[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 175 (Tuesday, December 6, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6730-S6754]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        21ST CENTURY CURES BILL

  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, today I wish to support the 21st Century 
Cures Act, the bill currently before us that, if all goes well, will be 
approved by the Senate very shortly.
  This important legislation represents the hard work of Members from 
both parties and from both sides of the Capitol. It has support across 
the economic and ideological spectrum and promises to do quite a bit of 
good for a number of people.
  Put simply--or as simply as one can for a measure of this size--the 
21st Century Cures Act represents a significant investment in improving 
our ability to discover and develop new treatments and medicines and 
ensure that patients have access to them.
  To accomplish this goal, this legislation, among many other things, 
provides a much-needed expansion of funding for the National Institutes 
of Health, improvements to the approval process at the Food and Drug 
Administration, resources to respond to the growing opioid abuse 
crisis, and an updated government framework for addressing mental 
health needs.
  Thanks to this bill, universities across Utah will be able to access 
the funding streams from the Precision Medicine Initiative, the BRAIN 
Initiative, and the Cancer Moonshot. Utah is known for its ability to 
leverage significant public-private partnerships to work towards 
cutting-edge health and innovation. I am proud to represent a State 
where complex technologies are being utilized to help patients find the 
best treatments and avoid interventions that would be costly, invasive, 
and ineffective.
  Over the past several months, I have had several meaningful 
experiences working to improve health care for the people of Utah and 
for all Americans. For example, I had the pleasure of welcoming Vice 
President Biden to the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Utah as part of his 
Cancer Research Center tour.
  The Vice President and I had an insightful discussion about a number 
of promising therapies being developed in Utah. This legislation will 
provide an infusion of funding for these types of

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projects that will improve lives for individuals and families across 
our country and around the world.
  Among the many noteworthy provisions in this bill are several items 
advocated by members of the Senate Finance Committee, which I chair. 
Throughout the 114th Congress, the Finance Committee has worked 
tirelessly to advance a number of bipartisan legislative efforts and 
address the concerns of our Members' constituents.
  We have reported more bills out of the committee in this Congress 
than really in any other Congress in modern history, all of them--every 
single one--with bipartisan support. The long list includes bills in 
virtually every area of the Finance Committee's jurisdiction, including 
health care policy.
  Some of these priorities--and many others--have been included in the 
Cures Act.
  All told, the current version of the bill includes at least 22 
separate provisions that reflect the hard work of Finance Committee 
members. These include modifications and updates to Medicare, Medicaid, 
and SCHIP, along with other important changes to the law.
  I want to collectively thank the members of the Finance Committee for 
the work they have done on these measures and on everything else we 
have been able to accomplish over the last two years.
  A number of measures that I personally worked on as a member of the 
Senate HELP Committee have also been included in the bill. All told, 
about 37 provisions in this bill are ones that I either drafted or 
helped draft at some point during my years in the Senate.
  For now, I want to focus on my work to help those in the rare disease 
community. Millions of Americans suffer from unexplainable illnesses 
that leave them feeling abandoned and alone. And, if we do not address 
the dry pipeline for drugs that end up treating just a few hundred 
patients, we are making a national decision that these people do not 
matter.
  None of us should accept that.
  To address these concerns, I worked to include specific measures in 
the Cures Act that improve pediatric care and expedite the drug 
approval process for rare diseases, ensuring that thousands of patients 
get the treatments they need when they need them.
  With this bill, Congress will make significant steps in helping 
Americans with rare diseases, but our work will be far from over. 
Families affected by rare diseases have united around the country to 
speak with a growing voice, and we need to do all we can to make sure 
their pleas do not fall on deaf ears.
  As you can see, there are a number of good things to say about the 
21st Century Cures Act. However, I don't want to leave the impression 
that the bill is perfect from my point of view. While I support the 
bill and plan to vote in favor of passage, I do want to make note of 
what are, in my view, some of the bill's shortcomings.
  As this legislation was being developed, I noted that I had concerns 
with some of the pay-fors that were being thrown around. I have always 
supported the goals of this legislation and believed it was important 
that we try to move it forward. However, I do not believe we should be 
setting undesirable precedents when it comes to funding these types of 
endeavors.
  Early on in this process, some publicly expressed their belief that 
the spending in this bill could be paid for by making alterations to 
federal health entitlement programs, namely Medicare and Medicaid.
  I will spare my colleagues a lecture on the budget process today. 
Instead, I will just note that, while there are a number of areas where 
we can responsibly find savings in these programs, we have almost 
always tried to avoid diverting funds from these programs--which 
constitute mandatory spending--to pay for discretionary spending 
programs.
  And, put simply, I believe we need to continue following what has 
generally been a brightline rule in that regard. If we start casually 
commingling mandatory and discretionary funds, we run the risk of 
greatly expanding discretionary spending programs while simultaneously 
weakening our entitlement programs that are already on the brink of 
fiscal crisis.
  Fortunately, the main proponents of the Cures Act have been willing 
to work with me, and they have scaled back their initial efforts to use 
the mandatory spending sources to pay for the bill. While those pay-
fors haven't been entirely purged from the bill, I do not intend to 
vote against the legislation on that basis.
  That said, I do want to make clear that this shouldn't become a 
legislative template or be considered a precedent for how Congress will 
pay for new spending in the future. And, as the chairman of the 
committee that has jurisdiction over most of the relevant mandatory 
spending programs, I intend to do all I can to make sure we avoid this 
practice going forward.
  In addition, I want to say that I was disappointed that the bill 
before us does not include provisions from the Family First Prevention 
Services Act, which Senator Wyden and I, along with our counterparts in 
the House, introduced earlier this year.
  This is commonsense legislation that, in my view, would be a good fit 
for this vehicle. It has broad support from Members of both parties and 
in both Chambers, and we all worked to get it included in this package. 
Unfortunately, we weren't able to complete this task. So all of us will 
have to keep looking for any reasonable vehicle or opportunity to move 
this important bill in the near future.
  Still, even with these concerns I have about this final version of 
the 21st Century Cures Act, I am strongly supportive of the bill, and I 
want to commend those who worked so hard to get it this far, including 
Chairmen Brady and Upton and Speaker Ryan over in the House, and 
Chairman Alexander, Leader McConnell, and his leadership team here in 
the Senate.
  They have all done good work, and I congratulate them on this 
success.
  Now, we just have to pass the bill.
  Once again, I intend to vote in favor of the 21st Century Cures Act, 
and I urge my colleagues to do the same.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
  Ms. STABENOW. Mr. President, first, we got a little out of order on 
the speaking schedule as to how it should have started this afternoon.
  I ask unanimous consent that Senator Nelson go immediately after me. 
He has been courteous enough to allow me to speak, and I ask unanimous 
consent that he speak after I am done speaking.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Ms. STABENOW. Mr. President, I wish to congratulate everyone who has 
worked on the Cures bill. There are many areas that I have concerns 
about, and there are many positive things. I am looking forward to 
coming back as well and working with colleagues on how we complete the 
job on mental health by providing full funding for community mental 
health care across the country, which is not in the bill. But there are 
some positive steps forward on health care.


                                Medicare

  I think it is very important, as we are coming to the end of this 
session in the next week or two, that we talk about the fact that when 
we come back, there will be incredibly important debates on health 
care, and one of them is what will happen to Medicare for tens of 
millions of seniors and people with disabilities going forward in our 
country. I want to take a moment to speak to that.
  First of all, Medicare and Social Security are great American success 
stories. Those two programs have lifted a generation of seniors out of 
poverty and created a quality of life for them and a guarantee, after 
paying in all their lives, that health care and some basic economic 
security will be there.
  I am particularly concerned right now, though, about the comments we 
are hearing about proposals to fundamentally change Medicare and 
undermine Medicare. We are hearing every day now that Medicare, as we 
know it, is in jeopardy of being dismantled, taking away the security 
and the peace of mind of tens of millions of Americans and their 
families across the country who are currently on Medicare--the health 
care guarantee of Medicare--or those who care for others or those who 
within the next few years will be on Medicare or who are concerned 
about their children.
  Why are we expressing this now? First of all, the Speaker of the 
House said on Sunday that Medicare is burning through the budget. He 
has consistently said Medicare is on the verge of

[[Page S6732]]

bankruptcy, which is not true. It appears the goal is to scare people 
by telling us Medicare will not be there for our children. It will not 
be there only if we don't keep our commitments to Medicare and the 
people of this country.
  I think I have heard almost every single day since the 1980s that if 
we want to save Medicare, we have to destroy it as a guaranteed health 
care system somehow. Now, we know there was a huge difference of 
opinion and a partisan split back when Medicare was created between 
Democrats and Republicans, and I am proud as a Democrat that we created 
Medicare and have been able to expand prescription drug coverage and 
other quality measures and other coverage that is so critical, but it 
seems like we are constantly going back in some way redebating whether 
Medicare should exist as we know it. So we hear that to save Medicare, 
we have to destroy it as a guaranteed health care system--which I 
completely reject, as do my Democratic colleagues.
  We are hearing we have to cut Medicare, we have to change it from a 
guarantee into a ``maybe.'' We also hear all kinds of different names 
used, whether it is a voucher system, where you get a certain amount of 
money in a voucher and you go to the private sector and try to buy 
coverage, and whatever is not covered by the voucher, you have to make 
up the difference. I would remind people that Medicare came into being 
because the private sector was not providing affordable health care for 
seniors and people with disabilities so we have absolutely no reason to 
believe that would not be the case today.
  We hear about eligibility changes, premium support, means testing, 
and all kinds of other things that go to the very essence of what 
Medicare is all about. Again, Medicare is a great American success 
story that Americans of all ages want to see continue and be expanded 
upon. Regardless of what kinds of names are used, the end result is 
still the same. These plans are plans to take away the benefits 
Americans have worked their entire lives for, a system they pay into 
that lets them know that as we all get older, we will have the health 
care we need for ourselves and our families.
  What is also not mentioned is the fact that Medicare is solvent 
through 2028, thanks to the Affordable Care Act which extended the 
fiscal sovereignty of Medicare. The Affordable Care Act also closed the 
gap in coverage--what has been called the doughnut hole--for 
prescription drug coverage. By the way, if the ACA is repealed, there 
will be another hole in that coverage and seniors' Medicare 
prescription drug costs are going to go back up. We have seen that 
Medicare, in fact, is solvent to 2028. It now actually costs less for a 
prescription drug today than it used to cost, and we are seeing quality 
efforts going on every day, preventive efforts, to continue to extend 
sovereignty and bring down costs.
  I am all for improving Medicare. I have supported efforts to bring 
additional accountability and credibility into Medicare. We will 
continue to do that. We want to make sure it continues to be more and 
more effective. We want to strengthen Medicare. Cutting it, taking it 
from a guarantee to a maybe, is not the way to do that. In fact, it is 
not--despite the Speaker's own hashtag--a better way. It is not a 
better way.
  Why am I concerned at this point? Why do we think Republicans are 
serious about trying to undermine Medicare as well as Medicaid, of 
which 80 percent of the spending goes to long-term care for senior 
citizens? There are two things that are deeply concerning to me. First, 
in every House Republican budget since 2011, everyone has effectively 
turned Medicare into a voucher for people eligible after 2023, 6 years 
from now. It would raise the costs. It would take away the certainty 
and the guarantee of Medicare. It would reopen the gap in prescription 
drug coverage. For millions of people across Michigan and across 
America, you don't need to make health care harder. It needs to be 
easier.
  In addition to comments from the Speaker of the House about changing 
Medicare and making it a priority in the budget, creating payoffs in 
the system, taking away the universal guarantee, we now have the 
President-elect nominating Dr. Tom Price, a current House Member, for 
Secretary of Health and Human Services, who has supported that budget 
privatizing Medicare, block granting, and cutting Medicaid and long-
term care for seniors in nursing homes and so on. We are told by the 
nominee that he expects Republicans in Congress to move quickly on this 
legislation in the new year, even though President-Elect Donald Trump 
promised throughout his campaign that Medicare would be safe on his 
watch. He made that promise to the people I represent--the people we 
all represent--and I can assure you, I am going to be doing everything 
possible to make sure that promise is kept.
  The only thing gutting Medicare is going to do is create chaos for 
tens of millions of seniors, people with disabilities, and for the 
health care system in general. Seniors and people with disabilities--
all Americans--deserve better than this. As we enter the new year, 
Democrats will fight tooth and nail to protect Medicare, to make sure 
Medicaid and long-term care is available for our seniors, to make sure 
the health care guarantee that has been there for a generation of 
retirees and people with disabilities is continued. Medicare is a great 
American success story, and we are ready to do everything possible to 
protect it and strengthen it as a guarantee for Americans in the 
future.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida.


                                DREAMers

  Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I want to speak about DREAMers. These are 
children who are brought to this country in an illegal status because 
they are brought by their parents who are undocumented. These children 
often do not know that in fact they are undocumented.
  There are threats in the new administration to completely reverse 
President Obama's Executive order that allows these children to stay in 
the United States and continue their education. I want to tell you 
about one such DREAMer. This is Elisha Dawkins. Elisha came from the 
Bahamas in an undocumented status with his mother at the age of 6 
months. Elisha's mother was deported shortly thereafter, and he was 
raised by family in Florida.
  He always thought he was an American citizen. After high school, he 
joined the Army. This photo shows when he served a tour in Iraq. He 
came back and was mustered out of the Army with an honorable discharge 
after having been awarded the Iraqi Service Medal. He was assigned to a 
very sensitive position as a photographer.
  Promptly after coming back and starting his studies, he decided to 
join the Navy Reserves and was given a top secret clearance. He 
performed photography at a very sensitive location, Guantanamo, with 
all of the detainees.
  So Elisha, coming off his Reserve duty, resumed his studies at the 
University of North Florida. At one point, he had started to fill out a 
passport application but did not go through with that application and 
never turned it in. Later on, filling out a passport application, he 
was asked if he had ever applied for a passport and he checked the box 
``no'' because he hadn't. The U.S. attorney's office came in and 
arrested him, threw him in the clink, and in the process, found out he 
was undocumented because of the circumstances I just told you. A 
veteran of Iraq and Guantanamo--Army in Iraq, Navy in Guantanamo--is in 
a detention center awaiting trial.
  Fortunately, Elisha Dawkins' situation came to my attention and I 
started raising some cain about this. As a matter of fact, in a further 
hearing in front of a Federal judge, the Federal judge, in essence, 
dressed down in court the assistant U.S. attorney who had pursued this 
case and, fortunately, the charges were dropped. That enabled Elisha to 
go on and to continue his studies. In the process, since he had no 
conviction, he was allowed to apply for U.S. citizenship. His military 
service justified him to do that. This past week, he is now graduating 
from the University of North Florida.
  Because a child came here in an undocumented status through no fault 
of their own, it is not right that children, such as Elisha Dawkins, 
who grow up to be great assets for the United States would be penalized 
and threatened with deportation.

[[Page S6733]]

  Obviously, we have to attend to the national security implications, 
in his case of potential passport fraud, which was not the case, but 
this was a man who had not committed that fraud and who had served his 
country honorably.
  As this case has resolved itself into a happy ending, just think of 
all the other stories of DREAMers who are out there and who share 
Elisha's commitment to and love of country, commitment to the ideals 
that all these DREAMers share of growing up in the only country they 
have ever known, and they had always thought they were a member of that 
country.
  I have said it before, and I will say it again. The DREAMers are our 
neighbors, they are our friends, they are our high school 
valedictorians, and they are our veterans.
  They were brought to this country before they ever even knew of the 
significance of their trip, and they have benefited our communities 
greatly. It is clear that America is stronger for a person like Elisha 
Dawkins.
  As this Congress comes to a close, I remind all of us and urge us to 
remember--next year, when there is an attempt to turn around that White 
House Executive order, I want us to remember the faces of people such 
as Elisha Dawkins. I want us to come together and acknowledge their 
many contributions to this great country.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Ernst). The Senator from Oregon.


                     Treasury Department Nomination

  Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, colleagues, we are now 4 weeks out from 
a Presidential election in which millions of American voters indicated 
they wanted a change.
  Donald Trump, our President-elect, campaigned and was elected on a 
platform he called draining the swamp. Getting rid of entrenched 
special interests sounds good. Fighting on behalf of middle-class 
Americans sounds good. Taking on Wall Street's powerful special 
interests sounds good.
  In fact, month after month, our President-elect attacked Secretary 
Clinton, saying she was too close to the Wall Street banks. He said 
things such as ``Hillary will never reform Wall Street.'' He said, ``I 
know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total control'' over his 
opponent.
  These are pretty harsh words. With months of hammering Wall Street 
and hammering his opponent, it came as a big surprise to many last 
week, when President-Elect Trump announced that he would be naming 
Steve Mnuchin, a darling of Wall Street, a 17-year veteran of Goldman 
Sachs, a career in the financial industry, to run the Treasury 
Department--the single most important post in our economy to be run by 
Wall Street.
  Instead of draining the swamp in Washington, it looks as if our 
President-elect is turning our government intended to be of, by, and 
for the people into a government of, by, and for Wall Street. 
Appointing a 17-year Goldman Sachs executive to oversee financial 
regulation is the definition of the fox guarding the hen house. It has 
the potential to undo all the progress and recovery we have made since 
shutting down the Wall Street casino, which dragged our country into 
the Great Recession. Furthermore, wouldn't it be great to have someone 
at the helm of our economy who fought to put people into homes, instead 
of fighting to kick people out of their homes and onto the street, as 
he has done.
  One of the great things about America is the resiliency of the 
American people. They come upon a challenge, sometimes a catastrophe, 
and they work to put the pieces back together again. We have made our 
way through the Great Depression. We made it through two world wars, we 
made it through the September 11 terrorist attacks, and we have worked 
to recover from the Great Recession.
  That crisis saw 8.7 million jobs lost, trillions of dollars of lost 
family wealth, and more than 2 million businesses shuttered. It was a 
financial crisis that cost about 4 million Americans their homes. It 
wiped out the hard-earned retirement savings of millions more families.
  The American people are working to rebuild, but they haven't 
forgotten. They haven't forgotten foreclosed homes. They haven't 
forgotten the lost jobs. They haven't forgotten the retirement savings. 
They haven't forgotten the shuttered businesses across our great land, 
and they definitely haven't forgotten the recklessness of Wall Street 
that made it all happen.
  It seems that perhaps President-Elect Donald Trump has already 
forgotten not just the driving force behind the Great Recession of 2008 
that caused these calamities for millions of American families and 
businesses, but he has also forgotten his campaign vow to take on Wall 
Street. Instead, Mr. Trump is planning to put Wall Street in charge of 
the Treasury Department--again, the most powerful economic position in 
the United States of America.
  Where does Wall Street stand on these issues? Wall Street hates the 
provisions that Congress adopted to end predatory lending practices in 
mortgages and consumer laws. They hate those provisions, and they want 
to get rid of them. They want to get rid of the watchdog that makes 
sure those provisions don't return. Wall Street hates the provisions 
that we adopted to shut down the Wall Street casino, where Wall Street 
firms made huge bets with the deposits of American savers to terrible 
consequences.

