[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 190 (Thursday, October 28, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7452-S7455]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          INFRASTRUCTURE BILL

  Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the floor tonight to talk 
about the growing epidemic of drug addiction and the issue that is 
occurring in my home State of Ohio and, really, all the States 
represented here in this Chamber and how we need to redouble our 
efforts.
  It is a heartbreaking story because we were making so much progress 
prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but, now, underneath the pandemic, we 
have this epidemic that is growing.
  But before I get into that, I must talk first about what is going on 
this evening in the U.S. House of Representatives. Almost 3 months ago, 
at the beginning of August, we passed in this Chamber bipartisan 
legislation to finally address our infrastructure shortfalls in this 
country. Presidents of both parties had been proposing it for many 
years. Congress had talked about it a lot, but we had never been able 
to figure out a way forward.
  So a group of 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats got together and said: 
We are going to grow this from the middle out and figure out how to 
address our infrastructure challenges and do so in a bipartisan way.
  We did that. The President of the United States, President Biden, 
supported our effort, and we were able to get that legislation across 
the floor here in the U.S. Senate--not without some challenges and some 
changes and modifications. But we were able to do it because it was 
great for America, great for every State represented here, because it 
was repairing roads and bridges but also our ports, our waterways, our 
water infrastructure, our infrastructure that is considered digital, 
which would be high-speed internet, to make sure it is available to all 
of our citizens.
  So there are a lot of things that people had talked about for a long 
time and said they were for, but finally we were able to actually put 
it into writing and get it done. And it passed this Chamber with a big 
vote: 69 votes. Rarely does something so significant pass this Chamber 
with that kind of bipartisan support.

  Unfortunately, it has languished in the House of Representatives for 
almost 3 months, since early August. And the reason it has languished 
over there isn't because it doesn't have the votes. It is really more 
because people would like to use it as a hostage for something they 
want even more, and that is just wrong.
  So, tonight, I urge my House colleagues, Democrat and Republican 
alike, to put aside the partisanship and focus on the substance of the 
bill and pass it. It has been held political hostage to something that 
House Democrats, particularly progressives in the House, want even 
more. It is not that they are opposed to infrastructure. They know this 
is needed. They know it is good for their constituents and it is good 
for our country. It is because they want even more to pass a massive, 
new spending bill called sometimes the Build Back Better bill, 
sometimes the reconciliation bill, sometimes the $3.5 trillion tax-and-
spend bill. That is totally separate from infrastructure, but that is 
really what they want to pass.
  So they know that a lot of moderate Democrats support the 
infrastructure bill. They need those moderate Democrats to support the 
massive tax-and-spend bill. So, in effect, they have held it hostage. 
They have not allowed the infrastructure bill to move unless they get 
commitments on the bill they really want, which is the tax-and-spend 
bill. I think that is just wrong.
  So I urge the Speaker of the House and my colleagues in the House to 
go ahead and vote on that legislation this evening. I know there has 
been back-and-forth all day about what will happen. All I can say is it 
is the right thing to do for our country.
  When you think about it, the infrastructure bill is exactly what we 
need right now. Not only do we have a long-term challenge that 
everybody knows about and that we have been talking about for literally 
decades, but for the problems we face right now in our economy, it is 
very effective.
  Inflation: Everybody is concerned about it, and they should be. The 
cost of gasoline at the pump is up about 42 percent this year compared 
to last year. It is really tough on middle-class families because, 
although paychecks may have gone up a little bit, inflation has gone up 
higher. So it is essentially a tax on so many of our working families 
in this country. But everything is up: food, clothing, furniture, 
everything.
  So inflation is driven, in part, by the stimulus spending. You 
remember that, back in March, there was a big bill, $1.9 trillion. And 
many of us said, including some Democrats and including, famously, 
Larry Summers, who is the former Democratic Secretary of the Treasury 
for President Obama and in the Clinton administration: If you do this 
massive amount of spending, an unprecedented amount of stimulus 
spending, you will drive up inflation because you are putting many more 
dollars into people's pockets, into the economy, at a time when the 
economy

