[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 138 (Thursday, September 24, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6910-S6931]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      HIRE MORE HEROES ACT OF 2015

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will 
resume consideration of H.J. Res. 61, which the clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       A joint resolution (H.J. Res. 61) amending the Internal 
     Revenue Code of 1986 to exempt employees with health coverage 
     under TRICARE or the Veterans Administration from being taken 
     into account for purposes of determining the employers to 
     which the employer mandate applies under the Patient 
     Protection and Affordable Care Act.

  Pending:

       McConnell (for Cochran) amendment No. 2669, making 
     continuing appropriations for the fiscal year ending 
     September 30, 2016.
       McConnell amendment No. 2670 (to amendment No. 2669), to 
     change the enactment date.
       McConnell amendment No. 2671 (to amendment No. 2670), of a 
     perfecting nature.
       McConnell amendment No. 2672 (to the language proposed to 
     be stricken by amendment No. 2669), to change the enactment 
     date.
       McConnell amendment No. 2673 (to amendment No. 2672), of a 
     perfecting nature.
       McConnell motion to commit the joint resolution to the 
     Committee on Appropriations, with instructions, McConnell 
     amendment No. 2674, to change the enactment date.
       McConnell amendment No. 2675 (to (the instructions) 
     amendment No. 2674), of a perfecting nature.
       McConnell amendment No. 2676 (to amendment No. 2675), of a 
     perfecting nature.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the time until 2 
p.m. will be equally divided between the leaders or their designees.
  The Senator from Utah.


                   Remembering Elder Richard G. Scott

  Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute to Elder Richard 
G. Scott, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church 
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who passed away September 22, 
2015, at the age of 86.
  Richard G. Scott had the razor-sharp mind of an engineer, fused with 
the tender softness of a disciple's soul.
  A graduate of George Washington University in mechanical engineering, 
who did post-graduate training in nuclear engineering, he had a 
brilliant mind with an uncanny capacity for formulas, projections, and 
calculations. Yet he became known throughout the world for an enormous 
heart with an equally uncanny capacity to love and to have empathy for 
people from every walk of life.
  Elder Scott's gentle voice invited all who had lost their way, who 
had given up hope or had wandered far to come home, home to the faith, 
family, and community that would bring them real peace and lasting, 
genuine joy.
  Countless individuals around the world heard his invitation to come 
home and rightly felt that he was talking directly to them. Ever in 
search of the one who was lost--Elder Scott's words and witness of 
Jesus Christ served as the lower lights upon the shore to gently guide 
many a wanderer home.

  Elder Scott had an extraordinary depth of empathy, particularly for 
those who silently suffered and anxiously sought for relief, 
redemption, and renewal in the midst of life's storms. He, himself, was 
a man acquainted with grief, having lost two young children and later 
his wife Jeanene to untimely deaths. He also seemed to intimately 
understand the feelings of deep discouragement, overwhelming 
uncertainty, as well as the crushing avalanche of personal inadequacy 
that can descend upon the human soul during difficult days and trying 
times. Yet he continually stood as a beacon of hope to those who 
struggled because he knew with an absolute certainty to what source we 
should look for strength and security during such days and at such 
times.
  His complete love for and belief in the divine potential of each and 
every soul led him to speak plainly, powerfully, and often with tender, 
heartfelt, personal feelings. He urged the struggling as well as the 
faithful to cast aside any behavior, habit or belief that weighed them 
down or kept them from living up to their full potential. Members of 
the LDS Church all around the world often felt, as they watched him 
speak, that he was not only speaking specifically to them but also that 
he was looking straight into their souls. In truth, he was just 
speaking with such love, empathy, and genuine compassion that he 
empowered his listeners to look into their own hearts and see what 
their Savior saw in them.
  Elder Scott saw people not for where they were currently positioned 
on the road of life but for the potential each person had to do, be, 
and become more. He once declared: ``We become what we want to be by 
consistently being what we want to become each day.''
  Elder Scott's vision extended far beyond the struggles of mortality; 
he focused on raising our sights to higher things, grander places, and 
more noble thoughts.

[[Page S6911]]

  The role of the family as the bulwark of society was paramount in his 
life and teachings. Elder Scott often expressed his belief in the 
unparalleled power and influence that a man and a woman, equally yoked 
as husband and wife, could have on children and communities. He taught 
that in marriage oneness is not sameness and of the vital importance of 
valuing our differences. To illustrate, he once declared: ``I may not 
know what it means to be a woman, but I do know what it means to be 
taught by one and to love one with all my heart and all my soul.'' His 
love for his wife Jeanene was legendary and was forever sprinkled into 
his sermons. I take comfort in knowing that after nearly 20 years, 
Elder Scott has gone to that Heavenly home he so often pointed to and 
is once again united with Jeanene.
  One of Elder Scott's colleagues described him as a clever teacher. 
His formula for teaching was not of the engineering variety but rather 
followed a pattern described in a hymn by Lorin Wheelwright entitled 
``Help Me Teach with Inspiration,'' which says:

       Help me teach with inspiration; Grant this blessing, Lord, 
     I pray.
       Help me lift a soul's ambition To a higher, nobler way.
       Help me reach a friend in darkness; Help me guide him thru 
     the night.
       Help me show thy path to glory By the Spirit's holy light.
       Help me find thy lambs who wander; Help me bring them to 
     thy keep.
       Teach me, Lord, to be a shepherd; Father, help me feed thy 
     sheep.

  Elder Richard G. Scott was indeed an inspired teacher, a leader, and 
lifter of people. His amazing mind and compassionate soul enabled him 
to help engineer a path for all of us to return home.
  Mr. FLAKE. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. LEE. I yield to the Senator.
  Mr. FLAKE. Mr. President, I just wish to second what has been said 
about Elder Scott and appreciate the Senator from Arizona--or Utah, 
taking the time to say it.
  One of my fondest memories of being in Congress was at one point 
showing Elder Scott around a bit of the Capitol. He knew it well. He 
had been here before, but it was my privilege and honor to be with him 
at that time. It has been my privilege and honor over many years to 
hear him at general conference and other venues exhorting people to 
follow the example of Christ and to love their families, love their 
wives. To see him pass now after such dedicated service for so long, it 
is truly wonderful for him to be reunited with his wife and for his 
family to reflect on a life of service.
  I thank the Senator for his comments and wished to add my own.
  I yield back.
  Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I thank my distinguished colleague from 
Arizona for his kind remarks regarding Elder Scott. I would also 
remark, just briefly, that my late father, himself an Arizonan, would 
be pleased to hear me referred to as a Senator from Arizona, given that 
I was born there.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I think many of us today have been struck 
with a serious case of deja vu because once again, with a government 
shutdown looming, some Republicans continue to pander to their base 
with a political show vote instead of working with Democrats to prevent 
a budget crisis. Once again, it is women's health that is being used as 
a tea party political football, with Republicans attempting to cut off 
women's access to care, and once again workers and families across our 
country are watching Congress and wondering whether their elected 
officials can do the absolute bare minimum.
  The government shutdown that Republicans pushed us into in 2013 did 
nothing to help them repeal the Affordable Care Act, but it did have 
real consequences for families and communities we represent. Workers 
didn't know when they would get their next paycheck. Businesses felt 
the sting of fewer customers. Families across the country lost even 
more trust that elected officials in Washington, DC, could get anything 
done.
  In my home State of Washington, thousands of employees at Joint Base 
Lewis-McChord were sent home with no return in sight. Startups couldn't 
get small business loans, national parks such as Mount Rainier shut 
down. It kept families away from true national treasures and customers 
away from small businesses that rely on their tourism.
  After all of that, I had hoped Republicans would learn their lesson, 
especially because once that economy-rattling exercise in futility came 
to an end, I was proud to work with the Republican budget chairman, 
Paul Ryan, to do what we shouldn't have needed a shutdown to get done--
negotiate a 2-year bipartisan deal that prevented another government 
shutdown. It restored critical investments in priorities such as 
education, research, and defense jobs and showed our families that 
government can get something done when both sides are willing to come 
to the table and compromise.
  That deal was an important reminder that governing by crisis simply 
does not work. Unfortunately, now it seems that some of my Republican 
colleagues have forgotten that, because instead of working across the 
aisle on another bipartisan budget deal, as Democrats have pushed them 
to do for months, some Republicans are once again using a looming 
fiscal deadline as an opportunity to pander to their base, no matter 
what that means for our workers and families who are wondering whether 
government will still be running in a few days.
  Since they clearly need another reminder, attacking women's health 
does not keep the government open and these shutdown threats will not 
work. It didn't work in 2011, when House Republicans tried to defund 
Planned Parenthood in the budget at the very last minute. It didn't 
work in 2013, when extreme Members of the GOP were dead set on 
repealing ObamaCare, and they will not work today.
  I am going to be proud to vote against this partisan attempt to 
defund Planned Parenthood and take critical health care services away 
from millions of people.
  Then I hope that finally Republicans will remember what they should 
have learned last Congress: accept that enough is enough and make sure 
that women, workers, families, and our economy are protected from a 
completely unnecessary crisis.
  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. COATS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                           Wasteful Spending

  Mr. COATS. Mr. President, since February I have been coming to the 
Senate floor every week to talk about the waste of the week.
  Back in 2010, when I made the decision to answer a call to run for 
the Senate again, one of the primary reasons for my decision to go 
forward was my alarm over the plunge into debt and rising deficit that 
was taking place. At the time, the national debt of this country was a 
little over $10 trillion. It is alarming to note that as I stand here 5 
years later, our debt has nearly doubled. It's over $18 trillion in 
just the 5 years I have been here.
  There were alarm bells ringing in 2010, and those alarm bells were 
saying that we cannot stay on this course, that it is going to come 
back to haunt us someday, that it will affect our economy, that it will 
affect our credit rating. Someday the bill collector will be at the 
door of the taxpayer saying: You have to pay up big time or we are 
going to go into default.
  What took place going forward from that was a series of efforts--some 
of them very equally bipartisan by both Republicans and Democrats who 
were alarmed at where we were and wishing to come together to persuade 
the President to work with us and put us on a path toward fiscal 
responsibility. That work involved any number of proposals and 
iterations. We all remember the so-called Gang of 6, the Committee of 
12, the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, and various others who 
had plans. It was the dominating issue of our time during the first 
couple of years of my return here in 2011 and 2012.
  After the election of 2012, when the President was reelected, at his 
own initiative he reached out to a few Republicans--I was one of them--
and said: I am willing to sit down and work together to deal with this. 
This is a

[[Page S6912]]

major issue affecting the future of our country, affecting our economy.
  I was encouraged that after the election and when no longer seeking 
any further office, the President would be willing to seriously work 
with us. We did serious work for several months. The President's top 
three appointees--the head of the Office of Management and Budget, his 
Chief of Staff, and his political director--met with eight of us on a 
regular basis, both here in the Capitol and at the White House. We had 
agreed we would not have any public meetings. We would not have staff. 
It would just be Members and the President's designated individuals. We 
did not broadcast what we were doing because we knew it would become 
public and then political and therefore perhaps end up with the same 
fate all the other efforts had resulted in.
  We got to the end of that, and in the end, even though we made an 
extraordinary number of concessions to the President, even though we 
essentially had put together a package of items he himself had 
suggested in his budget plans that we could accomplish in slowing down 
the growth of government, the spending, and the deficits every year 
that were rolling out and plunging us into debt, we came up short.
  At that point, it became very clear to me that we were not going to 
be able to achieve a long-term plan for putting us on the road to good 
fiscal health. So I thought: OK, I am hearing from a lot of colleagues 
here in the Senate but also from other outside sources saying that 
under sequester we just can't cut any more. We need more revenue to 
expand necessary spending projects in government. And while some 
essential functions that only government can do might need that type of 
attention, there is a range of things that you really have to question 
why they are on the books in the first place.
  A number of my colleagues--particularly former Senator Coburn--took 
this floor often--as I did, as well as others--to point out areas where 
not the Republican Party had decided, where not individuals 
representing our party had decided, but where nonpartisan agencies of 
the government--the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget 
Office, the Office of Management and Budget at the White House--had 
investigated and produced examples of spending that were either waste, 
fraud, or abuse, and had no legitimate qualification to stay on the 
books.
  So we started looking into this. Thanks to Senator Coburn and others, 
we have come up with a number of things we could easily take off the 
books, easily use to pay for essential things, easily use to reduce our 
deficit spending, keep from going into debt, return money to the 
taxpayers, or however we wanted to do it. So we started to accumulate 
that, and our goal was to reach $100 billion to simply defy the myth 
going around that there is not a penny we can cut and that we have done 
all we can do.
  So over the 20-some times I have been on this floor, we have come up 
with a number of issues which could save the taxpayer money and 
certainly need to be addressed. Our current total is now well over $100 
billion, and today we are adding $10.5 billion to our $100 billion 
total. We are now at $116 billion. I said we would stop at $100 
billion, but the examples keep rolling in, and so we are going to keep 
going every week. As long as this cycle of the Senate is in session, I 
will come to the floor and label yet another example of waste.
  Last month, when I was home in Indiana, coming down from northwest 
Indiana to our capital city of Indianapolis on Interstate 65 for the 
umpteenth time--as I drive from north to south or south to north on 
that road, I pass through wind farms of literally thousands of 
windmills. Interestingly enough, and as I observed even this time, many 
of them are not turning. There are windmills--a few of them turning--
driven by the wind, but most of them are not turning. We have thousands 
of these, and it looks as if fewer than 100 or a comparable number are 
operating, and so I am wondering why and whether the taxpayer is 
getting a good deal on this.
  I want to give a little bit of history of how all this came to be put 
in place. Back in the early 1990s--in fact, in 1992--the Congress 
passed the Energy Policy Act of 1992, which included the renewable 
electricity production tax credit, called the PTC. The point was that 
as we looked at alternative ways to produce electricity to reduce our 
dependence on oil and fossil fuels, there was a tax credit created for 
those using windmills to create power. It was designed to be claimed if 
the wind farm was actually making the power.
  Earlier I said that many times I have come down that road and I have 
seen windmills that were idle. But the blades had to be turning and the 
electricity had to be being produced in order to receive that tax 
credit.
  At the time, because I thought we were overly dependent on Middle 
Eastern oil and that it was creating issues for us geopolitically and 
militarily and otherwise, I thought it would be good to have a stimulus 
here to support the creation of wind energy, to give us the ability to 
stand on our own and have less dependence on Middle Eastern oil. The 
main reason I supported it is because it was to start the process and 
incentivize diverse energy sources to get them off the ground. It was 
going to be a short-term boost to help these new energy sources become 
competitive.
  The original credit was designed under the law to last only 5\1/2\ 
years and then there would no longer be this credit. Well, like any 
other credit, subsidy, or anything else passed here which provides 
taxpayer support for production of something, it never expires. Few if 
any of them expire on the expiration date. So once again, once you get 
a law on the books, once you get a credit on the books, once you get a 
subsidy on the books, you can't get it off.
  Since the time the original bill passed, the wind industry and its 
supporters have repeatedly come to Congress and said: Just give us a 
few more years and then wind will be competitive, without taxpayer 
subsidies.
  As a result, this 5\1/2\-year program, which started in 1992, has 
been extended multiple times. In 2013, nearly two decades after the 
time the subsidies expired, Congress changed the rules so the 
facilities only have to begin construction before the expiration date 
to automatically qualify for a future 10-year subsidy, even before 
those windmills become operational. So if someone is just in the 
business of building windmills, as some of our major companies are, 
they are going to qualify for the subsidy. They are going to get the 
tax credit--whether or not the windmills are needed. They can just pour 
some concrete and start the building process, and they are going to 
qualify for the credit. The result is that more and more wind 
facilities are being constructed irrespective of the needs of the 
electricity grid or market demand.
  Just last year, Warren Buffett, who is a smart investor, noted that 
wind isn't profitable without subsidies. He said:

       For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we 
     build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build 
     them. They don't make sense without the tax credit.

