[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 5145-5160]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




 ENERGY AND WATER DEVELOPMENT AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 
                                  2016

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will 
resume consideration of H.R. 2028, which the clerk will report.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       A bill (H.R. 2028) making appropriations for energy and 
     water development and related agencies for the fiscal year 
     ending September 30, 2016, and for other purposes.

  Pending:

       Alexander/Feinstein amendment No. 3801, in the nature of a 
     substitute.
       Alexander amendment No. 3804 (to amendment No. 3801), to 
     modify provisions relating to Nuclear Regulatory Commission 
     fees.

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, 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. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cotton). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Under the previous order, the time until 12 noon will be equally 
divided between the two managers or their designees.


                National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, we have recently been talking quite a 
bit--because, frankly, unless we talk about it people won't know what 
happened--about how productive we have been over the last year and a 
half in advancing legislation that benefits the American people, which 
is, of course, the reason why they sent us here.
  I say we have been talking about it, because if we don't talk about 
it, maybe they will never learn, and even if we talked about it, some 
of them may never believe it. But the fact of the matter is that we 
need to talk about what we are doing here for the people we represent.
  Of course, nothing happens in the Senate or in Congress or in 
Washington unless it is done on a bipartisan basis. But leadership 
matters. Leadership matters.
  We have seen with the new Republican majority in the 114th Congress, 
under Senator McConnell and Speaker Ryan now, that we have been able to 
pass some important legislation. This includes legislation to combat 
the epidemic of opioid abuse throughout our Nation. We passed an 
important piece of legislation called the Comprehensive Addiction and 
Recovery Act to deal with it.
  But I want to talk about another aspect of the prescription drug 
problem or issue and reflect on some bipartisan legislation we passed 6 
years ago--obviously, with people on both sides of the aisle and in 
both Chambers--when we came together to tackle another issue related to 
prescription drugs. This had to do with the fact that many prescription 
drugs are filled. They will sit in medicine cabinets and perhaps be 
subject to pilfering by people for whom they were not prescribed or be 
disposed of in a way that is bad for the environment. We found that the 
growing use of prescription drugs for nonmedical uses is particularly a 
problem among teenagers. When people take drugs for recreational or 
other purposes that have not been prescribed for them, unfortunately 
the consequences can be fatal.
  We noticed that some State and local law enforcement agencies have 
had success with drug take-back programs. The programs allowed people 
to turn in their leftover prescription drugs, limiting the chances that 
these drugs would get into the hands of someone who doesn't need them 
or that they would hurt them.
  I remember in Austin, TX, shortly after we passed this legislation in 
2010, going to one of the locations where the take-back program was in 
use, and people were bringing garbage sacks full of prescription drugs 
they had in their home. In some instances, they had a

[[Page 5146]]

relative who had been ill and passed away. They had all of these 
prescription drugs that were sitting there, and they didn't know what 
to do with them. Do you flush them down the toilet? Do you put them in 
the garbage can? What do you do? Fortunately, we provided a mechanism 
for people to deal with these unneeded drugs.
  We focused our efforts on making it easier for Federal agencies to 
take and dispose of some of the most dangerous drugs, including 
opioids, and finding a way to encourage more communities to do the 
same.
  The legislation we passed in 2010 was the Secure and Responsible Drug 
Disposal Act, and it gave law enforcement officials the flexibility 
they need to be able to build these programs. Like most legislation 
nobody has ever heard of, it passed Congress unanimously. But just 
because we didn't fight like cats and dogs doesn't mean it is not 
worthwhile. I am thankful that this week we will be able to highlight 
the importance of legislation like this to address our Nation's 
prescription drug epidemic.
  Today, folks on Capitol Hill can hand in any unused prescription 
medication they have as part of Federal take-back day. That is today. 
On Saturday, we will get a chance to see this in action across the 
country through the National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day. Take-back 
days not only highlight the problem of prescription drug abuse, they 
help local communities take control of the problem by rallying the 
community to turn in drugs that are either unwanted or expired and to 
make sure they are safely disposed of.
  I look forward to going back home to Texas for national take-back day 
this weekend, where I will have a chance to join local law enforcement 
and city leaders in Dallas and Austin and Walgreens pharmacy--all 
working together to help highlight this important initiative. I 
encourage all of my colleagues to do the same.


