[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 15661-15687]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




  NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2016--CONFERENCE 
                                 REPORT

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will 
resume consideration of the conference report to accompany H.R. 1735, 
which the clerk will report.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       Conference report to accompany H.R. 1735, a bill to 
     authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2016 for military 
     activities of the Department of Defense, for military 
     construction, and for defense activities of the Department of 
     Energy, to prescribe military personnel strengths for such 
     fiscal year, and for other purposes.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the time until 1 
p.m. will be equally divided between the two leaders or their 
designees.
  The Democratic leader.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, our ranking member on the Armed Services 
Committee is here on the floor. He has done an exemplary job working 
with Senator John McCain to move legislation forward. I have followed 
his lead, and I am not going to vote for this conference report, as he 
is not going to vote for this conference report. I would say that the 
House had a vote similar to this one a few days ago, where they had 
more than enough votes to sustain a veto if the President does veto 
this, which he says he is going to do. I want everyone to know that as 
to Democrats who voted for this in the past, not all of them will vote 
the same way they did last time. But our Democrats have stated, without 
any question, if it comes time to sustain a Presidential veto, that 
will be done.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. REED. Mr. President, I rise to discuss the conference report of 
the fiscal year 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, which we will 
be voting on in the next hour. This conference report is the product of 
months of negotiation and compromise between the House and the Senate. 
I want to commend Chairman McCain, Chairman Thornberry, and Ranking 
Member Smith for a thoughtful, inclusive and cordial process.
  There are many provisions in this bill that provide the support we 
owe to our servicemembers and their families--the funding, authorities, 
and equipment necessary for our troops to succeed in combat; and 
significant and critical reforms to the military retirement, 
compensation, and acquisition systems--many of which I will talk about 
in further debate on this bill in the days and hours ahead.
  However, I regret that I am unable to support this conference report 
because it shifts $38 billion requested by the President for enduring 
or base military requirements--the base budget, if you will--to the 
overseas contingency operations, or OCO, account, essentially, skirting 
the law known as the Budget Control Act, or BCA.
  Again, this is a maneuver to get around a statute that was signed by 
the President, voted for by Congress, and which has imposed budget caps 
on every department. Central to that agreement was the significant 
consensus that domestic and defense discretionary spending would be 
capped. What this conference report does is violate that consensus by 
using OCO in a way that it was not originally intended to be so used.
  This budget gimmick allows the majority to fully fund the Defense 
Department without breaking caps imposed by the BCA on both defense and 
nondefense spending. However, the OCO account provides no relief for 
nondefense departments and agencies, and that includes many agencies 
that are critical to our national security. Because of this device, I 
and nearly all of the Democratic conferees on the bill did not sign the 
conference report.
  Abusing OCO, as this bill would do, is counter to the intent of the 
Budget Control Act. The BCA imposed proportionally equal cuts to 
defense and nondefense discretionary spending to force a bipartisan 
compromise to our ongoing budget difficulties. OCO and emergency 
funding are outside budget caps for a reason. They finance the cost of 
ongoing military operations or they respond to other unforeseen events 
such as national disasters. In my view, to suddenly ignore the true 
purpose of OCO and treat it as a budgetary gambit in order to skirt the 
BCA caps is an unacceptable use of this important tool for our 
warfighters in the field.
  Adding funds to OCO does not solve--and actually complicates--DOD's 
budgetary problems. Defense budgeting needs to be based on our long-
term military strategy, which requires the Department of Defense to 
focus at least 5 years into the future. A 1-year plus-up to OCO does 
not provide DOD with the certainty and stability it needs when building 
its 5-year budget.
  Just to highlight how this OCO gimmick skews defense spending, 
consider the amount of OCO in relation to the number of troops 
deployed. Again, I think it is a useful metric because OCO evolved when 
we were deploying troops overseas--first in response to Afghanistan 
during Operation Enduring Freedom and then with respect to Iraq. And 
there is a correlation, at least in the minds of most people, between 
our efforts overseas with troops engaged and the size of OCO.
  In 2008, at the height of our Nation's troop commitment in Iraq and 
Afghanistan and with approximately 187,000 total troops deployed, we 
spent approximately $1 million in OCO for every servicemember deployed 
to those countries. Under this bill, we will spend approximately $9 
million in OCO for every servicemember deployed to Iraq and 
Afghanistan--roughly about 9,930 people, in DOD projections. So this 
increase has gone some place. It hasn't gone overseas, directly to the 
men and women who are fighting, but it has gone to other accounts 
within the Department of Defense.
  In addition to this phenomenon, within the next few years the 
services will begin procuring new weapons systems while modernizing and 
maintaining legacy weapons systems. For example, in the Future Years 
Defense Program, or FYDP, the Department will spend $48 billion to 
procure the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter; $10.6 billion for the Ohio-class 
replacement program; $13.9 billion for the Long Range Strike Bomber; 
and $29.7 billion for the Virginia-class submarine program.
  Each of these programs is critically important to our national 
defense, and we must ensure they are robustly funded. But if the BCA 
caps remain in place, it is likely tough budget choices will need to be 
made. As a result, if we decide to stay within the stringent budge 
caps, we may be forced to fund

[[Page 15662]]

these programs at the expense of other, equally meritorious programs. 
We will have a choice of not investing fully in these necessary 
strategic improvements or using legacy systems, which are still 
important, to pay for them--tough choices.
  Alternatively, and what I think is more likely to happen, these 
programs will be funded in the base budget. However, in order to ensure 
the budget caps are not breached, funding will be shifted from the 
operations and maintenance accounts to the OCO account in order to 
accommodate increased procurement for new weapons systems. In many 
respects, that is what is happening with this $38.3 billion that 
shifted from the traditional base budget into the OCO budget account 
for O&M requirements.
  What you have here is a sense of budgetary sleight of hand. We know 
we have these increased demands coming to us because we do have to 
recapitalize on strategic systems, in particular. If we have the BCA 
caps in place, we have to find money some place, and that is likely to 
be the OCO account. We will see a fund, OCO, which was designed to 
support ongoing operations overseas suddenly be used to pay for long-
term base budget items, i.e., recapitalization of our strategic 
deterrent forces.
  If we use this scheme this year--maybe with good intentions and the 
only honest intention of 1 year to get us ahead--it will be easier to 
do it next year and the year after that, ensuring that this imbalance 
between security and domestic spending continues. As we all recognize, 
effective national security requires that non-DOD departments and 
agencies also receive relief from the BCA caps. The Pentagon simply 
cannot meet the complex set of national security challenges without the 
help of other government departments and agencies--including State, 
Justice, and Homeland Security.
  Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Christine Wormuth made this 
point when she was before the Armed Services Committee a few weeks ago 
to testify on our strategy to counter ISIL, which many Americans 
believe to be the top national security threat facing our country. The 
Department of Defense is only one part of a whole-of-government 
approach to defeating ISIL. Secretary Wormuth said:

       ``It will take more than just the military campaign to be 
     successful [against ISIL]. We also will need to dry up ISIL's 
     finances, stop the flows of foreign fighters into Iraq and 
     Syria in particular, protect the United States from potential 
     ISIL attacks, provide humanitarian assistance to rebuild 
     areas cleared of ISIL forces, and find ways to more 
     effectively counter ISIL's very successful messaging 
     campaign.''

  Unfortunately, we will effectively diminish our national capabilities 
to do all these things by underfunding non-DOD departments and agencies 
that are critical to our national security. Use of the OCO gimmick--it 
has been referred to that by many people--in this bill facilitates 
underfunding those departments, and it should not be supported. We need 
an all-out governmental effort to provide for our national security. 
Underfunding State, Treasury, and other departments is not going to get 
us that all-out effort. And when it no longer becomes easy to underfund 
nondefense agencies, my suspicion is that nondefense programs will 
begin appearing in OCO. There is some precedent to this. For example, 
in fiscal year 1992, Congress added funds to the defense bill for 
breast cancer research. At the time, discretionary spending was subject 
to statutory caps under the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990--the follow-
on legislation to the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act of 1985. That was a 
situation where they were capping discretionary domestic spending, but 
defense spending was uncapped, and this is a situation that I think we 
are recreating in this conference report. That initial funding led to 
the establishment of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research 
Program, and I think every Senator is familiar with this important 
program. It has strong bipartisan support, and each fiscal year 
Congress authorizes and appropriates hundreds of millions of dollars to 
the program for cutting-edge and critically essential medical research.
  In fact, since 1992, this program has received over $13 billion in 
funding. While this program is funded through the annual Defense bill 
and the program is managed by the Army, the Department of Defense does 
not execute any of the money itself. It is a competitive grant process, 
and proposals are subject to stringent peer and programmatic review 
criteria. Essentially, the money goes out to medical research 
facilities throughout the United States. For all intents and purposes, 
it is a medical research program much like we fund through NIH.
  I am a strong supporter of medical research and a strong supporter of 
this program, and indeed this program has, through its research and 
through its efforts, saved countless lives, but my concern is that 
under the aegis of OCO, approaches and budgetary maneuvers like this 
will become common. It will be a way to skirt the budget caps. If we do 
it this year, we have set a precedent for next year and the following 
year, and 10 years from now the Defense bill could authorize billions 
of dollars of funding for programs that may be meritorious but will 
have little or nothing to do with national defense and should be 
properly budgeted within our base budget from other departments. 
Indeed, some programs should be properly funded within the Department 
of Defense's base budget.
  Simply put, this approach, which circumvents the Budget Control Act, 
is not fiscally responsible or honest accounting. It is time we come 
together as a Congress--before the short-term continuing resolution 
expires--to fulfill our responsibilities to the American people, 
especially our troops and their families, to fully fund our government 
by revising or eliminating the budget caps proposed by the BCA on both 
defense and nondefense spending.
  In fact and indeed, if it were not for the OCO issue, I would have 
likely signed the conference report and voted for this bill. However, I 
believe this OCO issue is too important. The Secretary of Defense 
believes it is too important, the President believes it is too 
important, and he said he will veto this bill and any other bill that 
relies on this OCO gimmick. As Secretary of Defense Carter said last 
week:

       ``Without a negotiated budget solution in which everyone 
     comes together at last, we will again return to 
     sequestration-level funding, reducing discretionary funding 
     to its lowest real level in a decade despite the fact that 
     members of both parties agree this result will harm national 
     security. . . . Making these kinds of indiscriminate cuts is 
     managerially inefficient, and therefore wasteful, to 
     taxpayers and industry. It's dangerous to our strategy, and 
     frankly, it's embarrassing in front of the world.''

  These are the words of the Secretary of Defense, echoing the comments 
that we have heard from uniformed military leaders about the inherent 
dangers of sequestration if it is allowed to continue forward.
  The BCA was created by Congress to address the immediate threat of 
what would have been a catastrophic national default and to compel 
Congress to come together and reach a balanced compromise on the 
budget. It is time for Congress to make the hard choices, modify or 
eliminate the caps in the BCA, and end the threat of sequestration. It 
is not just an appropriations issue. It is affecting everything we do. 
Unfortunately, it affects the Fiscal Year 2016 National Defense 
Authorization Act and therefore I will not be prepared to support this 
legislation.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.
  



                      Passing Appropriations Bills

  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, Democrats have spent a lot of time lately 
talking about the importance of keeping the government open. Well, the 
Senate Republicans couldn't agree more. We know Congress has a 
responsibility to ensure that our Nation's priorities are funded, and 
we spent a lot of time this year working on that.
  In May, we passed the first joint House-Senate balanced budget 
resolution in more than a decade, and by the end of July the Senate 
Appropriations Committee had approved all 12 appropriations bills for 
the first time since 2009. It was the first time in 6 years that the 
Senate Appropriations Committee approved all 12 of the appropriations 
bills, but there is one problem.

[[Page 15663]]

For all their talk about providing for the government, apparently 
Democrats are reluctant to take any action when it comes to actually 
passing these bills through the Senate. Republicans tried to bring up 
the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs appropriations bill last 
week, but Democrats refused to allow the Senate to even consider it. We 
couldn't get on the bill. They blocked the motion to proceed to even 
get to debate that bill.
  That is right. Senate Democrats, who spent weeks talking about 
funding the government, refused to allow the Senate to even debate a 
bill that would fund military construction, protect our homeland, and 
keep the promises we made to our veterans.
  I might be able to understand Democrats' position if they had been 
shut out of the process on this legislation, but they weren't. The 
Military Construction and Veterans Affairs appropriations bill was 
debated in the Appropriations Committee, where Members of both parties 
were given an opportunity to offer amendments and to help shape the 
bill's contents. The bill passed out of the committee with an 
overwhelming bipartisan majority. If Democrats had allowed the bill to 
reach the floor, they would have had yet another opportunity to debate 
and amend the legislation, but the Senate Democrats wouldn't even let 
the bill come to the floor to be debated. They blocked the motion to 
proceed to the bill that would even allow us and allow them an 
opportunity to be heard and an opportunity to offer amendments.
  Some Democrats have threatened to block the bill that we are 
currently considering this week, which is the National Defense 
Authorization Act, which again is a bicameral agreement that authorizes 
funding for our Nation's military and our national defense. This is the 
bill that ensures our soldiers receive the bonuses and the pay they 
have earned, that their equipment and training will be funded, and that 
our commanders will have the resources they need to confront the 
threats that are facing our Nation. Like the bill Democrats blocked 
last week, this legislation is the product of a bipartisan committee 
process, and it received bipartisan support when it came out of the 
committee. More than that, it received strong bipartisan support on the 
Senate floor when it first came up for consideration in June.
  This bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, which funds our 
military's priorities, was reported out of the Senate Armed Services 
Committee--a big vote--it came to the floor of the Senate, received a 
big bipartisan vote in the Senate, but now some of the very same 
Democrats who supported this bill a little more than 3 months ago are 
planning to vote against it. On top of that, President Obama has 
threatened to veto this bill when it gets to his desk.
  The question is, Why are Democrats opposing a bill that would 
authorize the funding our troops need to operate?
  Historically the National Defense Authorization Act has received 
strong bipartisan support, and there is a good reason for that. 
Historically both Democrats and Republicans have known that we have a 
great responsibility to the men and women who keep us safe, and we have 
made a habit of working together to try and meet that responsibility.
  Why are things different this year?
  Well, basically Democrats have decided that since they can't get 
everything they want, they are going to take their ball and go home. 
Republicans knew Democrats were considering this, of course, but we had 
hoped that after months of successful collaboration, they would rethink 
that strategy because, as I said, all 12 appropriations bills were 
reported out of the Senate Appropriations Committee with bipartisan 
majorities, collaboration, input from both sides, amendments offered 
and amendments voted on, but unfortunately it has been clear over the 
past week that Senate Democrats and the President are committed to 
following through on their plans to obstruct these bills.
  Their argument is that they want more money for this or for that, and 
they are not going to fund the military until they get more money for 
whatever their domestic priority is--whether it is more funding for the 
EPA or the IRS or some other agency of government. That is what this is 
about. It is somewhat staggering to think that some Senate Democrats 
would think of blocking the National Defense Authorization Act after 
supporting this bill in June. It is pretty hard to explain why one 
would think a bill is good one day and not the next. Let's just remind 
ourselves what they are voting to block and what the President is 
threatening to veto. The National Defense Authorization Act authorizes 
funding for our Nation's military and our national defense--from 
equipment and training for our soldiers to critical national security 
priorities, such as supporting our allies against Russian aggression 
overseas.
  In my State of South Dakota, we are proud to host the 28th Bomb Wing 
at Ellsworth Air Force Base, one of the Nation's two B-1 bomber bases. 
The B-1s are a critical part of the U.S. bomber fleet, and bombers from 
the 28th Bomb Wing have played a key role in armed conflicts that the 
United States has engaged in over the past 20 years.
  During Operation Odyssey Dawn, B-1s from Ellsworth launched from 
South Dakota, flew halfway around the world to Libya, dropped their 
bombs and returned home all in a single mission. This marked the first 
time in history that B-1s launched combat missions from the United 
States to strike targets overseas.
  Without the National Defense Authorization Act, however, the funding 
levels needed in 2016 to maintain these bombers and the readiness of 
our airmen at Ellsworth will not be authorized. It is that simple. That 
is what is at stake with this bill.
  If the President chooses to veto this legislation, he is vetoing the 
bill that authorizes benefits for our troops and the funding our 
military needs to operate. He is also vetoing authorization for the 
weapons, vehicles, and planes our military needs to defend our country 
against future threats, such as the Long Range Strike Bomber, which is 
one of the Air Force's top acquisition priorities, and it also 
represents the future of our bomber fleet.
  By vetoing this bill, the President would also be vetoing a number of 
critical reforms that will expand the resources available to our 
military men and women and strengthen our national security.
  For instance, this year's National Defense Authorization Act tackles 
waste and inefficiency at the Department of Defense. It targets $10 
billion in unnecessary spending and redirects those funds to military 
priorities like funding for aircraft, weapons systems, and 
modernization of Navy vessels.
  The bill also implements sweeping reforms to the military's outdated 
acquisitions process by removing bureaucracy and expediting 
decisionmaking which will significantly improve the military's ability 
to access the technology and equipment it needs.
  The act also implements a number of reforms to the Pentagon's 
administrative functions. Over the past decade, Army headquarters staff 
has increased by 60 percent. Yet in recent years the Army has been 
cutting brigade combat teams. From 2001 to 2012, the Department of 
Defense's civilian workforce grew at five times the rate of our Active-
Duty military personnel.
  The Defense authorization bill we are considering changes the 
emphasis of the Department of Defense from administration to 
operations, which will help ensure that our military personnel receive 
the training they need and are ready to meet any threats that arise.
  This bill also overhauls our military retirement system. The current 
military retirement system limits retirement benefits to soldiers who 
served for 20 years or more, which does not apply to 83 percent of 
those who have served, including many veterans of the wars in Iraq and 
Afghanistan. The
National Defense Authorization Act replaces that system with a modern 
retirement system that would extend retirement benefits to 75 percent 
of our servicemembers.
  No time is a good time to veto funding for our Nation's troops. But 
with tensions in the world where they are, the decision by Senate 
Democrats and