  So regardless of the demand, regardless of whether or not those 
windmills need to be turning and generating electricity, regardless of 
whether or not that electricity can be put into the grid--and, by the 
way, the cost of wind energy is three to four times the cost of fossil 
fuel energy--regardless of any of that, the tax credit is there.
  In 2014 Congress retroactively extended the wind tax credit at the 
end of the year, and the general assumption here in Congress is that 
the production tax credit will once again be extended at the end of 
this year. That is probably going to happen.
  According to an estimate from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on 
Taxation, if we continue and extend this tax credit, this will add 
another $10.5 billion to our budget.
  Clearly, it is way past time to end this seemingly never-ending 
subsidy. It is time to give the hardworking taxpayers savings, and it 
is time to stop wasteful spending. If we can prevent Congress from just 
automatically extending this way beyond the original 5\1/2\ years, 
decades beyond, we can save the taxpayers $10.5 billion.
  So today I am adding to this chart and picture here $10.5 billion, 
which now totals $116 billion-plus in terms of money that falls under 
the category of waste, fraud, and abuse. My colleagues cannot come down 
to this floor and say we can't cut a penny more of any program and 
defend the numerous--now

[[Page S6913]]

well more than 20--examples of what have been defined as waste, fraud, 
and abuse--not by me, not by the Republican Party, but by nonpartisan 
agencies of the Federal Government.
  There it is. Stay tuned for next week's ``Waste of the Week.''
  I yield the floor.
  Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, it is time give it our best to move 
America forward and give Americans a fair shot. Let's show the American 
people that we can work across the aisle and across the dome to get the 
job done.
  Instead, here we are facing another shutdown showdown. There is no 
reason for there to be a government shutdown. Republican leadership 
does not want a shutdown. Democrats don't want a shutdown. There may be 
some drama, but we intend to keep the government open and avoid 
shutdown, slamdown politics.
  I hoped the Senate had learned its lesson in October 2013, when 
Republicans shut down government over the Affordable Care Act, or this 
February 2015, when Republicans threatened the Department of Homeland 
Security with shutdown over immigration policy.
  Senate Democrats won't be threatened and bullied into accepting 
poison pill riders. Serious policy issues like family planning and 
reproductive health deserve serious debate rather than becoming an 
``add on'' rider to a funding bill.
  Shutdowns are bad for everyone, jeopardizing family checkbooks, 
business bottom lines, and the Federal checkbook. A shutdown makes it 
impossible for Federal agencies to meet missions that serve the 
American people. A shutdown means furloughed Federal employees and 
contractors; delayed tax returns; delayed small business loans; and 
delayed contracts.
  Uncertainty slows economic growth and hurts the health and well-being 
of the entire Nation. When the government was closed for 16 days in 
2013, the shutdown hurt our growing economy, sacrificing 120,000 
private sector jobs. Billions of dollars of economic output was lost. 
We lost 6.6 million work days, about 850,000 Federal employees were 
sent home.
  My home State was hit particularly hard. Maryland is home to many 
Federal agencies. It was not just the Federal workers that got hurt. 
The Baltimore Sun wrote about Jay Angle, the owner of Salsa Grill, a 
Peruvian restaurant in Woodlawn outside the Social Security 
Administration. Every day, 4,700 workers go to work at Social Security, 
but only 500 were on the job during the shutdown. Salsa Grill counts on 
the Social Security workers as customers, but they were not there. 
There were stories like Jay's all over the country.
  Because of the 2013 shutdown, hundreds of patients could not enroll 
in clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health, NIH, so their 
last chance for a miracle was delayed or denied. About 8,000 rural 
families had their home loan decisions delayed, pushing the American 
Dream down the road. Head Start grantees in seven States closed, 
leaving 7,200 children at home and families searching for high quality 
child care.
  Avoiding a shutdown is just the first step. We also need a new budget 
deal to cancel sequester.
  Right now our budget caps spending, but it does not cap tax breaks 
for billionaires and corporations that send jobs overseas. Americans 
are angry. They feel the rules are rigged against them and that those 
who write the rules don't care. But Democrats do care. We believe the 
people deserve a government on their side.
  That is why we are fighting to make sure the American people have a 
government that works as hard as they do.
  We have three steps to meet that goal. First, no government shutdown. 
We need to pass a clean, short-term continuing funding resolution with 
no poison pill riders to keep the government funded and open for 
business for as short a time as possible. After all, a yearlong CR just 
locks in sequester.
  The CR will give us time to take the second step, negotiating a new 
budget agreement that cancels sequester and lifts the spending caps 
equally for defense and nondefense spending so we can protect our 
national security and give the American people a fair shot.
  After the new budget agreement is reached, we will take the third 
step, writing and enacting an Omnibus spending bill. Remember, the 
Appropriations Committee needs 30 days to get the job done once we have 
our topline.
  That is my plan to cancel sequester and put the American people 
first.
  Why do we want to cancel sequester? Sequester requires draconian cuts 
to critical programs that will have consequences for American families 
for a generation. Sequester was supposed to be so arbitrary and 
unthinkable that it would drive Congress to a budget deal. But 
gridlock, hammerlock, and deadlock kept that from happening.
  It was the reality of sequester that led Congress to negotiate the 
Murray-Ryan budget deal that provided sequester relief for 2014 and 
2015.
  Now we have got deja vu. We need a new agreement to cancel sequester-
level spending in fiscal years 2016 and 2017.
  The Republican budget for fiscal year 2016 calls for spending at the 
sequester level of $1.017 trillion. The President's budget request asks 
for $74 billion more. That may sound like a big number, but it is 
hardly expensive. It is equal to the 2010 level--6 years ago.
  We must cancel sequester to give Americans a fair shot by investing 
in our country and our people.
  Sequester hurts national security. According to Army Chief of Staff 
General Raymond Odierno, only 33 percent of our brigades are ready to 
fight. Without sequester relief, the Army will not be truly ready to 
fight until 2025.
  Sequester keeps us from building and maintaining our physical 
infrastructure. Funding to build roads, bridges, and transit creates 
jobs while easing peoples commutes to their jobs.
  Sequester deepens our innovation deficit. Funding for basic research 
is an investment in jobs today and jobs tomorrow. New ideas and 
discoveries lead to startups that rev up our economy and find new cures 
for deadly diseases.
  Under spartan budgets, NIH funding has not kept up with inflation. 
Even the increases proposed under the Republican spending caps fund NIH 
by cutting education, college affordability, and labor protections. On 
the other hand, when we cancel sequester, we will invest in innovation 
and discovery without sacrificing other investments in our future. For 
example, the National Science Foundation would give 600 more grants 
supporting 7,500 scientists, students, teachers, and technicians.
  Cancelling sequester means meeting compelling human needs. We can 
help make college affordable for families. Right now, under sequester-
level budgeting, Republicans instead took $300 million from Pell grants 
and eliminated First in the World grants to make college more 
affordable.
  Under sequester-level appropriations bills, we can not keep our 
promises to our veterans. Both the Senate and the House Republican 
bills underfund medical care at the Veterans Administration--by more 
than $600 million in the Senate. That is enough money to provide 
medical coverage for 61,000 veterans. The House also cuts $580 million 
for building VA health care facilities when there is a $10 billion 
maintenance backlog.
  It is clear that we need to end sequester. It is also clear that the 
shutdown was a disaster for everyone, not to be repeated. Because 
without the resources to keep our government open, agencies can not 
serve the American people keeping us safe, healthy, educated, moving, 
and thriving.
  The bottom line is we need a new topline. We need a new budget deal 
to invest in America's safety and future. We need a short-term CR, free 
of poison pill riders, to get there--not another shutdown.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I rise once again to speak against 
this callous, misguided effort to defund Planned Parenthood. This is a 
clear case of politics being put ahead of the country's best interests. 
This time the majority has tied this effort to the funding of the 
entire Federal Government--they are willing to shut down the government 
over this issue. That is preposterous.
  Planned Parenthood serves some of the most vulnerable women in our 
society. It cares for 2.7 million patients in the U.S.--5 million 
patients worldwide. Ninety-seven percent of the services its 700 
clinics provide are basic health care, including breast exams, cervical 
cancer screenings, testing for sexually

[[Page S6914]]

transmitted diseases, and contraception. One in five women will use 
Planned Parenthood as their primary health care provider at some point 
in their lives.
  Nationwide, 80 percent of Planned Parenthood patients make less than 
$18,000 per year.
  Planned Parenthood is often the only health care option for low-
income women and women in rural communities. And yet here we are, 
facing another effort by Republicans to block funding for this vital 
health care provider, an effort echoed and supported by Republicans who 
are running for President.
  Since this latest attack on Planned Parenthood began in July, I've 
received more than 25,000 calls and emails from women and men in 
California who support Planned Parenthood. While the details of the 
stories vary, they share the same theme: Planned Parenthood was there 
for them at a critical time in their lives. It was the only place they 
could go for health care when they were in college, earning minimum 
wage, or struggling to provide for their children and families. It was 
the only place where they felt safe and respected. It provided 
essential tests and screenings and allowed them to plan their families, 
which is critical to women's economic security over the course of their 
lives.
  Here is one example from a constituent in San Francisco.
  She said ``Thirty-two years ago, I was broke, and Planned Parenthood 
was the only place that would give me birth control. I am now retired, 
and my life would be so different if they hadn't been there. This is so 
necessary for those who can't afford it.''
  Another constituent from Alameda said, ``I'm calling your office for 
the first time because I want you to support Planned Parenthood. When I 
was a young woman, their medical services saved my life. I hope this 
phone call helps save them in return.''
  To me, that is why this organization is so important to women in this 
country. Not only does it provide health care, it gives women the 
ability to make a better future for themselves and their families.
  I also want to address the false claim put forward by those who are 
pushing to defund Planned Parenthood: They claim that Planned 
Parenthood patients would easily find another community clinic to go to 
for their health care. This is just not true.
  Community health centers and clinics do great work, but if 2.7 
million Planned Parenthood patients were suddenly without a doctor, 
they simply could not handle the sudden influx of new patients. The 
Congressional Budget Office estimates that up to 650,000 Planned 
Parenthood patients would lose their access to health care. What's 
more, many community clinics don't provide the level of contraception 
care and other health care services provided by Planned Parenthood. In 
two-thirds of the counties where Planned Parenthood has a clinic, it 
serves half of the women eligible to receive family planning services 
under the Title X program.
  In California, 13 of 58 counties would not have a single clinic to 
provide family planning services under the Title X program without 
Planned Parenthood. That tells us what will happen if this funding is 
stripped--huge numbers of women across the country will have no place 
to go for vital health services. This isn't a matter of speculation. 
We've seen what happens when Planned Parenthood is defunded because it 
has happened at the state level. In 2012, Texas defunded Planned 
Parenthood. To serve all the women who needed access to a doctor or 
nurse, the remaining community clinics would have had to increase the 
number of patients they saw by an average of 81 percent. In other 
words, they would have needed to accept almost a doubling of their 
existing number of patients. Unsurprisingly, those clinics lacked the 
ability to do so. As a result, nearly 20,000 fewer women were served by 
the Texas Women's Health Program the following year, a 10 percent 
decline. The number of prescriptions for birth control was cut in half, 
meaning 100,000 fewer women were able to access affordable birth 
control.
  Louisiana is another State trying to defund Planned Parenthood, and 
recently defended its actions in court. As part of its rationale, the 
State actually claimed that dentists and eye doctors are capable of 
providing women's health care services. Let me repeat: Louisiana 
officials claimed that women who receive breast exams, contraceptive 
counseling and prescriptions, and other medical services at Planned 
Parenthood could go to dentists and eye doctors instead. Any woman 
knows that is just unrealistic. So make no mistake about it: If Planned 
Parenthood is defunded, many American women simply will not get the 
health care they need.
  The attacks on women's health don't stop at Planned Parenthood's 
door. The House of Representatives recently proposed completely 
eliminating the Title X program, which provides affordable family 
planning services to low-income women. Title X is proven to reduce 
abortions by preventing unplanned pregnancies. Let me repeat that: The 
House has proposed to eliminate a program that reduces abortions. Of 
course, we also know that the House voted to repeal the Affordable Care 
Act more than 50 times. Here in the Senate we've suffered through at 
least 30 similar votes. This law they want to repeal guarantees women 
basic preventive care like mammograms and cervical cancer screenings. 
It requires that prenatal care and labor and delivery are covered by 
insurance companies. It prevents women from being denied coverage or 
charged more because they're women. It's the greatest achievement for 
women's health in a generation; yet we wasted days and weeks on futile 
attempts to eliminate it.
  These attempts to deny women and their families access to basic 
health care, to defund Planned Parenthood, to eliminate funding for 
family planning services that reduce abortions, and to deny women the 
right to make their own reproductive decisions are appalling. Planned 
Parenthood has been under constant attack since its founding in 1916. 
Its founder, Margaret Sanger, was thrown in jail for providing birth 
control to women. The proponents of defunding Planned Parenthood have 
been engaged in this assault for years. The group behind this latest 
effort, the Center for Medical Progress, has long-standing ties to the 
anti-choice movement. It is currently under investigation for possible 
criminal activity. The individuals who obtained the footage used false 
identification to represent a fake medical company. The videos, which 
are presented to the public as the full, unedited videos, have been 
analyzed by forensics experts at Fusion GPS. And the truth is, they are 
not the full, unedited videos. Content is missing, and numerous edits 
have been made even to the so-called full footage videos. Many members 
of Congress have requested the full videos. Those requests have gone 
unanswered. So the point is, this is part of a sustained assault on an 
essential health care provider for millions of American women.
  I also want to reiterate the real-life consequences of the rhetoric 
that's been directed at Planned Parenthood and its staff. I talked 
about this when I spoke on this subject in July. I strongly believe 
that the rhetoric directed at Planned Parenthood sends a message that 
it is ``OK'' to intimidate its staff and patients. It is not.
  A few weeks ago, a Planned Parenthood health center in Washington 
State was severely damaged when an arsonist lit it on fire. Thankfully, 
no one was hurt. But I would hope that we'd learn from this event, and 
opponents of Planned Parenthood would think about the ramifications of 
their words. This is dangerous territory.
  In closing, we must remember that the attacks on Planned Parenthood 
aren't about improving women's health. They are about taking away 
women's rights, choices, and access to the doctors and nurses they know 
and trust. And quite frankly, their efforts will only jeopardize 
women's health by removing the only source of health care many women 
have available.
  I've seen great gains for women during my lifetime, including more 
education, greater workplace freedom, and the right to decide what 
happens to our own bodies. I simply will not stand by and watch our 
advances slip away. We are standing up for Planned Parenthood because 
we stand up for women. I urge a ``no'' vote.
  Let's defeat this bill and move on so we can fund the government and 
address many other critical issues.

[[Page S6915]]

  Thank you, Mr. President.
  Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, I am in strong opposition to the 
substitute amendment to H.J. Res. 61 imposing a moratorium on Federal 
funding for Planned Parenthood clinics and their affiliates unless they 
stop providing abortions.
  Let's be clear about one thing: the effort to defund Planned 
Parenthood is not about Federal funding for abortions. Since 1977, it 
has been well established under the Hyde amendment that Federal funding 
cannot be used for abortions, except in very narrow circumstances where 
the life of the mother is endangered or in cases of rape or incest.
  The impetus for this amendment stems from the recent release of 
surreptitiously recorded and heavily edited videos that falsely portray 
Planned Parenthood's participation in legal fetal tissue donation 
programs and the subsequent attempts to defund Planned Parenthood on 
the basis of that intrinsically dishonest campaign. It is not the first 
time anti-choice advocates have deliberately misrepresented Planned 
Parenthood. I remember when a Senator stood on the floor of the U.S. 
Senate 4 years ago and claimed that abortions are ``well over 90 
percent of what Planned Parenthood does''. And then his press 
spokesperson had to acknowledge that what he said ``wasn't intended as 
a factual statement''. How much of what we are hearing and seeing now 
isn't ``intended as a factual statement''? Senators certainly are 
entitled to their sincerely held positions on abortion and 
contraception, but I think we ought to refrain from saying things we 
know aren't true, especially on the floor of the United States Senate.
  The attack on Planned Parenthood, if successful, would have a 
devastating impact on women and families across this country, 
especially lower income women and their families. Planned Parenthood 
health centers are an integral part of our safety net health care 
system, providing high quality, affordable health care services to 2.7 
million patients per year. Every year, Planned Parenthood physicians 
and nurses provide family planning counseling and contraception to 2.1 
million women, perform nearly 400,000 screenings for cervical cancer 
and nearly 500,000 breast exams, and provide nearly 4.5 million tests 
and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.
  Banning Federal funding for Planned Parenthood would put millions of 
women at risk of having no place to go for basic, preventive health 
care. For many women, family planning clinics such as Planned 
Parenthood provide the only basic health care they receive. In fact, 6 
in 10 women who access care through a family planning health center 
consider it their main source of health care. More than half of Planned 
Parenthood health centers are located in rural areas, health 
professional shortage areas, or medically underserved areas, putting 
women living in those areas at particular risk of losing access to 
health care services. It isn't just Planned Parenthood that is under 
attack; it is also the one out of every five women in this country who 
has relied on Planned Parenthood for health care at some point in her 
lifetime.
  Earlier this week, I also voted against invoking cloture on another 
assault on women's reproductive health--H.R. 36, an unconstitutional 
attempt to impose a nationwide ban on abortions when the 
``postfertilization age'' of the fetus is determined to 20 weeks or 
greater, with extremely limited exceptions. More than 40 years ago, in 
its landmark Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court made it clear that 
women in this country have a constitutional right to abortion services 
and that no legislature may ban abortion prior to viability, which is 
exactly what H.R. 36 attempts to do. Previous attempts to impose 
previability bans on abortion have been repeatedly struck down by the 
courts, and last year, the Supreme Court refused to review a Ninth 
Circuit Court of Appeals decision permanently blocking Arizona's 20-
week ban. Nevertheless, anti-choice advocates continue their relentless 
efforts to undermine women's reproductive rights and health in any and 
every way possible. The cloture votes on H.R. 36 and today's amendment 
to defund Planned Parenthood are simply the latest attempts.
  In addition to imposing an unconstitutional previability ban on 
abortion, H.R. 36 threatens doctors with criminal penalties, including 
up to 5 years in prison, for attempting or performing an abortion in 
violation of the bill's onerous restrictions, which is clearly intended 
to intimidate and discourage doctors from providing abortion care. The 
bill also puts the health of pregnant women at risk by allowing an 
exception to the 20-week ban only in the very narrow circumstance where 
an abortion is necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman. 
Therefore, under H.R. 36, a pregnant woman who develops a serious 
medical condition or complication after 20 weeks would be barred from 
terminating her pregnancy, no matter how serious the risk to her 
health, unless the abortion is deemed necessary to prevent the woman's 
death. In addition, H.R. 36 would not allow an exception in the heart-
wrenching situation in which a severe fetal anomaly is discovered late 
in a woman's pregnancy, despite the fact that these conditions are 
often only detectable around 20 weeks.
  H.R. 36 also lacks a reasonable exception to the 20-week ban for 
victims of rape and incest. Adult women who have been raped would be 
required to report the assault to law enforcement or undergo compulsory 
medical treatment or counseling at least 48 hours prior to receiving an 
abortion, meaning that the rape survivor must have at least two 
appointments with two different providers in order to access the care 
she needs. H.R. 36's treatment of minors who have survived rape or 
incest is even more extreme. For minors who have been the victim of 
rape or incest, H.R. 36 would require proof that the crime was reported 
to law enforcement or the appropriate government agency in order to 
qualify for an exception to the 20-week ban.
  These extremely narrow exceptions completely ignore the fact that the 
majority of sexual assault survivors do not or are not able to report 
their assaults to law enforcement for a variety of compelling reasons. 
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention--CDC--estimate that only 
35 percent of sexual assaults or rapes were reported to the police in 
2010. It is simply unconscionable to subject survivors of rape and 
incest to these burdensome and unnecessary requirements in order to 
receive the care they need.
  We are 6 days away from a government shutdown; yet we have spent most 
of this week on misguided attempts to ban legal abortions and defund 
Planned Parenthood--and to link the Planned Parenthood issue to whether 
the Federal Government will remain open for business--even as it has 
been obvious to everyone that such attempts would fail. A government 
shutdown is a completely avoidable crisis, and using floor time this 
time to attack women's health care and reproductive rights instead of 
negotiating a bipartisan plan to fund the government is both 
unacceptable and irresponsible. The American people deserve better. 
They deserve a budget that supports a strong national defense and 
growing economy, not the threat of another government shutdown. I urge 
my colleagues to join with me in opposing these latest attacks on 
women's reproductive rights and access to high quality, comprehensive 
health care services.