                   United States-Mexico Relationship

  Mr. President, separately, I want to talk for a moment about another 
matter of importance, and that is the importance of our Nation's 
relationship with our neighbor to the south. Coming from Texas, which 
has 1,200 miles of common border with Mexico, I often observe that this 
is a relationship from which we cannot get a divorce. We are bound 
together as countries, contiguous countries, and frankly our well-being 
depends in part on how well Mexico is doing. We know that Mexico, like 
the United States, has its own unique challenges.
  As the largest exporting State in the country, Texas exported $95 
billion worth of goods to Mexico just last year--$95 billion to Mexico 
just last year. In fact, Mexico is our largest export market, and it is 
the second largest export market of the United States. The truth is, 
Mexico and its economy are very important to our economy and how we do 
as a country.
  In today's globalized world, we must continue to support our economic 
partnership with Mexico and find ways to build on it and certainly not 
do anything to undermine it. That is why I prioritized efforts such as 
the Cross-Border Trade and Enhancement Act, legislation I have 
introduced with my colleague in the House, a Democrat by the name of 
Henry Cuellar. I worked with him a lot on border-related and especially 
trade-related issues. This bill would help reduce wait times and 
upgrade infrastructure at our border ports of entry.
  I bet most people don't realize that the single largest land port of 
entry into the United States is Laredo, TX. If you come with me to 
Laredo sometime, you will see semis and tractor-trailers stacked up 
literally for hours trying to get across the International Bridge, 
engaging in the kind of trade that helps support American jobs and 
helps our economy.
  It is important that we move goods and people more efficiently, 
safely, and legally, and grow our trading relationships with partners 
like Mexico. The fact is, 6 million American jobs depend on binational 
trade with Mexico--things we send there and things they send here. A 
lot of the jobs that used to go to China because they could produce 
things in a manufacturing process that was cheaper because of lower 
wages and the like--because of the benefit of the proximity of Mexico, 
many of the maquiladoras and other manufacturing facilities in Mexico 
are integral to North American manufacturing.
  Our relationship with Mexico, as complicated as it can sometimes be, 
goes well beyond impressive trade statistics. Mexico is a key partner 
for the United States as we work to keep our country safe and to help 
them deal with the challenges they have from a law enforcement 
standpoint.
  Mexico is critical to our joint goals of countering and interdicting 
illegal substances entering the United States from across the border. 
We know the supply is huge, and unfortunately the demand in the United 
States is huge, and our Mexican friends always remind us of that. Every 
time we are critical of them, they say: Well, if it weren't for the 
demand in the United States, the supply wouldn't be there. They have a 
point.
  We have also worked with Mexico in trying to stem the tide of illegal 
immigration. I know most people may not quite accept that, but the fact 
is, Mexico has stepped up and dealt with immigration across its 
southern border from countries such as in Central America--some of the 
most challenging environments in this hemisphere. We have seen that 
manifested in the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who come 
from Central America, across Mexico, and into the United States, ending 
up on our doorstep. But Mexico has worked with us to try to stem that 
flow of illegal immigration from Central America.
  We have worked together to try to help make sure our border is not an 
easy target for terrorists and other bad actors seeking entry to our 
country.
  There is no doubt that these shared challenges are just that--
challenging. But what should be crystal clear to all of us is that we 
can't address them without working with Mexico. We can't ignore it. As 
I said earlier, we can't get a divorce. We have to work this out 
because our futures are joined together in many important respects. 
That is why I say that the success of the United States depends in part 
on Mexico's success, and we should diligently look for ways to grow 
that partnership for the good of both countries. One practical way we 
can do that is by confirming a U.S. Ambassador to represent us in 
Mexico City.
  Roberta Jacobson was nominated last summer, and I believe she is 
qualified to represent us in this key relationship. Our bilateral 
relationship is simply too important to the people of Texas and to the 
people of the United States to leave this position unfilled. We have to 
get somebody representing the United States in Mexico City to advocate 
on behalf of the United States for all of the reasons I mentioned 
earlier--trade, security, immigration. Otherwise, I don't think we are 
going to be able to make the kind of progress we all would like to see, 
and we certainly can't afford to let our relationship with Mexico go 
stagnant. That is one of the risks of not having an ambassador there.
  I was really glad to hear my friend, the junior Senator from Florida, 
call the U.S.-Mexico relationship one of the most important ones we 
have. He said that yesterday on the floor. I share his optimism that 
this impasse over the confirmation of Ms. Jacobson can be resolved 
soon. I certainly think it is time we come together to move her 
nomination forward. Here in the waning days of the Obama 
administration, it is very important that we have this important 
ambassadorship filled for all of the reasons I mentioned earlier.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Tillis). The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. COTTON. 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. COTTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all time in 
quorum calls until 12 noon be evenly divided between the two parties.

