[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 171 (Wednesday, November 30, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6606-S6609]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        21ST CENTURY CURES BILL

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, the second subject I came here to talk 
about is the 21st Century Cures Act and the mental health legislation, 
both of which are being debated in the U.S. House of Representatives. 
There will be a vote on that legislation this afternoon at about 5:30.
  This is legislation that has the strong support of the President of 
the United States, the active support of the Vice President of the 
United States. House Speaker Ryan has said that it is an important part 
of his agenda for health care for the future, and the majority leader, 
Senator McConnell, has said he believes it is the most important piece 
of legislation Congress could enact this year. One reason it has been 
successful is that it has been so bipartisan in its making, both in the 
House and in the Senate.
  Let me begin by thanking President Obama and Vice President Biden for 
their strong support and their interest. The President supports 
precision medicine--the idea of personalized medicine. For example, if 
the Senator from Pennsylvania and I each have the same disease, we 
might not take exactly the same medicine because our genetics might be 
different. We now know enough about it that if we can help doctors have 
that information, they can prescribe medicines that will help us live 
longer.
  The President and the executive office of the President have issued a 
Statement of Administration Policy that is one of the strongest I have 
seen. I hope it persuades both Republicans and Democrats to be 
supportive of this legislation.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of my 
remarks, the Statement of Administration Policy be printed in the 
Record.
  Mr. President, I mentioned the bipartisan nature of the legislation, 
and I will give two examples of that. My two colleagues, who are on the 
floor, will give the second example, which is the mental health bill.
  This has been complex, no doubt about it. Yesterday I spoke at length 
on the floor about that. I ask that my colleagues recognize the core of 
this legislation, which is the following: There were 19 different bills 
that went through the Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions 
Committee--22 Members of the Senate. After many hearings, the largest 
number of recorded votes against any of those 19 bills was 2. We have a 
very diverse committee. We have some of the most liberal Members and 
some of the most conservative Members, and we were able to work out 19 
bills that are the core of this legislation on a complex issue like 
this, and the largest number of votes recorded against any of the 19 
bills was 2.
  Secondly, every single one of those 19 bills but one had a Democratic 
sponsor and a Republican sponsor--usually more than one.
  In addition to that, there is money attached to the bill. That is 
very unusual because this is an authorization bill, but the House did 
it, and we did it as well. We recognized the importance of this to the 
American people, and we did it in a fiscally responsible way. It is 
$6.3 billion. It doesn't add a penny to the overall budget because for 
every increase in the discretionary budget, we reduced the same amount 
in the mandatory budget.
  What is the funding for? The National Institutes of Health will get 
$4.8 billion for research on urgent matters; $1.8 billion for the 
Cancer Moonshot that the Vice President is leading; $1.4 billion for 
precision medicine; $1.6 billion for the BRAIN Initiative, including 
Alzheimer's; and then $1 billion for State grants to help States fight 
the opioid abuse epidemic. That money has been accelerated so that all 
of this money is spent in the first 2 years and all of the Cancer 
Moonshot money is spent in the first 5 years. Speaker Ryan arranged for 
this money in the following way: While it has to be approved each year 
by the Appropriations Committee, it cannot be spent on anything other 
than what it has been designated for. So that $1 billion can be spent 
only on opioid abuse.
  I cannot imagine that the House of Representatives, if it 
overwhelmingly passes the 21st Century Cures bill in a vote, will not 
complete its promise to spend $1 billion on opioid abuse this year and 
next year. I cannot imagine the U.S. Senate, which I also expect will 
approve this by a large vote, doing the same. I also can't imagine 
Democrats and Republicans going home and having to explain why they 
would vote no on $1 billion worth of State grants for opioid money when 
all year we have been talking about what an urgent epidemic it is or 
having to explain why they voted no for $1.4 billion for Cancer 
Moonshot when so many advances are being made or voting against $1.4 
billion for precision medicine when the President so eloquently made 
the case of why it is important or $1.6 billion for the BRAIN 
Initiative at a time when Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National 
Institutes of Health, tells us that we are close to identifying 
Alzheimer's before there are symptoms and we could have the medicine 
that will permit us to retard its progression. Think of the grief that 
will save millions of families. Think of the billions of dollars that 
will save for our country.
  This bill has had the participation of dozens of Members of the U.S. 
Senate but none more effective and important than the Senator from 
Louisiana, Mr. Cassidy, and the Senator from Connecticut, Chris Murphy. 
Even though they are both relatively new to the Senate, they have taken 
the mental health bill and navigated landmines as

