. We asked the best minds in our 
Nation to tell us what would be the 20 things we could do as a Congress 
to make sure we are competitive in the future so that we can keep this 
high standard of living we have come to enjoy. It is a very high 
standard of living. We have about 5 percent of all the people in the 
world. We have about 25 percent of all the wealth in the world that we 
produce each year. How can we keep doing that?
  They gave us these 20 ideas and we passed many of them. It is one of 
the great successes of our Congress over the last several years, 
working together. One piece of unfinished business from the America 
COMPETES Act of 2005 and 2007 was to pin a green card on the foreign 
student who gets a graduate degree in science, math, technology,or 
engineering.
  The legislation Senator Coons and I offered yesterday would do that. 
I greatly value his leadership and his approach. I hope we can work 
with our colleagues on both sides of the aisle to take this idea, turn 
it into a law, and give our country more of an opportunity to create 
new jobs as we move forward.
  I already asked permission for the next 15 minutes that Senator Coons 
and I would be in a colloquy. I wish to defer to him for his comments 
at this time.
  Mr. COONS. I thank very much Senator Alexander. I cannot think of a 
better person to partner with, to seek advice and guidance and 
leadership from, on the issue of STEM immigration and education reform 
than Senator Alexander, a national leader on education policy. Like me, 
Senator Alexander is the son of a former classroom teacher, but also 
served as the U.S. Secretary of Education and president of a prominent 
university, the University of Tennessee. He knows firsthand of the 
challenges, of the opportunity lost when tens of thousands of foreign 
nationals, who come here and seek the opportunity to get STEM master's 
and doctoral degrees in some of our best universities, are then forced 
to return home to their nation of origin rather than being able to stay 
here, if they choose, to create jobs, grow businesses, and contribute 
to our country and our economy.
  As someone who, before running for public office, worked with a 
highly motivated materials-based science company that employed over 
1,000 researchers, I too have a sense of what great contributions 
immigrants have always made to this country, but particularly in these 
areas of innovation and how they can contribute to our competitiveness.
  Senator Alexander's closing comments about the America Competes Act 
is where we start this conversation. I came to this Senate knowing that 
my predecessor from Delaware, Senator Kaufman, had been a strong 
supporter of the America Competes Act, one of the few engineers to 
serve in the modern Senate. I was happy to take up the cause and press 
for its reauthorization in the waning days of the 111th Congress.
  I met with Senator Alexander last year and we talked about this as 
one of the most promising unfinished pieces of business in that 
critical report, ``Rising Above The Gathering Storm,'' and in that 
vital piece of legislation, the America Competes Act. As Senator 
Alexander had referenced, the America Competes Act was passed with 
strong bipartisan support. That was the sort of thing that was focused 
on moving America forward by identifying strong ideas that had support 
across the whole country and a lot of different sectors and from both 
parties. It is my hope this is the beginning of building a strong 
bipartisan coalition on moving forward on immigration reform.
  Let me talk for a minute, if I could, about our history and tradition 
of immigrants contributing to our country, being a strong part of job 
creation and growth here, and in particular immigrants who come to this 
country to be educated in STEM disciplines--science, technology, 
engineering, and math.
  If you think about it, for most of the last century we had some of 
the strongest universities in the world. For much of the last 50 years, 
anyone who came here from a foreign land to get a doctorate in a STEM 
discipline, if they chose to go home, was going home to a country that 
wasn't a competitive environment. The United States--because of our 
advances in workforce and infrastructure and our legal system, our 
entrepreneurial culture, our capital markets--was the world leader in 
innovation and competitiveness. This is no longer the case. We still 
have the strongest universities in the world, 35 out of the top 50, but 
today those 17,000 STEM doctoral and master's graduates that Senator 
Alexander referred to, when we force them to go home to their country 
of origin rather than allowing them to compete for those jobs here and 
contribute to the American economy, are finding open arms in nations 
such as India and China, which are vigorous competitors. They are 
providing the capital markets, the infrastructure and the workforce, 
the resources to take advantage of those opportunities. We need an 
immigration system that responds to the modern economy and the 
opportunities of a highly competitive modern world. Rather than 
hemorrhaging these highly skilled folks and having them return home, we 
should give them an opportunity to participate in being job creators 
here.
  The numbers bear this out. If you take a look at the Fortune 500 
companies today, more than 40 percent of them were founded by 
immigrants or their children. Folks who had come to this country 
recently from other parts of the world have established companies that 
employ more than 10 million people worldwide and have combined revenues 
of more than $4 trillion, a figure greater than the GDP of every 
country in the world except the United States, China, and Japan. 
Immigrant-founded startup companies created 450,000 jobs in the United 
States in the last decade, and collectively they have generated more 
than $50 billion in sales in a single year.
  Let me give one example that has meant a lot to me. I became friends 
with the founder of Bloom Energy, KR Sridhar. In his native India he 
got his undergraduate degree, but he came to the United States to get 
his doctorate in mechanical engineering and then went on to be a 
researcher at NASA's Ames Center and made a critical invention in solid 
oxide fuel cells. He runs Bloom Energy, which has already created 1,000 
jobs. Last week the Governor of Delaware and my senior Senator, Tom 
Carper, joined others at the site of a former shuttered Chrysler plant 
for the groundbreaking of a facility that Bloom Energy will make 
possible.
  Why would we want a capable, bright contributor to our economy like 
KR to be forced to go home to his country of India, rather than 
welcoming him here and giving him a chance to participate, to 
contribute, and potentially become not just an American business leader 
but an American citizen? We need to make it easier for the next 
generation of inventors and innovators to create jobs here.
  This bill, as Senator Alexander has laid out, is relatively simple. 
It creates a new class of visas for foreign students to pursue STEM 
master's and doctoral

[[Page S3260]]

degree programs, and allows us to continue a conversation about how do 
we recognize the longstanding central contribution to our economy, our 
culture, and our country of immigrants.
  I believe there are other areas of immigration reform that have to be 
on the table, that we have to move forward on. I am eager to move 
forward on family-focused reform and on other areas as well, where I am 
a cosponsor of other immigration bills, but my hope is this legislation 
will get the attention it deserves, will get the broad support from 
Members of both sides of the aisle it deserves, and that it will form 
part of a compromise that will address the needs of all the 
stakeholders in immigration reform in a responsible and balanced 
manner.
  This legislation is not the end of the road, but it is a critical 
step forward in making sure we continue a bipartisan, thoughtful, and 
constructive dialog on how do we deal with an immigration system that 
is broken and that doesn't make America as competitive as it could be.
  If I could, I want to close by thanking Senator Alexander for his 
leadership, for allowing me to work with him and to produce a bill that 
is streamlined, that is simple, that is accessible, and that I think 
can contribute to making America a land that continues to welcome and 
celebrate the real job creators, inventors, and innovators from all 
parts of the world.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, Senator Coons is one of the most 
eloquent speakers we have in the Senate. He did a beautiful job in 
explaining the bill. I hope it attracts support from both Republicans 
and Democrats. He mentioned the fact there are other immigration 
issues--and there are. There are a number of ones I wish to work on and 
get something done. I was here when we tried to get a comprehensive 
immigration plan a few years ago. It had strong bipartisan support, but 
one of the lessons we learned in that effort was that we do not do 
comprehensive well here in the Senate. Sometimes it is better to go 
step by step. That has been true for a long time.
  We remember Henry Clay as the Great Compromiser, but Henry Clay's 
greatest compromise was not passed by Henry Clay. He failed. It nearly 
ruined his health and he went to Massachusetts to recover from it. A 
Senator named Stephen A. Douglas, from Illinois, the home of our 
assistant Democratic leader, came to the floor and introduced the Clay 
compromise section by section and each section passed with a different 
coalition, with Senator Sam Houston being the only Senator who voted 
for each one of them. So my hope is that with the broad support we have 
for this very simple idea--pin a green card on the lapel of a gifted 
graduate of an advanced program in science, technology, engineering, 
and math, and allow them to stay here and create jobs here instead of 
forcing them to go home--I hope we have such strong support for this 
idea that we can go ahead and pass it, and then we can follow that up 
with the other necessary steps we need to take on immigration, and 
hopefully we can do that with a coalition that represents Democrats and 
Republicans as well. This is a great idea.

  Somebody might say: Well, why don't they just do it the way we do it 
now? Right now, it is H 1B visas. As everyone who is an employer knows, 
they are complicated, burdensome, and there are not enough of them. 
This is simple. It is a new visa. They get it if they are admitted, and 
they get to stay 12 months while they look for a job. If they get a 
job, they get a green card, and there is no cap on the number, and that 
is the idea.
  I thank Senator Coons for his leadership. I look forward to turning 
this good idea, this piece of unfinished business in the bipartisan 
America COMPETES Act, into law.
  Mr. COONS. In closing, I will just say that the economics of this 
legislation are simple, but, as Senator Alexander and I recognize, any 
step toward immigration reform is complicated. Making it easier for 
foreign-born, American-educated innovators to stay in the United States 
is just one aspect of many of the urgently needed steps to reform our 
outdated immigration system.
  I see that Senator Durbin has come to the floor. I am proud to 
cosponsor the Dream Act. I also support the Uniting American Families 
Act. There are other pieces of legislation that are essential to allow 
us to recognize and to strengthen the role immigrants play in the 
fabric of our country. I think this opportunity today to move forward 
on a bipartisan bill that focuses on this one area without caps, with a 
new class of immigration visa, is an important contribution to moving 
this discussion forward for all of us.
  I thank Senator Alexander.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sanders). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.