[[Page 15664]]

the President to block this funding authorization is particularly 
unconscionable.
  As we speak, ISIS is carving a trail of slaughter across the Middle 
East, Russia is becoming increasingly aggressive, and Iran is 
continuing to fund terrorism. Thanks to Iran's nuclear deal, Iran will 
soon have access to increased funds and the ability to purchase more 
conventional weapons. That is right. While President Obama is 
threatening to veto a bill that funds our Armed Forces, he has agreed 
to a deal with Iran that gives Iran access to over $100 billion to fund 
terrorism and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. That same flawed Iran 
deal waives the sanctions on Iranian leaders, including General 
Soleimani, who is responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in 
Iraq, yet the President is threatening to veto pay bonuses and improved 
military retirement benefits for our soldiers here at home.
  The President's Iran deal also gives Hezbollah and Hamas more funding 
to spread terrorism, yet the President is threatening to veto 
additional resources for our allies to defeat ISIS as well as missile 
defense systems for our allies, including Israel. Right now, President 
Obama is threatening to veto funding for our advanced weapons systems 
for U.S. military forces, yet his nuclear agreement gives Iran access 
to conventional weapons, ballistic missiles, and advanced nuclear 
centrifuges.
  Now, above all, in the wake of this flawed Iran deal and growing 
chaos in the Middle East, holding up funding for our troops by blocking 
this authorization bill is unacceptable.
  While Senate Democrats and the President may have decided to pursue a 
strategy of obstruction, it is not too late for them to change their 
minds. They can still cast a vote in favor of funding for our military 
and our national security priorities. I hope that before this vote 
happens today, they will rethink their opposition and join Republicans 
in supporting this critical bill.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, when the Senate took up the fiscal year 
2016 National Defense Authorization Act, I opposed it. I did not 
believe that the Senate had fully debated some of the most 
consequential provisions of the bill. But a majority of the Senate 
allowed that bill to move forward, and now we have a compromise before 
us that is a step even further backward.
  The biggest but by no means only problem with this bill is, of 
course, the overseas contingency operations account, which has been 
turned into an escape hatch for defense spending over Budget Control 
Act caps. Those caps imposed by the Budget Control Act--across defense 
and nondefense spending--were intended to force Congress to the table 
to realistically address fiscal concerns. Today, those caps are hurting 
defense spending, though not nearly as much as they are devastating 
domestic spending.
  Other problematic sections are related to Bush-era detainees kept at 
Guantanamo Bay. The new Guantanamo restrictions contained in this 
conference report are a needless barrier to efforts to finally shutter 
that detention facility. The bill would continue the unnecessary ban on 
constructing facilities within the United States to house Guantanamo 
detainees and the counterproductive prohibition on transferring 
detainees to the United States for detention or trial. Even more 
troubling, this year's NDAA would undo the important step taken by 
Congress in 2013 to streamline procedures for transferring detainees to 
foreign countries. Section 1034 of this year's bill would reimpose 
onerous, unnecessary, and unrealistic certification requirements that 
must be satisfied before transferring detainees to third countries--a 
step in exactly the wrong direction. Transfers should be accelerating, 
not slowing down.
  As long as Guantanamo remains open, it will continue to serve as a 
recruitment tool for terrorists and tarnish America's historic role as 
a champion of human rights. Maintaining the detention facility at 
Guantanamo is also a tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars. We spend an 
astonishing amount at Guantanamo--a single detainee costs approximately 
$3.4 million per year to maintain--at a time when budgets are tight and 
that money is needed elsewhere; yet this conference report does not 
even include the cost-saving measure from the Senate bill that would 
allow detainees to be brought to the U.S. on a temporary basis for 
medical treatment. Closing Guantanamo is the morally and fiscally 
responsible thing to do, and I strongly oppose the unnecessary 
statutory restrictions in this conference report.
  The concerns with this conference report do not end with Guantanamo 
Bay. Massive changes to our procurement system that will recreate 
stovepipes we eliminated with the Goldwater-Nichols reforms and 
adjustments to benefits given to men and women who serve and have 
served in order to pay our bills are just two examples. But what's not 
included is significant, too. There are several provisions related to 
the National Guard that enjoyed strong Senate support and yet were 
stripped in this so-called compromise, most inexplicably a provision I 
authored to better account for the requirements placed on the Guard. A 
similar provision was included in the House-passed bill. Rather than 
compromising between the two as the rules call for, both were simply 
dropped from the bill.
  It is too bad that, in exchange for these controversial provisions, 
good policy will be left behind. This NDAA would have promoted the 
bipartisan National Guard State Partnership Program Enhancement Act to 
strengthen the State Partnership Program, which leverages unique 
National Guard capabilities and relationships to bolster our national 
security agenda around the world, at pennies on the dollar. This would 
have been a considerable improvement.
  I want to recognize Senator McCain's efforts to ensure that the 
conference report includes the McCain-Feinstein antitorture amendment. 
That provision would codify in statute the interrogation standards in 
the Army Field Manual--not just for military personnel, but for 
intelligence agents as well. Last year, Senator Feinstein and the 
Senate Intelligence Committee exposed the CIA's horrific practices 
under the Bush administration. The McCain-Feinstein amendment is the 
next step toward ensuring that America never tortures again. If this 
bill does not become law, the Senate should take action to make the 
McCain-Feinstein amendment law this year.
  Every year, the National Defense Authorization Act provides an 
opportunity for Congress to support our men and women in uniform and 
align our national security priorities with our fiscal obligations. 
This bill falls far short, and I cannot give it my support.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The assistant Democratic leader.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, how much time is remaining on the 
Democratic side?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. There are 5 minutes remaining.
  Mr. DURBIN. I thank the Chair.
  The issue before us is a conference committee report on the House 
Defense authorization bill. It is not the spending bill; it is the 
authorizing of spending. It is a bill that largely is bipartisan. There 
is no argument on either side of the aisle to support our troops, no 
argument against providing the technology and weaponry they need to 
keep themselves and Americans safe. The issue before us is a larger 
budget issue that goes even beyond the Department of Defense but 
certainly includes it, and that is, how are we going to fund our 
government?
  The Republican approach is to put in $37 billion to $38 billion of 
made-up money. In other words, they take $37 billion or $38 billion of 
what is known as OCO funds, or war funds, and just assume it is there 
and put it in the budget for the Department of Defense only, but they 
don't put money in for nondefense agencies. So they adequately fund the 
Department of Defense--in fact, some say generously fund it--and then 
cut back in the rest of government. What is the difference? What 
difference does it make?
  The cutbacks include, on the nondefense side, medical research at the

[[Page 15665]]

National Institutes of Health. The cuts include adequate resources for 
the Veterans' Administration to keep our promise to the men and women 
who have served us in the military. The cuts include keeping America 
safe when it comes to homeland security and the FBI. So they make cuts 
in all of these agencies but provide the funding for the Department of 
Defense.
  We argue: Let's have some balance. We want to give our troops the 
very best treatment, but we certainly don't want to shortchange the 
other side of government--the nondefense side--and that is what the 
budget negotiations are all about.
  So Republican after Republican comes to the floor and says the 
Democrats don't care about the military. That is not true; both sides 
care about the military. But there are other parts of our government 
that are important as well for the safety of the United States and the 
future of the United States. Whether it is education or medical 
research or caring for our veterans, let's have a balance in our budget 
that acknowledges that reality, and let's look at a couple other things 
that are realistic too.
  How many people in America think we are suffering from not enough 
handguns on the streets of America? There are some who do. There is a 
provision in this bill which is no surprise to people who follow 
legislation on Capitol Hill. The gun lobby is always looking for a way 
to expand their universe of more guns in America. So they proposed, in 
the House of Representatives--the Congressman from Alabama proposed--
that the military sell 100,000 .45-caliber semiautomatic handguns 
without any background checks on the purchasers. That was the proposal 
in the House--100,000 semiautomatic handguns without any background 
checks on the purchasers. Did they really do that? They did. It was in 
the bill. Jack Reed, the Senator from Rhode Island who is the ranking 
Democrat, changed that provision and limited it from 100,000 to 
10,000--10,000 handguns--and said they have to go through dealers so 
there will be a background check.
  I raise that point because guns are in the news again. Guns are in 
the news every day. Each day 297 Americans are shot with firearms, and 
89 lose their lives. We saw the terrible tragedy last week. I was 
stunned to hear on NPR over the weekend that what happened at Roseburg, 
OR, was the 45th school shooting in America this year--the 45th this 
year.
  We have to do something about it. It is not going to be solved with 
this bill alone, but it will be solved if Democrats and Republicans 
start looking for reasonable ways to limit the access of guns from 
those who have a history of committing criminal felonies or a history 
of mental instability. I am glad the Senate conferees cleaned up the 
House provision that would have dumped 100,000 handguns into the hands 
of purchasers without any kind of background check. I still believe 
this bill goes too far when it comes to that gun issue.
  I will close by saying this: We are all committed to the military and 
the defense of the United States. Many of us believe the agreement with 
Iran that precludes their development of a nuclear weapon will lead to 
a safer world. We are going to carefully monitor it, as we promised we 
would, for the sake not only of Israel but for all of the nations in 
the region, as well as the United States. We want to make this a safer 
world. We want to turn to diplomacy before we turn to a military 
response. I supported it, and I will continue to support it.
  I hope, in the closing minutes of debate, that Members will reflect 
on the fact that we can have a better deal not only to help our 
military but to help those others who are funded by the nondefense side 
of the budget, to have some balance too, to make sure it isn't lopsided 
with the money all going to the Department of Defense without 
acknowledging precious needs of America in many other nondefense 
subjects.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I say with respect to the Senator from 
Illinois, he just authenticated an old saying: ``Talk is cheap.'' This 
is really one of the more remarkable performances by the other side.
  We are talking about legislation that is vital to the welfare of the 
men and women who are serving in uniform, yet the Senator from Illinois 
says we shouldn't take care of them because he has another problem. 
That is a logic which defies anything I have observed in a long time.
  This is an authorization bill. It has nothing to do with the 
appropriations process and the money that needs to be spent or not 
spent on any kind of mechanism.
  The Senator from Illinois and the Senator from Nevada, the Democratic 
leader, keep talking about the fact that the budget passed by the 
Budget Committee by a majority vote here in the U.S. Senate calls for 
additional funding for defense. So now, in direct contravention to 
that, my friends on the other side of the aisle object to that 
provision in the Budget Act and will now oppose legislation that 
authorizes a pay raise for our troops, authorizes special pay and 
bonuses to support recruitment and retention, makes health care more 
affordable, increases access to urgent care for families, and knocks 
down bureaucratic obstacles to ensure servicemembers maintain access to 
the medicines they need as they transition from Active Duty.
  There are literally tens if not hundreds of provisions that take care 
of the men and women who are serving in our military. So what do my 
friends on the other side say? Turn this down because they don't like 
the way it is funded. The fight is on the appropriations, my friends, 
not on the authorization that defends this Nation.
  To do this kind of disservice to the men and women who are serving in 
uniform is a disgrace. Please don't say that you support the men and 
women in the military, come to this floor and say that, and then vote 
no on this legislation. Don't do it. Any objective observer will tell 
us that the provisions in this bill are for the benefit of the men and 
women who are serving in an all-volunteer force.
  The Senator from Illinois wants a ``better deal.'' I want a better 
deal. I am tired of our providing funds for the military on a year-to-
year ad hoc basis. I don't like it. I hate sequestration. I think 
sequestration risks doing permanent damage to our ability to face this 
Nation at a time when there are more crises in the world than at any 
time since World War II--when there is a flood of refugees, when the 
Chinese are moving into the Spratly Islands, endangering the world's 
most important avenue of commerce, while Vladimir Putin dismembers 
Russia. And my colleagues from the other side of the aisle are now 
complaining that they didn't like the way it was funded.
  I will tell my colleagues, this is a remarkable time. So apparently 
the President of the United States--and we will talk about it later--
who has just shown his remarkable leadership with the insertion of 
Russia into Syria, which he did not find out about from his meeting 
with Vladimir Putin of 90 minutes, and which his Secretary of State has 
said is an opportunity, and which his Secretary of Defense said was 
``unprofessional''--they are now slaughtering--slaughtering--young men 
whom we trained outside of Syria and sent into Syria to fight against 
ISIS and Bashar Assad, and the Russians are dropping bombs on them. It 
is an incredible situation.
  There has never been a greater need to authorize and fund our 
military--which is facing more challenges since the end of World War 
II--than today, and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle will 
urge a ``no'' vote. They will urge a ``no'' vote for the first time in 
53 years on an overall--not a specific issue but on a broad issue of 
the budget. My friends want to turn down our authorization and our 
responsibilities to the men and women who are serving in the military.
  I urge my colleagues to rethink their misguided logic. Attack the 
appropriations bill. Let's all sit down and try to negotiate an 
agreement that takes care of all of these other aspects of our 
government, but let's not do this to the

[[Page 15666]]

men and women who are serving. Let's not prevent us from improving 
their quality of life. Let's not prevent them from having a pay raise. 
Let's not prevent them from having the medical care they need. Let's 
not do these things in the name of a budgetary fight.
  Mr. President, I urge an ``aye'' vote on the motion to invoke cloture 
and on adoption of the conference report when the time comes. I will be 
speaking a lot more about it between now, if we approve the cloture 
motion, and when we vote on the conference report.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                             Cloture Motion

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair lays before 
the Senate the pending cloture motion, which the clerk will state.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

                             Cloture Motion

       We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the 
     provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, 
     do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the conference 
     report to accompany H.R. 1735, a bill to authorize 
     appropriations for fiscal year 2016 for military activities 
     of the Department of Defense, for military construction, and 
     for defense activities of the Department of Energy, to 
     prescribe military personnel strengths for such fiscal year, 
     and for other purposes.
         John McCain, Bob Corker, John Hoeven, Ron Johnson, Dan 
           Sullivan, Steve Daines, Richard Burr, Joni Ernst, Deb 
           Fischer, Tim Scott, Orrin G. Hatch, Shelley Moore 
           Capito, Mike Crapo, Tom Cotton, Cory Gardner, Kelly 
           Ayotte, Mitch McConnell.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Rounds). By unanimous consent, the 
mandatory quorum call has been waived.
  The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on the 
conference report to accompany H.R. 1735, a bill to authorize 
appropriations for fiscal year 2016 for military activities of the 
Department of Defense, for military construction, and for defense 
activities of the Department of Energy, to prescribe military personnel 
strengths for such fiscal year, and for other purposes, shall be 
brought to a close?
  The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator 
from Florida (Mr. Rubio).
  Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio) 
would have voted ``yea.''
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Daines). Are there any other Senators in 
the Chamber desiring to vote?
  The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 73, nays 26, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 275 Leg.]

                                YEAS--73

     Alexander
     Ayotte
     Barrasso
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Blunt
     Boozman
     Burr
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Casey
     Cassidy
     Coats
     Cochran
     Collins
     Corker
     Cornyn
     Cotton
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Donnelly
     Enzi
     Ernst
     Feinstein
     Fischer
     Flake
     Gardner
     Graham
     Grassley
     Hatch
     Heinrich
     Heitkamp
     Heller
     Hoeven
     Inhofe
     Isakson
     Johnson
     Kaine
     King
     Kirk
     Klobuchar
     Lankford
     Lee
     McCain
     McCaskill
     McConnell
     Menendez
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Murphy
     Murray
     Perdue
     Peters
     Portman
     Risch
     Roberts
     Rounds
     Sasse
     Scott
     Sessions
     Shaheen
     Shelby
     Stabenow
     Sullivan
     Tester
     Thune
     Tillis
     Toomey
     Udall
     Vitter
     Warner
     Wicker

                                NAYS--26

     Baldwin
     Booker
     Boxer
     Brown
     Cardin
     Carper
     Coons
     Durbin
     Franken
     Gillibrand
     Hirono
     Leahy
     Manchin
     Markey
     Merkley
     Mikulski
     Nelson
     Paul
     Reed
     Reid
     Sanders
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wyden

                             NOT VOTING--1

       
     Rubio
       
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Portman). On this vote, the yeas are 73, 
the nays are 26.
  Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn having voted in 
the affirmative, the motion is agreed to.
  The Senator from Texas.


              Calling for Appointment of a Special Counsel

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes speaking 
about a topic we should all be able to agree on, even in this polarized 
environment in which we live and work, and that is the idea that 
transparency and accountability are key to good governance. 
Transparency and accountability are key to good governance.
  Open government is a prerequisite for a free society, one in which 
the legitimacy of government itself depends upon consent of the 
governed. In fact, we can't consent on something we don't know anything 
about. My colleagues get my point.
  As our Founding Fathers recognized, a truly democratic system depends 
on an informed citizenry so they can hold their leaders accountable at 
elections and between elections. But the American people cannot do that 
without transparency. Justice Brandeis famously said that sunlight is 
the best disinfectant, and he is right. That is why Congress has 
enacted numerous pieces of legislation that have promoted 
accountability and transparency in government so that good governance 
can hopefully flourish.
  This is a bipartisan issue. When I came to the Senate, I found a 
willing partner in Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont. Senator Leahy 
and I are polar opposites when it comes to our politics, but on matters 
of open government and freedom of information, we have worked closely 
together on a number of pieces of legislation. As we both have said, 
when a Democratic President is in charge or a Republican President is 
in charge, the first instinct is to try to hide or minimize bad news 
and to maximize the good news. That is human nature. We all get that. 
But the American people are entitled to know what their government is 
doing on their behalf, whether it is good, bad, or ugly.
  So I have made transparency a priority of mine, and I have pressed 
for more openness in the Federal Government through commonsense 
legislation. One of those bills was the Freedom of Information 
Improvement Act, which would strengthen existing measures found in the 
Freedom of Information Act that was first signed by a Texas President, 
Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Judiciary Committee passed that bill in 
February by a voice vote, and I look forward to it passing in the 
Senate soon.
  But even the very best laws with the very best intentions can be 
undermined by those who are willing to ignore or even abuse them. More 
than 6 years ago, President Obama promised the American people that 
transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstone of this 
Presidency. He said, ``Transparency and the rule of law will be the 
touchstones of this presidency.'' Needless to say, his record has been 
a disappointment because it certainly doesn't meet the description of 
transparency and adherence to and fidelity to the rule of law.
  For example, when an estimated 1,400 weapons were somehow lost by the 
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in Mexico, with one of them--
actually two of them--eventually linked to the murder of a U.S. Border 
Patrol agent, the Obama administration stonewalled congressional 
investigations. This was the Fast and Furious debacle. As a matter of 
fact, the Attorney General--then Eric Holder--refused to comply with a 
valid subpoena issued by Congress so we could find out about it, so we 
could figure out where things went wrong and how we could fix them so 
they didn't happen again. Former Attorney General Eric Holder, rather 
than comply with Congress's legitimate oversight request, refused and 
was thus the first Attorney General, to my knowledge, to be held in 
contempt of Congress--in contempt of Congress. Then, of course, there 
are the IRS and ObamaCare--instances in which this administration has 
either refused to

[[Page 15667]]

testify to Congress or failed to answer our most basic questions.
  This administration has been equally dismissive of the press, who are 
also protected--freedom of the press under the First Amendment to the 
U.S. Constitution--leading dozens of journalists to send a letter to 
the President asking him to end this administration's ``politically 
driven suppression of news and information about Federal agencies.'' 
That is really remarkable.
  So we can see the American people have been stiff-armed by this 
administration, and they have become increasingly distrustful of their 
own government. That is because secrecy provides an environment in 
which corruption can and does fester. In fact, according to a recent 
poll, 75 percent of Americans who responded believe there is widespread 
corruption in the U.S. Government. Seventy-five percent believe that. 
That is a shocking statistic and one that ought to shock us back to 
reality to try to understand what their concerns are and what we can do 
to address them because that is simply inconsistent with this idea of 
self-government, where 75 percent of the respondents to a poll think 
the fix is in, and the government is neither accountable nor adhering 
to the rule of law.
  It was back in March that the public first learned that a former 
member of this administration, Secretary Clinton, used a private, 
unsecured server during her tenure as Secretary of State. It was just 
last Wednesday that the State Department announced the release of even 
more documents from Secretary Clinton's private email server. This 
ongoing scandal has been but the latest example of this 
administration's pattern of avoiding accountability and skirting the 
law. I will explain in just a few minutes why this is so significant 
and why this isn't something that ought to be just brushed under the 
rug and ignored.
  Secretary Clinton's unprecedented scheme was intentional. It wasn't 
an accident. It wasn't negligence. She did it on purpose. It was by 
design. Her design was to shield her official communications--
communications that under Federal law belong to the government and to 
the people, not her. I can't see any other way to explain it. It was 
deliberate. It was intentional. It was designed to avoid the kind of 
accountability I have been talking about today. There is just no other 
way to look at it.
  Because her emails were held on this private server, the State 
Department was in violation of the legal mandates of the Freedom of 
Information Act for 6 years, and it is only now, through Freedom of 
Information Act litigation and more than 30 different lawsuits, that 
the public is finally learning what it was always entitled to know, or 
at least part of it. By the way, that is the power of the Freedom of 
Information Act and why it is so important. You can go to court and 
seek a court order to force people to do what they should have done in 
the first instance so the public can be informed about what their 
government is doing.
  Secretary Clinton's use of a private, unsecured server as a member of 
the Obama Cabinet is also a major national security concern. We have 
learned that classified information was kept on and transmitted through 
this server. According to the latest reports, the newest batch of 
documents released just last week have doubled the amount of emails 
that contain classified information. News outlets are reporting that 
there are more than 400 classified emails on the server, and that is 
just the report so far.
  It is no coincidence that along with this news, the media has also 
reported that Russian-linked hackers attempted at least five times to 
break into Secretary Clinton's email account. That should make obvious 
to her and to everyone else the vulnerabilities that exist for a 
private, unsecured email server, one used by a Cabinet member in 
communicating with other high-level government officials, including 
people in the intelligence community. This is absolutely reckless.
  This Chamber is aware--we are painfully aware from the news--that 
cyber threats are all too prevalent today. It seems every week we read 
a new story about different cyber attacks, cyber theft, cyber espionage 
against our own country. This last summer we discussed at length the 
data breaches that occurred at the Office of Personnel Management. 
People who had actually sought and obtained security clearances so they 
could handle and learn classified material--that information was hacked 
and made available to some of our adversaries. Then, of course, there 
is the information we all learned about the IRS being hacked as well. 
The personal information contained in those two hacks alone covered 
millions of Americans.
  At a time when our adversaries are trying to steal sensitive national 
security information, especially classified information, I find it 
incredibly irresponsible for Secretary Clinton or anyone else to invite 
this kind of risk and to conduct routine, daily business on behalf of 
our Nation over a private, unsecured email server. I find it even more 
egregious that she or her senior aides would send classified 
information over this same server.
  I am not the only one who believes Secretary Clinton compromised our 
national security by doing this. Just last month, before the Senate 
Select Intelligence Committee, the current Director of the National 
Security Agency, ADM Mike Rogers, who also serves as commander of U.S. 
Cyber Command, said conducting official business on a private server 
would ``represent an opportunity'' for foreign intelligence operatives. 
In other words, foreign intelligence services would relish the 
opportunity to penetrate the private server of a high-profile leader 
such as Secretary Clinton or any other Secretary of State who, once 
again, is a member of the President's Cabinet, his closest advisers.
  Some hackers clearly noticed this opportunity and tried to take 
advantage of it, and we don't know--perhaps we never will know--the 
extent to which that national security information, that classified 
information was compromised.
  We need to come to terms with the fact that due to Secretary 
Clinton's bad judgment, it is probable that every email she sent or 
received while Secretary of State, including highly classified 
information, has been read by intelligence agents of nations such as 
China and Russia who we know are regularly trying to hack into our 
secure data and to learn our secrets or to steal our designs and to 
replicate those by violating our commercial laws. So this email scandal 
is more than just bad judgment; it represents a real danger to our 
Nation.
  I am sorry to say, but it is true, that Secretary Clinton's actions 
may well have violated a number of criminal laws. Under the 
circumstances, the appointment of a special counsel by the Justice 
Department is necessary to supervise the investigation and ensure the 
American people that investigation gets down to the bottom line and we 
follow the facts wherever they may lead.
  As I made clear in a recent letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, 
the Department of Justice regulations themselves provide for the 
appointment of a special counsel if there is potential for criminal 
wrongdoing and if there is a conflict of interest at the Department of 
Justice or if extraordinary circumstances warrant the appointment.
  Let me start by explaining which criminal statutes Secretary Clinton 
may have violated.
  Federal law makes it a crime to retain classified information without 
authorization.

