[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 170 (Monday, October 23, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6707-S6711]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
BANKRUPTCY JUDGESHIP ACT OF 2017--Continued
Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the
mandatory quorum call with respect to the cloture motion on the House
message to accompany H.R. 2266 be waived.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Florida.
Mr. NELSON. Madam President, to accommodate the majority leader, I
ask unanimous consent--I understand that he will object, and I will
explain it afterward, but it involves what you see here in the
aftermath of the hurricane, all of this citrus fruit on the ground--
[[Page S6708]]
that it be in order to call up my amendment No. 1575--approximately $3
billion for all of the agriculture for Florida and Texas, which Senator
Cornyn, Senator Rubio, and I have all been working on--to the motion to
concur with an amendment to the House message on H.R. 2266 and that the
amendment be agreed to with no intervening action or debate.
In order to accommodate the majority leader, I will explain it after
he has returned to his meeting.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The majority leader.
Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I
would say to my good friend from Florida that I hope he knows that the
Senate remains committed to doing its part to support the ongoing
hurricane relief efforts. We all see this as a multistaged process in
providing needed relief. There will be additional rounds, and we are
all fully committed to meeting the needs that have arisen as a result
of these devastating hurricanes.
For the moment, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from Florida.
Mr. NELSON. Madam President, in my explanation, I will go into it in
detail.
It is my hope that the White House promise that this will be taken up
in November, which is the next tranche of the hurricane money, the
disaster assistance. It has been well past a month since Hurricane Irma
hit Puerto Rico and 2 months since it hit Florida, and Floridians all
across our State are working as hard as ever to recover.
One group of individuals who were hit especially hard by this storm
is Florida's citrus growers. I will refer again to this photograph. You
can see the citrus grove. You can see the branches on the citrus trees.
Some of the trees have blown over, but in the meantime, you can see all
of the fruit that is on the ground.
Toward southwest Florida, at least 75 percent of the crops are on the
ground. In more central Florida, it is upward of 50 and 60 percent. Of
all the times, this was going to be a bumper crop. Lord knows, with the
greening disease--its nickname is ``greening,'' but it is a bacteria--
it will kill the tree in 5 years, and it has been declining the citrus
production over the course of the last 10 years. We had suffered enough
through all of that, and then here had come this hurricane. When it
looked as if there was going to be a good crop to turn around the
lessened production that had occurred over each of the last 10 years,
this is what happened.
If that were not enough--all of the fruit on the ground--take a look
at this. This is what has happened to citrus groves. Whole trees have
been blown over. Whether you are talking about a grove that is totally
demolished or a grove that has lost almost all of its crop, that is why
the Florida citrus growers are in such a very difficult economic
situation. Some of Florida's farmers lost nearly everything when Irma
tore through the State. In fact, the statewide agricultural industry
has lost more than $2.5 billion. Included in that is $760 million that
Florida's citrus industry alone, just by itself, has lost, as you see
in these photographs.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its
first crop estimates for the 2017-2018 citrus season. They estimated
that Florida's citrus growers would harvest 54 million boxes of oranges
this year, but that number doesn't yet fully account for all the damage
caused by Hurricane Irma.
According to the folks on the ground, they believe the actual
estimate is going to be only 31 million boxes this season. Now compare
31 million boxes to a decade ago when Florida harvested over 203
million boxes. Ten years before that, Florida growers harvested 244
million boxes. Now they are estimating, after the storm, a yield of
only 31 million boxes.
So the Florida citrus growers are really taking a hit. They have to
have disaster assistance. The citrus industry is a vital part of
Florida's economy, and that is why Senator Rubio is here with us. We
have been pushing so hard to get our citrus growers some help.
Just a couple of days after the storm, Senator Rubio and I met with a
group of growers in a citrus grove in Polk County in Central Florida,
where the loss is about 50 or 60 percent, unlike South Florida, where
the loss is 75 to 90 percent.
Unfortunately, the White House has been saying: No, we can't do it in
this disaster assistance bill. As we have been working on a bipartisan
amendment that would provide the growers with the help they need, the
same amendment that the majority leader had to object to, President
Trump has reportedly been making calls urging others in the Chamber to
move forward with the overall package as is and to nix the money we
need to help Florida's farmers.