                   Recognition of the Majority Leader

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized.


                       His Holiness Pope Francis

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I know I speak for the entire Senate 
when I say it was a privilege to welcome the Pope to the Capitol this 
morning. For the thousands who gathered on the Capitol lawn, it was an 
experience they are unlikely to ever forget.
  A quiet nod, a soft smile, a simple wave--the gestures may have been 
small, but their meaning ran deep, captured forever in the hearts of 
the faithful and the hopeful.
  As we turn back to the work of governing, many will interpret his 
words in many ways. The media certainly has. But we can also hear him 
as simply expressing his faith. And we all appreciate his closing 
remarks: God bless America.
  Mr. President, it is no surprise that Members of the Senate have 
differences on issues. That is normal, healthy even. But even if our 
Democratic colleagues may not agree with us on every

[[Page S6916]]

issue, let us agree that the scandal surrounding Planned Parenthood is 
deeply, deeply unsettling. Let us agree that it makes sense to at least 
place a scandal-plagued political organization on leave without pay and 
then use that money to fund women's health care as Congress 
investigates these serious allegations.
  Let us also agree that it is time for our Democratic colleagues to 
finally allow the Senate to fund the government, just as we have worked 
hard to do all year long.
  Here is the view the new Senate took from the beginning. The best way 
to fund the government is to pass a budget, and then to fund it. That 
may be a different approach from previous years, but it is the approach 
we chose to pursue when we came to office.
  We didn't think it was right that the Senate hadn't passed a budget 
in 6 years or that the Senate's Appropriations Committee hadn't passed 
the 12 bills necessary to fund the government in 6 years. So we changed 
that.
  The appropriations process got off to a great start. There was often 
a spirit of bipartisanship inside that committee. Consider that nearly 
all of the 12 funding bills passed with bipartisan support. More than 
half attracted the support of over 70 percent of Democrats. We saw our 
Democratic colleagues use phrases such as ``win-win-win'' or declare 
the appropriations legislation would ``do right by'' their particular 
State as they issued press releases praising the bills that they voted 
for.
  It was great to see that bipartisan action. I was hopeful that our 
Democratic colleagues would actually join with us on the Senate floor 
to debate and pass the legislation they had praised in committee. But 
no, they took a different path.
  I regret that Democratic leadership determined a crisis would be 
necessary to advance a policy aim of growing the government, and that 
our colleagues decided accordingly to block every single funding bill--
every single one--almost all of which had been supported by a 
significant number of Democrats in committee. So we have been forced to 
pursue a continuing resolution as a result.
  It would be much better to simply finish the appropriations process 
we worked so hard to advance. But if our colleagues continue to block 
the Senate from doing so, the Senate is left with very few options. It 
may be regrettable, but that is the reality we now face.
  The bill before us would help get things back on track. It would 
ensure the government remains funded and open. It would adhere to the 
bipartisan spending level already agreed to by both parties. It would 
also allow our Democratic colleagues to join us in standing up for 
women's health instead of a political organization mired in scandal. 
For 1 year, the legislation would redirect $235 million in Planned 
Parenthood funding to women's health instead, strengthening health 
centers that provide critically needed community care.
  I wish our colleagues hadn't pursued a strategy of blocking 
government funding. That strategy may have succeeded in bringing the 
country to this point, but there is no reason to continue blocking 
every attempt to fund the government or to protect political allies 
mired in scandal.
  So I am calling on colleagues across the aisle to join us in standing 
against a shutdown. I am calling on them to join us in standing up for 
women's health instead.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time following the 
vote until 6 p.m. be equally divided between the two leaders or their 
designees; further, that all time during quorum calls until 6 p.m. be 
charged equally between both sides.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I further ask unanimous consent that 
notwithstanding the provisions of rule XXII, all time be yielded back 
and the Senate proceed to vote on the motion to invoke cloture on 
amendment No. 2669.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Hoeven). Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.


                             Cloture Motion

  Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair lays before the Senate the pending 
cloture motion, which the clerk will state.
  The senior assistant 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, 
     do hereby move to bring to a close debate on Senate amendment 
     No. 2669 to H.J. Res. 61.
         Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, 
           Orrin G. Hatch, Joni Ernst, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, 
           David Vitter, Chuck Grassley, Thom Tillis, Steve 
           Daines, Bill Cassidy, David Perdue, John Boozman, James 
           Lankford, Thad Cochran.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. By unanimous consent, the mandatory quorum 
call has been waived.
  The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on 
amendment No. 2669, offered by the Senator from Kentucky, Mr. 
McConnell, to H.J. Res. 61, shall be brought to a close?
  The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from California (Mrs. Boxer) 
is necessarily absent.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cassidy). Are there any other Senators in 
the Chamber desiring to vote?
  The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 47, nays 52, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 270 Leg.]

                                YEAS--47

     Alexander
     Barrasso
     Blunt
     Boozman
     Burr
     Capito
     Cassidy
     Coats
     Cochran
     Corker
     Cornyn
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Enzi
     Ernst
     Fischer
     Flake
     Gardner
     Graham
     Grassley
     Hatch
     Hoeven
     Inhofe
     Isakson
     Johnson
     Lankford
     Lee
     Manchin
     McCain
     McConnell
     Moran
     Perdue
     Portman
     Risch
     Roberts
     Rounds
     Rubio
     Scott
     Sessions
     Shelby
     Sullivan
     Thune
     Tillis
     Toomey
     Vitter
     Wicker

                                NAYS--52

     Ayotte
     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Booker
     Brown
     Cantwell
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Collins
     Coons
     Cotton
     Donnelly
     Durbin
     Feinstein
     Franken
     Gillibrand
     Heinrich
     Heitkamp
     Heller
     Hirono
     Kaine
     King
     Kirk
     Klobuchar
     Leahy
     Markey
     McCaskill
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Mikulski
     Murkowski
     Murphy
     Murray
     Nelson
     Paul
     Peters
     Reed
     Reid
     Sanders
     Sasse
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Stabenow
     Tester
     Udall
     Warner
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wyden

                             NOT VOTING--1

       
     Boxer
       
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 47, the nays are 
52.
  Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted 
in the affirmative, the motion is rejected.
  The majority leader.


                        Vote on Motion to Commit

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I move to table the motion to commit.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
  The motion was agreed to.


                      Vote on Amendment No. 2672.

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I move to table amendment No. 2672.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
  The motion was agreed to.


                      Vote on Amendment No. 2669.

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I move to table amendment No. 2669.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
  The motion was agreed to.


                           Amendment No. 2680

       (Purpose: Making continuing appropriations for the fiscal 
     year ending September 30, 2016, and for other purposes.)

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I have a substitute amendment at the 
desk that I ask the clerk to report.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Kentucky [Mr. McConnell], for Mr. Cochran, 
     proposes an amendment numbered 2680.

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
reading of the amendment be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (The amendment is printed in today's Record under ``Text of 
Amendments.'')

[[Page S6917]]

  

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays on my 
amendment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.


               Amendment No. 2681 to Amendment No. 2680.

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I have an amendment at the desk that I 
ask the clerk to report.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Kentucky [Mr. McConnell] proposes an 
     amendment numbered 2681 to amendment No. 2680.

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
reading of the amendment be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The amendment is as follows:

       At the end add the following.
       ``This Act shall take effect 1 day after the date of 
     enactment.''

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays on my 
amendment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second.
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.


                Amendment No. 2682 to Amendment No. 2681

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I have a second-degree amendment at the 
desk.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Kentucky [Mr. McConnell] proposes an 
     amendment numbered 2682 to amendment No. 2681.

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
reading of the amendment be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The amendment is as follows:

       Strike ``1 day'' and insert ``2 days''

                           Amendment No. 2683

  Mr. McCONNELL. I have an amendment to the text proposed to be 
stricken.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Kentucky [Mr. McConnell] proposed an 
     amendment numbered 2683 to the language proposed to be 
     stricken by amendment No. 2680.

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
reading of the amendment be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The amendment is as follows:

       At the end add the following.
       ``This Act shall take effect 4 days after the date of 
     enactment.''

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays on my 
amendment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.


                Amendment No. 2684 to Amendment No. 2683

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I have a second-degree amendment at the 
desk.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Kentucky [Mr. McConnell] proposes an 
     amendment numbered 2684 to amendment No. 2683.

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
reading of the amendment be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The amendment is as follows:

       Strike ``4'' and insert ``5''

               Motion to Commit With Amendment No. 2685.

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I have a motion to commit with 
instructions at the desk.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the motion.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Kentucky [Mr. McConnell] moves to commit 
     the joint resolution to the Committee on Appropriations with 
     instructions to report back forthwith with an amendment 
     numbered 2685.

  The amendment is as follows:

       At the end add the following.
       ``This Act shall take effect 6 days after the date of 
     enactment.''
  Mr. McCONNELL. I ask for the yeas and nays on my amendment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.


                           Amendment No. 2686

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I have an amendment to the 
instructions.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Kentucky [Mr. McConnell] proposes an 
     amendment numbered 2686 to the instructions of the motion to 
     commit.

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
reading of the amendment be disposed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The amendment is as follows:

       Strike ``6'' and insert ``7''

  Mr. McCONNELL. I ask for the yeas and nays on my amendment.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.


                Amendment No. 2687 to Amendment No. 2686

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I have a second-degree amendment at the 
desk.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Kentucky [Mr. McConnell] proposes an 
     amendment numbered 2687 to amendment No. 2686.

  The amendment is as follows:

       Strike ``7'' and insert ``8''
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the time until 6 
p.m. will be equally divided between the two leaders or their 
designees.
  The majority whip is recognized.


                       His Holiness Pope Francis

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, today has certainly been a historic day in 
Washington, DC. With the arrival of His Holiness Pope Francis this 
week, Washington has been flooded with the faithful who were eager to 
mark his first visit to the United States. I know my colleagues and I 
are grateful we were able to host him at a joint meeting of Congress, 
and we were all in awe of his incredible stamina given his schedule--
something we are not unfamiliar with.
  As head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis leads a diverse 
community of believers. Catholics in the United States make up about 
one-fifth of the population in the United States and also in my home 
State of Texas. In fact, Catholic priests from Spain were some of our 
earliest settlers in Texas, and one of the dozens of missions 
established by the Catholic Church early in the 18th century in Texas 
was Mission San Antonio de Valero, what would later be called the 
Alamo.
  It was a privilege to welcome Pope Francis this morning and to hear 
his remarks. I am told he was the first pontiff ever to address a joint 
meeting of Congress.


                        Cardinal Daniel DiNardo

  It was also my honor to host a friend of mine, Cardinal Daniel 
DiNardo, who accepted my invitation to join me today to hear Pope 
Francis. Cardinal DiNardo is the archbishop of Galveston-Houston, home 
to more than 1 million Catholics--the largest number of the 15 dioceses 
in Texas. I have had the honor of knowing Cardinal DiNardo for a number 
of years, and I am grateful to him for his unwavering commitment to 
life and for his extreme compassion in both a pastoral and spiritual 
sense as well as a practical one. We saw that in action recently when 
historic flooding devastated many of the communities in the Houston 
area. During that time, Cardinal DiNardo was quick to ensure that 
Catholic Charities would provide some relief to those in need. There is 
no doubt that his leadership will continue to serve not only the 
Catholic community in the Galveston-Houston area well but also all of 
us in Texas.
  Mr. President, on another matter, earlier today Democrats blocked a 
measure that would fund the U.S. Government but redirect Federal money 
that currently goes to Planned Parenthood to go for women's health care 
at community health centers. Actually, there are many more community

[[Page S6918]]

health centers in Texas than there are Planned Parenthood facilities.
  Earlier this week I outlined how the Democrats, while earlier calling 
for regular order in this Chamber, have delivered on their promise to 
block legislation from moving forward that would fund vital parts of 
our government, such as the men and women in uniform who defend us. 
This is in spite of the fact that earlier this year, as I believe the 
majority leader mentioned, members of the Appropriations Committee 
actually did the work we were elected to do. We passed a budget and 
then in a bipartisan way passed appropriations bills out of the 
Appropriations Committee. But because they have chosen to filibuster 
all of these appropriations bills, we find ourselves with unneeded and 
unnecessary drama when it comes to funding the Federal Government--
hence the vote on Monday for closing off debate on a continuing 
resolution to fund the government through December 11, 2015. 
Unfortunately, even our uniformed military has been taken hostage to 
this strategy, which has created unnecessary drama, as I said, and 
created some real hardship. So as we approach the looming fiscal 
deadline of next Wednesday at midnight, it is important to remember how 
we got here.
  While Democrats filibustered legislation that would have removed all 
Federal funding for Planned Parenthood, this fight--the fight for the 
sanctity of life Pope Francis talked about this morning--is far from 
over. We are going to continue the four different investigations of 
Planned Parenthood's practices and pursue legislation that would 
protect the fundamental right to life of the unborn. Protecting the 
sanctity of life is an ongoing mission, and it does not end with this 
one vote.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President here we are again: with just 6 days until 
the Federal Government has to close its doors, we find ourselves faced 
with another manufactured crisis. Two years ago, it was defunding the 
Affordable Care Act. Congress has voted nearly 60 times on that so far, 
all of which failed. In the meantime, more than 17 million Americans 
who had no health insurance have obtained health insurance.
  Four years ago, it was the same issue Republicans are pushing today: 
defunding an organization that provides health care to millions of 
women across this country. With the vote to defund Planned Parenthood 
now behind us--for the second time in as many months--it is time to 
move forward to pass a clean, short-term continuing resolution and get 
to work addressing the real challenge before us: ending sequestration.
  We've said it before, and it bears repeating: sequestration was never 
supposed to become the status quo. Its cuts are so extreme and so 
draconian that imposing it will hurt programs across the board, 
impacting every American. Sequestration neglects police and fire 
departments, national parks, highways and bridges, airports, public 
health and education; and abandons promises made to our veterans and 
men and women in uniform. Allowing sequester-level spending bills to 
become law for the next fiscal year, which the President has rightly 
said he will not do, would be an abdication of our sworn 
responsibilities as Members of Congress.
  We must pass a clean, continuing resolution; we must negotiate a new 
deal to end sequestration, and we must pass appropriations bills that 
reflect the urgent needs of our country, not a political score card.
  Last weekend, my wife, Marcelle, and I were fortunate to join 
hundreds of Vermont women at the 19th Annual Women's Economic 
Opportunity Conference in Randolph, VT. I have sponsored this 
conference each year in an effort to help Vermont women of all ages and 
generations take advantage of the economic opportunities available to 
them.
  From emerging entrepreneurs or those transitioning their careers, 
thousands of participants have been drawn to the conference over its 
nearly two decade history. Sequestration puts at risk the ability of 
small businesses to access loans and counseling from the Federal 
Government, which helps spur and strengthen our economy. Sequestration 
will cut critical workforce investment programs that help young 
workers, dislocated workers, and veterans find permanent employment. 
Sequestration reverses the progress we have made in recent years to 
restore our economy and create jobs.
  The economic harm of sequestration is, of course, not all that is at 
stake. As Senators in both parties have pointed out, sequestration 
hurts our national security and the readiness of our Armed Forces. 
Sequestration hurts our roads, our infrastructure, and our public 
transit systems and will deeply impact our affordable housing supply. 
Sequestration makes maintaining our commitment to our veterans, 
including a generation of disabled veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan 
wars, nearly impossible. What's more, to meet the requirements of 
sequestration, we are poised to rob from such vital needs as job 
training programs and preschool development grants.
  The bottom line is this: sequestration was never intended to happen. 
But relying on budget gimmicks, as the Senate's defense spending bill 
does, while nearly zeroing out critical programs for low-income 
Americans, as the Senate's transportation and housing bill does, 
creates more problems. Republican leaders have waited too long to come 
to the table to negotiate relief from sequester-level spending caps.
  By passing this clean, short-term continuing resolution, we can get 
to work now--immediately--to negotiate a new deal that builds on the 
2013 Murray-Ryan deal and keep the doors of our government open.
  We have now had the pointless debate over defunding Planned 
Parenthood. Let's move on. Let's not manufacture another crisis that 
puts millions of jobs on the line and hurts Americans in every state of 
this country. We were elected to represent our constituents. The voice 
from Vermonters is clear: it is time to get our work done.
  Mr. CORNYN. 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. REED. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. REED. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues in 
support of a clean, short-term continuing resolution--or, as we say, a 
CR--to temporarily fund the government without controversial policy 
riders. After the vote we just had, I hope we can move to such a 
measure. Even some Republican leaders have acknowledged that this 
previous vote was a show vote designed to appease, but to fail. It is 
part of a troubling pattern that has been emerging over many months of 
avoiding meaningful, bipartisan talks to fix the budget and waiting 
until the last moment to deal with issues everyone knows must be 
addressed.
  We have an obligation to the American people to keep their government 
working. It is one of the most basic responsibilities we have as 
Members of Congress. A clean CR at this juncture fulfills this 
obligation, keeping the government open for a few more weeks while we 
work on a plan to eliminate the sequester-level budget caps for defense 
and nondefense programs. I wish we could have begun work on an overall 
agreement earlier in the year, as Vice Chairwoman Mikulski and others 
strongly urged months ago, but at this late hour we should pass this 
short-term measure and move on to serious negotiations on budget caps 
for this year and beyond.
  Shutting the government down now will not serve any useful purpose. 
What a shutdown will do is waste taxpayers' money and hurt the economy. 
Indeed, the 2-week Republican government shutdown in 2013 cost our 
economy billions of dollars. Based on that experience, here is some of 
what we can expect if there is another forced government shutdown this 
year:
  The Department of Housing and Urban Development will have to furlough 
more than 95 percent of its workforce, impacting services to more than 
60 field and regional offices nationwide. Payments will be delayed to 
the roughly 3,000 local public housing authorities that manage the 
country's publicly assisted housing programs. In fact, this shifts the 
burden onto them, causing them to turn to local municipalities that are 
equally stressed in terms of their budgets. So there is no avoiding