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is already beginning to improve, and it will be chasing fewer and fewer 
goods, and that will raise inflation.
  And that is exactly what has happened, which is bad for everybody, 
particularly, again, lower and middle-income families who are seeing 
this hidden tax, really, on everything they buy and, again, taking away 
the power of their slight increase in wages that we have seen. In fact, 
when you look at the data, it looks like wages have actually gone down 
in the past year. They have gone down because, after inflation, wages 
are worth less.
  So that is where we are right now. And the infrastructure bill is 
actually counterinflationary. Why do I say that? Because it doesn't 
invest in the way that the tax-and-spend bill invests. It is not about 
stimulus. It is about longer term investments in hard capital assets.
  So the economists look at that--including conservative economists at 
the American Enterprise Institute, including Doug Holtz-Eakin, who is a 
former CBO Director here and a more conservative economist--and they 
say: Now, this actually will be counterinflationary because you are 
investing long term in these capital assets, creating jobs, making our 
economy more efficient, making it more productive; and, therefore, in 
this instance now where we have this high inflation, it is a good thing 
to do.
  No. 2, we have had a lot of natural disasters in this country, 
particularly in the last year. About one out of every three Americans, 
apparently, lives in an area that has been subject to one of these 
natural disasters. It is the hurricanes. It is the floods. It is the 
wildfires. It is something that is affecting our country in a major way 
right now, and we hear about it virtually every week.
  This legislation, the infrastructure bill, actually has provisions 
for resiliency to mitigate the damage from these natural disasters. So 
it is a well-timed bill in that sense as well.
  There is an historic commitment to ensuring that we are not just 
talking about climate change and natural disasters but actually putting 
in place things that will protect communities from these natural 
disasters--whether it is forest fires, whether it is hurricanes, 
whether it is tornadoes, or other natural disasters. That is in this 
legislation, the infrastructure bill.
  And, finally, what is one of the biggest issues we face right now in 
terms of our economy? The supply chain crisis. Go to a store in your 
community, as many of you have, and you will see that the shelves are a 
lot more bare than they used to be. And there is not much on the 
shelves because we have this supply chain problem, kind of a 
bottleneck.
  Well, this legislation helps in that regard because it provides 
funding for infrastructure, including our ports: our ports of entry, 
our land ports, but also our seaports that are now in a situation where 
they are jammed with more and more container ships, and, yet, they 
can't process them quickly enough.
  So what the experts tell me is that the $2 billion in the 
infrastructure bill will help to improve those facilities, improve 
their operation, improve the intermodal connections--in other words, 
the truck connections, the train connections--to our ports and help 
move along this supply chain issue that we are currently facing.
  The legislation helps with regard to freight, rail. It helps with 
regard to our waterways, which carry a lot of freight in our country.
  So it is something that would be helpful in all three of these areas: 
inflation, natural disasters, and also our supply chain issues.
  At the same time, again, it is just needed because our infrastructure 
has fallen behind, particularly fallen behind other countries. And, 
therefore, making our economy more efficient and more productive is a 
good thing. Again, that is why it got 69 votes here in the U.S. Senate 
and why we need to pass it.
  It is totally different from the tax-and-spend reconciliation bill, 
which, again, is massive new spending, massive tax increases, which 
will add to inflation; and at a time when we have such high debts and 
deficits, it will add to our record level of debt and deficit. Its 
large tax increases will hurt our economy at a time when we cannot 
afford it.
  We just got the numbers in from the economic growth in the last 
quarter. They just came in today: 0.5-percent growth. Very 
disappointing. Well below expectations.
  So we know economic growth is slowing. We know inflation is rising. 
We know that this is not the time for us to put forward this kind of 
legislation because it will aggravate the inflationary pressures, but 
it also causes us, at a time of debt and deficits, to see big increases 
in spending.
  And, finally, again, at a time when our economy is, unfortunately, 
not performing the way we would like to see it--it is slowing down; it 
has been the worst economic quarter we have seen since 2000--we need to 
make sure we were not adding new taxes to our economy at this time. So 
the timing is bad.
  By the way, the infrastructure bill has no new tax increases. The 
infrastructure bill is not about immediate spending. It is about long-
term spending over 5, 10, 15 years for capital assets--again, 
counterinflationary.
  So they are very different proposals, aren't they?
  I call on my colleagues in the House tonight to pass this 
legislation, get the infrastructure bill done. Don't hold it hostage 
with something else. That is not how we operate. Do the right thing for 
your constituents and for our country.
  The other focus that I had tonight was on our opioid and, more 
broadly, drug addiction crisis we face in this country and, 
unfortunately, at a time with the pandemic, causing huge healthcare 
problems that has distracted a lot of our attention, understandably. 
But underneath that pandemic there has been this epidemic that has been 
growing, and that is, again, this addiction issue.
  Back in 2018, we saw a reduction in addiction and, specifically, in 
the way it is typically measured, which is the number of overdose 
deaths that occur in our States. It was great news: a 22-percent 
decrease in overdose deaths in my home State of Ohio, after decades of 
increases every single year--22 percent in 1 year.
  2019 was also a good year, where we saw significant success in 
getting people into treatment, getting people into recovery, reducing 
the use of drugs through prevention--all the things that we have been 
wanting to do.
  So much of that came from work that was done in this Chamber because 
we did enact new legislation and provided billions of more dollars for 
prevention, for treatment, for recovery. And we had a lot of great 
activity going on at the State level, at our local levels as well, 
building on that.
  We had more Narcan being provided to our communities, which is this 
miracle drug that reverses the effects of an overdose. We had very good 
success in getting more people not just into treatment but into longer-
term recovery, where there is a greater chance of them succeeding and 
not relapsing.
  We did that through some legislation called the Comprehensive 
Addiction and Recovery Act, bipartisan legislation passed here in this 
Chamber. Senator Whitehouse joined with me on that as a coauthor. And 
then we also passed additional legislation to get more money directly 
to the States. And we found that we were, again, making progress, and 
then the pandemic hit.
  Unfortunately, we now know from the latest data from the Centers for 
Disease Control--the CDC--that under the cover of this pandemic, the 
drug epidemic has not only not gone away, it has actually gotten much 
worse.
  Overdose deaths rose by nearly 30 percent between March 2020 and 
March 2021--the latest year for which we have data; 30-percent increase 
in overdose deaths.
  This is very discouraging and heartbreaking really because that means 
much more devastation for our communities, families being broken apart, 
people not being able to achieve their God-given ability in life. 
Thousands more being lost--96,779 more individuals--moms and dads, sons 
and daughters, friends and loved ones--lost their lives to overdose 
deaths during that yearlong period, the most recent year that we have 
data for. It is the worst year we have had in the history of our 
country in terms of overdose deaths.
  Again, we have been rightfully focused on COVID-19. But, 
particularly,