  Bloomberg News reported that Trump's nominee, Steve Mnuchin, was 
front and center during these operations of the Wall Street casino. 
Have no doubt that he plans to do what he can to restore that casino. 
While being interviewed right after his nomination, he promised to 
``strip back parts of Dodd-Frank'' and went on to suggest that the 
Volcker rule, which is the provision that shut down the Wall Street 
casino, should be weakened or eliminated. It is not speculation; it is 
straight from his own testimony to the American public, after he was 
nominated, that he wants to restore the Wall Street casino.
  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is another target. That 
protection bureau is a watchdog on the beat against predatory financial 
practices. It is a pretty good thing when you have an organization that 
has returned nearly $12 billion to 27 million American citizens harmed 
by illegal and predatory practices in the lending business. 
Furthermore, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has saved far 
more by preventing these practices in the first place on current 
lending--$12 billion returned, but who knows how much they saved 
consumers on the front end. Maybe it is $50 billion, maybe it is $100 
billion, maybe it is more. But the fact is, our citizens are getting a 
better foundation for our financial success.
  If you believe in the success of American families, you want to block 
predatory practices designed to undermine them. That is what we did in 
Congress, and that is what is at risk.
  We did a lot of powerful things to rectify the excesses that led to 
the disaster of 2008 under the Bush administration. We created stress 
tests to ensure the strength and security of our largest banks--that 
they had sufficient reserves to withstand periods of economic 
challenge. That makes sense. We put procedures in place to unwind 
megacorporations when they fail so they can be unwound and not take the 
rest of the economy, the financial system, down with them. That makes 
sense.
  We established a cop on the beat to make sure people aren't scammed 
by credit card companies. It makes sense. We made sure we had an 
organization to which people could appeal when they thought there was a 
predatory practice, to have it rectified and have the funds returned to 
them if they were right. That makes sense. All of this makes sense. It 
makes what type of sense? It makes common sense.
  Isn't it just common understanding that when a predator damages a 
family, our entire community suffers and when a family loses its home, 
our entire community suffers? Don't we understand that when people are 
thrown out into the street--as Steve Mnuchin's banks specialized in--
the families are hurt, the children are deeply hurt? But now we have a 
nominee who specialized in Wall Street and specialized in foreclosures. 
I say again, wouldn't it be great to have a nominee to head our economy 
who worked to put people into homes, who worked to make families 
successful, not someone who specialized in throwing them out of their 
homes and onto the street?
  In 2009, in the depths of the financial crisis, Steve Mnuchin 
purchased the

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fourth largest failed bank, IndyMac, when it collapsed in July of 2008. 
After buying IndyMac, he renamed it OneWest and took over as the CEO.
  Under Mnuchin's leadership, OneWest became what housing advocates in 
California called a foreclosure machine. Why did they call it a 
foreclosure machine? Because in the midst of the Great Recession, it 
pushed forward 36,000 homeowners into foreclosure, using tactics that 
were certainly off limits, such as robo-signing, fake signing--let me 
put it directly, fake signing of documents. His bank was responsible 
for more than one-third of all reverse mortgage foreclosures, which 
disproportionately were targeted at America's seniors.
  Let me tell you the story of Ossie Lofton. Ossie Lofton, a 90-year-
old woman from Lakeland, FL, took out a reverse mortgage on her home. 
This is a type of loan that allows an elderly individual to draw up the 
equity of their home to help them meet their basic monthly expenses. 
The beauty of this is that once you have that have reverse mortgage, 
assuming it is not designed with predatory features, it can supply to a 
senior some steady supply, and they don't have to write a steady 
mortgage check to anyone. Instead, they get income to help meet those 
basic expenses, so it is hard to imagine how you would end in default 
in this situation. But individuals are still responsible for paying 
property taxes and homeowners insurance.
  In Ossie Lofton's case, there was confusion over her homeowners 
insurance coverage. The bank sent her a bill for $423.30. Ossie looked 
at that. She thought she had it right, and so she sent the insurance 
company a check for $423, overlooking the 30-cent payment.
  Well, they sent her back another bill for 30 cents. Again, she 
misread it. She thought they were asking for 3 cents, and she mailed 
them 3 cents--27 cents shy.
  What did OneWest do under Steve Mnuchin's leadership? They foreclosed 
on Ossie for 27 cents.
  In my hand I have 30 cents, a dime and four nickels. Why would a bank 
foreclose on a woman who owed them a few cents? Why would they do that?
  Well, if you followed these predatory practices, some banks looked at 
it this way. They said if we can find a technicality to grab someone's 
home, we can resell it for far more than we are owed. That is a huge 
profit.
  So for that 27 cents, she lost her home. She and thousands of others 
lost their homes so this bank could profit rather than work out a 
mortgage modification. That is really a crime against an American 
citizen, a specialty of this bank, a specialty through which Steve 
Mnuchin profited millions and millions of dollars. Millions of dollars 
of income was accumulated based on the suffering inflicted on thousands 
and thousands of American homeowners.

  We could look at another story. Leslie Parks took out a subprime 
adjustable rate mortgage to pay for repairs. She faced some hard times 
and was falling behind, but under very constructive negotiations with 
One West to stay in the home, you will recall we had this program 
called the Home Affordable Mortgage Program--the HAMP program--wherein 
a bank could rework it. They were saying to her that we are reworking 
it, all is good, but, meanwhile, they were pursuing foreclosure. The 
result was, thinking she was working out a modification, she came back 
to her home in the middle of a blizzard and found herself locked out.
  This is an example of the widely publicized two-track policy in which 
banks would pretend to work out a modification while aggressively 
pursuing foreclosure. That is not a good practice. It is not fair to 
the homeowner.
  Let's look at another story. Gregg and Diane Horoski. They refinanced 
in 2004. They paid off their original mortgage with a loan from 
Deutsche Bank and used the rest of the money to cover health care 
costs, but it is one of those loans with an exploding interest rate, 
and the loan interest soared to 12.375 percent. Then Gregg Horoski 
started having health problems so they were having trouble keeping up 
with those high interest payments. So they asked the bank to work with 
them. What bank? One West. They asked One West to work with them to 
modify the loan, but the bank turned them down, misled them about how 
much they owed, lied to them about how much was at stake.
  The Horoskis felt betrayed by the misrepresentations and they took 
One West to court and Judge Jeffrey Spinner said the following about 
the bank's behavior. Which bank? One West, the bank that Steve Mnuchin 
was heading. He called the bank's behavior ``harsh, repugnant, shocking 
and repulsive.'' He also added, ``unequitable, unconscionable, 
vexatious and opprobrious.'' He pretty much summoned every word in the 
English dictionary to say how wrong the bank's action was as they dealt 
with this couple.
  Now, the bank lost that case, but they were aggressively pursuing 
everything so they took it to appeal. They spent a lot of money and had 
a lot of lawyers take on this couple and eventually the bank won. They 
won no grace period, no compromise, no home for this couple. The bank 
won and the Horoskis lost, as did thousands and thousands and thousands 
of individuals and couples who owned homes who lost them to these very 
aggressive foreclosure strategies.
  That is not all. Mr. Mnuchin and his bank didn't just prey on hard-
working Americans, they also had an operation that has a record of 
discriminating against minority home buyers and minority neighborhoods. 
Fair housing applicants have filed legal complaint after legal 
complaint against their practices.
  Here is an example. According to the California Reinvestment 
Coalition and Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, the bank's 
Southern California branches made a total of only two mortgage loans to 
African-American home buyers during 2014 and 2015. That is one per 
year; two loans over 24 months in one of the country's most diverse 
communities--a community that includes Los Angeles, where African 
Americans make up more than 9 percent of the population. This practice 
is known as redlining. It is an egregious practice. What is more, of 
the 35,877 homes that One West foreclosed on just in California between 
April 2009 and April 2015, 68 percent were majority non-White areas.
  Looking at this record, it is pretty clear that Mnuchin has not used 
his skills in life to put people into homes; he has used his skills to 
kick people out of their homes and into the street.
  Instead of fighting for homeowners, he has made a living--the life of 
a mega-multimillionaire--off the suffering of low-income and middle-
income Americans.
  Our President-elect bashed his opponent for being too cozy with Wall 
Street banks. He told Iowans: ``I am not going to let Wall Street get 
away with murder,'' but then he nominates an individual with this 
record of predatory practices, of private profit over the suffering of 
thousands of families, to lead our economy in the years ahead. This is 
just 4 weeks after his election, just 4 weeks after we heard the cries 
that he would stand up to Wall Street, and now he is putting Wall 
Street in charge.
  There is more. He is not appointing just one but two former Goldman 
Sachs executives to key positions of power and influence. One is Steve 
Bannon, assigned to be his Chief Strategist. That is right--Goldman 
Sachs--Chief Strategist for our President-Elect. Now we have an 
economist in chief, the Treasury Secretary, also coming from the same 
direction. It sounds like instead of ``draining the swamp,'' our 
President-elect is helping Wall Street restore the predatory practices 
that destroyed the living and the lives of millions of American 
homeowners. This is wrong.
  I call on President-Elect Trump to reverse course, to fight for 
government of, by, and for the people--not government of, by, and for 
Wall Street.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.


                        Congressional Priorities

  Mr. THUNE. Madam President, the business of the 114th Congress is 
drawing to a close to wrap up a few final bills. One of the most 
important bills that we will be passing this week is the National 
Defense Authorization Act. In fact, this is one of the most important 
bills that we pass each year.
  The National Defense Authorization Act is one of two bills that 
ensures that our military men and women have the tools and resources 
they need to defend our country. It is the bill that

[[Page S6735]]

authorizes funding for the body armor our troops wear and the weapons 
they carry into battle. It is the bill that authorizes funding for the 
advanced technology our military needs to be successful on today's 
battlefield and the bill that authorizes true pay increases which help 
us retain an All-Volunteer Force. Making sure our troops have what they 
need to defend our country is pretty much our most important 
responsibility as Members of Congress; first, of course, because the 
security of our country depends on it and, second, because we owe our 
men and women in uniform nothing less.
  This year's National Defense Authorization Act authorizes the largest 
troop pay increase in 6 years. It modernizes the military health care 
system to improve quality of care for our troops and their families. It 
reduces Pentagon bureaucracy to focus resources on our Nation's 
warfighters, and it supports our allies amid growing threats.
  It also addresses the dangerous underfunding of the military that has 
occurred under President Obama. It stops troop reductions for the Army 
and Marine Corps and authorizes additional funds to address readiness 
shortfalls.
  Members of our military should not have to be salvaging spare parts 
from retired aircraft to keep their planes in the air. Over the next 
few years, the Republican majorities in Congress will work with 
President-Elect Trump to rebuild our Nation's military and ensure that 
we have the strongest fighting force in the world.
  This bill is an important start.
  As we finish the work of the 114th Congress, we are also looking 
forward to the 115th. Republicans will move quickly to take up a number 
of important measures. Two big issues it will tackle right at the 
beginning are repealing ObamaCare and confirming a Supreme Court 
nominee.
  I don't need to tell anyone that ObamaCare is a failure. A Gallup 
poll released last week found that 80 percent of Americans want major 
changes to ObamaCare or want the law repealed and replaced. That 
shouldn't come as any surprise.
  The President promised lower premiums and affordable care, but 
ObamaCare has meant exactly the opposite. Premium costs have soared and 
soared again. Deductibles have increased, and health care choices have 
been sharply reduced.
  One constituent contacted me and said:

       My ObamaCare premium went up from $1,080 per month to 
     $1,775 per month, a 64-percent increase. That is $21,300 a 
     year for health insurance.

  Another constituent wrote to say: ``My ObamaCare premium doubles next 
year.'' It will double. I don't know too many Americans who can afford 
to have their health insurance premiums double.
  Still another constituent wrote to tell me that ``today I received a 
new premium notice for my ObamaCare insurance. My policy rate for 
myself, my wife, and my teenage son has increased by 357 percent''--357 
percent.
  ObamaCare is on the brink of collapse. We know what millions of 
Americans already know; that is, that the status quo is unsustainable. 
It is time to repeal this law and replace it with something that works, 
and that is precisely what we are going to do.
  We are going to get started on repeal as soon as the 115th Congress 
convenes, and then we are going to work step-by-step to replace 
ObamaCare with real health care reform--health care reform that focuses 
on the States rather than having the Federal Government running 
everything, health care that gives more control to patients and doctors 
when it comes to health care choices and decisions, health care that 
provides choices and is patient-centered so there are more options out 
there, more choices, more competition in the marketplace, and a health 
care system that allows flexibility for our small businesses on which 
much of the responsibility for providing health care for their 
employees falls.
  Another thing we are going to get started on right away in January is 
confirming the President's nominees, including his nominee for the 
Supreme Court. My Democratic colleagues have spent a lot of time 
talking about the importance of confirming a ninth Justice to the 
Supreme Court. I trust they will bring that same eagerness with them in 
January. I look forward to working with them during the confirmation 
process.
  After Justice Scalia's death, I came to the floor to honor him. Like 
others who spoke at the time, I mentioned his keen mind, his gift for 
language and, most of all, his absolute commitment to the law. For 
Justice Scalia, the Constitution truly was the supreme law of the land. 
He didn't let anything interfere with that. His politics, his personal 
opinions, his feelings about a case, none of those things were allowed 
to play a role in his decisions. That is the key right there.
  We all know Justice Scalia had personal opinions, but when it came 
down to deciding cases, he ignored them. He looked at the law and the 
Constitution, which is the supreme law, and he judged accordingly.
  It is wonderful to have strong opinions. It is wonderful to have 
sympathy for causes or organizations. It is wonderful to have plans for 
fixing society's problems, but none of those things have any business 
influencing your ruling when you sit on the Supreme Court. There only 
two things that should influence a Supreme Court Justice's ruling: the 
law and the Constitution. The minute something else comes into play, 
whether it is a Justice's personal feelings or a political philosophy, 
you have done away with the rule of law and replaced it with the rule 
of personal opinion. We have gone through a lot in this country to 
ensure that we will be governed by the law and not by someone's 
personal opinions.

  Justice Scalia will be a hard Justice to replace, but I am confident 
that President-Elect Trump will nominate a Justice with a similar 
respect for the rule of law, and I look forward to working with my 
colleagues to get a qualified nominee confirmed.
  Repealing ObamaCare and confirming a Supreme Court nominee are two 
important things we are going to do next year, but they are just the 
beginning. Republicans are going to spend the 115th Congress fighting 
for the American people's priorities, from growing our economy and 
creating better paying jobs to securing our borders and protecting our 
Nation. We have a chance to do big things for the American people in 
2017, and we can't wait to get started.
  Madam 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. BROWN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


             Mine Worker Health Care Benefits and Pensions

  Mr. BROWN. Madam President, it strikes me as pretty unbelievable that 
we are in the process of voting--debating a continuing resolution, and 
yet nobody has read it and nobody understands what is in it. We hear 
news reports, but nobody who I know here--at least on our side--has 
been in the negotiations even though we have a Democratic President and 
the Senate is 45, 46 percent Democrats, even though more people voted 
for Democratic Senators than Republican Senators in this election and 
most of the last several elections. Even with all that, that shouldn't 
matter, but Senator McConnell and the Republican leadership are asking 
us to vote on something this complicated with this many add-on 
amendments that we have not even read yet. What kind of way to run the 
Senate is that? We do know, though, from the reports I can get, what 
they have told us is that Majority Leader McConnell's response to the 
mine workers has been pretty pathetic.
  Today I met with Senator Hatch in his office. Today I met with 
Senator Wyden in his office. One of the things we did in the Finance 
Committee on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, joined by my 
Republican colleague from Ohio, Senator Portman, and other coal State 
Democrats and Republicans--Senator Capito, Senator Manchin, Senator 
Warner, Senator Kaine, Senator Casey, Senator Toomey--all of us in this 
committee supported a bipartisan fix for mine worker pensions and 
health care. Yet the continuing resolution at best--at best, we 
understand; again, we haven't

[[Page S6736]]

read it yet because they won't show it to us yet even though they want 
us to vote on it--at best, it has some 4 months of health care and 
nothing for pensions.
  This is not a taxpayer bailout; this is moving money--unused money--
from the abandoned mine fund in to fund the pensions and health care 
for mine workers and mine worker widows. Keep in mind--I know the 
Presiding Officer doesn't represent coal States. She may not know a lot 
of miners, as I and some of my colleagues do, but she knows about 
mining. Understand, there are more miner widows than there are likely 
to be insurance salesmen widows or realtor widowers or whatever. Mine-
working is a dangerous job. Mine workers too often get injured and 
killed on the job. Their lives are shortened from injury. Their lives 
are shortened from illnesses, black lung and other illnesses. So mine 
workers who marry at 20 or 25 are likely--their spouses are likely to 
outlive them by a number of years. That is the other reason we should 
do this.
  The third reason we should do this is that almost 70 years ago, 
President Truman made a commitment that we have lived up to until now. 
The reason we aren't living up to it now is because the majority leader 
of the Senate said no. I don't know exactly why he said no. I know he 
is not a big fan of the United Mine Workers union. I support the United 
Mine Workers union. I care about unions. I know unions helped create 
the middle class in this country. But that is not the point. My caring 
about this is--there are 12,000 mine workers in my part of the country, 
more than 1,000 in Ohio, for which this will be a very, very bad 
Christmas because they have already gotten notice, as Senator Manchin 
said, that their health care is going to be cut off. If we do a 4-month 
fix, then they will get another notice in January that their health 
care is going to get cut off. How do you treat people that way? I mean, 
we dress well. We are all well paid. We have good health care. We have 
good pensions. We are telling these mine workers: Yeah, you may have 
earned this under the old rules, but, sorry, we can't take care of you.
  My friends over there could bail out the banks--that is OK--and then 
banker compensation keeps going up and up, but they can't take care of 
mine workers with a relatively small pension and health care. They 
can't take care of them.
  We passed a bipartisan mine worker pension and health care bill. We 
passed it out of committee. We did it the way Senator McConnell, the 
majority leader, wanted us to. We went through the process. Now he is 
not willing to honor that. It is pretty outrageous. At the same time, 
they are doing something special in this bill for Wyoming. Nothing 
against Wyoming. I like Senator Enzi. I like Senator Barrasso. I want 
to help them help their State. But this is a part of the country. It is 
Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia. These are States that have 
thousands of mine workers, and this Senate is betraying them. If my 
colleagues think we should go home for Christmas starting next week 
without doing this, that is morally reprehensible.
  Senator Manchin and I were talking today and Senator Casey and 
Senator Kaine and Senator Warren and I were talking today about how we 
are willing to stay until Christmas, we are willing to stay until 
December 25--literally, to Christmas--to get this done because it is 
morally reprehensible and it is outrageous that we would leave here 
without taking care of these mine workers.
  I know some of them. I know Norm Skinner. I know Dave Dilley. I have 
known Babe Erdos for 35 years. These are people who worked very hard in 
the mines under dangerous conditions. They are the reason we are able 
to have so much manufacturing in Ohio. The coal they mine helps to 
produce the electricity that makes our standard of living so much 
higher than it would be without it.
  I spoke at the rally. Thousands of mine workers were here late this 
summer--I think in July. I am not sure what month it was; maybe in 
September they were here. It was a very hot day. I remember the 
president of the International Mine Workers, Cecil Roberts, asked the 
question: How many of you are veterans? A huge number of people waved 
their hands. They were all standing at this rally. How many of you had 
fathers or mothers who were veterans? It seemed as if it was the whole 
crowd. These are people who served their country, they make our 
communities work, and we are going to betray them, we are going to 
forget them because one Senator, who happens to be the majority leader, 
for whatever reason doesn't like the United Mine Workers. That is 
fundamentally what it is. I don't ever want to embarrass anybody, I 
don't want to call people out, but there are 12,000 mine workers who 
are going to have a bad Christmas. Their lives will be shortened if we 
don't take care of them. The stress they are under--they have already 
gotten one notification. If we do this for another 4 months, they will 
get another notification in January saying: Sorry, I know we gave you 
health care again for a while, but we are cutting it off again because 
Congress can't get its act together.
  The President wants to do this. Even the House of Representatives 
wants to do it--the House of Representatives that took out of a bill 
this week ``Buy American'' provisions for steel and aluminum. That is a 
whole other issue; I don't understand why they would do that. The fact 
is, the House did it, the President wants to do it, and a strong 
majority of the Finance Committee wants to do it. If we brought this to 
a vote on the Senate floor, there is no question it would pass. It 
doesn't cost the taxpayer money. It is not a bailout. It is honoring a 
pledge that Harry Truman made, that we made in the 1950s and 1960s and 
1970s and 1980s and 1990s and 2000, and all of a sudden we are not 
honoring that pledge. It is outrageous. We can fix this. We know how 
the Senate should do it.
  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. BLUNT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                  National Defense Authorization Bill

  Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, as we send troops into harm's way--and as 
you personally well know--it is our job to ensure that they have the 
tools and the resources they need to carry out the mission they are 
asked to carry out. We never want Americans to be involved in a fair 
fight. We always want them be involved in an unfair fight where they 
have every possible advantage. It doesn't always work out that way, but 
it should always be our goal. That is what the Defense authorization 
bill is designed to do.
  This will be the 55th consecutive year that the Congress has passed 
and the Senate has passed the National Defense Authorization Act. The 
leadership of Chairman McCain and Ranking Member Jack Reed makes it 
possible for us to be here one more time, emphasizing that the No. 1 
priority of the Federal Government is to defend the country. It is hard 
to find a bill that we pass every year for more than half a century, 
but this critical piece of legislation provides the vision and the 
authorization necessary for the military to move forward and to do that 
No. 1 job of defending America.
  There has been--and I think today we will see that again in the vote 
on this bill--the strong, bipartisan support that this bill always 
receives. Although there is sometimes a discussion about when it should 
be passed, we have not failed to pass it in a long time. It includes a 
lot of provisions that I think will make a big difference. One is a pay 
raise for our troops, which they deserve. It is the largest pay 
increase in the last 6 years, and it begins to fulfill our commitment 
to those who currently serve. As well, we need to fulfill our 
commitment to those who have served.
  I am also glad that there is a vital project for the Nation that 
happens to be located in my State, in St. Louis, MO. The final version 
of this bill includes authorization for the land acquisition for the 
National Geospatial movement from the south part of St. Louis, where it 
has been for seven decades, to a new location that allows them to build 
a facility, as it is right now, that is fully backing up the only other 
facility in the world that does the level of geospatial work that this 
one does. When something happens in

[[Page S6737]]

Springfield, VA, where that location isn't monitoring the world as it 
usually does, all of that work goes to St. Louis, where on every other 
day they share the responsibility for geospatial.
  There is a provision in here, at a fundamental level of safety, to 
build a fire station at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. Everything from 
building a fire station to creating a $1.7 billion facility that allows 
us to further keep an eye on the world as we do now is a good thing. It 
also addresses the issue that was raised earlier this year concerning 
members of the National Guard--men and women who were given a bonus and 
then wrongfully asked to return that bonus. It was not their error. 
That money in most families long ago has been spent. It was thought to 
be appropriately handed over to them, and they shouldn't be penalized 
because other people made a mistake when that distribution was made. 
With this bill, they will not be penalized.
  I think there is an increase here in end strength. It is in the 
conference report. I certainly supported Senator Moran's efforts on 
this issue and commend him for the hard work he put forward to be sure 
that we don't lose any more ground on the strength we have and the 
ability we have to be ready. Making down payments on our readiness 
issues, stabilizing our force at a time when we really face more 
challenges around the world--not less--was a minimum thing for us to 
do, but the bill does that. Senator Moran's leadership was important in 
accomplishing that as well.
  Once again, this bill puts Congress on record against the President's 
plan to move terrorist detainees held at Guantanamo Bay to any location 
on U.S. soil. I, along with a majority of Americans, oppose the idea 
that we bring these terrorists here. The President made a campaign 
pledge a decade ago now, and 10 years later, not only has that campaign 
pledge not been able to be fulfilled but the Congress once again today 
asserts our view that it should not be fulfilled.