[[Page S6919]]

this pain--in fact, it will be multiplied if we shut down the 
government.
  Thousands of home sales and mortgage-refinancing packages backed by 
the Federal Housing Administration, the FHA, will be put on standby. 
People who are ready to close, people who are ready to make a 
commitment to a home, people who are ready to keep this economy moving 
will be told: Stand back; wait and see.
  Cities, counties, and States will not be able to move forward with 
new community development block grant projects, preventing important 
local economic investment. This is a program which affects every 
community in this country, and it is something which is a very 
positive, constructive way to give local leaders the resources to fund 
the local initiatives the community desperately wants and needs. This 
is not Big Washington; this is local America getting a chance to see 
their projects put in place.
  The Federal Aviation Administration will not be able to certify new 
aircraft, interrupting billions of dollars in sales.
  The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration will be 
forced to stop investigations and emergency response training.
  Classrooms will be shuttered for 700 midshipmen at the U.S. Merchant 
Marine Academy in Kings Point, NY. These are young men and women who 
are committing themselves to serve the Nation either directly in the 
armed services of the United States or as members of our merchant 
fleet. They will basically be told to go home.
  Financial support will stop for the Maritime Security Program, the 
MSP. This is an important public-private partnership that is critical 
to sustaining our troops serving overseas.
  These are just a few examples from two of the Departments under my 
purview as the ranking member of the Transportation, Housing and Urban 
Development Appropriations Subcommittee. There are many other examples 
throughout the Federal Government that my colleagues are talking about 
today.
  Knowing the results that shutdowns and these hardball tactics have 
brought before, it is hard to believe some still are willing to resort 
to budget brinksmanship again.
  I know many of my colleagues on the other side share my concern. I 
particularly wish to commend Senator Collins, who has been an excellent 
leader in chairing the THUD subcommittee, for her support for a clean 
CR. She has done extraordinary work under very difficult and 
challenging circumstances. Her support for a clean CR so that we can 
negotiate a longer term budget solution is indicative of the kind of 
forthright, thoughtful, and in some cases very courageous service she 
has rendered to Maine and to the country.
  While we focus on the immediate showdown threat, let's remember the 
bigger threats we face in 2016. We are here because of the Budget 
Control Act and its attendant sequester-level caps on discretionary 
spending. Let's remember that these sequester-level caps were never 
intended to be implemented. At the time BCA was enacted, the cuts were 
considered to be extreme--in fact, so extreme that Congress would not 
ever let them happen, that they would embrace defense and nondefense, 
and that they would be an action-forcing mechanism--not an actuality of 
law but an action-forcing mechanism to cause us on a bipartisan basis 
to come up with long-term budget solutions. Unfortunately, that 
solution did not materialize.
  Over time, we had the very good work of Senator Murray and 
Congressman Paul Ryan to come up with a 2-year suspension, but we are 
right back where we were, and these sequester caps are staring us right 
in the face. But today, rather than working together to tackle the 
sequester, we are on the verge of orchestrating another fiscal crisis. 
And it is not a crisis that will help the American people; rather, it 
will hinder the American people. And, indeed, it is ironic because 
Members on both sides recognize the BCA cap should be raised for both 
defense and nondefense appropriations.

  Indeed, both the Defense authorization and the Defense appropriations 
bills carry bipartisan sense-of-the-Senate language that says: 
``Sequestration relief must be accomplished for fiscal years 2016 and 
2017.'' And, ``Sequestration relief should include equal defense and 
nondefense relief.'' So you have a bipartisan consensus on these two 
committees that represent a significant number of our colleagues who 
are essentially saying: We have to end this. And they are saying it 
because they believe, as I do, that our national security rests not 
just upon adequate elements of the Department of Defense but adequate 
investment for all our Federal programs.
  So beyond committing a clean, short-term funding bill, we must focus 
on eliminating these draconian spending caps imposed on us by the BCA. 
We know these caps will cause real harm to programs across the Federal 
Government that our States and constituents rely on.
  These are not academic issues that could be dismissed as being some 
programs that are ineffective and less limiting. These are across-the-
board cuts that hit all our constituents and hit them hard.
  Indeed, months ago Chairman McCain and I together wrote to urge the 
Committee on the Budget to include a higher baseline funding amount for 
the Department of Defense in the budget resolution. We were essentially 
asking them to ignore the BCA caps and produce a budget that 
realistically recognizes the base needs of the Department of Defense--
not the one-time spending of OCO contingency but routine spending that 
would be projected forth.
  Senator McCain in particular worked in extraordinarily good faith to 
try to get such a provision included in the budget resolution, but he 
did not succeed. And, in response, the use of OCO contingency funds was 
incorporated to skirt the budget caps. Essentially, what the committee 
has done--the defense authorization committee--is it has taken the 
President's budget numbers, but moved money out of the base budget into 
OCO, beyond the President's request. And what you are doing is creating 
this OCO funding mechanism--in a sense, a gimmick, really--to cover the 
real cost--the ongoing cost, the routine continuing cost--of the 
Department of Defense. That is not good budgeting, and it is not good 
for Defense either.
  Because of this I was unable to support legislation on the floor for 
the Defense authorization bill that in many other respects--virtually 
every other respect--was extremely well done and extremely thought out. 
Again, I commend the chairman for all his efforts and those of my 
colleagues.
  I clearly disagree that using this OCO funding arrangement--gimmick, 
sleight of hand, whatever you want to call it--is the way to proceed 
forward. Relying on it essentially preempts defense from the Budget 
Control Act and leaves everything else under those onerous caps. As I 
said, that not only does not adequately and realistically fund defense, 
but it seriously erodes national security because national security is 
something more than simply what the Department of Defense does. It is 
the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, and it is 
a myriad of other functions that will not see funding. In fact, they 
will see their funding begin to shrink dramatically.
  If we use this approach this year, with the argument that it is just 
a bridge to the day we finally get ourselves together, I think we are 
deluding ourselves. It would be much easier next year to put even more 
money into OCO, to take programs that are traditionally funded through 
the base budget of the Department of Defense and say: Well, we just 
don't have room. Let's put it in OCO. It becomes the gift that keeps on 
giving, and it will not provide the real resources and the certainty 
the Department of Defense needs over many years to plan for their 
operations.
  To stick things in 1-year funding is not to tell the Department of 
Defense: You can be confident that 2 or 3 years from now, when you are 
developing that new weapons system platform, the money will be there. 
It may, but again, it may not. We can't give them that insecurity. We 
have to give them a sense of certainty.
  Now, this is a view that is shared not just by myself and some 
colleagues here on both sides of the aisle but by senior Defense 
Department officials. They have testified repeatedly before our 
committee that OCO funding does not provide long-term budget certainty. 
They need that. And the

[[Page S6920]]

troops--the men and women they lead--need that.
  In fact, it really just allows DOD to plan for 1 year. And there are 
very few programs in the Department of Defense that are 1-year 
programs. A major weapons system is a multiyear development and then 
there is the production process. The strategy is not year by year. It 
is over several years at least. So this is not an efficient and 
effective way to run the organization. Proper budgeting and planning in 
the Department of Defense requires at least 5 years. That is the 
standard. The standard measure is a 5-year program forecast, budget 
forecast, and we are telling them: Well, this year you can have a 
bonanza of OCO funds. Next year could be more, could be less, could be 
much less.
  This is not the way to efficiently allocate resources for national 
security and to efficiently develop a strategy to counteract an 
increasing array of threats around the globe in many different 
dimensions in many different regions. If we go down this path, it will 
lead to instability for our troops, their families, and for our defense 
industrial base. They deserve certainty, not a year-to-year, perhaps-
maybe, maybe-perhaps approach.
  We also need to recognize, as I have repeated before, that national 
security is not just the Department of Defense. Other agencies are 
critical--the Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, 
Department of Justice, and Department of Treasury, which does all the 
terrorist financing sanctions. They have to trace funds flowing around 
the world to ensure they do not aid and assist terrorist activities or 
other maligning activities. They need resources too.
  Taking this approach as it stands now, using this OCO approach for 
defense and then letting everything else stay under BCA, will not give 
these agencies the resources they need.
  I was struck a few days ago when General Petraeus was here testifying 
that one of the critical areas of effort against ISIL is information 
warfare. They have proven to be extraordinarily adept at using social 
media, at communicating through the Internet. One of the questions from 
my colleague--which was very thoughtful and fundamental--was this: Is 
the State Department doing enough to counteract--as one of our major 
foreign policy organizations--this information campaign by ISIL? The 
General sort of chuckled a bit, and then he said: Let me tell you that 
when I was commanding, on active service, the State Department had to 
come to me and essentially borrow $1 million from CENTCOM funds so they 
could get in the ball game--to just get in the game in terms of 
information warfare: counteracting measures, public campaigns of 
information in countries throughout the globe, particularly in the 
Middle East.
  That will be much worse if we proceed down this path, and we will not 
be enhancing our national security. If the ISIL message is unanswered, 
if they are able to attract adherents from around the globe because all 
they can really hear is this grotesque discussion of ISIL and what they 
propose, and there are no counterarguments, there is no countervailing 
points, we lose that information war. And that is not just a DOD 
function.
  Now, we have to make investments in both defense and nondefense. But 
as I said before, if we stick with these BCA caps, our non-DOD programs 
will suffer. In addition to that, the needs of the American people will 
suffer.
  We will not be able to invest in adequate transportation and water 
infrastructure. We won't be able to do things that provide adequate and 
decent housing for our citizens. Under the budget caps we will lose 
jobs too. When the resources diminish, the need for workers diminishes, 
and that will happen.
  Now, we have a situation, particularly where some of our most 
vulnerable Americans would suffer grievously. Here are a few examples. 
The elderly housing program has been cut in half since 2010, even when 
we know the United States population today is aging faster.
  Every Member of this Senate has numerous elderly housing programs in 
their State. Their low-income seniors rely on them. I would suspect 
they take some pride in the fact there is adequate housing--in some 
cases not enough, but at least some adequate housing. They will suffer.
  There are 7.7 million very low income renters in the United States. 
That means they pay more than 50 percent of their income in rent or 
live in substandard housing or both. If these budget caps go into 
effect, then the THUD bill will not include meaningful funding for the 
affordable housing production program available to local governments.
  When we turn to Public Housing Authorities, they are facing more than 
$3 billion in capital needs just to keep them repaired, just to make 
them places that are decent to live in, where people can have 
appropriate hallway lighting, they can have elevators that work, they 
can have plumbing systems that are adequate--the basics.
  We are not talking about building whirlpools, spas, and Jacuzzis. 
This is just meeting basic requirements in maintenance and capital 
repairs. The level of funding PHA's are faced with is the same level we 
provided in the late 1980s. That is going back about 30 years. Thirty 
years ago, relatively speaking, we would be spending as much as we are 
now on simply maintaining public housing. These are real-world 
consequences.
  Again, BCA comes into play in terms of the impact on domestic 
programs. Funding for public transit continues to fall even while 
transit ridership goes up.
  One of the success stories over the past few years is our public 
transit systems. Our buses, our subway systems, our light rail systems 
are enjoying increased ridership. That is good for people to get to 
work, and it is good for our environment because of reduces the use of 
individual automobiles. But if our ridership goes up and the resources 
go down, we are going to see a system that gets less and less 
dependable, reliable, and effective, and we will lose not only a number 
of those riders but have incidents--as we have seen across the 
country--where there are significant safety concerns and significant 
disruptions.
  It has not been uncommon over the last several months here in 
Washington to hear on the radio that a whole subway line has gone down 
because of a maintenance problem or something else, and that day's 
workforce doesn't get to the office for 3 or 4 or 5 hours. Guess what. 
That costs a lot of private employers a great deal of money because the 
people aren't doing the work, and they probably would be paid. So 
essentially this impacts our economy, and it is multiplied. And it will 
be exponentially multiplied if we start cutting away the money, as 
suggested in the Budget Control Act.
  It is now time to work together and to enact first a clean CR, which 
will give us the time to systematically and comprehensively address the 
issues that are staring us straight in the face because of the BCA--the 
budget caps on Defense and nondefense. It is time to be able to move--
as I believe the vast majority of my colleagues want to--the excess OCO 
funding back into the regular budget of the Department of Defense as we 
raise the budget cap, and as we raise the budget cap for the Department 
of Defense, to recognize we have to raise the cap not only for other 
national security agencies to protect our country, but also for other 
agencies in order to invest in our economy, keep us productive, keep 
people employed, and also keep faith with the thousands and thousands 
of Americans who have worked and now may need help. There are seniors 
in need of rental assistance. They need the support of a good transit 
system to get to work or, if they are a senior citizen, to get to a 
doctor's appointment. They are counting on us.

  So I hope all my colleagues can come together, forge an agreement, 
avoid a shutdown, and then do something more than just keep the lights 
on--invest across the board in our people and watch those investments 
multiply to a productive, successful economy and a more secure America.
  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. CRUZ. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

[[Page S6921]]

  



                 Unanimous Consent Request--S. Res. 224

  Mr. CRUZ. Mr. President, in 1975, Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov 
was awarded a Nobel Prize for his public opposition to the totalitarian 
communism of the Soviet Union. He knew what he was talking about as he 
had spent decades working on the Soviet nuclear weapons program, work 
he had originally thought was a patriotic duty that would ensure the 
balance of power with the United States but that he came to understand 
was in the service of a brutal, oppressive regime with aggressive 
intentions.
  The Soviets prohibited Sakharov from accepting the award in person, 
although his wife Yelena Bonner was abroad at the time. She accepted on 
his behalf and delivered his seminal speech, ``Peace, Progress, and 
Human Rights.'' In it, Sakharov declared:

       I am convinced that international confidence, mutual 
     understanding, disarmament, and international security are 
     inconceivable without an open society with freedom of 
     information, freedom of conscience, the right to publish, and 
     the right to travel and choose the country in which one 
     wishes to live. I am likewise convinced that freedom of 
     conscience, together with other civil rights, provides the 
     basis for scientific progress and constitutes a guarantee 
     that scientific advances will not be used to despoil mankind, 
     providing the basis for economic and social progress, which 
     in turn is a political guarantee for the possibility of an 
     effective defense of social rights.

  He recited the names of his fellow dissidents who were being 
persecuted by the Soviets, but he called for peaceful reform, not a 
violent revolution, saying:

       We must today fight for every individual person separately 
     against injustice and the violation of human rights. Much of 
     our future depends on this. In struggling to protect human 
     rights we must, I am convinced, first and foremost act as 
     protectors of the innocent victims of regimes installed in 
     various countries, without demanding the destruction or total 
     condemnation of these regimes. We need a pliant, pluralist, 
     tolerant community, which selectively and tentatively can 
     bring about a free undogmatic use of the experiences of all 
     social systems.

