[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 153 (Monday, September 23, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5622-S5624]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             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 nomination 
     of Brian McGuire, of New York, to be a Deputy Under Secretary 
     of the Treasury.
         Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton, Roger F. Wicker, Rob 
           Portman, John Thune, Kevin Cramer, John Barrasso, James 
           E. Risch, Richard Burr, James M. Inhofe, Lindsey 
           Graham, Rick Scott, John Boozman, Mike Crapo, Tim 
           Scott, John Hoeven, Deb Fischer.

  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 
nomination of Brian McGuire, of New York, to be a Deputy Under 
Secretary of the Treasury, 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. THUNE. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator 
from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), the Senator from Georgia (Mr. 
Isakson), the Senator from Idaho (Mr. Risch), the Senator from Kansas 
(Mr. Roberts), the Senator from North Carolina (Mr. Tillis), and the 
Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey).

[[Page S5623]]

  

  Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet), 
the Senator from New Jersey (Mr. Booker), the Senator from California 
(Ms. Harris), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), the Senator from 
Massachusetts (Ms. Warren), and the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. 
Whitehouse) are necessarily absent.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber 
desiring to vote?
  The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 82, nays 6, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 294 Ex.]

                                YEAS--82

     Alexander
     Baldwin
     Barrasso
     Blackburn
     Blumenthal
     Blunt
     Boozman
     Braun
     Burr
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Cardin
     Carper
     Cassidy
     Collins
     Coons
     Cornyn
     Cortez Masto
     Cotton
     Cramer
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Enzi
     Ernst
     Feinstein
     Fischer
     Gardner
     Grassley
     Hassan
     Hawley
     Heinrich
     Hirono
     Hoeven
     Hyde-Smith
     Inhofe
     Johnson
     Jones
     Kaine
     Kennedy
     King
     Klobuchar
     Lankford
     Leahy
     Lee
     Manchin
     McConnell
     McSally
     Menendez
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Murphy
     Murray
     Perdue
     Peters
     Portman
     Reed
     Romney
     Rosen
     Rounds
     Rubio
     Sasse
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Scott (FL)
     Scott (SC)
     Shaheen
     Shelby
     Sinema
     Smith
     Stabenow
     Sullivan
     Tester
     Thune
     Udall
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Wicker
     Wyden
     Young

                                NAYS--6

     Brown
     Casey
     Gillibrand
     Markey
     Merkley
     Paul

                             NOT VOTING--12

     Bennet
     Booker
     Graham
     Harris
     Isakson
     Risch
     Roberts
     Sanders
     Tillis
     Toomey
     Warren
     Whitehouse
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 82, the nays are 6.
  The motion is agreed to.
  The senior Senator from Tennessee.


                      Ken Burns' ``Country Music''

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, Ken Burns told me last year that his 8-
part, 16-hour ``Country Music'' film, which concludes on PBS this week, 
could be more popular than his Civil War film. After watching the first 
episodes, I suspect he might be right. His new film plumbs the depths 
of the American soul, using the one tool--music--that is the most 
likely to touch the largest number of us.
  As a U.S. Senator from Tennessee, I will confess my bias. The first 2 
hours of ``Country Music'' a week ago Sunday were about the recordings 
of hillbilly music in 1927 at the birthplace of country music in 
Bristol, where the Tennessee-Virginia State line runs down the middle 
of Main Street. Two years ago, the Senator from Virginia, Mr. Kaine, 
and I, played a little concert--I on the keyboard and he on the 
harmonica--at the end of that Main Street, at a fiddler's festival that 
they had. The rest of the Ken Burns episode winds through a community 
called Boogertown in Eastern Tennessee, in the Smoky Mountains, where 
Dolly Parton was born, to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and to Beale 
Street in Memphis.