  The administration admitted earlier this year that Americans have 
been killed by terrorists released from Guantanamo, and they made that 
admission, by the way, days before they approved another dozen inmates 
to transfer somewhere else in the world, where I don't think they can 
be kept count of and track of like they need to be. We don't need to 
close this facility. We don't need to abandon the facility, and I am 
glad that there are strict prohibitions here that don't allow that to 
happen.
  This bill also makes important steps toward enhancing the quality of 
life for our servicemembers and their families. GEN Ray Odierno, 
recently retired, Chief of Staff of the Army, said that the strength of 
the military is in military families, and we need to do a better job 
recognizing that. I hope we are able to advance an effort that was in 
the Senate bill that didn't get into the final bill--the Military 
Family Stability Act--next year. This is an action that will allow 
military families to stay longer at a location or to move earlier than 
the individual in the military does if there is a professional reason 
or an educational reason for that to happen.
  The investment that military families have made in the country and 
the investment they have made in what the person serving has learned in 
a very complicated defense world don't need to be unnecessarily 
complicated by whether someone gets to finish a year in elementary 
school or gets to stay another 3 months so they can graduate from high 
school, particularly if the person in the military is willing to go on 
ahead and bear their own expense until the family, with the family 
assistance that families get or the living assistance, moves later.
  This was determined by everybody that looked at it, except the 
Pentagon, to have no cost. I asked every senior officer who came before 
the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee about this concept of making it 
a little easier for people to stay, for a spouse who needed to go ahead 
and move a little early to start that teaching year at a new school, to 
get a job that was available at a hospital, or to do whatever that 
spouse could do to continue to have their professional career. I asked 
officer after officer: What do you think about this?
  One after another, they all said: This is exactly the kind of 
investment we need to make. We didn't quite get there in this bill, and 
I am grateful that Senator McCain has pledged to work further to study 
why the Pentagon itself--or at least the Department of Defense at the 
highest levels--is the only place that thinks this would cost anything 
or would be too much trouble. It wouldn't be too much trouble. I hope 
to see it in the bill next year.
  Someone who has really helped in my ability to look at this bill, 
with the work that I do as a member of the Defense Appropriations 
Subcommittee and with the work that we do with great military 
facilities in our State, is here on the floor today, MAJ Andy Anderson. 
He has been a great resource to our office, and we have benefited for 
some time now of having military fellows come in and spend a year with 
us. I continue to hear from them that it is also a great benefit to 
them to see how this part of the process of preparing to do what is 
necessary to help them defend the country works.
  The knowledge and experience that Major Anderson has gained as an 
Army officer helped in discussions we had both in the State and in the 
Nation. I have been particularly appreciative of his willingness to go 
beyond what might be considered the typical duties of a military fellow 
in a Senate office. For instance, he has taken personal interest and 
has been instrumental in assisting a Missouri family in getting their 
father's remains returned home from Laos after having been shot down 
over Laos during the Vietnam war. He has devoted a lot of time to 
gathering and analyzing data on legislative history and actions that 
will continue to be critical to the office moving forward. I want to 
also thank his family and wish him the best as he and his wife Audra 
and their sons Reid and Joel go to what military assignment they have 
next.
  This bill renews the Iran Sanctions Act, and the Iran Sanctions Act 
would have expired at the end of the year. I am hopeful that the 
administration understands that this act is really a foundational 
element of the regime that they entered into. It was an agreement that 
I didn't support. I still don't support it, but extending the Iran 
Sanctions Act is perfectly consistent with what the Iran nuclear 
agreement purports to do. If the Iran Sanctions Act is a problem, the 
Iran nuclear agreement is just as bad as I thought it was.
  When that agreement was completed, the administration repeatedly 
promised that U.S. sanctions on Iran for its support of terrorism would 
remain in place under the agreement. For example, the day the agreement 
was announced, President Obama himself said that we will maintain our 
own sanctions related to Iran's support of terrorism.
  The administration continues to recognize the Iranian state as the 
leading state sponsor of terrorism. This Iran Sanctions Act extension 
sends another message to Iran that the Congress and the country of the 
United States are paying attention. It gives the next administration a 
powerful tool to hold Iran responsible, and I certainly urge the 
President to sign this bill. I urge my colleagues to vote for it.
  In conclusion, once again, for 55 years in a row, the Congress of the 
United States is going to make the point that the No. 1 obligation of 
the Federal Government is to defend the country, and this bill helps to 
allow that to happen.
  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. SANDERS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, I rise in strong opposition to this 
legislation, the so-called 21st Century Cures Act. While I appreciate 
the work Senator Murray, Senator Alexander, and others have done on 
this legislation, I cannot in good conscience vote on it in its current 
form.
  It goes without saying that everybody, whether Republican, Democrat, 
or Independent, wants to find cures to the terrible diseases that are 
impacting the lives of millions of people, such as cancer, Alzheimer's, 
diabetes, and the

[[Page S6738]]

terrible illnesses that strike children. We all want to find cures for 
those illnesses, but that is not really what this debate is about. The 
debate we are having on this bill is simple: Do we continue to cave in 
to the demands of the pharmaceutical industry--an industry that is 
making recordbreaking profits by charging the American people, by far, 
the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs--or do we have 
the courage to stand up to the CEOs of big drug companies whose prices 
are so high that one out of five Americans who gets a prescription from 
a doctor is unable to afford to fill that prescription? Let's be clear. 
If you cannot afford to fill that prescription, you will likely get 
sicker, and in some cases, you are going to die.
  It is incomprehensible to me that we have a major bill dealing with 
prescription drugs, and yet we are running away from the most important 
issue that impacts millions of people and that the American people feel 
very strongly about, and that is the greed of the pharmaceutical 
industry and the outrageously high prices our people are being forced 
to pay. That is the issue on which we must focus.
  If we were really serious about finding cures for life-threatening 
illnesses and diseases, maybe--just maybe--we would adequately fund the 
National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. 
Over the last 12 years, medical research has been cut by over 20 
percent after adjusting for inflation. Even if this bill passes, 
funding for NIH will still be roughly $7 billion less this year than 
what it was in 2004. Meanwhile, over the same time period--just to put 
this in context--the top 1 percent has received over $1 trillion in tax 
breaks. In other words, we cannot fund the agencies that are trying to 
find cures for diseases, but we can give unbelievably significant tax 
breaks to the 1 percent.
  Let me very briefly give a few major reasons this bill should be 
defeated.
  No. 1, as I said a moment ago, the most important prescription drug-
related crisis facing our country right now is the skyrocketing price 
of prescription drugs. This bill does not even deal with that issue. 
How can we talk about a bill dealing with the pharmaceutical industry 
without addressing the elephant in the room, which is the fact that we 
pay the highest prices in the world for medicine? And in many cases, 
those costs are soaring.
  In America today, one out of five people between the ages of 19 and 
64 cannot afford to fill their prescriptions. Hundreds of thousands of 
seniors are forced to cut their pills in half because the medicine they 
need is just too expensive. Let me give just a few examples.
  Since 2007, Mylan has raised the price of a package of EpiPens by 461 
percent while rewarding its CEO with a 671-percent increase in 
compensation. Maybe, just maybe, we might want to address that issue.
  Last year, Turing Pharmaceuticals increased the price of Daraprim by 
5,000 percent overnight. It went from $13.50 to $750 for just one pill.
  While thousands of children in Flint have been poisoned by lead, 
Valeant increased the price of the drug to treat this disease 2,700 
percent in a single year--from $7,100 to about $27,000.
  Meanwhile, at a time when 35 million Americans cannot afford the 
medicine they need, the drug companies are making enormous profits and 
providing extremely generous compensation packages to their executives. 
Last year, fellow Americans, while you were paying more and more for 
prescription drugs you desperately needed, the 5 major drug companies 
made over $50 billion in profit--$50 billion in profit, 5 drug 
companies--while the top 10 pharmaceutical executives received over 
$320 million in compensation. In fact, the prescription drug companies 
literally have money to burn. This year, the pharmaceutical industry 
spent $131 million to defeat Proposition 61, a ballot initiative in 
California that would have lowered average drug prices by at least 24 
percent for millions of people. They spent $131 million in California 
to defeat a proposal that would have lowered drug prices.
  How does it happen that the pharmaceutical companies can charge any 
price they want for prescription drugs? The answer is clear: The 
prescription drug industry, along with Wall Street, is the most 
powerful political force in America. I have been fighting the greed of 
the prescription drug industry for decades, and as far as I can tell, 
the pharmaceutical industry always win. They never lose. They win, but 
the American people lose.
  Since 1998, the pharmaceutical industry has spent more than $3 
billion in lobbying all over this place. There are hundreds and 
hundreds of lobbyists telling Members of Congress what the 
pharmaceutical industry wants, and they have made hundreds of millions 
of dollars in campaign contributions. They currently have over 1,200 
lobbyists on their payrolls here in Washington, including former 
leaders of the Democratic and Republican Parties. That is why the 
pharmaceutical industry makes huge profits while the American people 
cannot afford the medicine they need.
  It would be one thing if these outrageous price increases were 
happening in other major countries. Are these price increases taking 
place all over the world? The answer is, they are not. In 2013, we 
spent nearly 40 percent more per person on prescription drugs than 
Canada and five times as much as in Denmark. How is it that the cost of 
prescription drugs in Denmark, Canada, the UK, and France is 
significantly lower than it is in the United States? That is an issue, 
and it is high time we begin discussing it. For example, it costs $730 
for a 90-day supply of Crestor--which is used to treat high 
cholesterol--in the United States but just $160 in Canada. Americans 
with heartburn pay $736 for a 90-day supply of Nexium, but that same 
product costs $214 in Canada. Americans with arthritis are forced to 
pay $895 for Celebrex, but it costs just $280 in Canada.
  During this recent campaign, President-Elect Donald Trump promised, 
among many other things, to lower the prices of prescription drugs. 
That is what Mr. Trump said. He promised that he would ``allow 
consumers access to imported, safe and dependable drugs from overseas 
to bring more options to consumers.'' He also promised to require 
Medicare to negotiate with the drug companies for lower prices--
something that is banned by law today.
  Here is what President-Elect Trump said while on the campaign trail:

       We are not allowed to negotiate drug prices. Can you 
     believe it? We pay about $300 billion more than we are 
     supposed to, than if we negotiated the price. So there's $300 
     billion on day one we solve.

  Since President-Elect Trump supports requiring Medicare to negotiate 
with drug companies to lower prices, which is an idea that many people 
in this body also support, and since Mr. Trump believes we should be 
able to reimport low-cost medicines from Canada and other countries, I 
am quite confident that all of my Republican colleagues will support an 
amendment in my hands that will do exactly what Mr. Trump said he would 
accomplish as President. Think about what you can do to pave the way 
for Mr. Trump when he comes into office. You will have already 
satisfied one of his major campaign pledges.
  Therefore, Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending 
motion to concur with an amendment be set aside, and I ask unanimous 
consent for the immediate consideration of a motion to concur in the 
House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 34 with a further 
amendment that I send to the desk.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
  Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, reserving the right to object, one way to 
be sure of not getting the work done we are doing today is to add 
another topic. I think the work we are doing today is important.
  My friend from Vermont mentioned some statistics that were right a 
couple of years ago about the decline in health care research money. We 
are not where we should be, but we are not where we were 2 years ago, 
either. When my side took control of the majority, I got a chance to 
chair the appropriating committee for Health and Human Services, and 
for the first time in 12 years, we had an almost 7-percent increase. 
The Senator is absolutely right--at that moment, we were 22 percent 
behind in research buying dollars from where we were 12 years earlier. 
But if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. So we did what 
the government should do and what people want the government to do: We 
went

[[Page S6739]]

through the process of prioritizing. We eliminated 18 programs last 
year--zeroed them out for either being duplicative or not doing what 
they were designed to do--so we could prioritize exactly the important 
health care research this bill talks about and my friend from Vermont 
mentioned, a 7-percent increase last year and another 6.5-percent 
increase this year. Another $2 billion came out of our committee, came 
out of the full appropriating committee, and has been on the desk ready 
for the minority to let us take up for months now. That would be an 
almost 14-percent increase in 2 years. Fourteen percent of the 22 
percent would have been eliminated if we could have taken up the bill 
that I still wish we were voting on today. The bill we are voting on 
today does some of what that baseline increase would do.
  Why do we want to increase health care research? Obviously for 
individuals and their families who might be able to better deal with or 
totally avoid a health care crisis they would otherwise have.
  From the point of view of taxpayers, on Alzheimer's, which was 
mentioned here today, we are spending $250 billion a year right now. 
The NIH projection for 2050 is that we will be spending $1.1 trillion 
that year in today's dollars, which is twice the defense budget. Now, 
$1.1 trillion sounds like a lot and $250 billion sounds like a lot to 
me. In fact, pretty small numbers sound like a lot to me. But when I 
think about spending twice the defense budget on Alzheimer's alone--and 
that is just tax dollars, that is not what families would be spending 
if we don't invest in research now. It makes a big difference.
  So from Alzheimer's--there is an inducement here that I would like to 
see be even more specific, and when we get back to the regular 
appropriating process, I will work to do that again. There is a prize 
inducement, the Beau Biden cancer research fund. There is money that 
could go to autism. Everything from Alzheimer's to autism benefits when 
we focus on health care research.
  There is also money in this bill to further enhance the ability to 
get drugs to the marketplace quicker so that people have an opportunity 
that they don't currently have to work with their doctor and decide 
they want to try that new advancement.
  This bill matters. I think in some ways it is better to let NIH--the 
real researchers--prioritize spending and let us prioritize research as 
a topic.
  I think this bill should pass. I think it should pass today. I was on 
the House floor last week when they overwhelmingly voted for it to 
pass. The sure way for this bill not to pass in this Congress is to do 
something now that changes the subject.
  I am particularly glad that my longtime friend from both the House 
and Senate is really interested in President Trump fulfilling his 
campaign pledges, and I am particularly pleased to see him agree with 
at least that one pledge, but that won't happen until next year. 
Today's work is to pass the 21st Century Cures bill. I look forward to 
the vote that will do that before we leave this week.
  Mr. President, I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lankford). Objection heard.
  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, two points. First of all, let me 
reiterate that is for inflation-adjusted dollars, not nominal dollars. 
The funding for the National Institutes of Health this year will still 
be roughly $7 billion less than what it received in 2004. That is point 
No. 1.
  Point No. 2--and I will yield briefly to my friend from Missouri--did 
I hear him say that he is supportive of reimportation and having the 
Federal Government--Medicare--negotiate prescription drug prices with 
the pharmaceutical industry? That is what I thought I heard him say.
  I yield to my friend.
  Mr. BLUNT. I thank my friend for yielding.
  In terms of the money available for research, we have taken that 22 
percent of buying power and changed it to about 15 percent. If we 
doubled our bill this year, we would change it from 15 to about 7 or 8 
percent. We need to get back to where we were 12 years ago and then not 
stop in real buying power. I want to do that.
  I think what I said about the overall discussion of reimportation and 
other things was that I was delighted to hear my friend from Vermont so 
supportive of the next President's program.
  Mr. SANDERS. I am very supportive, he is dead right. But I was 
wondering if my friend--when he said we are going to get to it next 
year, what does that mean? Does that mean you will be pushing the 
ability of Americans and pharmacists and distributors to be able to 
benefit from unfettered free trade and buy low-cost medicines and some 
of the same drugs sold in Canada and the UK? And will you also, as Mr. 
Trump made the point, allow Medicare to negotiate for lower prices? Is 
that something on which we can expect our Republican friends to support 
the President-elect?

  Mr. BLUNT. If my friend would yield, I would say we have passed this 
bill in the Congress--that bill--several times over the last few years. 
On each occasion, often with Democratic administrations, the only 
obstacle has been for the administration to certify that reimportation 
could be safely done.
  Mr. SANDERS. Exactly right.
  Mr. BLUNT. And none of them have ever been willing to do that.
  Mr. SANDERS. My friend is exactly right. Neither a Republican nor a 
Democratic administration will have the guts to stand up to the 
pharmaceutical industry.
  Today, if you have a salad, it is likely you are going to get your 
salad with tomatoes and lettuce that are from Mexico or some other 
country with very poorly inspected farms. That is no problem, but 
somehow or another, we are led to believe that it is impossible to 
bring in brand-name medicine from Canada or the United Kingdom or 
France, that it just cannot be done. It is beyond belief that anybody 
with a straight face believes that to be true. Clearly, this is what 
the pharmaceutical industry wants us to believe, but I hope that my 
friend from Missouri will not accept what the pharmaceutical industry 
tells us and understands that the next Secretary of HHS should certify 
that with proper procedures, we can reimport medicine.
  I yield to my friend.
  Mr. BLUNT. I thank my friend for yielding. I would just say that if 
the Secretary of HHS can certify that, that is a good thing, and I 
voted for that in the past. But I know what a tomato looks like. I 
don't know what is inside a capsule, and that has always been the 
obstacle for the people we have asked to look at this and certify the 
safety.
  If people can figure out how to do that so we know what is inside of 
that pill--the worst thing you can do health-wise is believe you are 
taking a pill that isn't the pill you believe you are taking.
  Mr. SANDERS. I know what a tomato looks like, too, but you don't know 
what kind of pesticide was used or how that tomato was grown. The idea 
that we cannot get a product from across the border safely really 
doesn't pass the laugh test, frankly. This is one of the things the 
pharmaceutical industry has been pushing. We have unfettered free trade 
for fish, for vegetables, for meat from all over the world, but 
somehow, from Canada or the UK or France--we cannot safely bring 
medicine into this country at a fraction of the price our pharmacists 
are now paying. Frankly, I would say to the Senator from Missouri, that 
does not pass the laugh test, and I hope we can work together. Clearly, 
we want the medicine to come in safely, but I think we can do that, and 
I look forward to doing that.
  I yield.
  Mr. BLUNT. I would say that the one thing we will accomplish before 
the week is out is passing this bill, but I hope this bill doesn't 
become something that we continue to refer back to and say we have 
already done that. This bill is a step in the right direction, but in 
health care research, it does not get us to where I would like to be or 
where we were 12 years ago. We need the kind of research dollars that 
encourage young researchers to stay in the research business, the kind 
of research dollars that encourage them to find solutions, the kind of 
research dollars that ensure that every family who can avoid a crisis 
or be ready to deal with it in a better way is able to do that. So I 
look forward to the bill being passed as we finish the week.
  I yield back.
  Mr. SANDERS. I agree with the last statement the Senator from 
Missouri made.