  Sakharov was relieved of all his scientific duties and, after 
denouncing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, was banished to 
Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow on the Volga River, to remove him from 
the public eye. His wife joined him in 1984, charged with anti-Soviet 
slander, and was prohibited from traveling abroad for medical 
treatment. Sakharov began a hunger strike in protest. Soviet 
authorities detained and force-fed him.
  In solidarity, President Ronald Reagan--who was then initiating his 
historic negotiations with the Soviets--proclaimed May 18, 1983, 
National Andrei Sakharov Day, and the following year the United States 
Congress passed a bipartisan measure renaming the mailing address of 
the Soviet Embassy from 1125 16th Street to No. 1 Andrei Sakharov 
Plaza. Every piece of mail delivered to or sent from the embassy would 
thus bear the name of the courageous dissident the Soviets were trying 
to silence.
  The following year, the Soviet Union allowed Bonner to travel abroad 
for heart surgery, and the year after that, Gorbachev allowed Sakharov 
and his wife to return to Moscow, although Sakharov remained critical 
of the slow speed of Gorbachev's reforms until his death in 1989--just 
1 month after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
  The bravery of Andrei Sakharov was instrumental in bringing down a 
great and oppressive empire. Armed only with the truth, he was able to 
expose to the world the reality of Soviet Communism, the futility of 
trying to placate or domesticate the regime, and the power of standing 
for human rights.
  Today, we have a case before us that is eerily reminiscent of 
Sakharov's legacy. Dr. Liu Xiaobo, who was awarded the Nobel Peace 
Prize in 2010, sits today in a Chinese jail for the crime of 
subversion.
  A poet, author, and political scientist, Dr. Liu was in 1989 a 
visiting scholar at Columbia University, but when the pro-democracy 
protests broke out in Beijing in June of that year, he returned to 
China to aid the movement. He staged a hunger strike in Tiananmen 
Square in the midst of the historic student protests and insisted the 
protests would be nonviolent, even in the face of the violence 
threatened by the People's Republic of China. The PRC arrested Liu for 
his involvement in the Tiananmen Square demonstration and sentenced him 
to 2 years in prison. In 1996, the party subjected him to 3 years of 
``reeducation through labor'' for questioning the single-party system. 
In 2004, the PRC cut Liu's phone lines and Internet connection after he 
published an essay criticizing the party's campaign to silence so-
called subversive journalists and activists.
  In 2008, Liu, along with over 350 Chinese intellectuals and human 
rights advocates, penned ``Charter 08,'' a manifesto modeled after the 
Czech ``Charter 77,'' an anti-Communist manifesto written in 1977 by 
Vaclav Havel and others calling for human rights and political reforms 
in the Soviet Republics.
  Dr. Liu's ``Charter 08'' made 19 specific demands of the PRC, 
including abandoning one-party rule in favor of instituting a 
separation of powers composed of a legislative democracy and 
independent judiciary; abolition of the Hukou housing system that has 
victimized poor and rural Chinese for decades; and securing freedom of 
association, assembly, expression, and religion. ``Charter 08'' was 
released on December 10, 2008. Although the Communist Party quickly 
censored it, over 10,000 journalists, scholars, businessmen, and 
teachers have signed the document since 2008.
  Two days prior to the release of ``Charter 08''--on the eve of the 
100-year anniversary of China's first Constitution and the 30-year 
anniversary of Beijing's Democracy Wall movement--the PRC detained Liu 
for his involvement in this charter. In June 2009, he was officially 
arrested and charged with ``inciting subversion of state power'' for 
his coauthorship of ``Charter 08.''
  After being detained for over a year, Liu pled not guilty to 
``inciting subversion of state power'' before the Beijing No. 1 
Intermediate People's Court on December 23, 2009. His defense was not 
allowed to present evidence, and on Christmas Day Liu was sentenced to 
11 years in prison with an additional 2 years' deprivation of all 
political rights. Beijing High Court rejected his appeal 2 months 
later.
  On October 2010, Dr. Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace Prize for 
his leadership in writing and publishing ``Charter 08.'' Like Sakharov, 
he could not attend in person but accepted in absentia, boldly 
declaring in his acceptance speech:

       Hatred can rot away at a person's intelligence and 
     conscience. Enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a 
     nation, incite cruel mortal struggles, destroy a society's 
     tolerance and humanity, and hinder a nation's progress toward 
     freedom and democracy. That is why I hope to be able to 
     transcend my personal experiences as I look upon our nation's 
     development and social change, to counter the regime's 
     hostility with utmost goodwill, and to dispel hatred with 
     love.

  The very moment the Nobel Commission awarded the Peace Prize to Liu, 
his wife Liu Xia was taken into custody by the PRC. She penned an open 
letter to Chinese President Xi Jinping in June 2013 decrying her unjust 
arrest and detention:

       I have been under house arrest and have lost all my 
     personal freedoms since October 2010. No one has told me any 
     reasons for detaining me. I have thought about it over and 
     over. Perhaps in this country it's a ``crime'' for me to be 
     ``Liu Xiaobo's wife.''

  Both Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia remain in prison today. The opening 
paragraph of ``Charter 08'' captures the entirety of Liu Xiaobo's 
lifework:

       Having experienced a prolonged period of human rights 
     disasters and challenging and tortuous struggles, the 
     awakening Chinese citizens are becoming increasingly aware 
     that freedom, equality and human rights are universal values 
     shared by all humankind, and that democracy, republicanism, 
     and constitutional government make up the basic institutional 
     framework of modern politics. A `modernization' bereft of 
     these universal values and this basic political framework is 
     a disastrous process that deprives people of their rights, 
     rots away their humanity, and destroys their dignity. Where 
     is China headed in the 21st century? Will it continue with 
     this `modernization' under authoritarian rule, or will it 
     endorse universal values, join the mainstream civilization, 
     and build a democratic form of government? This is an 
     unavoidable decision.

  Dr. Liu's enormous courage and willingness to voluntarily sacrifice 
not only his own freedom but also that of those most dear to him poses 
a challenge to the free world. Will we be silent, eager to enjoy the 
economic benefits of cooperation with the PRC? Or will we put President 
Xi on notice that

[[Page S6922]]

for America, human rights are no longer off the table, and that we are 
listening to the truth about Communist China.
  I believe that the freedom championed by Dr. Liu is possible for all 
the Chinese people. I believe that from Tiananmen Square to Taiwan, the 
evidence is clear that the Chinese desire--and are capable of--
democracy. I believe that we have a moral responsibility to not 
marginalize Dr. Liu and his brave fellow dissidents but to make their 
plight central to all our dealings with the PRC.
  For that reason, we should follow the example of Ronald Reagan. We 
should follow the example of standing up to oppression, standing up do 
the Soviet Union's oppression of Andrei Sakharov. For that reason, in 
solidarity with the Chinese people engaged in a long and nonviolent 
struggle for basic human rights, I am asking my colleagues to join me 
in creating a new version of Sakharov Plaza by naming the street in 
front of the People's Republic of China Embassy in Washington, DC, Liu 
Xiaobo Plaza. This would be the street sign that the Chinese Ambassador 
would look at each day. This would be the address that every piece of 
correspondence going into the embassy and coming out of the embassy 
would have written on it, just as with the Soviets when forced to 
recognize the bravery of Sakharov.
  The PRC officials will be forced to recognize the bravery of Dr. Liu 
and to acknowledge it dozens of times a day, day after day. I realize 
that this is an expedited request, but given the ongoing repression not 
only of the Lius but of so many other voices for political and 
religious freedom in China and the imminent arrival of the Chinese 
leader who is directly responsible for it, I hope that my colleagues 
will join me. I intend to propound a unanimous consent request, and it 
is my hope that all 100 Senators will stand with me.
  But for the moment, I yield the floor.
  Mr. CRUZ addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Capito). The Senator from Texas.
  Mr. CRUZ. Madam President, for reasons that I just detailed to this 
Chamber, reasons for which we should stand in bipartisan unanimity in 
support of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Liu Xiaobo and in support of 
human rights and dissidents across the world, that we should follow the 
successful pattern of Sakharov Plaza under Ronald Reagan, this should 
be an issue that brings us all together.
  Accordingly, I ask unanimous consent that the Homeland Security and 
Governmental Affairs Committee be discharged from further consideration 
of and that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 224. 
I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble 
be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  The Senator from California.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I 
would like to make an observation. The notice for this went out less 
than an hour ago. The consultations with others haven't been made. It 
was precipitously brought to the floor, and I can only infer that it 
has political implications, because the President of China is due to 
arrive here tomorrow and, therefore, this would be passed today, moved 
out of committee without a vote in front of the Senate.
  I don't think that is the way we should do business in this Senate. 
Maybe people don't believe diplomacy makes a difference, but I do. I 
think there will be ample time for the President to speak with the 
President of China and for some of us to speak as well. This is, of 
course--the human rights, of course--a subject. But in the absence of 
that, I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  The Senator from Texas.
  Mr. CRUZ. Madam President, I note that this is a sad day for this 
body. When standing up to the Soviet Union, Democrats and Republicans 
were able to come together in support of Andrei Sakharov, and it 
worked. It made a difference speaking up for human rights. The senior 
Senator from California is correct that this was expedited, and she is 
correct as to why. As I said in this floor speech, the presence of 
President Xi in this country is precisely the reason that we should 
stand in unanimity in support of human rights. It is what makes it 
timely until a few minutes ago, when we had been informed that there 
were no objections on the Democratic side and Republican side. It 
saddens me. I know there are many Chinese Americans in the State of 
California, there are many Chinese Americans in the State of Texas, and 
across the country there are millions of Americans who care for human 
rights.
  Just this morning we sat on the floor of the House of Representatives 
and listened to Pope Francis talk about putting aside petty partisan 
differences and coming together with a voice of compassion.
  Dr. Liu is in a Chinese prison, and the senior Senator from 
California is standing and objecting to recognizing this Nobel 
laureate's bravery, is standing and objecting because presumably it 
would embarrass his Communist captors. I, for one, think as Americans 
we should not be troubled by embarrassing Communist oppressors.
  I note, as the senior Senator from California leaves the floor, that 
this is not an issue that is abstract to me. My family, like Dr. Liu, 
has been imprisoned by oppressive regimes. My father, as a teenager, 
was imprisoned and tortured in Cuba. He had his nose broken. He had his 
teeth shattered. He lay in the blood and grime of a prison cell in 
Cuba. My aunt, my Tia Sonia, was a few years later again imprisoned and 
tortured. This time by Castro. My father by Batista and my aunt by 
Castro was imprisoned and tortured by a Communist regime. It is a sad 
statement when the United States of America cannot stand up and say: 
You who are imprisoned unjustly, we stand with you.
  If any of us listened to a word Pope Francis said this morning, that 
is a word we should have heard--that we should be a voice of freedom, a 
clarion voice of freedom across this globe. What we saw on this Senate 
floor saddens me greatly. I understand the Democrats feel partisan 
loyalty to the White House, and this White House's Secretary Clinton 
said at the beginning of the administration that human rights are off 
the table. America no longer stands for human rights. We will coddle up 
with oppressors if they make cheap calculators to sell in our stores. I 
think they are values that transcend the mighty dollar, and it is 
entirely possible to deal with foreign countries and yet maintain our 
principles and speak with unanimity.
  A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to visit with Natan 
Sharansky, the famed Soviet dissident. He and I visited in Jerusalem. 
He talked to me about how, when he was in the Soviet gulag, the 
prisoners would pass from cell to cell notes: Did you hear what 
President Reagan said--``evil empire,'' ``ash heap of history,'' ``tear 
down this wall''? The leadership of the United States of America--mind 
you, it wasn't partisan leadership; it was clear bipartisan leadership 
in America--shined a light to the dark of those prison cells.
  I pray today that Dr. Liu, in his prison cell, does not hear word 
that the Democratic Senators are unwilling to stand with him. That is 
heartbreaking at a level rarely seen. It is one thing for us to 
disagree on partisan matters. We can have disagreements over the 
appropriate rate of capital gains taxes. But for standing with an 
oppressed Nobel Peace Prize laureate, for standing up to Communist 
oppression, that should not be a partisan divide.
  The objection raised by the senior Senator from California is deeply 
disappointing, and I intend to continue to press this issue because the 
voice of America, the voice for freedom that Pope Francis urged us to 
aspire to will not be extinguished. It is who we are that is essential 
to our character and to our integrity.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.


                              Gun Violence

  Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, over the course of the summer we have 
watched with horror as thousands more have died in Syria and Iraq, and 
the debate over what we should do about it has been omnipresent here in 
the Senate and in the House. We have held hearings, appeared on 
television to tell our story of how we should respond, and talked about 
it on the floor of the

[[Page S6923]]

Senate and the House. Similarly, we have watched the conflict continue 
to persist in eastern Ukraine. Although they have not had the same 
number of casualties as we have seen in Syria and Iraq, they have had 
similar death and destruction, and we have responded with a vigorous 
debate on the floor of the Senate--again, hearings in committees, 
letters to the President, bipartisan pieces of legislation that have 
been proposed--about how the United States should seek to reduce the 
amount of casualties in a place like eastern Ukraine, and we are also 
debating what our response should be in Syria and Iraq.
  What if I told you that this summer 4,000 people died in another 
conflict in which there was absolutely no debate here in the Congress? 
What if I told you there were 4,000 people who died this summer in a 
conflict and not a single committee in the Congress held a hearing on 
it? What if I told you there was a conflict this summer in which 4,000 
people perished and not a single Member of the majority party in the 
House or the Senate has proposed any comprehensive way to deal with it?
  This chart shows the number of people on a daily, monthly, and annual 
basis who are killed by guns. On average, it is 86 a day, 26,000 a 
month, and 31,000 a year. This summer, while kids were out of school, 
over 4,000 people--just this summer--died across this country from gun 
violence. I come to the floor not as often as I would like but as often 
as I can to tell some of their stories because I kind of thought these 
numbers would be enough to persuade Members of this body to do 
something--anything--to try to stem the scourge of gun violence in this 
body, but it hasn't, and so my hope is maybe by telling the stories of 
some of these individuals, it will hopefully make a difference. Every 
day we add dozens of stories of young men and women--mostly young men 
and women--whose lives were cut short, whose greatness we were never 
able to see, whose potential was never realized because they were 
killed by a gun.
  This summer we have been gripped by mass shooting after mass 
shooting.
  Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Sharonda Singleton, Myra Thompson, 
Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Daniel Simmons, and DePayne Doctor, and 
Clementa Pinckney--we don't know all of those names, but we know about 
many of them because they were killed at a mass shooting in a church in 
South Carolina.
  Sgt Carson Holmquist, PO2 Randall Smith, GySgt Thomas Sullivan, LCpl 
``Skip'' Wells, and SSgt David Wyatt--maybe you have heard their names 
because they were all killed at a shooting in Tennessee at a 
Chattanooga Armed Forces recruiting center.
  Maybe you have heard of Jillian Johnson and Mayci Breaux, who were 
killed in a movie theater in Lafayette, LA, in July of this year.
  Most people have now heard of Allison Parker and Adam Ward, who were 
gunned down on live TV just a few weeks ago in Virginia.
  On each one of those days--June 17, a shooting in South Carolina; 
July 16, a shooting in Tennessee; July 24, a shooting in Louisiana; and 
August 26, a shooting in Virginia--there were dozens more people who 
died from gunshot wounds whom we never heard of, but they meant 
something to their families. To this day their loss is experienced 
deeply by those who knew them well.
  Some of them were people who were close to those of us who serve in 
public service. Matthew Shlonsky was killed this summer in Washington, 
DC. On August 15 he was heading to a going-away party, and he had just 
stepped out of a cab when he was shot outside of the Shaw-Howard Metro 
station. He was the sixth gunshot victim in the Shaw area in a little 
over a week.
  Think about what it is like to live in a neighborhood in which there 
have been six shootings over the course of a week. Think of the fear 
that breeds in those communities.
  We knew Matthew because he was an intern for one of our colleagues. 
He was working as a consultant at Deloitte, but he had served as a 
Senate intern. He was an amazing kid by all accounts. He traveled the 
world, spoke two languages, and was a star hockey player. His future 
was absolutely limitless. But because this city is awash in guns--many 
of them illegal, many of them in the hands of criminals who get them 
because of giant, gaping holes in our background check system--Matthew 
Shlonsky is no longer with us. He is dead at the age of 23.
  How about the heartbreaking story of Carey Gabay, who was 43 years 
old. He was serving as an assistant counsel to New York Governor Andrew 
Cuomo, and before that he had been counsel of the Empire State 
Development Corporation. He died on September 16--just on the back end 
of the summer--after he was caught in the crossfire of a shooting in 
New York City. He was an innocent bystander when he was shot in the 
head while attending the pre-West Indian American Day Parade festival 
with friends and family.
  He was the son of Jamaican immigrants and grew up in public housing 
in the Bronx. He had done amazingly well. He attended Harvard 
University and Harvard Law School. He was working for the Governor and 
trying to make a better life for others by trying to give opportunities 
to kids who grow up in the same circumstance as he did. A friend 
described him as ``an amazing human being who melded public service, 
professionalism, personal integrity with warmth and caring for everyone 
he knew.'' He was 43 years old when he was gunned down in broad 
daylight outside of a festival simply because he was in the wrong place 
at the wrong time.
  This summer 4,000 people were killed by guns, and not a single public 
hearing has occurred in the U.S. Senate to discuss a solution. There is 
not even mention of a debate happening anytime soon on the floor of the 
Senate as to how we stop these episodes of mass slaughter. We are 
averaging more than one mass shooting in this country every single day 
this year. That is astounding. That is shocking. Yet there is total, 
utter, absolute silence from the world's greatest deliberative body on 
what we should do about it.
  I am the last person to say there is any panacea coming from the 
Congress on how to stem gun violence. We are never going to be able to 
eliminate these epidemic rates of gun violence just by one law or set 
of laws that are passed. But what is an absolute indictment of this 
place is that we don't even try.
  I have made this contention on the floor before, and I will make it 
again. I truly believe our silence on this has become complicity. We 
have become accomplices to these murders because by saying and doing 
nothing, we offer up a kind of quiet endorsement to people who exist in 
the fringes of their minds and who are thinking about contemplating 
violence, and the leaders of this country are doing absolutely nothing 
to seriously condemn or stop their destructive, malevolent behavior. 
Our silence has become complicit.
  I hope that at some point over the course of the rest of this year, 
we can begin a conversation as to how we can turn these numbers back in 
the right direction. There is no other country in the industrialized 
world that even comes close to these numbers.
  I can offer a suggestion on where to start. If between now and 
December we can't come to a common understanding on our gun laws--I 
still don't understand why we can't just do that since 90 percent of 
Americans support expansive background checks--let's start by fixing 
the mental health care system.
  I think there are a lot of reasons why Adam Lanza walked into Sandy 
Hook Elementary School and killed 20 kids over 2 years ago. The child 
advocate in Connecticut issued a damning report on his interactions 
with the mental health care system. His mother tried and tried and 
tried, but in the end she gave up and let him retreat into the 
isolation of his room, where he plotted these murders. That family and 
mother and young man ran into barrier after barrier and obstacle after 
obstacle trying to find a course of treatment for his very serious set 
of illnesses.
  What we know is that people with mental illness are much more likely 
to be the victims of gun violence than the perpetrators of it. There is 
no inherent connection between being mentally ill and being violent. 
There is no greater incidence of mental illness in the United States 
than anywhere else in the world. Yet we have epidemic rates of gun 
violence. But I will certainly be the first to admit that if we fix our 
mental health care system, it will help lots of people who have no 
intersections with gun violence, and it will