                             Postal Reform

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, today the Postmaster General announced 
that the Postal Service would begin the process of consolidating about 
140 processing facilities around the country. Despite the harsh 
realities of this announcement from the Postmaster General, there are a 
few bright spots in Illinois.
  The processing facilities in Springfield and Fox Valley, which the 
Postmaster General had originally slated for closure, will remain open. 
Additionally, I am glad that the Postmaster General has heeded our 
calls to keep Illinois jobs in Illinois and other jobs in the States 
where the processing facilities currently exist. The Postmaster 
General's original plan would have potentially sent over 500 Illinois 
postal jobs to surrounding States, along with the mail they have 
processed so efficiently for so many years.
  Beyond the postal employees, the Postal Service supports tens of 
thousands of private sector jobs in Illinois, which is the center of 
the mailing and printing industry.
  Certainly, today's announcements are difficult for my constituents 
who live in Quincy and Rockford, Carbondale and Centralia, Bloomington 
and Effingham. I have consistently insisted--and the Postmaster General 
assured me--that we are going to avoid layoffs and that all of the 
employees in these facilities will have the opportunity to pursue 
another role in the Postal Service or to accept, if they wish, early 
retirement incentives. I am told none of these facilities will close 
before the end of the year.
  As I said, today's news is disappointing and difficult for many in my 
State, including postal customers, postal employees, and small 
businesses. Still, I think it is important to note how far we have come 
from the Postmaster General's original plan to where we are today. 
Originally he sought closure of 250 processing facilities nationwide--
today's announcement, 140--and called for the closure of 3,700 mostly 
rural post offices.
  In Illinois, the Postal Service originally targeted 9 plants for 
closure which employ over 1,800 people. After countless hours of 
meetings and hard work and a great deal of floor debate, we have moved 
off the potentially destructive path.
  Let me say this too, Mr. President. You know this subject better than 
any other Member in the Senate. We met in my office with the Postmaster 
General--I believe in November or early December--sat down with him and 
said that his proposal to reduce the number of post offices and 
processing facilities could be the death knell of postal service as we 
know it today.
  You will remember that we challenged them. We said: Mr. Postmaster 
General, do not make any of these changes until May 15. Give Congress 
an opportunity to come up with a way to save money for the Postal 
Service, to preserve the Postal Service, and to do it by way of 
legislation, which is why we were elected.
  He reluctantly said he didn't want to do it. Reluctantly he gave us a 
letter and said: I won't do anything until May 15. I will give the 
House and the Senate a chance to do their work.
  If you will remember, Mr. President, I called Senator Lieberman, 
chairman of the administration committee--the government operations 
committee, and said to him: With this jurisdiction, we have to roll up 
our sleeves and get to work.
  He said: We are ready. Senator Collins and I and Senator Carper and 
others will work together to pass a Senate bill that achieves Postal 
Service reform in a fairer way.

[[Page S3261]]

  And he did.
  The same day, I called Chairman Darrell Issa, the California 
Republican chairman of the House committee with the responsibility for 
the Postal Service. I said to Chairman Issa: We now have until May 15 
to do our job, to pass a bill in the House and the Senate and get it to 
the President, and now the clock is running.
  Mr. President, you will remember that we had a break over the 
holiday, and when we came back we were anxious. We didn't want to waste 
any time. Let the record show that at the end of the day, the Senate, 
on a bipartisan basis, passed the postal reform bill. Thirteen 
Republicans joined 49 on the Democratic side and passed a bipartisan 
bill.
  Well, what happened in the House? The answer is nothing happened in 
the House. The House of Representatives failed to do their job. They 
failed to pass Postal Service reform. To my knowledge, they didn't 
bring a bill to the floor. And then May 15 came. The Postmaster General 
kept his word and waited, and then he made this announcement.
  If the Senate bill that we passed had become the law of the land, 
today's announcement would have never taken place. We set up a process 
for post offices and processing facilities to be evaluated in terms of 
their efficiency and costs that I think was sensible, reasonable, and 
would have saved money. We didn't get to that point because the House 
failed to act. That is the harsh reality of why we face what we do 
today.

  Only the Speaker of the House and his majority can explain why they 
didn't accept the challenge to legislate. My question to them is, If 
you are not here to legislate, why are you here? An issue of such 
national importance as the future of the Postal Service should have 
been done, as it was in the Senate, on a bipartisan basis in the House 
of Representatives. We did it here. We worked together. I cannot even 
remember how many amendments we considered, but we labored through 
every single one of them and got it done.
  Now I look around my State and see six or seven major processing 
facilities closed, and it breaks my heart because what we did in the 
Senate would have avoided some of those. It would have at least put a 
process in place that was a lot fairer.
  Well, my last word to the Members of the House is that it is not too 
late. It is not too late to accept the responsibility and to pass the 
Senate bill if you can't pass one of your own. Call our bipartisan 
Senate postal reform bill to the floor. At least give it a vote in the 
House of Representatives.
  If they can pass it, let's send it to the President, and perhaps 
before the end of the year we can actually save some of these postal 
facilities.
  I don't want to create false hope because I couldn't believe that May 
15 would come and go and the House wouldn't act, but that is what 
happened. So let's hope that changes for the better.
  I am going to continue to work with the Presiding Officer as well as 
the President of the United States and all of the committee members. 
The Postal Service is something special.
  I will close by saying this. When they ask Americans what they think 
of people who work in the Federal Government, they don't always have 
the highest opinion--including Members of Congress. But when you ask 
them about what branch of the Federal Government they have particularly 
positive feelings about, it is the Postal Service. You know why, and I 
do too. It is that letter carrier who is looking in the window and 
waving at your mom to make sure she is OK each day, and she looks 
expectantly for the delivery of the mail even if it is just some 
circular. That is that visitor each day who keeps her in touch with the 
world and our Nation in touch with itself. That is the Postal Service.
  I just went into the Springfield post office, my local branch, 
recently, and they couldn't have been kinder or more courteous, helping 
all the people who were there. Our postal employees are some of the 
best Federal employees in America, and I am proud of what they have 
done. I am sorry they are going through this change. It is not 
something we wanted to see happen.
  We are going to do this in a way that is good for the future of the 
Postal Service. I hope the House will join us in this bipartisan 
effort.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.


                      Student Loan Interest Rates

  Mr. REED. Mr. President, I am joined by my colleague, Senator Brown 
of Ohio. We are extraordinarily apprehensive that in 45 days the 
interest rate on subsidized student loans will double in the United 
States. Young people and middle-aged people who are struggling to 
educate themselves and reeducate themselves will be faced with a 
tremendous increase in the cost of college and postsecondary education. 
The interest rate will go from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. This is 
particularly ironic when the Federal Reserve routinely lends to large 
banking institutions huge sums of money at less than 1 percent. So this 
is a huge impact on middle-income Americans who are struggling with so 
many challenges: housing costs, employment problems--the whole plethora 
of issues they face.
  It is estimated that more than 7 million students, including 43,000 
in Rhode Island, will suffer because of this doubling that will take 
place. A lot of our colleagues have said: Of course we don't want to 
see this happen. I thought it was terribly ironic yesterday that they, 
with very few exceptions, voted consistently for budgets that would, in 
fact, double the student interest rate. In fact, one of the budgets 
they voted for previously, the Ryan budget from the House, would also 
eliminate the in-school interest subsidies for certain loans. So there 
is this incongruity between, oh, we are all for keeping interest rate 
low for students, but, of course, in our budget we double it.
  There is another problem, and it has been reported in so many 
different national and local newspapers. There is a huge problem with 
student debt. We have reached the $1 trillion mark in student debt. 
This could be the next big, huge bubble we face financially. It 
certainly impairs the ability of young men and women when they graduate 
to go and take the job they want, to buy the house they want, because 
they are struggling with huge debts, and we are adding to that by 
doubling the interest rate.
  This is a policy issue, but it is also an intensely personal issue. I 
received letters from many constituents about the potential impact, and 
I know Senator Brown from Ohio has as well. I wonder if the Senator has 
some comments at this point.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. I appreciate the work of the Senator from Rhode 
Island and Senator Harkin. Of course, Senator Reed has been working on 
this issue for months and months. I am still amazed that the Senate 
refuses time and again and the House refuses to do the right thing.
  This started back in 2007. It was bipartisan with President Bush, 
with the Democratic House and the Democratic Senate. The Presiding 
Officer was involved, Senator Reed and others, and we passed it. We did 
a 5-year freeze of interest rates. Now the bipartisanship seems to have 
gone, and repeatedly this body has either failed to step up or actually 
voted no or voted wrong in some cases to move forward on this.
  As Senator Reed has said, I, too, have tens of thousands of people--
380,000 Ohioans--who are now in the Stafford subsidized loan program. 
It will mean about $1,000--as it will in Rhode Island--per student, per 
year if we fail to act by July 1.
  I have been at four campuses just in the last month or so. I have 
been at a community college in Cleveland, the University of Cincinnati 
at the other end of the State, Wright State University in Dayton, and 
Ohio State University in Columbus. I saw students--one was from the 
Young Republicans on one of the campuses and others are Democrats--
trying to find a way to pay their bills. They are working-class kids, 
middle-class kids, poor kids--kids who want to find a way to get ahead.
  We hear the same stories over and over, but let me just share one. On 
my Web site people sign up and come to the Web site and tell their 
stories. I will just share one of them. I know Senator Reed has been 
hearing from people in Providence and Warwick and all over his State 
also.
  This comes from Dorothy in Mount Sterling, OH. She wants to be a 
special ed teacher. Dorothy says:


[[Page S3262]]


       I never thought that student loans would have such a huge 
     impact on my life. I am studying to be a special ed teacher. 
     I really want to make a difference so that our youngest 
     generations have an equal opportunity to succeed in life.
       I rely on student loans to pay for my education and assist 
     me in times of need in this harsh economic climate.
       Higher interest rates mean that I will never be able to 
     afford a home, a reliable vehicle. I will never be able to 
     provide for my family, and I will always feel in debt for 
     trying to make myself a better person and trying to be a 
     better citizen for our country and the State of Ohio.
       If given the chance for a better job opportunity outside my 
     area of expertise, I would surely take it into great 
     consideration. I know that in the years to come, I will 
     desperately be looking to relieve myself from the cost of my 
     college education.
       I feel like I have been punished for wanting an education 
     and wanting to better myself so that I can better the lives 
     of others. I just wanted to make a difference and I am 
     fighting against those who do not even realize what it means 
     to truly struggle.
       Please don't stop fighting for me.