[[Page 5147]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. COTTON. 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. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cassidy). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, in a few minutes we will be voting on 
whether to end debate on the Energy and Water Development 
Appropriations bill. Most of what we have to say about it at this point 
is very good news. This is the first appropriations bill of the year. 
It is the earliest date an appropriations bill has been acted on in the 
Senate since 1974. If it goes through in the regular order, it will be 
the first Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill that has 
done so since 2009. More than 80 Senators have contributed policy 
suggestions and amendments to the bill on both sides of the aisle. In 
addition to that, we have dealt with 17 amendments on the floor. Now we 
are ready to end debate and move in our process toward a final solution 
on the bill.
  I believe this bill was put on the floor because Senator Feinstein 
and I have a good history of working together, and the expectation was 
that we would find a way to do that. Let me say the problem--and I will 
leave time for Senator Feinstein or the Democratic leader or perhaps 
Senator Cotton or others who may want to say something.
  An issue has arisen over an amendment offered by Senator Cotton. He 
did that after the administration made an announcement over the weekend 
that it would be purchasing heavy water from Iran. Heavy water by 
itself is not much. It is just water. It is in drums. It doesn't hurt 
anybody. It is not dangerous. It is distilled water, and it is used 
primarily for two reasons: one, for scientific instruments--we use it 
for fiber optics and other scientific reasons--and it can be used to 
make plutonium. So it was a part of the agreement between the United 
States and Iran.
  Senator Cotton--and I will characterize his amendment with his 
permission--sought to do two things. One was to say you couldn't use 
any appropriated funds for the fiscal year 2017--the one we are working 
on now--to buy more heavy water from Iran. The second thing he sought 
was to do something about Iran's business of selling heavy water. What 
would the implications be about that for our own national security? 
Remember, this is a decision by the U.S. Department of Energy that was 
announced over the weekend without any notification to the chairman of 
the Foreign Relations Committee or to the Intelligence Committee or to 
the Armed Services Committee. So you have a U.S. Senator who is on the 
ball, and he says: OK, this is an issue I would like to do something 
about.
  Our friends on the other side have raised an objection, especially 
Senator Feinstein, for whom I have the greatest respect. So today, in 
talking with the Democratic leaders, I asked: May I talk with Senator 
Cotton and see if he will modify his amendment in a way that might be 
acceptable so that we can go on with the appropriations process and not 
blow it up?
  It was blown up last year because we put controversial water language 
in the bill, and instead of bringing it to the floor and voting on it 
and letting the President veto it and then bringing it back, the 
Democrat majority decided we just wouldn't bring the bill to the floor.
  This year I talked to the Democratic leaders. They wrote Senator 
McConnell a letter, and we all agreed to try to have an appropriations 
process. What they said to me was, no controversial riders in 
committee. So I went through my whole committee with Senator Feinstein, 
and we persuaded many Senators to leave their controversial amendments 
off the bill in committee, and we said to them: You can bring them up 
on the floor when they have 60 votes. If you can get 60 votes, you can 
put it in the bill, and if the President of the United States doesn't 
like it, he can veto it. Then it takes 67 votes to override it.
