[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 16928-16946]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




      DRUG QUALITY AND SECURITY ACT--MOTION TO PROCEED--Continued

  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed 
to address the Senate as in morning business and that the Senator from 
South Carolina, Mr. Graham, be allowed to join me in a colloquy.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Arizona.


                                  Iran

  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, the administration's negotiations with 
Iran failed to achieve an interim agreement this past weekend, and if 
published reports are accurate, we owe our French allies a great deal 
of credit for preventing the major powers in the negotiations--the so-
called P5-plus-1--from making a bad, bad, bad interim deal with Iran--a 
deal that could have allowed Iran to continue making progress on key 
aspects of its nuclear program and in return receiving an easing of 
billions of dollars in sanctions.
  The Senator from South Carolina and I are not opposed to seeking an 
interim agreement with Iran as a way to create better conditions for 
negotiations on a final agreement. We joined with some of our 
colleagues in a letter to the President in support of such an approach 
before the Geneva agreement. But our support was conditioned on the 
need for any interim agreement to be based on the principle of 
suspension for suspension; that is to say, the Iranians would have to 
fully suspend their enrichment of uranium and the development of their 
nuclear weaponization programs and infrastructure, including 
construction of the heavy water reactor at Arak. The idea would be to 
freeze Iran's nuclear program in place so that negotiations could 
proceed on how to roll it back without the threat the Iranians could 
use negotiations as a delaying tactic.
  I remind my colleagues they have done that time after time. In fact, 
the new President of Iran, Mr. Rouhani, bragged when he was negotiator 
that they were able to fool the negotiators and increase the 
centrifuges from 150 to 1,000. We have seen the movie before.
  If Iran agreed, though, to this freeze, Senator Graham and I have 
said we would support suspension of our efforts to pass and implement 
new sanctions. Unfortunately, public reports suggest the administration 
was willing to agree in Geneva to less than a full suspension of Iran's 
program and to pay for that inadequate step with billions of dollars in 
sanctions relief. This is not ``suspension for suspension,'' regardless 
of administration claims to the contrary. And that is a problem. It 
puts too much trust in President Rouhani--the one whom I talked about 
before who bragged--he bragged--about deceiving the international 
community when he was Iran's nuclear negotiator. In fact, the current 
diplomatic efforts are consistent with a pattern of past dealings 
undertaken by the Iranian government to buy breathing space and shift 
international expectations in order to continue development of its 
nuclear program.
  We have to avoid an interim agreement that diminishes Iran's 
incentive to make the hard decisions we ultimately need them to make as 
part of a final agreement, and that final agreement must require Iran 
to do the following: Comply with all outstanding U.N. Security Council 
resolutions; sign, ratify, and implement the additional protocol of the 
nuclear proliferation treaty; address outstanding concerns of the IAEA, 
especially through expanding inspection measures; halt construction on 
and ultimately dismantle the Arak heavy water reactor; stop development 
of advanced centrifuges; and turn its supply of enriched material over 
to the IAEA.
  A final agreement should also not recognize that Iran has any 
inherent right to enrich. A country that has continuously been on the 
path for nuclear weapons, that has violated protocol after protocol, 
should not have the ``right to enrich.'' Without these measures, Iran's 
nuclear program will continue to grow. And as the program grows, it 
will be harder to track and harder to set back.
  Only when Iran seriously undertakes measures to dismantle its nuclear 
program should sanctions be unwound. The administration should not 
weaken the strong negotiating position that Congress has helped create. 
Instead, it should use its position to its advantage.
  Before I ask my friend from South Carolina to comment, I would add 
that we should not forget the context of Iran and negotiations with 
Iran. This is an arms control issue--the nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, we 
seem to ignore the fact that Iran is spreading terror throughout the 
Middle East and would like to throughout the world.
  It is the Iranians who have armed and trained and equipped 5,000 
Hezbollah, who are slaughtering people in Syria. It is Iran that sends 
the Iranian Revolutionary Guard into Syria and slaughters people. It is 
Iran that is supporting the Islamic extremist groups that are now 
moving seriously on the side of Bashar Assad into Syria. It is Iran 
that is spreading terror throughout the Middle East and would attempt 
to throughout the world. They still view the United States of America 
as the great Satan. They are still committed to ``wiping Israel off the 
map.''
  Iran is a threat to peace in the world. And it is not only the issue 
of nuclear weaponry, it is their entire behavior of spreading terrorism 
throughout the region, propping Bashar Asad while he continues to 
slaughter, maim, rape, torture, and kill. And for this administration 
and this Secretary of State to ignore those facts about Iran, in my 
view, is disgraceful conduct.
  Finally, before I turn to my friend from South Carolina, I would add 
that the influence and power of the United States throughout the world, 
especially in the Middle East, is no longer there. Every Middle East 
leader I talk to, everyone I know in the region, says they believe the 
United States is leaving, the United States is not in any way involved, 
and they are making accommodation for the absence of the United States 
leadership.
  This President does not believe in American exceptionalism. America 
must lead or Iran, Russia, and other countries will lead, and sooner or 
later the United States will pay a very heavy price. We must not ignore 
the lessons of history. Several times in our history we have tried to 
withdraw the fortress America, and every time we have paid a very heavy 
price.
  So I say to my friend from South Carolina, it is important, this 
Iranian issue, it is of transcendent importance, but I do not believe 
it can be viewed in a vacuum, considering Iran's continued effort to 
try to undermine and destroy everything--the freedom and democracy--for 
which American stands.
  Mr. GRAHAM. If I could respond, I guess the essence of what we are 
trying to say is we believe Iran is the problem, not the solution, to 
the Mid East and the world at large. There has been bipartisan support 
for curtailing and controlling and eventually eliminating the Iranian 
nuclear program. There has been bipartisan support for our friends in 
Israel, and we want to keep it that way. We want to make sure Congress 
speaks with one voice, that we are helpful when we can be, and that we 
offer criticism at an appropriate time.
  I guess the concerns we have about this agreement are that it is 
getting to be more like North Korea in a fashion that makes us all 
uncomfortable. If you interject billions of dollars into the Iranian 
economy now, without dismantling the centrifuges, I think you have made 
a huge mistake.

[[Page 16929]]

  What are we trying to accomplish? We are trying to make sure the 
Iranians do not have the capability to develop a nuclear weapon. The 
first question you have to ask: Are they trying to build a nuclear 
powerplant--a nuclear infrastructure for commercial purposes--or are 
they trying to create capability to produce a weapon? Trust me on this: 
Nobody goes about building a commercial nuclear program this way. They 
are trying to build a nuclear weapon. Why? Because that would give them 
influence in the region they have never had. It would give Iran a 
strong standing in the historical Sunni-Shia conflict between the 
Persians and the Arabs. And as a consequence, it would lead to a 
nuclear arms race in the Mid East, because the Sunni Arabs are not 
going to allow the Shia Persians to have a nuclear capability.
  They also believe, fairly rationally so, if they get a nuclear 
weapon, the regime is probably home free; that the West is going to 
back off, much as we did in North Korea. So the decision of how to 
handle this program is probably the most important decision President 
Obama will make in his second term and will be one of the most 
important decisions the world makes for the future of our planet here 
going into the 21st century.
  Mr. McCAIN. If my friend would yield for a question, the Senator from 
South Carolina and I have known the Prime Minister of Israel rather 
well over the years. Obviously, the first target of Iran, in the case 
of a nuclear weapon, would be Israel. Iran has never stepped back from 
saying that Israel should be wiped from the face of the Earth. Has the 
Senator from South Carolina ever known a time since the creation of the 
State of Israel that the United States and Israel have been further 
apart; that there has been more open disagreement and, indeed, tension 
at a level the likes of which we have never seen? And does it not 
appear by not including Israel in any of the negotiations, to start 
with, but also there seems to be a complete disregard of the knowledge, 
information, and frontline status of Israel in this whole issue?
  Mr. GRAHAM. Well, I think it is pretty obvious the tensions are 
growing, and not just with Israel. I believe the Obama administration's 
eagerness to reach a deal is unnerving to the people in the region, and 
not just Israel. The Israelis and the Sunni Arabs are being pushed 
together in an unprecedented fashion. We are hearing out of the Arab 
community the same concerns as out of the Israeli community. So that is 
an odd alignment.
  Mr. McCAIN. And haven't the Saudis already basically let it be known 
if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon they will be right behind them?
  Mr. GRAHAM. Oh, absolutely, it will create an arms race.
  There is a positive note here: The Congress itself. The Congress has 
not been confused. We are more together on this issue than we have ever 
been. The Congress passed 90 to 1 a resolution rejecting the idea of 
allowing the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon and trying to contain 
them. The idea of containing a nuclear-armed Iran is not a good idea. 
We fear they would share the technology with a terrorist group that 
would wind its way here to the United States. And Israel believes they 
could never have a moment of peace with a nuclear-armed Iran. 
Containment won't work.
  Secondly, the Congress, 99 to 0, said: If Israel has to defend itself 
against a nuclear-capable Iran, has to intervene to stop this 
existential threat to the Jewish state, that we would provide 
political, economic, and military support. So the Congress has been 
very much together.
  The next thing we hope to do is have a resolution, bipartisan in 
nature, that defines the end game. What are we trying to accomplish? We 
don't want a war. Nobody wants a war. The idea of the Iranians having a 
commercial nuclear powerplant is OK with me. Mexico and Canada have 
commercial nuclear power facilities. They just don't enrich uranium. 
They buy the product from the world community. They don't have 
enrichment and reprocessing. I don't mind the Iranians having a nuclear 
powerplant for commercial purposes as long as the international 
community controls the fuel cycle.
  Here is the problem: They are insisting on the right to enrich. And 
the problem is you can take uranium and enrich it to a certain level 
for commercial purposes, and with today's technology you can break out 
and have a nuclear weapon very quickly.
  Mr. McCAIN. May I ask, aren't the parameters of this proposed 
agreement to allow them to continue to enrich materials?
  Mr. GRAHAM. The concern the Israelis have, and that my colleague and 
I have, is the number of centrifuges available to the Iranians is into 
the tens of thousands now, pushing from 18 to 24,000. Who really knows. 
But the advanced centrifuges we are talking about can take 3.5-percent 
enriched uranium and go to 90 percent to get a weapon in just a matter 
of weeks, if not months.
  So here is the rub: I think Congress will speak with one voice. We 
don't mind a commercial capability for the Iranians as long as you 
control the fuel cycle. As to the previously enriched uranium, 
particularly the 20 percent stockpile, turn it over to the 
international community. That is the U.N. position. Stop enriching. 
There is no right to enrich. At the end of the day, this plutonium 
heavy water reactor that you are building is a threat to Israel beyond 
belief. Dismantle that reactor. You don't need a heavy water plutonium-
producing reactor to engage in commercial power production. These are 
what we would like to let the administration know would be a successful 
outcome regarding the Congress. They actually mirror the U.N. 
resolutions.
  I am hopeful we can find a way to end the nuclear program in Iran 
which would be a win-win situation for the Iranians and the world at 
large. But what we can't afford to do is get it wrong with Iran. These 
negotiations, the interim agreement, as Senator McCain stated so well, 
sent chills up the spine of almost everybody in the region. So if the 
Iranians insist upon enriching, to have the ability to take the uranium 
and enrich it in the future, I think is a nonstarter. That would be 
incredibly dangerous, and we will wake up one day with a North Korea in 
the Middle East. If the Iranians get a nuclear weapon, it will be far 
more destabilizing than North Korea having a nuclear weapon on the 
Korean Peninsula. It will open Pandora's box.
  I am hopeful the administration will go into the next round of 
negotiations eyes wide open, understanding where the American people 
and the international community are and the people in the region and if 
we get a deal, it is a good deal. But what is a good deal? To make sure 
the Iranians can have a peaceful nuclear power program but can't get a 
bomb. The only way they can get a bomb is to have enrichment capability 
as part of an agreement. Mexico, Canada, and 15 other nations have 
nuclear powerplants for commercial purposes, but they don't insist on 
enriching uranium to provide the fuel. If they insist on enriching, 
that tells us all we need to know about what their true intent is.
  I thank Senator McCain for bringing his voice.
  Mr. McCAIN. It is also true that the right to enrich is undercut by 
their many years' record of deception and efforts at acquiring a 
nuclear weapon.
  Finally, again, I want to emphasize our Israeli friends are on the 
frontline. It is not the United States of America that the ayatollahs 
have committed to ``wipe off the face of the earth,'' that have been 
dedicated ever since the Iranian revolution to the extinction of the 
State of Israel.
  So shouldn't we pay close attention? We aren't dictated by Israeli 
behavior, but shouldn't we profit from their experiences? Twice the 
Israelis have had to act militarily against nuclear facilities. Twice 
they have had to do that in order to prevent in one case Syria and 
another case Iraq from acquiring nuclear weapons which would threaten 
them with extinction. Now this agreement, clearly, in the words of the 
Israeli Prime Minister, is something that is very dangerous to the very 
existence of the State of Israel.
  Again, Israel does not dictate American policy, but to ignore the 
warnings