[[Page S6924]]

push these numbers downward because some of these people are committing 
these murders because they are not getting treatment for serious 
illnesses.
  Senator Cassidy and I--frankly, we don't agree on a lot because he is 
a conservative Republican from the Deep South, and I am a progressive 
Democrat from the Northeast--introduced a mental health reform measure 
which has broad bipartisan support and which would seek to break down 
these barriers in order to get care for the seriously mentally ill and 
try to get the parents more involved in the care, especially of young 
adults. It would increase the capacity in our mental health treatment 
system for both outpatient and inpatient care. Maybe over the course of 
the rest of this year, at the very least we can make a dent in the 
massive shortfalls in our behavioral health care system.
  The families I have become so close with in Sandy Hook, CT, commanded 
me to come down to the floor every week or so and tell these stories, 
the voices of victims. They would like us to come together on a set of 
meaningful changes to our gun laws. They just don't understand why Adam 
Lanza was able to walk into the school with a gun that killed 20 little 
boys and girls in less than 5 minutes because of how powerful it was 
with the 30-round cartridges he was able to use. They don't want our 
inability to get action on gun laws to stop us from making other 
progress that would make the next Adam Lanza less likely. Maybe we can 
do that. But we should do something.
  Our silence is an embarrassment after this summer of mass shootings. 
These news reports should command us to action, but we, frankly, 
shouldn't have had to wait for the news reports of shootings in 
Virginia or Louisiana or South Carolina because these numbers were just 
as true last year as they are this year. Maybe there are more episodes 
of mass violence and mass shootings and headline-grabbing atrocities, 
but these numbers which reflect what is happening on the ground in New 
Haven, CT; Hartford, CT; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; and Los Angeles have 
been a reality for a long time, and we should have woken up long ago. 
But maybe over the course of this year we can make some progress so 
that moving forward there are a few less voices of victims to bring to 
the floor of the Senate.
  I thank the Presiding Officer.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
order for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                               Volkswagen

  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I rise to speak about recent 
revelations that Volkswagen woefully deceived regulators and the 
general public to artificially lower emissions of its 2009 to 2015 
Volkswagen and Audi diesel vehicles. These actions raise significant 
consumer, environmental, and public health concerns.
  According to the EPA's Notice of Violation of the Clean Air Act, 
Volkswagen used a sophisticated software algorithm on certain vehicles 
that detected when vehicles were undergoing emissions testing. This 
software--referred to as a ``defeat device''--allows vehicles to meet 
emissions standards during testing, but under normal driving 
situations, these same vehicles emit nitrogen oxides up to 40 times the 
allowable emissions standards.
  This is unbelievable. I think we can imagine that such technology 
exists, but I don't think we ever thought that one of our major 
international car companies would be alleged to have used it. So far 
approximately 482,000 diesel vehicles sold in the United States and 11 
million cars worldwide have been affected. A deliberate attempt like 
this by a company to mislead regulators and the general public is 
completely unacceptable.
  This raises serious questions that need answers: Why did Volkswagen, 
for more than a year, claim that the discrepancies in the emissions 
tests and the levels on the road were a technical error? Who at 
Volkswagen signed off on the defeat device? Did executives at 
Volkswagen know these actions were put into place to deliberately 
deceive regulators and the general public? Does the EPA have the 
necessary testing systems in place to detect such devices that trick 
the software? Have other auto manufacturers of clean diesel vehicles 
been tampering with their software to get around emissions standards? 
How do we ensure that this never happens again?
  This is a matter of public trust. Consumers were lied to and sold a 
product under false pretenses. Those consumers who brought certain 
Volkswagen Jettas, Beetles, Passats, and certain Audis with 2-liter 
diesel engines believed they were purchasing a vehicle that would 
provide premium fuel economy and performance while also meeting strict 
emissions standards. Who wouldn't be enticed by these vehicles after 
they were named the ``Green Car of the Year'' and ``Eco-Friendly Car of 
the Year'' by national publications?
  We now know these consumers were duped and that they will now have to 
bring their vehicles under compliance to meet Federal emissions 
standards. Volkswagen will likely pay for the repairs but what about 
the costs of reduced fuel economy and lower resale values?
  Congress intentionally included strong enforceability elements into 
the Clean Air Act statute. Regulations promulgated under the Clean Air 
Act aimed to protect human health and the environment by reducing 
nitrogen oxide and other pollutants. Motor vehicles are the primary 
source of nitrogen oxide pollution from transportation. These highly 
reactive gases play a major role in atmospheric reactions that produce 
smog.
  That smog accelerates climate change and exacerbates respiratory 
diseases that harm human health, including asthma, which affects 23 
million Americans, including 6 million children.
  That is why we have emissions standards. It is not just some far-off 
number that is put into place; it is to protect children from getting 
asthma; it is to protect the world from heating up; it is to ensure 
that we protect our environment for generations to come.
  The Clean Air Act requires automakers to certify to the EPA that 
their vehicles will meet applicable Federal emissions standards to 
control air pollution. Through this process, Volkswagen deceived 
regulators into believing these vehicles produced low emissions. 
Vehicles with the defeat device emit anywhere from 5 to 40 times more 
nitrogen oxide than allowed by law while on the road. If we pick a 
number in the middle of the range--let's say 20 times as much--it would 
mean that Volkswagen's fleet in the U.S. produces 46,657 more tons of 
harmful smog.
  Changes to the EPA's emissions standards testing process are needed 
as well. I have written to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy to express 
that concern. The EPA needs to explain why their systems did not detect 
this deceptive software and what changes the Agency will be making with 
their testing processes. I strongly urge the EPA to establish robust 
safeguards to prevent automakers from gaming the system and prevent 
this from happening again.
  There must also be a full investigation into Volkswagen's actions. 
The Department of Justice is conducting a criminal investigation into 
the company's actions, and I urge DOJ to leave no stone unturned in its 
investigation to determine how a company could have willfully deceived 
Federal regulators and the general public.
  Volkswagen must conduct a thorough and comprehensive public education 
campaign to ensure that all owners of these vehicles are made aware of 
the defect and are informed about where and when they can go to get 
their vehicle fixed.
  The Department of Transportation, which has expertise with vehicle 
recalls, should also play an active role. If we learned anything from 
the General Motors and Takata airbag recalls, it is that recalls need 
to be broad enough from the outset and cover affected vehicle models 
and years, the general public needs to know how and where to get their 
vehicle repaired, and automakers must have a system in place to make 
timely repairs with replacement parts that truly fix the problem.
  Other agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, should also 
take a serious look at how they can help in this process.

[[Page S6925]]

  As a member of both the Senate Commerce Committee and the Senate 
Judiciary Committee, I believe that consumers must be protected. I also 
believe Volkswagen's competitors that actually follow the law should be 
able to play on an even playing field. Other car companies that follow 
the law did the right thing. They put the right systems in place, and 
they should not be penalized because one car company did this. They 
should have been able to play on an even playing field. If there is an 
uneven playing field, it hurts American employees, it hurts American 
companies, and mostly it hurts American consumers.
  The actions by Volkswagen to deliberately deceive consumers around 
the world about the emissions levels in their cars is fundamentally 
about a breach in trust. Consumers thought they were getting the same 
product that was being advertised, when what they were getting was a 
product that met those standards only when it was tested, only for 1 
day, and only for the time of the emissions testing.
  As Federal agencies move forward with their investigation, it is 
critical that we get to the bottom of this to figure out how this 
happened, what the extent was, and if it is happening with any other 
automakers to ensure that what happened never happens again.
  Thank you, Madam President.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior 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.


                        Pilot's Bill of Rights 2

  Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I wish to take advantage of an 
opportunity to bring up the subject that no one is talking about now. 
Of course, right now everyone has been in the middle of the Pope's 
visit and other things and what is happening with the Iran bill and the 
votes we have. I wish to mention there is something else very 
significant going on right now, that we are in the middle of, and that 
is the Pilot's Bill of Rights 2.
  To put it into perspective, 3 years ago last month we had the Pilot's 
Bill of Rights 1, and it was one people were not aware of. There are 
only 617,000 pilots in America, so it is not one of these issues that 
gets an awful lot of attention. But the mere fact that those 617,000 
people--many of them are single-issue people. A lot of people are not 
aware that prior to the passage of the Pilot's Bill of Rights 3 years 
ago, there was just one area left within our system whereupon you are 
guilty until proven innocent.
  That is exactly what we corrected with that bill, just to refresh the 
memory of my colleagues. It gave the pilots who were accused of 
something the evidence that was used against them. I had a personal 
experience with it. It actually happened to me. I was never sensitive 
to that until such time as I experienced it myself.
  What we have right now is we are up to 64 cosponsors of the Pilot's 
Bill of Rights 2. The major part of this bill is something that is out 
there that doesn't resolve anything. Ten years ago, as kind of an 
experiment, we put in a sport pilot-eligible exemption so that the 
pilots of small aircraft would not have to have what they call a third-
class medical. The result of this was that after a 10-year period, the 
medical safety experience of these pilots has been identical to those 
with medical certificates. A joint study was made following that by the 
Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association and by the EAA, the Experimental 
Aircraft Association, of the 46,976 accidents over a 6-year period. Of 
those, only 99 had a medical cause as a factor. That is less than one-
quarter of 1 percent. Of those 99, none would have been prevented by 
the current third-class medical. That shows that experiment worked and 
there is no reason to have a third-class medical.

  So people are aware that some changes have been made, I want to 
briefly outline the modifications that have been made. The 
modifications require three things for pilots to qualify for an 
exemption. The exemption we are talking about is the exemption from 
having to take a third-class medical exemption process every 2 years--
sometimes more extensive than that.
  First, pilots will have to complete an online medical education 
course. Secondly, pilots have to maintain verification that they have 
been to a doctor at least once every 4 years and certify that they are 
receiving the care they need by a physician to treat any medical 
condition that warrants it. Third, a pilot would have to complete a 
comprehensive medical review by the FAA. That would be applied to a new 
pilot, so they establish a benchmark as to what a pilot's physical 
condition is.
  The pilot would be required to take an online medical course every 2 
years. This gives the pilot access to information on medical issues 
that may not be covered by a doctor in a medical examination but that 
would have an impact on their physical condition to fly. For example, 
this course would make sure pilots are aware of impacts on interactions 
of over-the-counter and prescription medications and how these 
interactions could impact their flying capabilities. Requiring pilots 
to take this course boosts aviation safety for the aviation community.
  Secondly, pilots would need to complete an exam by their personal 
physician at least once every 4 years and include a proof of their 
doctor's visit in their logbooks. This resolves the problem most people 
are concerned about; that they would have to at least see a physician 
and be assured that they didn't have some condition they didn't have 
prior to that. Furthermore, the pilots would be required to certify 
that they are under the care and treatment of a doctor for any medical 
condition that would warrant treatment. Pilots would do this instead of 
visiting an aviation medical examiner every 2 years and sometimes even 
more frequently than that. With this modification, we are actually 
encouraging pilots to be honest about their health and seek treatment 
for it.
  Right now pilots are incentivized to hide any medical condition from 
the FAA, including by not seeking treatment for it, out of the fear 
that the pilot might lose his wings. We don't want that to happen. 
People who are not pilots do not realize how significant it is that you 
don't want to be taken out of the air, particularly for some reason 
that is not justified. Pilots, like any individual, maintain stronger 
relationships with their personal physician, and this is a good thing 
that fosters an honest dialogue between pilots and doctors, which is 
something we should all want and something that is not there today.
  We want pilots to get the treatment they need. Any medically treated 
pilot is safer than one who is not being treated. So for many pilots 
the most burdensome aspects of the FAA controversy is simply the 
constant churn of submitting paperwork over and over, every 2 years or 
less, even when there has been no change in their medical status. This 
bill, as modified, gives pilots a break from the bureaucracy.
  The third requirement for pilots to receive the third-class medical 
exemption is to complete one FAA medical review. So if a new pilot 
comes in, we need a benchmark--where is that pilot, what is his 
physical condition today--so as time goes by we can see how he might be 
changing. If someone does not have an existing medical certificate, 
such as new pilots who have never gone through an exam, they would have 
to do it before they fall into qualifying for the exemption. By the 
way, of the 617,000 pilots in America today, this is the one thing that 
concerns me more than anything else, which is to have to go back and go 
through the type of examination they are required to, now that we know 
the 10-year experiment of being exempt has worked.
  There is one caveat. If a pilot flying under the third-class medical 
exemption is diagnosed with a severe condition--let's talk about maybe 
a heart attack--then they need to go through the FAA special issuance 
process to receive medical clearance to fly again. Again, this would 
only be needed to be done one time.
  The ability of the FAA to maintain a stranglehold on pilots will be 
gone. I am confident the changes will result in a safer flying 
environment. I want to reiterate that the Pilot's Bill of Rights does 
not change the certification standard to obtain a pilot's certificate. 
All pilots still have to possess the pilot's certificate, pass the 
required practical tests and necessary check rides to

[[Page S6926]]

demonstrate that they have the knowledge, skills, and ability to safely 
operate their plane.
  Further, this bill does not change the fundamental responsibility of 
every pilot to self-certify their ability to fly each time they get 
into the cockpit of a plane. I am a pilot, and every time I get in a 
plane I make a conscious decision that I am fit to fly. Everyone I know 
who is a pilot does the same thing.
  Again, all of this is not necessary. When you go back and realize 
that over the 10 years of the experiment with a limited number of 
pilots there were no changes. There is no difference between those who 
have or have not had the pilot exams. With these changes, the third-
class medical exemption and the Pilot's Bill of Rights is enjoying a 
greater level of support from Members of the Senate. Support from 
general aviation is strongly bipartisan. Sixty-four of my colleagues 
are cosponsors of this legislation. Half of those are Democrats and 
half are Republicans. Groups representing general aviation in the 
community and in the pilot unions have declared their support for the 
bill. General aviation organizations, such as the Aircraft Owners and 
Pilots Association, the Experimental Pilots Association, and the 
General Aviation Manufacturers Association, support the bill. The 
National Association of State Aviation Officials support the bill, the 
Allied Pilots Association and the Southwest Pilots Association, both 
unions which represent 23,000 pilots who fly for American Airlines, 
U.S. Airways, and Southwest Airlines, support the bill. Pilots for 
NetJets support the bill.
  The bill has strong bipartisan support. I urge all the Members who 
support general aviation and all the economic activity of general 
aviation to be a part of this bill.
  One of the reasons I am doing this today is one of the two 
organizations--and I am not sure which one it is, it is either the AOPA 
or the AA--is doing a major effort right now to encourage the pilot 
population out there to encourage their Members of the Senate to 
cosponsor this bill. Again, we currently have 64 sponsors of the bill. 
I can't think of any reason we can't get everyone else. The same 
individuals who supported it 3 years ago should be there to support it. 
So I encourage those few Members of the Senate who are not sponsors to 
look at it very carefully.
  It may be 617,000 people are not a lot of people, but of the 617,000 
people, most of them are single-issue people. So it would be very good 
to join in on this. This is something we now have demonstrated clearly 
is not going to incur any safety hazards and it is going to be a real 
godsend for pilots who don't want to go through this bureaucracy every 
2 years or more frequently in some cases. The bill is out there, and it 
is one I feel very strongly that we ought to be able to work into our 
floor use probably in the next very short period of time.
  With that, I do yield the floor because my very good friend from 
Delaware is here to say something profound.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.