[[Page S7454]]

as the COVID pandemic is beginning to get better, the Delta variant 
finally beginning to affect our communities less, we have got to 
refocus ourselves on this addiction issue. If we don't do it, we are 
going to continue to see this tragic epidemic take away more lives.
  In 47 States and the District of Columbia, the overdose rate went up 
during this last year, including a 26-percent increase in my home State 
of Ohio. In some States, by the way, the increase was as high as 85 
percent. And I know the Members of the Senate who represent those 
States are well aware of that and would join me in saying we have to 
figure out a way; we have got to figure out a way.
  So what is the way forward?
  Well, part of it is to getting back to what we know works. The 
Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act and the bill called the 21st 
Century Cures Act--both signed into law in 2016--again, provided 
billions of new dollars for prevention, for treatment, for longer-term 
recovery, for Narcan to help our first responders. And that worked, and 
we made progress. So let's get back to that and redouble our efforts 
there.
  But we need to do more. And we have new legislation we have 
introduced we think will do that. It is called the Comprehensive 
Addiction and Recovery Act 2.0--I am sorry, 3.0. We have already done 
the first bill and 2.0. Now, we are at 3.0. And it provides additional 
help but also has some new provisions in addition to funding those that 
we know work, and that is extremely important as well.

  By the way, in these overdose deaths, we know that, increasingly, it 
is synthetic opioids that is causing the deadly outcome. Fentanyl, in 
particular, which is a synthetic form of heroin or other opioids that, 
for a long time, was being produced in China and then sent to our 
shores, and this poison was coming into our communities by our own U.S. 
Postal Service.
  So several years ago, we wrote legislation to deal with that called 
the STOP Act, and it actually has been quite effective to keep these 
drugs from coming in through the United States mail system. At that 
time, our mail system didn't provide the kind of screening that the 
private carriers did, like FedEx or UPS or DHL, and so people who were 
traffickers chose to use our own Postal Service. Maddening. And they 
were doing it successfully.
  But it is kind of like whack-a-mole. Once we dealt with the STOP Act 
and dealt with the fentanyl coming in from China directly through the 
mail system, it started to show up where?
  Through our southern border.
  So, today, what the experts will tell you is this deadly fentanyl is 
coming in primarily through the U.S.-Mexico border; it is cheaper than 
ever, very inexpensive. Sometimes it is produced in Mexico using 
precursors that come from China. It is being pressed into pills, often, 
so people don't know it is fentanyl. The pill may be Xanax. The pill 
may be Percocet. People think they are getting pain relief or anxiety 
relief when, in fact, they are getting fentanyl; and the tragic result 
of that is, again, more and more overdose deaths.
  We had a roundtable discussion recently where we talked about the 
issue of the border and what was happening and the fact that so many 
people now are coming across the border, but also so much contraband, 
including these drugs. And we had a witness whose name was Virginia 
Krieger. This was last week: Virginia told us her very tragic story 
about her daughter, who thought she was taking a Percocet for pain 
because that is what the pill said. And she died of an overdose. And it 
was determined after the fact that, in fact, she had died of fentanyl 
because some evil scientist--perhaps in Mexico--had pressed these 
pills, made these pills, probably to try to get her addicted to this 
powerful drug fentanyl, and, in fact, she had ingested it, taken it, 
and it had caused her to overdose and die.
  Virginia--God bless her--has taken the death of her daughter, Tiffany 
Leigh Robertson, and channeled that grief into something positive. She 
is going out to the schools now and talking to young people--I see our 
pages are here tonight--and saying: Every drug, every pill that is not 
from a pharmacy that you might find on the streets is potentially 