[[Page 16930]]

of literally every expert in the Middle East--especially that of 
Israel, including Arab countries--I think is ignoring evidence and 
opinions that are very well informed. To get an agreement for the sake 
of an agreement, in my view, would be a disaster.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Would the Senator yield? To conclude, why are the 
Iranians at the table? Because the sanctions are working. The Congress 
has passed tough sanctions. To the Obama administration's credit, they 
put together an international coalition--unprecedented in nature--which 
has gotten the Iranians' attention and we are at the table. The last 
thing we want to do is relieve the pressure because that is what got 
them there. There are two things they must understand: Until you 
abandon your nuclear quest for a bomb and replace it with a reasonable 
solution for commercial nuclear power aspirations, we will continue 
sanctions. The threat of military force is also one of the factors that 
got them to the table.
  Jay Carney said yesterday: If you push for new sanctions, you are 
inviting war. I would like to respond. I think the reason we are having 
a peaceful opportunity moment here is because of the sanctions. If we 
back off now and infuse billions of dollars into the Iranian economy 
and leave the centrifuges in place, we are inviting an attack by 
Israel. If you don't shut down the plutonium heavy water reactor, 
Israel is not going to sit on the sidelines forever. So to not have a 
continuation of sanctions until we get the right answer is going to 
invite more destabilizing in the region.
  We have to realize that Israel is in a different position than almost 
anybody else. They are close. The Iranians have talked about wiping 
them off the map. When it comes to the Jewish people, they don't take 
that stuff lightly anymore. When they say ``never again,'' they 
literally mean it. Can you tell the Prime Minister of Israel--given the 
behavior of the Iranians in the last 30 years--that they are just 
joking? Can you tell the people of the United States, if the Iranians 
got a nuclear weapon, they wouldn't share it with a terrorist group to 
come our way? Name one thing they have produced they haven't shared.
  So this is a moment of history. This is the biggest decision 
President Obama will make, and I would like to help him make the right 
decision. I would like to help the world resolve this problem without a 
war. But here is the situation we find ourselves in: If we attack Iran 
to stop their nuclear program if we couldn't get a peaceful ending, we 
would open Pandora's box. It would be difficult. But if they got a 
nuclear weapon, it would empty Pandora's box. That is the world in 
which we live. We have a little time to get this right. I hope we can.
  Mr. McCAIN. I appreciate the patience of my friend from Iowa, and I 
thank the Senator from South Carolina.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I wish to cover the bill we are on, the 
Drug Quality and Security Act. Before I do, I ask unanimous consent 
that at the end of my remarks the Senator from New Hampshire, Ms. 
Ayotte, be recognized to speak.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. HARKIN. One year ago, we were at the beginning of our effort to 
understand one of the worst public health crises this country has 
experienced in recent years. We were just learning about the New 
England Compounding Center's astonishing disregard for basic procedures 
to ensure that the products they were manufacturing were sterile. We 
were shocked and saddened by the news that hundreds were sick and 
dozens had died from infections caused by NECC's blatant disregard for 
patient safety, and we were fearful for the fate of the thousands of 
additional patients who had received injections of NECC products.
  Despite the urgency of that crisis, the bill we are considering was 
not slapped together overnight--far from it. It is the product of a 
full year of careful bipartisan policy collaboration, and it rests upon 
the factual foundation developed through the bipartisan oversight 
investigation that Senator Alexander and I launched over 1 year ago. 
When we learned of the NECC tragedy, we did not rush to pick up a pen 
and dash off a quick legislative answer. Instead, we sought to 
understand what that story was, what its causes were, so we could 
develop legislation which would make a difference in the future and not 
just make headlines.
  In early October of 2012, shortly after the outbreak became known, 
this is what the outbreak looked like. We had these States with 64 
deaths and 750 people got sick. I don't mean they just got sick 
overnight and then got better. Some of the people who lived will have 
lingering illnesses for the remainder of their lives. In many cases 
they will never be able to work again because of meningitis. My 
partner's home State of Tennessee was very hard hit with 153 cases. 
Michigan was the highest with 264 cases.
  But this is what it looked like when this outbreak occurred. As we 
can see, there were a couple out West, and it was starting to spread in 
that direction. Thankfully, the Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention was able to intervene and find the source of it and stop it; 
again, another example of how CDC protects the American people.
  When this happened, we began to talk directly with various 
stakeholders to understand it. We continued to talk to the FDA and the 
CDC on their investigations. We held briefing calls with the 
Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy, where the NECC was located. We talked 
to an array of compounding pharmacies and purchasers of the compounded 
products.
  On October 25 of last year, to explore the need for and potential 
contours of legislation, the committee launched a bipartisan process to 
examine the respective State and Federal roles in regulating 
compounding pharmacies. My oversight team worked with Senator 
Alexander's to gather documents from FDA and from the State of 
Massachusetts that shed light upon how NECC had been allowed to grow so 
large with so little oversight. Last November, we released an initial 
report and held a hearing exploring the statutory and regulatory gaps 
that contributed to this tragedy. Our bipartisan investigation 
continued and culminated in a final report released on May 22 of this 
year.
  Over the course of this investigation, we explored how drug 
compounding has evolved as an industry over the past couple of decades. 
Drug compounding is a traditional and longstanding activity of 
pharmacies. It serves an important role in our health care system. 
Compounding is when just a few people--maybe only one person--needs a 
certain compound of a drug. So a pharmacist, maybe not with the classic 
mortar and pestle but with other devices, mixes, compounds the specific 
drug that is needed. Maybe it is needed for a few people in a hospital, 
a specific chronic illness that someone might have. This is sort of the 
traditional compounding, where you can't just get a prescription for it 
and go down to the pharmacy and have it filled, simply because there is 
not that big of a demand for it. But over the last couple of decades a 
number of large-scale drug compounding companies have started to 
produce large batches of high-risk drugs for national sale.
  For example, at the time of the meningitis outbreak, NECC's sister 
company called Ameridose was providing prepared IV mixtures to 25,000 
hospitals and facilities across the country. Despite a scope of 
operations that makes these companies much more similar to drug 
manufacturers than to pharmacies, they primarily faced oversight 
similar to State-licensed community pharmacies rather than the more 
rigorous quality standards governing traditional drug manufacturers.
  Our investigation found that both NECC and Ameridose had lengthy 
track records of producing drugs of questionable sterility and potency, 
and both had been the subject of repeated adverse event reports and 
consumer complaints. The committee review of FDA documents indicates 
that between 2002 and 2012, NECC was the subject of

[[Page 16931]]

at least 52 adverse event reports, exposing the dangers created by its 
hazardous compounding practices with documented issues including the 
failure to ensure the sterility of equipment and products, the 
distribution of drugs containing particulate matter, the manufacture of 
superpotent and subpotent drugs, mislabeling of drugs, inaccurate 
``beyond use'' dating, and the illegal distribution of drugs in the 
absence of patient-specific prescriptions.
  Similarly, between 2007 and 2012, internal documents indicate that 
Ameridose was the subject of at least 18 adverse event reports. 
Ameridose was cited in 2008 for producing a compounded version of the 
pain reliever fentanyl that was more than 100 percent stronger than the 
standard level.
  What was happening at NECC during this time period was unfortunately 
an example of a larger problem across the industry. In an effort to 
understand better the risks posed by increasingly large drug 
compounding companies, the FDA undertook surveys of compounded drugs in 
2001 and 2006. In each of those surveys, about one-third of the drugs 
sampled failed one or more standard quality tests. In the 2006 survey 
of sterile injectable drugs, 33 percent of the samples contained either 
not enough or too much of the active drug ingredient.
  Between 2001 and 2011, FDA documents indicate at least 25 deaths and 
36 serious injuries, including hospitalizations, were linked to large-
scale drug compounding companies, including 13 deaths in 2011 alone. 
Between 1998 and 2005, FDA documented at least 38 deaths and 210 
injuries from drugs that were contaminated, mislabeled, or caused 
overdoses because they contained more of the active pharmaceutical 
ingredient than indicated. These include the deaths of 6 infants and 
children, and at least 18 other children paralyzed, burned, 
hospitalized, or suffering from other severe reactions, and these 
numbers likely understate the actual number of adverse events because 
current law, unlike what we have in this bill, does not require 
reporting of adverse events.
  Our bipartisan investigation concluded that large-scale drug 
compounders continue to pose a serious risk to public health. At the 
time of our final report in May, we had identified at least 48 
compounding companies that had been found to be producing and selling 
drugs that were contaminated or created in unsafe conditions in just 
the preceding 8 months since this outbreak.
  I guess what I am saying is, if you follow this, this had been going 
on for some time but it kept getting worse and worse as more and more 
of these large-scale drug compounders found they could get away with 
it.
  In that same time 10 drug compounders had issued national recalls 
because of concerns about contamination, and 11 drug compounders had 
been ordered by State licensing agencies to stop producing some or all 
drugs.
  Our investigation concluded that in order to reduce the serious and 
ongoing risk to the public health from compounded drug products, it is 
essential that a clear statutory framework be enacted that requires 
entities compounding drugs outside of traditional pharmacy practice to 
engage in good manufacturing practices and to better ensure the 
sterility and quality of their drugs. So we developed this bill, the 
DQSA, as we called it, to address the regulatory gaps that we 
identified in this investigation.
  Under the legislation before us, large compounders such as NECC or 
any other compounder that chooses to operate outside of traditional 
pharmacy practice have only one legal option: They must register with 
the FDA. They must follow good manufacturing practices. They must tell 
FDA when their products hurt people; otherwise, they must follow the 
manufacturer-like requirements that apply to outsourcing facilities 
under this bill. If they are not traditional compounders and they do 
not meet the requirements for outsourcing facilities, our bill says FDA 
can shut them down immediately.
  The Drug Quality and Security Act is a carefully crafted bill that 
not only responds to the NECC outbreak but to the root causes that I 
have gone over that go back almost 2 decades, that really led up to 
this tragedy. It is good bipartisan policy.
  I pointed out the other day in my remarks, and I point out again 
today, it has wide industry and consumer support: the Academy of 
Nutrition and Dietetics, the American Pharmacists Association, the 
Chamber of Commerce of the United States, large drug manufacturers, and 
also consumer groups--the Center for Science and Democracy, the Center 
for Medical Consumers, and others. So it has both consumer and industry 
support.
  I wanted to take this time to lay out the background as to why this 
bill is so vitally important. I will also point out the House of 
Representatives passed this bill on a voice vote. Now we have it here 
at the desk. It is the same basic bill we passed out of our committee 
on a bipartisan unanimous vote.
  Last night we had a 97-to-1 vote on cloture to proceed to this bill. 
That ought to be an indication that this is an important bill, but one 
that has broad bipartisan support. Now, under the rules of the Senate 
we have 30 hours, of which I am now taking my part of 1 hour. I don't 
intend to take the whole hour. Then we go 30 hours, and then we get on 
the bill. If one person then--this one person--continues to object, I 
guess we will have to file cloture on the bill. That will take 2 days 
to ripen, 2 days for cloture to ripen. Then we will have yet another 
vote on cloture on the bill. I assume we will get 97 to 1. Then we have 
30 hours after that, and then we vote. I think that takes us to Sunday, 
if I am not mistaken, if we stay here.
  This is not really part of what I want to talk about, but I think 
this is an important reason why I have supported a change in the rules 
of the Senate since 1995. We cannot continue to be a 21st century 
country, to be a major world power, and operate under 19th century 
rules and regulations. It is just not right that one person, one 
Senator, any Senator--I am not pointing fingers at anyone. I am saying 
anybody, any one Senator in the face of a bill that is not only vital 
for the health and safety of the American people but which has broad 
bipartisan support--that one person could tie up the Senate for 
literally a week or more through procedural roadblocks. That is why I 
say we need to do something about the rules around this place.
  If this were a contentious issue, I could see the need to slow things 
down. This has to do with the health and safety of the American people. 
A lot of time and effort went into this bill, by Republicans and 
Democrats, FDA, CDC, pharmaceutical companies, consumer groups. That is 
why I think it has such broad support. I hope we do not have to go 
through all this. But if we do, we do. There is no doubt in anybody's 
mind that this bill will pass and it will probably pass on a 97-1 vote. 
But why tie up the Senate for all this time? Why put off the signing of 
a bill that would get action to protect the health and safety of the 
American people?
  I hope we can bring this to a resolution and have a vote up or down 
on it. Frankly, I think we could probably voice-vote the bill. I think 
we could ask for unanimous consent--but for one person--and then we 
could voice vote it. Then, if there is an objection, maybe we do have 
to have a rollcall. If someone wants a rollcall, that is their right, 
but at least let's vote on the bill and get it out of here. That is the 
least we can do to protect the health and safety of the American 
people.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.


                               ObamaCare

  Ms. AYOTTE. Mr. President, last week I came to the floor to discuss 
the negative impact that ObamaCare is having on the people of New 
Hampshire. I shared dozens of compelling stories from my constituents, 
who are telling me that they are seeing their coverage canceled and 
they are seeing their premiums rise. These sad stories continue to 
arrive in my in-box every day, and these are real people. They are 
having great difficulty with not only the Web site but structural 
problems that exist with the law itself.

[[Page 16932]]

They deserve to have their voices heard on the floor of the Senate. I 
will say, as one of my constituents said to me: Lives in New Hampshire 
are depending on it.
  Last week President Obama said he was sorry to those who are now 
receiving cancellation notices. But a simple apology falls short 
because the structural problems we are now seeing with this law, 
including the cancellation notices that too many of my constituents are 
receiving, were problems that many in this Chamber, even before I got 
elected to the Senate, warned about before the law was passed.
  Here are some of the stories I want to share from people in New 
Hampshire and how they are being impacted by this law.
  Jeanne in Meredith wrote me she was diagnosed with breast cancer 2\1/
2\ years ago. She was laid off from her job of 20 years and then went 
on COBRA. Jeanne traveled to Mass General in Boston to receive care and 
when her coverage ran out she worked with her insurance agent to 
receive coverage that she could afford and that would allow her to 
continue with her subsequent treatments without any interruptions. She 
has now told me that what she has worked out in the plan she had has 
been canceled. She wrote me:

       I liked my plan. And I not only liked my doctors, I 
     consider them my lifeline. If I purchase a plan under the 
     Exchange, I lose access to all my doctors in Boston, and I am 
     finding that I will also lose my oncologist in Nashua as 
     well. This can't be happening.

  Lori in Littleton wrote me. She told me she and her husband recently 
were notified that their coverage will be canceled. When she learned 
about the new plan that was being offered to comply with ObamaCare, she 
said:

       We were shocked that the cost would be $400 a month more 
     than we are currently paying. This is way beyond our budget. 
     So we began to explore the so-called Exchange to shop for all 
     of our choices. Once again, we were very frustrated to learn 
     that New Hampshire has a monopoly with only one carrier [on 
     the exchange].

  What I have also heard from my constituents is concerns that they are 
receiving notices that their premiums are rising as a result of 
ObamaCare. Sara in New Castle wrote me that her premiums for a high-
deductible plan that complies with ObamaCare will be double her current 
premium. Moreover, Sara said that she ``will no longer be able to go to 
Portsmouth Hospital. My primary physician, gynecologist, eye doctor, 
and children's pediatrician are all excluded from the ACA plan that I 
will be forced to purchase by the end of 2014.''
  She finished the letter she wrote to me by saying: ``No, my family is 
not better off with the ACA.''
  John in Pembroke wrote:

       The new law is called the Affordable Care Act. What a 
     hurtful joke that is to hard-working Americans. My existing 
     policy is being canceled. After I called Anthem to inform 
     them they must have misheard the President and the other 
     supporters of the ACA, they told me that my existing policy 
     did not meet the standards for the new law. I was shocked. 
     The new higher plans from Anthem in the best case scenario 
     are more than double my existing plan.

  David in Nashua wrote me that recently he saw his coverage canceled 
like too many others. He wrote:

       When working with Anthem to get a plan that will have the 
     closest coverages and plan services with similar deductibles 
     and copays, I was disheartened to learn it will cost me an 
     additional $110 per month--about 40 percent more than I was 
     paying.

  He continued:

       To get comparable services to what I had it will cost an 
     additional $45 per month. All said, I am looking at an 
     increase of $155 per month.