  We can hear the desperation. We can hear the focus she has on 
community service and public service, but we can also hear the view 
that she is being undercut by decisions we are making--or not making.
  She also said something else that was pretty interesting. When we 
saddle these young people with loans, the average 4-year graduate in 
Ohio has about $27,000 in debt. When we pile more on Dorothy or 
somebody in Rhode Island or Vermont, it means they are less likely to 
buy a house, less likely to start a business, less likely to start a 
family. It is morally wrong to stand in their way or make it harder.
  Think what it does to the economy too. I want people such as Dorothy 
to get an education without huge debt, to buy a home, to begin to 
provide and prosper and lift the whole community; people who are 
productive workers and who care about the community. We have no 
business taking that away from Dorothy and people like her and adding 
to her debt. That is why we have to do this first.
  Mr. REED. Mr. President, if I could reclaim my time, the Senator has 
been a tremendous leader on this issue because he leads from the front. 
He is in Ohio. He is talking to students and families. He understands 
the personal ramifications that are involved.
  Let there be no mistake. This is a program that benefits middle and 
lower middle-income Americans. Nearly 60 percent of the dependent 
students who qualify for subsidized loans come from families with 
incomes of less than $60,000. This is not a perk for the superwealthy. 
Nearly 70 percent of independent students--that is the term of art for 
those adults or older people who may have some previous training but 
they have to go back to the community college to get a certificate and 
are trying to transition from a job that was shipped overseas to one 
they think they can get here.
  Nearly 70 percent of independent students borrowing these loans have 
incomes of less than $30,000 a year. So we are talking about people who 
cannot afford a doubling of the interest rate.
  But there is another issue too. It is not just, as Senator Brown 
pointed out, to fulfill legitimate and, in fact, admirable personal 
ambitions of establishing oneself in a community by buying a home or 
raising a family; this is about our future, our productivity as a 
nation, our ability to compete in an incredibly difficult 
international, global economy.
  We have looked at the statistics at universities such as Georgetown 
University. Their Center for Education and the Workforce said over 60 
percent of the jobs by 2018--a few years from now--will require some 
postsecondary education--60 percent. But in 2010, only 38 percent, 
roughly, of working adults held a 2-year or 4-year degree. So we have 
this gap, a 20-percentage point gap, between the skills we need through 
postsecondary education and the skills we have. We hear not just from 
analytical papers that are done by think tanks; we hear it every time 
we go back to either Ohio or Rhode Island because employers come up to 
us and say: I have jobs to fill, but I can't find people with the 
skills, the training that I need to give them a job.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. REED. I am happy to yield.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Senator Jack Reed from Rhode Island is one of the 
few graduates from West Point in this body and served his country in so 
many ways and still does. But I think about Jack Reed when I think 
about what happened with the GI Bill after World War II. We want to 
help individual people with keeping these interest rates from doubling, 
but we know when we help lots of individual people we help society as a 
whole.
  After World War II, literally millions of young men and women 
returned from fighting for our country, came back to the United States, 
and the government was farsighted enough in 1944 under President 
Roosevelt, who signed the GI Bill, to prepare for this huge wash of 
young men and women coming back from the war. We as a nation were smart 
enough back 65, 70 years ago to help millions of those young men and 
women one at a time with their education.
  But here is what else it did: Those millions of students who 
benefited from the GI Bill gave so much to society. Perhaps our best 
times economically as a nation in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s 
came out of the GI Bill because when government helps in partnership to 
give opportunity to thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of 
people, it also helps the country as a whole, and that is part of our 
philosophy in public service in many ways.
  So what these Stafford loans, these subsidized loans do, as do Pell 
grants--and we are seeing efforts to cut Pell grants by the House of 
Representatives too, which is just the stupidest thing ever in my mind 
because I don't understand the way some of them think--but when we 
provide opportunities for Stafford loans, subsidized loans, or Pell 
grants, it is helping people such as Dorothy and people in Rhode Island 
and Vermont. It is helping people in Mansfield and Toledo and Cleveland 
and Garfield Heights. I think it is one of those things that is hard to 
understand why we would not do this.

  I wanted to ask Senator Reed a question, if I could. He explained on 
the Senate floor one day how Republicans have said they are for this 
now, that they don't want to double the interest rate--although I am 
not sure of that from some of their activities. The Senator from Rhode 
Island has talked about the way we want to pay for this versus the way 
they want to pay for this.
  I know the Senator talked about closing tax loopholes, and they 
talked about sort of playing college students against women needing 
mammograms by cutting health care--if the Senator could explain that to 
my colleagues.
  Mr. REED. I would be happy to, reclaiming my time. First, let me echo 
what Senator Brown said, how this is about being competitive. When he 
talked about the Pell grants, I have to reference my colleague and 
predecessor, Claiborne Pell, because he seized on the lesson of the GI 
Bill and said: Let's extend it broadly to college students. So Pell 
grants, Stafford loans, all of those vehicles were created. Frankly, I 
think that is not only the reason we have led the world and the Nation 
in creativity, but it is the reason America, as well as--and probably 
better than any other place in the world, was able to proliferate 
computers and technology, et cetera, because we have a literate, well-
educated citizenry who first could invent these devices and then could 
use them properly. We are in danger, if we don't continue to support 
education, of losing our innovative edge and losing our capacity as a 
people to adopt innovation and technology and to continue to lead. For 
all of these reasons, our economic future is linked to continuing to 
support higher education.
  There is another point I wish to make before I talk about the way we 
have proposed to pay for this; that is, there have been some on the 
other side who say the problem is that tuition is going out of sight, 
and we are contributing to those tuition hikes. Well, under the 
subsidized loan program, the maximum borrowing is $23,000. So this is 
not the driving force. Colleges have to recognize they have to rein in 
costs, but this is not the driving force. This is the way so many 
families are able to make it through college and make it into the 
economy and move up the economic ladder.
  But what our colleagues have said is they are all for preventing this 
doubling. Of course, yesterday they voted consistently, with very few 
exceptions,

[[Page S3263]]

to double the interest on Stafford loans. So what they say and what 
they do sometimes are different.
  But then they said the real dispute is how to pay for it. They want 
to pay for it by going after the money in the prevention fund, which is 
part of health care reform. But this prevention fund is absolutely 
critical. As Senator Brown indicated, people need diagnostic tests. 
They need to be able to go to a medical facility and get advice, 
assistance, and tests so they can avoid problems. That is not only 
sensible for the individual; that is the only way we are going to get a 
handle on the proliferation of costs in the health care sector.
  One of the ironies of our current health care system, pending the, we 
hope, implementation of the affordable care act, is that we have 
millions and millions of Americans who have no real access to health 
care, no access to preventive care, no access to simple things such as 
cheap pharmaceuticals to control cholesterol until they get to be 65 
years old. Then they go into the doctor's office, and they have 
Medicare. But their problems are so much more expensive.
  I was speaking to ophthalmologists in my office, and they said: You 
are absolutely right. We see people come in for the first time with 
health care under Medicare who have serious problems such as diabetes 
and glaucoma. If we had seen them 10 years ago--if a physician had 
treated them--through a prescription or another very inexpensive 
therapy, they could have avoided these tremendous costs. That is what 
they are going after.
  By the way, that is, to me, another middle-class program because, 
frankly, if one is well off and well situated financially, one will get 
all the preventive care one needs. It is those people who are 
struggling in the middle class and moving into the middle class who 
need this prevention fund.
  So what we have proposed--is not to attack another benefit, or a 
smart, wise, cost-effective approach to health care that would benefit 
middle-income Americans--instead we are going after a tax dodge, plain 
and simple. This is a tax dodge that has been called out by the 
Government Accountability Office as something that has been used to 
avoid over $23 billion in taxes on wages in 2003 and 2004--a huge gulf.
  In 2005, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration called 
this loophole a ``multibillion employment tax shelter.''
  Let me tell my colleagues how it works. An individual who is a 
professional--a lawyer, an accountant, a consultant, a lobbyist--and 
the skills of that individual represent what he or she does as a 
lawyer, an accountant, et cetera. They are personal skills. But instead 
of being paid by an employer directly, they substitute a subchapter S 
corporation so they are now an employee of the corporation. They take a 
minimum a salary, if you will, from the corporation, but then at the 
end of the year, the corporation gives the individual the surplus as a 
dividend, which is taxed much cheaper, so the person can avoid payroll 
taxes. It is legal, but it is a tax dodge. It is a loophole.
  This loophole is so egregious that conservative columnist Bob Novak 
called it out, Sean Hannity of Fox News called it out, and the Wall 
Street Journal called it out saying it is a simple way to avoid paying 
payroll taxes, Medicare taxes, as well as other employment taxes.
  Closing this loophole is sound policy. We should do this anyway. But 
when we do it in conjunction with this student lending, we actually are 
able to help struggling families and close an egregious loophole.
  What some of our opponents have suggested is that this is just 
another tax increase. We have been very careful. We restrict these to 
professional endeavors. We also restrict the impact to those making 
over $200,000 a year. So this is not targeted at the mom-and-pop 
stores. This is not targeted at the local laundry or the local dry 
goods store or the local hardware store that is organized as a 
subchapter S. In fact, Politifact, one of the agencies that does 
independent analyses of various claims, clearly rejected this 
characterization as a tax increase on the mom-and-pop stores and on the 
small business companies and the job generators as false. So we have 
not only a sensible, but a compelling way to pay for this.
  So everyone agrees we can't let this happen on July 1. We have an 
egregious loophole that should be closed anyway to pay for it, and I 
suggest we move on. Just, procedurally, let's bring this to a vote. If 
they want to put up the prevention fund for a vote, if they want to put 
up any other means to pay for it, fine.
  Let's have our vote, and let's avoid the doubling of student loan 
interest rates on July 1.
  I know the Senator from Ohio has some comments.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. I thank the Senator.
  I appreciate that explanation because this is a tax loophole that 
almost anybody who is fair-minded about this sees as a giveaway to 
some. They call it the Newt Gingrich-John Edwards tax loophole, to be 
bipartisan, where each of them benefited by tens of thousands of 
dollars. Again, they did not cheat; they did not break the law. They 
just took advantage of a tax loophole I would think everybody here 
would want to close because most people play it straight.
  Their income is their income. They pay the Medicare tax on it. This 
is a case where they do not. We, I thought, believed in some fairness 
in taxation. But back to the individual people who will benefit from 
this. That is why Senator Reed is involved. That is why the Presiding 
Officer and Senator Sanders, I know, care about this issue.
  Let me share, in closing, one last letter. This came from Courtney in 
Galloway, OH:

       I, like many other students, always had a college savings 
     account. I remember putting birthday and holiday money in it 
     every year, and I always assumed that it would pay my way 
     through college.
       Before I even made it to high school, though, my 
     grandmother fell gravely ill and my family had no other 
     choice but to use my college savings to pay for her hospital 
     bills, and eventually, the funeral.
       Since then, paying for college has been my own 
     responsibility.
       All the loans are in my name, and it is a burden that is 
     constantly hanging over my head. I am less than a year from 
     graduating--likely with honors--from The Ohio State 
     University with a degree in Social Work, but instead of being 
     excited and looking toward my future, I am constantly worried 
     about my loan debt and the possibility of rising interest 
     rates.