                         Transportation Funding

  Mr. CARPER. Madam President, I don't know that I will say anything 
profound, but I appreciate the chairman of our committee saying that.
  Madam President, and fellow native West Virginian, I will show a map 
of the United States in just a minute, and there are some States that 
are delaying and some States that are cutting back on transportation 
projects. One of them is West Virginia. One of them is Delaware. I want 
to talk a little bit about that.
  Before I do, I would like to go back in time 10 months to the 
election of last year. I am reminded of the message I heard from the 
electorate that came out of that election. To simplify it, there were 
three things they were trying to tell us. No. 1, they want us to work 
together; No. 2, they want us to get things done; and, No. 3, they want 
us to get things done that will actually strengthen our economic 
recovery.
  If you go back in time to the January--the week Barack Obama and Joe 
Biden were inaugurated as President and Vice President, 628,000 people 
filed for unemployment insurance in that 1 week in January of 2009. Any 
time that weekly number of people filing for unemployment insurance is 
over 400,000, we are losing jobs in this country and in the economy.
  Last Thursday we got a number from the Department of Labor. Last 
week's number was about 265,000 who filed for unemployment. That was 
last week. There is a new number today--I am not sure what it was, but 
for the last 28 weeks that number of people filing for unemployment 
insurance has been under 300,000. I think that is the longest that we 
have been keeping track, where we had 28 consecutive weeks where fewer 
than 300,000 people in this country were applying for unemployment 
insurance. That number is way under 400,000, so we are adding jobs, and 
we are expecting to continue to add jobs in this country.
  There are still people looking for jobs in my State, there are in 
West Virginia, and other States as well, but when you consider the 
unemployment rate was about 10 percent in the early part of 2009 and 
today it is a little over 5 percent, we are making progress, but we can 
make a lot more progress.
  One of the ways we can make progress is by dealing with our fiscal 
plan and not hold the Nation's economy hostage with our inability to 
pass a spending plan. And God help us if we drop the ball on this again 
and have another shutdown. I sure hope we come to our senses and avoid 
doing that. My hope is that we will.
  One of the other ways we can strengthen our economic recovery--and it 
is right out there for us to seize and do--is to make sure that in a 
nation where roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems are 
deteriorating, where we need to make improvements and we need to build, 
frankly, new projects--new highways, bridges, roads and transit 
systems--at the very least we need to maintain the quality of what we 
have or improve the quality of road safety, surfaces, potholes, you 
name it. There is a lot of work to be done, and there are a lot of 
people who would like to do the work.
  The McKinsey Global Institute, an arm of the national consulting firm 
McKinsey, looked at what we could do for our growing GDP in this 
country if we fully funded a 6-year transportation plan, what we could 
do for an employment opportunity if we funded a 6-year transportation 
plan, and the numbers are remarkable--I think amazing.
  We were told that fully funding a 6-year transportation plan would 
grow our GDP by approximately 1.5 percent per year--not for 1 year but 
for the life of the transportation plan that we funded--probably 6 
years at 1.5 percent a year. When you consider the GDP growth over the 
last couple years, even though it is better than it was, adding 1.5 
percent of the GDP growth would help our economy grow in a robust way. 
We are told by McKinsey & Company's study that a 6-year transportation 
plan robustly funded would put about 1.8 million people to work. A lot 
of folks would like to be building roads, highways, and transportation 
systems, and they don't have employment opportunities because we are 
not funding them. We are not funding them.
  Let's take a quick look at this map if we could. The States that are 
gray are States, as far as we know, that are not planning to delay or 
cancel projects. They are not even considering delaying projects, but 
the States that are in red, including Delaware over here, are States 
that have delayed or cancelled projects. The States that are in yellow, 
including West Virginia, are States that are considering project 
delays.
  That is not good. I have not counted the number of States--it looks 
like seven--that are in red. Those are the States that have delayed 
projects. More than that, probably 10, are considering doing that. Why 
is it important for us to fully fund at the Federal level--do our share 
for roads, highways, bridges, transit funding? It is because about half 
of the money that our States spend through their departments of 
transportation, half their money comes from Federal user fees--largely 
Federal user fees--primarily, not entirely, but primarily user fees on 
the sale of gasoline. It has been unchanged in 23 years--not since 
1993--22 years. The user fee on diesel has been unchanged for some 22 
years, right where we were. The price of everything else goes up. 
Concrete goes up, asphalt goes up, steel goes up, and labor goes up.
  We have more energy-efficient vehicles. They are not using as much 
gas or

[[Page S6927]]

diesel. That is a good thing, but it is also a bad thing for having 
funding for transportation projects. So I want to look at a map and 
would invite all of us to consider it. I don't anybody who says--any 
economist worth their salt--who does not say: Fully funding a multi-
year transportation plan, not for 6 months or 3 months, something like 
that, but fully funding it--robustly funding it for 6 years--will do 
great things for our economy.
  The reason we end up with job growth of something like 1.8 million 
people, according to McKinsey and Company, is because the economy works 
far more efficiently if roads, highways, bridges are operating and 
working well. So I just want to share that and start off my remarks 
today.
  I have some numbers here that I would like to share. So far in 2015, 
this year, four States--Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Wyoming--have 
shelved some $805 million in projects due to the uncertainty over 
Federal funds. Again, the uncertainty is over roughly half the money 
that they are going to spend on roads, highways, and bridges. It comes 
from Federal user fees, Federal taxes.
  Our transportation system--at least the way we fund it--has been 
broken since 2008. Since that time, in the last 5 or 6 years, we have 
passed I think 12 short-term patches to the tune of nearly $74 billion. 
How do we pay for them? We pay for them with budget gimmicks. That is 
how we do it. And we pay for them with debt. When we issue debt, we 
borrow money. We sell Treasury securities, and we sell them around the 
world. Among the countries that buy them are China and the Chinese 
people. We are then beholden to them as our creditors. It puts us in a 
situation that I do not find too comfortable. My guess is some of you 
don't either.
  There are better alternatives to fund our Nation's transportation 
system. I only mentioned a couple of them. I feel as if I have not a 
magic wand but the ability to see into the future. Twenty years from 
now, I think there is a pretty good chance that we will have figured 
out how to pay for roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems by 
figuring out how to make sure those folks who use transportation pay 
for it. One of the ways we are trying to do that--they have been trying 
to do that in Oregon for almost 10 years. They have something called 
road user charge. Some people have heard of that term. More people have 
heard of something called vehicle miles traveled, and the ability to 
say your vehicle--I don't care what kind of vehicle it is, but we know 
how many miles that vehicle travels on a road, highway or bridge in the 
course of a year. There is fee that is attached to that. Some people 
are uncomfortable with that because it has implications on privacy. I 
can understand that.
  In Oregon they are trying to figure it out. They have got about 5,000 
vehicles--at least--in their system. They are sort of--I like to say 
States are laboratories of democracy. In this case, Oregon is trying to 
be the laboratory. I believe California is looking at being another 
laboratory to figure out we make something like vehicle miles traveled 
work in a State. Oregon is good-sized state, and California is a very 
big State. If they can do that, then we will learn from them, not just 
at the State level but perhaps at the Federal level as well.
  I think we will be funding projects--not just now but in the future, 
20 years from now--through tooling. When I travel back to my native 
State of West Virginia, I go through West Virginia and I pay tolls. 
When I was a little kid and they first built the turnpike, we would 
have to stop and find change--whatever--stop every 5 or 10 miles. You 
don't do that anymore. We don't do that anymore in Delaware either, 
because we have--in Delaware and I think in West Virginia--highway-
speed E-ZPass. It is an express E-ZPass. You go through, and it is 
charged to your credit card that you have already established when you 
establish your E-ZPass plan.
  Also, we now have the technology that even if folks don't have an E-
ZPass--in some tolling operations around the country, a person drives 
through in their vehicle, car, truck, van, whatever the system--when 
you go through the toll plaza, they don't collect a toll. They have a 
highly accurate camera with the ability to take pictures of the vehicle 
and great pictures of your license plates, and then they send a bill to 
the owner of that vehicle. So you don't even have to have high-speed E-
ZPass. But a combination of those two, systems like E-ZPass and systems 
like the one I just described where people drive through with no E-
ZPass or a similar system, but they actually get billed for it later 
on. They do not get billed and fined; they just get billed for it. If 
you don't pay it, then I am sure something will happen.
  But I think 20 years from now we will have something that looks a lot 
like that. My guess is we will also have user fees, but not everybody 
likes tolling. As it turns out, Oregon has been working on road user 
charge, also known as vehicle miles traveled. They have been working on 
it for 10 years, and they have got 5,000 people in the plan. So this is 
not going to happen in 5 years or 10 years, but maybe 20 years for both 
a combination of tolling and vehicle miles traveled.
  There is another idea out there that is used in some places around 
the country. It is called 3P or P3. When I first heard that, I thought 
they were talking about P-3 airplanes. I spent a lot of years of my 
life as a naval flight officer in P-3 aircraft. I used to command them, 
but they were not talking about airplanes when they were talking about 
P3. They were talking about public-private partnerships. We have some 
pretty good examples of where that is working. We can learn from those 
in different States. I think that can be part of the future. It ought 
to be.
  Put the three of them together, is that a comprehensive plan? Not 
entirely, but it is pretty good approach. It is a heck of a lot better 
than what we have been doing: pension smoothing, increasing fees for 
TSA. Instead of improving aviation safety, we put the money in the 
transportation trust fund. Raising Customs fees--instead of putting the 
money in ways to make our borders most robust and so forth, we put some 
of that money in the transportation trust fund.
  We sell oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve--I think probably 
at a bad time to sell it, when the price is really low. They say: Buy 
low, sell high. Well, if we are going to sell petroleum out of the 
petroleum reserve--the price of oil is about as low right now as it has 
been in a long, long time.
  I am told that--I don't know if it was last week or the week before--
there are 10,000 gasoline stations across the country where they are 
selling gasoline for less than $2 a gallon. I don't know what they are 
charging in West Virginia, but I filled up my Chrysler Town and Country 
minivan, which has 403,000 miles on it, and I paid $2.15 a gallon. 
There are some places in Delaware where people are paying less and in 
neighboring New Jersey where they are paying less. But right now, it 
does not make much sense to sell oil out of our Strategic Petroleum 
Reserve. There are some people who want to and who want to use that 
money to go into the transportation trust fund. I think that is 
foolish. We have to be smarter than that.
  I have another chart I want us to take a look at. I want to thank 
``Vanna White'' here for putting up these charts. I will pay for that 
later. This chart talks about legislation--it is kind of ironic. That 
is S. 1994. I mentioned earlier how the last time we raised the Federal 
gasoline and diesel tax or fee was in 1993 when we raised it to 18 
cents for gas and about 23, 24 cents for diesel. They have been there 
for 22 years.
  One of the things I have done is introduce legislation, and I have 
done so with Dick Durbin, who used to serve on the Bowles-Simpson 
Commission--remember the Bowles-Simpson Commission. I thought it was a 
great approach to figure out how to seriously address our Nation's 
deficit in a variety of ways. One of the ways that Bowles-Simpson said 
we should address our deficit situation--I will say our budget deficits 
are down--topped out, I think, in 2009 at $1.4 trillion. This year we 
are down about $400 billion. Is that an improvement? Yes, it is. Do we 
have some ways to go? We sure do.
  What Bowles-Simpson suggested is that we raise the gas or diesel tax 
at the Federal level by a penny each quarter, a penny every 3 months 
for 15 quarters. So effectively you would be raising the gas or diesel 
tax by 3 or 4 cents a year for 4 years and index it going forward.

[[Page S6928]]

  What Senator Durbin and I have introduced is actually something quite 
similar to that, which a majority of the Bowles-Simpson Commission 
voted for. It is called the Traffic Relief Act. What it calls for is an 
annual 4 cent gas increase in gas and diesel. That would be for a total 
of about 4 years--4 cents a year for 4 years. After that, we would 
index those user fees, those taxes, to the rate of inflation. The rate 
of inflation is pretty low lately, so they would not go up very much if 
the rate of inflation stays where it is. If the rate of inflation rears 
its head again, then that would be different.
  A fellow who was a member of my staff back in Wilmington, DE--when we 
introduced this bill, the price for gas at a station in the 
neighborhood where his family buys gas--in the space of 2 days, the 
price of gas either went up or went down by 13 cents. It went up in 2 
days, 13 cents. As we know, the price of oil moves up and down all of 
the time.
  My own belief is--and I have heard this from a lot of people--there 
are a lot of days or a lot of weeks where the price of gas or diesel 
goes up a lot more than 4 cents. Right now our world is not literally 
awash in oil but certainly figuratively awash in oil. One of the 
reasons the price at the pump for gas and diesel is so low--as I said 
earlier, a couple of weeks ago there were 10,000 gas stations across 
the country selling gas for less than two bucks a gallon. One of the 
reasons it is so low is because the United States is producing a lot 
more than we have for some time, and so are a bunch of other countries, 
including the OPEC nations.
  With the approval of the Iran agreement, as the Iranians comply with 
the agreement--my hope is that they will comply in spirit and in 
letter, and then as a result of that, they will be in a position to 
begin selling. They have only been selling some of their oil products 
to customers, including I think India, maybe Japan, China, but they 
will be able to sell more products. A world that is already awash in 
oil is going to find that Iran, which I think has the fourth greatest 
oil reserves in the world, is going to be back in the market and 
selling their own products. I believe that will keep the prices from 
rising anytime soon. And I think there is reason to believe that the 
price at the pump, which is already quite low, might even go down 
further. Time will tell.

  I have one last poster board here I wish to look at for just a 
moment.
  Our legislation--this is a typo here. It says that it restores $240 
billion for the highway trust fund. It is not $240 billion, it is $220 
billion. Still, compared to what? Compared to nothing. Compared to 
doing nothing, it is a whole lot. If we had a status quo, any kind of a 
status quo increase--a highway bill or a transportation bill--we would 
use maybe half of that. So what we are talking about is double, just 
getting by, And we have such a backlog of work to do, that it doesn't 
make sense just to push enough money to these projects to get by.
  This would provide roughly twice that amount of money and would maybe 
not raise our GDP by 1.5 percent, but it would sure raise it. It may 
not put 1.8 million people to work over the next year, but it would put 
a lot of people to work and people who like to do these jobs.
  The money would fully fund the Federal highway and transit programs 
in our country. It would increase investments in upgrades and in 
repairs as well. It would do it in a way that doesn't drop a huge 
burden on users of these products--gasoline and diesel--all in one fell 
swoop. It is like 4 cents a year over 4 years. After 4 years, there 
will be a 16-cent increase.
  People say: Well, what is that in terms of practical impact? What 
does that actually mean for somebody?
  I am told that it is actually--I don't drink a lot of coffee, but my 
friends who do get a small coffee over in the Dirksen Building across 
the street. They pay $1.70, and if they get a medium-sized coffee, it 
is like $2.50, and a really big one is maybe a little bit over $3. This 
is not really fancy coffee but just a regular cup of coffee with cream 
and sugar, and the price is maybe $2 or $3. Literally for the price of 
a cup of coffee a week, for those of us who use roads, highways, 
bridges, who buy gas, who buy diesel, we could have a much better 
transportation system. This isn't $10 a week or $20 a week or $30 a 
week. That increase over 4 years--4 cents a year for 4 years--without 
the data for the average driver, that is about a cup of coffee a week. 
Is that too much to pay for roads, highways, bridges, and a good 
transit system? I don't think so.
  There is an interest in offsetting some of these increases with a 
regressive tax, but there is an interest in offsetting some of that by 
making some tweaks like Michigan is going to do with their State 
earned-income tax credit with a Republican Governor and Republican 
legislature. I think there is maybe a lesson or something we can do 
there to help address the regressive nature of this tax.
  I close by saying I come to this floor from time to time and I 
mention one of the things I love to do. I don't know if you ever do 
this, Madam President, but I love to ask people who have been married a 
long time ``What is the secret for being married for a long time?'' I 
have done it for years. I have asked this question of hundreds of 
people who are older folks who have been married 30 years, 40 years, 50 
years, 60 years, 70 years. I ask them ``What is the secret?'' I get 
hilarious answers. I get some that are very poignant and others are 
just plain memorable for a lot of reasons. But the best answer I have 
ever gotten is there are two C's. What are the two C's? Communicate and 
compromise.
  That is not only the secret for a vibrant marriage between two 
people, it is also the secret for a vibrant democracy, to communicate 
and compromise. I would add a third C, and that is to collaborate. What 
the American people said to us last November--whether they are 
Republicans, Democrats, or Independents--is that they want us to 
communicate, they want us to compromise, and they want us to 
collaborate, and we need to do that.
  One idea I have not mentioned here bears mentioning. It was an idea 
that was endorsed last year by the administration and was endorsed last 
year by the immediate past chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, 
with whom our President served, Dave Camp. He retired earlier this year 
as a Congressman from Michigan, a very good person. What they proposed 
is international tax reform. What both Chairman Camp at the time and 
the administration said is that there are about $2 trillion in overseas 
profits of American companies. They are just keeping it over there and 
they are not that anxious to bring it back because they don't want to 
have to pay--I don't know--35 percent, 33 percent, 32 percent, 29 
percent. They are looking for a lower tax break and then to bring it 
back when it makes sense.
  The administration and Dave Camp said: Let's deem it repatriated.
  The Treasury said: All right. You have money over there, American 
companies. Bring it back. It is going to be taxed at about 10 percent.
  That was the proposal.
  The administration said: American companies that have money over 
there, we want you to bring it back. You won't be taxed at 35 percent 
or 25 percent, but you will be taxed at about 14 percent.
  That is an idea, and it is an interesting idea. It doesn't solve the 
problem forever. It provides one-time money--quite a bit of it--for 
roads, bridges, rail, and for airports as well. It doesn't solve the 
problem permanently, but it surely gives us a lot of money. Not every 
company likes that idea, and not everybody who serves here likes that 
idea, but it is a serious idea, and it is one that deserves a lot of 
consideration, and I hope we will do that.

  Let me just say this. At the end of the day, if we come to the end of 
this calendar year--when we run out of money yet again for roads, 
highways, and bridges and we say ``Well, what are we going to do 
now?''--we will have not just the States I pointed out here in yellow 
and red that are bailing on projects, delaying and stopping them in 
some cases, we will have a lot more yellow and a whole lot more red on 
the map I had up earlier. What do we do about it? Do we just do what we 
have done for 5 years and kick the can down the road yet again and look 
for cats and dogs and wherever we can find a few bucks and sort of 
throw them at the problem for a while, not make a real committed 
effort? Frankly, we are not giving the voters in this country any 
reason to feel encouraged about our courage. I hope we don't do that.