  We like to say that the whole world sings with Tennessee, but country 
music is more than Tennessee music. It is more than Appalachian music. 
It is more than the music of poor white Americans. It comes from the 
heart.
  As Burns' and Duncan's storytelling reminds us, every one of us has a 
heart. There is no better evidence of this than paying less than $20 to 
sit at a table at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. There you listen to 
three songwriters tell the stories behind their songs and play them for 
a small audience who doesn't even whisper during their performances.
  I sat at the Bluebird on a Saturday in 2013, listening to a young 
songwriter, Jessi Alexander, sing her song, ``I Drive Your Truck.'' One 
of her cowriters, Connie Harrington, had heard the story on NPR. It was 
the story of Jared Monti, an American soldier killed in Afghanistan 
trying to save another soldier. He won a Congressional Medal of Honor 
for that. To remember his son, his father, Paul, drives Jared's Dodge 
Ram truck because, the father says, ``I am alone, in the truck, with 
him.'' When Jessi Alexander finished singing, everyone in the Bluebird 
was weeping. I said to the person next to me, ``That has to be the song 
of the year,'' and it was.
  Last week, I attended the Annual Nashville Songwriter Awards show. I 
looked through the program listing all of the previous songs of the 
year. In 2012, it was Dolly Parton's farewell song to Porter Wagoner, 
``I Will Always Love You.'' Dolly Parton is a great songwriter too. In 
2003, it was ``Three Wooden Crosses.'' In 1972, it was ``Old Dogs, 
Children, and Watermelon Wine,'' by Tom T. Hall. Then, in 1969, it was 
``Okie from Muskogee,'' by Merle Haggard. ``Three chords and the 
truth'' is how songwriter Harlan Howard defines country music.
  Ken Burns has become America's storyteller, a skill much more 
difficult than it would seem. He tackles the subjects that divide us, 
like the Civil War and Vietnam, and he presents them in a form that 
allows us to travel through those wrenching experiences, gathering the 
information we need to form our own opinions.
  One could argue that Ken Burns is our most effective teacher of U.S. 
history, a subject woefully undertaught in our schools. The lowest 
scores on high school Advanced Placement tests are not in math and 
science. They are in American history. So I am glad to know that there 
is more of Ken Burns' work to come.
  According to a New Yorker article in 2017, during the next decade 
Burns plans to produce films about the Mayo Clinic, Muhammad Ali, 
Ernest Hemingway, the American Revolution, Lyndon B. Johnson, Barack 
Obama, Winston Churchill, the American criminal justice system, and 
African-American history from the Civil War to the Great Migration.
  Producing these films must cost a lot of money, but, in my view, 
every penny that the Public Broadcasting System and private 
contributors have spent has been worth it. If I had the money, I would 
ask Burns how much time he will spend raising funds to pay for these 
next films and I would give him the amount of money that it would take 
so that he could spend that time producing an extra three or four more 
films before he hangs it up. Since I don't have the money, maybe 
someone else will do that.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be printed in the Record an 
op-ed that was in the New York Times, ``Country Music Is More Diverse 
Than You Think,'' by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the New York Times, Sept. 13, 2019]

              Country Music Is More Diverse Than You Think


Common stereotypes overlook the roles that blacks and women have played 
                  in shaping a uniquely American genre

                    (By Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan)