[[Page S6607]]

if they have been here 25 years. They have worked across the aisle with 
each other, and they have worked with Democrats and Republicans in the 
House of Representatives to produce a bill that passed overwhelmingly 
in the House and will be added to the bill today by amendment. It has 
also been approved by our Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions 
Committee here, and I thought it would be helpful today--and an example 
of the bipartisan support for the bill--to ask Senator Cassidy and 
Senator Murphy to describe the mental health bill.
  Senator McConnell says the 21st Century Cures bill is the most 
important piece of legislation that Congress will enact and pass this 
year. I believe that the mental health bill, which has three parts that 
we will enact this year--a part from our committee and part from 
judiciary--is the most significant piece of mental health legislation 
in terms of reforms of programs that the Congress will have passed in 
more than a decade.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

         Executive Office of the President, Office of Management 
           and Budget,
                                Washington, DC, November 29, 2016.

                   Statement of Administration Policy


House Amendment to the Senate Amendment to H.R. 34--21st Century Cures 
                                  Act

       The Administration strongly supports passage of the 
     bipartisan House Amendment to the Senate Amendment to H.R. 
     34, the 21st Century Cures Act, which dedicates more than $6 
     billion to implement key priorities such as the President's 
     proposal to combat the heroin and prescription opioid 
     epidemic; the Vice President's Cancer Moonshot; and the 
     President's signature biomedical research initiatives, the 
     Precision Medicine and Brain Research through Advancing 
     Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiatives. It also 
     takes important steps to improve mental health, including 
     provisions that build on the work of the President's Mental 
     Health and Substance Use Disorder Parity Task Force, and 
     includes policies to further modernize the drug approval 
     process.
       The legislation includes $1 billion over two years, 
     including $500 million in Fiscal Year 2017, to combat the 
     prescription opioid and heroin epidemic, consistent with the 
     President's budget request. More Americans now die every year 
     from drug overdoses than they do in motor vehicle crashes, 
     and the majority involve opioids. The opioid epidemic is 
     devastating families and communities and straining the 
     capacity of law enforcement and the healthcare system. The 
     resources included in the bill will allow states to expand 
     access to treatment to help individuals seeking help to find 
     it and to start the road to recovery, with preference given 
     to states with an incidence or prevalence of opioid use 
     disorders that is substantially higher relative to other 
     states.
       The Administration is committed to taking immediate action 
     to lay the groundwork to ensure that the funds in the bill 
     would be disbursed quickly and effectively so we can begin to 
     address these important public health challenges.
       The bill also includes $1.8 billion, including $1 billion 
     over the next three years, to support the Vice President's 
     Cancer Moonshot. The Moonshot aims to accelerate research 
     efforts and make new therapies available to more patients, 
     while also improving our ability to prevent cancer and detect 
     it at an early stage. The resources in this legislation will 
     support investment in promising new therapies like cancer 
     immunotherapy, new prevention tools, cancer vaccine 
     development, novel early detection tools, and pediatric 
     cancer interventions. As the Vice President and scientific 
     experts have said, we are at an inflection point in cancer 
     research and this investment could help seize this 
     opportunity.
       The legislation also dedicates support for other key 
     research initiatives. In 2013, the President launched the 
     BRAIN Initiative with the goal of helping researchers find 
     new ways to treat, cure, and prevent brain disorders, such as 
     Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury. In 
     2015, he launched the Precision Medicine Initiative to 
     pioneer a new model of patient-powered research that promises 
     to accelerate biomedical discoveries and provide clinicians 
     with new tools, knowledge, and therapies to select which 
     treatments will work best for which patients. The bill 
     creates dedicated funding of $1.5 billion for the BRAIN 
     Initiative and $1.4 billion for the Precision Medicine 
     Initiative to continue these signature Presidential 
     Initiatives, which have broad bipartisan support, over the 
     next decade.
       The legislation also includes bipartisan mental health 
     reforms. These include a renewed emphasis on evidence-based 
     strategies for treating serious mental illness, improved 
     coordination between primary care and behavioral health 