       Whoever, being an officer . . . of the United States . . . 
     knowingly removes [classified] documents or materials without 
     authority and with the intent to retain such documents or 
     materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under 
     this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.

  That is 18 USC, section 1924.
  We know from media reports that Secretary Clinton retained classified 
documents on her server. According to those reports, more than 5 
percent of the latest emails released by the State Department contained 
classified information. So we need a thorough, unbiased, impartial 
investigation to determine how those documents made it to

[[Page 15668]]

Secretary Clinton's unsecured server and whether she knew that was 
happening. A special counsel would be the best person and in the best 
position to do just that.
  While Secretary Clinton may argue--which I heard her argue on news 
reports--that none of this information was marked ``classified'' when 
it was emailed to her, under the Espionage Act, that is irrelevant even 
if true, and I certainly doubt that is the case. According to the act, 
it is a crime to deliver national defense information to unauthorized 
individuals. At 18 USC, subsection 793(d), it states that ``whoever, 
lawfully having possession of . . . any document . . . or note relating 
to the national defense . . . willfully communicates, delivers, 
transmits . . . the same to any person not entitled to receive it . . . 
[s]hall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten 
years, or both.''
  So you can see this is serious. This is serious stuff and deserves to 
be treated with that same requisite seriousness, and that is again why 
it is so important to have an impartial investigation.
  We know, for example, that information on North Korea's nuclear 
program was in Secretary Clinton's emails. I was recently with some of 
my colleagues at Pacific Command, and Admiral Harris, a four-star 
admiral, the head of Pacific Command, said that on his list of security 
threats confronting his region of the world, North Korea is at the top. 
It has nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and it has 
a leader who is capable of doing just about anything he could imagine. 
It is a very dangerous situation and a very serious national security 
issue. Yet Secretary Clinton was communicating information or had 
communicated to her on her private email server information about North 
Korea's threat. We don't know whether that information was among the 
200 classified emails released by the State Department last week. We 
know her lawyers and perhaps others reviewed every email on her server 
before turning them over to the State Department. We don't know who 
reviewed them, whether they had a proper clearance, whether they were 
actually entitled to see classified information, and that is why a 
special counsel would be important to answer that question too.
  Under the Espionage Act, we see that it is a crime to remove national 
defense documents or permit them to be stolen. Here is a summary of the 
statute: ``Whoever, being entrusted with . . . any document . . . 
relating to the national defense . . . through gross negligence permits 
the same to be removed from its proper place of custody . . . or to be 
lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed . . . shall be fined under this 
title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.''
  Now we know that the server was not held in a proper place of 
custody, and we know from the testimony of experts in the intelligence 
community that the likelihood that something was removed from Secretary 
Clinton's server by foreign hackers is high. Last week, as I said 
moments ago, news outlets reported that they were certainly trying. So 
a special counsel could answer this question and determine whether this 
statute was violated and how it should be enforced if it was violated.
  What greater example of gross negligence is there than for a high 
government official, such as the Secretary of State of the United 
States of America, a member of the President's Cabinet, to communicate 
all business on a private, unsecured server when it is likely--and 
maybe more than just likely--it is almost certain that sensitive 
national defense information would pass through it?
  We simply don't know what other laws may have been broken or whether 
there are other explanations that Secretary Clinton might have that 
might shed some light on this. But this is certainly why a special 
counsel should be appointed. And I would say that if Secretary Clinton 
and the Obama administration are confident that no laws have been 
broken, then why wouldn't they embrace the appointment of a special 
counsel?
  I would point out that in another case, the President's own 
Department of Justice has aggressively pursued the mishandling of 
classified information in the past. So my simple request in calling for 
a special counsel is that the same rules apply to Secretary Clinton.
  The Department's clear conflicts of interest in this case and the 
extraordinary circumstances surrounding it could not be more obvious. 
As a high-level official in the administration for 4 years, Secretary 
Clinton is clearly allied with the administration. As a former First 
Lady and a U.S. Senator, Secretary Clinton has a deep professional and 
personal relationship with the administration, including the 
President's choice for Attorney General, Loretta Lynch. I would think 
Ms. Lynch, the Attorney General, would want the sort of integrity and 
proper appearance that would occur by appointment of special counsel 
rather than have it look as if she has simply sat on this information 
and not conducted a thorough investigation herself.
  I am simply calling for that kind of investigation. As somebody who 
spent 17 years of my life as a State court judge and attorney general, 
I believe that sort of investigation is entirely warranted. Of course, 
some of my Democratic colleagues--including the Senators from Vermont 
and California--have already claimed that this call for a special 
counsel is some sort of political stunt. The senior Senator from 
California was quick to say that calls for a special counsel are purely 
political and completely unnecessary and would amount to wasting 
taxpayer dollars. Well, I would like to point out to both Senators from 
Vermont and California that each of them on more than one occasion has 
called for a special counsel in the past. Surely I don't think they 
would characterize their own call for a special counsel in the same 
terms that the current call for a special counsel is described.
  While serving as Senators, the President of the United States, Barack 
Obama, and former Secretary Hillary Clinton, while both of them were 
Senators, called for the appointment of a special counsel.
  All of that is to say that requesting an appointment of a special 
counsel is not uncommon, and it is clearly warranted in this case.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the response from the 
Justice Department to my letter requesting a special counsel be printed 
in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                                       U.S. Department of Justice,


                                Office of Legislative Affairs,

                               Washington, DC, September 22, 2015.
     Hon. John Cornyn,
     U.S. Senate, Washington, DC.
       Dear Senator Cornyn:  This responds to your letter to the 
     Attorney General dated September 15, 2015, requesting that a 
     Special Counsel be appointed to investigate the use of a 
     private e-mail server by former Secretary of State Hillary 
     Clinton.
       The Special Counsel regulations, 28 C.F.R. Sec. 6001, which 
     were issued as a replacement for the former Independent 
     Counsel Act, provide that in the discretion of the Attorney 
     General, a Special Counsel may be appointed when an 
     investigation or prosecution by the Department of Justice 
     (the Department) would create a potential conflict of 
     interest, or in other extraordinary circumstances in which 
     the public interest would be served by such an appointment. 
     This authority has rarely been exercised.
       As you know, the Department has received a security 
     referral related to the potential compromise of classified 
     information. Any investigation related to this referral will 
     be conducted by law enforcement professionals and career 
     attorneys in accordance with established Department policies 
     and procedures, which are designed to ensure the integrity of 
     all ongoing investigations.
       We hope this information is helpful. Please do not hesitate 
     to contact this office if we may provide additional 
     assistance regarding this or any other matter.
           Sincerely,
                                                  Peter J. Kadzik,
                                       Assistant Attorney General.

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I would just say that for those who are 
interested in reading the response--interestingly, I didn't get a 
response from the Attorney General, to whom I addressed the letter; I 
got a response from the Assistant Attorney General. I read it over and 
over and over again, and it doesn't agree to the appointment of a

[[Page 15669]]

special counsel and it doesn't refuse to appoint a special counsel. In 
other words, it is a non-answer to the question. I don't know what 
reason the Attorney General or the Department of Justice might have for 
leaving this open-ended and not actually declining at this time to 
appoint a special counsel, if that is their conclusion, but they simply 
didn't answer the question.
  I would just say in conclusion that my constituents in Texas sent me 
here to serve as a check on the executive branch, and I am going to 
continue to press the Attorney General and the rest of the 
administration for answers because the American people deserve the sort 
of accountability and, indeed, in the end, justice that need to be 
delivered in this case--not a sweep under the rug, not a playing out 
the clock until the end of the administration, but answers that can 
only come from an independent investigation conducted by a special 
counsel.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
  Mr. UDALL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to engage in a 
colloquy until about 3:40 p.m. with Democrats and Republicans who are 
going to show up here--I think Senator Vitter, Senator Inhofe, Senator 
Whitehouse, Senator Manchin, and we may have others who will be here.
  I see my good friend Senator Inhofe is here.
  Senator Inhofe, we are now beginning. And Senator Whitehouse is here. 
So if the Senator would like to jump in with his statement, that would 
be great at this point.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there an objection to the unanimous consent 
request?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. INHOFE. Thank you very much.


                              TSCA Reform

  Mr. President, let me first mention that you don't see many things 
around this Chamber that are truly bipartisan, and you are about to see 
one now.
  I have to give credit to the Senator from New Mexico for the great 
job he has done in making it a possibility to even be talking about 
this now. I am honored to be chairman of the public works committee. We 
do a lot of significant work in that committee. We just passed out 
arguably the second most significant bill of the year, which was the 
highway reauthorization bill, and others. It is a very busy committee. 
However, the issue we are concerned about today--and I want to talk 
about it a little bit--is the bill we have been working on for a long 
period of time.
  We had a great Member--Frank Lautenberg--of the Senate for a number 
of years. He and I became good friends on this committee when Democrats 
were for 8 years the majority party, and prior to that we were in the 
majority for a long time. During that timeframe, Frank Lautenberg and I 
became good friends. We had some things in common people were not aware 
of; that is, we both came from the corporate world. We were involved in 
doing things together and looking at things through a corporate mind.
  But this bill we are talking about now is one where we are enjoying 
60 cosponsors.
  I would mention that Bonnie Lautenberg is in the Gallery today. She 
has been so cooperative. If you can single out one legacy of the great 
Frank Lautenberg, it would be this bill. I can remember calling Bonnie 
and asking if she would be willing to come and testify before the 
committee--this was some time ago--and she was more enthusiastic than I 
expected she would be, and she has been a big help.
  It is great to see so many of my colleagues excited about TSCA reform 
and specifically the Lautenberg bill, which now has overwhelming 
support on both sides of the aisle. For a long time, we have been 
focused--and rightfully so--on the public health and environmental 
benefits of reforming this 39-year-old failed law. I know a lot of my 
friends across the aisle who are here will continue talking about that 
today, so I wanted to take my time on the floor to tell them some of 
the benefits of TSCA reform that they might not be aware of, from a 
Republican perspective.
  TSCA reform, in addition to providing greater protections for 
families in my State of Oklahoma and the rest of the country, can play 
a pivotal role in boosting our economy, creating well-paying American 
jobs, and creating regulatory certainty for businesses not only in the 
United States but across the world.
  Today, the U.S. chemical industry is experiencing a resurgence. 
Nobody had ever predicted it. For years, chemical manufacturing has 
been moving its way out of this country, relocating in places such as 
China, Saudi Arabia, and South America. One of the reasons for this is 
that we have this antiquated law on the books that made it very 
difficult for them to operate in the United States. So we kind of got 
used to this. Everyone was leaving the United States because of that. 
Now they are coming back. The interesting thing is, there are two 
reasons that I am going to mention to you in a minute for why they are 
coming back and what it means to us economically.
  In the last few years, one thing has completely flipped the idea on 
its head that we are not going to be able to change the laws that are 
regulating the chemical industry. Natural gas liquids are the primary 
feedstock for chemical manufacturing in the United States. Due to the 
shale boom or the shale revolution--we are very sensitive to that in my 
State of Oklahoma--natural gas production from companies such as 
Continental Resources, Devon, Chesapeake Energy--all in my home State 
of Oklahoma--manufacturers have an abundant and reliable source of 
natural gas for decades to come.
  This provides the stability and certainty that manufacturers need to 
once again make major investments in the United States. There is no 
better example of an industry reinvesting in this country because of 
our energy revolution than the chemical industry. As of this June, the 
chemical industry has announced 238 investment projects valued at $145 
billion. Let me repeat that: $145 billion in new capital investments in 
the United States of America by the chemical industry in large part due 
to American natural gas production.
  This investment is predicted to be responsible for over 700,000 new 
jobs along with $293 billion in permanent new domestic economic output 
by 2023. The benefits don't stop there. This investment is also 
predicted to lead to $21 billion in new Federal, State, and local tax 
revenue in the next 8 years and will lower our trade deficit by 
increasing our exports by nearly $30 billion by 2030.
  Right now the U.S. chemical industry is capturing market share from 
around the world, and all of those facilities that packed up and moved 
to China, moved to the Middle East, and moved to Western Europe are 
rushing back. You don't have to look any further than comments by folks 
such as Antonio Tajani, the European Commissioner for Industry, who 
said:

       When people choose whether to invest in Europe or the 
     United States, what they think about most is the cost of 
     energy. The loss of competitiveness is frightening.

  In North America as a whole, chemicals and plastics production is 
predicted to double in the next 5 years, while it falls by one-third in 
Europe. In other words, it will go down by one-third in Europe. At the 
same time, it doubles in the next 5 years in the United States. Some of 
you may be wondering what this has to do with TSCA reform because I am 
talking about the cheaper prices of energy. The main stock for 
chemicals is natural gas.
  Specifically, the Lautenberg bill, what we are talking about today--
let me tell you, passing this bill and getting TSCA reform signed into 
law not only provides these domestic industries with one manageable 
national rule book so products can be manufactured and distributed in 
all 50 States consistently, it also provides necessary regulatory 
certainty, the lack of which could be the one thing to drive away this 
much needed economic investment.
  Moreover, today global chemical manufacturing and use, in the absence 
of a coherent and functioning U.S. chemical policy, is dominated by the 
European system called REACH. I will

[[Page 15670]]

not get into much detail about the European regulatory system, but it 
is significantly more burdensome and costly than many of our businesses 
can afford to deal with.
  Unfortunately, today it is the global standard. By enacting 
meaningful U.S. chemical policy, our Nation will be on the path to once 
again be the world leader, not only in chemical manufacturing or 
manufacturing in general but to set the global standard in how 
chemicals should be managed. That is what we are talking about. That is 
what this is all about. So there are two things that are bringing this 
industry back to the United States. One is our plentiful and cheap 
natural gas and the other is this legislation.
  Imagine people anticipating that the legislation is going to pass and 
making corporate decisions bringing back many jobs to the United 
States. So there is going to be a surge in economic benefit, and 
consequently right now the price of natural gas, the main feedstock 
that goes into chemical manufacturing, is far cheaper in this country 
than it is in Europe.
  So I say to my good friend who has carried this ball, Senator Udall, 
that it is great that those two things are happening at the same time. 
Again, when I looked around at the press conference we had this 
morning--and we saw everyone ranging from the most liberal Democrats 
and the most conservative Republicans. That does not happen very often 
in Washington, DC. I think a lot of it is due to my good friend from 
New Mexico, along with Senator Vitter, who has been carrying this ball.
  I would vacate the floor and ask for any comments.
  Mr. UDALL. Mr. President, I thank Chairman Inhofe very much. I thank 
him for his leadership. He is the chairman of the Environment and 
Public Works Committee. I remember we came early on--Senator Vitter and 
myself--to him, and said: We have been working on this bill a couple of 
years. We think it is ready to go, but obviously it has to go through 
your committee.
  The Senator worked with us all the way along the line. A lot of this 
has to do with his leadership and helping us with--amending it in a way 
to keep making it bipartisan. That has been the history of this bill; 
that it has grown. As we know, it passed his committee 15 to 5.
  I say to Chairman Inhofe, our next speaker, Senator Whitehouse, who 
is on your committee, was able to work with you and three other members 
of the Environment and Public Works Committee to get the bill in shape 
so we could then get it ready for the floor. Working with you, we have 
made a few additional tweaks and things, but I think it is ready to go; 
don't you?
  Mr. INHOFE. If the Senator will yield, I would observe the number of 
people who said--when the bill first started out, there was a lot of 
opposition. There was opposition in our committee. I think a lot of the 
people on the committee were surprised when we passed it on a 
bipartisan basis. Then, of course, once it got down to the floor--this 
is going to have support from all corners.
  Again, yes, it was a bipartisan effort. It is kind of rewarding to 
have that happen now and then. This is a good example.
  Mr. UDALL. This is a great example. Thank you so much. Once again, we 
could not have done this without your leadership, your chairmanship of 
the Environment and Public Works Committee. You helped us shape this 
and helped us move in a bipartisan way.
  I am going to next ask Senator Whitehouse to talk a little bit 
because Senator Whitehouse has the ability--the experience of a State 
official, a former State attorney general.
  He took a look at this bill. It was ready to go in front of the 
Environment and Public Works Committee. He looked at it as a former AG. 
He looked at it in terms of the States being able to participate on 
enforcement and was able to help us craft a bill that could get out of 
committee 15 to 5.
  Senator Whitehouse, we appreciate your help and your hard work on 
this. You did an amazing job. Any thoughts, comments? Is this something 
the Senate can take up and get done, in terms of where we have it right 
now?
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I would answer my colleague's question 
by saying that I think we are very definitely ready to go. We are 
particularly ready to go because of Senator Udall's achievement in 
securing the 60th vote, a filibuster-proof majority who are on this 
bill as cosponsors. That does not count people who are willing to vote 
for it. I think we always had 60 people voting for it, but to have 60 
people willing to cosponsor it so it is clear from the get-go that if 
this bill is called up, it will get through.
  I think that is very important. There was some dispute on the 
Environment and Public Works Committee. We had a very lively hearing. I 
think the impact of that hearing caused people to go back and say: We 
really do need to improve this bill in some way. I commend Senator 
Merkley and Senator Booker for joining me in I guess a little mini 
``Gang of 3'' to pull the bill to a place where we would all support it 
in the committee. That is part of how it got to 15 and 5.
  I think, since then, what Senator Udall has been able to accomplish 
is some of those 5 have now come over to join the 15. So to say that it 
is a 15-to-5 EPW committee-supported bill actually understates this 
support because of Senator Udall's continued work.
  There is one issue on which I want to make a particular point because 
I know both Senator Udall and I have served as attorney general of our 
States. We take this question of a sovereign State's ability to defend 
its own citizens very seriously. We both were attorneys general. We had 
the responsibility to very often lead for the State those public 
protection efforts.
  So we wanted to be very careful about making sure there was a 
significant role for the States in this bill to look out for the health 
and the safety of their citizens. What we came up with is a provision 
that I believe tracks very closely with the constitutional provisions 
that govern this. A State is restricted from taking action here if it 
would unduly burden interstate commerce. Well, that is a statutory 
restriction. But guess what. As Senator Udall knows, that is also the 
constitutional restriction under the so-called dormant commerce clause. 
So we were not going to be able to move much further than that anyway. 
That is essentially the commerce clause written into legislative text.
  The next is if the action by the State would violate a Federal law or 
regulation. There is another part of the Constitution called the 
supremacy clause, which says that when Congress has made a decision, 
the States cannot overturn it. Once again, the restriction that we have 
on States coming to protect their citizens mirrors and matches a 
restriction that exists in the Constitution.
  The last piece says that if a State is going to regulate in this 
area, it has to be based on peer-reviewed science. There is a third 
clause in the Constitution called the due process clause. Under the due 
process clause, the regulatory agency cannot just willy-nilly regulate. 
If it does, its regulation can be challenged as being arbitrary and 
capricious. In order to meet the challenge that it is arbitrary and 
capricious, it has to be based on a sound factual foundation.
  Here in the realm of science, that foundation is peer-reviewed 
scientific evidence. So as a former attorney general working with a 
former attorney general, I think we are confident that where this bill 
is now gives our colleague attorneys general the ability to have a very 
strong case to be made that they still have the authority to take 
action where their State has a real problem and people's health and 
safety is suffering and somebody needs to act, even if somebody at EPW 
will not.
  I will close by saying this. This has been an education in 
legislating for me. I came out of being a prosecutor, I came out of 
being an executive official, I came out of being a staff person for a 
Governor, and I came out of being a practicing lawyer. But watching 
Senator Udall work has been instructive because--he will not say but I 
am prepared to say that he cosponsored this