deadly. It can kill you. So be cautious. Don't ever take a pill if you 
don't know that it is coming from a pharmacy, that it is what it says 
it is.
  My heart goes out to Virginia, her family, and all those who have 
lost loved ones to these deadly substances. We need to be sure that we 
reduce the supply of these drugs, and we also do much more in terms of 
the demand reduction.
  One way we can start to address the supply of fentanyl and other 
synthetic opioids is to make sure that they are illegal. That might 
seem obvious to you, but we have had a hard time here in this country 
dealing with this issue because--think about it--if the synthetic form 
of an opioid, which can be changed by one of these evil scientists 
fairly easily--maybe just one molecule changes--and suddenly it is not 
on the list of controlled substances and not illegal.
  So in order to avoid this problem and be sure that people are 
properly prosecuted for illegal drugs, we are putting together 
legislation and trying to pass it, that ensures that there is a 
permanent classification of these drugs as being illegal.
  The Drug Enforcement Agency, back in 2018, used its authority to 
temporarily classify all fentanyl-related drugs--all of them--as 
schedule I substances, meaning illegal at the highest level, which 
allows law enforcement to aggressively intercept and destroy those 
substances. Unfortunately, that was only temporary. So that designation 
needs to be made permanent.
  We have successfully extended the temporary extension a few times 
here, but it is going to expire again at the end of January. So in just 
a couple of months, once again, we will have an expiration of that 
designation.
  Until we make these fentanyl-related drugs permanently illegal, law 
enforcement will not have the certainty they need to go after the 
criminals moving these deadly substances, and fewer lives will be lost.
  The legislation is called the FIGHT Fentanyl Act. It is bipartisan. I 
introduced it with Senator Manchin. Again, it fixes this problem by 
permanently classifying these drugs that are fentanyl-related as 
schedule I. It also gives our law enforcement the certainty they need 
to go after synthetic opioids in all forms and show we are committed to 
addressing the threat posed by this particularly dangerous class of 
drugs.
  So my hope is my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will work with 
us to get this done before the end of January. There is no reason we 
should do it at the last minute. We should provide that certainty and 
predictability.
  At the same time, I continue to believe that the most progress can be 
made on the demand side. So, yes, we need to do a better job at the 
southern border. It is outrageous what is happening now. So many drugs 
are coming across at record levels. The apprehensions of fentanyl are 
at record levels. In fact, enough fentanyl has been apprehended this 
year alone to kill every man, woman, and child in America. That is how 
deadly the drug is.
  But, ultimately, we have to deal with the demand for that drug in 
this country. As long as we have this insatiable demand, it is going to 
be difficult to stop it through the supply side or even making these 
drugs illegal.
  So that is why I think we need new legislation to build on the 
Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, to build on what we have done 
previously, and this CARA 3.0 that we have introduced with Senator 
Whitehouse can help on that. It does so by addressing three important 
areas: research and education, treatment and recovery, and criminal 
justice reform.
  First, it will bolster our work to prevent drug abuse before it 
happens, through funding, through research and education. To me, it is 
time for a national awareness campaign. It would be money well spent. 
And I believe we could use the money that we would appropriate here to 
leverage a lot more private interest in this, to get the private 
companies--like the pharmaceutical companies--to step forward and to 
help us in a true national drug awareness campaign.
  Second, research and development. We need to have better pain relief 
drugs in this country. We are still relying on things like Percocet, as 
I mentioned, and other opioids, prescription forms, that we have been 
relying on for decades. It is time to actually move