     services, reauthorization of important programs focused on 
     suicide prevention and other prevention services, and mental 
     health and substance use disorder parity provisions that 
     build on the work of the President's Mental Health and 
     Substance Use Disorder Parity Task Force.
       In addition, the bill takes multiple steps to further the 
     progress made in this Administration in improving the drug 
     development process. It enhances the ongoing efforts to 
     better incorporate patients' voices into the Food and Drug 
     Administration's (FDA) decision-making processes; supports 
     FDA's efforts to modernize clinical trial design; and 
     improves FDA's ability to hire and retain scientific experts. 
     The legislation includes strong protections for individuals' 
     health data, as well as provisions preventing unnecessary 
     restrictions on the sharing of health information technology 
     data with patients and providers.
       There are also provisions in the bill that raise concerns, 
     but that have been modified from previous versions to help 
     address concerns, such as provisions that allow for the 
     marketing of drugs to payors for off-label uses. In addition, 
     a number of effective dates will be challenging to meet, 
     especially without additional administrative funding. The 
     requirement to sell additional inventory from the Strategic 
     Petroleum Reserve, when added to the sale requirements of the 
     Bipartisan Budget Act and the FAST Act, continues a bad 
     precedent of selling off longer term energy security assets 
     to satisfy near term budget scoring needs.
       That said, this legislation offers advances in health that 
     far outweigh these concerns. As such, the Administration 
     strongly supports passage of the House Amendment to the 
     Senate Amendment to H.R. 34, the 21st Century Cures Act.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.
  Mr. CASSIDY. Mr. President, I thank Senator Alexander for yielding 
and for his leadership, and I thank Senator Murray for her leadership. 
I thank Senator Murphy for his cooperation and collaboration in passing 
this legislation.
  I will speak to mental health as Senator, a doctor, a family member, 
and as a friend of those with mental illness. Because of these 
different hats, passing comprehensive mental health reform has been a 
priority since day one. Senator Chris Murphy and I introduced the 
Mental Health Reform Act in 2015, shortly after arriving in the Senate. 
Since then, Senators Alexander and ranking member Murray have made 
mental health reform a priority, and I thank them once more for their 
vital work to include the provisions the four of us introduced in the 
Mental Health Reform Act of 2016 in the 21st Century Cures Act.
  In some way, everyone is affected by serious mental illness. This is 
not a partisan issue. It crosses any division of age, gender, 
demographics, and certainly political party. If I go to a townhall 
meeting in Louisiana in an area that is not so wealthy and speak of the 
need to address mental health, heads nod yes. If I go to another 
townhall meeting in another area that is very wealthy and mention the 
need to address mental health, all heads nod yes. Everyone nods their 
head yes because mental health is an issue in the back of everyone's 
mind.
  Earlier I mentioned that everyone has a family member or friend who 
has a serious mental illness--maybe not, but it might be that person 
whom you went to high school with and her life turned out far 
differently. Perhaps her marriage broke up, perhaps her children are in 
foster care, or perhaps she is homeless. If you think--not even hard--
that person will come to your mind. The largest problem affecting 
Americans with serious mental illness is lack of access to care.
  Just a few weeks ago, I spoke to a neuropsychologist in Baton Rouge, 
Dr. Paul Dammers. He said he sees 15 to 20 patients a day and is booked 
up to 6 months in advance. If your loved one is having a mental health 
crisis, they should not have to wait 6 months to receive treatment. He 
stressed the significance of the barrier to treatment posed by the 
shortage of mental health professionals. Thank God for Dr. Dammers and 
for all the work he and the other mental health specialists do to help 
those with mental illness return to wholeness, but they need help. 
Access delayed is access denied, and access is hampered by a shortage 
of mental health providers and too few beds for those with serious 
mental illness who need to be hospitalized. Too often patients cannot 
get the care they need, and too often they have a long delay between 
diagnosis and treatment. Without appropriate treatment options, 
prisons, jails, and emergency rooms become the de facto mental 
facility.
  Sheriff Greg Champagne from St. Charles Parish, LA, and past 
President of the National Sheriffs' Association quotes a statistic that 
sheriffs are the No. 1 providers of mental health services in any 
parish or county in the

[[Page S6608]]

country. Incarceration has become our top mental health treatment 
strategy. More than three times as many mentally ill are housed at any 
one time in prisons and jails than being treated in hospitals.