  If I could interrupt the letter for a second, think about that. She 
is about to graduate. She wants to serve the country. She wants to 
serve her community. She clearly grew up with the right values--putting 
money aside, not spending it on things she wanted to do--when she was 
mowing lawns or babysitting or whatever she did in her teens, putting 
money aside and then spending it on her grandmother's medical expenses, 
and now she is worried.
  Upon graduation--a wonderful moment in her life--she is anxious about 
what this all means. In the life of a social worker, she is not going 
to make a lot of money, obviously. That is what she wants to do. Yet 
she is going to be facing these bills for years to come.
  She said:

       I know that, as a future Social Worker, I will be not 
     making as much money as people in other professions, but 
     helping others is where my heart lies.
       Unfortunately, I may be limited in the positions I can take 
     if my interest rates increase.
       Maybe even unable to work within the populations I am truly 
     interested in helping--veterans, the homeless, and senior 
     citizens if the pay would render me unable to pay off my 
     student loans.
       I am very passionate about my education, and hold no 
     grudges . . . for what needed to be done, but the threat of 
     rising student loan interest rates has affected me in a very 
     serious way, and I feel as though it is something that I have 
     no control over, which is a very heartbreaking feeling.

  She may not be able to pursue the public service she wants to do as a 
social worker because her loan debt is so heavy. How dare people in 
this body make a decision by inaction or make a decision by doing 
nothing to heap more burden, put more debt on Courtney's shoulders. How 
dare they and how shameful it is that we simply cannot get bipartisan 
agreement--which we had 5 years ago with President Bush--to move 
forward on this and close a tax loophole to pay for it.
  Do not put Courtney up against somebody who needs an immunization or 
a breast cancer screening or a prostate cancer screening. Close the tax 
loopholes, move forward on this, take the anxiety off of Courtney and 
others

[[Page S3264]]

as much as we can and do the right thing.
  I yield.
  Mr. REED. Reclaiming my time, again, let me thank the Senator from 
Ohio for his leadership, for his passion, for his commitment. We are 
hearing from the other side that this is just about how to pay for this 
necessary legislation to prevent the doubling of the interest rate. We 
have offered a compelling way to pay for it in terms of closing this 
egregious loophole. They have, as Senator Brown indicated, once again, 
put on the chopping block, if you will, preventive services for 
families across this country and potentially the most sensible way to 
begin to reduce our health care costs over time.
  They have--when they have wanted to--completely ignored paying for 
things such as tax cuts. We have seen that. Just recently the House 
passed the so-called Small Business Tax Cut Act with no offsets. So to 
literally hold these students hostage to their unwillingness to bring 
the bill to the floor, to debate it vigorously--to vote on their 
proposal to pay for it and to vote on our proposal to pay for it--is, I 
think, unfortunate, if not unconscionable.
  We have 45 days left.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.


                             PDMRA Program

  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I rise today to urge my colleagues to 
join me in passing a critical bill that keeps the faith with the men 
and women of our Reserve Forces.
  Representative Kline, a Republican Congressman from Minnesota, has 
led this effort in the House. I am leading it in the Senate. It affects 
troops from all over the country, a promise that was made to them that 
must be kept.
  My home State of Minnesota has no large Active-Duty bases, but we 
have a long and proud tradition of military service in our National 
Guard and our Reserves.
  Throughout every military engagement since the Civil War--including 
the two wars we have fought over the past decade--Minnesota's National 
Guard members and reservists have served with courage and honor to 
defend our Nation overseas.
  In fact, it was a ragtag group of workers and farmers who signed up 
for the precursor of the National Guard during the Civil War, who went 
to the Battle of Gettysburg and had the highest percentage of 
casualties of any unit in the Civil War. There is a big monument for 
them honoring the fact that they had that high rate of casualties. In 
fact, they held the line for troops to come in in the Civil War.
  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have highlighted the importance of 
our brave citizen soldiers across the country and the unprecedented 
sacrifice they have been called upon to make. The National Guard and 
Reserves were not built to serve as an active-duty force for prolonged 
periods. Yet at times as many as 40 percent of the American forces 
fighting in these wars have been Guard and Reserve troops. I say to the 
Presiding Officer, I know you know that, being from Vermont, where you 
have many National Guard troops who have served our country.

  Just last month, about 3,000 members of Minnesota's National Guard 
First Brigade Combat Team--our Red Bulls--returned home from a year of 
service in Kuwait assisting the drawdown in Iraq. Some of these men and 
women were not serving for their first, second, or third time. I met 
these soldiers. Some of them were serving for their fourth time, for 
their fifth time, some even for their sixth time.
  The repeated mobilizations and overseas deployments of Guard and 
Reserve units have profoundly affected families and communities in 
Minnesota and across the Nation. That is part of the reason we pushed 
so hard to bring those troops home from Iraq. That is also why, in 
2007, in recognition of the extraordinary sacrifices our servicemembers 
and their families have made, the Department of Defense created the 
Post Deployment/Mobilization Respite Absence--or PDMRA, as it is 
called--Program.
  The PDMRA Program awards extra leave days to servicemembers who 
deploy beyond the standard rotation cycle. The motivation is simple: 
Troops who serve multiple deployments above and beyond the call of 
duty--who are basically being deployed as Active Duty even though they 
are not; folks who have raised their hands and stepped forward time and 
time again to volunteer and support our country--deserve leave time at 
home with their families as some compensation.
  When they signed up to serve, there was not a waiting line. When they 
come home to the United States of America and they need a job or they 
need health care or they need an education or they want some time with 
their families, they should have that.
  Well, one can imagine the concern the Red Bulls felt and I felt too 
when we learned all of a sudden the leave benefits our troops were 
promised under the program were being reduced as they were serving 
overseas. They were promised one thing when they left, and the program 
changed when they were gone.
  Here is what happened. Until last fall, members of the Reserve 
Component who served more than 1 year out of 6 could be awarded up to 4 
extra PDMRA leave days for each extra month of service. Then on 
September 30, 2011, the Defense Department changed the policy, reducing 
the 4 days down to 1 or 2, depending on the location of service.
  But here is the problem: Instead of grandfathering in the troops who 
had been promised the 4 days of leave under the old policy, the Defense 
Department implemented the change immediately, applying it to all 
troops on the ground.
  I can understand having a new policy, I really can. But do not do it 
to the troops who have already been promised one thing. That meant in 
the middle of their deployment, 49,000 reservists deployed around the 
world, who had been promised up to 4 days of leave for their service 
each month and who had earned that leave, were told, with little 
warning, that the days they were promised under the PDMRA Program were 
going to be cut, starting October 1, 2011.
  Well, as you can imagine, this was a real setback for our troops, and 
for many reasons. First of all, it means they would get less time at 
home with their families, whom they have not seen--their kids, their 
spouses, their parents.
  Second, it means our troops and their families are forced to cope 
with unexpected financial challenges as their leave benefits are cut 
without warning.
  Finally, the change has meant that our reservists--who, unlike the 
Active Component, do not necessarily have a job to come back to when 
they separate from duty--are faced with an increased and unexpected 
urgency to find employment.
  Well, our economy is on the mend, it is stable, but we are still 
seeing, as the Presiding Officer knows, record numbers of unemployment 
among our veterans of the past two wars. Now is not the time to cut the 
leave benefits of people who have been promised the leave and push them 
out to find their own way.
  When the men and women of our armed services signed up, they did it 
for the right reasons. They are patriotic. They put their lives on the 
line for our country. The least we can do is keep the promises we made.
  That is why my colleague in the House of Representatives, Congressman 
John Kline--himself a decorated veteran--and I introduced legislation 
that makes a simple fix to this program.
  Our bill does not reverse the new policy change that the Department 
heads made after careful review of the program. Our bill simply 
grandfathers troops deployed under the old policy so they receive the 
leave benefits they were promised.
  I want to take a few moments to share just a few key points about 
this bill.
  First, it has bipartisan support in both the Senate and the House of 
Representatives. In fact, it passed in the House on Tuesday night with 
the support of all Representatives.
  Second, the cost of this bill is fully offset. No new spending is 
created in this bill.
  Finally, this bill is now supported by Secretary Panetta himself. It 
is supported by the Department of Defense, after they realized what the 
effect of this policy would have if troops were not grandfathered in.
  This is a country that believes in patriotism, and patriotism means 
wrapping our arms around those who have served and sacrificed for our 
country. I