  Here we are, early in the process in April, moving ahead, and all of 
a sudden I understand that the Democratic minority is going to block us 
from going forward because they don't like the Cotton amendment.
  Let me say this, Mr. President, and I will stop my remarks. I think 
Senator Cotton has acted responsibly. He acted as soon as he knew about 
the Department of Energy's decision. He has listened to the objections 
that were raised by the other side. He has amended his own bill. He has 
offered for it to be adopted by voice vote. He has offered for it to be 
voted on at 60 votes.
  As I said, he has modified it. He has completely taken out the part 
that could limit American businesses from getting licenses to buy heavy 
water from Iran. That is to be discussed at a later time. He has left 
in only the part that says you can't use fiscal year 2017 money to buy 
heavy water from Iran. But the Department can use prior year 
appropriated money, and it can use revolving fund money. It can buy all 
the heavy water Iran has if this President or the next President wants 
to. I think that is a very reasonable step, and I would ask the 
Democratic leader and the whip and Senator Feinstein, all of whom I 
work with very well and for whom I have great respect, if they are 
determined to block the bill at noon. But let's keep talking about this 
because I think it is the basic constitutional framework of our U.S. 
Senate to do our job on appropriations, and Senators should be allowed 
to offer germane amendments.
  When confronted with an objection on the other side, if they say 
``well, 60 votes'' or ``voice vote'' or ``I will modify my amendment,'' 
that ought to be respected, and we should go ahead. Then if the 
President at the end still feels he wants to veto the bill, that is the 
way our process works. He vetoes it.
  If we don't do this, we are going to end up with an omnibus bill. 
Senators won't have a chance to participate in it, and then the 
President will have to veto it in an omnibus bill at the end of the 
year. That is not the kind of process that earns the respect of the 
American people.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic leader.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I have the deepest respect, without any 
question, for the Senator from Tennessee, who is my friend, and, of 
course, Senator Feinstein is already legendary as a figure in 
Democratic politics and politics of this country. But I have some 
reservation, for lack of a better description, about my friend, the 
senior Senator from Tennessee talking about the appropriations process.
  I was on the Appropriations Committee from the first day I came to 
the Senate, and I loved my service on the Appropriations Committee. For 
the last 8 years under President Obama, the Republicans have done 
everything they could--I am trying to find a pleasant word--to mess up 
the appropriations process--everything.
  For those who understand the Senate, everyone should know we didn't 
ask that there be cloture on a motion to proceed. We are as cooperative 
as we can be on everything we have done during the time we have been in 
the minority, which is more than a year now.
  I would suggest to my friend that cloture will not be invoked on this 
bill in 2 or 3 minutes. If there is some proposal that the Republicans 
want to come back with that is reasonable and doesn't have a poison 
pill in it, fine; we are willing to move forward on this. For someone 
to give me the statement ``Well, you know, it is germane''--the world 
is germane on this bill. I did this bill for 15 years. I did it. I know 
what is in this bill. Just about everything is germane. They have all 
kinds of defense stuff, energy and water--it is a big, big important 
bill, and this amendment by the Senator from Arkansas is nothing more 
than an effort to sidetrack the work we are doing here.
  The Republicans are in the majority. I hope that it doesn't last that 
long, but that is where we are. It is up to