  David said he is looking at a 57-percent increase in costs and an 
additional $1,800 per year.
  He said to me:

       This is grossly unacceptable, has been misleading from the 
     words conveyed by the President and downright frustrating to 
     have to deal with such a problem.

  A couple from Amherst, NH, wrote me and said:

       . . . because of the Affordable Care Act our health 
     insurance plan is being canceled and the least expensive 
     plan, either within the exchange or outside of it, will more 
     than double our cost. The least expensive plan we can obtain 
     will increase our monthly premium from $582 to $1,183 per 
     month. Our annual premium under the new health care law will 
     increase from $6,984 to $14,196--an increase of [over $7,000] 
     per year.

  They further wrote to me:

       President Obama promised us that if we liked our plan, we 
     could keep it. But ours has been canceled. President Obama 
     promised us that if we liked our doctor we could keep our 
     doctor.
       President Obama promised us that under the new health care 
     law we would save $2,500. But our premiums will be increasing 
     by over $7,000 a year.

  A couple from Center Sandwich also contacted me. They said their 
rates will double and cost them an additional $7,000 per year.
  They wrote:

       We are both in our second careers and in our 50s, working 
     hard and doing two jobs. Blue collar couple who are very 
     healthy. Under this so-called Affordable Care law, our rates 
     are going to double!

  Scott from Concord wrote:

       I currently have a great family plan through my work. This 
     plan costs me $240 per month. On January 1st this plan will 
     cost me $600 per month. I can't afford to pay such a high 
     premium. Now I am forced to get a plan that has a 50% greater 
     deductible, and much higher co-pays.

  I also heard from a mother from Manchester. She has a little girl who 
is scheduled to have surgery at the beginning of January. As any mother 
would be, she is worried, and now she has been told her plan has been 
canceled. She wrote:

       I looked, and my current plan is not available through the 
     Exchange. I will have to purchase a plan with a high 
     deductible. The new plan will cost over $1,200 per month, 
     increasing my premium which is currently just over $1,000 per 
     month. The new plans, through the Exchange, have a smaller 
     network of doctors, so I could be losing my doctors too.

  Finally, I am hearing frustration and concerns from my constituents 
about the Web site.
  David in Bedford wrote:

       My wife and I are semi-retired and have been trying since 
     October 1 to obtain health insurance through HealthCare.gov. 
     We have also used the telephone option but we were unable so 
     far to obtain coverage.

  He finished this message to me by saying:

       We are very concerned with being without coverage on 
     January 1, 2014.

  I heard a similar concern from a resident in Greenfield who also 
expressed deep concern about private information put on the Web site. I 
heard the same from a registered nurse from Milford. She expressed 
frustrations about how the exchange is working.
  There are many more pieces of correspondence I have received from my 
constituents. I will not share them all on the floor today, but their 
voices deserve to be heard. Because of this law, people in New 
Hampshire are losing the coverage they thought they could keep. They 
are getting premium increase notices, which they cannot afford to pay, 
that are attributed to ObamaCare. Finally, as I have previously said on 
the floor, some people are having their hours cut because it defines 
the workweek as a 30-hour workweek. Unfortunately, the people who do 
want to continue to work more hours are being harmed.
  As I have done before, I come to the floor today to call for a 
timeout on ObamaCare. We need a timeout because we are seeing that the 
problems with this law are much deeper than a Web site. We hope those 
problems will be fixed. Of course, they have not yet been fixed. The 
Washington Post reported today that they may not even be fixed with 
what the administration has represented--at the end of this month.
  That said, what about the canceled policies, the premium increases, 
and the lost hours? It is time to have a timeout where we do what 
should have been done in the beginning. Instead of passing a law of 
this magnitude on a partisan basis, people need to come together to 
address health care, rising costs, access, and the issues the American 
people want us to take on. This law is not the answer, and the American 
people--and the people of New Hampshire--deserve better.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Coons). The Senator from Washington.
  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as if in 
morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

[[Page 16933]]




                       Early Childhood Education

  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about 
the issue that got me into politics many years ago in the first place--
early childhood education.
  I thank my friend and colleague Chairman Harkin, whose leadership on 
this critical issue is unparalleled. I am delighted he is on the floor 
today as well. I also thank Senators Casey and Hirono for their strong 
support of early childhood education. They are great partners in this 
work as well.
  Of the 535 Members of Congress, I have to say each one of us comes to 
Washington, DC, with our own unique background. We are a collection of 
military veterans, farmers, business owners, and a lot more.
  As for me, I come to Congress as a mother and preschool teacher. When 
my kids were much younger, I found that their wonderful preschool 
program was being closed down by my State because of budget cuts. When 
my children were very young, I put them in my car and traveled to 
Olympia, our State capital, which is 100 miles away, to explain to 
these legislators, whom I did not know, why they could not cut this 
important program. When I got there, legislators told me there was 
nothing someone like me could do to save that preschool program. One 
legislator in particular told me I was just a mom in tennis shoes and 
had no chance of changing anything. He said I could not make a 
difference.
  Well, that made me slightly mad. I drove home, picked up my phone, 
started calling other moms and dads, and they called moms and dads from 
around our State. Over time--about 3 months--we organized thousands of 
families in our State. We wrote letters, held rallies, and when all was 
said and done the legislature listened to us and reinstated that 
preschool program. I went on to teach in that program as a preschool 
teacher and then to serve on my local school board.
  When I eventually did come to Washington, DC, as a U.S. Senator, I 
knew firsthand that if we want to strengthen our economy and give our 
kids a brighter future, we could not wait until they were teenagers or 
adults to invest in them. I had seen in my own classrooms that when 
young children get the attention they need, they are miles ahead of 
their peers on the path to success. I saw that my own students who knew 
how to raise their hands or ask questions or stand in line to go to 
recess were the ones who were then able to go on and tackle a full 
curriculum in school.
  That is why this week I joined a bipartisan group of colleagues to 
introduce legislation that will give every American child access to 
high-quality early education. The bill, the Strong Start for America's 
Children Act, aims to significantly increase access to and quality of 
early learning programs that start when a child is born and last until 
their first day of kindergarten. This legislation authorizes a Federal 
program that supports our individual States' efforts to educate their 
youngest citizens. It ensures that early learning programs everywhere 
have quality teachers and meet high standards, but it also provides 
States, school districts, and preschool programs the flexibility they 
need to meet their local children's needs.
  Although I approach this issue today as a grandmother and mother and 
a former preschool teacher, many of my colleagues have their own 
reasons to support early education. Former law enforcement officers and 
lawyers and sheriffs whom I work with know that when we invest in our 
children at a young age, they are more likely to stay out of trouble 
and out of jail. Business leaders and economists know that when we 
spend $1 on a child's education in the first few years of their life, 
we save as much as $17 throughout their life. Our military leaders tell 
me that 75 percent of our Nation's 17- to 24-year-olds are ineligible 
to serve their country often because they are not able to pass the 
necessary math and reading.
  It is not only teachers who are fighting for pre-K, it is generals, 
sheriffs, and CEOs. Fifty years of research backs this up. We know that 
80 percent of a person's brain development occurs before the age of 5. 
While China is aiming to provide 70 percent of their children with 3 
years of preschool by 2020 and India is doing the same, we do not have 
a national strategy to get the youngest Americans ready to learn. Nobel 
Prize-winning economist James Heckman, an advocate for early learning, 
says ``skill begets skill.''
  This summer I traveled throughout my home State of Washington 
visiting early learning programs. I heard from a kindergarten teacher 
who told me that while some of her students in kindergarten are 
practicing writing their names on their work, others are learning how 
to hold a pencil. Those children, even at an early age, are already 
playing catchup. So when a child who has benefited from early education 
knows how to open a book and turn a page, someone can teach them to 
read. But in classrooms across our country, some children are falling 
behind. The gap between children who start school ready to succeed and 
those who don't has serious implications for our country's future.
  Although historically we have invested in education to build a path 
to the middle class, we are now falling behind. We now rank 28th 
globally in the proportion of 4-year-olds enrolled in pre-K and 25th 
globally in public funding for early learning. That cannot continue.
  In the coming weeks and months, I will be working with my chairman 
Senator Harkin, who is here today, and with many others to work toward 
making some smart investments in our educational system so we can move 
this legislation forward. Our country in very large part is the product 
of decisions that were made decades ago. The decision to make public 
education a priority now will have an extraordinary impact on the next 
generation. Every day we are choosing between being a country that is 
struggling to catch up or being a country that has the knowledge and 
power to continue to lead.
  I thank the Presiding Officer.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.


            Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 3204 and S.1197

  Mr. VITTER. Mr. President, I rise today to again advocate for no 
Washington exemption from ObamaCare. This is an issue I have talked 
about with several of our colleagues in this body, and I have been 
joined by many supporters in the House of Representatives. I believe it 
is very important.
  As we hear story after story from Americans in each of our States 
about what they are facing--being dropped from policies they liked and 
wanted to keep, having premium increases of 1,000 percent in some 
cases, getting their work hours cut back to under 30 hours a week--the 
fact remains that Washington has essentially an exemption from all of 
that pain. Washington has a big taxpayer-funded subsidy that nobody 
else in America at the same income level can get, and that really needs 
to end.
  One critical component of this issue is the fact that even though the 
ObamaCare statute clearly said that every Member of Congress and all of 
their official staff had to go to the exchanges for their health care--
and of course mentioned nothing about any huge taxpayer-funded 
subsidy--in fact, that language was considered and not included. Even 
though that is crystal clear under the statute, the Obama 
administration issued a special rule to get around that clear language. 
Part of that rule, which I think is outrageous on its face, says: Well, 
we don't know who official staff are. We cannot determine that, so we 
are going to leave it up to each individual Member of Congress to 
determine who their official staff are. As long as they deem certain 
staff nonofficial, then they don't have to go to the exchanges at all. 
They don't have to follow that clear mandate in the statute itself.
  Well, again, when we are talking about folks who work on our staff, 
committee staff, and leadership staff, that is ridiculous. They are 
clearly official staff. They are not campaign staff. They are not off 
Capitol Hill and outside of government. They are not working for other 
entities. They are

[[Page 16934]]

clearly official staff. This is just one of the major ways this illegal 
rule does an end run around the clear language of the statute.
  In reaction to that part of the illegal rule, I introduced a bill 
that simply says these decisions by each individual Member of the 
Senate and the House need to be made public. There needs to be full 
disclosure when anybody is using this end-run around and saying: Yes, 
this person works for me but somehow they are not ``official,'' so they 
do not have to follow the mandate of ObamaCare to go to the exchanges. 
That information should absolutely be public, and I put that in the 
form of a bill which I have filed both as a freestanding bill and as an 
amendment to the measure before the Senate today.
  Whatever we think about the underlying issues--and I know there is 
disagreement--to me it should be a no-brainer that there is full 
disclosure about how each individual office handles the situation. That 
is not fully disclosed now. Some Members may choose to say it to the 
press, to answer press questions, but it is not public information. It 
seems clear to me that how each office elects to handle that situation, 
how each elected Member elects to handle that situation, should be, by 
definition, public information, fully disclosed.
  The measure I am talking about right now, that is all it does. It 
does not prohibit anything else from going on. I object to that. I have 
other measures I will push to prohibit it. But all the measure I am 
talking about right now does is make sure that information, that 
election by each individual Member, is public, that there is full 
disclosure about something I think clearly the public has a right to 
know about. So I am simply on the floor lobbying for that measure to 
pass and lobbying for a vote opportunity up or down on that important 
provision.
  My first choice would be a simple vote on the measure in front of the 
Senate right now, the drug compounding bill. I have no interest in 
delaying progress of that bill. I simply want an amendment vote on the 
measure I am describing. We can vote it up or down. Either way, I think 
it is crystal clear this bill will proceed to become law. If my 
amendment is adopted, it would be voted on in the House. I think it 
would clearly be passed, become law. That is my first choice request 
here.
  If that is not possible, I do have a second choice request, which is 
to simply make this vote in order in the context of the next major bill 
coming to the floor, the National Defense Authorization Act--again, a 
simple amendment, a simple vote. I have no interest in delaying the 
time running on the consideration of this bill, on delaying votes on 
this bill, or of delaying debate and voting on other amendments on the 
Defense authorization bill. It seems to me that is a very basic, 
straightforward request: a vote on a pure disclosure provision.
  By the way, this provision has been hotlined on the Republican side, 
and there is no Republican objection to the substance of this 
provision. It is pure disclosure. We all think it should be public 
information. There is no objection.
  So I would simply ask unanimous consent to proceed in this way and 
expedite, in the process, consideration of all of this, including the 
compounding bill on the floor right now. The distinguished floor 
manager for the bill said a few minutes ago he does not want delay on 
this bill. I do not want it either. There does not have to be any 
delay, and, in fact, this unanimous consent will expedite all of that 
consideration.
  In that spirit, I ask unanimous consent that all remaining time on 
the motion to proceed to H.R. 3204, the compounding bill, be yielded 
back; that the motion to proceed be agreed to; that my amendment No. 
2024 be the only amendment in order; that no second-degree amendments 
be in order; and that the amendment be subject to a 60-vote affirmative 
threshold for adoption; I further ask that there be 2 hours of debate 
equally divided, and that upon the use or yielding back of that time, 
the Senate proceed to a vote on my amendment; following the disposition 
of my amendment, that the bill, as amended, if amended, be read a third 
time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be considered made and 
laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  The Senator from Iowa.
  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  Mr. VITTER. Well, Mr. President, reclaiming my time, that is 
unfortunate. That could dispose of this bill and pass this bill today--
a very straightforward, expeditious way of passing this bill with no 
delay.
  I said I had a second choice, a path forward which I think is very 
reasonable as well, related to the National Defense Authorization Act.
  So let me propose this unanimous consent request: I ask unanimous 
consent that all remaining time on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3204, 
the compounding bill, be yielded back; that the Senate proceed to H.R. 
3204; that the bill be read a third time and passed, and the motion to 
reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table; I further ask 
that the Senate then proceed to the consideration of S. 1197, the 
national defense authorization bill; that my amendment, which is at the 
desk, be called up, and that notwithstanding rule XXII, my amendment 
remain in order; that no second-degree amendments to my amendment be in 
order; and that the amendment be subject to a 60-vote affirmative 
threshold for passage.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, on behalf of leadership, I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  Mr. VITTER. Well, Mr. President, reclaiming my time again, I think 
that is unfortunate. That would be an even quicker route forward on the 
compounding bill because had that unanimous consent request been agreed 
to, the compounding bill would have just passed the Senate. It would 
have happened right now, and we would move on to something that clearly 
needs time for debate and discussion and amendments, the National 
Defense Authorization Act.
  In closing, let me underscore all I am seeking, urging, and, yes, 
demanding is a clear up-or-down vote on a pure disclosure provision: 
let the public know, as I think they clearly have a right to, how each 
individual Member is handling the situation. If a Member actually has 
the gall, in my opinion, to say: No, all these people who work for me 
are not ``official staff'' and therefore they can right out ignore the 
clear language and mandate of ObamaCare that says Congress and all 
staff must go to the exchanges for their health care--people have a 
right to know that.
  By the way, a lot of Members, including myself, say: No, we are all 
going to the exchanges. That is what the law says. It is perfectly 
clear, and that is what we are going to live by. A lot of Members are 
doing that.
  Either way, the public should know what is going on. There should be 
full disclosure, and that is all the provision I am discussing today 
does.
  It has been completely cleared by hotline on the Republican side. 
There is no objection. I would urge us to move forward with a simple, 
straightforward vote on it, so we can expedite consideration of this 
bill on the floor, so we can move more quickly to the national defense 
authorization bill, which does merit a lot of significant floor time, 
so we can have amendment votes on that bill immediately and not have 
any controversy about that.
  I urge that reasonable and expedited and clear path forward.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I want to say a couple things about my 
objections. I know a lot of Senators, when they object, always use that 
phrase: reserving the right to object. But I think if you look at the 
Senate rules, there is no such provision for reserving a right to 
object. I have always made it my habit that if you object, you object,