[[Page S6740]]

  Let me give another reason why I am opposed to this bill. Incredibly, 
this legislation makes it easier for prescription drug companies to get 
away with fraud. Fraud is something the major drug companies have been 
perpetuating on the American people for a number of years.
  It is not widely known, but it should be known that since 1991, drug 
companies have paid over $35 billion in fines or resettlements for 
fraud and misconduct--$35 billion--but instead of cracking down on 
pharmaceutical company fraud, this bill actually legalizes the 
fraudulent behavior of some of the big drug companies.
  Specifically, under this bill, pharmaceutical companies would be 
allowed to promote unapproved uses of drugs to insurance companies--a 
practice which is currently illegal. Why would we allow the 
pharmaceutical industry the opportunity to market drugs to insurance 
companies for uses that haven't been approved by the FDA? This is a 
major problem. Let me give a few examples.
  In 2013, the Justice Department ordered Johnson & Johnson, one of the 
major pharmaceutical companies in the country, to pay $2.2 billion in 
fines for ``recklessly promoting drugs for uses that have not been 
proven to be safe and effective.'' According to the U.S. attorney 
handling the case, Johnson & Johnson's ``promotion of Risperdal for 
unapproved uses threatened the most vulnerable populations of our 
society: children, the elderly, and those with developmental 
disabilities. Congress rightfully determined that this is unacceptable 
and made it illegal, but under this bill, it could become legal. That 
is wrong.
  In 2010, AstraZeneca pharmaceuticals paid $520 million to resolve 
allegations that it illegally marketed the antipsychotic drug Seroquel 
for uses not approved as safe and effective by the FDA.
  In 2009, Eli Lilly was fined over $1.4 billion for its off-label 
promotion of another antipsychotic drug known as Zyprexa. According to 
Federal investigators, Eli Lily's illegal activities increased 
patients' costs, threatened their safety, and negatively affected the 
delivery of health care services to over 9 million military members, 
retirees, and their families who rely on health care.
  We need to make it harder for the pharmaceutical industry to commit 
fraud, but instead this bill allows the pharmaceutical industry to, in 
fact, commit even more fraud. That is unacceptable.
  Third, let's be clear: This bill would cut Medicare and Medicaid by a 
billion dollars. Millions of senior citizens are in desperate need of 
Medicare and Medicaid.
  Thanks to Medicare, today more than 48 million seniors and 9 million 
people with disabilities have health insurance coverage through 
Medicare, and over 73 million Americans are enrolled in Medicaid. The 
last thing we should be doing today is cutting Medicare and Medicaid. 
We need to make health care more affordable to senior citizens, the 
disabled, and low-income families with children--not more expensive.
  Finally, this bill--and this is quite significant--cuts $3.5 billion 
from the Affordable Care Act's prevention fund to prevent Alzheimer's, 
diabetes, suicide, heart disease, and lead poisoning.
  Instead of cutting Medicare and Medicaid, instead of cutting funds 
for health care programs, we should be demanding that the wealthiest 
people in this country and the largest corporations start paying their 
fair share of taxes. We should not be cutting life-and-death programs 
for the most vulnerable people in this country.
  I say to my colleagues, if you want to lower the outrageous cost of 
prescription drugs, vote against this bill. If you are opposed to 
legalizing pharmaceutical fraud that can endanger the lives of many 
Americans, please vote against this bill. If you are opposed to cutting 
Medicare and Medicaid, vote against this bill. If you want to prevent 
cuts to programs that would prevent Alzheimer's disease and many other 
diseases, vote against this bill.
  It is time to stand up to the pharmaceutical industry and stand with 
the American people who are tired of being ripped off by this extremely 
greedy industry.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak about the 
fires and tornadoes in Tennessee, but I would observe beforehand that 
by tomorrow we will be voting on the 21st Century Cures and the mental 
health bill.
  I have a little different view of it than the Senator from Vermont. 
For example, using the money in the prevention fund, which was a part 
of the Affordable Care Act, I would say is a pretty good use of it to 
support the President's Precision Medicine Initiative and to support 
the Vice President's Cancer Moonshot and to support the BRAIN 
Initiative at the National Institutes of Health. This is what we do in 
the bill, with $1.4 billion for precision medicine, $1.8 billion for 
Cancer Moonshot, and $1.5 billion for the BRAIN Initiative. If we are 
interested in reducing grief and reducing spending in this country, 
accelerating the arrival of medicines that will identify Alzheimer's 
before its symptoms and other medicines that will retard the 
progression of Alzheimer's would be a magnificent thing to do. It would 
be a miracle for many families. It is not just a miracle; it is 
something that Dr. Francis Collins, a renowned scientist who is head of 
the National Institutes of Health--the ``National Institutes of Hope'' 
is what he calls it--predicts will happen in the next 10 years, along 
with a vaccine for Zika, a vaccine for HIV-AIDS, a vaccine for 
universal flu, which killed 30,000 people last year, and advances in 
regenerative medicine that would put a physician like our former 
majority leader, Dr. Bill Frist of Nashville, out of business.
  Bill Frist was at one time a heart transplant surgeon. I think he 
transplanted more hearts than anybody in the world--or nearly anybody. 
But Dr. Collins believes that with advances in using our own adult 
cells, we will restore hearts. We will not have to transplant them. We 
may be able to restore eyesight. These are the kinds of miracles this 
legislation will encourage that could affect nearly every American 
family.
  The other part of the legislation, equally important to money, is 
that it would make reforms in the Food and Drug Administration and in 
the National Institutes of Health that will move research for those 
treatments and cures through the regulatory and investment process more 
rapidly, at lower costs, into the medicine cabinets, and into the 
doctors' offices, where they can help virtually every family in this 
country.
  That is why 85 Senators yesterday voted to end debate on this floor, 
and I suspect more will vote tomorrow to send it to the President. That 
is why, in the House of Representatives, 392 of them voted for this 
bill. Only six Democratic Members of the House of Representatives voted 
against it. They are not persuaded that there is some evil force in 
there. They like what they see, and not only them. The President of the 
United States says that this is ``an opportunity we just can't miss.''
  The Vice President of the United States, talking about his Cancer 
Moonshot, says that this is a big and important step forward.
  The Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, turned a couple of 
somersaults trying to figure out the way to do the funding on this 
because it is an important part of his own agenda for our Nation's 
health care future.
  I have heard the majority leader of the Senate, Senator McConnell, 
say in private meetings and in public that this is the most important 
piece of legislation we will pass this year.
  Add to it the mental health legislation that Senator Cassidy, Senator 
Murphy, and Senator Cornyn worked so hard on over here, and you can get 
something we can be very proud of, which is why it received such a big 
vote yesterday.
  I want the American people to know that is what we are doing. I think 
that is what they want us to do. We could do something in a partisan 
way, we could do something by Executive order, or we could take 2 
years, as we literally did in this bill, with multiple hearings, 
multiple consultations, many differences of opinion, all of them 
resolved though in a bipartisan way, and produce a lasting result.
  It will not be like ObamaCare, where the next day one party is trying 
to repeal it and the next party is defending

[[Page S6741]]

it. It will not be like some other partisan legislation. This will 
last. Nobody is going to be trying to repeal it because almost 
everybody voted for it. The money will come just as the legislation 
says, year after year.
  I am proud of the Senate, and I am happy for the American people, and 
I look forward to tomorrow.


                           Sevier County Fire

  Mr. President, on a more somber note, a week ago last Wednesday, on a 
mountaintop called the Chimney Tops in the Great Smoky Mountains 
National Park, someone spotted a fire and called the National Park 
Service about 5:20pm in the afternoon. I have been up on Chimney Tops 
many times--more times when I was younger than when I have been older--
but it is a peak with rocks at the top. We are not like the West where 
they have a lot of rocky mountains. We don't have many of those. We 
have an average of 83 inches of rainfall a year, unlike Southern 
California or Phoenix, places like that, where they only get a few 
inches of rain a year. We almost have rain forests. When the fall 
comes, there are lots of leaves on the ground.
  But the fire started up on the Chimney Tops. I can tell you there 
wouldn't have been anyone within 100 miles who would have imagined that 
somehow the next Monday, wind would have swept that fire into 
Gatlinburg, TN, killing 14 people, injuring another 134, causing an 
evacuation of 14,000 people, wrecking lives and wrecking homes.
  There have been some people wondering a little bit: Well, how could 
this have happened? Look, we have had fires all over East Tennessee 
this year. We are not used to that. It is because we have had a drought 
for a long time.
  I have an article by Bob Hodge about Greg Ward of Sevier County. This 
is the county where Gatlinburg is. Greg Ward spent his 53 years roaming 
around the woods and waters of Sevier County, according to Bob Hodge, a 
writer for the Knoxville News Sentinel.
  The long and short of it is, those who know the woods and the waters 
in East Tennessee know that this drought has been with us for a while. 
Trout stocking programs wouldn't work because the water was so low that 
the streams wouldn't handle the trout, and the water was too warm for 
them to survive.
  In some places the creeks were flowing at 10 percent of normal. We 
may have seen that once before in someone's memory back in the 1970s, 
but for the last 3 months, there has been very little rain. According 
to Bob Hodge's article, we have had a drought since 2015.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
this article by Bob Hodge of the Knoxville News Sentinel following my 
remarks.
  On Friday, Governor Haslam of Tennessee, Senator Corker, and I went 
to Gatlinburg. The only thing I could think to say to the people 
assembled there were two things. One was that your character is 
measured not so much by how you handle things when things are going 
well, but how you handle adversity. If that is the measure of 
character, the character of the people of Gatlinburg in Sevier County 
are through the roof because they are not complaining.
  The mayor of Gatlinburg, Mike Werner, had his home burn down in 15 
minutes. He was at the press conference worried about other people, not 
himself.
  Cindy Ogle, the city manager of Gatlinburg for a long time, had her 
home burn down. She was there, not complaining, and worrying about the 
other people of Gatlinburg and Sevier County.
  Mike Werner's business was also burned down. He is staying in the 
apartment of a friend nearby.
  That story is happening over and over and over in Sevier County. 
There have been extraordinary gestures by people to help.
  At one point, shortly after the fire started, there were 140 fire 
trucks from all over Tennessee and more than 400 volunteers. The fires 
kept going and going because this wind came up on Monday night after 
the fire had already started 10 miles away on the top of this rocky 
mountain, and a 90-mile-an-hour wind blew the fire all the way into 
Gatlinburg. The wind knocked down transformers and started other fires, 
and people were racing for their lives.
  On the floor, I mentioned stories of firefighters having to get back 
in their trucks to get away from the bears that were running toward 
them escaping the fire, of people driving through fire to escape, of 
windshield wipers melting as they drove down the mountain. It was a 
terrifying experience. In the West they may be used to this. Nobody 
ever gets used to it, I guess, but we don't see that where we are from, 
typically with 83 inches of rain in a year.
  I salute the people of Sevier County and Gatlinburg for their 
courage, their character, and their compassion for one another. I know 
it is going to take a long time for many to get back on their feet. We 
are doing what we can to help.
  I salute the Governor of Tennessee. He was there the next day. So 
were many of their agencies, working seamlessly together. As I have 
said, last Friday we went there together with him. Through the State, 
we have arranged for Federal assistance, which will pay for 75 percent 
of the cost of fighting the fires.
  Then that same day we went to some other counties in Tennessee that 
had experienced tornadoes about the same time. We went into McMinn 
County. No one was killed there, but several were hurt.
  We went to Polk County where we talked with a lady named Mrs. Stoker, 
who wasn't hurt, but a trailer next to where she lived had been blown 
across the road, and her daughter and her daughter's husband had been 
killed. We talked to her for a while, and the Governor and Senator 
Corker and I were very impressed with her. We doubted that we would 
have the strength she does.
  As we left, she said to us: You fellows go back on up there, do your 
job, and we will take care of it here.
  I am sure she will, but I am awfully impressed with Mrs. Stoker.
  I have told the people of Sevier County that many Senators had said 
something to me about the fire. For example, Senator Feinstein called 
because of her experience in California.
  I am here only to say those two things, first that the people of 
Sevier County, in Gatlinburg, the area of Polk County and McMinn 
County, if their character is measured by how they handled adversity, 
their character is over the top.
  Secondly, I thank all of those who have tried to help.
  One last example: In McMinn County, a young woman had a baby during 
the tornado. Her home was damaged. She went to the hospital. When she 
came back the next day, the neighbors had found another home for her. 
They had clean sheets and everything that she needed.
  There are wonderful stories that came out of a terrifying series of 
instances. I wanted to come to the floor and say that we are proud of 
the people of East Tennessee.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

              [From the Knox News Sentinel, Dec. 3, 2016]

              Gatlinburg Fire Was Set in Motion Months Ago

                         (Op-ed by: Bob Hodge)

       Greg Ward has spent his entire 53 years roaming around the 
     woods and waters of Sevier County, many of them as one of the 
     best known hunting and fishing guides in the state. When a 
     lot of those woods starting burning he knew things could get 
     bad.
       Then again, he had suspected things were going to get bad 
     for months.
       The fire that has destroyed over 17,000 acres inside and 
     outside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, destroyed 
     hundreds of buildings and cost at least 13 people their lives 
     has left Ward wondering what, if anything, could have been 
     done. He's lived his life and earned his living listening to 
     what the mountains tell him.
       ``Everybody talks about the drought we've had this year, 
     but the drought started in 2015,'' said Ward, owner of Rocky 
     Top Outfitters in Pigeon Forge. ``This year it just got a 
     whole, whole lot worse.''
       Back in the summer, the drought which would lead to the out 
     of control fires that would destroy so much was already 
     wreaking havoc on the mountain fisheries. Trout stocking 
     programs were curtailed in June because there was too little 
     water in the creeks and rivers and what was there was too 
     warm for stocked trout to survive. In July, Ward said he and 
     his guides started noticing species hardier than trout, like 
     stonerollers, were beginning to die off.
       Water flows and volume are measured in cubic feet per 
     second or CFS. During the summer Ward said the CFS numbers in 
     many of the rivers and streams in the mountains in and out of 
     the park were about 10% of normal. That was bad for his 
     fishing business,

[[Page S6742]]

     but he thought it was just bad business, period.
       ``You would hear numbers about us being 8 or 10 inches 
     below normal when it came to rainfall, but it was a lot worse 
     than that in the French Broad Watershed,'' Ward said. 
     ``Whatever number they were saying it was probably double 
     that.
       ``It's happened before back in the 1970s. We were in a 
     drought cycle then and this was just like that.''
       It was so bad he had even thought that, maybe, it would be 
     a good idea to delay the opening of hunting season in Sevier 
     and other counties in the mountains. Fewer people in the 
     woods would mean fewer opportunities for an accident to 
     happen.
       ``There's a lot of hindsight people can have right now,'' 
     Ward said.
       Fast forward to Monday night and about 8 p.m. a knock came 
     on the door at his home in Pigeon Forge near the base of Iron 
     Mountain. It was the authorities telling Ward and his wife 
     Diane to evacuate. They were ahead of the game, having 
     already packed up papers and pictures and things that 
     couldn't be replaced if lost.
       After getting his wife to safety, Ward--this isn't too 
     surprising to the people that know him--then drove up Pine 
     Mountain to see what he could see.
       It was devastating.
       ``There's nobody that knew anything like this was going to 
     happen . . . but because of the drought you knew it could 
     happen,'' he said. ``From up on top (of Pine Mountain) you 
     could see fire just about everywhere and you could see it 
     moving because of the wind.''
       The stay wasn't a long one because even though the area 
     where Ward was at was safely out of harm's way, he could see 
     that what was not being threatened by the fire one minute was 
     ablaze the next. He and a friend had packed chainsaws to cut 
     through any trees that were blown down by the wind, and it 
     turned out they needed them.
       ``I wasn't going to die on that mountain,'' he said. 
     ``We've had fires before. I've seen a lot of fires before, 
     but there was so much fuel and so much wind . . .''
       Eventually the fire would come within a few hundred yards 
     of his house. But when he and his wife went back the next day 
     it was no worse for wear.
       ``I have a house today because they made a stand at 
     Dollywood.''
       Perseverance is the standard for the people that have been 
     impacted by the fire.
       Ward said he doesn't know what if anything, could have been 
     done differently. All he knows is the fires that burned so 
     much on Monday were set in motion months and months ago.
       ``It's been so god awful dry . . . it was that way two 
     months ago,'' he said. ``You had the drought and then this 
     summer all the heat that just made it worse. We were just in 
     an awful situation.''

  Mr. ALEXANDER. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Ayotte). The Senator from Indiana.


                         Farewell to the Senate

  Mr. COATS. Madam President, today I rise for the second time on the 
Senate floor to deliver a farewell speech. It doesn't seem like that 
long ago, back in 1998, that I delivered my first Senate farewell 
speech. I spoke then about making the transition from Senator to 
citizen, and I reflected on the end of 24 years of public service.
  Standing here today in 2016, 24 years has now become 34 years, as the 
call for additional public service has brought me back to the U.S. 
Senate. Now, as I begin today, I want to assure my family, some of whom 
are in the Gallery; my colleagues, some of whom I am pleased to see 
have come to hear me speak; my campaign contributors, and even the 
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee that I will not be back for a 
third farewell address.
  Through it all--the ups and the downs, the highs and the lows, the 
successes and the failures--I have felt nothing but gratitude for the 
incredible privilege of serving. Serving in the military, working as a 
congressional staffer to then-Congressman Dan Quayle, serving in the 
House of Representatives, representing my home State, and as a U.S. 
Senator, and representing our country overseas as U.S. Ambassador to 
Germany--all of this together has been the adventure of a lifetime, and 
I am so very grateful for the opportunities I have been afforded. 
Participating in the process of governing, being in the arena fighting 
for the principles and values in which I believe--these experiences 
have all been a privilege almost beyond description.
  It is time to express a few thanks. My good friend and fellow Senator 
from Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, who is sitting here today, who has a 
good habit of speaking words of wisdom, has said: When you are driving 
down a country road and see a turtle on the top of a fence post, 
chances are that turtle didn't get there on its own. I didn't get here 
on my own. Throughout my career, I have been blessed to have the 
support of so many talented and wonderful people who provided 
invaluable help along the way. First and foremost, though, I want to 
thank God for His providence, guiding my steps along the way. I want to 
thank my family, including my wife Marsha for her unwavering support 
and wise counsel, our three wonderful children, and our 10 
grandchildren, for their love, their support, and their patience that 
allowed me to engage in the consuming job of an elected official.
  I thank my former Senator and Vice President Dan Quayle, a mentor, 
friend, and the person who first encouraged me to consider public 
service. I want to express gratitude to former Indiana Governor Robert 
Orr, who chose me to fill the Senate seat vacated by then-Vice 
President Quayle.
  I thank President George W. Bush, who gave me the opportunity to 
serve as our Nation's Ambassador to Germany, and Colin Powell, who led 
the Department of State during my time as Ambassador.
  I thank the exceptional staff I have been blessed to have support me 
over the years--some who are here today and many who have served 
through the years and gone on to achieve great success in their own 
careers. I specifically want to thank the five chiefs of staff I have 
had as a Senator who have put the team together to support me in such 
exceptional ways: David Hoppe; Dave Gribbin, now deceased; Sharon 
Soderstrom; Dean Hingson; and Viraj Mirani. All have led our team with 
exceptional leadership.
  I thank my colleagues for their friendship and encouragement over the 
past 6 years. This is a demanding job, and we all work hard, but it is 
also a job that allows each of us the opportunity to spend a lot of 
time interacting together. The friendships I have had and now have with 
the talented men and women who serve in this distinguished body is what 
I will miss most in leaving the Senate.
  Last, but certainly not least, I thank the citizens of Indiana. 
Hoosiers have given me the honor of representing them in the world's 
greatest deliberative body. Hoosiers, thank you from the bottom of my 
heart.
  Now, I am not here today to offer deep reflections about the health 
of this institution or to advise my fellow Senators on how to govern in 
the years ahead. It is clear that at this time in our history, in our 
great Nation, we are a divided country with two very different visions 
for America's future. The Senate is not immune to those divisions, but 
I firmly believe that all of us, Republicans and Democrats, are trying 
to do what we think is in the best interests of our country and its 
posterity. We are all united in the common cause of making our country 
a better place, a safer place, and a more prosperous place, even if our 
means of getting there differ.
  With that spirit in mind, I know there are many topics of significant 
importance that the Senate will consider when I am gone, but I want to 
briefly discuss two transcendent issues that I believe jeopardize 
America's continued existence as the world's leading Nation. These are 
issues I have repeatedly expressed deep concern about on this Senate 
floor.
  From a practical standpoint, our country simply cannot keep borrowing 
money we don't have. Today our national debt exceeds $19.5 trillion and 
continues to grow by the second. Meanwhile, programs that millions of 
Americans depend on--Social Security and Medicare are two--are creeping 
ever closer to insolvency. America's looming fiscal storm is bearing 
down upon us, and the alarms are sounding louder each day. One day, if 
not addressed, this debt bomb will explode and have a devastating 
effect on our country's economy and on our children's future.
  My second great concern is what I call the terrorist bomb--the threat 
posed by terrorists or rogue state actors who can successfully conduct 
an attack with weapons of mass destruction. We must ensure that the 
world's most dangerous weapons stay out of the hands of its most 
dangerous people, and we must also adapt to the new threats we face, 
such as a cyber attack, that could shut down our financial systems or 
electric grid. These challenges require all those who have governed to 
rise above the political consequences that may occur in making the hard 
decisions needed to make our country

[[Page S6743]]

stronger and more secure for future generations.