[[Page 5148]]

them to move this process forward. We have tried our best to cooperate.
  I suggest to my friend from Tennessee to see what happens and come 
back with something this afternoon. We have said on many occasions over 
the last 24 hours, we will vote right now on final passage of the 
bill--as it stood before this amendment was offered.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Ernst). The Senator from Arkansas.
  Mr. COTTON. I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 2 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. COTTON. Madam President, as the Senator from Tennessee has said, 
the administration announced that they were purchasing heavy water from 
Iran on Friday night. On the first legislative day back on Monday, I 
proposed an amendment which is germane to the bill and thereby entitled 
to a simple majority threshold vote.
  I have offered to give a voice vote to the Democrats so they don't 
have a record vote. I have offered to put it at a 60-vote threshold 
because there are 60 Senators who do not believe that the U.S. 
taxpayers should be subsidizing Iran's heavy water industry.
  This morning, as Senator Alexander said, I offered to revise my 
amendment, yet here we are. The Democrats are going to vote no on 
cloture, objecting to an amendment that is not pending and is not 
included in this legislation.
  I, too, do not want to see the appropriations process end. I want to 
pass this bill. I want to move on to the next appropriations bill, and 
I am committed to continue working in good faith with the Senator from 
Tennessee and the Senator from California to try to reach some 
solution, whether on this bill or any other, that we can move forward 
on in an orderly fashion and pass all of our appropriations bills, as 
well as ensure that the U.S. taxpayer is not subsidizing a critical 
component of Iran's nuclear industry, which, I may add, we are not 
required to do under the nuclear agreement with Iran.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. May I speak for a few minutes prior to the cloture 
vote?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Madam President, we have the Democratic leader on the 
floor and the chairman of the Energy and Water Development 
Appropriations Subcommittee. I want him, particularly, to know how very 
much it has meant to me to work with him to try to reverse the 
deterioration of order of this body.
  That deterioration of order was the inability to pass an 
appropriations bill on its own and go back to what is called regular 
order. I have watched the Appropriations Committee lose prestige over 
the years. I have watched something happen that never happened in the 
early years. Members would vote for a bill in committee. They would 
come out, and they would sustain it on the floor.
  So the Appropriations Committee gained, I think, a prestige and an 
honor in this body. I think it has been very wounded. So the ability of 
Senator Alexander, my chairman, and myself to try to restore that order 
by sitting down and working out problems--and seeing that he gives, I 
give, we put together a bill, and we believe that bill can get through 
this body and that we can conference that bill successfully--is a 
really big deal to change the nature of this body, and we can show that 
we can get our job done.
  Well, into this climate, which is so amicable and so positive, comes 
an amendment. I go to the White House. I pick up the phone. I call the 
Chief of Staff. I say: This is an amendment. It may affect the Iran 
deal. I would like to know what the administration's position is. The 
word back is that the administration will veto this bill if these words 
are in it.
  So I began to learn a little bit about heavy water--what it is and 
what it is not--and how this all came about. So I understand the 
administration's problem with it, because it destroys something they 
are trying to do with the Iran agreement; that is, to show Iran a legal 
pathway with which it can proceed to go into the family of nations in a 
moderate way.
  Iran happens to have a foreign minister whom I have known for at 
least 15 years. I know he believes in this Iranian agreement. I know he 
wanted to take Iran in another direction. I know it because he proposed 
an earlier plan when he was Ambassador to the United Nations.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. I ask unanimous consent for such time as I may 
consume. I will be short.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. I have no objection if I can have the same.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. So, to make a long story short, this body discussed 
the joint agreement. We agreed that the President should go ahead and 
implement this agreement. Now, there are difficult problems because 
Iran is emerging and wanting to come into the family of nations in a 
positive way. They have to get this heavy water out. The heavy water is 
out. It is sitting in a store room in Oman.
  Iran desires to sell it, just as India sells heavy water. Canada has 
sold heavy water to us. That heavy water is used for peaceful purposes, 
as the chairman said, for fiber optics, for medical research. Our 
National Labs are interested in it, and there are many companies that 
would use it to improve fiber optics and that kind of thing.
  So it is a way of removing proliferation from the country. This is 
suddenly on our Energy and Water bill. I believe we have the votes to 
not enter into cloture at this time. I guess what I want to say is my 
very deep regret to my chairman. I don't want it to end this way. I 
want us to continue to work together. I truly believe that there is 
more in the interests of this country that we can do appropriations 
bills in regular order, with concurrence on both sides of the aisle, 
than the value of this amendment.
  This amendment has raised hackles all over. So why can't it be left 
for another day? Why does it need to be on an appropriations bill? Why 
can't we have the ability to do one bill in this body that does not 
have a poison pill on it, to set an example for future bills? This was 
the bill--Senator Alexander and I both know that--that was supposed to 
do that. Why can't a Member see this? Maybe he is a new Member. Maybe 
he does not understand what the years have been like.
  Why can't he wait for another time? I have been here 24 years. I have 
waited for another time plenty of times, because someone said: Your 
amendment won't go well with the bill. Don't do it now. We may help you 
later.
  I did it. Why destroy our chances? Because that is exactly what is 
happening.
  So I just want Chairman Alexander to know how very sad I am that we 
are at this point. I believe it is not necessary to be at this point. I 
believe we could show that we could do it. I would say that if cloture 
is not granted, we stand ready to continue to work to try to get a 
bill. But I would so appreciate it if a new Member could recognize this 
and say: Oh, I wanted to do this. It is my right to do it.
  All of that I admit, but what you are doing is going to disturb our 
effort to produce a series of appropriations bills without poison pill 
riders.
  I will predict that there will be more on other bills. Our effort, 
which the majority leader began with the Democratic leader--was to be 
able to put together a process where we could produce bills.
  Please, think about that.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I will make brief concluding remarks 
and then we can vote. We are not debating the Iran agreement here 
today. This is the Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill of 
the Appropriations Committee. We are not even debating the Cotton 
amendment. It is not even part of the bill. Senator Cotton has filed an 
amendment that could