[[Page S3265]]

think all of my colleagues here today agree that nobody needs and 
deserves our support more than the men and women who have offered their 
lives in defense of our Nation.
  For 10 years, the men and women of our National Guard and Reserves 
have done their duty. Now I believe it is for us in Congress to do our 
own duty to make sure our troops receive the benefits they are due.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Shaheen). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I have high hopes that in the days 
immediately ahead the Senate will proceed to the consideration of the 
Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act of 2012.
  I am pleased to report to my colleagues that the Health, Education, 
Labor, and Pensions Committee has produced an excellent bill, the 
product of nearly a full year of bipartisan collaboration and good-
faith negotiation. The bill reauthorizes critically important FDA user-
fee agreements and systematically modernizes FDA's medical product 
authority to help boost American innovation and ensure that patients 
have access to the therapies they need.
  In this era of often extreme partisanship and legislative gridlock, 
this bill is truly a refreshing exception. That is why I am hopeful and 
confident that there will be no objection on the Senate floor to moving 
to this bill next week.
  Frankly, all of us on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions 
Committee are proud not only of the bill but of the remarkable 
bipartisan process that produced it. I am especially grateful to the 
committee's ranking member, Senator Mike Enzi, for his own insistence 
on a bipartisan process, and for his leadership in moving this very 
complex legislation forward.
  This afternoon I will review the bipartisan process--at every step 
marked by openness and transparency--that produced this legislation.
  More than 1 year ago, beginning in early 2011 for some issues, my 
office and the office of Ranking Member Enzi convened six bipartisan 
HELP Committee working groups. Each working group was tasked with 
developing consensus policy proposals on key issues, such as drug 
shortages and the integrity of the drug supply chain.
  These bipartisan working groups met weekly and, in many cases, 
biweekly, over the whole course of 2011, discussing and developing 
draft consensus proposals.
  While this consensus process was ongoing, my staff would often meet 
many times a week with staffers representing both Democratic and 
Republican members of the HELP Committee.
  As I said, every single working group was bipartisan, and staff from 
my office worked closely with Senator Enzi's office to solicit 
priorities from other members of the committee. In many cases, we 
invited all HELP offices to join the groups.
  We even invited staff of noncommittee Members who have been leaders 
in a particular policy area to join the groups. For example, our 
bipartisan drug shortage working group had staff members from 18 Senate 
offices, including the staffers for two Senators who are not even 
members of the committee.
  While developing the consensus drafts, each of these bipartisan 
working groups met with key stakeholders throughout the year to solicit 
their input. For example, the drug supply chain integrity working group 
met with more than 40 stakeholders over a period of 9 months.
  In addition to the working group meetings, beginning in late 2011, my 
staff met twice a week for almost 18 weeks with all Democratic HELP 
offices to brief them on the reauthorization process and update them on 
the progress of all of the policy proposals.
  To further engage committee members, the administration, 
stakeholders, and the public, we held a total of five full committee 
hearings on the user-fee reauthorization over the last year. After our 
first public hearing in July of 2011, we held three hearings on 
distinct policy issues surrounding user fees, as well as a hearing on 
the actual user-fee agreements.
  As a result of the excellent work of these bipartisan working groups, 
in March of this year my staff and Ranking Member Enzi's staff released 
five bipartisan consensus drafts and solicited further stakeholder 
input. Bipartisan staff conducted stakeholder briefings on the release 
of each draft, and the drafts were available on the HELP Web site for 
more than 3 weeks prior to markup.
  In response to the five discussion drafts released to the public, our 
staffs received more than 160 comments and held more than 30 
stakeholder meetings on a bipartisan basis over 3\1/2\ weeks.
  Bipartisan staff worked to incorporate stakeholder feedback into the 
drafts, and then the committee publicly released a managers' package on 
Wednesday, April 18, 1 week before markup.
  On April 25 of this year, the committee met to consider the bill. 
Committee members voted nearly unanimously, by voice vote, to send the 
bill to the full Senate.
  As I said, this entire process has been a model of bipartisanship, 
openness, and transparency. Believe me, it was tough to achieve 
consensus on many of the complex and controversial provisions in the 
bill. At every step, it required difficult and sometimes painful 
compromise. Even as the committee chair, I did not get some of my 
highest priority proposals, since I could not get consensus among 
members and stakeholders.
  Compromise and sometimes sacrifice were essential. I was acutely 
aware, as were other members of the committee, that it is imperative 
that we pass the user-fee agreements in this bill. We were determined 
not to allow partisanship to slow this package down or to jeopardize 
our goal of consensus.
  As I said, the end result is an excellent bill. In addition to 
authorizing the critically important FDA user-fee agreements, this 
legislation makes it possible for the FDA to keep pace with the ever-
changing biomedical landscape.
  Here are some of the major provisions of the FDA Safety and 
Innovation Act, which will be on the floor next week:
  It authorizes key user-fee agreements to ensure timely approval of 
medical products. It streamlines the device approval process, while 
enhancing patient protections. It modernizes FDA's goal of drug supply 
chain authority. We spur innovation and incentives for drug development 
for life-threatening conditions. The bill reauthorizes and improves 
incentives for pediatric trials. It helps prevent and mitigate drug 
shortages. It increases FDA's accountability and transparency.
  With this bipartisan bill, I think we have a bill, I hope, we can all 
support and that we can move forward on expeditiously. Neither 
Democrats nor Republicans got everything they wanted. On every issue, 
we sought consensus. Where we could not achieve consensus, we didn't 
allow our differences to deflect us from the critically important goal 
of producing a bill that everybody could support. As a result, this is 
a truly bipartisan bill, and it is broadly supported by the patient 
groups and industry.

  This is the chart showing over 100 different associations and groups, 
patient groups, consumer groups, pharmaceutical groups, and research 
organizations all over America that have come out in support of this 
legislation. So everyone from the pharmaceutical industry, your 
drugstores, research institutions, and consumer organizations have all 
now supported this bill to reauthorize our user-fee agreements.
  I am also very pleased that today the Obama administration issued an 
official statement of administration policy asserting that ``the 
administration strongly supports passage of S. 3187.''
  Lastly, I will mention that the CBO scored the bill as fully paid for 
and estimates that the legislation would reduce the deficit by $363 
million over the next 10 years. Again, not only are we enhancing 
patients' rights and protections, we are ensuring better integrity for 
the drug supply chain. As we know, more than 80 percent of the products 
that go into our drugs manufactured in this country come from

[[Page S3266]]

abroad. There have been many stories written, and many television 
investigative stories included, on problems in that drug supply chain. 
Well, this bill enhances our ability to ensure the integrity of that 
drug supply chain from where they get the raw materials to where they 
put it together in this country.
  This bill, as I said, not only does good for our patients, we enhance 
FDA's authority to streamline and make sure that we bring drugs to 
market in more rapid order. We save $363 million over 10 years doing 
it.
  I look forward to bringing the FDA Safety and Innovation Act to the 
floor in a few days. The House has had a similar bipartisan process, 
and they are also scheduled to take up their version of the bill next 
week. If the Senate acts quickly, I am confident we can go to 
conference and get a final bill on the President's desk this summer.
  To that end, I am hopeful and confident we can move without objection 
to consideration of the bill. It is important that we do so. This is 
absolutely must-pass legislation. It is critically important to the 
FDA, to the industry, and to our patients to get this done.
  I urge all of my colleagues to join in the bipartisan spirit of 
cooperation we have engineered and witnessed in the HELP Committee over 
the last year. Let us come together, Democrats and Republicans alike, 
and get this legislation on the floor and pass it because of its 
critical importance to the American people.
  With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                             Global Warming

  Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I ask that I be recognized for up to 15 
minutes as if in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, today I want to expose a far-left 
environmental agenda that is being imposed upon the Department of 
Defense by President Obama and a lot of his allies, and it comes at the 
same time that the Obama administration is focusing on dramatically 
reduced cuts in the military.
  As ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public 
Works, and as a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, stopping 
the radical global warming agenda, as well as President Obama's 
devastating cuts to our military, have been my top priorities, and that 
is all I have been talking about for the last couple of months. I have 
had a growing concern about how President Obama's global warming agenda 
is harming our military, but the remarks recently made by Secretary 
Panetta have led me to come and make a few statements.
  First, let me say this about Secretary Panetta: I served with him for 
5 years in the House, and a number of years ago he and I became very 
close friends. In fact, I rejoiced when he was nominated and we 
confirmed him as Secretary of Defense. So I was extremely disappointed 
to see that he was wasting his valuable time perpetrating the 
President's global warming fantasies and his war on affordable energy, 
which occurred, no less, at a gathering of radical environmentalists. 
That is where the statement was made. Secretary Panetta said:

       In the 21st century, reality is that there are 
     environmental threats that constitute threats to our national 
     security.

  He also vowed that the Pentagon would take a leading role in shifting 
the way the United States uses its energy. Every talking point 
Secretary Panetta used in his speech, from rising sea levels to severe 
droughts to the so-called plight of the polar bear, all of these--I 
will not go into them one at a time--these all came out of Al Gore's 
science fiction movie, and they have all been totally rebuked.
  In reality, it is President Obama's war on affordable energy that is 
having a dramatic impact on our national security, a war that is 
further depleting an already stretched military budget and putting our 
troops at risk.
  Secretary Panetta made another revealing statement in justifying the 
President's green agenda. This was about two editions ago in the Hill 
magazine:

       As oil prices continue to skyrocket, the department `now 
     [faces] a shortfall exceeding $3 billion of higher-than-
     expected fuel costs this year,' according to Panetta. In 
     order to dig its way out of that financial hole, DOD has no 
     choice but to look to alternative fuel technologies. Pentagon 
     officials plan to invest more than $1 billion into developing 
     those technologies in fiscal year 2013.

  I might add, that is $1 billion that would otherwise be spent on 
defending America. That is right, energy prices have skyrocketed, we 
understand that--precisely because of the politics of this 
administration. Remember, they have openly admitted this.
  Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said:

       [S]omehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of 
     gasoline to the levels in Europe.