[[Page 15671]]

bill at a time when he did not like it. I think he cosponsored this 
bill at a time when what he saw was not that ``this is the bill I am 
going to go with,'' but he saw that we need to fix TSCA, we need to 
have a bipartisan solution to this, and ``if it takes me signing up for 
a bill I don't like as the opener to begin building that consensus''--
that went first with Tom, then with Senator Carper coming on, then with 
our Merkley-Booker-Whitehouse contingent, and now most recently with 
Senators Durbin and Markey joining us--he has been the thread that has 
made all of that possible.
  I wish to close by expressing a personal appreciation to him for 
hanging in there--particularly through that early period when there was 
not a lot of support for this in our caucus--and working with us and 
Senator Inhofe and Senator Vitter to build the coalition that has today 
made 60-plus cosponsors possible.
  Congratulations to Senator Udall, and I thank him for letting me say 
a few words.
  Mr. UDALL. I say to Senator Whitehouse, thank you so much.
  I just want to say about Senator Whitehouse--I mean, this bill would 
not be where it is today had we not had that trio working in the 
Environment and Public Works Committee. I really believe that. They 
took the bill that was coming up, we had a hearing on it, and they 
really analyzed it and applied all the principles Senator Whitehouse 
and I have both talked about, and they came up with a very significant 
improvement. We are here today because of his hard work.
  I have been very open. I think Senator Vitter, who will join us in a 
minute, has been very open. Both of us said: Give us your ideas, give 
us your input, and we are going to take a look at it. We got technical 
advice from the EPA and asked, ``Will this work?'' because they are 
over there running this bureau.
  So the Senator should feel very good about moving it down the field 
to the point where we are today.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. My only caution going forward is that, for all the 
wonderful work that has been done by Senator Vitter and Senator Udall 
to pull us together, for all the support that has been reached here, 
this is still a fairly delicate compromise. We first have to figure out 
and solve the procedural blockages that are preventing this from going 
through this Chamber.
  I would suggest that the majority party ought to be supporting the 
passage of legislation that is led by the majority party. It is the 
minority party's role to throw up objections and to make demands 
against legislation proceeding. So maybe not everybody on the other 
side is completely taken aboard, but they are in the majority now. So I 
think those blocks will be cleared and we will have the chance to go 
forward. But then we have to do something with the House. Either they 
have to pass something or they have to pass this or we end up in 
conference. I think it is important that the record of this bill 
reflect that there is not a whole lot of wiggle room here for mischief 
to be accomplished between the House and the Senate.
  My confidence is that--I really do think the industry supports this 
bill. They have worked with us, they have worked with you, and so I 
don't think there is a huge incentive for mischief, but I think we do 
have to be on our guard that the spirit, the structure, and the key 
points of this piece are preserved in anything that goes forward 
because otherwise we will be back where we started, with everybody back 
in their seats again.
  Mr. UDALL. I say to Senator Whitehouse, I couldn't agree more. I 
think those are the delicate phases we have to go through.
  What we have been telling our House colleagues all along is we have 
worked long and hard on this, we have been more comprehensive than they 
have, and so we need their patience to work through it with us. There 
is not a lot of room. I couldn't agree with you more that that is where 
we are today.
  I have good relationships in the House. I served there 10 years. Fred 
Upton, John Shimkus, and Frank Pallone are all willing to work with us. 
I believe that if we look at what our goal is--to protect the American 
public and to protect vulnerable populations--we can get this done.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. While we have the floor and until Senator Vitter 
comes, might it be a good time to say a kind word about our staffs?
  Mr. UDALL. Yes.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I know that during our process, our staff worked 
enormously hard, and the Senator's has been at this for a longer time 
than just that intense period of negotiation where we moved the bill in 
our section, so I defer to the Senator to make those comments. I would 
applaud the Senator's staff and Senator Vitter's, who have been doing a 
terrific job.
  Mr. UDALL. I couldn't agree with the Senator more.
  I also wish to talk a little bit about Senator Frank Lautenberg. I 
have a picture here of him with his grandchildren.
  But let me first say, Senator Whitehouse, did you wish to mention 
your staff member who worked on it, who I know spent time with Jonathan 
Black and with the whole team? We have a great team of staff members 
who are very goal-oriented and who want to get things accomplished.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. My team was led by Emily Enderle, who leads my 
environmental team. She has terrific credibility in the environmental 
community, and she knows these laws very well, but even with that it 
was an enormously complicated task. This was a big bill. I forget the 
number of changes we actually put into it in the course of that 
negotiation, but it was 20, 22. It was a large array of changes, so it 
was a lot of work in a short period of time. Emily, the Senator's 
staff, and everybody who was involved in that really dove in and worked 
hard in the best traditions of good staff work in the Senate with the 
intention to get to ``yes.''
  Mr. UDALL. I thank Senator Whitehouse. I very much appreciate his 
comments here today and especially appreciate his participation in 
terms of moving this forward in a bipartisan way.
  I worked with my staff diligently on this bill. I was lucky to have a 
chief of staff by the name of Mike Collins who spent many hours working 
on this. My legislative director, Andrew Wallace--Drew Wallace--worked 
on this. He is a lawyer by training. Jonathan Black was the legislative 
assistant in the main policy area. He has been with this bill all 
along, and he is very evenhanded and very good at dealing with the 
other staff members in getting people to focus on the goal and not get 
into the arguments and not get sidetracked.
  I think this is true of the staff on the Republican side and the 
staff on the Democratic side. We have had tremendous support, and I 
expect that to go forward when we start. Indeed, if we can get floor 
time and get this out--and I believe the bill is ready to go--I think 
we have the kind of staff effort in the House and the Senate that can 
resolve most of the major differences without too many problems. So 
that is what we are looking forward to.
  As I said earlier, I would like to say a few words about Senator 
Frank Lautenberg. This is a picture of Senator Lautenberg and his 
grandchildren. I served on the Environment and Public Works Committee 
with Senator Lautenberg for a number of years, and there couldn't have 
been anything he was more passionate about than his grandchildren. You 
saw that in his public work.
  Before I got onto the committee, Senator Lautenberg was a champion in 
terms of smoking and indoor smoking and tobacco smoke hurting people 
and passed some significant legislation. So it was particularly moving 
to me to hear him say--when he got on this compromise bill with Senator 
Vitter, he said he thought that bill, the Lautenberg-Vitter bill, would 
save more lives than all the work he had done in the public health and 
environmental arena. I know he said that to Bonnie Lautenberg. And that 
really hit all of us. He saw the legislation, he saw how it was going 
to evolve, and he really believed this would make a difference.
  I saw that in Senator Lautenberg over and over again on the 
committee.

[[Page 15672]]

Whenever an issue would come up--it didn't matter what issue it was--he 
always came back to his grandchildren: Are we doing the right thing by 
our children? So if we were looking at a infrastructure issue and the 
question was ``How do we frame the best possible infrastructure 
package?'' he was looking out a couple of generations in the future and 
saying ``Are we going to pass on a better infrastructure system so we 
can grow jobs and do those kinds of things?'' He had passion about it, 
and he brought up his grandchildren on a frequent basis.
  We all miss him very much, and we have named this bill after him. 
This bill is the Frank Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century 
Act. Everybody is going to know how it started because he was one who 
believed in fighting for the very best, but he always believed in 
compromise.
  I will never forget when Senator Lautenberg had what I would call the 
perfect bill--I guess that is the best way to describe it--and he was 
able to pass it through the Environment and Public Works Committee, but 
it passed without a single Republican vote. When it passes out of 
committee, it is now ready for floor time. But everybody realized that 
without any Republicans on the bill, it wasn't going to go anywhere. So 
leadership said: You know, you better go back to square one. You can't 
get this out of the Senate the way it is currently crafted.
  To Senator Lautenberg's credit, he then took the opportunity to 
visit--I believe Senator Manchin was involved with this in terms of 
them going together, and they started talking and saying: Maybe we can 
come up with something which is bipartisan and which can attract people 
from both sides. And that was the original Lautenberg-Vitter bill that 
was introduced. This is one of the interesting things: It immediately 
had 24 cosponsors--12 Republicans and 12 Democrats. I was one of those 
cosponsors. I think that was due to the very good staff work--he had 
some great people on his staff--but it was also due to his meeting of 
the minds with Senator Vitter, coming together, and finding that common 
ground.
  I will never forget that on that bill, the New York Times came out 
almost immediately--they had huge respect for Senator Lautenberg, and 
they said: You know, this is much better than current law. Congress 
ought to pass this. Of course, it needs a couple of changes--and I 
think they mentioned three things in their editorial. We eventually 
made those three changes they were talking about. But that just shows 
the respect Senator Lautenberg had. He was able to work with everyone, 
he was able to convey to the media what he was trying to do, and he had 
tremendous support for engaging the other side.
  One of the things that has helped us come such a long way is--we lost 
Frank, and then I joined with Senator Vitter on the bill. We lost 
Frank, but we haven't lost Bonnie, his widow. Bonnie Lautenberg has 
been in this from the very beginning, wanting to see this bill become 
law and wanting to see that her children and grandchildren are 
protected. I remember very well the speech she gave on the floor of the 
Environment and Public Works Committee. Senator Inhofe was very 
generous in terms of saying: If Senator Lautenberg's wife, Bonnie 
Lautenberg, wants to come and testify on the bill, we are going to put 
her right up front.
  She spoke very eloquently at the EPW Committee earlier this year:

       Frank understood that getting this done required the art of 
     compromise. . . . This cause is urgent, because we are living 
     in a toxic world. Chemicals are rampant in the fabrics we and 
     our children sleep in and wear, the rugs and products in our 
     homes and in the larger environment we live in. How many 
     family members and friends have we lost to cancer? We deserve 
     a system that requires screening of all chemicals to see if 
     they cause cancer or other health problems. How many more 
     people must we lose before we realize that having protections 
     in just a few states isn't good enough? We need a federal 
     program that protects every person in this country.

  That was Bonnie Lautenberg testifying before the Environment and 
Public Works Committee.
  Earlier today, we also had a large number of groups, which I will 
talk about in a little bit, and Bonnie Lautenberg came down once again 
and spoke eloquently about the need to get this done for our children 
and to have a tough cop on the beat who is going to look out there, 
analyze these chemicals, and try to do the right thing when it comes to 
that regulatory effort--at the same time, as Senator Inhofe said, 
working with the business community.
  It has been great having Bonnie Lautenberg work with us. I know she 
feels so passionate about this, she picks up the phone from home and 
calls Senators and says: The bill is at this particular point. We need 
your help. Will you take a look at it, and get with your staff?
  She has been quite an advocate in terms of moving this legislation 
along.
  Now, I just want to say a little bit about what happened earlier 
today because it was really a remarkable experience to see the coming 
together of Democrats and Republicans and for us to finally reach the 
60 votes we need in order to break a filibuster and get the bill on the 
floor. We had a variety of groups represented from the public health 
and environmental side. There was my good friend Fred Krupp from the 
Environmental Defense Fund, Collin O'Mara from the National Wildlife 
Federation, and then we had representatives from the March of Dimes, 
the Humane Society, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, 
Moms Clean Air Force, and other groups there on that NGO side.
  We also had business leaders such as former Congressman Cal Dooley, 
with whom I served in the House of Representatives. Cal is now the head 
of what is called the American Chemistry Council. And there were other 
leaders who were there also from the business side: the Alliance of 
Automobile Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National 
Association of Manufacturers, and the American Petroleum Institute.
  When we got them all there and saw them together, the big question I 
asked was this: Who would have ever thought that all of these groups 
would be together supporting this bill and wanting this bill to move 
forward?
  So that is one of the reasons we say to the leadership now that this 
bill is ready to go. It has 60 Senators. We believe the actual votes 
would be higher than that, but clearly we have 60 cosponsors now, and 
we are ready to roll here. So that is something that is very important 
for both the leadership on our side and the leadership on the 
Republican side to know, that we are willing to do the hard work on the 
floor and willing to make sure that these kinds of issues that will 
arise as we move through this we can take care of.
  Now, I want to say a little bit about--I am hoping Senator Manchin or 
Senator Vitter will arrive at some point here because they have crucial 
things they want to talk about. But people should understand that the 
Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 is there to protect American 
families, and it doesn't. There are over 84,000 known chemicals and 
hundreds of new ones every year, and only 5 have been regulated by the 
EPA--only 5 out of 84,000.
  What is absolutely clear here is that the American people want and 
deserve a government that does its job to keep families safe. That is 
why I rise today to urge support for the passage of the Frank R. 
Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act. Senator Vitter and 
I introduced this legislation for one reason and one reason only--to 
fix our Nation's broken chemical safety law.
  Ever since the EPA lost a lawsuit in 1991, it hasn't been able to 
regulate asbestos, a known carcinogen. So that was one of the key 
things that Senator Lautenberg knew a lot about. In 1991--so imagine, 
20-plus years back--the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in a ruling said 
that in their analysis and in the tests they put forward--and the 
lawyers at the EPA looked at it and said: We are unable to regulate 
asbestos now. We are unable to move forward. And no real activity has 
taken place since then.
  There is nothing that says something is more broken than when an 
agency is

[[Page 15673]]

unable to move forward with the regulatory activities it was set up to 
do. So for decades the risks have been there, the dangers have been 
there, but there is really no cop on the beat taking a look at chemical 
safety. The current system has failed. It fails to provide confidence 
in our consumer products. It fails to ensure that our families and 
communities are safe. So there is just no doubt that reform is 
overdue--40 years overdue. On this Sunday, TSCA will be 40 years old.
  I see my good friend Senator Vitter has arrived on the floor. Let me 
just take a moment, before I introduce Senator Vitter, to say that I 
couldn't have a better partner. I remember that over 2 years ago, 
Senator Vitter and I met for dinner, and we talked about this bill. We 
said: Let's work on it with each other, and let's grow bipartisan 
support. The Senator has worked actively on both sides of the aisle, as 
have I, and we have come a long way. We think we are ready to go. We 
think this bill is ready to go. I sure appreciate the partnership that 
Senator Vitter and I have formed on this. He has been a man of his 
word. When he said he was going to do something, he did it, and that is 
the way we have worked through all of the issues. And we have had many 
issues.
  Just to inform the Senator, we are in a colloquy situation now until 
about 3:40. I think we have about 5 more minutes of the colloquy, and 
then Senator Daines, who has arrived, is taking time at about 3:40, 
unless we can persuade him to give us a minute or two more.
  So I thank the Senator for his good work on this. He has really 
pulled long and hard to get the bill to this point, and we are ready to 
go; are we not?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lankford). The Senator from Louisiana.
  Mr. VITTER. Mr. President, absolutely we are ready to go, and I want 
to join my friend and colleague Senator Udall. I want to join the 
chairman of the committee, Senator Jim Inhofe, and urge all of us to 
come together, as we have been doing over these many months, and 
actually pass a good solid bipartisan TSCA reform effort.
  It was over 2 years ago that I sat down with the late Senator Frank 
Lautenberg of New Jersey in an attempt to find compromise and work 
together on updating the drastically outdated Toxic Substances Control 
Act, what we are talking about and sometimes known as TSCA. Updating 
this law was a long-time goal and passion of Frank's, as has been 
noted, and I am saddened he is not here today to see it finally moving 
forward because he worked so hard for that.
  After Frank's passing, Senator Tom Udall stepped in to help preserve 
Frank's legacy and continued working with me to move bipartisan TSCA 
reform forward. But in the time since, Senator Udall and I have worked 
tirelessly to ensure the bill substantively addresses the concerns of 
our fellow Republican and Democratic colleagues as well as concerns and 
ideas from industry and the environmental and public health 
communities.
  If you need any evidence of this being accomplished, look no further 
than the 60 bipartisan cosponsors of this bill--60 bipartisan 
cosponsors--as well as endorsements from groups ranging from the U.S. 
Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the 
American Chemistry Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, the March 
of Dimes, and the Humane Society.
  The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act was 
created to balance the needs of the regulatory bodies, the chemical 
industry, and the affected stakeholders in an effective and transparent 
way. Our bipartisan legislation ensures that Americans will have the 
certainty they deserve that the EPA is overseeing the safety of 
chemicals in the marketplace without stifling industry's success and 
innovation.
  That work has been a long time in coming, as many of my colleagues 
have noted, but it is here, and now we need to move forward. We have a 
moment of opportunity we need to act on, and I urge all of us to come 
together here on the floor and get this done now. In our work in the 
Senate, these opportunities don't come a dime a dozen. They do not come 
every day. They are here before us right now, and so I urge all of us 
to act.
  We have virtually unanimous agreement about a way to move this 
through the Senate on an extremely short time frame. The only issue is 
Senators Burr and Ayotte and their desire to have a vote on a 
completely unrelated piece of legislation. I am completely sympathetic 
to their wanting a vote, but we have an agreement otherwise to deal 
with TSCA on the floor in 2 hours and move it through the Senate. So we 
must take up this opportunity in an effective, bipartisan and 
responsible way, and I urge all of us to do that.
  I look forward to doing that in the very near future, and I thank 
again everybody who has worked so tirelessly on this, including my lead 
Democratic partner in this effort, Senator Tom Udall.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  Mr. UDALL. I thank the Senator so much. As I have said, he has been a 
great partner to work with on this. He has always been a man of his 
word.
  Senator Manchin is now on the floor, and I thought it would be good 
for him to talk a bit about his involvement. I know he was an early 
cosponsor. He was a good friend to Senator Lautenberg.
  I say to Senator Manchin, one of the issues we have been talking 
about is the question of whether this bill is ready to go, but please, 
it is open for your comment and discussion. Please proceed.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia.
  Mr. MANCHIN. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about a bill that 
is long past due--long past due--and one that, in part, honors our dear 
colleague and my dear friend Frank Lautenberg. Anybody who served with 
Frank knew he served with compassion, and he had a passion with that 
compassion that was unbeatable.
  This is one of those pieces of legislation he had compassion for and 
the passion to get it done, and I think we can all agree the current 
Toxic Substances Control Act, which we know as TSCA, is inadequate and 
the law is long past due to be reformed. The Toxic Substances Control 
Act has not been improved in more than 30 years.
  I couldn't believe that when Frank explained to me the history of 
this piece of legislation. How this all came about and how I became 
involved is that in 2013 I started talking to Senator Vitter. He was 
working it diligently, and he told me that Frank had always been on the 
frontline and championed this thing. So I went to Frank to get his 
input, and he said: Joe, the time has come. We have to do something. We 
have to move the ball forward. It is not going to be a perfect bill. I 
understand that. And to be honest, I have never seen a perfect bill. So 
we worked on it, but Frank was willing to move it forward.
  Here are the facts. In the 30 years that we have been talking about 
doing nothing but talking about it, 80,000 chemicals have been 
registered in the United States--80,000 new chemicals have been 
registered--which many of us use every day. We use these unknowingly. 
Only 200 have undergone EPA testing--only 200 out of 80,000. So Frank 
thought, very pragmatically, if we can just move the ball, can we do 
20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 or 50,000 of them? That is all we were 
trying to do, and he knew this.
  There is not one person here who can question Senator Lautenberg's 
dedication to not only reforming the law but also protecting the 
environment and the health and safety of every American. This thing got 
a little bit nasty, to the point where Frank, really sincere about 
moving this forward, knew he had to take some steps. After 30 years, I 
can tell you Frank Lautenberg knew exactly what he was doing. He knew 
exactly that he had to make some adjustments to move the ball forward, 
and that is what we are here for. Frank wanted to do that.
  So we had a long talk about that, and Frank said: Joe, try to move it 
if you can. So we all got together, our staffs got together, and things 
started to happen. Then Senator Udall became