[[Page 16935]]

and then, when you get time on the floor, you explain why you objected. 
Thus, I am taking my time now to explain why I objected.
  The Senator from Louisiana propounded two unanimous consent requests. 
The first was basically that we go ahead and get to the bill, the 
compounding bill that we are on right now; that his amendment, which 
has nothing to do with the bill, by the way--and I think he would agree 
with that. It has nothing to do with it. It is not even relevant, not 
even germane to this bill. It has something to do with ObamaCare and 
whether we tell people whether our staffs are going on the exchange. So 
it has nothing to do with this bill.
  It seems odd that the Senator from Louisiana says he wants an 
inalienable right to be able to offer an amendment to this bill, but no 
one can offer an amendment to his amendment. It is kind of a double 
standard, to my way of thinking. He says that we vote on his amendment 
and that no second-degree amendments be in order. Why not? If 
amendments were allowed to be in order on the bill that were nongermane 
and nonrelevant, why shouldn't there be a second-degree amendment 
allowed on his amendment? Kind of a double standard. He wants it all 
his way, without thinking about the rest of the Senate. Well, again, 
that is why I keep saying we need the rules changed so that not one 
person can demand such outrageous accommodations.
  Again, this bill is so important to get passed and to get to the 
President so we can begin this process of protecting the health and 
safety of the American people. We know how to treat compounders, and 
they have to register and stop doing what they have been doing in the 
past. This is vitally important.
  The Senator says: Well, we can expedite it if only you will do it my 
way. Why should we have to do it his way? When 97 people already voted 
on this bill, when it passed the House by unanimous consent, why should 
it be: Well, this one Senator has the right to stop this bill, slow it 
down, unless we meet the demands of that Senator? Yes, it is outrageous 
in terms of how we conduct our business in the Senate.
  Again, I have argued for a long time that rules need to be changed. I 
have also argued for a long time that the minority ought to have the 
right, the inalienable right, to offer amendments, but amendments that 
are relevant and germane to the bill before you; otherwise, you get 
amendments on everything from Timbuktu to wherever on any bill, and 
that you can keep offering them and offering them and offering them.
  It was my understanding that the majority leader offered to the 
Senator from Louisiana an up-or-down vote on his amendment--not on this 
bill, but at some point an up-or-down vote, as long as that was the 
definitive vote on the amendment and it would not keep coming up. It is 
further my understanding that the Senator disagreed with that, that he 
wanted the right to bring it up again and again and again and again. I 
think this is, again, an outrageous imposition of one Senator's views 
and considerations on the entire Senate.
  I would say to the Senator that there ought to be some way for the 
Senator to get an up-or-down vote on his amendment--not on this bill. 
It is not relevant. It is not germane. I do not think it is relevant or 
germane on the Defense bill. I will say more about that in a second. 
But we have a lot of things coming down the pike before we leave here 
this year--or even in the next session of this Congress--to accommodate 
the Senator from Louisiana on his amendment. But why should we have to 
keep voting on it time after time after time if we have one dispositive 
vote on it up or down, which is, as I understand, what the majority 
leader offered?
  Secondly, in regard to the second unanimous consent request proffered 
by the Senator from Louisiana, to which I objected on behalf of the 
majority leader--I am not the chairman of the Defense Authorization 
Committee, nor do I have the right to bring legislation to the floor--
again, the Senator wants everything accommodated to his wishes because 
if you read the unanimous consent request, the Senator asks the Senate 
then proceed--well, there is a word missing there--it means: to the 
consideration of S. 1197, the Defense authorization bill.
  That is the right of the majority leader. It is the majority leader's 
right to bring legislation on the floor--not my right, not the right of 
the Senator from Louisiana, not the right of a Senator from anyplace 
else. I do not know if the majority leader wants to go to the Defense 
authorization bill next. I do not know, but that is not my decision to 
make. But the Senator from Louisiana says he wants to make that 
decision, and to make sure the Senate does just that. I would say to 
the Senator from Louisiana, well, when he becomes the majority leader, 
he would have that right.
  So he wants, again, to be able to bring up his amendment--again, 
which has nothing basically to do with the Defense authorization bill--
and, again, that no second-degree amendment be in order on his 
amendment--again, a little bit of a double standard.
  He wants the right to offer a nongermane, nonrelevant amendment to a 
bill, but nobody can offer any amendments to his amendment in the 
second degree. Well, I think we see this for what it is. The Senator 
obviously wants to vote on his amendment, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, 
maybe next week, maybe next month; I do not know how many times he 
wants to vote on his amendment. He was offered the right for an up-or-
down dispositive vote on that amendment.
  My understanding is--it is only my understanding; I do not know 
whether this is correct--that was turned down by the Senator from 
Louisiana. So I say that is why I objected to both of these requests, 
because on the compounding bill, of the necessity to get it through. I 
do not know whether the Senator's amendment would fail or lose. I do 
not. But I do know that the House has said they will not take the 
compounding bill back. You might say the House is unreasonable. I do 
not run the House. I do not run the House. All I know is the House 
passed it by unanimous consent, sent it over here, and said if it is 
amended, they will not then revisit it. That is what the House said.
  So if the Senator's amendment, as worthy as it might be to some, is 
put on the compounding bill, that is the end of the compounding bill. 
That is the end of protecting the people of America, their health and 
their safety, that we have worked so hard to come together. That is why 
it has no place on this bill.
  It may have a place, and I say that the Senator should have a right 
for a vote on his amendment at some point on either a relevant bill or 
a freestanding bill, that the Senator gets the right for an up-or-down 
vote on his amendment, either as a freestanding bill itself or as a 
relevant or germane amendment to some other bill on the floor. He 
should have that right but not to stymie, to stop a bill that is so 
vital to the health and safety of the American people. That is why I 
objected.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.
  Mr. VITTER. Mr. President, I appreciate the comments of the 
distinguished floor manager. I want to respond very briefly. My goal is 
a clear up-or-down vote on this pure disclosure proposal. I am open for 
suggestions for that to happen in any reasonable timeframe, meaning 
this calendar year.
  I have focused on these two bills simply because it seems to me, from 
what I know of the Senate schedule and floor activity, these are going 
to be the only opportunities in terms of amendments proposed. If there 
are other opportunities we can identify for this year, if we can 
identify an opportunity for a vote on a freestanding bill, I am all 
ears. I am completely open to that. I want more amendment votes in the 
Senate, not fewer. If there is a side-by-side idea, that is fine by me. 
I am completely open to that. I simply made these concrete suggestions 
because, based on what I know of the majority leader's plans for the 
rest of the calendar year, these are going to be the amendment 
opportunities.
  By the way, the only reason I put in my second consent to turn to the 
Defense bill is because that is exactly

[[Page 16936]]

what the majority leader articulated as his desire, his plan, to turn 
to that as soon as possible, to take up amendments.
  So I am open for any reasonable opportunity this year for this vote. 
Again, this is a pure disclosure provision. I do not see why it should 
be partisan or controversial. It has been cleared through the hotline 
on my side. So if there are any other suggestions of how this can 
happen, I am completely open to that.
  Unfortunately, I had a phone call with the distinguished majority 
leader last week and proposed various options. His response was simply: 
No. No. No. No. No other ideas, no other options. No. But I am 
completely open to those other ideas. It is obviously part of the 
tradition of the Senate that nongermane amendments are considered all 
the time. In fact, with regard to the Defense bill, that is the norm, 
not exception. There are usually significant nongermane amendments, 
often by the majority side, sometimes by the majority leadership, which 
are critical votes on the Defense authorization bill. That is not 
unusual at all.
  I am for more amendment votes, if there are alternative ideas on this 
topic, more amendment votes there, not fewer. So I look forward to 
moving forward in a productive, effective way toward getting this 
simple vote on disclosure and toward moving in an expedited way through 
this bill and to the Defense bill and whatever else is on the Senate 
calendar as determined by the majority leader. But, again, so far the 
response is no, across the board, not any sort of alternative 
suggestion.
  Finally, with regard to the idea of having one vote and one vote 
only, there is a clear practical problem with agreeing to that. That is 
the following: For instance, what if there were one vote on my 
disclosure provision on the Defense authorization bill? That bill is 
going to a conference committee, so it would obviously be possible for 
my amendment to be adopted 100 to 0 and then be dumped in the 
conference committee and stripped from the bill. Then I would have 
forgone the opportunity to ever bring up the subject again this entire 
Congress. I mean that is a fool's agreement. I am not going to agree to 
a fool's agreement. I need to be able to protect my right to revisit 
the issue, particularly when it would pass through a vote under that 
scenario and then be stripped in conference.
  So I hope we find a productive way forward. Again, this is a pure 
disclosure provision. I am going for a simple up-or-down vote in 
whatever context presents itself this calendar year, on this bill or 
any bill. I am open to other suggestions.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada.
  Mr. HELLER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business for 10 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                     Condolences to Senator Inhofe

  Mr. HELLER. Mr. President, before I begin, I would like to offer my 
condolences to my friend and colleague from Oklahoma Senator Inhofe and 
his family on the tragic loss of their son Perry. Both my wife and I 
will continue to keep their entire family in our thoughts and prayers 
during this very difficult time.


                           Health Care Reform

  I rise today to talk about the President's broken promises on 
ObamaCare and its effects on the people of Nevada. For more than a 
month now, the American people have witnessed how poorly this 
burdensome law has been implemented. People all over the country are 
frustrated with the problems plaguing healthcare.gov, as they should 
be.
  The government spent hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars to 
overpromise and underdeliver on the signature legislation of this 
administration. But there are serious problems in addition to the Web 
site, and one glaring issue in particular I would like to focus on 
today. We have all heard from the law's supporters that ObamaCare would 
give uninsured Americans access to health insurance. Time and time 
again they promised that people who already had their health plan could 
keep it. In fact, President Obama made the exact promise on numerous 
occasions.
  In a speech to the American Medical Association in June of 2009, 
President Obama said:

       . . . no matter how we reform health care, we will keep 
     this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, 
     you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like 
     your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health 
     care plan, period.

  But one of my constituents sent me a letter last week telling me that 
that was not the case. Sunny from the Las Vegas area wrote, ``I wanted 
to tell you that we have lost our wonderful health insurance plan.'' 
Sunny's family received a letter from their insurance company telling 
them that their existing plan did not qualify under the Affordable Care 
Act. They were automatically reassigned to a new plan that cost about 
$400 more per month.
  Let's remember what the President said, this time in August of 2009, 
during his weekly Presidential address about what he called ``phony 
claims'' regarding health reform:

       If you like your private health insurance plan, you can 
     keep your plan. Period.

  But yet another one of my constituents, Kirk from northern Nevada, 
was just notified that his current health insurance has been cancelled. 
He went to the exchange to find a new policy and shared his story with 
me. He wrote:

       . . . despite higher deductibles and higher co-pays, my new 
     insurance under this devastating law will be more than 250% 
     of what I am paying now.

  Again, March 15, 2010, just a few days before the law was passed--
albeit unread--by a party-line vote and signed into law, President 
Obama said:

       If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like 
     your doctor, you can keep your doctor.

  I wonder how President Obama and the law's supporters would explain 
that statement to Marc in Reno. Marc received a letter telling him that 
his current plan was no longer offered. The plan, the letter detailed, 
was cancelled in order to ``meet the requirements of the new laws.'' 
Marc was given the option to keep his plan for 1 additional year if he 
accepted a rate increase, even though he just saw a rate increase in 
September.
  Marc goes on to tell me:

       As an individual health care plan holder and a self-
     employed individual, the ACA appears to punish me for doing 
     the right thing by having a health care plan for the past 10 
     years and rewards those who did not.

  But yet as recently as this past July, President Obama promised:

       If you already have health care, the only thing this bill 
     does is make sure that it's even more secure and insurance 
     companies can't jerk you around.

  President Obama made this statement more than 2 years after his 
administration admitted in comments in the Federal Register that 40 to 
67 percent of existing individual policies would lose their 
grandfathered status. The President knew millions of Americans stood to 
lose their existing policies but he repeatedly told the American public 
in no uncertain terms that they could keep their plan.
  I think Steven from Washoe County would likely take issue with that 
promise. He told me that he now has health care that costs $293 per 
month. However, he just received a letter from his health care provider 
informing him that the cost of his health care would increase to $546 
per month on January 1. That means his health insurance costs will 
nearly double next year.
  There is nothing affordable about that. There is nothing secure about 
that.
  On September 26, just days before the exchanges opened to a 
disastrous rollout, the President repeated yet again what the 
administration knew was not true:

       . . . the first thing you need to know is this: If you 
     already have health care, you don't have to do anything.

  Well, I have another letter here from a father from Reno. He writes:

       I am writing to tell you that I'm now eating crow. A few 
     weeks back I wrote to you and expressed my support for health 
     reform and my dissatisfaction with the government shutdown. 
     Since then, I've received notification from my insurance 
     company informing me that my current policy is being 
     discontinued. I then began shopping for new policies for 
     myself and my family and have

[[Page 16937]]

     found that rates are two to three times what I am currently 
     paying and that my max out of pocket will double, all for 
     basically the same plan as what I have now. In essence, I've 
     been put into a situation where I can either save for my 
     kid's college education or buy healthcare.