  We all know why he made that statement. That was way back in 2008.
  It was Obama's statement that said under his cap and trade--which is 
what they have been talking about--``electricity prices would 
necessarily skyrocket.''
  Now, because domestic energy prices have skyrocketed under his 
administration, just as they wanted them to do, Secretary Panetta wants 
the military to go green. Instead of spending scarce resources greening 
the military, the commonsense solution is simple--to begin developing 
our own vast supply of energy resources.
  Secretary Panetta's comments came just 2 weeks before the Senate 
Armed Services Committee is to begin the markup of this coming year's 
Defense authorization bill. So I will be taking this opportunity to 
work with my colleagues on the committee to put the spotlight on 
President Obama's forcing his costly green agenda on the Department of 
Defense while he is taking down the budget for the defense. I look 
forward to introducing a number of amendments that will put a stop to 
this nonsense and help ensure that Secretary Panetta has the tools he 
needs. I can assure you--because I know him well--this is a script this 
came off of.
  As part of that effort, I am also releasing a document put together 
by the Congressional Research Service that puts a pricetag on how much 
the Federal Government provides global warming policies, and I will be 
discussing this.
  With President Obama running for reelection and pretending to be for 
an ``all of the above'' energy approach, Secretary Panetta's comments 
are surprising. But they are still also illuminating. President 
Panetta's commitment of $1 billion for alternative fuels makes clear 
that despite the President's recent change in rhetoric for his 
reelection campaign, he remains fully determined to implement his all-
out attack on traditional American energy development, and the military 
is one place where he can force that experiment. We are talking about a 
green experiment using our military.
  To show just how egregious this whole thing is, let me spend just a 
second documenting how badly President Obama wants to take down the 
military for the benefit of his green agenda. Over the past 4 years, 
DOD has been forced to drastically cut its personnel, the number of 
brigade combat teams, tactical fighters, and airlift capabilities. It 
is eliminating or postponing programs such as the C 27, the Global Hawk 
Block 30, the C 130 avionics modernization package, which we 
desperately need, and the advancement of the F 35. These are programs 
we have had on the drawing board, and it is very important we carry 
these through to fruition.
  Even more concerning, these cuts could go even deeper. Because the 
subcommittee failed to report legislation last fall--and we all 
remember this--that would have reduced the deficit by at least $1.2 
trillion over the next 10 years, the Pentagon's budget could be cut by 
an additional $495 billion between 2013 and 2021. That is very 
interesting because during that period of time we are talking about two 
things--not just degrading the military, but over the next 10 years 
taking $\1/2\ trillion out. If sequestration should come in that would 
be another $\1/2\ trillion, and everyone realizes that would be 
devastating to the military.

  Secretary Panetta has rightly warned us that such drastic cuts would 
be a threat to national security. He said:


[[Page S3267]]


       Unfortunately, while large cuts are being imposed, the 
     threats to national security would not be reduced. As a 
     result, we would have to formulate a new security strategy 
     that accepted substantial risk of not meeting our defense 
     needs. A sequestration budget is not one I could recommend.

  That is a quote by Secretary Panetta.
  General Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, weighed in 
also and said:

       The impact of the sequestration is not only in its 
     magnitude. It's in what it does . . . we lose control. And as 
     we lose control, we will become out of balance, and we will 
     not have the military this nation needs.

  When they talk about accepting risk, we are talking about lives. That 
is what that means; risk equals lives. What are you willing to do for 
this green agenda?
  The remarks by the top DOD officials make Panetta's recent global 
warming speech at odds with solving our military's budget problems. 
Even as Secretary Panetta expresses concern about the impact of these 
cuts on national security, he is openly supporting President Obama's 
forcing DOD to expend large amounts of scarce resources on expensive 
alternative fuels. This doesn't make any sense, and that is why I 
believe Secretary Panetta's global warming remarks were written by 
someone in the White House to appease the radical left and not 
Secretary Panetta. I am absolutely convinced of that. After seeing how 
severe these cuts to DOD would be, how could anyone justify this so-
called greening of the military?
  Consider, for example, the Navy's plan to sail its Green Fleet, a 
strike group powered by alternative fuels, by 2016. The success of this 
Green Fleet is predicated upon biofuel--much of it algae based--
becoming practical and affordable. So they are assuming that is going 
to happen, which I don't think it is going to happen.
  In 2009 the Department of the Navy paid $424 a gallon for 20,000 
gallons of biodiesel made from algae, which would set a record for all-
time cost of fuel. That is per gallon--and that is when it was on the 
market for $4 a gallon--and it is $424 a gallon.
  In December 2011 the Navy purchased 450,000 gallons of biofuel for 
$12 million, which works out to be about $26 a gallon. This purchase is 
part of a larger deal in which the Navy has pledged taxpayer funds of 
$170 million as their share of a $510 million effort to construct or 
retrofit biofuel refineries in order to create a commercially viable 
market. This biofuel will be mixed with conventional fuels by a 50 50 
ratio to yield a blend that will cost roughly $15 a gallon--roughly 
four times what we should have to be spending.
  Keep in mind this is at the same time we are rejecting systems that 
were in our plans, and have been for a long period. And as if the 
services are not already stressed by serious budget cuts, the Secretary 
of the Navy also directed the Navy and Marine Corps to produce or 
consume one gigawatt of new renewable energy to power naval 
installations across the country.
  Everyone agrees energy efficiency in the military is a worthy goal. 
In fact, I have been a strong supporter of the DOD's alternative energy 
solutions that are affordable and make sense, including the initiatives 
on nonalgae biofuels and natural gas. In fact, in my State of Oklahoma 
we are working, through the major universities and the Noble Foundation 
and others to take that leadership role. But forcing our military to 
take money away from core programs in order to invest in unproven 
technologies as part of a failed cap-and-trade agenda is not only 
wrong, it is reckless.
  I am not alone in saying this. My good friend, Senator McCain agrees 
with me on this point. Just last month Senator McCain criticized 
earmarks for alternative energy research in the Defense appropriations 
bill which cost the taxpayers $120 million. Senator McCain said:

       We're talking about cutting the Army by 100,000 people, the 
     Marines by 80,000 people, and yet we now have our armed 
     services in the business of advanced alternative energy 
     research? The role of the armed forces in the United States 
     is not to engage in energy research. The job of energy 
     research should be in the Energy Department, not taking it 
     out of Defense Department funds.

  That is where it belongs, and I agree with Senator McCain's 
statement.
  The CRS report is significant. Largely due to my concern about green 
spending in the military, I recently asked the CRS to figure out how 
much money--how much of taxpayers' dollars--is actually being used to 
advance the green agenda. The amount came out that since 2008, $68.4 
billion has been used to advance a green agenda.
  Just to name a few options, if we didn't do that, we could add $12.1 
billion to maintain DOD procurement at fiscal levels of 2012 and allow 
our military to continue to modernize its fleet of ships, its aircraft, 
and its ground vehicles. We could avoid a delay in the Ohio-Class 
Ballistic Missile Submarine Replacement Program, and it goes on and on, 
which I will have as a part of the Record.
  Instead of funding these priorities, the Department of Defense has 
been forced to spend valuable resources on research relating to climate 
change and renewable energy.
  In the stimulus package, each branch of the Armed Services and the 
Pentagon itself was given $75 million, for a total of $300 million, to 
research, develop, test, and evaluate projects that advance energy-
efficiency programs. In total, since 2008, DOD has spent at least $4 
billion on climate change and energy-efficient activities. The same $4 
billion could have been used to purchase 30 brandnew F 35 Joint Strike 
Fighters, 28 new F 22 Raptors, or completely pay for the C 130 Aviation 
Modernization Program that we have been working on for a long period of 
time.
  Now, just for a minute I will turn to the argument that President 
Obama and the far left have been using to justify this mission to go 
green. They always say we need a transition away from fossil fuels. One 
thing we do know--and it is a fact, and I don't think there is anyone 
out there who is disagreeing or arguing with this--we have more 
recoverable reserves in oil, gas, and coal than any other country in 
the world. When you stop and think what we have been talking about on 
this war that this administration has had on fossil fuels, it has been 
that on domestic energy.

  One thing, if people understand, there is not a person in this body 
or anyone else I have found in America who did not learn back in 
elementary school days about supply and demand. We have all this vast 
supply but the government will not let us develop our own supply. It is 
ludicrous. We are the only country in the world where that is a 
problem.
  In addition to the fact that we cannot use our resources, develop our 
own resources, we keep hearing over and over what people are saying: If 
we were to even open our public lands to development, to drilling and 
to producing, it would take 10 years before that would reach the pump.
  I know my time is real short here so I am having to shortcut this, 
but I am talking to one of the top guys producing today, Harold Hamm. 
He is from Oklahoma. He actually is up in North Dakota right now and he 
is doing incredible things, developing shale and developing gas and oil 
to run this country.
  I asked him a question. I said: I am going to use your name in 
quoting. How long would it take, if you were set up in New Mexico and 
all of sudden they would lift the ban, in order for that to reach the 
pump? Do you know what his answer was? He said: Seventy days. It would 
take 2 months to get the first barrel of oil up and then 10 days to go 
through the refining process and reach the pumps.
  It is supply and demand. We have that. We should not be using our 
military to advance the green agenda by this President.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.


                           Order of Procedure

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. May I interrupt for 1 moment?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I wanted to confirm the order of proceeding would be 
Senator Franken is going to speak and then I will speak for a few 
moments after Senator Franken. I know the Presiding Officer is to be 
excused very shortly.
  Mr. FRANKEN. The Senator wishes to speak now?
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask consent I follow Senator Franken. We will see 
to it the Presiding Officer is relieved timely, at 4 o'clock.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

[[Page S3268]]