  In conclusion, I would like to say this. My congressional career 
began during the Reagan administration. I would like to conclude my 
comments with a reflection on remarks President Ronald Reagan made 
during a memorial service in 1987 for the fallen sailors of the USS 
Stark. Allow me to quote a few of the words President Reagan shared 
that day:

       Yes, they were ordinary men who did extraordinary things. 
     Yes, they were heroes. And because they were heroes, let us 
     not forget this: That for all the lovely spring and summer 
     days we will never share with them again, for every 
     Thanksgiving and Christmas that will seem empty without them, 
     there will be moments when we see the light of discovery in 
     young eyes, eyes that see for the first time the world around 
     them and wonder, ``Why is there such a place as America, and 
     how is it that such a precious gift is mine?''

  As citizens of this great country, we have been given a precious 
gift--the gift of freedom. America has been a beacon of freedom that 
has burned bright before a world that cries out for liberty, but we 
should never forget that we have been able to preserve this precious 
gift throughout our history because men and women have heard the call 
and then said: ``I will stand in defense of freedom and I will 
sacrifice for future generations.''
  In looking back on my life of public service, I have experienced 
moments when I also have seen that light of discovery of this precious 
gift of America and asked myself: How is it this precious gift is mine? 
I have seen the light of discovery at Veterans Day ceremonies as we 
remind ourselves that this gift has been earned and preserved by those 
who have fought in defense of our freedoms and especially those who 
have paid the ultimate sacrifice. I have seen it in the eyes of wives 
and young children who rush into the arms of dads arriving home from 
the frontlines of battle. I have seen it in the tears of joy as our 
Olympic athletes stand while the ``Star-Spangled Banner'' is played 
before the eyes and ears of the world. I have seen it in the 
naturalization ceremonies, where immigrants like my mom expressed pure 
joy in becoming an American citizen.
  Do we not then--those of us who have been given this privilege and 
the challenge of serving in this body as U.S. Senators--do we not then 
have an obligation and a solemn duty to carry on the task of ensuring 
that the young eyes of future generations can see this light of 
discovery and continue to wonder how it is that such a precious gift is 
theirs?
  So, my colleagues and friends, with gratitude to the Almighty, love 
in my heart for each of you, and bright hopes for the future of our 
beloved country, I bid farewell.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.


                         Tributes to Dan Coats

  Mr. DONNELLY. Madam President, I rise as we bid farewell to my good 
friend, my colleague, my captain, the senior Senator from Indiana, Dan 
Coats, who has served his State of Indiana and our country so well and 
with such honor and such dedication for more than 35 years.
  I also note how grateful I am to be serving with the Presiding 
Officer, for what an extraordinary Senator you have been, what a good 
friend. Someday I hope to come see the White Mountains of New Hampshire 
and visit and see your family. We have been very lucky to have been 
touched and blessed by you.
  As many of us know, my friend Dan's service to his country started 
long before he was elected to this body. After graduating from Wheaton 
College in Illinois--and he has not often told folks he was a soccer 
star there--he joined the U.S. Army, where he served from 1966 until 
1968 and earned the rank of staff sergeant.
  After coming to Indiana to earn a law degree at Indiana University's 
McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis, Dan moved to Fort Wayne, where 
he continued his public service as a staff member for then-U.S. 
Congressman Dan Quayle.
  In 1980, Dan Coats was elected to represent the Fourth Congressional 
District of Indiana--a wonderful area which he served so well--and it 
was an office he held for 8 years. Then, in 1988, as Senator Quayle was 
elected to serve as Vice President, Senator Coats was appointed to the 
U.S. Senate, and he successfully won reelection in 1990 and in 1992. 
For 10 years, Dan continued his legacy of service to our beloved State.
  As I mentioned, Dan is the senior Senator, and I am the junior 
Senator, so whenever we have football discussions, Dan wins every time.
  Through his work on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the 
Intelligence Committee, he ensured our country was more secure and more 
prosperous for the future.
  In 1999, Dan retired from the Senate. He was soon called back, 
though, when President Bush asked him to serve our country again--this 
time, as U.S. Ambassador to Germany.
  Then-Ambassador Coats arrived in Germany ready for his duties on 
September 8, 2001. We know how much our world changed 3 days later and 
how important his job became in ensuring the United States continued 
its constructive relationship with our German allies and in keeping all 
of us safe back here at home. He not only forged a strong relationship 
with then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and Angela Merkel, but he 
also played a key role in the establishment of a new U.S. embassy in 
the heart of Berlin. It is hard to stress how critical Dan Coats' 
leadership was for our country at that time, as he used American 
diplomacy to help maintain American security.
  In 2011, Dan made his return to the Senate, eager once again to serve 
the people of Indiana. Over the last 6 years, he has produced steadfast 
leadership on the Finance Committee, the Intelligence Committee, and 
the Joint Economic Committee.
  On a more personal note, I have always been able to count on him as a 
partner and a thoughtful friend, willing to work together to address 
the many issues impacting Hoosiers and our whole country--because, when 
it comes down to it, we are Americans, and we are all in this together.
  Dan always has been ready to roll up his sleeves and work in a 
bipartisan manner, whether it was on an issue impacting our veterans, 
protecting our national security, advocating for fiscal responsibility, 
or even the finer issues of government, such as making sure the 
Government Printing Office could change their style guide. As the rest 
of us all know, Dan was able to make it clear that we are not 
Indianians; we are Hoosiers, and it should be appropriately discussed 
as such.
  Dan, it has been an honor to serve with you.
  He has been a true gentleman and a great teammate in our work to 
improve the lives of the hardworking Hoosier families we represent. I 
am proud of the work we have done together.
  As Dan leaves the Senate, I wish my friend and partner--my senior 
Senator--the best. He will be remembered for his extraordinary service, 
his love of country, his love of our State, and his love of his family. 
I hope he will be able to spend a lot of time with his wonderful wife 
Marsha, their 3 children, and their 10 grandchildren. Dan has been 
blessed to have a wonderful family, and we have been blessed that we 
could be a part of his life.
  May God bless Senator Coats and his family, may God bless Indiana, 
and may God bless America.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.
  Ms. COLLINS. Madam President, as I have listened to the eloquent 
farewell remarks of my friend and colleague, Senator Dan Coats of 
Indiana, I could not help but think that he sounded happy, contented, 
serene, and at peace with the decision he has made. But he leaves the 
rest of us feeling bereft and sad and knowing that we will miss him as 
a friend and as an esteemed colleague.
  As the 114th Congress draws to a close, many words of affection and 
gratitude will be offered in tribute to our friend and colleague Dan 
Coats as he leaves this Chamber. But there is no word that better 
defines this outstanding leader than the one word that has guided his 
entire life, and that word is ``service.''
  As we have heard from his colleague from Indiana, the junior Senator, 
in 1966, at the height of the Vietnam war, Dan Coats enlisted in the 
U.S. Army, achieving the rank of staff sergeant. In 1980, he was 
elected to the U.S. House

[[Page S6744]]

of Representatives from Indiana's Fourth Congressional District, and he 
joined the Senate 8 years later. He quickly became widely known and 
deeply respected as a strong voice for fiscal discipline and national 
security and as an expert in our intelligence agencies and foreign 
affairs.
  Dan Coats left the Senate in 1999 and was named as U.S. Ambassador to 
Germany 2 years later. He arrived at his post in Berlin just 3 days 
before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I cannot help but 
think how fortunate our country was to have him in that key position at 
a time of such turmoil, anxiety, and fear for our country and all the 
world. He played a central role in strengthening the relationship 
between our Nation and Germany during that critical time.
  After his tenure as Ambassador had ended, Senator Coats continued his 
service. He became the president of Big Brothers and Big Sisters of 
America and offered his talents to many other civic and volunteer 
organizations, including the Center for Jewish and Christian Values, 
which he chaired with another dear friend of mine, Senator Joe 
Lieberman. With his wife Marsha, he founded the Foundation for American 
Renewal to advance faith-based solutions and initiatives to help 
resolve our Nation's many social problems.
  When Dan Coats returned to the Senate in 2012, he pledged to the 
people of Indiana and to our Nation that he would focus his tremendous 
energy and extraordinary intellect on cutting wasteful spending, 
reducing our national debt, promoting pro-growth, job-creating 
policies, and strengthening our national security in an era where we 
face numerous threats from every possible place. He has kept those 
promises. As a father and a grandfather--two roles that I know he 
cherishes--Senator Coats has taken to heart our obligation to ensure a 
sound economic future for the next generation.
  It has been a particular honor to work side by side with Dan Coats on 
the Intelligence Committee. His public service through that committee 
will never be fully known to the public, but I can share with you that 
Senator Coats has almost an instinctual ability to get to the heart of 
an issue, no matter how complex or difficult the topic. That, of 
course, is also a tribute to the fact that he has thought so deeply 
about the issues that confront our country and the threats posed by 
rogue states and terrorist groups. He was one of the first Members of 
the Senate to recognize the crisis that would emerge due to this 
administration's failed policy and incoherent strategy toward Syria.
  His strong and effective advocacy for improved cyber security, a 
passion that we share, is another example of his deep commitment to the 
safety and security of our Nation and its people. For years, Senator 
Coats has worked to protect our Nation's most critical infrastructure 
from devastating cyber attacks. Senator Coats has warned us that it is 
not a matter of if but of when such attacks occur right here in our 
country. He did so--he led the way--knowing of the political pressure 
that would be brought to bear to accept the status quo of cyber 
insecurity that exists within our country's most important 
infrastructure.
  Senator Dan Coats is an inspiring role model to all of us who seek to 
serve. He epitomizes dedication, effective service, and an untiring 
commitment to making America--already the greatest country in the 
world--an even better place to live. Our Nation is truly grateful to 
this great man, and I am so grateful for his friendship.
  I wish Senator Coats and his family all the best in the years to 
come.
  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. PORTMAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I speak today as a neighbor of Dan 
Coats. I am his neighbor here on the Senate floor, and I am his 
neighbor back home. I represent the State of Ohio, and he represents 
Indiana. I also was involved in Dan Coats' early political career 
because I was asked to interview him when I was a young lawyer for his 
potential move from the House to the Senate. There was no way to be 
involved in that process without acquiring great respect and admiration 
for this man.
  I got to know about his family and his background. He is literally 
and figuratively a Boy Scout in every way. He is also a guy who we will 
miss here greatly. He has become the voice of reason, the voice of 
wisdom, and the voice of knowledge here in the Senate. In our 
conference meetings, he is the person who, when he stands up to speak, 
others stop their conversations and actually listen, which is a rare 
trait for people in public office sometimes. But that is because Dan is 
always sincere, he is to the point, and, again, he has the experience 
and knowledge to be able to speak intelligently on a whole range of 
issues--some which we heard about today on the national security front. 
But also, he is an advocate for economic growth. He is the leader here 
on tax reform proposals. He is the guy who continually reminds us of 
our solemn duty here to represent all the people.
  So, Dan, we will miss you greatly. I know Marsha is happy to have you 
around a little more. You are going to have a great time with your 
grandkids, as we have talked about. But we know that there will be a 
great loss here when you move on. I have to find a new neighbor.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
  Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I have one story I want to tell about 
Senator Coats.
  We have been able to serve together on the Intel Committee. We sit 
near each other on that committee. We work together on other things.
  I came to the Senate when Senator Coats came back to the Senate. It 
has already been established here that he served and then served in 
another capacity as Ambassador. Then in 2010, when the Presiding 
Officer and I came to the Senate, he came with us. In almost everything 
in the Senate, there is some element of seniority in how everything is 
done.
  As the only person in our class with prior Senate service, Dan Coats 
is the ranking member of our class. He was 88th in seniority in the 
Senate the day he started his second term of the Senate. For 
circumstances, I turned out to be 89th.
  In the process of going through and selecting offices, when they got 
to 88, Dan Coats called me, standing in the hallway of the Russell 
Senate Office Building, and he said: I am standing here in front of an 
office that says it was Harry Truman's office when he was in the 
Senate. You choose after me; don't you?
  I said: Yes, I choose after you.
  He said: If I don't take this office, will you take it?
  It was the best of the 12 offices still left. That wouldn't have been 
the reason I would take it, but I said: Yes, I will take that office. 
It would be great for me to be in an office in which Harry Truman had 
spent 10 years while in the Senate, and I later found out he also spent 
82 days as Vice President in that office.
  I said: I will stay there if I take that office.
  I am actually the only Member who--every year when the question comes 
around ``Do you want to look at another office?'' I check the ``no'' 
box and send it right back. Almost everybody else checks the ``yes'' 
box because they want to see the real estate in the building that is 
available.
  I said: I will stay there if I take it.
  He said: Well, I am going to find an office somewhere else.
  I have chaired the Rules Committee in the last couple of years. I 
deal with lots of Members about lots of requests. I don't actually know 
of very many similar circumstances. In fact, I don't know of any 
exactly like that one where Senator Coats said: I want you to have the 
office.
  I mentioned it to him again the other day, and he said: You know, the 
reason for that was, it was the right thing to do.
  If there is any part of Dan Coats' character that comes through time 
after time, it is that part. It is that part of who he is that always 
wants to do the right thing. He is a man of great conscience, of great 
courage, of great

[[Page S6745]]

willingness to serve. He is a good friend, and it has been one of the 
honors of my life in elected office that I have gotten to spend 6 years 
working in the Senate with him.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland.
  Mr. CARDIN. Madam President, first, I notice that Senator Coats is 
still on the floor. I want to add my personal congratulations to 
Senator Coats for an incredible career of public service, not only here 
in the Senate but serving our country in a very important diplomatic 
role.
  Senator Coats has added such dignity to this body. He is a person of 
incredible integrity and a person who always listens and tries to do 
what is right not only for the people of his State but for our Nation. 
It has been a real honor to serve with Senator Coats in the U.S. 
Senate, and I wish him only the best going forward. I know he will 
continue to find ways to help our country.


                         21st century cures act

  Madam President, I rise today to comment on a provision in the 21st 
Century Cures Act that I have strong concerns about that would affect 
thousands of patients receiving home infusion therapy. As many of my 
colleagues know, home infusion therapy is important because it provides 
patients with a higher quality of life. Patients are able to receive 
this treatment in the comfort of their own home, surrounded by their 
family. Furthermore, home infusion therapy eliminates unnecessary 
emergency room visits and travel to and from hospitals.
  A provision in the Cures Act reduces the payment for infusion drugs 
without including a payment for home infusion services until January 1, 
2021. As a result, home infusion suppliers will not be paid to 
administer infusion therapy until 4 years after the change in 
reimbursement. Without a service payment, it will be economically 
difficult for home infusion suppliers to provide patients with home 
infusion therapy. Many patients will be unable to receive care in the 
comfort of their home and will have to go to hospitals and long-term 
care facilities to receive treatment. This provision in 21st Century 
Cures Act could affect over 20,000 people with congestive heart 
failure, neurological disorders, and immune deficiency problems who 
receive home infusion therapy.
  Patients' lives are at stake. That is why I prepared an amendment to 
the 21st Century Cures Act that delays the reimbursement change for 
infusion drugs by 1 year. I hope that this amendment could be included 
in the 21st Century Cures Act or the end of session continuing 
resolution. Instead of going into effect on January 1, 2017, the 
overpayment reduction would go into effect on January 1, 2018, under my 
amendment. This is only a 1-year delay, but it would allow 20,000 
patients to continue receiving infusion therapy at home. I think this 
is reasonable and fair and I urge my colleagues to support the 
amendment.
  The 21st Century Cures Act includes many very important provisions 
that should be enacted, so I hope this issue can be corrected.


                     Tribute to Barbara A. Mikulski

  Madam President, this is a bittersweet moment as I rise to pay 
tribute to my esteemed colleague, dear friend, and fellow Senator, 
Barbara A. Mikulski, the longest serving woman in the history of the 
United States Congress.
  Senator Barb has been more than a dedicated champion for the State of 
Maryland; she has fought tirelessly for the welfare of all Americans 
across the country but especially the disadvantaged--equal pay for 
equal work, funding for childcare for working families, quality health 
care for all Americans, an ambitious space exploration program, robust 
homeland security programs, and fire protection grants. These are but a 
few of the causes Senator Barb has worked on for more than four decades 
as an outstanding public servant and legislator.
  She is rooted in the city we both call home, Baltimore, where her 
father ran a grocery store in Highlandtown. She earned her bachelor of 
science degree in sociology from Mount Saint Agnes College and a master 
of social work degree from the University of Maryland School of Social 
Work. She became a social worker and then demonstrated her formidable 
organizational skills and resolve when she led the successful 
opposition to a 16-lane highway that was going to cut through the Fells 
Point neighborhood in Baltimore. Throughout her 40 years of 
congressional service, she has returned to Baltimore almost every 
night.
  She ran for the city council in 1971, where she served for 5 years 
before she was elected to the House of Representatives to represent 
Maryland's Third District--a seat she held for 10 years. I was proud to 
succeed her in the House when she was elected to the Senate in 1986 and 
became the first female Democratic Senator elected in her own right. 
Here in the Halls of the Senate, she opened doors that had previously 
been closed to women. She refused to accept second-class treatment 
because of her gender and fought to be recognized as an equal. 
Generations of young women who chose to participate in public life or 
who dreamed of joining the U.S. Senate have benefited from Senator 
Barb's trailblazing legacy.
  From affordable housing and education to childcare, health benefits, 
and pensions, she has left an indelible imprint on the Nation's social 
policies as a senior member of the Committee on Health, Education, 
Labor, and Pensions. It is fitting that she authored the Lilly 
Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009--the first major bill to be signed into 
law by the first African-American President. I know one of her proudest 
accomplishments is strengthening the social safety net for seniors by 
passing the Spousal Anti-Impoverishment Act, which helps keep seniors 
from going into bankruptcy while paying for a spouse's nursing home 
care.
  Senator Barb said, ``We work on macro issues and macaroni and cheese 
issues. . . . Our national debate reflects the needs and dreams of 
American families.''
  In 2012, she became the first woman and the first Marylander to chair 
the Senate Appropriations Committee. She has worked well with Senator 
Cochran and other Republicans on the committee to produce annual 
appropriations bills under difficult budget constraints. I think she 
has shown how the Senate can work in a productive, bipartisan fashion.
  Senator Mikulski has served as the dean of the women Senators from 
both parties, promoting collegiality, civility, and consensus-building. 
In this capacity, again, she has been one of the leaders of this 
institution with respect to making it work better.
  Senator Barb has always had her feet planted firmly on the ground, 
but she has reached for the stars. No one has been a stronger advocate 
for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA; the 
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA; the National 
Science Foundation, NSF; and for researching and understanding the 
universe to make life better here on Earth than Senator Barbara 
Mikulski.
  Not only has she reached for the stars, she is a star. NASA named a 
supernova after her in 2012--Supernova Mikulski--discovered, fittingly, 
by the Hubble Space Telescope on January 25, 2012. The supernova is 7.5 
billion light-years away and the remnants of a star more than eight 
times as massive as our own Sun.
  Senator Mikulski has so much political energy per square inch of 
height that she has reached her own orbit in space. Even though her 
realm includes the entire universe, Senator Barb always kept the needs 
of Marylanders close to her heart during her tenure. Whether it is 
fighting for funding to restore the Chesapeake Bay, supporting mass 
transit improvements in Baltimore, standing up for Federal employees 
and retirees who work and live in our State, or posting the world's 
best recipe for crabcakes on her Web site, I know I speak on behalf of 
each and every Marylander when I say how much we will miss her 
outstanding leadership and unwavering commitment to our State.
  I am privileged to have worked with Senator Barb for 10 years in the 
Senate and for 20 years before that when I was in the House of 
Representatives. I am proud to have stood alongside her as two members 
of Team Maryland.
  On a personal basis, I have a very close friend and my service in the 
Senate is much more productive, much more enjoyable, and much more 
rewarding because of Senator Barbara Mikulski.
  The United States Congress, the State of Maryland, the United States, 
and, indeed, the world are better places because of Senator Mikulski's 
public

[[Page S6746]]

service. She may not be the tallest Senator, but she certainly leaves 
the biggest shoes to fill. I will miss her, but I will remain 
internally inspired by her shining example of public service at its 
best.