  But this particular letter closes with something that really 
highlights the tough financial decisions facing the American people in 
these difficult economic times. This father says:

       I'm unfortunately one of those people who makes too much 
     money to qualify for Federal subsidy, but not enough to sell 
     my house which is still underwater from the housing crisis of 
     2008.

  This is the reality of the health care law. Now, in addition to 
trying to save for his children's education and attempting to recover 
from the housing crisis, a father has been forced off the plan he 
likes.
  The options available are two or three times more expensive. These 
stories don't fit with the narrative we have heard for nearly 5 years. 
President Obama is now trying to backtrack on the dozens of times he 
made his promise to the American people. Only last week he said:

       Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the 
     Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that 
     plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn't changed 
     since the law passed.

  That is just not true. That is not what he promised. Now my 
constituents are receiving cancellation notices for their existing 
plans.
  The administration argues that even though many people are losing 
their existing plans, those plans were subpar policies and their new 
policies will be better, but that ignores the promise. My constituents 
liked their plans. They decided what was best for them, what plans fit 
their individual and family needs.
  The President and the administration knew before the legislation 
passed that millions of Americans would lose their current plans. They 
admitted it in the Federal Register after the bill was signed into law, 
but the whole time they continued to promote this promise and dismiss 
any concerns as fearmongering or phony claims. That is unacceptable.
  These personal stories are why I am proud to cosponsor the If You 
Like Your Health Plan You Can Keep It Act, introduced by my colleague 
Senator Johnson of Wisconsin. This is a simple but necessary bill to 
give Americans the ability to keep their health plans if they like 
them. The people of Nevada deserve better, and they deserve to have a 
government that keeps its promises.
  I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. MURPHY. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum 
call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                              Gun Violence

  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, reports are emerging of another school 
shooting today. Early reports out of Pittsburgh are that three people 
have been shot at a high school. The police right now are searching for 
the shooter in the woods surrounding the high school. We hope and we 
pray that the three reported victims will survive.
  This is becoming part of our regular work week in Washington; that we 
can expect at some point during the week that we are going to turn on 
the TV to one of the cable news networks and find a live report from a 
school or a mall or a church somewhere in this country where a shooting 
is in progress. It is happening at a rate I don't think any of us could 
have expected. This number is growing at a rate I don't think any of us 
could have expected.
  I brought this chart to the floor of the Senate for about 6 months 
since the failure of our commonsense anti-gun violence bill this 
spring. This number represents the number of Americans who have died of 
gun violence since December 14.
  December 14 means something to everybody in this Chamber but 
certainly to those of us from Connecticut. That is the day in which 26 
6- and 7-year-olds and the teachers who protected them died in Sandy 
Hook--10,465 additional people have died.
  I have tried to come down to the Senate floor since the failure of 
that bill to try to tell the stories of these victims. If statistics 
don't do the job, if the sheer numbers alone don't convince people that 
something should change, then maybe hearing about who these people are 
might change things. We hope we will not add to this number with some 
new young victims from the reported shooting in Pittsburgh today.
  These shootings happen in unlikely places. Schools, now, 
unfortunately, are a likely place for a shooting to happen because they 
seem to happen with some regularity in schools, in part because we do 
very little, if anything, to stop them with legislation from this 
Chamber.
  They are happening in other unlikely places as well. Clubs--for 
instance, in New Haven, CT--have been the site four times just this 
year of major shootings. Only a few weeks ago, on October 26, police in 
New Haven responded to an early Saturday morning shooting at a place 
called the Key Club Cabaret. They arrived and found that 26-year-old 
Erika Robinson had been killed in a shooting spree that also injured 
19-year-old Amanda John, 29-year-old Jahad Brumsey, 24-year-old Nijia 
Ward, 34-year-old Albert Dickerson, as well as 25-year-old Ivette 
Sterling.
  Officers rushed to the scene as hundreds of patrons were running out. 
They walked in and found six victims of gun violence--a dispute in a 
club resulting in the death of Erika Robinson and several more being 
injured.
  Only a few days ago, in Cypress, TX, there was another shooting at a 
house party in which two high school students were killed and 19 others 
were injured shortly before 11 p.m. on November 9, 2013. There was a 
house party celebrating a young woman's 18th birthday. And because of a 
local dispute between two rival groups, Qu'eric Danarius Bernard 
Richardson, 17 years old, was killed, and Arielle Shepherd as well. 
According to authorities, Richardson was shot in the head while he was 
running away from the house party. When students returned to school on 
Monday, there was a lot of crying as they mourned the death of two of 
their classmates.
  School parties celebrating 18th birthdays, clubs in places like New 
Haven and Bridgeport, CT--not places you think of going where you might 
end up being shot at when you walk into them--are now the scenes of 
pretty vicious shootings, as are our schools.
  And shootings are increasingly happening in another way as well--by 
accident. Unfortunately, in preparation for a lot of these speeches, I 
riffle through a lot of pretty grizzly reports and increasingly I am 
seeing more and more accidental shootings ending up in tragedy. In 
Waterbury, CT, again, just a few weeks ago, Dow Kling and Shawn French, 
both 22 years old, were playing around with their .22 caliber Ruger 
inside an apartment in Waterbury when the gun went off and Dow was shot 
to death. His best friend Shawn French, who shot him, said:

       I'm sorry. I wish it was me and not him. I wish I could 
     trade places with him, I really do.

  A week earlier, in Henderson, NV, another example where Cherish 
Pincombe was playing around with a gun with her friend Colin Lowrey. 
The Remington .45 was loaded. They didn't know it was loaded, and Colin 
shot Cherish dead, 23 years old. She was described as follows:

       An amazing coworker. She was so caring. She was kind. She 
     was always helpful. She always wanted to do something to help 
     you out. She was very generous.

  And just because they didn't understand the gun was loaded, and they 
were being reckless and playing around with a firearm, Cherish is dead.
  So that is why people out there don't understand why we can't have an 
honest conversation about change. Even when those conversations are 
attempting to take place, they get shut down and cut off. A pretty 
innocent op-ed piece in the Guns & Ammo magazine suggested that maybe 
people should get a few hours of training before they

[[Page 16938]]

get a concealed carry permit. As a consequence of running that 
editorial, the editor of Guns & Ammo had to resign and step down, 
simply because he ran an op-ed by an author that suggested maybe people 
should get some training before they have a concealed weapon.
  So even when we try to engage in these discussions, we can't have 
them because the folks who get their money from the gun industry, 
whether it be the NRA or these magazines, aren't even allowed to have 
these conversations, despite the fact that 84 percent of gun owners 
support universal background checks, despite the fact that 50 percent 
of gun owners support a restriction on high-capacity ammunition clips, 
despite the fact that 46 percent of gun owners think it is a good idea 
to ban high-powered assault weapons.
  Organizations such as Guns & Ammo and the NRA are out of step with 
gun owners who don't want to see this number continue increasing, who 
don't want to turn on the TV and see another school shooting.
  The reason I come here to talk about who these victims are is because 
the conscience of this Nation should be enough to move this place to 
action, and it is about time gun owners and nongun owners alike get 
together to do something about this. There is much more agreement than 
there is disagreement among both people who own guns and people who 
choose not to own guns. Whether it is background checks or a ban on 
illegal gun trafficking or just a simple requirement that you get a 
little bit of training on how to use a gun so you don't fire it 
accidentally and end up shooting your best friend, there are simple 
commonsense bipartisan things we can do to make sure this number 
doesn't continue to accelerate at the pace that it has since December 
14.
  I thank the Chair, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Murphy). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business for up to 20 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                             Climate Change

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here today for now the 50th time 
to urge my colleagues to wake up to what carbon pollution is doing to 
our atmosphere and our oceans. Once a week--50 weeks--every week. Why? 
Why do I do this?
  First, because it is real. It is very real. It is happening. Here is 
the change in average global surface temperature since 1970. It is 
pretty hard to deny. Of course, if you are a denier, you will look at 
it and you will see from the same data that it stopped. The denier who 
tells you it stopped won't tell you that it stopped five times earlier 
on the way up. In fact, you could say that climate change has stopped 
six times since the 1970s, and even went down, but it didn't stay 
stopped long.
  Look at the linear trend for the whole data set from 1970 to 2013. No 
one can deny over this period the Earth is warming. This decade was 
warmer than the last, which was warmer than the one before that, which 
was warmer than the one before that.
  Let's look at NASA's entire historic surface temperature record going 
back to the 19th century. Listen to what University of California 
Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller has to say about the 
temperature record.

       The frequent rises and falls, virtually a stairstep 
     pattern, are part of the historic record, and there is no 
     expectation that they will stop, whatever their cause. . . . 
     [T]he land temperature record . . . is full of fits and 
     starts that make the upward trend vanish for short periods. 
     Regardless of whether we understand them, there is no reason 
     to expect them to stop.

  Here you can see again these short steps in the upward march.
  One reason we can't expect these upward steps to stop is that we know 
what is driving them. What is driving climate change is something even 
contrarian scientists accept; that is, more carbon dioxide leads to 
more warming. Simple as that; a 150-year-old established basic 
principle of physics.
  This is the October 1861 edition of the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin 
Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. It includes a manuscript 
by physicist John Tyndall entitled ``Radiation of Heat by Gases and 
Vapours.'' He says:

       [T]o account for different amounts of heat being preserved 
     to the Earth at different times, a slight change in [the 
     atmosphere's] variable constituents would suffice for this. 
     Such changes in fact may have produced all the mutations of 
     climate which the researches of geologists reveal.

  The ``variable constituents'' to which Tyndall refers include carbon 
dioxide, methane, and water vapor. That is from 1861. President Lincoln 
took office that year. Yet here we are today having to explain on the 
floor of the Senate the physics of what carbon dioxide does in the 
atmosphere.
  It is not just the principle that is established. There are lots of 
measurements. The carbon dioxide in our atmosphere now exceeds 400 
parts per million. For the last 800,000 years--at least 800,000 years, 
and perhaps actually millions of years--we have been in a range of 170 
to 300 parts per million. That has been the whole of human existence. 
Homo sapiens have been around for about 200,000 of those 800,000 years, 
and it is only now--it is only since the industrial revolution--that we 
have broken out of that safe window that has protected us through that 
entire history of our species and now we have broken to 400. And that 
is a measurement.
  Look at the oceans. Oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the 
excess heat caused by greenhouse gases over the last 50 years. 
Absorbing all that heat makes the oceans rise. Oceans have absorbed 
about 30 percent of our carbon emissions, which would otherwise be in 
the atmosphere causing more warming. Absorbing that carbon makes the 
oceans more acidic, and that is all stuff we measure.
  At the Newport tide gauge, sea level is up almost 10 inches since the 
1930s when we had our catastrophic 1938 hurricane in Rhode Island. You 
measure that. It basically takes a ruler.
  We are about 3 to 4 degrees warmer in the winter in Narragansett Bay 
than we were 50 years ago when my wife's URI mentor was doing his 
doctoral thesis--3 to 4 degrees. You measure that. It takes a 
thermometer.
  And the ocean is acidifying at the fastest rate recorded in 50 
million years. You measure that with a litmus test, which anybody with 
an aquarium does.
  It is one thing to be against science, it is another to be the party 
against measurement. So the polluters and front groups don't talk much 
about the oceans, but that doesn't change the fact this is real and it 
is past denying.
  That takes me to the second reason I do this, and that is that it is 
plain old-fashioned wrong when people lie and trick other people, 
particularly when people are going to be hurt by the lies. And it is 
worse when there is money behind the trickery--when it is purposeful. 
Lies cannot go unanswered, and that is another reason that I speak.
  There isn't just lying going on. There is a whole carefully built 
apparatus: phony-baloney organizations designed to look and sound like 
they are real, messages honed by public relations experts to sound like 
they are true, payroll scientists whom polluters can trot out when they 
need them, and the whole thing big and complicated enough to be fooled 
into thinking it is not all the same beast. But it is. It is akin to 
the mythical Hydra--many heads, same beast.
  One day folks are going to look back at this and those behind it are 
going to be disgraced for what they did and it is going to be a 
scandal. That is the third reason I speak. We are all going to be 
judged very harshly, with all the dread power that history has to 
inflict on wrong. The polluters and their collaborators will be judged 
harshly. The Republican Party will be judged harshly for letting itself 
be led astray by them.

[[Page 16939]]