[[Page 5149]]

be part of the bill if the Senate decides to adopt it in our debate 
after we adopt cloture. He has done that.
  Just to repeat, over the weekend, the U.S. Department of Energy, 
without any consultation with anybody in the Senate that I know about--
without the Intelligence, Armed Services, or Foreign Relations 
Committees--decided it was going to buy heavy water from Iran. The 
Senator from Arkansas introduced an amendment on the subject.
  My understanding of the way the Senate is supposed to work is that we 
save the controversial amendments for the floor. If you can get 60 
votes, you pass them. Then, as Senators, if the issue is an important 
issue about which we disagree, we vote on it and we accept the vote. 
Sometimes we win, and sometimes we lose.
  We also listen to each other. So if the other side says this is an 
especially difficult issue for us, we try to accommodate that. So the 
Senator from Arkansas has said that he will take 60 votes, although he 
is entitled to 51. He can force a 51-vote vote on this issue if he 
chose to do that, under parliamentary rules.
  He said: I will take a voice vote. He does not have to do that. Then 
this morning he said: I will modify my amendment. I will eliminate all 
of the part about licenses. That is the second sentence of this very 
simple amendment. We will reserve that for discussion by the Armed 
Services, Foreign Relations, and other committees. So all that his 
amendment says is that you can't use money from this fiscal year to buy 
heavy water from Iran--except that the Department of Energy has 
potentially millions of dollars it could use from other years to do 
that, and it has a revolving fund it could use.
  In effect, if this President or the next President wanted to continue 
to buy heavy water from Iran, it could do so. So I think the Senator 
from Arkansas is entirely within his rights, whether he has been here 2 
years or 20 years. I think he is entitled to come up and ask for a 
vote. I think he has bent over backwards in offering three or four 
different ways to accommodate the concerns of the others.
  I think it would be a real shame if we came up with yet one more 
reason not to have an appropriations bill after we have done all of 
this work, 80 Senators have made their contributions, and we have 
adopted 17 amendments.


                             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 Senate amendment 
     No. 3801 to Calendar No. 96, H.R. 2028, an act making 
     appropriations for energy and water development and related 
     agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2016, and 
     for other purposes.
         Mitch McConnell, Lamar Alexander, Jerry Moran, John 
           Boozman, Steve Daines, Richard Burr, Roy Blunt, Orrin 
           G. Hatch, John Hoeven, John Thune, Thad Cochran, Roger 
           F. Wicker, Mark Kirk, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, 
           Johnny Isakson, Pat Roberts.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. By unanimous consent, the mandatory quorum 
call has been waived.
  The question, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on amendment 
No. 3801, offered by the Senator from Tennessee, Mr. Alexander, as 
amended, to H.R. 2028, shall be brought to a close?
  The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the 
Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from Alabama (Mr. Sessions), 
and the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey).
  Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) is 
necessarily absent.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber 
desiring to vote?
  The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 50, nays 46, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 64 Leg.]

                                YEAS--50

     Alexander
     Ayotte
     Barrasso
     Blunt
     Boozman
     Burr
     Capito
     Cassidy
     Coats
     Cochran
     Collins
     Corker
     Cornyn
     Cotton
     Crapo
     Daines
     Donnelly
     Enzi
     Ernst
     Flake
     Gardner
     Graham
     Grassley
     Hatch
     Heitkamp
     Hoeven
     Inhofe
     Isakson
     Johnson
     Kirk
     Lankford
     Manchin
     McCain
     Menendez
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Paul
     Perdue
     Portman
     Risch
     Roberts
     Rounds
     Rubio
     Scott
     Shelby
     Sullivan
     Thune
     Tillis
     Vitter
     Wicker