                        Tribute to Barbara Boxer

  Madam President, for the 10 years I have been in the Senate, I have 
been privileged and have had the pleasure to serve alongside the 
Senator from California, Barbara Boxer, on the Committee on Environment 
and Public Works and on the Committee on Foreign Relations. She is the 
ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee and 
previously chaired the committee, the first woman to do so.
  Senator Boxer has spent the last 40 years in elective office--24 
years here in the Senate, 10 years before in the U.S. House of 
Representatives, and 6 years on the Marin County Board of Supervisors. 
She was the board's first woman president. Earlier, she worked as a 
stockbroker while her husband Stewart, whom she met at Brooklyn 
College, attended law school. Senator Boxer has been a journalist and 
is the author of two books.
  The first time Senator Boxer ran for the Sixth Congressional District 
seat, in 1982, her campaign slogan was ``Barbara Boxer gives a damn.'' 
Her constituents have agreed. She ran for reelection four times and 
never received less than 67 percent of the vote. In 2004, when she was 
running for a third term in the Senate, she received 6.96 million 
votes--the most votes any candidate has ever received in the history of 
the U.S. Senate.
  Oscar Madison and Felix Unger may have been the original odd couple, 
but Senator Boxer and the Senator from Oklahoma, Senator Inhofe, have 
been the Senate's odd couple. An unabashed liberal and unabashed 
conservative working together to pass some of the most important 
legislation of the last quarter century--our periodic surface 
transportation bills and the Water Resources Development Act 
reauthorizations. These bills have put millions of Americans to work 
and made our economy more efficient.
  Senator Boxer understands the importance of building, and she also 
understands the importance of preserving. She has helped to set aside 
more than 1 million acres of Federal land in California as wilderness. 
The omnibus public lands package, which became law in 2009, includes 
three Boxer bills to protect 57,000 acres in Big Sur and the Los Padres 
Forest and another 273,000 acres of California coast as wilderness. She 
wrote the Senate bill that elevated Pinnacles National Monument into 
America's 59th national park. She helped champion the creation of the 
Fort Ord National Monument and Cesar Chavez National Monument and was 
instrumental in expanding the Gulf of the Farallones and Cordell Bank 
National Marine Sanctuaries. She also authored the California Missions 
Preservation Act to protect and restore California's 21 historic 
missions and led the effort in the Senate to create the Manzanar 
National Historic Site.
  Senator Boxer's concern for the environment hasn't been just a 
parochial interest; no one has fought harder to defend and improve our 
Nation's landmark environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act and the 
Clean Water Act. She fought to remove arsenic from drinking water. The 
air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are better 
because of Senator Boxer.
  Senator Boxer's environmental bona fides are well known, but she has 
been a superbly effective legislator on so many other issues. She is a 
champion for women. In 1991, she led a group of women Members to the 
Judiciary Committee to demand that the committee, which was all-male 
and all-White at the time, take Anita Hill's charges seriously. Senator 
Boxer has defended women's reproductive health choices and privacy. She 
was involved in passing the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act 
and the Violence Against Women's Act. She is a senior member of the 
Foreign Relations Committee, where she chairs the first committee to 
focus on global women's issues.
  In a business meeting earlier today, the members of the Senate 
Foreign Relations Committee unanimously passed a resolution honoring 
Senator Boxer's work on that committee and her work in the U.S. Senate. 
At that time, we noted that she was the ranking member on the 
subcommittee that provided help for women and girls globally, and her 
work in Afghanistan was most notable. She has made a difference around 
the world for young women.
  Senator Boxer authored the first ever specific authorization for 
afterschool programs, a bipartisan bill that then-President George W. 
Bush signed into law in 2002. Today's afterschool programs are funded 
at $1.15 billion, allowing them to serve 1.6 million children. She was 
the author of another bipartisan bill to accelerate America's 
contribution to combat global HIV-AIDS and tuberculosis.
  Senator Boxer wrote two laws to enhance economic and security 
cooperation with Israel. In 2012, she worked with the Senator from 
Georgia, Mr. Isakson, on the United States-Israel Enhanced Security 
Cooperation Act, which extended loan guarantees to Israel, increased 
the U.S. military stockpile in Israel, and encouraged NATO-Israel 
cooperation. In 2014, she worked with the Senator from Missouri, Mr. 
Blunt, on the U.S.-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2014, further 
strengthening economic and security cooperation between the two 
countries.
  Senator Boxer has strong principles. She can be outspoken when the 
need arises, but she is also a consummate legislator, able to work 
across the aisle and across the Hill to get important things done. We 
are going to miss her skills and her leadership. I know we will 
continue to hear from her because she is not the retiring type, but she 
certainly has earned the right to spend more time with her husband 
Stewart, their children Doug and Nicole, and four grandchildren.
  We wish her well, and we will miss her in the Senate.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.


                           Free Speech Rights

  Mr. LEE. Madam President, over the weekend, syndicated columnist 
George Will wrote about a disturbing ruling in a French court. The 
court ruled that a video called ``Dear Future Mom,'' produced by the 
Global Down Syndrome Foundation, must be banned from television. It 
cannot be viewed on television anywhere in France. What, you might ask, 
triggered this draconian act of censorship? Was it speech inciting 
violence? No. Was it a hate speech? No. Was it discrimination? In fact, 
it is the opposite, as it turns out. I will let Mr. Will tell the story 
as I read the words from his column.
  The column is entitled ``The `right' to be spared from guilt.''

       The word ``inappropriate'' is increasingly used 
     inappropriately. It is useful to describe departures from 
     good manners and other social norms, such as wearing white 
     after Labor Day and using the salad fork with the entree.
       But the adjective has become a splatter of verbal fudge, a 
     weasel word falsely suggesting measured seriousness. Its 
     misty imprecision does not disguise, but advertises the 
     user's moral obtuseness.
       A French court has demonstrated how ``inappropriate'' can 
     be an all-purpose device of intellectual evasion and moral 
     cowardice. The court said it is inappropriate to do something 
     that might disturb people who killed their unborn babies for 
     reasons that were, shall we say, inappropriate.
       Prenatal genetic testing enables pregnant women to be 
     apprised of a variety of problems with their unborn babies, 
     including Down syndrome. It is a congenital condition 
     resulting from a chromosomal defect that causes varying 
     degrees of mental disability and some physical abnormalities, 
     such as low muscle tone, small stature, flatness of the back 
     of the head, and an upward slant to the eyes. Within living 
     memory, Down syndrome people were called Mongoloids. Now they 
     are included in the category called ``special needs'' people. 
     What they most need is nothing special. It is for people to 
     understand their aptitudes, and to therefore quit killing 
     them in utero.
       Down syndrome, although not common, is among the most 
     common anomalies at 49.7 percent per 100,000 births. In 
     approximately 90 percent of instances when prenatal genetic 
     testing reveals Down syndrome, the baby is aborted. Cleft 
     lips or palates, which occur in 72.6 percent per 100,000 
     births, also can be diagnosed in utero and sometimes are the 
     reason a baby is aborted.
       In 2014, in conjunction with World Down Syndrome Day (March 
     21), the Global Down Syndrome Foundation prepared a two-
     minute video titled ``Dear Future Mom'' to assuage the 
     anxieties of pregnant women who have learned that they are 
     carrying a Down syndrome baby.
       More than 7 million people have seen the video online in 
     which one such woman says,

[[Page S6747]]

     ``I'm scared: What kind of life will my child have?'' Down 
     syndrome children from many nations tell the woman that her 
     child will hug, speak, go to school, tell you he loves you 
     and ``can be happy, just like I am--and you'll be happy 
     too.''
       The French state is not happy about this. The court has 
     ruled that the video is--wait for it--``inappropriate'' for 
     French television. The court upheld the ruling in which the 
     French Broadcasting Council had banned the video as a 
     commercial.
       The court said the video's depiction of happy Down syndrome 
     children was ``likely to disturb the conscience of women who 
     had lawfully made different choices.''
       So, what happens on campuses does not stay on campuses. 
     There, in many nations, sensitivity bureaucracies have been 
     enforcing the relatively new entitlement to be shielded from 
     what might disturb, even inappropriate jokes.
       And now this rapidly metastasizing right has come to this:
       A video that accurately communicates a truthful 
     proposition--that Down syndrome people can be happy and give 
     happiness--should be suppressed because some people might 
     become ambivalent, or morally queasy about having chosen to 
     extinguish such lives because . . .
       This is why the video giving facts about Down syndrome 
     people is so subversive of the flaccid consensus among those 
     who say aborting a baby is of no moral significance than 
     removing a tumor from a stomach. Pictures persuade.
       Today's improved prenatal sonograms make graphic the fact 
     that the moving fingers and beating heart are not mere 
     ``fetal material.'' They are a baby. Toymaker Fisher-Price, 
     children's apparel manufacturer OshKosh, McDonald's and 
     Target have featured Down syndrome children in ads that the 
     French court would probably ban from television.
       The court has said, in effect, that the lives of Down 
     syndrome people--and by inescapable implication, the lives of 
     many other disabled people--matter less than the serenity of 
     people who have acted on one or more of three vicious 
     principles:
       That the lives of the disabled are not worth living. Or the 
     lives of the disabled are of negligible value next to the 
     desire of parents to have a child who has no special, meaning 
     inconvenient, needs. Or that government should suppress the 
     voices of Down syndrome children in order to guarantee other 
     people's right not to be disturbed by reminders that they 
     have made lethal choices on the basis of one or both of the 
     first two inappropriate principles.

  That is the end of Mr. Will's column, which I just read in its 
entirety.
  As Americans enter yet another era of change in our politics, it is 
my sincere hope, and indeed my prayer, that it can also be a season of 
change in our hearts. Here in the United States, the free speech rights 
of groups like the Global Down Syndrome Foundation to produce videos 
like ``Dear Future Mom,'' which I highly recommend, are protected by 
the First Amendment, but the rights of actual Americans with Down 
syndrome, both born and unborn, can only be protected by their fellow 
citizens, not just in our laws but in our communities, our families, 
and our culture.
  This time of year, we would all do well to remember the life-changing 
joy that can come from a single, unexpected, and special child, and 
also remember the courage of their mothers and fathers who chose life--
the heroes who chose to make room at the inn.
  I know I speak for all of my colleagues when I wish all of them a 
very merry Christmas.
  I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. WARNER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                         Miners Protection Act

  Mr. WARNER. Madam President, I rise to join my colleague who spoke 
earlier today, the Senator from Ohio, and here shortly, the Senator 
from Pennsylvania. I wish to also thank my friend, the Senator from 
West Virginia. Without his tireless efforts, this cause we are fighting 
for might not still have a chance, and I want to commend him for the 
countless hours and the amazing amount of work he has done on an issue 
we have been here time and again on; that is, begging this body to take 
meaningful action on the Miners Protection Act before the end of this 
year.
  For over a year and a half, we have been coming to the floor to tell 
our colleagues that if we do nothing, retired coal miners and their 
families--for the most part we are talking about widows because most of 
the miners have passed away--will lose their health care at the end of 
this year. Well, the end of the year is upon us. It is literally days 
away, and we have taken every procedural step to ensure a vote on the 
Miners Protection Act.
  Under the leadership of the Senator from West Virginia, we were asked 
to go through regular order. We were asked to have a hearing. Those of 
us on the Finance Committee--the Senator from Pennsylvania and I--were 
asked to have a committee markup. We had the committee markup. We 
reported the bill out with strong bipartisan support. Yet here we are, 
days away from the supposed end of the session, and we still have not 
had that vote. We have a long-term bipartisan solution, but instead we 
are being told the CR that might simply fund the government for a few 
months may have some kind of stop-gap effort--a stop-gap effort that 
would barely provide enough time, for those who were already threatened 
with losing their health care at the end of the year--barely have 
enough time to even reschedule a doctor's appointment.
  These miners--many of them have faced devastating illnesses as a 
result of their time in the mines--will be given absolutely no 
certainty that they will receive the medical care they need if we 
simply were to extend this bill to the time of the CR. And what would 
happen after May 1? And that has nothing to say to the more than 
100,000 miners across the country--thousands of them in my State of 
Virginia--who lose not only health care but also future pension 
benefits that are threatened by the approaching insolvency of the 
United Mine Workers 1974 pension fund.

  Madam President, you may not know this--as a matter of fact, even my 
colleague from West Virginia didn't realize this--but today, December 
6, is actually National Miners Day. Each year on December 6, we set 
aside a day to honor the mine workers of today and yesterday and 
reflect on their contributions to our Nation and rededicate ourselves 
to doing everything we can to protect their lives and health. Think 
about that. Today is actually National Miners Day. What better day to 
take the long awaited action to make sure that for those miners--and 
particularly, more often than not, for their widows--we honor the 
commitment that was made back in 1947 to make sure that their health 
care and pension benefits--at least their health care benefits--are 
guaranteed. The reality is that even with stronger safety standards, 
coal mining remains a dangerous and difficult profession. The truth is 
that nobody can really understand what it is like to be in a mine 
unless you have been underground. I have had that opportunity a number 
of times in my career. So many of the miners I worked with and 
supported when I was Governor and now as I am a Senator have seen all 
the changes that have come about by the changing nature of the 
industry, by globalization and by technology. Now many of those 
communities are on hard times. If we produce one more hit to these 
communities--a hit whereby the Federal Government doesn't honor the 
commitment they made to those miners in terms of protecting the health 
care of the miners and their families--then, quite honestly, we are not 
doing our job.
  We have come together and worked in a bipartisan fashion. We have a 
solution. We have a solution that wouldn't add to the debt or the 
deficit. I hope that those who are holding up this long-term solution--
and it is not simply one side. We have complete support on this side of 
the aisle and from a number of our colleagues on the other side of the 
aisle. Again, we ask: Let's make sure these miners, their widows, and 
their families don't lose their health care come the end of this year. 
We can ensure that happens, and I look forward to working with my 
colleagues to make sure that promise becomes a reality.
  With that, I yield the floor to my colleague from Pennsylvania.
  Mr. MANCHIN. We are close. It is West Virginia.
  I yield the floor to my dear friend and colleague, the Senator from 
Georgia.
  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I have a parliamentary inquiry.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Gardner). The Senator from Georgia.

[[Page S6748]]

  

  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, it was my understanding that I was going 
to follow the Senator from Connecticut on the VA bill, and I am happy 
to accommodate the Senator from West Virginia or the Senator from 
Pennsylvania or the Senator from Connecticut, whomever knows what order 
we should be in.
  Mr. MANCHIN. Sir, that is so kind of you. If we could do that, since 
the Senator is not here, then we can be very brief on ours, if you 
don't mind.
  Mr. ISAKSON. Will I yield to the Senator from West Virginia?
  Mr. MANCHIN. Yes.
  Mr. ISAKSON. And then would you yield to the Senator from 
Connecticut?
  Mr. MANCHIN. Let's let you do yours now. Go ahead. The Senator from 
Connecticut can go ahead.
  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to recognize the 
Senator from Connecticut, the Senator from Georgia, and then the 
Senator from Pennsylvania.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleagues who are 
very gracious for yielding to me, and I thank the Presiding Officer for 
recognizing me.


             Veterans Health Care and Benefits Legislation

  Mr. President, there is welcome news today, which is that the Senate 
has received from the House H.R. 6416, a bipartisan comprehensive 
measure that keeps faith with our veterans and makes sure that we 
continue our progress toward leaving no veteran behind.
  I want to emphasize at the very start that this measure is a down 
payment. It is far from a final or even fully acceptable solution to 
many of the problems that it addresses. It has more than 70 provisions. 
It is broad and comprehensive in scope and scale. More vets, many at 
risk and homeless, will receive the care and benefits they need and 
deserve. VA hospitals will have better management and more mental 
health caregivers and emergency room doctors. Families of veterans will 
be helped by extending critical education benefits to surviving members 
of those families. Work will finally begin to help descendants of 
veterans exposed to toxic substances. But again, on those issues and so 
many more, we are only taking another step in what must be a journey 
toward helping our veterans with services that they need, deserve, and 
have earned.
  One example that is long awaited is a landmark move that will 
commence research on descendants of veterans who have been exposed to 
toxic substances and address the painful residual wounds. It is all the 
more important today because we know the modern field of combat is 
ridden with nerve gas and other toxic and poisonous substances that all 
too often may endanger not only the brave men and women engaged on the 
battlefield but also their descendants. This measure expands the 
definition of homeless veterans to include individuals--perhaps women 
fleeing domestic violence--and it broadens the eligibility for critical 
homeless prevention programs. Many of those women fleeing brutality and 
violence deserve this kind of help.
  Under this legislation, the Veterans Health Administration will be 
given the flexibility it needs in scheduling physician workloads to 
bring them in line with the common practice that prevails in most 
medical centers. It is past time that we adjust the 1950s schedules, 
practices, and policies to work regulations within the VA hospitals and 
the need of today's veterans.
  One extraordinarily important provision relates to mental health, 
long a priority for me. We will make it easier to hire mental health 
counselors and access mental health treatment, significantly 
overhauling VA construction practices and authorize major medical 
construction projects in Reno, NV, and Long Beach, CA.
  On the issue of accountability that is so critically important and 
needs so much work, a provision in this measure would limit the ability 
of the VA to place an employee who is under investigation for 
misconduct on paid administrative leave for more than 14 days. This 
limitation would end the current practice of placing problematic 
employees on long periods of paid administrative leave and the 
provision would force the VA leaders to address issues when they arise 
to impose accountability.
  I want to thank my colleague Senator Isakson for his leadership, his 
dedication, his attention to detail, and his flexibility in the best 
traditions of this body. He clearly has put veterans first by sharing 
their ideas. They have come to us from many of the veterans service 
organizations, and I want to acknowledge all of them as well because 
they have been such a positive force.
  I want to thank my staff on the Veterans' Affairs Committee for their 
work on this bill and others that we passed, such as the Clay Hunt 
Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act, which I did in 
partnership with Senator Kaine and Senator Isakson.
  We need to do more to help veterans cope with opioid addiction, 
combat homelessness, protect veterans against identity theft, and make 
sure that our health care system for veterans continues to improve. It 
is still clearly a work in progress and still fails to meet the demands 
of access for thousands and tens of thousands of our veterans, even as 
it provides quality health care to many others.
  Many of the current challenges faced by veterans are directly 
attributable to management failures, and that is why accountability 
needs to improve. I want to thank Senators Burr and Tester for their 
bipartisan agreement to move forward on these challenges, and, 
hopefully, we will continue their work in the next session. Likewise, I 
have worked with Senator Moran and Chairman Isakson on numerous 
accountability reforms in the Veterans First Act, which was before this 
Chamber, again, providing goals and measures that we must achieve in 
the next Congress.
  Our bipartisan efforts to pass, hopefully within the next few days, 
H.R. 6416 is a crucial test of whether there is the necessary will and 
determination in this body to move ahead on the enormous challenges yet 
unmet and the enormous obligations that we have.
  Just as critical as the health care challenges, so too are the 
chronic problems in providing veterans the benefits they have earned--
benefits that are denied them in decisions they appeal. Today, over 
450,000 veterans' appeals await a decision. That is why I introduced 
the Department of Veterans Affairs Appeals Modernization Act of 2016. 
The present veterans' appeals process is a travesty. It is a mockery of 
justice. It must be reformed. It must be given the resources to make it 
effective. Even when veterans earn benefits, there are too many 
examples of unequal application. I joined Senator Murray in her efforts 
to ensure that all caregivers for severely wounded and disabled 
veterans, regardless of when the veterans have served, have access to 
caregiver support services. These caregivers are moms and dads, 
spouses, and children who provide care day after day after day at great 
expense and burden to them with very little support from the Nation 
that should be as grateful to them as to the veterans themselves.
  Simply put, veterans deserve better, and they deserve more. Even when 
they have grievances, often they are denied a day in court. They are 
forced into arbitration agreements concerning their reemployment rights 
and workplace protections. That is why I introduced the Justice for 
Servicemembers Act in June--to clarify that servicemembers cannot be 
denied access to the courthouse and forced into arbitration and that 
servicemembers cannot be forced to sacrifice those rights as a 
condition of future or continued employment. It is about basic American 
justice. Who deserves that justice more than our veterans who fought 
for it and died for it and should never be denied it?
  I want to thank again all of my colleagues who have worked with me 
over these past 2 years. We owe every veteran--regardless of the war or 
the conflict, regardless of the era--the basic guarantee that they will 
never be left behind, that this Nation will keep faith with them. This 
body owes them the obligation to summon the political will to cross 
partisan lines to make sure that we keep faith with them.
  As I yield the floor today, I want to express my gratitude again to 
Chairman Isakson and say that I yield the floor today but none of us 
should ever yield in the fight to help our veterans.