But--and here is where it truly hurts--the failure of American 
democracy this is causing will also be judged harshly and will stain 
the reputation of our great American experiment. We in this generation 
have been passed this precious experiment by generations before us that 
fought, bled, and died to put it safely in our hands--and we do this. 
We foul it, by lying and denying for a bunch of polluters. Some 
generation we are going to be.
  If we believe this world needs America, this matters. Because a world 
fouled and changed by carbon pollution, in ways we could foresee but 
denied, will not believe it as much of a need for what a lying and 
denying America has to offer. This episode will darken the lamp America 
holds up to the world. We are a great country but not when we are lying 
and denying it is real. The atmosphere is warming; ice is melting; seas 
are warming, rising, and acidifying. It is time for the misleading 
fantasies to end.
  Here is how we go forward. First, price carbon right. Make the big 
carbon polluters pay a fee to the American people, as I have proposed 
with Representatives Waxman and Blumenauer and Senator Schatz; a 
pollution fee to cover the cost of dumping their waste into our 
atmosphere and oceans, a cost which they now happily push off onto the 
rest of us. I know at present political conditions do not allow us to 
price carbon, so we must change those political conditions, and we can.
  Recently, President Obama changed the calculus for polluters: carbon 
pollution standards for new and existing powerplants, no more unchecked 
carbon dumping. Fifty powerplants emit one out of every eight tons of 
America's carbon dioxide emissions. These 50 dirtiest U.S. powerplants 
emit more than Canada or Korea. When the big polluters see the costs of 
complying with those new standards coming down at them, they may take a 
second look at an economywide carbon fee. Here is a news flash. When 
the polluters' calculus begins to change, the political calculus in 
Congress will change too.
  Nothing says we have to wait for the polluters to figure this out on 
their schedule. There are armies on our side. It is not just the 
environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, 
League of Conservation Voters, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club 
or National Wildlife Federation. It is not just virtually every major 
scientific organization, such as the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union or the American 
Meteorological Society.
  We have faith-based groups such as the U.S. Conference of Catholic 
Bishops, the National Council of the Churches of Christ, Interfaith 
Power & Light, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, and 
the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. We have fishing, wildlife, and 
outdoor groups such as Trout Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, and Ducks 
Unlimited. They are joined by major sports leagues such as the National 
Football League, Major League Baseball, National Basketball 
Association, and National Hockey League, as well as the American Lung 
Association--which prefer to see kids playing outside in clean, healthy 
air.
  We have the Joint Chiefs of Staff on our side, joined by NASA, the 
National Academies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration, even the Government Accountability Office, the 
congressional watchdog. By the way, about NASA--let's not forget that 
NASA scientists sent an SUV-sized rover to Mars, they landed it safely 
on Mars, and they are driving it around on Mars right now. I will put 
NASA scientists up against the polluters' payroll scientists all day 
long.
  We have insurers and reinsurers whose business depends on 
understanding the mounting risk of natural disasters, folks such as 
Munich Re, Swiss Re, Allianz, and the Reassurance Association of 
America. We have State and local governments that are already active. 
Nine Northeastern States, for instance, including my own Rhode Island, 
engage in cap and trade through the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. 
Four Florida counties share resources and strategies for adapting to 
climate change through the bipartisan Southeast Florida Regional 
Climate Change Compact, and those are just two examples of many from 
around the country.
  A coalition of investors worth nearly $3 trillion just wrote to 45 
fossil fuel companies seeking explanation about risks facing their 
fossil fuel investments. Divestment campaigns are popping up at college 
campuses across the Nation. Major utilities accept the science and are 
investing in renewables and improving efficiency. Energy companies 
PG&E, the Public Service Company of New Mexico, and Exelon all quit the 
U.S. Chamber of Commerce after a Chamber official called for putting 
climate science on trial such as the Scopes ``monkey trial'' of 1925.
  America's flagship companies such as General Motors, Ford, Coca-Cola, 
Pepsi, Nike, Apple, Walmart, and Alcoa all recognize the serious 
implications of climate change. This support is latent, though, and it 
is unorganized. It is time to wake up and to gather our armies. We have 
to create allied command, assemble our divisions, agree on a strategy, 
and go into action. That will affect the calculus in Congress.
  Most important, we have the American people. Sixty-five percent of 
voters support the President taking significant steps to address 
climate change now. Another poll found that 82 percent of Americans 
believe we should start preparing now for rising sea levels and severe 
storms from climate change. Those in Congress who would deny science to 
protect the polluting interests increasingly look ridiculous, even to 
their own side. Misleading statements in the media, such as the stuff 
purveyed by the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, are losing 
their battle and losing their audience. It is not just time to wake up. 
People are waking up. Inevitably, the truth will be fully known.
  The polls show clearly that climate denial is a losing tactic. Four 
out of five voters under 35 support the President taking action to 
address climate change. Fifty-two percent of young Republican voters 
would be less likely to vote for someone who opposed the President's 
climate action plan. Even a majority of Texans say more should be done 
about global warming by all levels of government, with 62 percent of 
Texans saying more should be done in Congress. For those last holdout 
deniers comes this: Fifty-three percent of young Republican voters 
under age 35 said they would describe a climate denier as ignorant, out 
of touch, or crazy.
  Republicans outside of Congress are trying to lead their party back 
to reality and away from what even young Republicans are calling 
ignorant, out of touch, and crazy extremist views. They support a 
revenue-neutral carbon fee: Republicans such as our former colleagues 
in Congress, Sherwood Boehlert, Wayne Gilchrest, and Robert Inglis; 
Republicans such as former Environmental Protection Agency 
Administrators William Ruckelshaus, Lee Thomas, William Reilly, and 
Christine Todd Whitman, who served under Presidents Nixon, Reagan, 
George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush respectively; advisers such as 
President Reagan's Secretary of State George Schultz, Reagan's economic 
policy adviser, Art Laffer--known as Reagan's economist--and David 
Fromm, speech writer for George W. Bush.
  Here is what the Republican Presidential nominee had to say 5 years 
ago:

       [I]n the end, we're all left with the same set of facts. 
     The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention, 
     especially in Washington. Good stewardship, prudence, and 
     simple common sense demand that we [act to] meet the 
     challenge, and act quickly. . . . We have many advantages in 
     the fight against global warming, but time is not one of 
     them.
       [T]he fundamental incentives on the market are still on the 
     side of carbon-based energy. This has to change before we can 
     make the decisive shift away from fossil fuels. . . . [T]here 
     were costs we weren't counting . . . [a]nd these terrible 
     costs have added up now, in the atmosphere, in the oceans, 
     and all across the natural world. . . . We Americans like to 
     say that there is no problem we can't solve, however 
     complicated, and no obstacle we cannot overcome if we meet it 
     together. I believe this about our country. I know this about 
     our country. And now it is time for us to show those 
     qualities once again.


[[Page 16940]]


  It is indeed time for us to show those qualities once again. It is 
time to wake up. It is time to turn back from the misleading propaganda 
of the polluters, the misguided extremism of the tea party, and the 
mistaken belief that we can ignore without consequence the harm our 
carbon pollution is causing. It is time to face facts, be adults, and 
meet our responsibilities.
  I give these speeches because climate change is real, because the 
campaign of denial is as poisonous to our democracy as carbon pollution 
is to our atmosphere and oceans, and because I am confident, I am 
confident we can do this. We can strengthen our economy, we can 
redirect our future, we can protect our democracy, and we can do our 
duty to the generations that will follow us and will look back in shame 
unless we change our program. But we have to pay attention. We have to 
wake up.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.


                              The Economy

  Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I come to the floor once again to talk 
about jobs and economic growth.
  We are continuing to see signs of a steadily improving economy, with 
more than 200,000 jobs created last month in the jobs report just 
released last Friday. Of those, 19,000 were new manufacturing jobs. We 
have had 43 straight months of private sector job growth, but the 
unemployment rate remains stubbornly high and sadly particularly for 
those who are long-term unemployed.
  Earlier today the Budget Conference Committee met, and we heard from 
Congressional Budget Office Director Dr. Elmendorf. He let us know that 
in his view, the uncertainty--the lack of clarity about the path 
forward for all of us here, for the solutions we need for the budget 
and for the deficit--is one of the greatest drags on job creation and 
on competitiveness for our country and our economy.
  In our Budget Conference Committee, we need to come together and 
reach a balanced budget deal that repeals sequester and allows the 
Appropriations Committee--ably led by Chairman Mikulski--to move 
forward with an Omnibus appropriations bill for this fiscal year. We 
cannot afford, in my view, another long-term continuing resolution at 
the current sequester levels.
  As we heard today from Dr. Elmendorf, and as we have heard from other 
sources, the sequester will have killed 750,000 jobs by the end of the 
year, and next year these ongoing, steady, grinding cuts could kill 
another 800,000. These are jobs. These are investments by the Federal 
Government that could be helping the private sector create jobs in 
repairing our crumbling infrastructure. In Delaware alone, we have 175 
deficient bridges being neglected. These are jobs that help families to 
put food on the table. In Kent County, DE, where Dover Air Force base 
is, sequester has hurt those who serve our Nation who operate the base 
and serve our country valiantly. These are jobs that could be going to 
help research a cure for cancer. NIH supported more than 500 jobs in 
Delaware in 2011. Now cuts are costing those jobs and setting us back 
in the fight to find a cure for cancer and many other diseases.
  Sequester has been devastating to Delaware and the whole Nation. We 
need to replace it with a smarter, more balanced set of spending 
reforms that maintains investments that will allow our country to be 
competitive. In particular, if I might, we need to refocus on jobs by 
investing in infrastructure and focusing on manufacturing.
  In my view, the 19,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector that we just 
learned were created in the last month were a promising development but 
far from as many as we should be filling. Why? Because manufacturing 
jobs are high-quality jobs. They pay more in wages and benefits. They 
help create secondary local service jobs. They contribute more to the 
local economy. And manufacturers invest more in private R&D than any 
other sector in our economy.
  Mr. President, as you know, before I came here to the Senate and 
before my service in county government, I spent 8 years with a 
manufacturing company in Delaware. At one point I was part of a large 
site location team that went around the country to try to decide where 
to build a new state-of-the-art semiconductor chip packaging 
manufacturing plant. To make a long story short, in the end we decided 
on a location where there was a skilled and reliable workforce, a 
responsive government that invested in the local infrastructure, and 
certainly we considered other factors--tax rates and incentives offered 
by the State and local government--but really the skill of the 
workforce and the quality of the infrastructure were absolutely 
essential to the decision we made--a surprising decision in terms of 
where we ultimately located. We invested and were able to get up and 
running a state-of-the-art plant in record time and were able to 
contribute significantly to local employment and the tax base. This 
taught me a lot about the significance of infrastructure and workforce 
skills.
  If I could mention this, the World Economic Forum ranked the United 
States 25th overall in infrastructure, a key drag on our 
competitiveness. The American Society of Civil Engineers says we are 
falling behind by $250 billion a year in deferred maintenance, in 
investments not made by Federal, State, and local government. In my 
view, the case for infrastructure investment is a no-brainer. This is 
exactly the sort of thing we should be doing and that the sequester is 
preventing us from doing, making wise, timely, and needed investments 
in improving our infrastructure.
  Another critical foundation for growth, as we saw, is a skilled and 
adaptable workforce. We can be the world's manufacturing leader again 
but not without investing in workforce skills and in workforce 
training. There are many programs that can help make this possible. One 
I like to point to is the Federal, State, and local partnership called 
the Manufacturing Extension Partnership that helps make it possible for 
university-based researchers to partner with local manufacturers to 
deliver skills training that keeps them at the cutting edge, that makes 
them more productive.
  In today's modern manufacturing workplace, there are fewer people, 
but they are more productive because of their skills. Back in August I 
visited a new facility, the ILC Grayling plastics manufacturing plant 
in Seaford, DE, which is a great example of what it will take for 
America's manufacturing resurgence to continue and grow. This plant has 
already brought more than 100 jobs to Sussex, DE. These are not the 
manufacturing jobs of the past. The men and women working on this line 
need to be able to collaborate and communicate, to do advanced math and 
adequate quality control work and oversee high-tech machinery and have 
an intimate understanding of the products they are working with. In the 
end, this company looks forward to growing, to probably doubling the 
number of jobs in this facility in Sussex County. To me, in an even 
more exciting development, these are jobs that had left the United 
States to go south to a lower wage country and that have been brought 
back, brought back from Juarez, Mexico, to Seaford, DE, where there are 
now Delawareans employed in this newly expanded manufacturing facility.
  Let me conclude by simply saying that here in Congress we have the 
opportunity, if we work together across the aisle, to find a pathway 
toward making these investments in the skills of our workforce, in the 
infrastructure of our country, that will help grow our economy and help 
create good manufacturing jobs today and tomorrow.
  One of the core challenges we face in the budget conference committee 
is to find a path forward that will respond to the call that I hear up 
and down the State of Delaware, and I presume my colleagues hear from 
their home States, that we should make principled compromises that 
allow us to invest again, to replace the sequester with a more 
responsible and balanced package of revenue and cuts that allow us to 
return to investing in the skills and infrastructure necessary to grow 
our economy.
  I yield the floor.

[[Page 16941]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Brown). The Senator from Wyoming is 
recognized.


                               ObamaCare

  Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, it has now been more than 6 weeks since 
the Obama administration launched its health insurance marketplace. 
This afternoon, the Obama administration finally confirmed how few 
people have been able to select insurance through the exchange. 
According to the White House, only 106,185 people have selected 
coverage since October 1. This doesn't mean people actually bought 
their coverage, it just means they selected a plan.
  For most of these, it was through the State-based exchanges. People 
may be wondering how the Washington-run exchange did. Only 26,794 
people selected a plan through healthcare.gov. It is safe to say, if 
this were a commercial Web site, the plug would have been pulled by 
now. They came, they saw, they did not buy it.
  Low expectations met with even lower reality. The numbers paint a 
bleak picture of the confidence the American people have in the health 
care law and the faulty Web site created to sell it. The 
administration's goal was for a half million people, 500,000 Americans, 
to sign up in the month of October, the month of October alone. 
Instead, we now know that only a little over 100,000 people have 
actually signed up.
  The reason the numbers are so low and so disappointing is that the 
Web site is totally broken and the American people are discovering that 
the coverage offered on the exchange often costs them more than they 
can afford, and more than they were previously paying. So far, the 
ObamaCare exchanges have only succeeded at crashing people's computers 
or lightening their wallets.
  To make matters worse, for every one person who has selected an 
ObamaCare plan--either from the State or Federal exchanges--40 people 
have received cancellation notices. This is not what the President 
repeatedly promised and it is not what the American people deserve.
  Enough is enough. It is time to give Americans what they wanted all 
along: access to quality, affordable health care. It is time to stop 
this train wreck and ease the damage being done by this terrible law.
  To help make that happen, Senator Graham and I will soon introduce a 
bill that lets States opt out of some of the health care law's most 
burdensome provisions. Under the State Health Care Choice Act, States 
could opt out of the individual mandate that requires people to buy 
government-approved health insurance or face a tax penalty. They could 
opt out of the employer mandate that will force businesses to provide 
government-approved health insurance or pay penalties.
  Under our bill States could also opt out from the health care law's 
benefits mandates. These are the requirements that health insurance 
plans provide numerous expensive services that many people may not 
want, may not need, will never use, cannot afford, and do not want to 
pay for. The Obama administration has already issued hundreds of 
waivers to businesses and it has delayed the employer mandate by a 
year. States should have the same opportunity to give relief to their 
citizens.
  We know the numbers coming out of Wyoming. In Wyoming we see over 
3,000 people have received cancellation notices. Yet only 85 people 
have been able to select a plan. I was at the Target store in Casper 
this Saturday. A former patient came up to me, somebody I had operated 
on. He told me he had received a cancellation notice. He is a small 
businessman, works hard for himself and for his family, and the 
insurance he had worked for him. It was something he could afford. What 
he told me is he will now have to pay a higher premium and also more 
out-of-pocket costs in terms of a higher copay and higher deductibles. 
Frankly, he is not sure what he is going to do.
  The people I talk to tell me about all of the mandates, the higher 
costs, the bad side effects of the President's health care law, and 
they tell me this is not what they wanted in health care reform.
  I got a letter from one woman from Newcastle, WY. She told me she is 
losing her health insurance plan also. The reason she is losing it is 
it does not meet the President's requirements that she have maternity 
coverage. As she points out, she doesn't need maternity care, she said, 
because she has had a hysterectomy and she doesn't like Washington 
telling her that she has to pay twice as much to get a plan that covers 
it--something she doesn't want, will never use, doesn't need, cannot 
afford.
  When it comes to health care and health care coverage, one size does 
not fit all. States should be free to help the citizens of those States 
get the care they need from the doctor they choose at lower costs. A 
lot of people in this country do not want all these new mandates, all 
the burdens and the higher costs. All they actually wanted was 
President Obama to keep the promises, to allow them to have what the 
President promised them: that they could keep the insurance and the 
doctor they already had. After all, that is what the President said.
  We have millions of people getting letters from their insurance 
company canceling their insurance plans. As of today I know that number 
is over 4.2 million--42 people canceled for every 1 that actually got 
insurance through the exchange. One of the reasons for all of the 
insurance plans being canceled, in spite of what the President told the 
American people repeatedly, is something called the grandfather 
regulation that the Obama administration actually wrote. The 
President's own people wrote the regulation so that people cannot keep 
the insurance they want, in spite of the President's repeated promises. 
This was a rule the Obama administration wrote to force more people off 
the insurance plans they had before the law was passed, and force them 
into new Washington-approved plans.
  Three years ago Republicans saw that this regulation was going to 
lead directly to the millions of cancellation letters that have now 
gone out across the country. My colleague from Wyoming, Senator Enzi, 
took the lead and he took to the Senate floor to try to stop this 
destructive rule from the Obama administration. He introduced a bill 
that would immediately overturn the administration's restrictive 
regulations about people keeping their plans. Senator Enzi pointed out 
back then, 3 years ago, that the administration's rule would have 
caused millions of people to lose the insurance they had and that they 
liked. He was right, and the Washington Democrats, here on the floor of 
the Senate, did not seem to care. Every Democratic Member of this body, 
every Democrat in the Senate, voted to make sure that the restrictive 
regulations stayed on the books. Because of that vote, now we have over 
4 million Americans looking for new insurance plans that satisfy Obama 
administration mandates, but they have lost their insurance in spite of 
the President's repeated promises that if they like what they have, 
they could keep it.
  Many of them--such as my friend and former patient whom I ran into 
this past weekend in Casper--are learning that their copays and their 
deductibles will be much higher than the plans they have lost. Once 
they get those plans, many of them are going to find out that their 
costs have increased--but not just that; their choice of doctors has 
shrunk as well. They may not be able to go to their family doctor 
because he or she will not be covered by their new plan anymore.
  Last week President Obama finally admitted he and his administration 
were not, as he said, ``as clear as we needed to be.''
  Not as clear as he needed to be? That is what the President regrets, 
that he was not as clear as he needed to be? For the millions of people 
who are losing their doctors, they don't want an apology; they don't 
want a new government handout. What they want is what they had before 
this law came into effect. They want President Obama to live up to his 
promise and to allow them to keep the coverage they had and they liked 
and that worked for them. Even former President Bill Clinton has called 
for a change. Remember,