[[Page 15674]]

very much involved, and I appreciate that he was on the committee. He 
championed it from there. He and Senator Vitter are sitting on that 
committee and really making things happen.
  Reforming TSCA would establish much needed regulatory certainty for 
the chemical industry, which directly and indirectly employs about 
40,000 West Virginians and over 800,000 people nationwide. When Senator 
Lautenberg met with Senator Vitter, he toughened many of the most 
important provisions in the law, and Senator Udall has taken up that 
effort and further strengthened the bill.
  The bill we have before us includes increased States' rights under 
preemption. That was our hangup for a long time. They worked through 
this, and I commend both of them for working through preemption and 
making sure that the States that have been out front and doing things 
are not going to be harmed by this. That was never the intention.
  It ensures that doctors, first responders, and government health and 
environmental officials would have greater access to confidential 
business information to guarantee that those potentially exposed to 
harmful chemicals could receive the best possible treatment.
  Most importantly, it contains a safety standard that, unlike current 
law, is based solely on human health and the environment and includes 
no cost-benefit analysis.
  Now let me get personal here. In my State we had Freedom Industry 
leak a chemical called MCHM, used in the coal cleaning process in West 
Virginia. We had no idea what effect this chemical had on humans. We 
had one plant, one intake on the Elk River that supplied about 300,000 
homes with water. The whole valley was affected--everybody. Don't drink 
it, don't bathe in it, don't wash. We didn't know what effect it would 
have so all precautions were taken. It shut down a whole industry. It 
shut down the whole community--the whole city, if you will.
  In July of last year, I pushed the NIH and CDC to conduct further 
studies into the potential impacts of crude MCHM. We didn't know. We 
had to push them, and we had to get everybody onboard to tell us as 
quickly as they could what effect it has on our humans and on our 
children. Does it have any long-lasting effects?
  The NIH's National Toxicology Program concluded their study into 
crude MCHM and indicated that no long-term health effects should be 
expected for residents who were impacted. That was great news, but it 
came long after a lot of harm was done.
  While I am thrilled with the findings, we shouldn't have to wait more 
than 1 year to get safety information on the chemicals in question. 
This bill that we are working on right now would require the EPA to 
systematically review all chemicals in commerce for the first time 
ever. While this will be a long process, it is far superior to the 
current system that allows the chemicals we use every day to go 
untested for health impacts on all of us.
  Some of my colleagues have argued that the bill could be better. I 
assure you it could be better. Every bill that we ever pass here could 
be better. But you have to start somewhere. Frank Lautenberg knew that. 
After 30 years, he said: Listen, enough is enough. If Frank Lautenberg 
had been able and we could have gotten this done 2, 3 years later, my 
community, my State--300,000 residents out of 1.8 million--wouldn't 
have been affected for 1 year with the uncertainty of what effect it is 
going to have on them.
  I do know that before I decide to vote for a bill, I ask myself three 
things. Will this improve the quality of life of my constituents? Is it 
better than the status quo? And have we worked as hard as we can to 
preserve our core beliefs? For me, the Frank Lautenberg Chemical Safety 
for the 21st Century Act is a yes on all three. It is a win-win for all 
of us. Senator Lautenberg was an extremely smart legislator who knew it 
was time to move past partisan politics and craft a bill that would 
finally protect all Americans. This bill does that. It does it in grand 
fashion.
  I think Senator Vitter summed it up. We have a little bit of a 
jousting going on, if you will. I understand it. I sympathize with 
Senator Burr and Senator Ayotte in wanting to get a piece of 
legislation that most of us--I think all of us--support. It may not be 
the right fit for it right now, and this bill should go as clean. As 
much work and as much time as has elapsed, this bill should go clean. I 
truly believe that.
  We are committed with our energy bill coming up, as we are with the 
LWG--the land-water grant--and we are going to be there. We are going 
to fight for that. But it should be done in a different format than 
what this piece of legislation is being done in and given how important 
this piece of legislation is--the Frank Lautenberg legislation, which 
he worked so hard on and dedicated his life to. I want to make sure 
that we support this in the fashion that it should be. It is 
bipartisan. There are not too many things here that are bipartisan. 
This is one moment that we should seize and move forward for all of our 
constituents.
  With that, I say to Senator Udall, I commend you for the job you have 
done and the work you have put into this, and I know that Frank would 
be proud of you.
  Mr. UDALL. I say to Senator Manchin, I want to thank you too because 
I know you have labored hard on this, and you helped the original 
cosponsors get together and talk with each other and help them find 
common ground. With Senator Vitter here, we both believe we are going 
to have a couple of meetings now to try to move forward with the bill, 
as you have talked about, and meet with leadership and iron out the 
differences. But this thing is ready to go.
  Mr. MANCHIN. If I may, I ask the Senator, the preemption was the last 
thing hanging, right?
  Mr. UDALL. Yes.
  Mr. MANCHIN. You have worked through that. All of our States that had 
concerns about that know they will not be usurped by preemption, that 
we will commence and you have to reduce your standards.
  Mr. UDALL. The key here is that States are going to be able to 
participate much more. When we started with the original bill, we 
worked more towards having States participate.
  I know that Senator Daines has been very generous to us and shown us 
great courtesy. We have run over our time. I am going to yield the 
floor, Senator Manchin, unless you have something else.
  Mr. MANCHIN. I would like to recognize Mrs. Lautenberg here to 
observe this historic moment.
  We are so happy to have you here, Bonnie. I know that Frank would be 
proud of you, having fought the good fight that he fought forever.
  There is our good friend right there.
  Mr. UDALL. Earlier, before the Senator got here, this is what I 
showed everybody, which is a picture of Frank and his grandchildren. 
You know well how he always talked about his grandchildren--
  Mr. MANCHIN. God bless.
  Mr. UDALL. And how we were supposed to legislate with grandchildren 
in mind.
  I wish to thank Senator Daines for his courtesies. The Senator can 
count on me and Senator Manchin to work with him on the Land and Water 
Conservation Fund. Senator Manchin is from West Virginia, but I am from 
the West, like he is. I think we all believe that should move forward.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Montana.
  Mr. DAINES. Mr. President, Montana has a rich legacy of service to 
our country. From maintaining our Nation's peace-through-strength 
strategy at Montana's Malmstrom Air Force Base, where we oversee one-
third of our Nation's intercontinental ballistic missiles, to our Army 
and Air National Guard members' work to support our communities in 
times of emergency and respond to calls for deployment overseas, 
Montana is playing a critical role in meeting our Nation's security and 
military needs. Montanans know firsthand the importance of supporting 
our men and women in uniform.

[[Page 15675]]

  The National Defense Authorization Act is critical to ensuring 
servicemembers have the funding and support they need to fulfill their 
missions. The NDAA prioritizes the needs of our servicemembers, while 
protecting the important role that Montana holds in our national 
defense. The passage of this legislation is critical to carrying out 
our missions in an increasingly dangerous world.
  In fact, earlier this year former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger 
testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He described the 
perilous state of our global security: ``The United States has not 
faced a more diverse and complex array of crises since the end of the 
Second World War.''
  The threats we face from Syria, Russia, China, and ISIS are too 
serious for our troops to lack the resources they need to protect and 
defend our Nation from foreign threats. Yet the leader of our troops, 
our Commander in Chief, has threatened to veto the bipartisan NDAA, 
which would fund our military priorities at the levels he requested. 
This is the same foreign policy agenda that has become the hallmark of 
President Obama's now famous ``lead from behind'' strategy.
  Even former Democratic President Jimmy Carter agrees. In fact, 
earlier this summer, President Carter was asked whether he thought 
President Obama's foreign policy was a success or failure on the world 
stage. Here is what President Carter replied: ``I can't think of many 
nations in the world where we have a better relationship now than we 
did when he took over.''
  President Carter then continued: ``I would say that the United 
States' influence and prestige and respect in the world is probably 
lower now than it was 6 or 7 years ago.''
  This weekend the Washington Post's editorial board criticized 
President Obama for holding our troops ransom for his domestic policy 
agenda. That editorial said this:

       American Presidents rarely veto national defense 
     authorization bills, since they are, well, vital to national 
     security. . . . Refusing to sign this bill would make 
     history, but not in a good way.

  It is a mistake for President Obama to use our troops for leverage. 
Our troops deserve better. The NDAA seeks to provide our troops with 
the support they deserve. It fully authorizes spending on defense 
programs at the President's budget request level of $612 billion for 
fiscal year 2016. It authorizes $75 million for the Southern Border 
Security Initiative to help address challenges facing the U.S.-Mexican 
border. It supports servicemembers beyond their years of sacrifice to 
our Nation by extending retirement benefits to the vast majority of 
servicemembers left out of the current system. It includes a provision 
that mirrors my legislation, which I introduced, called the Securing 
Military Personnel Response Firearm Initiative Act, or SEMPER FI Act, 
which empowers a member of the Armed Forces to carry appropriate 
firearms, including personal firearms, at DOD installations, reserve 
centers, and recruiting centers.
  Additionally, this bill provides much-needed support for Montana's 
military missions. There is $19.7 million for the Tactical Response 
Force Alert Facility at Malmstrom Air Force Base. There is $4.26 
million for an energy conservation project at Malmstrom. It authorizes 
funding for Avionics Modernization Program Increments 1 and 2 to ensure 
that our C-130s can stay in the air. It authorizes funding for C-130 
engine modifications. It expresses the sense of Congress that the 
nuclear triad plays a critical role in ensuring our national security 
and that it is the policy of
the United States to operate, sustain, and modernize or replace the 
triad and to operate and modernize or replace a capability to forward-
deploy nuclear weapons and dual-capable fighter bomber aircraft.
  The heroes of our Nation serve our country selflessly day in and day 
out, and they don't deserve partisan politics. It is unfortunate that 
critical appropriations for our military and veterans were blocked in 
recent weeks. Today's vote shows there is overwhelming bipartisan 
support to fund our troops. Given this, it is senseless that partisan 
politics continue to block funding for our troops.
  I urge our Democratic Senators to put politics aside. Let's do what 
is right. Join me in supporting the Department of Defense 
appropriations bill. Our heroes deserve our utmost respect and the 
security to carry out their missions without threats--without threats 
from our Commander in Chief. Congress has a constitutional duty to 
provide for the funding of our troops. This body needs to uphold that 
responsibility. Let's do what is right. Let's pass the National Defense 
Authorization Act.
  I yield back my time.
  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. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Flake). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.


                    The Economy and EPA Regulations

  Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, last Friday the Obama administration 
released the latest numbers on unemployment and jobs, and once again, 
the numbers were grim. Experts predicted that our economy would create 
200,000 new jobs in September. Instead, they fell woefully short. There 
were only 140,000 jobs, so they were about 60,000 jobs short. That is a 
big miss. It is nowhere near as many jobs as America's families need 
now.
  Here is how Investor's Business Daily put it in a headline on Monday, 
October 5, ``Private Hiring Pace Is Worst In 3 Years; Labor Force 
Shrinks.'' Wages have gone almost nowhere for 6 years. They actually 
declined in September. We have had 74 straight months with wage growth 
below 2 and a \1/2\ percent. Before the recession, we routinely had 3 
percent growth month after month, but President Obama seems to be 
satisfied with this limping progress. Over the weekend, he bragged 
about how many jobs have been created while he has been President.
  Is missing expectations good enough for President Obama? It is not 
good enough for me. It is not good enough to get the economic growth 
that we need in this country and that we should have coming out of a 
recession.
  One of the very big reasons for this slow growth is due to all of the 
regulations that this administration has piled onto the backs of 
American families. Since 2009, this administration has come out with 
more than 2,500 new regulations. According to the American Action 
Forum, the total cost of all of these new regulations--this new red 
tape--is about $680 billion. That is more than $2,100 for every man, 
woman, and child in America right now.
  According to the World Bank, the United States is 46th in the world 
in terms of how easy it is to start a business. Is 46th in the world 
good enough? Maybe it is good enough for President Obama, but I don't 
think it is good enough for the American people. All of these 
regulations make it very tough for someone to start a business right 
now. It is also tough for existing businesses to create new jobs.
  Last week, the energy company Royal Dutch Shell announced that it was 
going to suspend drilling for oil off the coast of Alaska. They said 
one of the reasons was ``the challenging and unpredictable federal 
regulatory environment in offshore Alaska.'' Too much regulation is 
making it too difficult to produce the American energy and American 
jobs that we need.
  Unelected, unaccountable Washington bureaucrats have been having a 
field day at the expense of our economy. As the Obama administration 
runs down, it is in a race to get even more rules on the books.
  Just last week the administration announced three big new 
regulations. On Tuesday, the EPA finalized a rule on oil refineries. It 
is going to require refineries to install new equipment and spend more 
money on something other than creating jobs and paying higher wages to 
their workers. It is estimated that the rule could cost up to $1 
billion and provide very little in the way of health benefits.

[[Page 15676]]

  On Wednesday, the EPA finalized more limits on coal, gas, and nuclear 
powerplants. Just like Tuesday's rule, this one will cost another one-
half billion dollars a year. The rule sets the unacceptable amounts of 
some emissions at zero.
  Finally, on Thursday the EPA released a new limit on ozone in the 
air. The limit was 75 parts per billion, and they cut it to 70 parts 
per billion. This is a tiny change--we are talking about parts per 
billion--but that tiny change is going to cost more than $2 billion a 
year once the rule is in full effect. Huge chunks of the country are 
going to have to adjust to meet the new standard, and the benefit is 
minuscule.
  Farms and small manufacturing companies will have to buy new 
equipment or change the way they do things. States and cities will have 
to change how they do local transportation projects. All of that adds 
up to lost jobs and even less economic growth than we have had in the 
past 6 years. These are huge effects, all to chase another few tiny 
parts per billion of ozone. Five parts per billion is the equivalent of 
5 seconds over 32 years. That is how small it is, but the costs are 
enormous.
  Over the course of three days last week, three new regulations have 
been added. They will cost our economy billions of dollars at a time 
when the private-hiring pace is at its worst in 3 years and the labor 
force shrinks.
  We all agree that reasonable regulations make good sense. In the 
1960s and 1970s, regulations helped to clean up pollution in our air, 
land, and water, but now Washington bureaucrats are chasing after 
smaller and smaller trace amounts of chemicals no matter what the cost, 
how high the cost, or how insignificant the benefits.
  The EPA issued one rule that I found hard to believe. I thought it 
was a misprint, but it is not. They issued one rule that would cost 
$9.6 billion per year to administer.
  What are the benefits? Only $4 million. I thought they had misspelled 
and misplaced the ``b'' and the ``m,'' but, no. It will cost $9.6 
billion and will produce only $4 million in direct benefits. That is as 
much as $2,400 in costs for every $1 in benefits. How can they do this? 
I am talking about direct benefits.
  The EPA tried to say: Well, there are all sorts of what they called 
ancillary benefits. Who gets to decide how much these are worth? 
Apparently the Obama administration says that it does. It is no 
surprise that this administration cooks up an imaginary number for 
those theoretical benefits--not direct benefits, but their 
``ancillary'' benefits, and they say it is big enough to balance the 
very real costs that American families feel.
  It is all a way to justify these ridiculous rules that destroy jobs, 
restrict freedom, and do very little good for Americans. It is 
Washington and this administration run amok.
  Is the Obama administration trying to make sure our economy continues 
to limp along as it has for the past 6\1/2\ years? Is that what they 
want?
  In 1972, the Clean Water Act was meant to protect navigable waters. 
It was reasonable. We want to protect our navigable waters. Today the 
administration has a new water rule called waters of the United States. 
It is going to give Washington bureaucrats control over everything from 
irrigation ditches to small natural ponds in someone's backyard. This 
is unreasonable. Where does it end? Bipartisan majorities in the 
Congress already say it needs to end now.
  I have introduced a bill that would direct the Obama administration 
to come up with a new rule on waters of the United States--one that 
protects traditional navigable water from pollution, which we must do, 
but it also protects farmers, ranchers, and private landowners. We can 
do both.
  This legislation has 46 cosponsors, Democrats and Republicans. We are 
telling the Obama administration that enough is enough.
  Republicans are also ready to take on some of these other outrageous 
rules such as the extreme new restrictions on powerplants. That is what 
Congress is going to be doing to stop the insanity of these out-of-
control regulations and out-of-control regulators. We need to cut 
through the redtape.
  Americans want to get back to work. They want to get our economy 
going again. Congress needs to help them do it because this 
administration certainly is not. The Obama administration basically 
needs to get out of the way.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  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. SULLIVAN. 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. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I wish to speak this afternoon on a very 
important vote that we took today to move forward on the Defense 
authorization bill. I thought I would start by backing up a little bit.
  Last week we had the opportunity to vote on and talk about funding 
for our veterans and our troops. In addition to the Defense 
authorization bill that we voted on today to proceed to that, the votes 
we took last week were very important. They were very important to the 
country and certainly very important to my State--the great State of 
Alaska--which has a huge military presence, but also to our huge 
veteran population. We have probably the highest number of veterans per 
capita than any State in the Union.
  I am honored to have a good friend of mine, Representative Bob 
Herron, the majority whip in the Alaska House. He is in the Gallery 
today. He is also a marine. So he represents not only Alaska in our 
State Government but Alaska as a veteran, as a fellow marine.
  The American people want the Senate to be working again. We all know 
the country has huge challenges. I wish to speak about some national 
foreign policy challenges. We have a huge debt: $8 trillion. I think we 
are close to $19 trillion. We got downgraded in terms of our credit 
rating for the first time in American history. We can't grow the 
economy. We have huge challenges.
  For years the Senate was not working. It was not moving forward. Some 
would have called it dysfunctional. No regular order, no amendments, no 
budget, no appropriations bills; a locked down U.S. Senate not doing 
its work. I think the American people wanted us to do work. So last 
fall they said it is time for a change. We need to get to work. We need 
to start tackling our challenges.
  So we are changing that. We are working hard to do things the 
American people sent us to Washington to do. We passed a budget. It 
hasn't happened in years. We passed appropriations bills through 
regular order, Democrats and Republicans, bringing amendments to the 
floor of the Senate, voting again. One of the things we have been 
doing--and it happened today--is we are prioritizing where they want us 
to prioritize. Our national defense, which is probably the most 
important role we have in this body--our troops, our veterans.
  So we are making progress, but progress is halting. It is never a 
straight line. For some reason--and we saw it over the last couple of 
weeks--a lot of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle didn't 
want to fund the government, particularly in terms of these critical 
issues of our troops, including our national defense and taking care of 
our veterans--and again we saw that over the last couple of weeks.
  Two critical appropriations bills moved to the Senate floor. There 
was the Defense appropriations bill, which again passed out of the 
Appropriations Committee by huge bipartisan numbers: 27 to 3. There was 
huge bipartisan support for that bill. Then we had the Military 
Construction and Veterans Affairs appropriations bill, which passed out 
of committee 21 to 9. It had huge bipartisan support. Why? Because the 
American people want us to focus on these critical issues: national 
defense, our troops, taking care of our veterans. So we are moving 
forward.
  The budget, appropriations bills that we voted on that haven't been 
voted on for years--bipartisan, prioritizing what

[[Page 15677]]

the American people want. But then these appropriations bills, which 
provide funding for our vets, funding for our troops, came to the 
floor, and progress stopped. I still don't understand why. When asked 
by constituents: Why did the other side vote to move these bills out of 
committee in such a bipartisan way, but then when they got to the 
floor, they stopped, they filibustered, no spending for our troops or 
for our vets, I don't know the answer. I have asked. My constituents 
are asking. Directions from the White House? Who knows. But I do think 
it is clear to me, I think it is clear to most Americans, and I even 
think it is clear to all of the Members of this body that when those 
bills were filibustered over the last 2 weeks, that our troops and our 
veterans were shortchanged because we are voting to defund them. That 
is what the filibuster did; it defunded our troops and our veterans.
  So I have to admit that when we were getting ready to vote today, I 
feared a repeat performance on probably one of the most important bills 
we are going to take up all year--the National Defense Authorization 
Act. It authorizes spending, pay raises, sets out our military 
strategy, retirement reform. It is so important to our country. Once 
again, I wish to commend Chairman McCain and Ranking Member Reed, the 
two leaders of the Armed Services Committee who did such a good job 
moving that bill forward. Once again, it started with such great 
bipartisan promise. It moved out of committee 22 to 4, very bipartisan. 
Then it came to the Senate floor for a vote a few months ago, the NDAA, 
the Defense authorization bill; 71 Senators, incredibly bipartisan, 
moved forward and voted for that bill. Then it went to a conference 
with the House where it was improved. It all seemed to be on track to 
bring this bill back to the floor of the Senate and to vote on moving 
forward on the conference report.
  What happened? That is great bipartisan progress. We are changing 
things. We are making things happen. The President of the United States 
has since said he is going to veto the bill. He is going to veto the 
bill--veto the National Defense Authorization Act.
  Once again--and I am not sure, taking orders from the White House or 
not--the minority leader came to the floor and told the American people 
this morning he would work with the President to sustain that veto, to 
sustain the veto of our Defense bill. What a disappointment. We have 
this huge bipartisan progress. When given the clear choice between 
standing with our troops and our veterans or the President, who says he 
is going to veto this bill for reasons I still don't understand, the 
minority leader is choosing the President.
  I am honored to sit on the Armed Services Committee of the Senate as 
well as the Veterans' Affairs Committee. As I said in remarks last week 
on the Senate floor, these are two of the most bipartisan committees we 
have. It is clear to me that every member--Democratic, Republican--of 
these committees cares about our troops, respects our troops, cares 
deeply about our national security. I believe every Member of this body 
does. Once again, we saw that today. We saw that today. There was no 
filibuster. Seventy-three Senators voted to move forward on the Defense 
appropriations bill. It was 71 before and today it was 73--an important 
bipartisan victory for our national defense, for our veterans, for our 
troops, but a Presidential veto still hangs out there. The President's 
veto threat still is like a cloud hanging over this very important vote 
today.
  I mentioned at the outset that this is very important for my State, 
the great State of Alaska. This is important for the national security 
of our Nation, and this is important for all of us. It is important to 
me. As a veteran and a marine in the Reserves, I know this is a 
critically important issue. If he is going to veto this bill, I don't 
know how the Commander in Chief will explain to the American people and 
our troops why he is doing this. There have been only four times in the 
last 53 years that the NDAA has been vetoed.
  Providing the common defense of this Nation, the national defense, is 
probably our most important duty. And that duty increases when you look 
around the world and see the threats that are emerging in different 
parts of the world--the Middle East, Ukraine, the Asian Pacific, the 
Arctic.
  Mr. President, to govern is to choose. To govern is to prioritize. 
The President's administration spent years negotiating a nuclear deal 
with Iran, and this body spent weeks debating the merits of the 
President's Iran deal. That deal and what we debated then needs to be 
put in the context of the President's veto threat to the Defense 
authorization bill.
  Let me give a few examples.
  The President's Iran deal will give billions--tens of billions--in 
the lifting of sanctions to Iran, the world's largest state sponsor of 
terrorism, but the President threatens to veto a bill that will fund 
our military.
  The President's Iran deal lifts sanctions on Iranian military members 
such as General Soleimani, who literally is responsible for the maiming 
and killing of thousands of American troops, but the President's veto--
his threatened veto--would stop payment of bonuses and improved 
military retirement benefits to our troops and veterans.
  The President's Iran deal gives access to the Iranians by lifting 
sanctions on conventional weapons, ballistic missiles, and advanced 
nuclear centrifuges, but the President threatens to veto in this bill 
advanced weapons systems for the United States.
  The President's Iran deal gives the opportunity for terrorist groups 
supported by Iran such as Hezbollah and Hamas to have further funding 
for their terrorist activities, but the President threatens to veto a 
bill that provides additional funding and resources and capability for 
our troops to defeat ISIS.
  To govern is to choose. To govern is to prioritize. As we move 
forward on the substance of the national defense authorization bill, we 
are choosing and prioritizing our troops and our national defense, and 
that is why this vote was so positive this morning. I hope we can have 
at least 73 Senators, who voted to move forward today, vote to pass the 
NDAA and put it on the President's desk for his signature. But if the 
President chooses to veto this critical piece of legislation, which has 
enormous bipartisan support, at this moment in time when our country 
faces serious international threats, I hope that my colleagues--the 73 
Senators who voted to move forward on this critical piece of 
legislation--will also stand strong and vote to override the veto of 
the President, which is exactly what our troops and the American people 
would want us to do.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.