       This spring the rapper Lil Nas X, who is black, released 
     ``Old Town Road,'' a twang-inflected song that rocketed to 
     the top of the country music charts--even though Billboard 
     temporarily removed it from the list, saying it wasn't 
     sufficiently ``country.''
       A few months later, when the Country Music Association 
     announced that three women--Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire and 
     Carrie Underwood--would host its annual awards show, some 
     people criticized the choice as political correctness, as if 
     ``real'' country music was restricted to good old boys.
       Both controversies reflect the stereotypes that chronically 
     surround country music. They overlook its diverse roots, its 
     porous boundaries and the central role that women and people 
     of color have played in its history.
       Such narrow views would astonish the two foundational acts 
     of the genre--Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family--who 
     contributed to country music's early commercial success in 
     the 1920s. They knew firsthand that what has made American 
     music so uniquely American has been its constant mixing of 
     styles and influences.
       It all began when the fiddle, which came from Europe, met 
     the banjo, which came from Africa--bringing together ballads 
     and hymns from the British Isles with the syncopations and 
     sensibilities of enslaved blacks. That mix, that ``rub,'' 
     which occurred principally in the South, set off a chain 
     reaction that has reverberated in our music ever since.
       The earliest country recordings were known as ``hillbilly'' 
     music, just as African-American recordings were categorized 
     as ``race'' music. The names echoed a prevailing prejudice 
     that each genre (and its artists and its fans) was somehow 
     beneath consideration from society's upper rungs--and that 
     each one was unrelated to the other.
       In truth, as the two of us learned during the eight years 
     we spent exploring the music and its history, they were 
     always intertwined. The music constantly crossed the racial 
     divide that a segregated nation tried to enforce.

[[Page S5624]]

       Before his career took off, Rodgers worked as a water boy 
     in Mississippi for the mostly black crews laying railroad 
     track. The men he met, and their music, shaped his own 
     emerging style--the songs he made popular as an adult were 
     essentially the blues, to which he added a distinctive yodel. 
     In 1930, at the height of his popularity, he recorded with 
     Louis Armstrong, the protean jazz artist.
       When A.P. Carter collected songs for the Carter Family, he 
     brought along Lesley Riddle, a black slide guitar player, to 
     help him remember the melodies. Riddle also taught the 
     Carters a hymn from his church, ``When the World's on Fire,'' 
     which they recorded. They then used the same melody for 
     another song, ``Little Darling, Pal of Mine.'' Years later 
     Woody Guthrie, a fan of the Carters, borrowed the melody for 
     his classic ``This Land Is Your Land.'' That one song's 
     journey encapsulates the real, interconnected story of 
     American music.
       Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, was mentored by an 
     African-American fiddle player. Hank Williams, the great 
     honky-tonk singer, credited Tee-Tot Payne, a black street 
     musician in Alabama, for ``all the music training I ever 
     had.'' Bob Wills created Western swing by adapting jazz's 
     big-band sound to fiddles and steel guitars.
       In Memphis in the 1950s, when rhythm and blues and gospel 
     and hillbilly music began swirling together in the eddies of 
     the Mississippi, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and 
     others pioneered rockabilly, a precursor to rock 'n' roll.
       The cross-fertilization went in both directions. Charley 
     Pride--the first postwar black artist to have a No. 1 country 
     hit, and the first artist of any color to win the Country 
     Music Association's male vocalist award two years in a row--
     was discovered in a bar in Montana, singing Hank Williams's 
     ``Lovesick Blues.'' He had grown up listening to the ``Grand 
     Ole Opry'' show on the radio.
       When the rhythm and blues star Ray Charles was given 
     creative control of an album for the first time, he chose to 
     record a selection of country songs. ``You take country 
     music, you take black music,'' Charles said, and ``you got 
     the same goddamn thing exactly.'' The album was a sales 
     sensation.
       ``There's a truth in the music,'' the jazz musician and 
     composer Wynton Marsalis told us, that ``the musicians 
     accepted at a time when the culture did not accept. And it's 
     too bad that we, as a culture, have not been able to address 
     that truth. The art tells more of the tale of us coming 
     together.''
       Likewise, the history of country music is filled with 
     strong and talented women in ways the common stereotype seems 
     (or chooses) to overlook. From Patsy Montana to Patsy Cline, 
     Kitty Wells to Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris to Rosanne Cash 
     to Reba McEntire, women have created some of country music's 
     most enduring art.
       In 1926, A.P. Carter and his wife, Sara, had been turned 
     down by a record label on the theory that a woman singing 
     lead could never be popular. Instead, the Carters added 
     Sara's cousin Maybelle to the group and went on to make 
     history, centered on Sara's remarkable voice and Maybelle's 
     innovative guitar playing, ``the Carter scratch,'' which has 
     influenced generations of guitarists.
       Jimmie Rodgers relied on his sister-in-law, Elsie 
     McWilliams, as the writer of more than a third of his songs. 
     (He couldn't read musical notations, so she came to his 
     recording sessions to teach her new compositions to him in 
     person.)
       In 1966, the same year that the National Organization for 
     Women was founded and the phrase ``women's liberation'' was 
     first used, Loretta Lynn wrote and recorded ``Don't Come Home 
     A Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind),'' a statement that 
     dealt with spousal abuse and alcoholism and a woman's right 
     to her own body, with a bluntness no other musical genre 
     dared make at the time. Her label later held back her song 
     ``The Pill'' because it seemed too controversial; when it was 
     released, some stations refused to play it--until her fans 
     made it a Top-5 country hit and crossed it over to the pop 
     charts.
       ``If you write the truth and you're writing about your 
     life,'' Ms. Lynn told us, ``it's going to be country.''
       At its best, country music has never been confined to one 
     simple category or convenient stereotype. It sprang from many 
     roots and then sprouted many new branches through the 20th 
     century, creating a complicated chorus of American voices 
     joining together to tell a complicated American story, one 
     song at a time.
       Country deals with the most basic, universal human emotions 
     and experiences--love and loss, hardship and dreams, failure 
     and the hope of redemption--and turns them into songs. The 
     songwriter Harlan Howard once defined country music as 
     ``three chords and the truth.'' Three chords imply 
     simplicity. But the truth part is always much more complex. 
     And more profound.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.