[[Page S7455]]

forward with the research and development of alternative pain 
treatments that don't lead to addiction as opioids do. There has been 
some progress there, but not nearly enough, and it needs more help.
  Third, in terms of treating substance abuse, our bill builds on what 
works by doubling down on proven evidence-based addiction treatment 
methods while expanding treatment options for groups particularly 
vulnerable to addiction, including young people, new and expecting 
moms, rural communities, communities of color. And it will make 
permanent the expanded telehealth options for addiction treatment that 
were temporarily created in response to the social distancing required 
by COVID-19. This is an exciting opportunity because it turns out, 
during COVID-19, when we had to rely more on telehealth, there was 
actually a lot of success in getting people into treatment.

  Now, it wasn't as good as having your recovery coach there with you 
and your, perhaps, other recovering addicts with you to give you the 
support you need, but for some people who couldn't travel because of 
the COVID-19 restrictions and, now, perhaps can't travel for other 
reasons, telehealth is something that was determined to be quite 
successful in many cases. We should continue that. We have to change 
laws to do that because it is about whether that would be reimbursed, 
particularly under Medicaid and Medicare.
  CARA 3.0 will also bolster the recovery options for individuals 
working to put addiction behind them through funding to support 
recovery support networks. It will enable physicians to provide 
medication-assisted treatment, like Methadone, to a greater number of 
patients and change the law to allow those drugs to be prescribed via 
telehealth for greater use of access.
  Part of the telehealth we are looking for is if you have a 
medication-assisted treatment plan, then you can use telehealth--in 
other words, over the internet--to be able to get your prescription. 
There needs to be safeguards in that. We need to be sure the first time 
a prescription is given, there is a face-to-face contact and make sure 
that it is not being abused, but this can be quite helpful.
  Finally, CARA 3.0 reforms our criminal justice system to ensure that 
those struggling with addiction, including our veterans, are treated 
with fairness and compassion by the law, putting them on a path to 
recovery instead of a downward spiral of substance abuse.
  When someone comes out of one of our prisons or jails and comes out 
as an addict and there is not treatment provided, way too often that 
person, of course, relapses and begins to use again, gets back into 
criminal activity, and gets right back in the criminal justice system. 
That doesn't help anybody. It certainly doesn't help the taxpayer 
because the cost is $30 to $35,000--probably more at the Federal 
level--to incarcerate someone.
  And when they get out, they are just creating more crimes in the 
community. It is worth putting some emphasis on treatment while someone 
is in prison if they are suffering from addiction and, certainly, when 
they get out, getting them into treatment and recovery programs to get 
them back on their feet.
  By the way, we need these people in our workforce right now. We have 
always needed them, but we particularly do now. This is a win-win for 
our economy and certainly for the addict.
  CARA and CARA 2.0 have given States and local communities new 
resources and authorities to make a real difference in our States. CARA 
3.0, this new bill, renews and strengthens those programs and, given 
the recent spike in addiction, provides a significant boost in funding 
as well.
  When added with existing CARA programs authorized through 2023, we 
would be investing over $1 billion a year to address the epidemic, 
putting us on a path toward brighter future free from addiction. It is 
money well spent, in my view. It is necessary. Again, it is going to 
help to bring our families back together, get people back to work, and 
ensure that our communities are not being devastated by crime that is 
committed in relation to these drug issues.
  I believe these two bills--the FIGHT Fentanyl Act we talked about and 
CARA 3.0--will make a difference in addressing this crisis of addiction 
our country now faces that has been made even worse during the time of 
the pandemic. A lot of our victims of this addiction crisis are 
suffering in silence.
  I urge my colleagues: Let's act now. Let's bring this to the light. 
Let's allow mere people to get into treatment, longer-term recovery. 
Let's be sure we are making fentanyl illegal in all of its forms. 
Let's, without delay, go to work to once again do what we know works 
because we turned the tide on addiction.
  We began to turn it in 2018, 2019. Let's get back to that. We will 
save lives and give so many more Americans the ability to achieve their 
God-given potential.
  I yield the floor.
  (Mr. KAINE assumed the Chair.)
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Ossoff). The Senator from Virginia.

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