                              Gun Violence

  Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, what we saw in Roseburg last week was 
a repeat of the evil we have seen in countless places across the 
country, causing tens of thousands of deaths in towns and cities and 
suburbs and rural areas across this country.
  Evil visited Roseburg. We saw the worst of human character in those 
moments of mass killing. We saw also the best in human character in the 
response from the firemen, police, and emergency responders who risked 
their lives and saved lives.
  When the sound of gunshots rang out that morning, my own recollection 
was triggered of a morning just a few years earlier when I stood with 
the parents and loved ones on that day of the mass slaughter in Sandy 
Hook in Newtown.
  My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Roseburg, with the 
victims and their loved ones. I know that nothing said here--certainly 
nothing I can say--will help mend those wounds and ease the grief and 
pain of those loved ones for the great lives lost and the many left 
behind.
  I am frustrated and angry coming here today because the places of 
those mass killings have become shorthand for a deep disease, an 
epidemic of violence in America today--Virginia Tech, Columbine, 
Charleston, Sandy Hook, Newtown, and now Roseburg. They are shorthand 
for mass slaughters which have occurred at the rate of about one

[[Page 15678]]

a week while President Obama has been in office. There have been 142 
school shootings since Newtown alone. There are 30,000 deaths per year 
in America, the greatest, strongest country in the history of the 
world.
  The mass killings are not even the source of the largest numbers. 
They are individual deaths, such as that of Javier Martinez, a young 
man from New Haven with an enormously bright and promising future. When 
I visited his school after he was killed by a gun because he was in the 
wrong place at the wrong time, his classmates asked me to talk about 
gun violence--not as an abstract notion but as a real threat to them 
and their community.
  It is a phenomenon that faces every community every day, everywhere, 
and everyone. All of us are touched by it if we think about it, if we 
put aside the denial that all too often affects us, a denial that 
causes people to minimize the threat. We all are victims or we know 
victims or we know of the tragic consequences of real stories in our 
community as a result of gun violence.
  The deaths in Roseburg are tragic, but no less tragic was Javier 
Martinez' death, nor are the gun deaths that occur in situations that 
involve domestic violence, gangs, fights between individuals, 
accidents, and suicides--a major source of death by gun violence--and 
countless other circumstances where people who are dangerous or who 
lack the mental health or the maturity to responsibly use guns 
nonetheless have access to them and use them for deadly purposes.
  Let's be very clear. The Second Amendment is a guarantee under our 
Constitution to law-abiding citizens that they can use guns for lawful 
purposes, whether recreational or hunting, that they can possess as 
many as they please, and the vast majority of them support measures 
that will keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.
  Keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people is the reason we 
have advanced commonsense, sensible measures to stop gun violence, and 
the failure to adopt them has made Congress complicit--in effect an 
aider and abettor to those deaths--because Congress has enabled the 
continuation of death and destruction that has become a fact of life in 
America, a disgraceful and shameful emblem of Congress's failure to 
act. There is a point when inaction causes culpability, when it 
becomes, in effect, aiding and abetting and complicity. Congress in 
some ways might just as well be standing at the elbows of those 
shooters, whether in Charleston or Roseburg or Sandy Hook or elsewhere.
  Regret and grief are appropriate, but they are no solution. They are 
no excuse for inaction. Inaction is reprehensible when it comes to gun 
violence--an epidemic and disease spreading in this country just as 
surely as a contagion or infection. The inaction of this body speaks 
louder than words.
  My simple reaction is, enough--enough of inaction. The time for 
action is now on universal background checks, a ban on illegal 
trafficking and straw purchases, a prohibition on assault weapons and 
high-capacity magazines, as well as mental health initiatives and 
school safety measures. This kind of comprehensive package of reforms 
has been proposed. This body failed to adopt it, but that is no excuse 
for inaction now.
  There is no one measure, no single solution, no panacea, no simple 
fix to this problem, but we must begin because laws have consequences. 
I refuse to adopt the defeatist or denial approach of many of our 
colleagues who say the laws simply will not work, cannot do anything, 
will not solve the problem.
  We are here because we believe laws can improve the lives of ordinary 
Americans, no less so when it comes to gun violence or any other 
problem we face. In fact, we ought to approach this issue of gun 
violence with the same urgency and immediacy that America would in 
attempting to solve any public health crisis because surely we face a 
public health crisis and emergency in gun violence.
  When there is a spread of a contagious disease, whether it is flu, 
tuberculosis, or Ebola, we track the source, hospitalize the victims, 
take remedial action, admit them to treatment, and take preventive 
measures to prevent that kind of disease from recurring. When there is 
a spread of food poisoning, we don't throw up our arms and say there is 
nothing laws can do. In fact, law enforcement and health authorities 
track down the packages that are contaminated and provide relief for 
the people who suffer from that kind of occurrence and take preventive 
measures to stop it from recurring by imposing sanitary conditions and 
rules and regulations on the food producer.
  Infections, contagion, and spread of disease can be deadly and 
crippling; they can threaten fear and harm and cause panic. Gun 
violence is exactly the same. It is equally insidious and pernicious, 
and its impact is greater than any of those single epidemics. The 
spread of stolen guns--guns that are stolen or illegally purchased--is 
much like a disease in America today, and the ones who will testify to 
that fact are our law enforcement authorities who see it firsthand and 
are on our side in urging responsible, commonsense measures and reform.
  When this Nation faced, in effect, an epidemic of car deaths and 
injuries, we didn't stop everyone from driving, but we did put in place 
reasonable safeguards--seatbelt laws, drunk driving measures, and speed 
limits--and we enforced them. They were resisted at the time. Drunk 
driving measures caused outrage among some civil libertarians, but now 
they are part of our everyday expectations about how life will work in 
America, and they have drastically reduced auto fatalities and 
injuries. The recognition of the damage and destruction that has been 
caused by automobiles means that we educate and we take commonsense, 
responsible measures.
  Much of the knowledge that led to those commonsense, sensible 
measures came from research--yes, knowledge. It was fact-based, 
evidence-driven research done by the Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention. Like many of my colleagues, I am dismayed by the fact that 
similar, incredibly valuable public health data about gun control from 
this world-class institution is unavailable to us because of the 
restrictive, politically motivated budget riders forbidding it. It is 
unconscionable that Congress's response to this problem is denial, 
shutting out research and responsible, fact-based evidence involving 
the provision of information.
  This country knows how to respond to a public health crisis. We are 
America. We face the challenges; we don't deny or disparage the truth 
tellers.
  After the Stockton schoolyard shooting in California where 34 
children were shot and 5 killed, President George H.W. Bush issued an 
Executive order in 1989 banning the import of semiautomatic assault 
rifles. There were repeated circumventions of that order. Part of the 
response was, in 1994, a measure authored by Senator Feinstein--our 
great colleague--banning the manufacture and transfer of assault 
weapons and high-capacity magazines. That measure expired, but it shows 
how we can act and how we can face challenges.
  Ronald Reagan was almost killed by an assassin's bullet--a would-be 
assassin's bullet--in 1981. Ten years after the event, he wrote in the 
New York Times that if the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act 
reduced gun deaths by as little as 10 percent, it would be ``well worth 
making it the law of the land because there would be a lot fewer 
families facing anniversaries such as the Bradys and the Reagan's faced 
every March 30th.'' That bill, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention 
Act, became law in 1993 with his support 12 years after that near 
assassination.
  Both Stockton and the Reagan near assassination show that these 
measures are possible. It may look like a marathon. It is never a 
sprint. It is not only possible, it is obligatory.
  I look forward to a number of my colleagues and myself--and I note 
that a partner in this effort has been my colleague Senator Murphy, who 
will follow me shortly--I look forward to all of us coming together and 
spearheading and championing again a set of reforms that will help make 
America safer and

[[Page 15679]]

better. The time for action is truly now. This public health emergency 
cannot go unaddressed. The gap in our current laws can be remedied.
  I have already offered the Lori Jackson Violence Survivor Protection 
Act, a bill named for a brave Connecticut mother of two children who 
was estranged from her husband, fled her home for her life, obtained a 
temporary restraining order for her and her children's protection, and 
then was gunned down by her estranged husband because the temporary 
protective order did not require him to surrender his weapon--a gap in 
the law that must be remedied. That bill would do so.
  This bill is modest. My bill would close this loophole requiring 
protective orders, whether temporary or permanent, to require the 
surrendering of weapons. Women who are victims of domestic violence are 
at the greatest risk. Women who are victims of this insidious peril are 
most in danger when they first leave or try to leave. That is when the 
temporary order is, in effect, most necessary, the danger at its 
greatest but the law at its weakest in stopping gun violence.
  We are on the right side of history. We are on the right side of law 
enforcement. We are on the right side of public opinion. The 
overwhelming majority of Americans clearly favor these kinds of 
measures and the overwhelming majority of gun owners too. If history is 
on our side, we must be on the right side of this issue.
  I urge my colleagues to join me in this effort to keep faith with the 
victims of Newtown and Sandy Hook, to demonstrate that our grief and 
regret is more than just words, that it will lead to action. The time 
for action is now.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, let me thank Senator Blumenthal for being 
such a great partner. He and I have traveled a very long journey 
together since September of 2012 when we both stood together at the 
firehouse in Sandy Hook, CT. We have become evangelical in our belief 
that this mass slaughter has to stop. On Friday we all stopped for a 
moment and we sent our sympathies to those who were killed in Portland: 
Lucero Alcaraz, Treven Taylor Anspach, Rebecka Ann Carnes, Quinn Glen 
Cooper, Kim Dietz, Lucas Eibel, Jason Dale Johnson, Lawrence Levine--he 
was the assistant professor there--and Sarena Dawn Moore.
  Mr. President, 274 days this year and 294 mass shootings. We are 
averaging one mass shooting--multiple people being shot at one 
particular moment--more mass shootings than we have days in the year.
  Of course, for us, this shooting and the information that came out in 
the aftermath of it was particularly chilling because we have seen this 
young man before. The young man, Christopher Harper-Mercer, was 
isolated, withdrawn, and obsessed with guns. His family had many of 
them. He had rebuffed attempts at socialization by his family. He had 
grievances that he mainly shared with himself. He eventually turned 
those grievances on nine people who died and about an equal number who 
were injured.
  We know that story because we saw it play out in Connecticut as 
well--a mentally ill individual, a young man who became isolated from 
his friends, his community, and his family, who had a rather large 
store of weapons, and who then took out his frustration and his outrage 
on 20 little kids at Sandy Hook Elementary.
  But I guess to me what is definitional about this scourge of mass 
violence is not necessarily what happened on Friday but what happened 
the day after, on Saturday. On Saturday there were likely another 80 
people killed by guns all across the country. That is about the number 
we run every single day. Every day there are a handful of exceptional 
stories, stories that make your heart turn, that make your gut cringe.
  On Saturday there was an 11-year-old boy who confronted his 8-year-
old neighbor in Tennessee over the fact that she would not let him play 
with her pet bunny. When she protested and said she did not want him to 
play with it, he marched back into his house, got a shotgun, walked 
back over to her, and shot her with a shotgun. How on Earth did an 11-
year-old boy get that quick access to a shotgun? How on Earth have we 
gotten into a moment in which a dispute over whether you can hold a 
little pet bunny turns into a murder?
  What I can tell you is that I guarantee that scene does not play out 
in other countries in this world, that 11-year-old boys don't shoot 8-
year-old girls with shotguns in Sweden or Japan or in Great Britain. We 
know that because what is happening here in the United States is 
exceptional. This rate of 80 people being lost to guns every day, this 
normalization of mass shootings, is exclusive to the United States. We 
have a gun homicide rate in the United States that is not twice the 
average of other OEDC countries, it is not 5 times, it is not 10 times, 
it is 20 times the average of our first-world competitor nations. We 
have to ask ourselves, what is different about the United States? What 
is different about life here, the way in which we resolve disputes, 
from all of these other nations that have gun violence, gun death rates 
that are 20 times lower than the United States?
  Let's be honest about one thing. It is not that the United States has 
higher rates of mental illness than other countries. It is not that our 
mental health delivery system spends less than other countries. There 
is no more mental illness in the United States than there is in any 
other industrialized country. Some studies will tell you that we spend 
more on mental illness treatment and behavioral health treatment than 
any other country. Yet gun deaths are 20 times what they are in other 
countries. It is not because we lack for protection. Our malls and our 
churches and our movie theatres are not any less protected or less 
secure than those in other countries. We invest in law enforcement at a 
same or greater rate than all of these other nations. What is 
different? What is different here in this country? What is different is 
that we are awash in guns. We are awash in illegal guns. We celebrate 
weapons that are designed exclusively to kill other people, and we 
collect them and show them off for sport, military-style assault 
weapons, cartridges, drums of ammunition that hold 100 rounds, whose 
utility is only associated with ending life. That is what is different. 
That is what is different about the United States.
  I will admit that the solution is comprehensive because I will be the 
last person to tell you that fixing our mental health system will not 
have a beneficial effect on the rates of gun violence. Adam Lanza and 
Christopher Harper-Mercer were deeply troubled individuals who were 
ill-served by a behavioral health system that was far too opaque and 
complex for them. Law enforcement needs more help on the streets of New 
Haven and New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. All those things will 
help. But what distinguishes America from the other parts of the world 
that have much lower rates on gun violence is not investment in law 
enforcement and is not our rate of mental illness. So we have to have 
this conversation about our laws that allow for this flow of high-
powered guns and illegal guns onto the street.
  Senator Blumenthal and I are going to join together tomorrow to 
introduce what we think is a modest measure to ensure that no guns get 
sold to people who cannot pass a background check. Walmart does it 
today. They say: We won't sell you a gun unless you can pass a 
background check. But unfortunately many other retailers take advantage 
of a loophole that allows for 72 hours to pass without a background 
check, which then allows them to sell a gun. We just think there should 
be a simple premise. If you can't pass a background check, you 
shouldn't be able to get a gun--getting a green light to walk out of a 
store with a weapon that can kill people.
  But that is just one brick in the wall. There are a series of other 
measures that enjoy 90 percent support in this country, whether it be 
making sure people who are subject to spousal restraining orders cannot 
buy a gun during the period of time in which they

[[Page 15680]]

are under a restraining order or just expanding background checks to 
gun shows and Internet sales or just giving more resources to the 
background check system so they can make sure they upload the proper 
records. Mental health is part of the solution. It is not a substitute 
for the reform of our gun laws, but it is part of a solution as well.
  I am proud to join with Senator Cassidy to introduce the primary 
comprehensive mental health reform legislation on the floor of the 
Senate. It has 10 cosponsors at this moment: five
Republicans and five Democrats. We think you should fix the mental 
health system because it is broken, full stop, but we also understand 
it will have a downward effect on gun violence.
  I wish to close by echoing the sentiments of Senator Blumenthal. We 
are going to introduce our legislation tomorrow, and we are hopeful it 
will be taken up by this body.
  What we really worry about is that this silence from Congress has 
become complicit. I know that sounds like a very hard thing to say--
that sounds very hyperbolic--but let me walk you through why I have 
come to believe that the failure to act in the wake of these mass 
shootings has made us complicit in them. I think these young men--and 
it is not all young men, but it is mostly young men--these young men 
whose minds are becoming unhinged and are contemplating mass violence, 
they take cues from the total, complete, absolute silence from Congress 
in the face of mass shooting, after a mass shooting. If the Nation's 
top elected leaders, the people charged with deciding what matters in 
this Nation, don't even try to stop the mass carnage, then these would-
be shooters reasonably conclude that we must be OK with it because if a 
society doesn't condone settling a grievance with a gun, wouldn't the 
people in charge of it at least try to stop it.
  But we don't try--and that is what is most offensive. That is what 
truly turns my stomach. We just lived through a summer in which 4,000 
people died on the streets of this Nation, and this body is sending a 
loud, clear signal that we don't care--we don't care. Nine more people 
died on Friday--another mass slaughter--and we are back to normal this 
week.
  We are going to debate the Toxic Substances Control Act this week. I 
don't deny that is probably a very important piece of legislation, but 
we are acting as if there isn't an epidemic of preventable murder 
happening in this Nation and that it is getting worse.
  Somebody wrote last week that the gun control debate ended the day 
after Sandy Hook because that was the day America decided it was OK to 
murder 20 first graders. I know that is not the message my colleagues 
are intending to send, and we appreciate all of the sincere notes of 
sympathy that have been sent over the course of the last 2 years, 3 
years, to Newtown and those that went out on Friday to Oregon, but 
words are beginning to become meaningless. The tweets aren't helping. I 
would argue they are becoming a cover for cowardice.
  It is not a coincidence that America has a gun violence rate that is 
20 times that of any other competitor nation. We are doing something 
wrong here and the whole reason we draw our paychecks is to make wrong 
things right. If we cannot do something--a background check law, a 
mental health bill, more resources for law enforcement--if we cannot do 
anything to try to stop this soul-crushing, life-extinguishing 
violence, then we might as well go home.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
  Ms. HIRONO. Mr. President, before I begin my remarks on the Land and 
Water Conservation Fund, I wish to associate myself with the remarks of 
my colleague Senator Murphy regarding the responsibility--our 
responsibility--to deal with the issue of gun violence in our country.