                      Student Loan Interest Rates

  Mr. FRANKEN. Madam President, last week my colleagues on the other 
side of the aisle blocked a vote that would have eased the burden of 
debt for millions of college students in Minnesota and across the 
country. My Republican friends disagreed with us about the best way to 
pay for this legislation, so a minority of Senators kept us from 
helping millions of families and taking a step toward keeping our 
Nation's workforce globally competitive. But this debate is not just 
about helping students pay for college. I want to talk a little bit 
about the two competing proposals to pay for this critical legislation. 
I wish to talk about our national priorities and our national values.
  On one side, the Democratic proposal would close a loophole that 
allows some of the wealthiest Americans to avoid paying taxes they 
should owe to the Federal Government. This fix, our fix, would only 
apply to Americans making over $250,000 a year and would not create any 
new taxes on businesses or individuals. It would close a loophole that 
allows high-income people to get out of paying taxes everyone else in 
America is already expected to pay. This is what it is.
  You see, some people making a lot of money talk to their accountants 
and tax lawyers who have figured out that the law was written in such a 
way that you could use an S corporation to get around paying some of 
your payroll taxes. Payroll taxes are your Social Security taxes and 
your Medicare taxes.
  S corporations are basically a passthrough. Whatever profits your 
company makes, you at the end of the year pass it through to you and 
claim it as income--and you pay regular income taxes on it. It is 
income. But although the law was never intended to allow this, this is 
the loophole: You can pay yourself an artificially low amount of money 
sometime earlier in the year and call that a salary, say, $40,000. Thus 
you will pay enough to qualify for Social Security later when you 
retire. You will only pay FICA on this amount. But then at the end of 
the year you take the rest of the business's profits as income. 
Remember, this is considered income--but you do not pay FICA taxes on 
the amount. That is the loophole. You still pay income tax on it 
because it is income but, because of an accident in the way the law is 
written--this was not intended--you avoid paying FICA taxes on the part 
you did not initially call salary.
  All of the money you pocketed, both the so-called salary and the 
profit at the end of the year, again, is income. It is income. It is 
not capital gains so you should be paying, like everybody else, 
Medicare taxes on all of it and Social Security taxes on income up to 
$110,000, like everyone else. There is simply no excuse, no reason for 
not paying taxes, paying your FICA taxes on the $110,000 Social 
Security, and all the rest for Medicare, except for an anomaly that was 
accidentally written into the Code.
  This is exactly the type of loophole we should be closing. It is not 
something that Congress created intentionally, for a reason--to help 
people buy homes or to encourage investment in research and 
development. There is no reason this loophole exists. There is no 
purpose to it. There is no reason to keep it there.
  The Democratic legislation would close that loophole for those 
individuals making more than $250,000 in a year and we would use that 
savings to prevent the doubling of interest that students pay on 
Stafford subsidized loans.

  By contrast, the Republican proposal which passed the House a few 
weeks ago, would eliminate the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which 
is our national investment in preventive health care. This proposal 
would undermine the health of our Nation by cutting funding for cancer 
screenings, child immunizations, and diabetes prevention, among others. 
It would be fiscally irresponsible to boot, since according to a study 
for the Trust for America's Health, every dollar invested in proven 
community-based disease prevention programs yields a return of $5.60.
  My home State of Minnesota leads the country when it comes to 
providing high-quality low-cost health care. When I was elected to 
represent the people of Minnesota, I put together a series of 
roundtables with experts around Minnesota to learn more about our 
health care system. I heard the same thing from leading national 
experts at the Mayo Clinic, the University of Minnesota, from 
providers, from doctors and people in public health and rural health, 
insurance--everyone said the same thing: An ounce of prevention is 
worth a pound of cure.
  There is no question that if we catch cancer early the patient will 
be much more likely to make a full recovery. If every child has access 
to immunizations, we will prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases and 
our kids will grow up stronger and healthier. And if we can prevent 
someone from getting diabetes they will be healthier than if we wait 
until they have it and then treat them for the rest of their lives.
  Not only will people be healthier if we prevent disease but we will 
save a lot of money too. That is why the health care law included the 
Prevention and Public Health Fund. The fund already is investing in 
community-based programs such as the diabetes prevention program, a 
program that Dick Lugar and I fought to include in the health care law. 
This program was pilot-tested by the Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention in Saint Paul, MN, and in Indianapolis. It involves 
structured nutrition classes for 16 weeks and 16 weeks of exercise at 
community-based organizations such as the YMCA, with people who have 
prediabetes.
  Guess what. The program, the diabetes prevention program, has been 
shown to reduce the likelihood that someone with prediabetes will be 
diagnosed with full-blown type 2 diabetes by nearly 60 percent. Those 
are pretty good odds.
  The program doesn't just make people healthier, it also saves 
everyone money. The diabetes prevention program, the program I just 
described, costs about $300 per participant, as compared to treating 
type 2 diabetes which costs more than $6,500 every single year.
  That is why United Health, the largest private insurer in the 
country--that happens to also be headquartered in Minnesota--is already 
providing the program to its beneficiaries. In fact, the CEO of United 
Health told me that for every dollar they invest in the diabetes 
prevention program they save $4 in health care later on. The money in 
the Prevention and Public Health Program in the affordable care act is 
there to scale up this program around the country so everybody in the 
country, every person who has prediabetes, can have availability to it. 
It can be available to them.
  This homegrown program is exactly what the Prevention and Public 
Health Fund was designed to support. It is not the only one like it. In 
Minnesota the fund has gone to support tobacco cessation programs. It 
has helped prevent infectious diseases. It has expanded our desperately 
needed primary care workforce. I think we can all agree these are 
worthwhile investments.
  Unfortunately, many of my friends on the other side of the aisle are 
trying to end this important work, calling the Prevention and Public 
Health Fund a waste of money or worse. Last week, one of my colleagues 
on the floor inaccurately claimed that ``a health clinic was using the 
fund to spay and neuter pets.''
  Let me take this opportunity to set the record straight. That is not 
true. The Department of Health my friend accused of using prevention 
funds to pay to spay pets has not and will not spend prevention fund 
money for this purpose. I ask that in these debates we confine 
ourselves to facts.
  This all comes down to priorities. My friends on the other side of 
the aisle would rather cut the Prevention and Public Health fund than 
close a tax loophole for wealthy Americans which serves absolutely no 
purpose. In fact, they would rather keep us from voting on a bill to 
ease the burden of debt for students across the country than close this 
loophole. I hear them sometimes talking about closing loopholes so we 
can bring the marginal rate down. If you cannot close this loophole 
which has no purpose, I don't see any loophole we can possibly agree to 
close.

  I ask my friends on both sides of the aisle one favor: Talk to your 
constituents. Talk to the people who have been saved from the 
affliction of diabetes or who have quit smoking or who have

[[Page S3269]]

immunized their children because of the Prevention and Public Health 
Fund. Talk to your State and local departments of health which are 
working to prevent outbreaks of the next dangerous strain of flu thanks 
to the infectious disease prevention fund. Stand with me in support of 
the Prevention and Public Health Fund.
  I thank the Chair.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Franken). The Senator from Rhode Island.


                             Climate Change

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let me thank my colleague from 
Minnesota for his courtesy in allowing this time for me when I would 
otherwise be presiding.
  I wanted to respond to the remarks that preceded Senator Franken's 
remarks, remarks by Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, suggesting that the 
military's investment in green technologies was an unwelcome imposition 
on them, and against their wishes, by outside political forces and on 
the basis of outside political considerations.
  I just held a hearing in the Environment and Public Works Committee 
on the subject of our Defense Department's investment and interest in 
alternative technologies. We had witnesses from all of the services, 
and the testimony was pretty clear and diametrically opposed to the 
point of view just expressed by the Senator from Oklahoma.
  I can certainly appreciate the enthusiasm of my friend from Oklahoma 
for fossil fuels since fossil fuels are a big home State industry in 
Oklahoma. But the testimony at the hearing was that the military was 
pursuing alternative fuels for reasons of its own, for reasons that 
related to protecting the troops, to be more efficient and to protect 
the strategic posture of the United States around the world.
  Perhaps the most striking testimony they gave was that over 3,000 
American soldiers gave their lives between 2003 and 2007 protecting our 
fuel convoys in Iraq. When we get in theater and we have a heavily 
fossil-fuel-based military presence, the price we pay for that is paid 
in the blood of soldiers who die protecting the fuel convoys--3,000 
young men and women between 2003 and 2007. So to the extent we can do 
things like the Cooley company in Rhode Island and invest in tents that 
have their own solar capture built right into the fabric so that the 
cooling within the tent in the blazing heat of the Middle East can be 
done without having to truck that fuel in and without having to cost 
those soldiers their lives--that is not something that is being imposed 
on the military; that is something they very much want to accomplish as 
part of their core mission.
  In Newport, RI, the Naval War College has a facility, and they are 
building wind turbines there. They are building wind turbines there 
because they have calculated that over time they will save money by 
putting up those wind turbines compared to buying electricity. It is 
not an imposition from outside. It is not some green agenda coming from 
Washington or anyplace else. It is the Newport Naval Station saying we 
save money for our budget by doing this. And when we save that money, 
we can put it into these other uses such as fighter aircraft, tanks, 
bullets, bandages, and boots.
  The third piece of testimony had to do with the strategic posture of 
the country internationally, which is something the military is 
concerned with in a very deep and profound way. They made a couple of 
points.
  The first was that the less dependent the United States is on the 
international oil market, the fewer vital interests we have to risk 
shedding our blood and spending our treasure to protect. So it is in 
our national strategic interest to get off of our fossil fuel 
dependency and into a broader portfolio of energy sources.
  The second is the emerging dangers of climate change, in which we are 
immersed all around us if we look at the obvious evidence in front of 
our faces, which creates profound risks for social and civil unrest and 
violence in other parts of the world as things change, as estuaries 
flood and are no longer productive agriculturally, as relatively dry 
areas turn to desert and can no longer sustain life, as the great 
glaciers in the high mountains dissipate and change the flow patterns 
of rivers on which economic life for individuals depends.
  All of those things create conflict and strife, and the American 
military is aware that where there is conflict and strife abroad, very 
often they are called in, and they feel the responsibility to try to 
avoid that.
  I take time every week to speak a little bit about climate change for 
a number of reasons. As I said, there are a lot of folks in Washington 
who would like to ignore this issue and it is presently being ignored, 
which is unfortunate and, in fact, shameful. The messages about climate 
change we are getting are coming through loudly and clearly and we 
ignore them at our peril.
  Every week for the past 15 months, as the Presiding Officer knows, I 
have distributed in our weekly caucus an update on some of latest 
climate science bulletins, the news that is fresh that week. This week 
the stories are that the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric 
Administration in the weather statistics for the month of April 2012 
reported warmer-than-average temperatures engulfing much of the 
contiguous United States during April with the nationally averaged 
temperature at 55 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above 
average and the third warmest on record.
  Warmer-than-average temperatures were present for a large portion of 
the Nation for April. Six States in the central United States and three 
States in the Northeast had April temperatures ranking among their 10 
warmest in history.