[[Page S6749]]

  Thank you, Mr. President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Connecticut for 
his recognition. I want to take this moment on the floor to praise him 
for the contribution he has made to the committee over the last 2 
years.
  I want to tell you a story. Richard became ranking member in the same 
year and at the same time that I became chairman. We met, we made a 
commitment to one another that we were going to move forward as a 
united Veterans' Affairs Committee, address the problems of our 
veterans, and do it in a bipartisan fashion. To set the tone for that, 
we introduced the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans 
Act, which Richard Blumenthal introduced, and passed it unanimously in 
the committee and 99 to zero on the floor of the Senate in the first 
weeks of this Congress. We did so to set the table that whatever the 
problems are, we should never let our pettiness, our politics, and our 
partisanship stop us from helping a veteran. Because of Richard 
Blumenthal on suicide prevention and our commitment to make it 
bipartisan, we passed that unanimously early on in the session and 
since that time have addressed other issues as well.

  The bill we discussed today, which is named in part for Richard 
Blumenthal, is, as he said a minute ago, a down payment on the 
continuing debt we owe to our veterans who have served us well. On the 
first day in the committee when I took over as chairman, I said: You 
know, there are no Republican veterans and no Democratic veterans; 
there are only American veterans. They are the Americans who fought for 
our flag, fought for our Constitution, fought for our liberty, and 
fought for each of us.
  I am proud to have fought with Richard for our veterans in the 
foxhole of the Senate.
  There is much left to be done. With the passage of this act today, 
which is named after Senator Blumenthal and Congressman Jeff Miller, 
who is retiring from the House, we are making another down payment on 
what we owe our veterans.
  There are other payments soon to come. I met earlier today with John 
McCain. We have made a commitment to make sure Veterans Choice is made 
permanent for our veterans and work to see that veterans have the best 
choice they can have, not to privatize the VA but to optimize the 
exposure of veterans to health care services wherever they need them.
  Last night I met with Jon Tester, our colleague from Montana, who 
will replace Richard as the new ranking member of the committee. He is 
equally committed with us to see to it that we move beyond the current 
sunset of the Veterans Choice Program, to solve the Veterans Choice 
Program as well as the other problems that confront our veterans.
  We are a team of Americans, not Republican Americans or Democratic 
Americans but Americans committed to see our veterans get what they 
were promised.
  As Senator Blumenthal said, this bill addresses homelessness, it 
addresses women's health care issues, it addresses the possible passage 
of exposure to toxic waste in a hereditary fashion to the surviving 
children and grandchildren of our veterans, an obligation we owe to see 
to it that if there is any transfer of the exposure of those toxic 
substances, the VA benefits that go to the veteran also can be passed 
down to the child who is a victim of heredity through no fault of their 
own.
  We do a lot on the court and the appeals. As Senator Blumenthal said, 
we have a backlog of 450,000 appeals. We are adding two judges in the 
appeals process. We need to do more to expedite the appeals process.
  This year I was personally disappointed that as close as we got to 
dealing with the administration and finding a solution, we still failed 
to say to our veterans: We are going to solve your problem of waiting 
in line.
  Two weeks ago, I had the sad duty of breaking into tears in the 
living room of a home of a veteran in Marietta, GA. This is a veteran 
who has been trying for 3 years to get an appeal responded to and can't 
get it. He is a veteran whose life is about to end without ever getting 
an answer as to whether his appeal is justified. That is just not 
right.
  We can find a way in this country to get the manpower and womanpower 
necessary, make the moral commitment that is imperative, and see that 
our veterans who have an appeal get an expeditious answer. Our veterans 
need to cooperate in that process by giving us all the backup data as 
fast as possible for every appeal they ask for. But it is not right for 
an appeal to last as long as the one that is before us in the U.S. 
Veterans Administration today, which is 25 years old. That's right, the 
oldest appeal in the Veterans Administration is 25 years old.
  I am committed--and I make the commitment on the floor of the Senate 
today--to work with Richard, Jon Tester, the members of our committee, 
and everybody in this body to see to it that we say to the 450,000 
veterans who are waiting on an appeal: We are going to get you an 
answer, and we are going to get it faster.
  To those sons and daughters today who are signing up for the U.S. 
military, if you have a need for an appeal, we will see you get an 
expeditious answer. They deserve the very best. They deserve no less 
than a thorough answer in response to the appeal they have made.
  The last 2 years, it has been a privilege and a pleasure for me for 
to work as chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee. It has been a 
pleasure to work with Richard Blumenthal, and I commend him on the 
contributions he has made. It has been equally great to work with his 
staff, who have worked closely with us to see that we brought the best 
legislation possible to the floor of the Senate.
  I particularly thank Tom Bowman, my chief of staff, who has made a 
lot of magic things happen during these last 2 years. But things have 
just begun in the Veterans' Committee of the Senate. We are going to 
work together to reach the dreams we all have to see to it that our 
veterans have seamless services and that we pay back to them what we 
owe them, equally what they have sacrificed and pledged for us--their 
lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
  I thank Senator Blumenthal for his support and ask each of our 
Members in the Senate today to help us pass this downpayment on the 
promise and the debt we owe to the veterans of the United States of 
America.
  I yield to the Senator from Pennsylvania.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania.
  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                         Miners Protection Act

  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I rise to speak tonight about the Miners 
Protection Act.
  First, I commend and salute the work that has been done in this 
Chamber. I especially highlight the Senators on the Democratic side who 
have been working. I know this will not cover everyone, but I thank 
Senator Manchin, the senior Senator from West Virginia, Senator Brown 
of Ohio, Senator Warner of Virginia, and others, including the 
Democratic leadership, for working on this. I know we have bipartisan 
support on this issue. I thank our Republican colleagues who have 
worked on this.
  Unfortunately, just today we are told that in the negotiations, in 
the back-and-forth on the continuing resolution, which we should be 
voting on this week--we are told that Majority Leader McConnell is not 
going to include the Miners Protection Act in the continuing 
resolution. That is very bad news, especially when we consider how we 
arrived at this point in terms of bipartisan support. I will get to 
that in a moment.
  Instead, apparently the proposal--or I guess at this point it might 
be beyond a proposal because it might be in a draft of the continuing 
resolution. Be that as it may, what has been proposed is 4 months of 
health care for miners and their families instead of a lifetime 
guarantee. In a word, that is unacceptable. I will not dwell on that 
because I want to get to the rest of our arguments on why this is a 
proposal we cannot accept.
  A long time ago, before the turn of the last century, Stephen Crane, 
known mostly for the ``Red Badge of Courage,'' a great novel, died at 
the

[[Page S6750]]

age of 28 or 29. But prior to his death, in addition to all that he 
wrote in a great novel, he wrote for McClure's magazine an essay about 
a coal mine near my hometown of Scranton in Lackawanna County. I come 
from a county that had of what they used to call hard coal, anthracite 
coal. It heated homes across the Nation and across the world, for not 
just years but generations.
  Stephen Crane described how dangerous it was to work in a coal mine. 
He did it with such beauty and such skill, but there were so many 
horrible images. I, of course, will not read the entire essay, but at 
one place he described the coal mine as a place of ``inscrutable 
darkness, a soundless place of tangible loneliness.''
  Then he described all the ways a miner could die in the mines. That 
was in the 1890s. Of course, coal mining today is safer, but still very 
dangerous. But no matter what the danger level, no matter what the 
circumstances of today, we owe these miners their health care, their 
pensions, and we owe their families.
  What they don't want to hear, what we should not engage in, is the 
usual horse trading and kind of back-and-forth of Washington. They 
deserve the Miners Protection Act. It is not some theory, and it is not 
some idea; it is legislation that was introduced, debated, and then 
voted on by the Finance Committee, 18 to 8, a bipartisan vote in a 
place that sometimes cannot agree on the time of day, let alone 
something as substantive and as important as health care and pension 
benefits for those who earned them. This isn't some extra thing we are 
giving, not some gift we are giving; they earned it, in many cases not 
just for years but for decades they earned this. OK. We owe them this. 
This country owes them this. This Chamber owes this to these miners.
  It was a promise a long time ago, in the late 1940s. These miners 
kept their promise. They went to work every day, year after year and 
decade after decade, and their families depended upon that promise. 
Some of them served in wars, including Vietnam, as just one example. 
They served in Vietnam and then worked in the mines again and worked 
and worked. So they kept their promise. They kept their promise to 
their family, they kept their promise to their country, and they kept 
their promise to their company.
  Yet here we are once again, and the only ones left out are the 
miners. The companies will figure out a way to do OK. The country will 
move forward, the Senate will be just fine, but once again we stand at 
the precipice or at the threshold of a new time period. People are 
wanting to get out of here for the holidays, yet coal miners are not 
asking us to do anything other than keep a promise.
  We should keep our promise, and the Republican majority leader should 
keep that promise. It is outrageous that anyone would think it is 
appropriate to propose temporarily saving benefits when, in practice, 
these recipients would be notified almost simultaneously that they are 
both eligible for benefits--temporarily--and that their benefits will 
terminate. That is not just wrong; that is an insult. It is an insult 
to them and to their families.
  Just imagine the stress of this. We cannot imagine it. I will answer 
my own question: We cannot imagine it. Probably no one in this building 
could imagine the stress on these individuals and their families. It is 
completely unnecessary.
  I know we are limited on time tonight, but I wish to highlight 
portions of letters that I have received. I know the Senator from West 
Virginia has received even more because of his great advocacy, his 
work, and the substantial impact that the mining industry has had on 
his great State and the work that is done by great miners to this day.
  To protect people in case we haven't received their permission, I 
will not use full names. This letter is from Waynesburg, PA, 
Southwestern Pennsylvania. I will limit it to a son talking about his 
mom. He said: ``I am writing to you for my mother.'' He is asking us to 
vote on this bill. In the letter he says his mom is a widow. ``She now 
lives on a fixed income. Her life depends on this passing,'' meaning, 
the bill passing. ``She has cancer and will need surgery.''
  Her life depends on this bill passing. OK. This isn't just another 
bill about some far-off issue. That is a son writing to us from 
Waynesburg, PA, about his mom.
  This is another letter from a son writing about both his parents, and 
I will provide just an excerpt. He writes that it would be ``very 
comforting'' to know his parents could ``continue their current UMWA 
benefits until they can turn 65.'' He is worried about the fact that 
two parents are going to turn 65 in 2017, and he wants to make sure 
that they are protected.
  The third and last letter I will read an excerpt from is from a miner 
himself from Johnstown, PA. It is a town I know pretty well in Cambria 
County. There has been a lot of mining there over many years. He is 
talking about working the mines for 21 years. He said: ``When you make 
a promise it should be kept.''
  That is what a miner from Johnstown, who worked in the mines for 21 
years, reminds us. It is just what I said: ``A promise should be 
kept.'' It continues, ``This insurance has gotten me and my wife 
through many health concerns including breast cancer in which my wife 
still fights today.''
  Then he talks about how this would dramatically change their access 
to doctors and medical care.
  So we are not talking about some budget number here; we are talking 
about a family telling us the life of their mother depends upon it; 
another family member whose mom has breast cancer, her life--or at 
least her health care at this point--depends upon it. So this isn't 
theory.
  This legislation, which passed the Finance Committee, as I said, 18 
to 8--all we have to do is have the majority leader stand up and say 
that we are going to attach this to the continuing resolution and have 
the House Speaker say the same because they have control. That is all 
they have to do--attach it to the continuing resolution--and we will 
finally have kept our promise.
  Temporary relief is not only insufficient, it is an insult. It is not 
just insufficient, it is dead wrong.
  No one here should be playing games with people's ability to pay for 
medication, pay for their oxygen. That shouldn't be the subject of 
games or horse trading.
  We delivered in both parties. We delivered to Majority Leader 
McConnell everything he asked for--committee consideration, debate and 
vote in the committee--and now it has come to the floor of the U.S. 
Senate. It is time for all of us to keep our promise to coal miners and 
to make the Miners Protection Act permanent law and to keep our promise 
to those miners and their families.
  I again commend and salute the Senator from West Virginia, and I 
yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia.
  Mr. MANCHIN. Mr. President, I wish to thank my dear friend from 
Pennsylvania, my neighbor State, for his commitment to the hard-working 
people who made this country what it is today.
  There are a lot of people who don't know the history of how we are 
the superpower of the world, how we won two world wars, how we 
energized the whole industrial age, and how we built the middle class. 
It came because of the domestic energy that we basically extracted 
right here in America and it was done by mine workers. My grandfather 
came to this country as a young child in the early 1900s, and his 
family came here to find a better life. On both sides--I had one set of 
grandparents who came from Czechoslovakia and the other set came from 
Italy, and both sides ended up in the coal mines, as well as all of my 
uncles and cousins. We had these little coal camps all over the area 
where I grew up in Farmington, WV.
  I was so proud of my heritage. I will never forget my Boy Scout 
leader was Pat Keener. He was a coal miner. When the coal mines 
automated in 1959, he had to go and find a job in Ohio in the auto 
industry. My Little League coach was a coal miner--everybody I knew. 
The hunting and fishing clubs were all coal miners who took all of us 
and showed us how to do things and enjoy the outdoors.
  It is just an unbelievable network of people, and most all of them 
were military. Most all of them were veterans.

[[Page S6751]]

They continued to serve their country when they left the mines and went 
to the military and came back to the mines.
  So I rise with a heavy heart because I thought we had this fixed. I 
thought this was something we had done--and Senator Casey laid it out 
so well. We have done everything we can. This day has been coming for 
quite some time. I warned everybody 2 years ago that this finite time 
would come December 31 of this year. We started working in earnest 
quite a while ago. We were told to go through the regular order, as 
Senator Casey said, to do the things we were supposed to do. It got its 
full purview, if you will, and it passed bipartisanly. Everyone is 
sympathetic. Everyone knows the hard work that is done and how 
dangerous it is.
  My uncle on my mom's side got killed in the 1968 mine explosion in 
Farmington. I lost a lot of kids I went to school with, classmates, so 
it has been very near and dear to me.
  As Governor of West Virginia, the Sago Mine disaster, I lost 12 
miners there. We had the Logan Mine disaster, and I lost two people 
there, and then we had the UBB, and we lost 29 people. So I have been 
through it. I know how dangerous and tough this business is, but I know 
the country depends on them. We can't run without them.
  I want to make sure everyone understands that this was never intended 
for the government or the taxpayers to pay. It never was. It wasn't set 
up that way. In 1946, John L. Lewis basically said we are going to go 
on strike. We are pulling everybody out. This was after World War II. 
The economy had been ramped up because it was 100 percent employment. 
We were producing and consuming because of the war effort. When that 
happened, the economy started heading down. He said: Oh, no. We have to 
keep this economy going. We can't let this tail off. They said: Listen, 
from the beginning of the 20th century until 1946--46 years--these 
miners have done back-breaking work. We have heard the old adage ``I 
owe my soul to the company store.'' My grandfather told me that when he 
worked in the mines in the early 1920s, he had four children and was 
expecting his fifth child, and he said at the end of the day, he had no 
money. All the script was at the company store. He had to borrow 
everything there, and at the end of the month, he owed them for 
working, trying to make it. He had no health care. There was a doctor 
who helped them a little bit. They had no pension or retirement. They 
worked until they died, and that was the way it was.
  In 1946, they said: Enough is enough. You shouldn't work this hard 
and so many people benefit. You helped build a country and you get 
nothing. So they said from that day forward--and that was the Krug 
amendment that was signed--and by the blessings of the U.S. President, 
Harry S. Truman. Then they said, from that day forward: All the coal 
that we mine, a percentage of that coal or the money on that percentage 
of coal, would go into a black lung fund and then it would go into the 
AML fund and then it would go into basically the miners health care and 
retirement--a portion of that.
  So it wasn't coming from taxpayers; it was coming from the work they 
were producing. That is where this came from.
  So everything is going fine. Then, basically, Congress passed 
bankruptcy laws that allowed companies to go and declare bankruptcy and 
basically divest themselves of all of their responsibilities to the 
people who worked for them. This was done to them. We had the 74 plant 
and the 92 plant.
  So we dealt with something that was not their making. These people 
negotiated contracts in good faith by bargaining, and they would give 
away salary or money that could have been in their pocket because they 
knew they were going to get guaranteed health care, and now here we 
stand basically saying: I am sorry. That is not going to happen. You 
are going to lose your pension and health care.
  We have over 16,000 who will lose their health care benefits by the 
end of this year, less than 4 weeks away--16,000. Senator Casey read 
some letters, and I am going to read some letters as well.
  What we are doing here is we are holding up--and I know it affects 
everybody's hard work. This is something that is not easy for me. I 
have never done this. I have been here 6 years. I have never used this 
procedure, but I have never felt so committed and so beholden to people 
who have given so much. We are talking 60-, 70-, and 80-year-old women. 
Most of the husbands have died; they are still depending on this. The 
little clinics we have in the coal communities around West Virginia and 
southwestern Pennsylvania, those coal communities and coal camps and 
basically those little clinics will not survive. This has a ripple 
effect.
  Now, I understand they are going to give us a 4-month extension--4 
months. Let me tell my colleagues what these people are going through. 
They were told the 1st of October they will lose their benefits of 
health care; 16,000 were sent letters telling them they will lose them 
by the end of this year. Now, what we are about to do--which I believe 
is totally inhumane--we are about to now send them another letter, if 
passed the way it is going to be presented to us in the CR, that says: 
I am sorry, Mrs. Smith. I know we told you that you are going to lose 
your health care on December 1, but now we are going to tell you that 
in January we will send you another letter and tell you, you are going 
to lose it in April.
  Now, you tell me if there is anything fair about that. You tell me 
how you face people who have given everything, and now we are just 
going to extend it for another 4 months with no certainty that anything 
will continue from there.
  We are asking for a permanent fix. We have a pay-for for that 
permanent fix. It is the excess we have, surplus in the AML money, but 
everybody has other plans for that. Well, guess what. The people who 
need it have plans also, to try to keep themselves alive. That is the 
plan they have, and that is what they are asking for.
  I haven't ever used this tactic before, but I feel so compelled that 
I said we are going to do whatever we can to keep this promise. We have 
asked for the health care--this had a health care and pension 
provision. It has only the health care provision right now because we 
understand that we worked and we negotiated and we said this is 
something we felt we needed now because they had a finite time--at the 
end of this month. We will work on the pensions next year, too, to make 
sure they are going to be preserved.
  That being said, I have gotten letters, the same as everybody else in 
coal country where we come from. Here is one: Dear Senator Manchin, 
without action I, along with thousands of other coal miners and widows 
of coal miners, will lose our health care on December 31. My husband 
died in 2012 of pancreatic cancer. He also had black lung. He loved his 
job even though it was so dangerous. He worked to ensure that we had 
good health benefits not just for me but for him and our family. I am 
asking Congress to please do the right thing and don't let us lose our 
health care benefits.
  I have another letter. This is from Carol Turek. Carol writes: My 
husband worked in the mines with blockages in his brain until he had 
enough time. He worked even though he was that ill so that I would have 
insurance if something happened to him, knowing that he was very ill. 
He retired in 2009 and he passed away in 2011. He was a good worker. He 
stayed over and worked days off when needed and this is how they thank 
him in return. How is an older person supposed to live when they take 
away your retirement, take away your insurance, and never give you 
raises in Social Security? Everything raises and medical is outrageous. 
I guess when you are old, they expect you to crawl into a corner and 
die. Well, I pray every day that God gives me another day, and I am 
praying that they pass this health care provision so that others and 
myself can live just a little bit longer.
  I have another one. She says: Dear Senator Manchin and all of you who 
are trying to help us. My husband Charles passed away on October 12 
from cancer. Patriot Coal filed bankruptcy before Charles passed away. 
He told me that if they took his medical coverage, that he would not go 
to the doctor because he didn't want to leave me in debt if he didn't 
get medical coverage, so he didn't want to go to the doctor. My income 
was cut almost 75 percent when Charles passed away. Charles was 
promised these benefits for us both. He worked all of those years in

[[Page S6752]]

coal dust to help supply this country with the energy that it needed. I 
pray that our government will pass this bill to help the thousands that 
will be affected by not having health care. Some people will choose to 
buy medicine instead of food. This is so sad and coal miners worked in 
the mines and risked their lives for so long. Some people that have 
never worked can get help under the new health care law, so why not 
help the ones who have worked and paid for it? Why can't they get what 
they are supposed to get? I am proud to be an American and daughter, 
sister, wife, and mother of coal miners.
  I have one here that explains it very well. She says: Dear Senator. I 
have dedicated my life to a career in nursing in Boone County, WV. My 
husband developed kidney disease and heart disease at an early age. He 
did not smoke, drink, nor do drugs. Doing his work he developed an 
autoimmune. He worked very sick for 30 years underground in the coal 
industry as an electrician in the mines and maintenance worker. He was 
an educated man but he loved working with his hands. After coming out 
of the U.S. Air Force when he worked in the World Communication Agency 
as a cryptographic specialist in the White House, he chose to go into 
the mines as a career because of the reliable future, retirement, and 
health benefits that it assured for his family. Rick worked hard every 
day and during the last 15 years that he worked he would sometimes 
travel over 45 minutes away and take chemotherapy treatments to treat 
his kidney disease while he was still working. He had heart disease as 
a result of those treatments. So many heart studies, the stent, and the 
bypass surgery followed along with the continued renal disease. All of 
those years he worked in the mines to provide electricity to so many 
who worked other jobs, were comfortable in their homes, sitting at 
their desks, not risking life or limb for the luxuries afforded them by 
the coal miners who had been promised health and retirement benefits if 
they took less pay, did not strike for same, and continued providing 
the valuable coal resources this country needed.