  Now, it is clear it is time to fix our broken mental health care 
system. The 21st Century Cures Act provides incentives to build an 
adequate and skilled mental health workforce to expand access to mental 
health care, providing quick and effective diagnosis and treatment. Our 
goal is that the person who has her first psychotic episode when she is 
18 will be restored to wholeness so that when she is 50, she looks back 
upon that as a distant memory but not as a life-defining event.
  This bill also addresses privacy issues that keep some patients from 
receiving the best treatment possible. As an effect of the government 
regulation HIPAA--an important law protecting patient privacy--
nonetheless, when it comes to a patient with mental illness as an 
adult, the doctor feels as if she or he is not allowed to share vital 
information for their care with a third party, even if that third party 
is their caregiver. A woman I went to high school with has an adult son 
with serious mental illness, and she relates that she is the one who 
brings him to the hospital and she is the one who gives him his 
medicines. Yet, when he is discharged, she is not told what medicines 
he takes. She is not told when he takes them, and she is not told when 
to bring him for follow up.
  Privacy is important, but when government regulation gets in the way 
of a doctor and a patient and a family trying to make sure their loved 
one is cared for, something needs to change.
  This legislation also provides incentives to build an adequate and 
skilled mental health workforce but also to train that workforce to 
better understand these rules of disclosing patient information. This 
allows doctors to better serve their patients and ensure they are 
getting the proper care they need. It also--again, as a physician, this 
next provision just matters so much to me--promotes access to services 
through the integration of primary and behavioral health. Right now, if 
someone with a serious mental illness goes to see their psychiatrist 
and the psychiatrist notes that their hypertension is out of control 
and she wants to send the patient down the hallway to see her 
colleague, the family practitioner, the Federal program won't pay for 
that. She refers the patient to the emergency room instead. Conversely, 
the family practitioner treating the hypertension knows that the 
patient is psychotic. They are not allowed to send the patient down to 
the psychiatrist on the same day.
  Now, in private insurance programs, this is not an issue. It has only 
been an issue in Medicaid. This law begins to change that. I will note 
that patients with psychiatric illness die 20 years younger than do 
patients who have a physical illness but do not have a psychiatric 
illness. We must do better by those with serious mental illness.
  Another thing this bill does is to establish a grant program focused 
on intensive early intervention for children who demonstrate the first 
signs that may evolve into serious mental illness later in life. Drs. 
Howard Osofsky and Joy Osofsky of the Health Science Center in New 
Orleans did research after Hurricane Katrina and found that you can 
detect from ages 0 to 3 evidence of a child who may have a problem with 
mental illness later in life. This bill provides grants for early 
intervention for the infants and children, which will address the 
effects of trauma and the adverse experiences that up to 10 to 15 
percent of children under the age of 5 have. A second grant program 
supports pediatricians consulting with mental health teams. This is 
modeled after successful programs in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
  This legislation does many important things to change how we treat 
mental illness. By expanding access to mental health resources, 
clarifying the rules on disclosure of patient information with family 
caretakers, and integrating primary and behavioral health, the 21st 
Century Cures Act will begin to fix our broken mental health system and 
prevent more people affected by mental illness from being denied the 
care they need.
  Thank you, and I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I wish to thank Senator Cassidy and 