  Above-average temperatures were also present for the Southeast, upper 
Midwest, and much of the West. No State in the contiguous United States 
had April temperatures that were below average.
  April 2012 came on the heels of the warmest March on record for the 
lower 48. January to April 2012 was the warmest such period on record 
for the contiguous United States with an average temperature of 45.5 
degrees Fahrenheit, 5.4 degrees above the long-term average. Twenty-six 
states, all east of the Rockies, were record warm for the 4-month 
period, and an additional 17 States had temperatures for the period 
among their 10 warmest.
  These rising temperatures can lead to a number of concerns. For 
instance, snowpack, and thus drinking water, could be drastically 
reduced in California and surrounding western States. The Scripps 
Institution of Oceanography presented a study to California's Energy 
Commission last month explaining that the warming of 1.5 to 3 degrees 
Fahrenheit between now and midcentury will reduce today's snowpack by 
one-third. By 2100, at those temperatures snowpacks would be reduced by 
two-thirds. That makes a big difference to the agricultural communities 
that depend on that water downstream of those snowpacks.
  Meanwhile, Science Daily reported yesterday that ozone and greenhouse 
gas pollution such as black carbon are expanding the tropics at a rate 
of .7 degrees per decade. Said the lead scientist, climatologist Robert 
J. Allen, assistant professor at the University of California, 
Riverside:

       If the tropics are moving poleward, then the subtropics 
     will become even drier . . . impacting regional agriculture, 
     economy, and society.

  People are noticing the changes around them. Outside of the Halls of 
Congress--where we have blinders on to this obvious issue--regular 
people see the changes, and they are concerned about them. The United 
States Geological Survey recently polled more than 10,000 visitors to 
the Nation's wildlife refuges, hunters, fishermen, and families alike, 
and found that 71 percent of those polled said they were ``personally 
concerned'' about climate change's effects on fish, wildlife, and 
habitats. Seventy-four percent said that working to limit climate 
change's effects on fish, wildlife, and habitats would benefit future 
generations.
  These special interests who deny that carbon pollution causes global 
temperatures to increase--and who have such a profound and maligning 
effect in this Chamber--deny that melting icecaps will raise our seas 
to dangerous levels, denying that all of these visible changes are 
taking place.
  The myth that these special interests propagate in the face of so 
much evidence is that the jury is still out on climate change caused by 
carbon pollution so we don't have to worry about it

[[Page S3270]]

or even take precautions. This is false. It is plain wrong.
  Virtually all of our most prestigious scientific and academic 
institutions have stated that climate change is happening and that 
human activities are the driving cause of this change. They say it in 
powerful language, particularly for scientists who are specific about 
what they say and guarded in the way they say it.
  The letter said:

       Observations throughout the world make it clear that 
     climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research 
     demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human 
     activities are the primary driver. These conclusions are 
     based on multiple, independent lines of evidence--

  And here is the final crescendo--

     and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective 
     assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science.

  That is an awfully nice way to say it, but in a nutshell they are 
saying anybody who disagrees is making it up.
  These are serious organizations: the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, American 
Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society, American Society of 
Agronomy, and on and on.
  It is not just them. It is also the military services--as I mentioned 
at the beginning of my remarks--it is also the intelligence 
organizations of the country, it is also most of our electric 
utilities, many of our biggest capitalists and investors, and of course 
it is our insurance industry that has to pay for the damage that 
ensues. A recent article said: The worldwide insurance is huge, three 
times bigger than the oil industry.
  Right now these companies are running scared. Some are threatening to 
cancel coverage for homeowners within 2 miles of the coast where 
hurricanes are on the increase, and in drying areas of the West where 
wildfires have wreaked havoc. Marsh and McClennan, one of the largest 
insurance brokers, called climate change ``one of the most significant 
emerging risks facing the world today,'' while insurance giant AIG has 
established an office of environment and climate change to assess the 
risks to insure us in the years ahead. The industry's own scientists 
are predicting that things could get a lot worse in the years ahead.

  I am indebted to the Presiding Officer, the junior Senator from 
Minnesota, for the following observation, which is that 97 percent of 
the climate scientists who are most actively publishing accept that the 
verdict is in on carbon pollution causing climate and oceanic changes. 
The example he and I have discussed--and I can't help, since he is 
presiding right now, referring to it again--we are being asked in this 
body to ignore facts that 97 percent of scientists tell us are real. 
Now, translate that into our personal lives. What if a child of ours 
was sick and we went to a doctor and said: Is there something I need to 
do about it? Is there a treatment that is necessary? What is the deal 
here? And we got an opinion, and then we said: I am going to be a 
cautious, prudent parent because a treatment might be expensive. I want 
to make sure I am going down the right path, so I am going to get a 
second opinion, and the parent gets a second opinion. Then the parent 
got a third opinion. You are a really prudent parent, and you got a 
third opinion. Let's say you kept going. You got a fourth opinion, a 
fifth, a 15th, a 45th, a 75th, a 95th--you got 100 opinions. People 
would think that was a little odd, but never mind. And then let's say 
that 87 percent of those professional opinions came back saying: Yes, 
your child is ill and needs this treatment. Would you then responsibly 
say: The jury is still out on the question of why my child is sick. 
Let's not take any action now. These 97 percent of the doctors might be 
alarmists. We don't really want to go there, and, after all, it will 
cost money to buy the medicine.
  Would any responsible parent do that? No. It is a ludicrous 
proposition, and that is just how ludicrous the proposition is that 
climate change is not real.
  The underlying facts are ancient ones. The guy who discovered that 
climate change is caused by the release of carbon dioxide into the 
atmosphere, John Tyndall, discovered this in 1863, at the time of the 
Civil War, 150 years ago. This is not a novelty. This is old 
established science, and it has become clear since then that there is a 
change that is happening.
  We pump out 7 to 8 gigatons a year. A gigaton is a billion--not a 
million, a billion--metric tons. We pump out 7 to 8 billion metric tons 
a year of carbon dioxide, and that adds to the carbon load in the 
atmosphere. This isn't something that is a theory, it is something that 
is a measurement now.
  For 8,000 centuries mankind has existed in an atmospheric bandwidth 
of 170 to 300 parts per million of carbon dioxide--170 to 300--for 
8,000 centuries, 800,000 years. We have been an agricultural species 
for about 10,000 years, to give my colleagues an idea. For 800,000 
years we were picking things off of bushes. Our entire history as a 
species falls essentially in that 800,000 years. All of our development 
as a species has happened in the last probably 20,000 years. So it has 
been a long run in that safe bandwidth of 170 to 300 parts per million. 
We have shot out of it. We are at 390 parts per million and climbing. 
The record in history as to what happens on this planet when we spike 
out of that range is an ominous one. It is a bad trajectory. It takes 
us back to massive ocean die-offs that are in the geologic record. So 
this is something we need to be very careful about and we need to take 
action.
  The suggestion that it is not happening is false. The suggestion that 
we can wait it out is imprudent, reckless, and ill-advised. And the 
notion that our professional career military who have lost 3,000 men 
and women defending fuel convoys in Iraq are engaged in trying to get 
off fossil fuels because of some outside political agenda that they 
don't share is a preposterous allegation to make about the men and 
women who run our military, who make these decisions for our military, 
and who are seeking to defend the soldiers out in the field against 
these consequences.
  With that, I yield the floor, once again thanking the distinguished 
Presiding Officer for allowing me this time, and I would have otherwise 
been sitting there and presiding. So with appreciation to Senator 
Franken, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Whitehouse). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.


                Representation Fairness Restoration Act

  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I apologize for keeping the Presiding 
Officer and the rest of the staff here a little later than they might 
want, but I have an important message that will be brief.
  I introduced legislation not too long ago called the Representation 
Fairness Restoration Act, S. 1843. It was a reaction to the NLRB's 
decision in the specialty health care case, where a group of nurses 
within specialty health care asked for permission to unionize and 
organize within that unit. The NLRB granted that, and that became the 
first microunion that has ever existed in the United States of America.
  Today it is my understanding that the NLRB has approved the 
following: the second floor designer shoes department and the fifth 
floor contemporary shoes department at Bergdorf Goodman in New York--
the two combined have 45 employees out of 370. They have granted them 
the right to organize.
  This is a gigantic leap that differs from 75 years of settled labor 
law. Microunions within any retail establishment, medical 
establishment, or any other type of business prevents cross-training, 
causes discord, and is a way to upset an organization that otherwise is 
not upset.
  Labor law in this country has been settled for a long time. Last year 
70 percent of all the union calls in the United States of America 
passed on their vote. There is not a problem with unions being able to 
organize. But there is a huge problem if we continue to tear down the 
firewalls that have had the playing field level.
  Just recently the courts have twice thrown out rulings of the 
National Labor Relations Board--one on ambush elections where they 
tried to reduce the average period of time from 58 days

[[Page S3271]]

to 10, which is totally unrealistic, and, even more importantly, on the 
posting rule where the employers were asked to post proorganization 
posters within the break rooms in their companies. Both times the 
courts threw them out and said the NLRB has reached too far.
  It is my hope the same thing would happen here again. But in the 
meantime, I want to encourage the Senate to allow us to bring S. 1843 
to the floor and have this debate. In the free enterprise system, in 
the tedious economy we have today in this country, the last thing we 
need is to begin changing labor law and pitting organized labor against 
management in an adversarial type of way.
  This example at Bergdorf Goodman today is an example of the National 
Labor Relations Board doing in regulation what we ought to be doing in 
legislation on the floor of the Senate. My biggest concern is that now 
it seems as if the administration's leadership in every Department has 
determined if we can circumvent the legislative body and through 
regulation do what we cannot do on the floor, we will forget about the 
House, we will forget about the Senate, and it will be the executive 
and judicial branches that run the United States of America. That is 
not good for our country, and that is wrong.
  So I am going to call on the Senate and ask our leadership to let us 
bring this bill to the floor, to let us debate it and see if we want to 
change 75 settled years of labor law and unbalance the playing field 
between management and labor. I do not think we do.
  I am sorry to rush to the floor after just hearing this information, 
but I think it is so important we nip it in the bud; that we let the 
playing field remain balanced, and we not turn over the operation of 
settled labor law to an NLRB that, quite frankly, seems to have run 
amok as far as I am concerned.
  Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity to speak and yield the 
floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

                          ____________________