[[Page 16942]]

the Obama administration has called President Clinton the so-called 
``Secretary of Explaining Stuff.'' They had him traveling the country, 
trying to convince people that their health care law was going to work 
out well for everybody. Now it looks as though he is trying to explain 
to President Obama how badly the President's own health care law has 
hurt Americans who are losing access to their insurance plans and to 
their doctors.
  Bill Clinton said it just the other day. He said:

     . . . even if it takes a change to the law, the president 
     should honor the commitment the federal government made to 
     those people and let them keep what they got.

  Well, that is exactly right. Not only should President Obama take 
steps to keep his promise to the American people, he should support 
Republicans who want to help all Americans who are being harmed by the 
President and the Democrats' terrible health care law. Today's 
enrollment numbers show what a disaster that law has been, and the 
President should support the Health Care Choice Act so that States can 
serve their citizens and opt-out of this terrible law.
  I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Blumenthal). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business for up to 10 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                  Network For Manufacturing Innovation

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, earlier this afternoon, I appeared with 
Senator Blunt, my Republican friend from Missouri, in front of Senator 
Rockefeller's Commerce Committee to talk about our bipartisan 
legislation with manufacturing hubs. It would promote new technologies 
to make our country a leader in advanced manufacturing.
  Let me illustrate by saying this: Along the Ohio Turnpike--from 
Toledo, to Lorain, to Cleveland, to Akron, to Youngstown--much of the 
auto industry grew, from glass that would go for windshields in Toledo, 
to steel in Lorain and Cleveland for the fenders and the hoods and much 
of the car, to rubber in Akron for tires--the world's leading tire 
manufacturer--to assembly in Youngstown, where today the Chevy Cruze is 
made. If you are on the Ohio Turnpike, you will see this huge plant 
with the big letters ``CHEVY CRUZE.'' If you have not been at an auto 
plant or you are not from Ohio and you may not have seen one, the 
expansiveness of this plant is pretty remarkable. Autos were assembled 
all along this turnpike.
  But the reason this matters--in addition to why it matters in the 
Presiding Officer's State of Connecticut and other places--is not just 
that the auto industry, the supply chain, creates jobs, but what 
happens when an industry sort of locates with a critical mass in a 
community.
  Because Toledo, OH, with the auto industry, had huge glass 
manufacturing, the University of Toledo had scientists who worked in 
material science and in glass manufacturing. Today, as a result, while 
we do not make quite as much glass in Toledo as we did for autos, 
Toledo is one of the top two or three largest centers for solar energy 
manufacturing.
  Go to Akron, which used to be the center of the world for tire 
manufacturing. There is not so much of that now, although Goodyear's 
corporate headquarters is still there and there is a lot of research. 
But now, again, in partnership with the University of Akron, the 
scientists who were processing and researching and innovating in rubber 
and tires--now, for polymer development and manufacturing, Akron is one 
of the leaders in the country and in the world.
  The lesson we learned is what Senator Blunt and I were talking about. 
We know in Ohio and Missouri manufacturing is a ticket to the middle 
class. We also know that for too long Washington made choices which 
biased finance over manufacturing, that left manufacturing behind--bad 
trade deals, failure to enforce trade laws, taxes that did not work for 
manufacturing, and a kind of backing off of a focus on innovation and 
technology.
  So we have seen communities such as Lordstown and Cleveland and 
Dayton live with the consequences. Between 2000 and 2010, 60,000 plants 
closed in this country and 5 million manufacturing jobs were lost.
  Since the auto rescue and the more aggressive trade enforcement from 
President Obama--while I do not agree with some of his trade policies, 
he has been more aggressive on trade enforcement, through the Commerce 
Department and through the International Trade Commission, than any of 
his predecessors in either party.
  So since 2010, we have seen a beginning of growth coming back in 
manufacturing--not nearly making up anything close to the 5 million 
jobs lost or the 60,000 plants closed. But the importance of 
manufacturing--not just because it is in my State, where my State is 
No. 3 in the country in production, in manufacturing; and only Texas, 
with twice our population, and California, with three times our 
population, make more than we do--but the importance of manufacturing 
is the multiplier effect. More than any other industry in our country, 
in manufacturing, for every $1 spent in manufacturing, another $1.48 is 
added to the economy. We know what that means in the auto supply chain 
or in the wind turbine supply chain or in the chemical supply chain or 
anything we manufacture in this country. But what is holding us back is 
this--we never consciously follow this--but this sort of ``innovate 
here, make it there'' syndrome. Yes, we still have the best scientists, 
the best engineers, the best researchers, the best universities. 
Whether it is Storrs at the University of Connecticut or in Cleveland 
at Case Western or in Dayton or in Cincinnati, we have the best 
universities, the best researchers, but too often we do the innovation, 
we do the discovery, we do the experimentation that leads to products, 
and then we offshore and make the products there.
  Let me give you an example about why that does not work and what does 
work. There is a small community in Ohio: Minster, OH. It is not far 
from Wapakoneta, Neil Armstrong's hometown--the first man who walked on 
the moon--and just north of Dayton. It is in Auglaize County, where I 
visited some time ago. It has the largest yogurt manufacturer in North 
America. When I went in that plant, they had just made it more 
efficient. In the past, their supplier had delivered little plastic 
cups to this yogurt manufacturer. In the plant they had these big 
silver vats of fermented milk with yogurt, and they would squirt this 
yogurt into these plastic cups and seal it and package it.
  A young industrial engineer and a couple of people who had worked on 
the line for a decade or so said: We can do this better. Instead of 
bringing the plastic cups in from a supplier, they did something simple 
for an engineer--not so simple for me. They took plastic rolls, and 
they fed a plastic sheet into a machine--the whole assembly line was 
maybe 80 feet long--and the plastic would be heated and then extruded 
and then cooled slowly, and the yogurt would be squirted into the 
plastic cup and sealed and sent.
  Now, the innovation took place on the shop floor. That is what 
happens. When you develop a product, wherever you manufacture it, the 
innovation, the product innovation and the process innovation--the 
process innovation meaning how you make it, the process of making it, 
as they did Dannon yogurt in the packaging and the actual improvement 
of the product--it takes place on the shop floor. That is why this is 
so important.
  This legislation, the Revitalize American Manufacturing and 
Innovation Act of 2013, creates a Network for Manufacturing Innovation 
and would position the U.S. as the world's leader in advanced 
manufacturing.
  We have already done something like this in Youngstown, OH, mentioned 
by

[[Page 16943]]

the President in his State of the Union message, the first ever 
National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute. It is called 
America Makes. It is in conjunction with the University of Missouri and 
in conjunction with businesses and universities--Eastern Gateway and 
Youngstown State in the Mahoning Valley and the University of 
Pittsburgh. It is sort of this tech belt along there. They do something 
called 3-D printing, which is kind of hard to conceptualize, until you 
see it. But it really is something to look for in the future.
  We know how to produce in this country. We have seen, with some 
Federal funding matched by $40 million in private funds, it is making 
Youngstown a world leader in 3-D printing manufacturing technology 
already.
  We need to build on this momentum. That is why our legislation is so 
important. It is supported by manufacturing associations, semiconductor 
groups. We have seen other countries begin to sort of mimic it and 
parrot it and imitate it. We know we have something here that will help 
America lead the world.
  In concluding, before yielding to the Senator from Oregon, think of 
this in terms of a teaching hospital, where you have a great teaching 
hospital at the University of Cincinnati or Ohio State or Case Western 
in Cleveland or the University of Toledo. At these teaching hospitals--
where research and development and innovation are happening with great 
scientists and great doctors and great researchers--often what they 
produce, what they come up with is commercialized locally, and you 
build a critical mass in that field. In some kind of scientific medical 
field you build that expertise in that region. That is what we want to 
do with these manufacturing hubs, like NMI in Youngstown, where in 
Youngstown we will see all kinds of job creation that will make 
Youngstown the vital city that it has been in much of its history and 
we want to see it become in the future.
  It is good for our country. It is good for manufacturing. It is good 
for families who earn their living from manufacturing. And it will be 
particularly good for our communities.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up 
to 10 minutes as in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                              Nominations

  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I rise to address an issue that should be 
of concern to all Americans; that is, the advice and consent function 
of the Senate regarding nominations. This is the critical check 
envisioned by our Founders in which the President has the power to 
nominate for the executive branch positions and for judicial nominees, 
and the Senate is held responsible to provide a check to make sure 
there are not outrageous nominees that are placed in positions.
  That is the advice and consent function which throughout our history 
has basically been a simple majority function with very rare 
exceptions. This issue comes up at this moment because 2 weeks ago the 
minority of this body in the Senate would not allow there to be a vote 
on whether to confirm Mel Watt. They did that by preventing there being 
enough votes to close debate.
  So that blockade was basically put in place without respecting, if 
you will, the fact that Mel Watt is highly qualified for his position 
at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, a position he would hold, and 
giving the entire Senate the ability to weigh in about whether they 
agreed with that judgment, the judgment of the President that Mel Watt 
was well qualified.
  In the same week, this body also blocked an up-or-down vote on 
Patricia Millett, who was a nominee for the D.C. Circuit Court. On this 
occasion, it was not because folks said she was not qualified. They 
said, instead: We do not want to put any more of President Obama's 
nominees onto the D.C. Circuit Court because we want it to be dominated 
by the judges who were confirmed when President Bush was President.
  Then, just yesterday, this pattern of blockading up-and-down votes on 
nominees continued with the minority filibustering, blocking the 
closing of debate on Cornelia Pillard--again, a highly qualified 
individual. An argument was not made that there was some exceptional 
circumstance in her background that left her unprepared for this 
position. The argument was simply made: We do not want to let the 
President put any judges on this D.C. Circuit Court.
  That is of extreme concern. I must say that it has caused folks who 
have been scholars in this area to look at it. Norm Ornstein of the 
American Enterprise Institute basically said: It is ridiculous for the 
minority to block up-and-down votes, not on the basis that there is 
something wrong with her qualifications, but just they want to take 
away the President's ability and constitutional responsibility to 
nominate individuals to fill vacancies.
  So this obstruction, exercised over the last almost 5 years now, has 
done significant damage to the court. It has done significant damage to 
the executive branch. It prevents qualified nominees to get a vote on 
this floor so that they can--if they receive a simple majority vote of 
support--work on behalf of the American people either in their 
executive branch capacity or addressing the huge backlog in our 
judicial system.
  The Senate has the advice and consent role which is a treasured 
responsibility. It is a weighty responsibility. I think everyone in 
this body--I think all 100 Senators--could agree that under advice and 
consent the Senate must exercise a significant check on the quality of 
Presidential nominees, whether for the courts or for the executive 
branch.
  The Senate should vet nominees. The committees that are related to a 
particular position should explore their background, they should hold a 
hearing, they should ask tough questions, they should debate the 
nominees, and then once recommended on the floor of the Senate, we 
should continue that vetting and debating process. Then, having shared 
our insights on their background, we need to vote to confirm or reject.
  It should be on very rare exceptions, when there are extraordinary 
circumstances that make someone unworthy that they should be blocked 
from having a final vote. Advice and consent must not become ``block 
and destroy.'' But advice and consent has become block and destroy. The 
Senate nomination process is broken.
  A minority of one branch of government, the Senate, should not be 
able to systematically undermine the other two branches of government. 
Yet that is what we see today. President Obama's district court 
nominees have waited, on average, more than twice as long as President 
George Bush's nominees to be confirmed by the Senate after being 
reported out of committee.
  So we have the challenge of getting up-or-down votes. We also have 
basically a process of dragging feet in order to make it more difficult 
to actually get to the votes on these individuals in the first place. 
For the circuit courts, that comparison is even worse. President 
Obama's nominees have waited 3\1/2\ times longer than the nominees of 
his predecessor--3\1/2\ times longer.
  The Congressional Research Service notes that of the last five 
Presidents, President Obama is the only one to have his district and 
circuit court nominees wait, on average, more than 6 months for 
confirmation. So those delays, in combination with ultimately denying 
the possibility to hold an up-or-down vote--to hold a final vote on 
whether to confirm or not confirm--they constitute a systematic 
undermining of the function of the other two branches of government.
  Now, this was not envisioned in any possible way by the creators of 
our Constitution. They argued there should be three coequal branches. 
But this outcome, in which the Senate minority seeks to undermine an 
executive branch nominee, is inconsistent with the constitutional 
design of coequal branches. They are not coequal if one branch can 
systematically undermine another.