                                NAYS--46

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Booker
     Boxer
     Brown
     Cantwell
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Coons
     Durbin
     Feinstein
     Fischer
     Franken
     Gillibrand
     Heinrich
     Heller
     Hirono
     Kaine
     King
     Klobuchar
     Leahy
     Lee
     Markey
     McCaskill
     McConnell
     Merkley
     Mikulski
     Murphy
     Murray
     Nelson
     Peters
     Reed
     Reid
     Sasse
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Stabenow
     Tester
     Udall
     Warner
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wyden

                             NOT VOTING--4

     Cruz
     Sanders
     Sessions
     Toomey
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 50, the nays are 
46.
  Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted 
in the affirmative, the motion is rejected.
  The majority leader.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, I enter a motion to reconsider the 
vote.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The motion is entered.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, I think we have come up with yet 
another definition of obstruction today. Our Democratic friends are 
going to prevent the passage of an energy and water appropriations bill 
because of an amendment that is not yet pending to the bill in yet a 
new way to blow up the appropriations process.
  Our Democratic colleagues were great at dysfunction when they were in 
the majority, and they are pretty good at it when they are in the 
minority. No matter what the issue--no matter what the issue--there is 
some new and creative way to try and throw a monkey wrench into the 
gears.
  I heard over and over and over again that there was broad support on 
both sides of the aisle for getting the appropriations process moving 
again. The Senator from Arkansas has been extraordinarily reasonable. 
He has offered to modify his amendment. He has offered to consider it 
in some other context. Our chairman, Senator Alexander, has been 
working on this for 24 hours. It ought not to be this hard to pass an 
energy and water appropriations bill that would be good for the country 
and that most of us support.
  So I just moved to reconsider my vote, and we need to continue to 
talk about this because this is a ridiculous place for the Senate to 
be--ridiculous. We are all adults. We have all been elected by the 
people of our various States to come and act responsibly.
  We are not going to give up on this bill, and when we finish this 
bill, we will go to a couple more appropriations bills. I think we have 
a collective responsibility in the Senate--Democrats and Republicans--
to work our way past this snag and figure out the way forward, so we 
will have time to do that.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.
  Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I would like to say a word in response 
from the Democratic side.
  First, I cannot think of two colleagues I admire more than Senator 
Alexander and Senator Feinstein. They are honorable people. It has been 
a pleasure to work with them and even to consider issues where we 
opposed one another because I knew it would be done in a professional 
and courteous way. They have spent more hours than I can calculate 
constructing one of the most important appropriations bills--the Energy 
and Water appropriations bill.
  This bill was brought to the floor first by Senator McConnell for 
good reason. We wanted to set a template, a model, for finishing the 
appropriations process, and I respect that. I have been

[[Page 5150]]