                    Land and Water Conservation Fund

  Mr. President, I wish to turn to another subject. I wish to talk 
about the Land and Water Conservation Fund or the LWCF as it is 
commonly known.
  Last week, at the end of the fiscal year, the LWCF authorization 
expired. The LWCF is one of the Federal Government's best tools for 
supporting conservation, and we need to act quickly to renew the law. 
As cities grow, suburbs swell, and our natural world shrinks, the need 
for more opportunities for outdoor recreation and education grows.
  The LWCF helps expand those opportunities: opportunities for our 
veterans, our children, and our families. For example, we have heard 
from veterans who shared the therapeutic value of our public lands.
  When Matthew Zedwick served in Iraq, he was comforted by memories of 
hiking and fishing on public lands in his Oregon hometown. Since coming 
home to Oregon, he has found that visiting many of the trails, lakes, 
and streams that are protected by the LWCF helped him heal.
  Also, this year, for the first time our Nation's fourth graders have 
free access to all of our national parks. Why fourth graders? Because 
fourth graders are able to understand their surrounding environments in 
more concrete ways. Through these kinds of experiences in our national 
parks, these fourth graders will, we hope, grow into having a lifelong 
appreciation of our environment.
  Finally, millions of families looking for a weekend getaway flock to 
our parks, refuges, and wildlife reserves, areas that are afforded 
protection thanks to the LWCF.
  Despite being chronically underfunded, over the past 50 years the 
LWCF protected and conserved land in every single State. Rather than 
relying on taxpayers, money for the fund comes from oil and gas 
development on the Outer Continental Shelf. Unfortunately, without 
renewing the LWCF, conservation efforts across the country are at risk, 
including in Hawaii.
  Hawaii's environment is unique. I am sure my colleagues are aware of 
our beautiful beaches, lush greenery, and spectacular geography. For 
all its beauty, Hawaii's environment is also fragile. One-third of our 
native forest birds are endangered, and we are home to almost half of 
the Nation's threatened and endangered plants, making us in Hawaii the 
endangered species capital of the world. Our coasts and beaches are 
being threatened as we speak by sea level rise. Our corals are expected 
to suffer the worst bleaching event in history this year--this coming 
on the heels of a major bleaching event that happened just last year. 
All of these phenomena impact our economy and way of life. We know what 
is at stake if we do not act today to protect our lands for tomorrow.
  That is why my State put together a collaborative landscape proposal 
to receive LWCF money. This proposal is entitled ``Island Forests at 
Risk,'' an appropriate title as we are seeing firsthand how the future 
of our forests is indeed at risk. The Obama administration recognized 
the importance of this proposal to conserving Hawaii's unique 
ecosystems. Thanks to this recognition, a number of the island forests 
at risk land acquisitions are in line to receive LWCF funding in the 
next fiscal year. Under the plan, almost 5,000 acres will be added to 
Hawaii's volcano national parks, Hawaii's most popular national park 
that in 2014 alone attracted almost 1.7 million visitors.
  Funds will also help add almost 7,000 acres to help allow Hakalau 
National Wildlife Refuge, a land acquisition that has been the top 
priority for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Pacific Region since 
2011. These critical land acquisitions have a pricetag of almost $15 
million, and these acquisitions will only be made possible by the 
financial assistance provided by the LWCF.
  Hawaii is not the only State that is set to receive money from the 
Land and Water Conservation Fund next year. Over the past few days, my 
colleagues from across the aisle have come to the floor to talk about 
the importance of the LWCF in their own States. They have talked about 
the lands in their States and the experiences they have had in the 
outdoors with their families.
  We all recognize the opportunities that LWCF investments provide for 
our people, our economies, and future generations. We know oil and gas 
drilling

[[Page 15681]]

is accelerating climate change. We know climate change is threatening 
our native birds, our coasts, and our coral. Why not reauthorize a fund 
that takes money from activities that threaten our climate and 
environment and invests it into conservation efforts? It seems like a 
no-brainer to me.
  Earlier this year, I joined Ranking Member Cantwell and my fellow 
Democratic colleagues on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in 
introducing legislation that would permanently reauthorize LWCF--
permanently so that it will not end.
  I urge my colleagues to join us in finding a bipartisan path forward 
to permanently reauthorize the commonsense fund that protects the 
environment and affords outdoor recreation and education opportunities 
in every single State. We owe it to the people who elected us, and we 
owe it to our children and our future generations.
  I yield back the remainder of my time.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                  Selling Used Cars on the Recall List

  Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, would the Chair like to buy a used car 
from a used car dealer that was on the recall list because it had a 
defective Takata airbag in the steering wheel; so that if you had a 
fender-bender and it suddenly exploded, it might send shrapnel into 
your face and into your jugular in your neck. The answer is obviously, 
no; that you would not want to buy such a used car. Well, to the credit 
of a major used car dealer, as well as new car dealer, AutoNation, 
headquartered in Florida but with hundreds and hundreds of dealerships 
all over the country, they have set as company policy that they will 
not sell a used car on the recall list for defective products until 
that recall problem has been corrected.
  All dealers do this with regard to new cars because it is the law. In 
fact, in the highway bill we passed a couple of months ago we put in an 
additional provision, which if you are a rental car company such as 
Avis, National, and so forth, you cannot rent to a customer if it has a 
recall on that vehicle until the recall item is fixed. That just makes 
common sense. You certainly wouldn't want to put a defective product 
out there for the consuming public.
  So then why is the National Association of Automobile Dealers 
fighting us as we try to extend the law for new cars to used cars when 
it comes to the sale of a used car with a defective item? It defies 
common sense.
  This is what it is: What is the economic interest versus what is the 
safety interest--the economic interest of the used car salesman versus 
the safety interest of the consuming public that would buy that used 
car? I hope the national association will reconsider. This is an 
argument that cannot stand on all fours that they are making--that they 
comply with the sale of new cars but they don't want to comply with the 
sale of used cars.
  What we ought to be looking out for in light of all of these 
revelations of all of the defective automobiles--look what happened 
with General Motors and the ignition. Look what has happened to Toyota 
and Honda with the Takata airbags. By the way, in airbags we are 
talking some 20 million recalls worldwide. It is huge. If we are going 
to protect the consuming public, we ought to make sure that recall 
items are taken care of before those vehicles are sold.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sasse). The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. FLAKE. 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. FLAKE. Mr. President, I wish to highlight a few items that are in 
the NDAA conference report authorization that we are considering this 
week. In April of this year, my office came across a $115,000 marketing 
contract with the New York Jets and some other teams. But the contract 
with the New York Jets showed that the weekly hometown hero tribute was 
actually paid for by the taxpayers. A resulting investigation found 
that other taxpayer-funded tributes were not just with the Jets or with 
the NFL but extended to other sports leagues, as well as the NCAA. We 
don't need this kind of paid-for patriotism.
  I wish to note that many in the NFL, many teams, and others of our 
sports teams and other leagues do this out of the goodness of their 
heart. It is what it looks like. But in many instances, these salutes 
to the troops have been paid for by the taxpayer. That needs to end. 
That is why I joined Senator McCain and Senator Blumenthal in adding an 
amendment to the NDAA that will bring an end to these taxpayer-funded 
salutes to the troops.
  This amendment also encourages sports organizations that have 
accepted these funds to consider making a contribution to a charity 
that supports members of the military or veterans or their families. In 
addition, the NDAA conference report also prohibits the DOD from 
spending 25 percent of its sports-related marketing budget until they 
can show that the money that they are spending in this regard actually 
contributes towards their marketing goals or towards their recruitment 
goals.
  These results have to be reported to both the House and the Senate. 
That is a good thing. I want to thank the Pentagon, especially 
Undersecretary of Defense Brad Carson and his staff, for working with 
my office and others as we continue to investigate the scope of these 
taxpayer-funded tributes.
  Another item I want to mention in this NDAA bill is that 22-year-old 
Marine Corps Cpl Jacob Hug of Phoenix was serving as part of the U.S. 
humanitarian mission to Nepal in response to the earthquakes in that 
country. In May, Hug was one of six marines and two Nepalese soldiers 
who were killed when their helicopter crashed during a mission to 
deliver food and aid to the victims in the earthquakes there. Because 
Jacob died during a humanitarian mission, Jim and Andrea Hug, his 
parents, were informed that the DOD was not authorized to pay for their 
flight to Dover Air Force Base to be on hand when their son's remains 
returned to the United States.
  Currently, the military is only authorized to pay for next-of-kin 
travel expenses if the servicemember is killed in action. That is not 
right. The Hugs did get to travel to Dover because many in the Arizona 
delegation worked with DOD to make sure the costs were eventually paid 
for by DOD.
  I worked with Senator McCain to amend the NDAA to ensure that no 
other family has to go through this--that if a family of a 
servicemember serving on an overseas humanitarian mission is killed, 
the additional hardship is not faced by their family. This amendment 
help pays for the next of kin to travel to meet the remains of deceased 
relatives if they are killed in humanitarian operations.
  I hope we can approve this NDAA in the coming days and we can send it 
to the President. I hope that the President will sign it.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Gardner). The Senator from Rhode Island.


                             Climate Change

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, Americans across the board recognize 
the growing threat of global climate change. Last week was a big week 
on the conservative and corporate sides. New polling revealed strong 
support among conservatives for smart policies to stem carbon 
pollution. Coalitions of leading corporate voices--6 major banks and 10 
major food and beverage companies--called on us to join them in backing 
strong climate action.
  I come to the floor today, now for the 114th time, to join with 
them--with scientists and lay people, with military commanders and 
faith leaders, with environmentalists and capitalists, with Democrats 
and Republicans, all saying it is time to wake up to this crisis.

[[Page 15682]]

  Yes, I said ``and Republicans.'' Outside this Chamber, Republicans 
are calling for action on climate. The poll out last week, conducted by 
three leading Republican pollsters, showed a majority of Republican 
voters, including 54 percent of conservative Republicans, agreeing that 
the climate is changing and that human activity contributes to the 
changes we are all seeing.
  They want solutions from us. The same proportion of conservative 
Republicans--54 percent--would favor a carbon pollution fee on electric 
utilities, provided the revenue would then be rebated to consumers. As 
we know, a carbon fee is a market-based solution, very much in line 
with conservative principles. I recently introduced a bill that I hope 
both Republicans and Democrats can embrace. It would establish an 
economy-wide carbon fee on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas 
emissions and then return 100 percent of the money to the American 
people.
  It would work. A recent analysis said it would reduce U.S. carbon 
dioxide emissions by nearly 50 percent by 2030. The revenue would 
offset annual payroll taxes for every working person by $500, with a 
similar benefit to veterans and Social Security recipients. It would 
reduce the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 29 percent. It 
would return the remaining funds to States to be used locally, for 
transition costs, efficiency investments or whatever the States prefer.
  With this bill, I extend to conservatives what my very conservative 
friend, former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis, has called not just 
an olive branch but an olive limb. Whether you want tax reform, a 
proper free market for energy or even to address climate change, 
please, let's get to work.
  To state the obvious, Congress has been ruled by the lobbyists and 
political enforcers for the fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel 
industry, with political threats and very big money and lots of phony 
front groups, has made the Republican Party in Congress its political 
wing. But outside this Chamber, where conservatives don't need fossil 
fuel industry money, there is considerable conservative support for a 
carbon fee, from leading right-of-center economists, conservative think 
tanks, and former Republican officials.
  President Nixon's Treasury Secretary, George Shultz; President 
Reagan's economic adviser, Art Laffer; President George W. Bush's 
Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson; and Bush Council of Economic Advisers 
Chair, Greg Mankiw, have all advocated for some form of a carbon fee as 
the efficient way to correct a market failure--the market failure where 
we all have to pick up the costs of carbon pollution for the fossil 
fuel industry. No wonder they spend so much money around here. That 
market failure is a sweet deal for the fossil fuel fellas, but it is 
not good free market economics.
  In a 2013 New York Times op-ed, former Republican EPA Administrators 
Bill Ruckelshaus, Christine Todd Whitman, Lee Thomas, and William 
Reilly wrote: ``A market-based approach, like a carbon tax, would be 
the best path to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.''
  Republicans in Congress are being squeezed. On one side they see 
unequivocal scientific consensus, compelling economic theory, and 
mounting public opinion--all pointing toward the need for strong action 
on climate. On the other side, they see rich and powerful polluters who 
fund their politics and who make heavy-handed threats against any 
Republicans who might dare to cross them. That is why it was such glad 
news when a group of 11 House Republicans, led by Congressman Chris 
Gibson of New York, introduced a House resolution committing to address 
climate change by promoting ingenuity, innovation, and exceptionalism.
  That is not a bill yet. We have a ways to go still. But it is another 
sign that the ``denier castle'' is crumbling. First, climate change was 
a hoax. Then, OK, maybe it is not a hoax, but it is natural variation. 
Then, OK, maybe it is real and humans do cause some of it. But, look, 
it paused. Then, OK, maybe it didn't pause. But we really can't do 
anything about it. And then, OK, we can do something about climate 
change, but please stop asking me about it because I am not a 
scientist. And now this: A resolution by sitting Republican House 
Members that we need to take climate action. It has been quite a 
journey.
  The escape of 11 Republicans from the dark, crumbling ramparts of 
denier castle gives dawning hope to Americans that bipartisan action on 
climate change is becoming possible, even in Congress.
  Last Thursday, Congressman Gibson and I joined together, bicameral 
and bipartisan, to hear from major food and beverage companies how 
climate change affects their industry, supply chains, and bottom line. 
It marked--as far as I can recall--the first time in years that a 
sitting Democrat and a sitting Republican Member of Congress joined in 
a public event on climate change. I hope that is another sign that 
things in this building have begun to shift.
  For these big companies, climate change is not a partisan issue. It 
is not even a political issue. It is business. It is their reality. 
``Climate really matters to our business,'' Kim Nelson of General Mills 
told us. ``We fundamentally rely on Mother Nature.'' The choices we 
make to protect or forsake our climate, she said, will be ``important 
to the long-term viability of our company and our industry.''
  Paul Bakus of Nestle agreed, impressing on us that this is not a 
hypothetical. Climate change ``is impacting our business today,'' he 
said. His company, Nestle, cans pumpkins under the Libby's brand. They 
have seen pumpkin yields crash in the United States. ``We have never 
seen growing and harvesting conditions like this in the Midwest,'' said 
Mr. Bakus.
  Chief sustainability officer for Mars, Barry Parkin, was more blunt: 
``We are on a path to a dangerous place.''
  These companies are reducing carbon emissions and demanding 
sustainable supply chains. Mars, for example, recently invested in a 
211-megawatt wind power farm in Texas to offset all of the electricity 
used by its U.S. operations. Unilever, in addition to shifting away 
from fossil fuels toward renewables and biofuel energy, is also 
fighting deforestation associated with farming.
  Message No. 1 from these businesses was: This is important.
  Message No. 2 was: They can't do it alone. They need us in government 
to pay attention. ``Business, government, civil society, and 
individuals all have a part to play,'' said General Mills. ``We need 
governments to be involved,'' said Unilever.
  Specifically, the companies want a strong global climate deal at the 
Paris conference this December. They released a joint letter pledging 
to accelerate their own climate efforts and urging governments to do 
their part as well. They even took out full-page ads in the Washington 
Post. Here it is.
  They had the full text of their letter and the signatures of the 10 
CEOs printed in the Financial Times on the very day of our event.
  The heads of Mars, General Mills, Nestle USA, Unilever, Kellogg 
Company, New Belgium Brewing Company, Ben & Jerry's, Cliff Bar, 
Stonyfield Farm, and Danone Dairy North America had the following 
statement in the letter:

       Climate change is bad for farmers and agriculture. Drought, 
     flooding, and hotter growing conditions threaten the world's 
     food supply and contribute to food insecurity.

  They also pledged:

       We will: Use our voices to advocate for governments to set 
     clear, achievable, measurable and enforceable science-based 
     targets for carbon emissions reductions.

  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this letter from the 
heads of these 10 major food and beverage companies asking world 
leaders and the Congress to act on climate change be printed in the 
Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                       [From Accelerating Change]

                     This Could be a Turning Point

       Dear U.S. and Global Leaders: When you convene in Paris 
     later this year for climate negotiations, you will have an 
     opportunity to take action that could significantly change 
     our world for the better.

[[Page 15683]]

       As heads of some of the world's largest food companies, we 
     have come together today to call out that opportunity.
       Climate change is bad for farmers and for agriculture. 
     Drought, flooding and hotter growing conditions threaten the 
     world's food supply and contribute to food insecurity.
       By 2050. it is estimated that the world's population will 
     exceed nine billion, with two-thirds of all people living in 
     urban areas. This increase in population and urbanization 
     will require more water, energy and food, all of which are 
     compromised by warming temperatures.
       The challenge presented by climate change will require all 
     of government, civil society and business--to do more with 
     less. For companies like ours, that means producing more food 
     on less land using fewer natural resources. If we don't take 
     action now, we risk not only today's livelihoods, but also 
     those of future generations.
       We want the women and men who work to grow the food on our 
     tables to have enough to eat themselves, and to be able to 
     provide properly for their families.
       We want the farms where crops are grown to be as productive 
     and resilient as possible, while building the communities and 
     protecting the water supplies around them.
       We want to see only the most energy-efficient modes of 
     transport shipping products and ingredients around the world.
       We want the facilities where we make our products to be 
     powered by renewable energy, with nothing going to waste. As 
     corporate leaders, we have been working hard toward these 
     ends. but we can and must do more.
       Today, we are making three commitments--to each other, to 
     you as our political leaders, and to the world.
       We will:
       Re-energize our companies' continued efforts to ensure that 
     our supply chain becomes more sustainable, based on our own 
     specific targets;
       Talk transparently about our efforts and share our best 
     practices so that other companies and other industries are 
     encouraged to join us in this critically important work;
       Use our voices to advocate for governments to set clear, 
     achievable, measurable and enforceable science-based targets 
     for carbon emissions reductions.


                        That's where you come In

       Now is the time to meaningfully address the reality of 
     climate change. We are asking you to embrace the opportunity 
     presented to you in Paris, and to come back with a sound 
     agreement, properly financed, that can affect real change.
       We are ready to meet the climate challenges that face our 
     businesses. Please join us in meeting the climate challenges 
     that face the world.
           Signed.
       Grant Reid, President & CEO, Mars Incorporated; Paul 
     Polman, Chief Executive, Unilever; Jostein Solheim, CEO, Ben 
     & Jerry's; Kendall J. Powell, Chairman of the Board & CEO, 
     General Mills, Inc.; Mariano Lozano, President & CEO, Dannon 
     & Regional VP, Danone Dairy North America; John Bryant, Chief 
     Executive Officer, Kellogg Company; Kevin Cleary, CEO, Clif 
     Bar; Paul Grinwood, Chairman & CEO, Nestle, USA; Esteve 
     Torrens, President & CEO, Stonyfield Farm, Inc.; Kimberly 
     Jordan, Cofounder & CEO, New Belgium Brewing Company.

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. We heard a similar appeal from America's largest 
financial powerhouses last week. Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, 
JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo released a strong call 
for governments to come together on a climate agreement.
  Here is what they wrote:

       Policy frameworks that recognize the costs of carbon are 
     among the many important instruments needed to provide 
     greater market certainty, accelerate investment, drive 
     innovation in low carbon energy, and create jobs. . . . While 
     we may compete in the marketplace, we are aligned on the 
     importance of policies to address the climate challenge.

  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that their statement also be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

  In support of Prosperity and Growth: Financial Sector Statement on 
                            Climate Change 

       Scientific research finds that an increasing concentration 
     of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere is warming the planet, 
     posing significant risks to the prosperity and growth of the 
     global economy. As major financial institutions, working with 
     clients and customers around the globe, we have the business 
     opportunity to build a more sustainable, low-carbon economy 
     and the ability to help manage and mitigate these climate-
     related risks.
       Our institutions are committing significant resources 
     toward financing climate solutions. These actions alone, 
     however, are not sufficient to meet global climate 
     challenges. Expanded deployment of capital is critical, and 
     clear, stable and long-term policy frameworks are needed to 
     accelerate and further scale investments.
       We call for leadership and cooperation among governments 
     for commitments leading to a strong global climate agreement. 
     Policy frameworks that recognize the costs of carbon are 
     among many important instruments needed to provide greater 
     market certainty, accelerate investment, drive innovation in 
     low carbon energy, and create jobs. Over the next 15 years, 
     an estimated $90 trillion will need to be invested in urban 
     infrastructure and energy. The right policy frameworks can 
     help unlock the incremental public and private capital needed 
     to ensure this infrastructure is sustainable and resilient.
       While we may compete in the marketplace, we are aligned on 
     the importance of policies to address the climate challenge. 
     In partnership with our clients and customers, we will 
     provide the financing required for value creation and the 
     vision necessary for a strong and prosperous economy for 
     generations to come.
       Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, 
     Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo.

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. These are serious people running big, successful 
companies. They don't take climate change lightly, they don't scoff and 
neither should we. They are asking that elected officials find the 
courage to address climate change. Majorities of voters of both parties 
and of Independents are also asking elected representatives to find the 
courage to address climate change. That brings us back to that squeeze 
I talked about.
  If you are not willing to address carbon pollution and the climate 
change and ocean acidification it is causing, I ask my colleagues who 
are on the ballot in 2016: What are you going to say? What are you 
going to say to your voters? Are you going to say it is a hoax? Great. 
Good luck with that.
  Are you going to say: OK. It is real, it is important, these 
companies are all right, but as far as fixing it, well, we have 
nothing--because right now that is what they have, nothing.
  Maybe they should just beg: Please don't ask me about climate change 
because the big fossil fuel polluters are paying my party's bills and 
making mean threats to me. Those are not a great set of options.
  At some point soon, I tell my friends: Your party's leaders are going 
to have to go to the fossil fuel billionaires and say: Enough. Enough. 
Let my people go. We held out for you as long as we could, but now you 
have to let my people go, and it has to be soon.
  As one executive told Congressman Gibson and me quite directly, ``The 
window of opportunity to act on climate change is closing.''
  It is time to wake up.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.


