[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Pages 13830-13832]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   UNANIMOUS CONSENT REQUEST--S. 2253

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, too often this body talks about supporting 
our veterans while doing far too little to pass critical legislation 
that would actually help them.
  The Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, of which I am a member--
and I am joined by my colleague on that committee, Senator Tillis, with 
whom I have worked on a number of issues in our time together in the 
Senate. Chairman Isakson and Ranking Member Blumenthal have had in this 
committee perhaps the best cooperation of any standing committee in the 
Senate. And we continue to work to address challenges facing veterans 
and the Veterans' Administration.
  Through hearings and legislative markups, we have listened and 
learned from veterans. As a result, we have worked together across the 
aisle to produce legislation that reflects the needs of those who 
served our country. It is a minimum we ought to be doing, and I think 
we are generally doing that pretty well.
  One result of our efforts has been the bipartisan Veterans First Act. 
It is a good bill that comprehensively addresses a host of issues 
facing veterans, including education benefits, homelessness, health 
care, and VA accountability. As we see too often, even commonsense 
legislation like Vets First can't make its way to the floor. Our 
inability to act on this doesn't mean we shouldn't try to address 
specific issues that have bipartisan support.
  One of those issues which I hope we can agree on is the need to 
provide relief to veterans who, through no fault of their own, were--
there is no other way to say it--bilked by the for-profit school ITT. 
Veterans and other students were betrayed and bilked, and taxpayers 
were fleeced. Veterans who were attending ITT at the time of its 
closure lost the GI bill or VA benefits used to pay for their 
education. Meanwhile, all other students who were enrolled at ITT were 
eligible to have their Federal student loans discharged. So if you are 
not a veteran and you had Federal student loans, you could get those 
loans discharged. If you are a veteran under the GI bill or VA 
benefits, you couldn't. It wasn't anybody's intent to do that, but that 
is what the law says.
  I know Senator Isakson, the chairman--and we are joined by Senator 
Carper on the floor as well--he is interested in this. I also know that 
Senator Tillis has cosponsored my bill to actually fix this. This is 
something we need to do. We are not the only ones who believe action 
needs to be taken. Governor Mike Pence, the Governor of the State next 
door to mine, Indiana, who is the Republican nominee for Vice 
President, supports this.
  The closure of ITT was the fault of the management of that school, 
who spent a lot of money on marketing and a lot of money on helping 
students get financing but not much money on education and even less on 
job placement for their students. The closure of ITT was not the fault 
of the veterans, for sure, not the fault of the students, but now 
veterans are worried about being able to pay their rent and pursue 
their education, which is what this legislation is going to allow them 
to do. In my State of Ohio, 520 veterans have been impacted by ITT's 
closure.
  There are some questions of finding a way to pay for this 
legislation, but I believe finding a pay-for is a red herring. We are 
simply giving the VA the authority to provide relief to veterans. No 
one is running around trying to find a pay-for for the Federal student 
loans that are going to be discharged. So we are saying we are just 
going to do the discharge on the nonveteran students, and we have to 
find a little legislative sleight-of-hand pay-for to take care of the 
veterans. That just doesn't make sense. Why should veterans be treated 
differently or worse than nonveteran students? All we are looking to do 
is to make sure veterans are treated like all other students who 
attended an institution like ITT or Corinthian, another scam 
institution that shut down.
  Veterans were promised GI benefits when they signed up to serve our 
country. ITT has cheated them out of the quality education they earned. 
If we fail to act today before leaving town, we abandon the 
responsibility to our Nation's heroes.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate Veterans' 
Affairs Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 2253 
and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the bill be 
read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered 
made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, my 
colleague from Ohio and I have worked on a number of different measures 
on the Veterans' Affairs Committee, and I hope to continue to work with 
him.
  I wish to talk a little bit about the process here. It may seem odd, 
on a bill on which I am one of the lead Republican sponsors, to come to 
the floor and object to the UC, but let's talk about structurally what 
is going on here. We said that the only reason there is a problem is 
there is no pay-for. In other words, we are trying to pass a policy 
that we haven't taken the time to make a decision about how to pay for 
it. We can say that we are authorizing the VA to pay for it, but what 
are they going to do? We haven't provided them with any funds to do it, 
so what potentially suffers as a result? That is one piece.