Florida's citrus industry may have been one of the industry's hardest
hit by the storm, but it certainly wasn't the only industry that was
affected in Florida. Florida's fruit and vegetable farms lost more than
$180 million when their fields were flooded and their bushes were
ripped straight out of the ground. Row crops, such as peanuts, cotton,
sweet corn, potatoes, and sugarcane together experienced nearly $450
million in losses from the hurricane-force winds and heavy rains.
Senator Rubio went to Hastings to see the potato farms. He saw how
they had been ripped to shreds. Florida's nurseries lost nearly $625
million when their greenhouses were damaged by the winds. Florida's
timber industry lost $261 million. Florida's cattlemen, whose ranches,
barns, fences, and equipment were severely damaged, lost a total of
$237 million in losses. Dairy farmers had to dump more than $2 million
worth of milk because they couldn't store it properly after they lost
power.
Farmers are the lifeblood of this country and an important part of
Florida's economy. Right now, they desperately need our help. In urging
the Senate to move forward with this disaster package as it is, not
amended, President Trump has told some of our colleagues that he would
support adding this additional agriculture money in a later
supplemental next month. To my colleagues who have farmers and ranchers
in their own States, you know as well as we do that these families and
businesses can't wait any longer. They need our help, and they need it
now. I ask you to consider how you would react if those farmers and
ranchers suffered $2.5 billion in losses from a single natural
disaster, as our agriculture industry in Florida has.
So, to accommodate the majority leader, I already made the unanimous
consent request, which the majority leader objected to. I want to
further state that to fulfill the White House promise of including the
disaster aid farmers desperately need, I have placed a hold on the
President's nominee for Deputy Director of the Office of Management and
Budget. Getting the additional money next month could be the difference
between whether Florida's farmers can replant their crops next year or
not.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida.
Mr. RUBIO. Thank you, Madam President.
I thank the senior Senator from Florida on this issue. I want to
elaborate on it a little further. Any time we ask the taxpayers of this
country to step in and help a private industry, it is important and
incumbent on us to justify why. The amendment he just made that we have
been working to get included in what is before the Senate obviously
deals with agriculture at large, and he described some of the different
industries in Florida that have been hurt in agriculture and some of
the crops in Florida that were impacted by the storm.
The reason I want to focus my attention on citrus is not because we
don't care about the other industries that were damaged, but citrus is
in a unique and precarious place. I want to describe it to people who
may not be as familiar with this as those who live in Florida and see
it all the time.
First, I would say that one of the signature issues in the campaign
and in politics today is the desire to make more and produce more in
the United States; the idea that somehow, because of these changes in
the global economy, we have lost significant industries to other
countries, and we talk about that primarily in manufacturing, but we
also talk about it in technology and things of this nature. I don't
think
[[Page S6709]]
we should leave agriculture out of that conversation. If we want there
to be agriculture in the United States, then we have to deal with each
of those crops and the unique challenges they face. We most certainly
want to have agriculture in the United States.
A lot of people don't identify Florida as an agricultural State. It
is better known for its tourism and being one of the largest places
where people move to be in warm weather and not have State income tax,
but Florida is a large agricultural State. I encourage people to look
at the numbers. If you have spent any significant time in Florida, it
is not just something we put on our license plates and not something we
call ourselves in our heritage, it is real now. Tens of thousands and
hundreds of thousands of jobs across the supply chain and entire
communities are sustained by the presence of agriculture. In the case
of citrus, the overwhelming majority of growers are actually families
who have had these operations for sometimes two or three generations
and are trying to stay afloat.
You look at this and ask: What is this industry doing wrong to be
under these circumstances? Yes, they had a storm, but why can't they
rebuild like everybody else? Two things. First, citrus in Florida was
already facing an extraordinary challenge. It wasn't a better orange or
better grapefruit that some other countries are doing than we are. It
is a disease called citrus greening that didn't just blemish the fruit
the way the canker did, but it killed the trees. You have a significant
number of growers who are on the borderline of being out of business
because unlike--and I am not diminishing other people's losses here, on
the contrary--but unlike a manufacturing plant that gets wiped out by a
storm, where you put the new machine in and in 6 months you are up and
running, that is not the way it works with citrus.
The time between when you plant the new tree and produce fruit is 4
to 5 years, and you have to stay afloat in between. They are already
facing that. So that already has them on the brink of catastrophe, and
they have been working very hard to get around and design scientific
solutions. They have made some advances, thanks to the work at the
University of Florida, but they are not there yet. In the process, they
have been hurting already.