                             The Filibuster

  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I come to the floor to comment on an 
extraordinary about-face that we have seen from many of my colleagues 
across the aisle with respect to the filibuster. When I say ``across 
the aisle,'' I mean an about-face on the part of Democrats who see the 
filibuster differently now than they did over the last 4 or 5 years. 
But now, like Paul on the road to Damascus, they have seen the light 
and have now embraced the filibuster wholeheartedly, and like many 
converts, they are very active in their faith.
  Naturally, this has caused frustration for many Americans who wonder 
why we cannot address the pressing issues we were elected to address, 
and there are a lot of frustrated Members of the Senate as well. I am 
one of those frustrated Members. When we have an opportunity for the 
Senate to function as James Madison said it should function, I don't 
understand why we cannot have it function that way. Not surprisingly, 
the recent series of filibusters on legislation of enormous 
consequences for our Nation has resulted in new calls for changes to 
the Senate rules.
  First, I would like to take stock of where we are right now. It was 
just last year that the previous majority leader was abusing the 
cloture motion to shut down debate and amendments on virtually every 
single bill, even before the debate had begun, all while blocking any 
amendments. Any Senator who routinely votes for cloture motions under 
those circumstances is obviously

[[Page 15684]]

abdicating his or her responsibility to the people who elected that 
Senator to offer and debate any number of different ideas. That is what 
the Senate is all about.
  Nevertheless, when those of us who were then in the minority voted 
against abdicating our responsibilities as Senators, we had a parade of 
Democratic Senators come to the floor and accuse us of that most 
dastardly deed, at least according to them, the filibuster. They 
repeatedly claimed that strict rule by the majority faction was the 
principle by which the Senate ought to operate with little or no input 
from the minority party; in other words, have it operate just like the 
House of Representatives.
  We now have a majority--a Republican majority--that has tried to 
restore the Senate to function as a deliberative body, as it used to 
and as it was intended to by the Framers of the Constitution. For 
instance, last year the previous majority leader didn't bring a single, 
individual appropriations bill to the floor of the Senate for 
consideration and vote. By putting off appropriations until the end of 
the fiscal year, that leader calculated that the threat of being blamed 
for a government shutdown would force Republicans to accept a massive 
omnibus bill containing policies that would otherwise be rejected.
  This year things are different. The Senate appropriators have done 
their work and reported out each separate appropriations bill--can you 
imagine, all 12 of those appropriations bills--and most of them on a 
bipartisan basis. Then, when the majority leader has attempted to bring 
them to the floor, Senator McConnell, the majority leader, has been met 
with a Democratic filibuster of the motion even to proceed to the bill.
  What is the justification of that on the part of today's minority? 
The majority leader Senator McConnell is not blocking amendments. In 
fact, he is even inviting amendments. So if there is something that the 
minority wishes to change or add to a bill, they can do it simply by 
participating in the process and offering amendments. After all, isn't 
that what the Senate is all about? We have to pass appropriations bills 
or the government will shut down, so why can't we even bring 
appropriations bills up for consideration?
  Well, the answer is quite obvious: The Democratic leadership is up to 
those old games they used to keep the Senate from debating 
appropriations bills that they did over the last 5 years. By blocking 
appropriations bills and threatening to blame us for the shutdown, they 
hope and believe they can bully us into busting open the spending caps 
that a majority in both the House and Senate agreed to in the budget 
resolution earlier this year. So much, then, for majority rule, which 
the Democrats claim was such a deeply held principle, as they expressed 
it only last year and years before that.
  They justify filibustering the appropriations bills because President 
Obama has threatened to veto them unless he gets more spending. That 
doesn't make any sense.
  The first appropriations bill they filibustered was the Defense 
appropriations bill--not because that bill didn't provide enough 
funding but because they want to hold it hostage to extract additional 
spending in other areas. Now they are holding hostage the bill that 
funds the Department of Veterans Affairs. So they are holding hostage 
funding for our men and women in combat and our veterans who have 
served our Nation in order to protect the President from having to 
follow through on his threat to veto these bills.
  I understand that the President might not want to have to defend 
vetoing funding for our troops and veterans as a bargaining chip to 
extract additional spending from the Congress, but protecting the 
President from having to follow through with his threat is not a very 
good reason for a filibuster.
  A similar thing happened with the filibuster of legislation to 
disprove the Iran deal. A bipartisan majority in both the House and the 
Senate was in favor of legislation to block President Obama's nuclear 
deal with Iran. Because the deal was set to go into effect unless 
Congress acted, the Democrats cannot claim their filibuster was needed 
for additional deliberation. It was a blatant attempt to run out the 
clock so the President would not have to use his veto pen.
  So clearly it is not as though Democrats have now grudgingly accepted 
the utility of the filibuster only in extraordinary circumstances; they 
have now embraced it so completely that they used it simply to prevent 
embarrassing the President.
  In light of this, it is understandable that many in my political 
party and even in the grassroots are questioning whether we ought to 
get rid of the filibuster on legislation. This is an expression of the 
frustration by a lot of conservatives that I hear from in the 
grassroots of Iowa, and they hear it in the other body as well.
  The argument goes kind of like this: After all, the Democrats 
unilaterally abolished the filibuster on nominations, contrary to 
Senate rules. Well, they will have to live with that come 2017 when the 
Republican President is inaugurated, as I hope. But just as I think 
they will live to regret that move, I think those of us on my side of 
the aisle would ultimately regret the loss of the Senate as a 
deliberative body if we were to change the cloture rule for 
legislation. What would the Democrats do with unchecked power? We don't 
have to guess. The Democrats briefly had the 60 votes needed to 
overcome any filibuster, and they promptly ran the unpopular health 
care law down the throats of an unwilling American public. They 
dismissed legitimate criticism from Republicans and skepticism from 
citizens of America. They promised that Americans would like it once it 
had passed and when we found out what is in it. Well, Americans now 
know what is in the health care law, and the law hasn't become any more 
popular.
  So does that mean we have to just accept that ObamaCare and other 
aspects of ``the fundamental transformation of America'' the President 
promised are here to stay? Of course not. But we must not be 
shortsighted. I think a lot of the people who are conservatives, such 
as the grassroots of America, who are frustrated, as a lot of us in 
this body are frustrated, would be shortsighted if they consider 
changing how the Senate operates.
  Keep in mind that the American left was greatly influenced by the 
progressive movement in the early 20th century which held that history 
is continually progressing toward a future of more governmental control 
over people's lives--for the people's benefit, of course. Now, most of 
us don't buy that--those who hold to the principle of limited 
government--but there are a lot of people today who are buying it. We 
hear it in the Presidential campaigns, particularly of the other 
political party.
  This led the progressives of the early 20th century to reject the 
Declaration of Independence and focus on individual liberty and to 
oppose our Constitution's system of checks and balances designed to 
protect that liberty because it made it harder for the government to 
act. That comes from the philosophy that government always knows best. 
It also means that those on the left played the long game, sometimes 
biding their time, sometimes accepting incremental progress toward 
their goals, and other times making radical changes when they see an 
opening.
  Those of us who are animated by the principle of individual liberty 
recognize that liberty is the exception in human history, and threats 
to liberty must be fought constantly or we risk losing liberty and 
freedom. As such, we are impatient to correct every loss of liberty 
right away, as we should be. However, in doing so, we must be very 
careful not to break down those very safeguards that are in place to 
prevent government encroachment on individual liberty. If we are not 
careful, then short-term gains could lead to even greater loss of 
liberty in the future.
  The President's former Chief of Staff was famous for saying something 
like this, and hopefully I am quoting him accurately: ``You never let a 
serious

[[Page 15685]]

crisis go to waste, and what I mean by that, it's an opportunity to do 
things you think you could not do before.''
  In other words, we have seen a concerted effort to take advantage of 
momentary passions and temporary majorities to enact longstanding 
policy goals of more governmental intervention in the economy and 
intervention in the lives of Americans. Preventing such a power play is 
precisely the role the Senate was designed to play. Just listen to this 
passage from Federalist No. 62: ``The necessity of a senate is not less 
indicated by the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies to 
yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced 
by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions.''
  Of course, that was written by James Madison, who is rightly called 
the father of the Constitution. Madison prepared extensively for the 
Constitutional Convention by studying ancient republics and ancient and 
contemporary political philosophers. He came to the convention with 
what was called the Virginia plan, which the convention used as a 
starting point for what became the U.S. Constitution. Madison also took 
extensive notes throughout the Constitutional Convention.
  In other words, I think that when he speaks about the intent behind 
the structure of the U.S. Constitution, he ought to know better than 
anybody, and that is particularly as he writes about the function of 
the Senate in our Constitution system.
  It is true that Madison did not speak to the filibuster itself, and 
the Constitution leaves the rules of the House and Senate up to each 
Chamber, but you cannot read the Federalist papers without a clear 
understanding that our system of government was intended to allow only 
measures that have broad and enduring support to actually get into law. 
The Constitution was not designed to allow whatever faction happens to 
be in power to have a free hand to do whatever it wishes.
  As Madison said in Federalist No. 10, ``Measures are too often 
decided not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the 
minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing 
majority.''
  Where that minority is protected is in the U.S. Senate--the only 
place in our political system. In fact, in arguing for the necessity of 
the Senate in Federalist Paper No. 63, Madison is quite critical of 
pure majoritarian democracies in ancient times and attributes their 
failure to the lack of something we call the U.S. Senate.
  That said, I understand why some of my Republican colleagues in the 
House of Representatives are frustrated with the fact that many of the 
things they pass become stalled here in the Senate. I say to them that 
a lot of us on this side of the aisle share that frustration. So I and 
we need to make sure those obstructing are held accountable. But anyone 
who would change the Senate rules to give the majority leader the power 
to ram any bill through the Senate on a party-line vote should then ask 
whether they can trust that this power will be used fairly by future 
majority leaders. Remember that the previous majority leader tried to 
shut the minority out of the legislative process at almost every stage. 
The Senate was routinely presented with bills often written behind 
closed doors in the majority leader's office and told that there would 
be only an up-or-down vote with no amendments.
  Moreover, what would conservatives gain by abolishing the filibuster? 
I want people to think about what might happen if the filibuster is 
abolished. In the short term, we would have the emotional satisfaction 
of seeing President Obama use his veto pen, but that is about it. In 
the long run, you can bet that modern-day progressives will use those 
tools to impose all sorts of policies to expand the scope of government 
that would otherwise not make it through our constitutional system.
  If you want to know what some of those ``intemperate and pernicious 
resolutions'' that Madison warned us about might be, we need only look 
to the past. I will list a whole bunch of things that could be the law 
of the land today.
  Had the Senate operated on a purely majoritarian basis in the past, 
our country would be in much worse shape than it is now. For instance, 
if you think ObamaCare is bad, we would have had a single-payer, 
totally government-run health care system if it weren't for the 60-vote 
requirement. We would have had the disastrous cap-and-trade bill in 
2008 with its crony giveaways, making special interests rich while 
destroying jobs for hard-working Americans. The list of items that 
would have passed the Senate goes on and on--the 2007 immigration 
amnesty bill; the DISCLOSE Act to intimidate private groups who engage 
in political speech that was brought up in 2010; the abolition of 
secret ballot elections for unions in 2007; the prohibition on 
businesses replacing striking employees that was brought up in 1992; a 
bill to encourage public safety employees to unionize in 2010; the 1992 
Clinton crime bill; drug price negotiations in Medicare Part D that 
amount to Federal price controls in 2007; an amendment to the 
Constitution to cancel First Amendment protections for speech around 
election time in 2014; stripping religious liberty protections from 
Christian business owners who object to paying for drugs that can cause 
an abortion in 2014; President Obama's second big-spending stimulus 
proposal in 2011; the so-called Buffett tax would have been passed 
several times by now; the tax increase to pay local government employee 
salaries in 2011; and who knows how many other tax increases they would 
have passed if they knew they could get away with it. Of course, we 
heard a few weeks ago a speech by Senator Alexander, who has argued 
that one of the first things the Democratic leadership would do is 
follow the orders of union bosses and outlaw the many right-to-work 
laws we have in the United States, forcing associations against the 
will of some people.
  This Senator knows well what it is like in the majority and what it 
is like being in the minority in the Senate, and I know things look 
very different from each perspective. I would ask my conservative 
colleagues who are frustrated that the current majority is not able to 
work its will to consider the example of history and look to the 
future.
  It is also interesting to observe the behavior of the many Democrats 
who had never experienced a minority before who have now gained a new 
perspective on the filibuster and the power of the minority and the 
protection of the minority by supporting the filibuster every chance 
they get--and it didn't take long. On the third vote in the Senate this 
year--after the change of control, that is--most of the Democrats, 
including the loudest critics of the filibuster, voted against cloture 
on a motion to proceed, which until that point they claimed to be an 
egregious and inappropriate abuse of Senate rules. I know there are 
some Senate Democrats who still say they are opposed to the filibuster 
even in principle, although apparently not in practice. It is no good 
saying ``Stop me before I filibuster again.'' If you think it is wrong, 
don't do it. It is as simple as that.
  When Senator Wyden and I began to work on ending the practice of 
secret holds, we pledged to disclose any hold that we placed on a bill 
in the Congressional Record, and we did that for years before finally 
getting the rules changed so that every Member had to do that.
  The Senate Democrats have shown through their actions that they now 
fully support the Senate filibuster. I guarantee that the next time 
Republicans are in the minority, we, too, will see the necessity of 
this traditional protection against what Madison referred to as ``the 
superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.''
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.


                              Gun Violence

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, in the year 1789, the U.S. Senate, in a 
chamber not far from here, approved the first 10 amendments to the 
Constitution. The Second Amendment reads: ``A well regulated Militia, 
being necessary to the security of a free State, the

[[Page 15686]]

right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.'' 
The Second Amendment to the Constitution is an amendment which has been 
uttered, debated, and litigated over the entire history of the United 
States. Whatever the true intent of our Founding Fathers in writing 
that language, that brief sentence, I wonder if they could even imagine 
what we are dealing with today in the name of the right of people to 
keep and bear arms because every day, on average, in America, 297 
people are shot--every day--and 89 of them die every day in America.
  Last Saturday I was with my wife in Chicago having a cup of coffee 
and reading over the papers, listening to National Public Radio. They 
reported the Roseburg, OR, shooting at the community college, and they 
cited a statistic that I was not aware of: That shooting at the 
community college that killed nine innocent people was the 45th school 
shooting in America this year. There have been 45 shootings in schools. 
There were many other mass shootings in different places, but now even 
schools, even students, even schoolchildren are not safe from the 
rampage of guns.
  I am honored to represent the city of Chicago. It is a great city. I 
do my best to help it in every way I can. But I also have to be very 
candid and honest with you. So far, there have been 2,300 shootings in 
the city of Chicago this year. Where are all these guns coming from?
  Yesterday morning I went to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and 
Firearms in Chicago and sat down with the new special agent in charge 
and asked him the question: Where are all these guns coming from? Why 
do we have more guns per capita in Chicago than in New York? Why is it 
that so many of these teenagers, kids, moms, and dads are armed to the 
teeth? Where are all these guns coming from?
  He said: Senator, the No. 1 source of guns in the State of Illinois--
crime guns that we have taken in the commission of crime and can 
trace--the No. 1 source is Illinois.
  We have a phenomenon where people go into a federally licensed arms 
dealer and purchase guns and use them in crime. But the bigger problem 
is they send in someone without a criminal record who can pass a 
background check and who buys guns and turns them over to drug gang 
thugs and criminals on the street. They call it straw purchasing. So 
the No. 1 source of guns is trading guns within the State of Illinois 
and these traffickers, these straw purchasers who purchase a gun not 
for their own use but to turn it over to a criminal or sell it to a 
criminal. That is the No. 1 source.
  What is the No. 2 State that supplies guns to the State of Illinois? 
It is Indiana, which adjoins Illinois to the east--specifically, Lake 
County, IN, in the northwestern section of that State.
  Why do we get so many guns from Indiana into Illinois that are used 
in the commission of crime? Because of gun shows. Gun shows occur on 
the weekends, and people literally show up in Indiana, show some State 
identification, and without any background check walk out with a gun--
not just a gun but many times fill their trunks with guns and 
ammunition and drive across the border into Chicago, Cook County, and 
go to the west side of town or down south in Englewood. They pull up in 
an alley or maybe even on the curbside and have an open market, selling 
these guns picked up at gun shows. The people who purchase these never 
went through a background check. Nine times out of 10, unless they are 
buying from a gun show from a Federal dealer, it is just an arms-length 
transaction--however many guns you want to buy; no questions asked. 
Many of these people would be disqualified if they went to a Federal 
gun dealer. They have a history of committing felonies and other acts 
that disqualify them.
  The fact is that today that is the No. 2 source of crime guns--
Indiana.
  What is the No. 3 source of crime guns in the city of Chicago? 
Mississippi. Mississippi. Why? Because their gun show requirements are 
even more lax than in the Midwest. It is an ongoing commerce of running 
those guns up the interstate and selling them in the city of Chicago.
  So what is happening? There is a dramatic increase in homicides 
across America. We are awash in guns. Sadly, many of them are in the 
hands of people who buy them to kill innocent people. There has been a 
spike in homicides this year--not just in Chicago but in Milwaukee, St. 
Louis, Houston, Baltimore, New Orleans, and many other cities. The 
plain reality is that we are now awash in guns in America, and it is 
far too easy for convicted criminals, felons, and unstable people to 
get their hands on a gun and to use it.
  When guns are everywhere and when it is easy for dangerous people to 
get them, it puts everyone at risk. Can you imagine for a second that 
any of those students heading into that community college in Oregon 
that morning had even an idea they would face a gunman and some would 
die? The heartbreaking stories--one I remember hearing from a minister 
who talked about his daughter, who survived because she appeared to be 
a bloody corpse. The gunman stepped over her. The father could hardly 
contain his emotions when he talked about dropping that girl off at 
school and living with the possibility that she would have died there 
and that would have been his last memory of his daughter. Is that what 
America has come to? Is that what we are?
  Pretty much anywhere you go now, you have it in the back of your mind 
that someone could have a gun, someone could start shooting. Do we want 
to live this way in America?
  If you talk to the gun lobby and the special interest groups that 
manufacture guns and want to sell more and more, they will say the 
solution is to arm more good guys with guns so they can shoot the bad 
guys. That is a solution they like because it sells more guns, but why 
wouldn't we try in the first place to keep guns out of the hands of bad 
guys?
  The Supreme Court has said there is no constitutional problem in the 
provision that I read with keeping guns away from felons, domestic 
violence abusers, the mentally unstable, and other dangerous people. 
The Supreme Court across the street said that is completely consistent 
with the Second Amendment. Why don't we do it? If our country did a 
better job of preventing bad guys from getting guns, there are a lot of 
innocent people who would still be here today.
  I held a hearing in my Constitution subcommittee a couple years ago 
about gun violence. We talked about the need for better laws to stop 
illegal straw purchases and gun trafficking.
  One of our witnesses, a young woman who has become my friend, was 
Sandra Wortham of Chicago. Her brother Thomas was a Chicago police 
officer. He had served two tours of duty in Iraq. He was a great guy. 
He was gunned down in front of his parents' home on the South Side of 
Chicago. He was murdered by gang members with a straw-purchased gun. He 
was an extraordinary police officer. When he was shot, he had a gun on 
him. He shot back at the armed gunmen who were trying to rob him, and 
so did his father, who was standing nearby, also a retired police 
sergeant. But Officer Wortham was killed. He died in front of his 
parents' house on May 19, 2010. I attended his funeral.
  Thomas Wortham's sister Sandra spoke at that hearing. It was 
powerful. This is what she said:

       My brother carried a gun. My father carried a gun. But the 
     fact that my brother and father were armed that night did not 
     prevent my brother from being killed. We need to do more to 
     keep guns out of the wrong hands in the first place. I don't 
     think that makes us anti-gun; I think it makes us pro-decent, 
     law abiding people.

  Sandra Wortham is right. I hope my colleagues will hear her words.
  Some say it is impossible to stop bad guys from getting guns; they 
are just going to get them. It is true that there are a lot of 
loopholes in the law to get them today, like the gun show loophole and 
the Internet loopholes in the background check system. I don't question 
the possibility that those loopholes are there. It is also true that 
the gun lobby is working hard every day to further weaken the laws on 
the books and to strike them down in court. But we can stop the gun 
lobby from gutting the laws on the books, and we can close

[[Page 15687]]

those loopholes if lawmakers just have the courage and political will.
  Our goal should be to keep guns out of the hands of bad guys, not to 
take them away from people who use them in a responsible and legal way. 
I grew up in downstate Illinois. Owning shotguns and rifles is just 
part of life. Taking your son or in some cases even your daughter out 
hunting is normal. It is what people do. I have been out duck hunting 
in Stuttgart, AR, with my former colleague, Mark Pryor. We had a good 
time. Everybody there knew that a gun was a dangerous weapon that had 
to be handled carefully. We filed the necessary permits and licenses to 
be out there hunting on that day and followed a long list of 
requirements that limited our right to go shooting ducks, migrating 
ducks in that area. We did it because it was the law and law-abiding 
people pay attention to the law.
  But what are we going to do now to respect those law-abiding people 
but still get serious about stopping these guns that end up in the 
hands of felons and mentally unstable people? Are we going to shrug our 
shoulders? Are Members of Congress going to put out the standard press 
release after a mass shooting? Or are we going to rise to this 
challenge on this occasion and do something? What a breakthrough it 
would be if we could save these innocent lives.
  I cannot imagine that classroom in that community college in Oregon 
where that crazy gunman, loaded and armed, went up to each of those 
students and asked if they were Christians. If they said yes, he told 
them: You are on your way to Heaven, and then he shot them dead. I 
cannot imagine that moment. I certainly cannot imagine if in that 
classroom was someone I loved, someone I knew, someone I cared about, 
and they were the victim of that kind of mental instability.
  So are we going to shrug our shoulders, remember the victims in our 
thoughts and prayers and do nothing? Is that what it has come to? We 
are better than that. We can easily pass laws to protect domestic 
violence victims by keeping the guns out of the hands of their abusers. 
All it takes is will. We could easily hold gun dealers accountable for 
guns that they purposefully misplace into the hands of criminals. All 
it takes is the will. We can easily adopt technology to stop criminals 
from stealing guns and stop kids from using them accidentally. All it 
takes is will. We can easily create a better background check system 
and pass better laws to stop straw purchasing and illegal gun 
trafficking. All it takes is will. We can stop the gun lobby from 
gutting the laws on the books, and we can close these loopholes if 
lawmakers just have the courage and the political will.
  As President Obama said, our thoughts and prayers are not enough. 
Stopping this violence requires courage and political will. I hope the 
Congress can rise to this challenge. I am not giving up. I have seen 
too many lives cut short, too many families and communities devastated 
by this violence. I am going to do all I can to bring down the number 
of shootings in America.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Daines). The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DAINES. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Gardner). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

                          ____________________