                 Honoring Captain Vincent Liberto, Jr.

  Mr. CASSIDY. Mr. President, I rise today with a heavy heart to honor 
the life of Mandeville police officer Captain Vincent ``Vinnie'' 
Liberto, Jr., who was killed in the line of duty last week. Captain 
Liberto will be remembered for his life of service to the community and 
country.
  After graduating from Brother Martin High School in New Orleans, he 
joined the U.S. Marine Corps, where he ultimately served 10 years as 
sergeant.
  Captain Liberto had a combined 30 years of law enforcement service, 5 
with the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Department and 25 years with the 
Mandeville Police Department, where he was recognized as officer of the 
year.
  The captain had a brilliant mind for law enforcement. He graduated 
from the FBI National Academy and ran the Mandeville Police 
Department's Criminal Investigations Division, where he worked as a 
polygraphist and was responsible for the Department's enforcement 
functions.
  Those who knew him best describe him as a gentle giant, polite, 
upbeat, reasonable, and fairminded--all qualities that make a great 
police officer.
  In his yard flies the Marine Corps flag, and mounted on the front 
door are twin wreaths, one for the marines and one for the police.
  Captain Liberto is survived by his wife, Tracey, and seven children. 
He was 58 years old.
  His passion for service was so strong that he inspired several of his 
children to follow in their dad's footsteps by entering the military 
and law enforcement. That is the definition of setting a great example 
for children.
  Captain Liberto's death is a painful reminder that our law 
enforcement officers put their lives on the line to keep our community 
safe. He died during a gunfire exchange when a routine traffic stop 
turned into a tragedy. The other officer, Ben Cato, was also injured 
but thankfully has returned to work.
  Like Captain Liberto and Officer Cato, our law enforcement officers 
report to work every day knowing that they might not come home at 
night. They do it for us all, and for that we should always be 
grateful.
  I ask those who are listening to say a prayer for Tracey, their kids, 
and the officers of the Mandeville Police Department, and for their 
entire community that is grieving the loss of one of their own.
  Vincent Liberto made Louisiana a better place and our country a 
better place, and he will be sorely missed.
  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. RUBIO. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.