You heard about the production figures and how low they have gotten,
and here comes the storm. The first thing it does is knock all the
fruit off the trees. When we flew over these groves, all we saw on the
ground was fruit all over the place. As those familiar with agriculture
know, once that fruit gets in the floodwater, it can't be sold, and you
can't do much with it. The fruit continued to fall over the days to
come.
On top of everything else they were facing, they lost this year's
crops. A lot of these fields were flooded, so they were sitting in feet
of water. That kills the trees, and they will continue to lose trees in
the weeks to come.
Put yourself in the position of the grower who has to say: I have
already lost everything for this year. I lost a bunch of trees that I
will not have next year or the year after that. I was facing citrus
greening. Do I really want to replant or has the time come to sell my
land for some other use, development, or has the time come for me to go
into another crop or has the time come to declare bankruptcy? This is
the life challenge of American agriculture families in the State of
Florida.
Look, I hope very much that in November we are going to be here next
month and we are going to pass a new bill and it will have this money
in there and it will be fantastic, but we know how this place works,
and I don't know why we wouldn't do it now. Do we truly want to keep
American businesses in America? This is a great example of an
opportunity to do it.
It is not an industry that benefits from anything extraordinary from
the government. They are literally on the verge of going away unless we
help them sooner rather than later. We have the entire Florida
delegation in the House in favor of it, and they couldn't get it in the
House bill. You have both Senators here for it. It can't be a part of
this because if we change it, it goes back, and we lose time.
No one can tell you why it is not in there, no one can tell you why
they are against it being in there, but it is not in there. Sometimes
you start to wonder, and you guess why people look at this process and
shake their heads.
Unfortunately, it looks like this has been foreclosed. Obviously,
Senator Nelson moved forward and made that motion and it was objected
to so it will not be a part of this package, but I hope we think about
these men and women and families who own the groves. How do you explain
it to them and what happens if it goes away? What happens if we lose
this industry? It will not just hurt Florida, I think it hurts the
country. I think it sets a precedent for other crops that might be
threatened by floods in the future.
I hope this can be reversed, and I am hopeful we will deal with it in
November, but if we don't, I just want everyone to understand what this
means. This is not hyperbole. This industry is in a lot of trouble. I
am not telling you that the amount of money we are asking for alone
will save them, but without it, sooner rather than later, I feel we
will lose not just Florida citrus, but I feel we will lose something as
a key part of the State's heritage and a key crop for the country, and
we will depend more than ever on foreign imports to feed our people
with this problem.
With that, I yield the floor.
Cloture Motion
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair lays before
the Senate the pending cloture motion, which the clerk will state.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
Cloture Motion
We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the
provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate,
do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the motion to
concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R.
2266.
Mitch McConnell, Pat Roberts, Roy Blunt, Shelley Moore
Capito, Mike Rounds, John Thune, Orrin G. Hatch, Deb
Fischer, Cory Gardner, John Barrasso, Johnny Isakson,
John Boozman, Thom Tillis, Richard Burr, James M.
Inhofe, Roger F. Wicker, Lindsey Graham.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. By unanimous consent, the mandatory quorum
call has been waived.
The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on the
motion to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R.
2266, an act to amend title 28 of the United States Code to authorize
the appointment of additional bankruptcy judges; and for other
purposes, shall be brought to a close?
The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the
Senator from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Kansas (Mr.
Moran), and the Senator from Alaska (Mr. Sullivan).
Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from New Jersey (Mr.
Menendez) and the Senator from Michigan (Ms. Stabenow) are necessarily
absent.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber
desiring to vote?
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 79, nays 16, as follows:
[Rollcall Vote No. 246 Leg.]
YEAS--79
Alexander
Baldwin
Bennet
Blumenthal
Blunt
Booker
Boozman
Brown
Burr
Cantwell
Capito
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Cassidy
Cochran
Collins
Coons
Corker
Cornyn
Cortez Masto
Cruz
Daines
Donnelly
Duckworth
Durbin
Ernst
Feinstein
Fischer
Franken
Gardner
Gillibrand
Grassley
Harris
Hassan
Hatch
Heinrich
Heitkamp
Heller
Hirono
Hoeven
Isakson
Kaine
Kennedy
King
Klobuchar
Leahy
Manchin
Markey
McCain
McCaskill
McConnell
Merkley
Murkowski
Murphy
Murray
Nelson
Peters
Portman
Reed
Roberts
Rounds
Rubio
Sanders
Schatz
Schumer
Scott
Shaheen
Tester
Thune
Tillis
Udall
Van Hollen
Warner
Warren
Whitehouse
Wicker
Wyden
Young
NAYS--16
Barrasso
Cotton
Crapo
Enzi
Flake
Inhofe
Johnson
Lankford
Lee
Paul
Perdue
Risch
Sasse
Shelby
Strange
Toomey
[[Page S6710]]
NOT VOTING--5
Graham
Menendez
Moran
Stabenow
Sullivan
The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 79, the nays 16.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn having voted in
the affirmative, the motion is agreed to.
