[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 173 (Tuesday, December 1, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8197-S8198]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF THE NEW SENATE

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, on another matter, the new Republican 
Senate has been working hard to get Congress back to work over the past 
year. We have obviously had a lot of success. As I noted yesterday, the 
new Republican Senate will soon pass two very significant bipartisan 
bills for a second and final time: the bipartisan multiyear highway 
bill and the bipartisan replacement for No Child Left Behind. We will 
send them to the President for his signature.
  These are the latest examples of a new Congress that is back to work 
on behalf of the American people. They are hardly the only examples we 
will be talking about. Take another important issue that languished for 
too long but passed the new Senate: cyber security. By a vote of 74 to 
21, we ended years of Senate inaction on this issue by passing an 
important bipartisan cyber security bill that even the White House has 
endorsed. That bill was the product of a lot of hard work by the top 
Republican and the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. I am 
glad that the new, more open, and more inclusive Republican Senate made 
their cooperation possible because even though the old forces of 
gridlock tried to trip that bill up several times along the way, we 
kept moving forward, and we always knew we were doing the right thing 
for the American people.

[[Page S8198]]

  My hope is that we can ultimately get this bill into conference and 
send it to the President closer to its current form because the 
challenges posed by cyber attacks are real and they are growing. A 
cyber attack can be a deeply invasive attack on personal privacy. The 
voluntary information sharing provisions in the bill we passed are key 
to defeating cyber attacks and protecting the personal information of 
the people we represent.

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