  We just heard a number of speeches here with Republican freshmen and 
a couple of veteran Members on the floor talking about being 
responsible in the budgeting process and actually living within our 
means and paying for things. Now I am in the uncomfortable position of 
having to object, potentially--reserving my right to object--to a 
measure that includes policy that I fundamentally support. What I don't 
want to do, though, is send something half-baked to the House and 
pretend that somehow it is going to be taken up before we get back from 
the recess. It won't be. As a matter of fact, if we don't do our job 
here, it will probably not move in the House.
  So why not work with Senator Isakson, who has done a remarkable job 
of trying to work with the veterans service organizations that have a 
concern with the direction we were going with the pay-fors, to find a 
legitimate way to pay for this policy before we send it to the House 
and make it more likely that before we get out at the end of the year, 
this bill will be passed? This is just about being responsible and 
doing both parts of our jobs--coming up with good policy and then 
coming up with a way to pay for it.
  So for those reasons, I do object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Tillis, and I understand 
his view on this issue. I appreciate the position of Senator Tillis, my 
colleague on the Veterans' Affairs Committee. I just fundamentally say 
that, first of all, we shouldn't leave town. We should finish our work. 
We should confirm the Supreme Court nominee or at least have hearings. 
We should finish our work that we haven't done this year. We have been 
in session less this year than any Senate in the last 60 years. I

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know Senator McConnell wants to send his Members home so they can 
campaign for reelection and spend their Koch brothers money that they 
have benefited from.
  More than that, what I don't get here is--we are only giving the VA 
the authority to provide relief for these veterans. We are treating 
veterans worse than other students at ITT or Corinthian. So if you were 
at ITT and you found out 3 weeks ago that that school was closing--2, 3 
weeks ago, something like that--and you are a veteran and you have a 
friend who is a nonveteran, the nonveteran gets their loans discharged, 
and you as the veteran don't with your GI benefits, because they had 
Federal student loans and you had GI benefits. It is just not fair to 
them.
  I don't think we should ever leave this place having treated a 
veteran worse than a nonveteran in the exact same situation. So I don't 
really understand the opposition. I hope we can reengage and figure 
this out and take care of these 500 or so Ohioans who served their 
country well.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I support Senator Sherrod Brown's 
unanimous consent request that the Senate adopt the Veterans Education 
Relief and Restoration Act, S. 2253, to support veterans who were 
harmed by the closure of ITT Tech.
  ITT Tech's predatory practices led to its sudden closure early this 
month, leaving tens of thousands of students in the lurch. Many 
veterans using GI bill benefits at ITT Tech have been particularly 
affected by this company's practices and now its closure and 
bankruptcy.
  ITT Tech has for years been a major recipient of GI bill benefits. 
According to a 2014 report by Senator Tom Harkin's HELP Committee, ITT 
Tech was the third largest recipient in 2012-13, receiving $161 million 
in GI bill funds. When it closed earlier this month, an estimated 7,000 
veterans were enrolled at ITT Tech.
  Not only have these veterans used up part or in some cases all of 
their limited GI bill education benefits, some of them relied on VA 
housing assistance to pay their rent and afford a place to live for 
themselves and their families. Veterans can only receive this housing 
stipend if they are enrolled in a school that qualifies for GI bill 
benefits, so the closure of ITT Tech has put them at risk of being 
unable to afford their current housing and further disrupting their 
lives.
  I support the bipartisan Veterans Education Relief and Restoration 
Act, or VERRA, introduced by Senators Blumenthal and Tillis, to 
reinstate GI bill education benefits in certain cases and to give the 
Secretary of Veterans Affairs the authority to temporarily extend 
housing benefits to veterans, including those who attended ITT Tech, 
who find their education interrupted by a sudden closure of a school.
  The closure of ITT Tech makes the need to pass VERRA an emergency for 
so many veterans across the country. This is a commonsense bill--it's 
bipartisan--and it's time sensitive.