Cloture having been invoked, the motion to refer falls.
The Senator from Utah.
Mr. LEE. Madam President, as we speak, our fellow citizens in Puerto
Rico, Texas, and Florida are recovering from a series of devastating
hurricanes. Over 100 people have lost their lives because of these
terrible storms, and many more are struggling to get by day to day.
The crisis is perhaps most acute in Puerto Rico, where 35 percent of
the population still does not have access to safe drinking water and
four out of five Puerto Ricans do not have power.
The people of Florida, Puerto Rico, and Texas have responded with
great tenacity and admirable creativity to this disaster. I wish the
same could be said of the politicians here in Washington, DC.
Once again, this body is poised to fail the American people. Instead
of helping the victims of these disasters through responsible aid
paired with lasting reform, Congress has rushed to its favorite so-
called solution--billions of dollars in new spending with little
accountability or meaningful oversight.
If this $36.5 billion aid package passes, it will mean even more
money and more power for government programs that in some cases left us
vulnerable to these disasters in the first place. If it passes, the
politicians and lobbyists will pat themselves on the back for doing a
good deed and then move on to the next multibillion dollar spending
opportunity. Meanwhile, the people of Florida, Puerto Rico, and Texas
will be left to pick up the pieces and to deal with the disastrous
consequences of this approach.
Puerto Rico, in particular, has to contend with the effects of a
devastating storm and decades of malfeasance that has left Puerto Rico
with $74 billion of debt.
This crisis calls for emergency aid, yes. More than that, it calls
for true lasting reform, the type of reform that is noticeably absent
from this measure. That is why I am voting no on this shortsighted
bill, because it is easy to caricature a vote against emergency aid as
calloused or cruel, but it is hard to do the real work that is
necessarily required by real, lasting, meaningful reform.
It is harder still to defend these packages when their contents are
exposed fully to the light of day. If you were evaluating an emergency
aid package, you might reasonably expect it to direct all of its
spending to programs that actually help the people of Florida, of
Puerto Rico, of Texas, but this proposal does not even come close to
directing all of its money to broad-based recovery efforts.
Just under half of the $36.5 billion in new spending would bail out
the National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP. In the Houston area,
just 17 percent of homeowners were enrolled in the NFIP. In Puerto
Rico, the numbers are even more sparse. Just 5,600 Puerto Ricans are
enrolled in NFIP, less than 1 percent of homeowners. That means 99
percent of Puerto Ricans will not get anything at all from the $16
billion to NFIP. But then again, it is not clear that NFIP recipients
get much from NFIP to begin with.
The National Flood Insurance Program represents the triumph of good
intentions over sound public policy. Its generous subsidies were
supposed to reduce the need for Federal aid after massive storms.
Instead, NFIP encourages thousands of Americans to live in some of the
most dangerous real estate in the country.
NFIP sells flood insurance at rates well below that of any reasonable
private insurer. As a result, its policies do not accurately reflect
the risk of living in manifestly flood-threatened, flood-endangered
areas. These government policies encourage Americans to live in
precisely those areas where their livelihoods--and, in fact, even their
lives--can be swept away in an instant.
Economists refer to this perverse incentive as moral hazard, and, in
more senses than one, that is just what the National Flood Insurance
Program is--a hazard to Americans. It is distinctly immoral for the
government to subsidize housing in the Nation's flood plains--deep
within the flood plains--or on the edges of its coast. Instead of
building your house on a rock, the government wants you to build it on
the sand.
NFIP pays out claims for properties that have been swept away not
once, not twice, but many, many times before. Homes that have been
flooded multiple times make up just 1 percent of NFIP policyholders,
but they account for more than one-third of its claims. This has cost
taxpayers more than $12.1 billion in payouts according to the
Congressional Research Service.
When Hurricane Harvey swept through Houston last month, it submerged
a house that had been flooded 22 times since 1979. The house is valued
at about $600,000. The government has spent $1.8 million to
rehabilitate it.