[[Page S6929]]

  If at the end of the day we don't do some kind of international tax 
reform, good ideas such as expanding tolling, vehicle miles traveled, 
and public-private partnerships--those are all good ideas, and I hope 
we grow them all. We are not going to have them all in place in the 
kind of scope we need by the end of this year.
  If we find ourselves at a time and place where we run out of money, 
where the States are looking to us and we are running out of money at 
the Federal level--and the price of gas is two bucks a gallon at gas 
stations across America--my hope is people will say: You know, for the 
price of a cup of coffee, I could have good roads, highways, bridges, 
and transit systems again. For the price of a cup of coffee a week, I 
could have that. Forty cents a week, maybe.
  Maybe that is not a bad deal for their family or for our country. I 
want people to think about that.
  In the weeks to come, I am going to be talking a lot about this 
proposal. My hope is that as time goes buy, people will say--like my 
dad used to say in West Virginia when my sister and I were little kids 
growing up and they were in West Virginia--my dad used to say to my 
sister and me after we had done yet another boneheaded stunt: Just use 
some common sense. He said that a lot. He did not say it that nicely. 
But I think this may be an opportunity for us to use some of that 
common sense here, and I know he would approve, and at the end of the 
day, so would the voters of America.
  There are a number of States that have actually done what I am 
talking about. They have raised their user fees, and in some cases they 
have phased them in over a couple of years. It is interesting what 
happened in the elections last year where the State legislators had 
voted to do that, where they raised the user fees in order to would pay 
for roads, highways, and bridges. Interestingly enough, the legislators 
who voted for that--Republicans--didn't get thrown out of office. 
Ninety-five percent of them were reelected. They won their primaries, 
they won their general elections, and they were reelected. The 
Democrats who voted for those modest user fees increases didn't get 
thrown out of office either. In the States that raised the money 
locally to make the improvements that were needed in transportation, 90 
percent of the Democrats won their primaries and they won their general 
elections. They were reelected.
  People want us to make hard choices here. They don't want us to 
continue to kid them or fool them; they want us to do the real thing. 
They want us to work together. They want us to get things done. They 
want us to strengthen our economic recovery, and this is not a bad way 
to do that.
  With that, I see a great American from New Mexico has joined us. He 
is somebody who has worked with the Senator from Louisiana and the 
Senator who was just here before, Mr. Inhofe, the chairman of the EPW 
Committee, to try to find a good way for us to strengthen the economic 
recovery and at the same time to further clean our air, promote public 
health, and do good things for our public environment. I wish to say to 
Tom Udall how proud I am to be his colleague and how much I appreciate 
his leadership position on a very important issue, an environmental law 
that hasn't been updated in almost 40 years and, frankly, doesn't work. 
It has never worked, and we need to do something about it. Under his 
leadership, along with our other two colleagues, my hope is that we 
will. I look forward to what he has to say.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.


                                  TSCA

  Mr. UDALL. Madam President, thank you very much for the recognition.
  I wish to say to Senator Carper about TSCA that we have been working 
on--you were one of the early Senators who really cared about this 
issue. You were involved with it, and you helped it develop. Over time, 
we did a marvelous thing in terms of improving what Senator Frank 
Lautenberg had put on the table, bipartisan--he developed a lot of 
Republican and Democratic support--and you were a key player all the 
way through.
  So we know--we think at this point, you and I believe--and we do a 
lot of visiting around on both sides of the aisle--that this is ready 
to go. We now have I think 53 cosponsors. We are developing more 
cosponsors every day, and we don't think there is any real hostility 
toward the bill in terms of wanting amendments that aren't relevant. 
That is a key factor for us, and both sides need to focus on that.
  I would like to express my appreciation to you for what you have done 
on TSCA to help blend it into and make it into a bipartisan product. We 
have been trying--you know, it has been very busy with the Pope in 
town, with the sequester facing us and the shutdown and things such as 
that. We have been trying to get onto the floor to talk about this, and 
I think we are going to continue to do that in the future. But it is 
tremendously important that this gets some floor time now, and I know 
you have been working on that with me.
  Do you see this as a product that is better than current law? I mean, 
my sense is it is much better than the current law.
  Mr. CARPER. If I could respond to my friend, I have a friend who--
when you ask him ``How are you doing?'' he says ``Compared to what?'' 
And when we talk about the legislation initially introduced by Senator 
Lautenberg, Senator Vitter, and now coauthored by you, Senator Vitter, 
and Senator Inhofe, with input from a number of us, I always say: Well, 
compared to what?
  The idea here is to ensure that the EPA does its due diligence on 
toxic substances in this country. And there are thousands or tens of 
thousands of chemicals--you know better than I do--that exist in our 
environment--in our air, our ground, in water--tens of thousands. Are 
they all toxic? No. But my recollection--correct me if I am wrong in 
this, but I think that out of those thousands, tens of thousands, I 
believe the EPA in the last 38 years has actually done their due 
diligence on really fewer than 200, maybe even fewer than 10 when you 
get down to it, maybe even just 5.
  And you say: How long has this bill been around, this law been 
around? Thirty-eight years. And they have now finished work on five 
highly toxic substances? If we can't do better than that, we ought to 
quit, and this is not the time to quit.
  It is sort of like football. You take the kickoff, and you are in 
your own territory and you start marching down the field. You get into 
the other team's territory, get down to the 20-yard line, and you are 
in the red zone--not in the end zone, but you are in the red zone.
  I think with your leadership and that of our colleagues, we are in 
the red zone. We need to bring this onto the floor with 53 cosponsors 
equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. There is a lot of 
interest in the House, and I think there is support from the 
administration. We ought to get this done.
  Thank you.
  Mr. UDALL. Madam President, it bears repeating. Senator Carper is 
very modest, and he is a humble man, but he has done a lot to help 
bring us to this point. I think he is one of the Senators here who work 
the best across the aisle, and that is what has happened. We have had a 
lot of Senators who have wanted to work across the aisle on this bill. 
As Senator Carper knows, on the Environment and Public Works Committee, 
he was joined by Senator Booker, Senator Whitehouse, and Senator 
Merkley in terms of helping to mark up the bill and make it a better 
product.
  When the Senator talks about going across the finish line, with 53 
cosponsors about evenly divided between Democrat and Republican--I 
think it is almost exactly even--that sends a signal to our majority 
leader that this has tremendous support in both caucuses. I believe the 
Presiding Officer here is on the bill. So everybody standing on the 
Senate floor right now is on what is a good, bipartisan product.
  So we are going to work very carefully in the next couple of days to 
see that attention is brought to this, and hopefully we will have an 
opportunity to have a debate with amendments and then meet with the 
House. The House, as Senator Carper knows, has already passed a piece 
of legislation, I think 378 to 1--1 person in the House opposing it. So 
we have a bill that is alive and ready to go, and we need to get it out

[[Page S6930]]

of the Senate so we can conference it with the House and get it to the 
President's desk for his signature.
  I don't know if the Senator has any other thoughts on what is the 
best way to move forward. I mean, obviously we have to be bipartisan, 
but at this particular point, is it the Senator's sense we are ready to 
go, from everything he has seen from the Environment and Public Works 
Committee and these other Senators in various places? Is it ready to 
go?
  Mr. CARPER. If I may respond to my colleague's question, I don't care 
if the majority leader is a Republican or a Democrat--they are always 
trying to figure out how do we have time on the calendar to get this 
stuff done. They are always looking at ways. And one of the best ways 
to ensure legislation actually fits into a reasonably small period of 
time is to line up bipartisan support.
  I tell my colleague, I have been here in the Senate for a while, and 
this is almost a picture-book way to pass legislation: Work it up 
through the grassroots--Democratic Lautenberg and Republican Vitter and 
now with your role and others. There are not many bills in the Senate 
that have 26 or 27 Democrats and an equal number of Republicans.
  Has everything been worked out? No. Is there a need for amendments? 
Yes. Is there a need for a filibuster? No. We should bring it to the 
floor.
  I think we should go to the majority leader and visit with him early 
and often and continue to remind him. And those who believe in this, 
whether they happen to be on the environmental side or happen to be 
folks in the health care arena or maybe on the manufacturing side--and 
we thank those who have helped us draft this--we ask for them not to be 
silent about it but to urge not just us but the leadership to find 
time--a couple of days--to bring this bill to the floor and just get it 
done.
  With that, I say to my colleague and the Presiding Officer, if I put 
down my microphone and pack up my bag, I can have dinner with my wife 
in the First State of Delaware, and that is my goal. So I will bid you 
adieu.
  Mr. UDALL. I thank the Senator. I wish you Godspeed on that train 
headed to Wilmington because you have a wonderful wife.
  Mr. CARPER. Well, it is not the last train to Clarksville, but it is 
the next train to Wilmington.
  Mr. UDALL. And let me say again that not only on TSCA, as Senator 
Carper held, we were going to have speeches earlier in the week, but we 
were unable, with some of the scheduling issues and everything, to get 
down here and talk as a group. We had Senator Whitehouse, who was going 
to come down, and Senator Merkley was going to come down, as well as 
several of the key members of the Environment and Public Works 
Committee who played such a big role in terms of moving this bill 
forward.
  The person who really kicked this off was Senator Frank Lautenberg. 
What a star in terms of bipartisanship. I remember working with him 
when I was on the Environment and Public Works Committee for a long 
period of time on a very substantive piece of legislation. It was so 
good, we couldn't find much bipartisanship on it, and he understood 
that. It got out of the committee. It wasn't ready for prime time here 
on the floor, and so what we ended up doing was saying we need to go 
back to square one. Senator Lautenberg took that very seriously. He met 
with Senator Vitter. Senator Manchin played a role in that, and Senator 
Manchin was one of the ones who were going to come to the floor to 
talk, and he played a role in getting them together. As a result, a 
bipartisan bill came out in the last Congress. That has continued now 
for almost 2\1/2\ years, and it is a very good product.
  Madam President, the American people want a government that works, 
not one that shuts down to send a message. They want a Congress that 
moves the Nation forward, not one that grinds to a halt. They want a 
responsible budget that supports working families and strengthens our 
economy and creates jobs. These should be our priorities, not an attack 
on women's health care.
  I understand some people have strong views about a woman's right to 
choose that are different from mine. There are strong differences of 
opinion on many important issues in this Senate and in the Congress--
health care, energy, climate change, foreign policy. We could make a 
very long list.
  I read an insightful quote the other day from my good friend 
Republican Senator Lamar Alexander. Senator Alexander said: ``If we had 
a shutdown every time we had a dispute over a contentious issue, the 
government would never open.'' I think that is a very wise observation. 
We do have many differences, but, most importantly, we must have the 
broader national interest in mind.
  The clock is ticking. Funding runs out in just a few days. We need a 
clean continuing resolution, and we need it now--a temporary funding 
bill just to keep the lights on.
  Have we forgotten what happened 2 years ago? The people of my home 
State of New Mexico have not forgotten. We were badly hurt by the 
shutdown then, and we would be badly hurt by a shutdown now.
  In Los Alamos and Sandia, our two DOE labs are working on modernizing 
aging nuclear weapons systems to keep them safe and secure. It is 
foolish to cause unnecessary disruption to projects of this 
significance where there is no margin for error. Each of these labs 
employs thousands of people, many of them scientists at the top of 
their field. Why would we threaten their paychecks and the important 
national security work they are doing?
  We have three Air Force bases in New Mexico--Cannon, Kirtland, and 
Holloman--all serving a variety of unique national security missions 
for our country. White Sands Missile Range, unlike any facility in the 
country, provides critical research and testing for future 
technologies. Shutdowns and sequestration send a terrible message to 
the men and women at these facilities. It limits their effectiveness 
and harms the economies in nearby communities, such as Clovis, 
Albuquerque, Alamogordo, and Dona Ana County.
  Shutdowns mean lost jobs and lost revenue, all in the face of a 
struggling economy. We cannot afford another government shutdown, and 
we cannot afford a return to sequester cuts. These are bad choices. 
These are self-inflicted wounds.
  A clean CR will keep the government open, but we need a long-term 
cure. We need a bipartisan budget agreement--one that makes smart 
investments and meets the real needs of American families.
  The people of my State work hard. Many are still struggling. The 
economy of New Mexico has not yet recovered completely from the 
recession. We know New Mexicans want us to come together and push for a 
stronger recovery. New Mexicans are eager for solutions, and they are 
tired of these political games that threaten jobs and weaken our 
economy. Yet here we are once again facing a manufactured crisis.
  We all know that in fiscal year 2016, which begins next week, the 
Murray-Ryan budget deal will expire and we will be left with a return 
to sequestration.
  As ranking member of the interior subcommittee on the Committee on 
Appropriations, I would like to talk about that today because the 
impacts of the funding levels required by the Budget Control Act are 
clear and they are very destructive. Just look at the Senate Interior 
appropriations bill reported out of the committee in June. To stay 
within the spending limits we faced under sequestration, it slashes 
more than $2 billion from the President's budget request. That means it 
doesn't provide enough funding for basic water infrastructure or to 
protect our public lands or to fulfill our trust responsibility to 
American Indians and Alaska Natives.
  I know my chairman, Senator Murkowski, did the very best she could 
with the allocation she was given, but here is the reality: The Budget 
Control Act caps don't meet the needs of our Nation. They fail critical 
programs. They fail our communities in New Mexico and nationwide.
  Our Nation faces an infrastructure crisis. Yet the Senate bill cuts 
grants to States for water and sewer infrastructure by more than $500 
million below fiscal year 2015 levels.
  Actions have consequences, and here are the consequences of the 
Senate bill: Some 230 communities will not have their water projects 
funded, 14,000 construction jobs will not be created, and

[[Page S6931]]

$1 billion in matching and leveraged funds from State partners will be 
lost.
  The Senate bill also shortchanges the National Park Service with $318 
million less than the President requested. That means 1,000 fewer park 
rangers. That means $150 million less to maintain our national parks 
even though the Service will celebrate its centennial in 2016 and will 
host a record number of visitors at national parks nationwide.
  We have 15 national parks in New Mexico, including our newest 
national park, the Valles Caldera National Preserve. These parks and 
other public lands in my State are critical not only for conservation 
but for our economy. A shutdown would be a disaster; sequestration is 
just a slower moving disaster. Carlsbad Caverns National Park, 
Bandelier National Monument, Tent Rocks National Monument, Bosque Del 
Apache Wildlife Refuge, and many other sites are key economic assets. 
These sites help grow jobs, they help communities grow, and they are 
great conservation assets in communities across the country. We cannot 
keep asking them to do more and more on less. Yet, without a sensible 
budget, that is exactly where we are headed in New Mexico and across 
the Nation.
  The Senate Interior appropriations bill also cuts more than $300 
million from the President's request for the Indian Health Service. We 
have a solemn trust responsibility to Native Americans, and we are 
failing. Again, these are not just numbers. The impact is very real and 
very painful. It means the Indian Health Service will fund 20,000 fewer 
doctor visits in 2016 and nearly 1,000 fewer hospital stays. It means 
falling further behind. We need a responsible budget to meet our 
obligation to the Indian Health Service and other tribal programs, such 
as housing, school construction, Indian education. All of those are 
being hurt by this sequestration budget.

  We cannot continue being shortsighted. We can't keep shortchanging 
programs that make a real difference in the lives of all Americans. 
This includes art and cultural programs, the Land and Water 
Conservation Fund, and funding for our national forests and wildlife 
refuges. And the list goes on and on. The time is now, and we are 
running out of time. We are on the wrong train, on the wrong track, and 
going nowhere.
  Fortunately, there is a solution. Let's pass a clean CR, and let's 
work together to pass a budget that actually meets the needs of our 
Nation, with sensible funding levels for defense and nondefense 
programs alike.
  Before I wrap up my remarks, I wish to call attention to another 
deadline that is fast approaching. The authorization for the Land and 
Water Conservation Fund will expire on September 30 if this Congress 
doesn't act. Recently, I was one of 53 Members who called on the 
leadership of this Chamber to pass an extension of the law, and I want 
to reiterate that call today. The Land and Water Conservation Fund just 
celebrated its 50th birthday. It enjoys strong bipartisan support 
because the idea behind it is so simple and so powerful. When this 
Nation develops one natural resource--our oil and gas reserves--we 
invest some of the proceeds in other critical conservation priorities.
  For five decades now, the Land and Water Conservation Fund has 
protected our national parks, forests, and other public lands. It helps 
ensure hunting, fishing, and recreational access, and it improves and 
expands our local parks and recreation facilities. The program has been 
a tremendous success and has had a tremendous impact on my State, from 
urban refuges--such as the Valle de Oro--to wide open preserves such as 
the Valles Caldera. It provides crucial funding to preserve open 
spaces, strengthen the economy, and enhance our way of life.
  LWCF allows us to leverage today's resources to protect vital lands 
and waters for future generations. Allowing the law to expire breaks 
that compact. It doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't have to happen. 
We shouldn't let the Land and Water Conservation Fund expire, even for 
a single day. I call on this Chamber to act swiftly to permanently 
authorize this important program and ensure that it is fully funded.
  Madam President, 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. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sullivan). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, those of us who believe in protecting 
innocent and precious life may have lost a vote today, but we are 
steadily winning a larger argument--a critical argument that goes to 
the heart of who we want to be as a society. We can feel momentum for 
life on the rise just as we see extremism on the other side increasing. 
By placing their allegiance with the far left instead of women, 
Democrats are making a losing bet they will come to regret over the 
long term.
  Today, however, we must grapple with the challenges of the present. 
Democrats' insistence on blocking the strategy pursued today means we 
have to consider the options now before us. The reality is that the 
government will shut down next week if Congress does not act.
  The president of Right to Life said to those of us who believe in 
protecting life:

       There are two different roads we can take. One is to insist 
     that no more money go to Planned Parenthood and cause a 
     government shutdown (which won't result in actually defunding 
     Planned Parenthood). The other is to take a slightly longer-
     term approach, taking advantage of the fact that we have the 
     attention of the country as probably never before. . . . 
     Every well-informed pro-lifer wants to defund Planned 
     Parenthood. I want to defund Planned Parenthood. There are 
     wonderful pro-life men and women in Congress who want to 
     defund Planned Parenthood. And, certainly National Right to 
     Life wants to defund Planned Parenthood. The difference here 
     is in strategy.

  This is not the end of this debate or this discussion.
  I urge colleagues to join me in supporting the legislation I am about 
to file which would ensure that the government remains open.
  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. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

                          ____________________