  I urge Republicans not to block this effort to extend this modest and 
much-needed relief to our veterans who have been put in this terrible 
position by ITT Tech.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.
  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I stand before my colleagues this evening 
as a veteran of the Vietnam War who returned to this country after a 
third tour in Southeast Asia. I moved from California to Delaware and 
enrolled there at the University of Delaware in their business school, 
in their MBA program. I was fortunate enough, along with many other 
Vietnam-era veterans, to receive a GI bill benefit; it was about $250 a 
month. College tuition was a lot less in those days. I was happy to 
have every penny of it. But today we offer a GI bill benefit that is 
far more robust and far more needed than it was when I came back from 
Southeast Asia.
  Today, veterans return often throughout the course of the year in 
Delaware. The Governor and our congressional delegation--Senator Coons, 
Congressman Carney, and I--will either send National Guard men and 
women off to deployments around the world or we might welcome them 
home. Whenever we welcome them home, I say to the returning National 
Guard men and women, the Army Guard and Air Guard: Welcome home to the 
best GI bill benefits in the history of the country.
  If they want to go to the University of Delaware, tuition is paid 
for; at Delaware State University or Delaware Community College, 
tuition is paid for. If they need books--they probably do--they are 
paid for, and fees are paid for. If they need tutoring, it is paid for, 
and they also receive roughly a $1,500-a-month housing allowance. That 
is a great benefit, and folks who go to those schools generally get a 
very good education, and they get a lot of help in job placement after 
they have completed their education. That is not always the case in 
some of our for-profit colleges and universities. Some of them do a 
good job; some of them don't.
  One of them that hasn't done a good job is called ITT Tech. We heard 
it talked about this evening on the Senate floor. There were about 
7,000 veterans using the Post-9/11 GI bill benefits that ITT Tech took 
from them when the school suddenly collapsed earlier this month. This 
provided $22,000 a year in educational assistance to private nonprofit 
and private for-profit colleges. The Post-9/11 GI bill provides a 
housing allowance that our veterans depend on to support their families 
while they attend class.
  When ITT Tech closed its doors, it also meant that this housing 
allowance came to an abrupt halt. I urged the Department of Veterans 
Affairs to work closely with the Department of Education to ensure that 
ITT Tech student veterans had the same resources and guidance they need 
to transfer and continue their education at high quality institutions 
of learning. But some veterans will not be able to transfer to another 
school this month or next month. We want them to make smart decisions 
about their educational future. That is why passing this bipartisan 
bill or some similar bipartisan bill to restore lost educational 
benefits and temporarily--underline temporarily--extend the housing 
allowance for students who attend schools like ITT Tech that suddenly 
close is so critical to our Nation's veterans and their families.
  We want to make sure that the student veterans have enough time--not 
an endless period, but enough time--to decide whether it is best to 
transfer to another school, to discharge their student loans, or start 
over at another school, such as a community college. This legislation 
is really about making sure the veterans continue to receive benefits 
they have earned in service to our country.
  Our Nation's veterans did not cause ITT Tech to collapse. Our 
Nation's veterans and our Nation's taxpayers deserve better than they 
have received at the hands of ITT Tech. The least we can do is provide 
some very modest relief during this tough period of transition. I think 
passing this bill or something similar to this legislation is the least 
we can do.
  My hope is that after we return from the recess after the election we 
can start talking across the aisle about more help to our student 
veterans and folks on the Post-9/11 GI bill. It is ironic that folks 
who are not veterans but recipients of Federal aid for education are in 
a similar situation, and they essentially would be made whole, but that 
is not the case with our veterans. I am not comfortable with that 
situation, and I suspect a lot of my colleagues are not either.
  I will close this part of my remarks. I think most of us ascribe to 
the Golden Rule--treat other people the way you want to be treated. I 
have been a veteran myself. I got a great education, graduate school at 
the University of Delaware, but I know how I would want to be treated 
if I were in the shoes of these thousands of veterans who have been 
mistreated at the hands of ITT Tech. We need to do something about it, 
and I hope that when we return, we will.

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