No private insurance company would ever offer insurance on the terms
that NFIP offers. Such a company would endanger its policyholders, and
it would run out of money.
That is precisely what has happened under NFIP. The program is $25
billion in debt and routinely blows through its statutory debt limits.
The emergency aid package Congress is considering today would cancel
$16 billion of NFIP's debt--no questions asked. Congress isn't making
NFIP bring its actuarial practices in line with reality or into
conformity with free-market forces. No, it isn't even appropriating new
funds for another failed program. That, at least, would be business as
usual in Washington. Instead, Congress is effectively giving a debt
amnesty to the National Flood Insurance Program. It is absolving NFIP
of its sins and making American taxpayers do the penance.
So that is an example of what is in the bill. Let's consider a little
bit of what is not in the bill.
If we want to be responsible leaders in a moment of crisis like this
one, we need to provide long-term reforms in addition to any short-term
assistance. We need to provide a full meal to those affected by these
storms and not just a temporary, passing sugar rush.
But this bill does not include any reforms that would help Puerto
Rico attain long-term stability or climb out from underneath its $74
billion debt. It doesn't even attempt to reform the dysfunctional
electrical utility program which, through a combination of neglect and
profiteering, has left millions of Puerto Ricans in darkness. Without
electricity, Puerto Rico can't power hospitals, clinics, food banks, or
even sewage systems. And it doesn't repeal the Jones Act, the
protectionist regulation that kept foreign-flagged relief ships out of
Puerto Rican harbors for precious days after Hurricane Maria and for a
long time has forced Puerto Rican consumers to pay significantly higher
prices on just about everything they buy.
Simple reform measures such as reforming PREPA, the electric utility
company I mentioned a moment ago, or repealing the Jones Act would
provide very meaningful, lasting benefits to Puerto Ricans long after
the public's attention has drifted and the relief money has dried up.
But Congress, true to form, would rather double down on broken laws and
broken programs rather than fix them, and Congress would rather take on
more debt than spend according to what we have and prioritize in order
to get there.
None of this $36.5 billion in emergency spending is offset by
spending reductions on other programs--none of it--not a single dollar.
That is the sad irony of this bill. If the trend of deficit-fueled
spending continues, one day soon we will wake up to the cries of our
fellow Americans and we will have nothing to give them in support.
Again, this bill doesn't take care of those programs, and it is not
as if there aren't solutions out there. One of my colleagues, Senator
Paul, has effectively been blocked from introducing an amendment that
would call for offsets to this spending. Another one of my colleagues,
Senator Flake, has tried to introduce an amendment, of which I am a
cosponsor, that would bring about some of these other reforms I have
described--reforms to the State-owned utility company, to the Jones
Act, and reforms to the way that we spend money through the Federal
Government in Puerto Rico.
[[Page S6711]]
I hope my colleagues will work with me on a more responsible,
sustainable, meaningful way to help our brothers and sisters in areas
affected by the recent hurricanes. Congress has the authority to lead,
especially over Puerto Rico, where we have plenary power that exceeds
the authority we have in other parts of the country within States. In
this hour of crisis, especially with regard to Puerto Rico, we are the
only ones who indisputably have this power, and we are the ones who
must act if we are going to achieve meaningful reform.
If we can only offer money and a pat on the head, it will be our
fault when the American people continue to suffer as a result of failed
programs that haven't worked and call out to us through their failures
for reform.
Thank you.
I yield the floor.
Mr. COCHRAN. Madam President, I urge the Senate to approve the
disaster relief supplemental appropriations bill.
This bill will provide additional funding for response and recovery
operations in areas devastated by recent hurricanes.
The storms this year have been severe in both strength and number.
Communities in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands
are struggling to recover.
Both the Disaster Relief Fund and the National Flood Insurance
Program are depleted. They will soon run out of money for disaster
response and to pay flood insurance claims.
The supplemental funding in this bill will ensure that first
responders and Federal agencies have the necessary resources to
continue their important work.
This bill also includes funding in response to the deadly wildfires
that have ravaged western States. While these emergency funds are
needed now, I will continue working with my colleagues to find a better
way to fund wildfire suppression in the future.
This will not be the end of our efforts to respond to this year's
disasters. The Appropriations Committee will continue to work with the
administration and with the affected delegations to determine and
provide for additional recovery needs. I am committed to doing what is
necessary to get the job done.
Mr. LEE. 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. DAINES. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________