Senator Alexander for being such amazing partners in bringing this 
legislation from its introduction last summer to the floor of the House 
and soon to the floor of the Senate. I will say a little bit more about 
them and their teams, but it really has been a pleasure. I have learned 
a lot, especially from Senator Alexander, about how to overcome some 
tough obstacles and pitfalls while bringing something this big and this 
meaningful through the process.
  I accept the premise that there is something fundamentally broken 
about the way things work here in Washington, DC. Cable news fame and 
getting ready for the next election all matter way too much here, and 
it means that there are a lot of big issues, like immigration reform 
and entitlement reform and infrastructure, that don't get done because 
politics get in the way. But there are, frankly, a lot more 
breakthroughs that happen here than most Americans know about, and a 
lot of them happen on the HELP Committee. There are, more often than 
one would think, moments where politics get put to the side or 
temporarily squeezed out of the way and something really important 
happens here. This is one of those moments.
  Senator Cassidy really explained the contours of this bill very well. 
So I want to provide just a little bit of the context for it. I have 
been working on this issue of mental health since I was 25 years old, 
in the Connecticut State legislature, and I ran for Congress in part 
because I knew that I couldn't fix what was broken in Connecticut's 
mental health system without addressing the myriad of Federal funding 
sources, laws, and regulations that create today what is kind of 
currently a dystopian web of uncoordinated, misaligned behavioral 
health care in this country.
  The consequences of this failed health care system are all around us, 
and they are just increasingly impossible to ignore. Senator Cassidy 
spoke about some of them. But it is personal because every single one 
of us knows someone in our family or our next door neighbor who 
suffered from a serious mental illness and failed to get the care they 
need. All of us recognize that this suicide crisis is spiraling out of 
control. We have seen a 25-percent increase in suicides in just the 
last 15 years. When we visit our hospitals, no matter what State we are 
in, we all notice that one of the major building campaigns that is 
happening is additions to the emergency departments to take care of 
this tsunami of mentally ill patients who are walking into these ERs 
because they have absolutely nowhere else to go.
  Lastly, for as much back-patting as we have done for ourselves in the 
last 50 years because of our decision to close mental institutions all 
across the country, we have essentially just recreated these 
institutions all over again. They are now called prisons. A recent 
article in the Boston Globe by the now famous Spotlight investigative 
team found that prisoners in that State essentially had to self-
mutilate themselves in prison in order to get any mental health care. 
The Spotlight team concluded that ``there may be no worse place for 
mentally ill people to receive care than prisons.'' Yet we have 
essentially decided in this country to exchange the old insane asylums 
for new ones.
  Mainly, though, I stay awake thinking about a meeting that I had 
earlier this year with moms--with a bunch of mothers in West Hartford, 
CT. These were moms that were at their wit's end. They were fairly 
affluent. They were well educated. They had learned the ins and outs of 
this broken system. Yet they still had no answers about what to do with 
their deeply mentally ill children. Many of them were adults. So, 
technically, they were not under the supervision of their parents any 
longer. They were petrified--petrified that their kids would end up in 
those prisons or, worse, that they would end up dead because there was 
no way for them to find proper care for their children's mental 
illness. These moms told the story dozens of times, courageously so. 
They wept and they trembled with me as they were telling these horror 
stories.
  Yet, of course, for all of the disaster that exists in our under-
resourced, uncoordinated behavioral health system,