[[Page 16944]]

  In regard to the courts, in an outcome in which the Senate minority 
is seeking to ideologically pack the courts by having insisted on up-
or-down votes for President Bush's nominees and then blocking up-and-
down votes on President Obama's nominees, it politicizes our judicial 
system. It undermines the integrity of our court system.
  The Senate has confronted this abuse of advice and consent three 
times in recent history. In 2005, the Democratic minority was blocking 
up-and-down votes on a series of President Bush's nominees. They were 
doing the same thing that we see today. A gang of 14 gathered to debate 
this, because essentially the Republican majority said: If you do not 
quit blocking up-or-down votes on the President's nominees, we are 
going to change the rules and make it a simple majority. Out of the 
gang of 14 came a deal. The deal was that Democrats would, except under 
exceptional circumstances, not block the nominee. The counterpoint 
being that the Republicans would not change the rules. So they got what 
they wanted, which was up-and-down votes without a rule change.
  That pledge the Democrats made was honored when subsequent nominees 
got their up-or-down votes. Now, in January of this year the Democrats, 
in the reversal of positions, insisted that the Republican minority 
quit blocking up-or-down votes of President Obama's nominees--kind of a 
deja vu moment, only the two parties were reversed.
  Out of that conversation, out of that dialogue in January, came a 
promise from the Republican minority leader of this body. He promised a 
return to the norms and traditions of the Senate regarding nominations. 
What are those norms and traditions? Those norms and traditions are 
simple up-or-down votes with rare exception.
  But that promise was barely made and within weeks it was broken, when 
we saw the first ever filibuster of a Defense Secretary nominee. It 
just so happened, ironically, that the Republican filibuster--the first 
time in history of a Defense nominee--was against one of their former 
colleagues, our Republican colleague Chuck Hagel. So the January 
promise was broken. This led to increasing tensions until July of this 
year when Democratic and Republican Members met in the Old Senate 
Chamber to privately share their concerns. A new deal was hammered out, 
which is, essentially that executive nominees would get up-or-down 
votes. That happened for a significant list of nominees.
  There was an up-or-down vote on Richard Cordray to be the head of the 
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Gina McCarthy to lead the EPA; 
nominees to fill the National Labor Relations Board; nominees to head 
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; a nominee to lead the Ex-Im Bank; and, 
following shortly thereafter, a nominee to be the U.S. Ambassador to 
the United Nations, Samantha Powers.
  So that July deal held through a list of nominees until 2 weeks ago. 
Two weeks ago this body blocked an up-or-down vote on Mel Watt. So we 
are right back where we were before, right back where we were, the 
promise made in January shattered, the promise made in July shattered, 
and the ability of this body to do its advice and consent 
responsibility shattered.
  This should be deeply troubling to all. We must restore the ability 
of the Senate to perform its responsibilities under the Constitution to 
advise and consent. The Senate with simple up-or-down votes will be a 
check on bad nominations from the President. I have voted against at 
least one of the President's nominees. I was prepared to vote against 
another here just a few weeks ago. The President withdrew that nominee 
so that vote was not necessary. But that was related to a judgment of 
the qualifications of the individuals and whether they were a good fit 
for a particular position. It was not about trying to systematically 
undermine the executive branch and keep them from operating.
  That is essentially why we have up-or-down votes; it is a check on 
unqualified individuals or a poor fit for a particular position. So in 
this area, both in the Senate's failure to do its job vis-a-vis 
judicial nominees and to do its job vis-a-vis executive nominees, we 
have created unequal branches of government. It is time to fix the 
broken Senate in regard to nominations. It is time to restore the 
traditional role of the Senate in evaluating nominations so that with 
nominees who are confirmed, they can go to work in the courts, can go 
to work in the executive branch to do the work that the citizens of the 
United States of America expect them to do on behalf of our Nation.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SCHATZ. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum 
call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SCHATZ. I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes as 
in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                            Typhoon Yolanda

  Mr. SCHATZ. Five days ago Typhoon Yolanda devastated the central 
Philippines. As a category 5 supertyphoon, this was reportedly the 
strongest storm ever to make landfall anywhere in recorded history, 
sweeping away almost everything in its path.
  Nearly 10 million people were impacted by this supertyphoon and tens 
of thousands of homes were destroyed. Eighty to ninety percent of the 
homes in city of Ormoc, the second largest city in the Leyte Province, 
are gone. The stories of loss are shocking and heartbreaking.
  We do not yet know the full extent of the devastation this typhoon 
has brought to the Philippines. Local authorities estimate as many as 
10,000 people may be dead in the Leyte Province alone, one of the 
hardest hit regions.
  The State Department has said roughly 3,000 Americans were impacted 
when the storm hit. Our Embassy in Manila is coordinating with U.S. 
agencies to locate these Americans and bring them home.
  The United States and the Philippines share a special bond, rooted in 
strong cultural and historical ties between our two countries. In 
Hawaii, where more than 197,000 Filipinos have made their home, we know 
this bond well.
  Our Filipino community has been a part of the islands for more than 
100 years, and many at home maintain close relationships with family 
and friends in the Philippines. My deepest condolences go to those who 
have lost family and friends in this tragedy.
  Although the storm is over, our work has just begun. Millions of 
survivors are without clean drinking water, food, shelter or power. 
Rescue workers are attempting to reach isolated coastal communities, 
but debris and downed power lines are blocking road access.
  The U.S. Government is helping the Philippines to recover. We have 
provided $20 million in humanitarian aid and deployed a Disaster 
Assistance Response Team to support the Philippine Government. These 
experts will help to assess the extent of the damage and determine what 
resources remain to be added.
  The USAID Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance has shipped 
relief supplies, including shelter materials and hygienic supplies, to 
help around 10,000 families. We are partnering with the U.N. World Food 
Program to provide $10 million for emergency food assistance because 
close to 2.5 million people will need food assistance over the next 6 
months.
  This aid will help airlift 55 metric tons in emergency food to feed 
more than 20,000 children and 15,000 adults, providing immediate relief 
for the next 4 to 5 days. It will bring more than 1,000 metric tons of 
rice to feed 60,000 people for 1 month.
  U.S. marines are on the ground. Our military is helping to airlift 
relief supplies, conduct aerial damage assessments, and coordinate 
search and rescue operations.
  U.S. Pacific Command has forces in Manila to help deliver food and 
water

[[Page 16945]]

to the impacted areas. The George Washington Carrier Strike Group and 
its 5,000 sailors are expected in the area soon to provide humanitarian 
assistance and disaster relief.
  For those still searching for displaced or missing loved ones, I urge 
you to contact the Philippine Red Cross or the National Disaster Risk 
Reduction and Management Council operations center.
  Google has also launched the Person Finder: Typhoon Yolanda. 
Americans can also visit CNN's iReport Web site to upload photos and 
information about people you may be looking for.
  The challenge for the Filipino people is great, but the Philippines 
is a resilient nation and a true American ally. They need our help. 
Please donate.
  I am proud of our local organizations in Hawaii collecting donations 
to help survivors and the families of victims. The Philippine consulate 
in Honolulu, Filipino Chamber of Commerce, Filipino Community Center, 
Congress of Visayan Organizations, and Kokua Philippines have all 
stepped up in this time of tremendous need. A full list of 
organizations is available on my Web site schatz.senate.gov. One may 
also text AID to 80108 to give a $10 donation to the mGive Philippines 
Typhoon Disaster Relief Fund. Text AID to 80108 if you would like to 
give $10 to the relief efforts.
  I wish to especially recognize and thank all of the women and men of 
the U.S. Embassy in Manila, USAID mission in Manila, the State 
Department, USAID in the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Pacific 
Command for their great efforts in coordinating our ongoing response.
  Today I introduced a resolution expressing the support of the Senate 
for the victims of the typhoon, along with several of my colleagues. I 
thank Senators Menendez, Durbin, Cardin, Rubio, Hirono, Tom Udall, 
Boxer, and Begich for cosponsoring this resolution.
  As the Philippines begins the recovery from this tragedy, I ask that 
we all pledge together to work with them. When they rebuild their 
communities, rest assured they will emerge stronger than ever.
  I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BEGICH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BEGICH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business for 10 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BEGICH. Before I make my comments regarding manufacturing and job 
creation in America and in Alaska, I would like to say I know my friend 
from Hawaii was here earlier, Senator Schatz, talking about the 
important resolution that has been submitted that I was honored to be 
able to cosponsor regarding the typhoon in the Philippines.
  Alaska has over 20,000 Filipinos living in our State--an incredible 
group of individuals, people I have known in the business world, as 
individuals, and family members. The devastation is unbelievable as you 
look at the photos and see the devastation of the typhoon and the 
impact it has had on families there. Even though it is thousands of 
miles away, I can tell you, in Alaska, we feel it, we see it. Our 
Filipino friends there have many relatives on the islands, and the 
impact is just unbelievable.
  I was in Alaska this weekend and met with members of the leadership 
of the Filipino community, as well as members from the Red Cross and 
others to see what we can do from an Alaskan perspective, because 
Alaska knows what disasters are like. From earthquakes to floods, we 
seem to have them quite often. We know what type of impact these events 
have on families, so I was very happy to support the resolution my 
friend from Hawaii submitted, but also want to recognize the 20,000 
Filipino community members in Alaska who are suffering and thinking 
about their families and friends overseas.
  We want to do everything we can. I know our country is there and 
ready and moving a lot of resources to assist. So I wanted to put that 
on the record and give my condolences to families who have lost loved 
ones, but also to Alaskans who are grieving for family and friends who 
may have been lost in the typhoon. I know personally I have done my own 
contributions, whatever I can to assist in moving operations forward 
and bringing resources to the islands.


                              Job Creation

  I also came today to talk on the floor about the need for additional 
job creation. Already in the first 10 months of this year we have 
created 1.9 million new jobs--higher than last year at this same time--
which is a good start, but more needs to be done. Senators Coons and 
Durbin and others have been discussing our Manufacturing Jobs in 
America initiative. In particular, we are talking about the skills 
necessary to succeed in today's economy--the skills Americans need to 
land and to keep good manufacturing jobs.
  There used to be a time when a bright kid in this country could work 
hard in school, graduate with a high school diploma, and go work in a 
factory. He or she could make a decent living, a living wage, enough to 
raise a family and own a home and think about the future of their kids. 
Those days are long gone. Unfortunately, today's factories and plants 
don't look like they used to. The level of technical expertise needed 
to operate some new machinery is pretty high. That is why I have made 
career and technical education a priority. We need to have options for 
the bright kids after high school or that mid-career worker looking to 
shift gears.
  My own State of Alaska is already a leader in career technical 
education--CTE. As these programs continue to innovate and change 
across the country, Alaska is in the forefront. I see it when I travel 
around the State. From career pathways in high schools to creative 
programs through the University of Alaska system, my State is a leader 
in career technical education.
  To address these issues, I have introduced a bill entitled Investing 
in Innovation, otherwise called i3, which takes a look at what is 
happening in our local schools and puts resources into what is working. 
It supports and expands programs that are helping to improve student 
achievement. This bill requires 25 percent of the money to go to local 
rural communities. There are so many programs that sometimes forget our 
small and rural communities, not only in Alaska but throughout this 
country.
  I have also introduced the Career Readiness package of legislation 
focused on career and technical education. One of the bills in this 
package is the Counseling for Career Choice Act. This bill will help 
fund stakeholders in developing comprehensive career counseling models 
that emphasize guiding students to productive careers.
  Our counselors are in unique position to help expose and guide our 
students to postsecondary opportunities--to help prepare them for high-
demand careers. This bill makes sure our school counselors have the 
resources they need to emphasize all types of postsecondary education, 
not just the traditional 4-year degree. It focuses on opportunities 
such as apprenticeships, certificate programs, associate degrees, and, 
of course, 4-year degrees. It makes sure that business, economic 
development, and industry leaders are at the table providing 
information on available postsecondary training opportunities and 
career trends--basically making sure that we match what we are teaching 
to not only what is available in the market today but in the future. 
Our students need the best teachers and the best facilities.
  I also have legislation that focuses on career technical education, 
CTE, professional development for teachers and principals.
  Another career readiness bill provides funding to make sure we are 
modernizing our CTE facilities. We know students who are involved in 
career and technical education programs are engaged in their future 
careers. We

[[Page 16946]]

have to keep making sure what our students learn is relevant to the 
real world. We must align our educational system with the in-demand 
careers to fill those jobs in that pipeline, and we must keep our 
students engaged.
  If we are going to compete in the 21st century as we did in the 20th 
century, we need to make sure our students have the very best skills--
skills that are tailored to the 21st century economy. Career and 
technical education is the best approach, in my opinion, to give 
students those skills.
  I am a big fan of the Manufacturing Jobs for America initiative led 
by Senator Coons and several of my colleagues. America's manufacturing 
sector has enormous potential to create new jobs and to speed up our 
economy and economic recovery. These are good jobs and they spin off 
into even more jobs.
  According to the National Association of Manufacturers, every 
manufacturing job we create adds 1\1/2\ jobs to the local economy. So 
let's move forward, let's pass these bills to help with job training, 
career facilities and readiness, and let's do everything we can to get 
our manufacturing sector running full speed ahead.
  Before I conclude my remarks, let me say that I know there is a lot 
of debate on the floor where we talk about health care, we are talking 
about a national defense authorization bill, and we are going to talk 
about a compounding bill, but at the end of the day, what Americans, 
what Alaskans, come to me to talk about on a regular basis--and 
certainly it was true in the 4\1/2\ days I just spent in Alaska--is 
what are we doing to create jobs for the future, not only for people 
today in the work environment but the kids of the future who will be in 
the work environment.
  This legislation, and many other pieces that have been introduced in 
this package, help lead this economy and continue to move this economy. 
We have to remind ourselves where we are: This year, this month, we 
created over 200,000 jobs. The first month I came here, when I was 
sworn in, the economy was in a tailspin. We had lost over 700,000 jobs. 
So we have been in the positive trendline for several months here, but 
we have more to do. And an area that I think is an incredible 
opportunity not only for Alaska but for all across this country is 
improving our manufacturing sector and ensuring our young people are 
ready for the 21st century.
  Again, I thank my friend Senator Coons for all the work he is doing 
to bring manufacturing to the forefront, as well as all my colleagues 
who have been coming to the floor to talk about an important piece of 
legislation to create jobs and improve our economy for the long term.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BEGICH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

                          ____________________