  Continuing: After educating me to beyond my Master's level; putting a 
girl through medical school, and another daughter to Master's level in 
teacher education--we depleted many of our financial resources to do 
this, knowing we had ``secure retirement and health'' planned for 
through his union. During the last 1\1/2\ years of his life, after 
retirement, Rick died of leukemia that developed from many years of 
chemical treatments for his autoimmune kidney disease. Meanwhile, I 
worked 26 years as a school nurse plus additional years as a registered 
nurse, planning to utilize my husband's percentage of retirement and 
health benefits to secure my own retirement.
  Continuing: When the courts of this land allowed bankrupting 
companies to fold on their commitments to our miners, that has become a 
frightening and impossible situation for myself, a widow, and many more 
in my same situation. Devastation is the only word that can be used to 
describe the trickle down effect it will have on so many other 
businesses and health agencies, if this congressional action does not 
carry through to secure our union miners, retirees, and widows. You are 
not only destroying the 12,000 plus miners and widows involved, you are 
destroying huge infrastructures and businesses that depend upon the 
income and health benefits where these individuals are served. Please 
note, only the ``union'' miners contributed to these funds, not the 
nonunion miners who chose much higher wages opposed to the union wages 
and structure. Please consider this so we can go into Christmas knowing 
we have the security of the fund being stabilized. Some will have no 
way out; some individuals will literally not survive without the needed 
health care and pensions they worked and sacrificed their health to 
obtain. Thank you, Sue Peros, Wife of Bert Ricky Peros, South 
Charleston, WV.
  We have many more.
  The thing I want to emphasize is that these are real people. This is 
not just something we are fabricating. These are people who work every 
day. These are people still living, still contributing, still taking 
care of their families, still depending on health care. The ripple 
effect is unbelievable. To sit here and say we are going to pass a CR 
because we want to go home for Christmas or to say we have the comfort 
of being home and we have 16,000 miners, retired--we have their widows 
and families depending on health care, and they have been told they are 
going to lose it December 31, but we are in a hurry to leave. We just 
can't wait to leave. We have got to get out of here. Well, I am sorry, 
that is not the way we do it back home. That is not how we treat our 
friends and neighbors and especially not how we treat our miners.
  I am asking all of you to work with us to make sure we get a 
permanent fix. That is all I am asking for. We have a way to do this 
with the surplus AML funds to pay for that, money that was made for 
mining the coal to be used for this. That is what we are asking for. 
That is what we promised them. That is what we owe them.
  I thank all of my colleagues, each and every one, for being so 
considerate. We have bipartisan support.
  I will say this: If this were a standalone bill on this floor, it 
would pass. This bill on this floor would pass, with Democrats and 
Republicans working together. It would also pass in the House. But that 
is not the case. We can't get a standalone bill. We have what we have. 
We are asking for the compassion of our leaders on both sides of the 
aisle here to give us a clean, long-term fix for health care for the 
retired miners as promised.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor to my dear friend from Ohio.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Manchin for driving this 
issue. It was done better with him than without him. I thank him for 
making a world of difference and Senator Casey for his impassioned 
pleas and reading the letters from mine workers, retired mine workers, 
widows, retired mine workers in Western Pennsylvania and all over West 
Virginia and Southeast Ohio. We are all getting letters in our offices 
that are heartfelt and just make me wonder, why aren't we doing 
something?
  I want to share a letter from a lady in Gallipolis, OH, a village. I 
was just there in the community of Rio Grande earlier this week. She 
wrote a letter to Mitch McConnell, who is, frankly, the single person 
standing in the way of doing this.

       Dear Leader Mitch McConnell:
       Just to inform you as a member of UMWA that it is vitally 
     important that we keep our insurance.
       My Husband (Larry) worked 35 years as a miner. He has had 
     bypass surgery this last Aug 8, 2016, also has black lung--
     COPD--chronic idiopathic gout, acute bron-
     chitis . . .

  And other things.

       I have history of cardiomyopathy and congestive heart 
     failure. . . . We need members of all Congress to consider 
     all that the Coal Miners has contribution to the welfare of 
     this country. Now we ask that they remember commitments made 
     to the Coal Miners. Please keep that promise made to the Coal 
     Miners.

  Over and over: Please keep that promise made to the coal miners. But 
instead we hear all kinds of excuses. Again, one man--the majority 
leader of the Senate, the Republican Senator from Kentucky--one man 
standing in the way.
  Senator Manchin just said that if this came to a vote right now on 
the Senate floor, it would easily have enough votes to pass, but one 
man has blocked this in the continuing resolution. He has kind of 
distributed--dropped a few crumbs to a few miners for a few weeks on 
health care but not pensions. But it is one man standing in the way.
  When I look at the other Senators--the two Senators from 
Pennsylvania, one Democrat, one Republican; two Senators from West 
Virginia, one Democrat, one Republican; two Senators from Ohio, one 
Democrat, one Republican; two Senators from Virginia, both Democrats--
all of them want to move on this, but we keep hearing excuses from one 
man, the majority leader of the Senate, from Kentucky.
  We were told by the majority leader we need bipartisan support. Well, 
we got it, the bill cosponsored by Republicans and Democrats. As 
Senator Manchin said, if it were brought up to a vote, we could pass it 
tonight.
  Then we were told the bill needs to go through regular order, which 
is a way, in Washington-speak, of simply

[[Page S6753]]

saying: Send it to a committee, examine it, debate it, bring a couple 
witnesses in, bring in experts, talk about it. We did that.
  Senators Warner and Casey and I also, on the Finance Committee, 
helped get this bill through with a bipartisan vote of 18 to 8--not 
even close. Again, the Republican Senators from Pennsylvania and Ohio 
joined the Democratic Senators from those two States. Eighteen to 
eight.
  Then we were told by the majority leader--the one man who is stopping 
this--find a pay-for. Find a way to pay for it. We did. The bill is 
fully offset. As Senator Manchin said, as Senator Casey said, as a 
number have said, this does not cost taxpayers a dime. This isn't a 
bank bailout that cost real dollars. This isn't even the auto rescue, 
which was so important to my State. That cost real dollars, although 
the money was paid back. This won't cost taxpayers anything. The 
Congressional Budget Office estimates it would reduce the Federal 
deficit by $67 million over 10 years because they would get the right 
kind of health care rather than having to rely on other kinds of 
government programs.
  These miners--again, we keep saying this over and over. They have 
done everything we have asked them to do.
  Almost seven decades ago, President Truman made this commitment. We 
have lived up to this commitment through Presidents of both parties, 
including this President, Barack Obama, but one person--again, one 
person--has stood in the way. The miners in my State can't afford to 
have this reduced to political gamesmanship. They are hard-working 
people. They spent their careers doing dignified work.
  I remember when we spoke at the rally on a really hot day earlier 
this year. There were thousands of miners there. I remember Cecil 
Roberts, the president of the United Mine Workers, stood up and said: 
Put your hand up if you are a veteran.
  Hundreds of hands went up.
  He said: Put your hand up if your father or mother was a veteran.
  Again, hundreds more hands went up.
  These are people who served their country. And those who weren't off 
to war were producing the coal to produce the electricity to power the 
war machine, whether it was World War II or Korea or Vietnam or 
anything since.
  Not taking up the mine workers protection act is violating the 
promise made by President Truman, violating the promise we all made. 
The bill should ride on the continuing resolution. The majority party 
has the ability to make that happen right now.
  I was talking a moment ago quietly, privately, with Senator Casey. We 
were talking about--unlike the spouses of insurance agents or realtors 
or teachers or Senators or bankers, mine workers are much more likely 
to die at a younger age. When you talk about so many, by any cross 
section, by any analysis of who is most in need of this kind of help, 
mine workers--there are a lot more mine worker widows than there are in 
other professions because of the danger of the work. There is a much 
greater likelihood of dying on the job, much greater likelihood of 
getting hurt on the job, much greater likelihood in later years of 
developing brown lung and developing various kinds of heart ailments 
and bronchial ailments because they worked in the mines. That makes it 
an even more fundamental moral question, that we do something about 
this.
  How many mine workers are sick and need health care? How many need 
these pensions? How many mine workers die and their widows need this 
help? And we sit here doing nothing.
  I just say again to Leader McConnell: Get out of the way. Just let 
this come to an up-or-down--however you want to do this, however you 
want to schedule this, however you want to move this through the 
Senate, we should be doing it now. We shouldn't go home for our 
Christmas break until we take care of these miners. It is the right, 
moral thing to do. It is the right thing for our country. It is a 
promise we made, a pledge we made. We should honor it, starting this 
evening.
  Mr. 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.
  Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Daines). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.


                     Montenegro Membership in NATO

  Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, today the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee approved the resolution to allow Montenegro to become a 
member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. I am here this 
afternoon to urge that the full Senate take up this issue and give a 
prompt vote to the accession before we bring the 114th Congress to a 
close.
  A top priority of the historic NATO summit that happened in Warsaw in 
July was bolstering the alliance's resolve and capacity to deter 
Russian aggression against the Baltic States and the rest of NATO's 
eastern flank. Also at the Warsaw summit, NATO formally invited 
Montenegro to become its 29th member nation. All 28 member states must 
now ratify the accession protocol according to our own procedures. In 
the United States, that means the Senate must ratify the protocol.
  In the decades since the end of the Cold War, NATO has been a 
tremendous force for stability, democratization, and freedom in Europe. 
That is exactly why more countries, including those created by the 
breakup of Yugoslavia, are eager to join.
  Montenegro has worked hard to prove its commitment to NATO, including 
by strengthening its democracy, making significant progress in fighting 
corruption, and improving its defense capabilities. Montenegro's 
membership in NATO would have significant impact, including completing 
the alliance's unbroken control of the Adriatic coast. It will serve to 
further anchor the Balkan region in the security framework of NATO.
  It speaks volumes that Vladimir Putin has fiercely opposed 
Montenegro's accession to NATO. During Montenegro's general election in 
October, authorities arrested 20 people suspected of plotting, with 
support from Russia, to overthrow the Cabinet and assassinate 
Montenegro's Prime Minister, Milo Djukanovic. While NATO is purely a 
defensive alliance, Russia has warned Montenegro of retaliation if the 
country continues to pursue NATO membership. By quickly approving the 
resolution on accession, the Senate can demonstrate that it stands 
firmly with Montenegro and that we will not allow Putin to bully 
European states with impunity.
  Montenegro's membership would reaffirm that NATO's door remains open 
to aspirant nations that share the values of all NATO members and stand 
ready to contribute to NATO operations. NATO must stand firm on the 
principle that the decision to seek membership in the alliance cannot 
be blocked by a third party.
  NATO is the most ambitious and successful alliance in history. Across 
nearly seven decades, it has risen to every challenge: deterring the 
Soviet Union during the Cold War; integrating former Soviet bloc 
countries into a Europe whole and free; restoring peace in the Balkans 
after Yugoslavia's breakup; invoking article 5 in defense of the United 
States after September 11; and most recently, taking the fight to the 
Islamic State terrorist group in Syria and Iraq.
  Montenegro is a small nation with big strategic importance. Its 
accession to NATO would strengthen the alliance. In turn, membership in 
NATO would bolster Montenegro's democracy and independence.
  As I said, today the Foreign Relations Committee approved the 
resolution of accession. I hope the full Senate will bring the 
resolution to the floor for a prompt, favorable vote. The United States 
has always stood strong for freedom and democracy in Europe, and it is 
time to stand strong for freedom and democracy in Montenegro.
  Mr. 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. GARDNER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                   Unanimous Consent Request--S. 3084

  Mr. GARDNER. Mr. President, I am pleased to come to the floor tonight 
to

[[Page S6754]]

talk about a bill, S. 3084, the American Innovation and Competitiveness 
Act. This is a piece of legislation that has taken several years of 
patience, perseverance, a lot of hard work, and testimony from both 
sides of the aisle.
  I am pleased that Senator Peters from Michigan and I have finally 
been able to come up with a product that has the strongest bipartisan 
support in both the Senate and the House. This is an effort that builds 
on the America COMPETES legislation. America COMPETES was first passed 
over a decade ago as an effort to make the United States more 
competitive economically, an effort to make sure we had the skills and 
our workers, the STEM force education to compete with nations around 
the world as global competition increases, as other nations try to gain 
an advantage over the United States in their manufacturing processes 
and in their innovation processes.
  The America COMPETES legislation arose from a report that was put 
together by a group of individuals--very smart business leaders, 
scientists--known as the ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm'' report, 
the ``RAGS'' report, the idea being, how are we going to make sure the 
United States remains competitive and how do we make sure we have the 
education programs we need in this country to gear the next-generation 
workforce for a more competitive environment? So we put together this 
bill, a bipartisan bill, passing it out of the Commerce Committee for 
the first time in a decade--the America COMPETES legislation--to renew 
this policy effort.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the 
immediate consideration of Calendar No. 695, S. 3084. I further ask 
that the committee-reported substitute amendment be withdrawn; the 
Gardner substitute amendment be agreed to; the bill, as amended, be 
considered read a third time and passed; and that the motions to 
reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, this 
legislation sounds pretty good. It is bipartisan, but I also know that 
in my State there are more than 1,000 retired mine workers and their 
widows. We know that people who have worked in the mines for 30, 35, or 
40 years are more likely to be sick and die younger. These 1,000-plus 
mine workers have been denied their pensions. Their pensions and health 
care have been threatened. Many of them are widows of mine workers. 
Yet, we have bipartisan support. It passed out of the Finance Committee 
16 to 8, and Senator McConnell--one person in this body--has blocked 
the mine workers pension and health care legislation for weeks and 
weeks and months and months.
  I would be very happy to support and help Senator Gardner in this 
legislation, the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act. I hope he 
will speak to the Republican leader and ask him to do the right thing 
to help these pensioners, widows, and mine workers whose pensions are 
threatened and whose health care is about to be cut off.
  Mr. President, I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  The Senator from Colorado.
  Mr. GARDNER. Mr. President, again, I want to reiterate that this 
legislation, the America COMPETES bill, is a bipartisan product. We 
have spent countless hours working with people from around the country 
to come up with a bill that focuses on giving workers and employees the 
skills they need to succeed.
  I understand the objection of the Senator from Ohio, which is based 
on the need to move forward with the legislation they are talking 
about, but it is my understanding that there is at least an effort to 
work on that legislation, which would provide some time to come up with 
a longer term solution providing an extension of the health care 
coverage they have been seeking for some time, although not the entire 
benefit package they were hoping would be extended under the 
legislation they were also talking about.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I can't exactly speak for my colleagues, 
but I know a number of Senators on this side of the aisle will be 
pleased to work with the Senator on this legislation, and I am hopeful 
we can do both in the days ahead.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado.
  Mr. GARDNER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Ohio.
  One of the challenges we have, of course, is the calendar, as this 
reaches toward the end. Again, I am committed to stay here as long as 
we can to fix this and make this work. I do worry about our colleagues 
across the hallway and their calendar and making sure that they are 
finding the time to process this legislation, along with the 
legislation that the Senator from Ohio is concerned about.
  Again, I think this is something that we ought to be able to move on 
as we address the concerns of the Senator from Ohio--and the concerns 
that I think, at least to some degree, will be addressed in the 
continuing resolution--and to continue to work on legislation that is 
truly bipartisan and beneficial from a standpoint of providing more 
resources for manufacturing partnerships, more resources for 
commercialization efforts, additional resources for STEM education, and 
having more underrepresented minority community members involved in 
STEM education fields. These are things I think we can work on, and 
this place has to have the ability to work together on efforts that the 
Senator from Ohio is so concerned about and also the efforts that we 
have through the America COMPETES legislation. I believe we can do 
both.
  I understand the objection, and I appreciate the offer and 
willingness to work together. But I know when you have a House and a 
Senate that work under two different calendars, one of which is under 
our control--again, let's stay here until we get this done. There is 
one calendar that is out of our control, and I just hope we can move 
forward on this because all 50 States do benefit from the bipartisan 
work we have been able to put forward on the American Innovation and 
Competitiveness Act.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I appreciate those words. I also recognize 
that we have not seen a continuing resolution yet. There is a rumor 
that it has 4 months of health care but it doesn't have any pension 
assistance, and there is nothing about fully funding their pension and 
continuing with their health care. They have already gotten a notice 
saying their health care will be terminated. If we continue this for 4 
months, they will get another notice in January. That is all hearsay 
because we still have not seen the bill.
  I know we are working on separate calendars. I understand that, and 
maybe the House is going to take the ball and go home, showing a real 
maturity in its leadership. The fact is we need to stay here. I don't 
know why we need to get out and go home for Christmas tomorrow or even 
Friday. I think we should stay here until we finish. We have been here 
until December 24 before. I am fine with that. I want to be home. I 
have a wife whom I love and kids and grandchildren, and I want to see 
them all, but I want to take care of these miners.
  Show us a bill. Let's talk about it, negotiate this, and follow 
regular order. I believe we had an 18-to-8 vote on taking care of this 
health care for miners. We can honor what Senator Gardner, the Senator 
from Colorado, wants to do. I am fine with doing that, but we are not 
going to do any of those things until we take care of the miners. We 
have an obligation to them that President Truman had begun with a 
pledge. It is morally reprehensible to betray that commitment to 12,000 
retired miners and their widows in the country.
  I want to do all of that, and I know Senator Gardner does too. It is 
up to my colleagues to push the majority leader, who, for whatever 
reason, is blocking this and is continuing to block our ability to do 
this. We should stay here until it is finished.
  I yield the floor.

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