[[Page S6609]]

there is lots of hope. Why? Because recovery is possible. Check that, 
actually. It is not possible, it is actually probable, if you can find 
the right therapy, the right set of supports, and perhaps the right set 
of medications needed.
  Over the last 20 years of public service, I have met plenty of people 
who have beaten this disease, who have trained their minds to work 
differently, and who are leading full and happy lives. The simple 
problem is that the resources here are just too far out of reach and 
sometimes nonexistent for millions of constituents living with mental 
illness.
  So that brings us to this moment and how this place actually does 
work for good sometimes. Two years ago, I approached Senator Cassidy 
right here on this very floor, just days after his swearing in, and I 
told him that I had heard that when he was a House Member, he would 
come to hearings on mental illness in the House with a dog-eared, 
wornout copy of a book called ``Crazy'' by Pete Early. I don't agree 
with everything in that book, but it is a story of a father who had the 
same story to tell as all of those moms in West Hartford. I asked Bill 
if his enthusiasm for this book meant that he was interested in working 
on mental health policy, and he said: Absolutely. For the next 6 
months, he and I worked together to meet with everybody we could find, 
both nationally and in our States, who could tell us what was wrong 
with our mental health system, and we decided to do something big.
  A lot of us work with Members of the other party on small bills. They 
are meaningful pieces of legislation, but they are kind of one-offs. 
They fix one problem here or there. We decided to write a big, sweeping 
bill--one that would tackle as many problems in the behavioral health 
system as we could all at once. We had a head start because of our 
friend in the House of Representatives, Representative Tim Murphy, had 
already introduced a comprehensive reform bill. So in August of that 
year, after hundreds of these meetings and forums, we introduced our 
own version of Tim Murphy's bill--the Mental Health Reform Act. Today, 
about 16 months after introduction, the House is going to pass this 
bill as a major component of the Cures package, as Senator Alexander 
said. My hope is that we will have a bipartisan vote here some time 
very soon.
  Senator Cassidy and I will be the first to admit that it doesn't come 
close to solving all the problems that people with mental illness 
confront. Most importantly, it doesn't include new Medicaid or Medicare 
money to address some of these huge shortages that patients and 
families face. But it does require insurance companies to stop 
discriminating against people with mental illness by rejecting claims 
for mental health at a rate that is much higher than they do for 
physical health. This strengthening of our Nation's mental health 
parity law is probably the bill's most important provision in my mind. 
I am convinced it is going to result in hundreds of millions of dollars 
in new care for people with mental illness. I wish to thank Senator 
Alexander and Senator Murray for supporting this provision, even though 
it was at times controversial.
  The bill also elevates the place of mental illness within the 
Department of Health and Human Services by creating a new assistant 
secretary who is going to oversee all of this funding that often is 
done in a really uncoordinated way. It creates new programming to 
assist young children who show the first signs of mental illness. We 
get at it early. It reauthorizes important suicide prevention programs 
that have been shown to work, and it clarifies that parents don't need 
to be totally cut out of their adult child's care--that doctors can 
share information with parents if it is in the best interests of the 
patient to do so.
  Frankly, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Senator Cassidy went 
much deeper. There are a lot of other provisions in this bill that will 
make it less likely that people with mental illness face continued 
barriers to care.
  Over the past 2 years, this bill has faced a lot of uncertain 
moments, and that is where Senators Alexander and Murray come in. They 
have really helped us navigate through some tough waters. I give a lot 
of credit as well to Senator Cornyn. Senator Franken contributed a big 
section of this bill that reforms the way the mentally ill are treated 
in the criminal justice system. Senator Cornyn, in particular, helped 
us overcome a major hurdle in this bill this fall.
  Finally, I just want to thank all of the staff people who have worked 
on this. I want to thank Brenda Destro in Senator Cassidy's office. I 
want to thank Mary Sumpter Lapinski and Laura Pence in Senator 
Alexander's office; Evan Schatz, Nick Bath, and Colin Goldfinch in 
Senator Murray's office. First and foremost, I want to thank Joe Dunn 
in my office, who in many ways is the parent of this bill from 
beginning to end, and all the people in our office who worked 
underneath him.
  When and if the Senate approves this bill and the President signs it 
into law, maybe the most important thing that will happen here is that 
we will show that this place can work together to address a big problem 
that really has no partisanship to it. Mental illness doesn't care if 
you are a Republican or if you are a Democrat. Mental illness doesn't 
care if you voted for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, and it doesn't 
care if you think you are not the kind of person who could suffer from 
mental illness. It doesn't discriminate. Yet we do. We continue to push 
those with mental illness into the shadows. Our unwillingness to fund 
the better coordinated care system that we know we need is a clear 
message to these patients that they are something less inside our 
health care system.
  That begins to change with the passage of this legislation. I think, 
accurately described by Senator Alexander, it is probably the most 
significant piece of mental health legislation we have passed in over a 
decade. I can say that maybe there is nothing I have worked on in my 20 
years of elected office of which I am more proud. I commend this bill 
to all of my colleagues.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, once again, I want to thank Senator 
Murphy and Senator Cassidy for their exceptional passion, leadership, 
and professionalism on a big issue. We all will have a chance to 
support their work when the bill comes over from the House on Monday as 
a part of the 21st Century Cures legislation.
  I want to reiterate what Senator Murphy said about Mr. Cornyn, the 
Senator from Texas. He played a key role in developing parts of the 
legislation that came through the Judiciary Committee and he, like 
Senator Murphy and Senator Cassidy, had to negotiate a few landmines in 
order for the bill to be considered and included as it has been. I want 
to pay my respects to Senator Cornyn and thank him for his leadership 
on the bill.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.

                          ____________________