honored to serve on the House Committee on Appropriations and now on 
the Senate Appropriations Committee, and I think it is a very important 
assignment. It has been many years since we have done our work in the 
way it was supposed to be done.
  Without a budget resolution, we took the budget agreement, moved 
forward with the bills. There were countless opportunities for the 
minority, the Democrats, to slow down this process, to make it more 
difficult, to make it more complicated, and to demand votes and delays 
of 30 hours after 30 hours. We did not do that because we were trying 
to be positive and constructive.
  I will not reflect on our experience in the majority, but I would say 
in response to the Republican leader, they broke the record in terms of 
filibusters on the floor of the Senate when the Republicans were in the 
minority. We don't want to go back to that era and we don't want to 
``get even.'' That isn't what this is about.
  There were basically two or three things guiding us in the process 
that I thought everyone signed up for, and I believe they did. One of 
them was balance between defense and nondefense spending overall; 
second, that each one of the bills hits a number that can be explained 
and rationalized based on the budget agreement; and third, the 
contentious issue of poison pills. These are subjects that are so 
controversial that if they are included in a bill, it becomes 
impossible to either pass it on the floor or expect the President to 
sign it.
  So we thought, if we are going to exercise our opportunity with an 
appropriations process that works, those three things have to apply. I 
give credit to both Senator Alexander and Senator Feinstein for 
producing a bill in subcommittee that met those tests and didn't 
include any great controversial items, going through full committee 
with exactly the same outcome, and bringing it to the floor.
  We were this close to the finish line--this close to the finish 
line--when yesterday the Senator from Arkansas, as is his right to do, 
offered an amendment. That amendment was offered around noon yesterday 
and the whole conversation changed. It was an amendment related to the 
Department of Energy, yes, but it was an amendment of great controversy 
because it was an amendment related to the President's agreement with 
Iran to stop them from the development of nuclear weapons.
  Everyone knows what that was about. Every Republican opposed the 
President's agreement and four of ours on the Democratic side. It was a 
highly controversial and volatile subject for many months and continues 
to be on the Presidential trail. To bring this amendment into the bill 
at the last moment, as it was, is to invite a debate and a controversy 
which was not in the bill up to that point.
  Now, was it the right of the Senator from Arkansas to do it? Yes. But 
I would just say that my experience in appropriations is, you would say 
to your colleague who had the right to offer an amendment: Let me just 
say in advance, this is going to slow down--it may even stop this bill. 
After all the work we have put into it, please don't offer that 
amendment, and if you do, I will have to oppose it.
  Those are the basics for kind of going forward on a bipartisan basis 
to bring this bill to a conclusion.
  We just had a procedural vote, and a few Republicans joined us, but 
the overwhelming majority of Democrats said we can't move forward on 
the bill until we resolve this basic question: If Senators will be 
allowed to offer amendments on the floor that are relevant to the bill 
and are controversial, we invite poison pills up to the very last 
moment when a bill can be considered.
  There has to be a better way. We have to prove to America that we can 
get things done in its best interests. That means some Senators cannot 
offer every amendment they would like to offer. That is just part of 
the restraint which we ask of Members who are consciously trying to 
help us be constructive in the Senate.
  I hope we can get back on track. The conversations are civil, as they 
should be between honorable people who are trying to work this out, and 
they need to continue. The underlying bill is very important. It is 
important to my State and to many other States. But let's finish this 
bill in the right way, in a bipartisan fashion, in a calm fashion, not 
in a confrontational fashion. We can do that. I am sorry we can't do it 
this morning. I hope we will all work together to achieve that goal as 
quickly as possible.
  Madam President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I would like to compliment my colleague 
from Illinois. He hit the nail on the head. I will be brief.
  The Republican leader said this is a new level of obstruction. I 
don't know if it is a new level of obstruction; he has been pretty good 
at it over the years. But certainly, if we wanted to obstruct these 
bills, we wouldn't have let the motion to proceed go forward. We would 
have done 17 other things that were done time and time again in the 
past.
  The way to stop this, I would say to the Republican leader, is very 
simple: Either prevail on Senator Cotton not to offer his amendment--no 
one is doing that. He has a right to do it. But in the old days, as 
Senator Durbin said, the way the appropriations process worked, the 
chair of the subcommittee would say: Don't offer your amendment because 
it will be defeated and we will help defeat it because it will blow up 
the bill. Plain and simple. That is still an option.
  We didn't offer the Cotton amendment. We could have offered our 
version of Cotton amendments to blow up this bill. We did not. Whether 
or not that was his intent--and I will not doubt the sincerity of my 
friend from Arkansas. But it was offered by the other side, and the 
onus is on the other side to fix this. The way to fix it is one of two: 
Either prevail on the Senator from Arkansas to pursue his goal here--
that is certainly his right, but don't do it using the appropriations 
process as a hostage to move forward on his bill--or tell him that if 
he offers the bill, Republicans will vote against it as well. Then we 
can move forward.
  That was how it used to work. When I was a junior Member and I wanted 
to offer amendments, some of them controversial, I would go to our 
chair or ranking member--depending on whether we were in the majority 
or minority--and say: I want to offer this amendment. The chair would 
consult with the other side, and they would come back and say: We, the 
majority/minority, cannot support this amendment. Then I wouldn't offer 
it. It would lose. That is the way the process used to work.
  I don't begrudge any individual--the centrifugal forces in our 
politics have pulled things apart, so it is much harder for Members on 
both sides of the aisle to do it. But let's not turn that around. The 
obstruction and the failure to deal with obstruction is not coming from 
this side, it is coming from the other side, and they have an onus to 
fix it.
  One more point before my good friend--and I love him--from Tennessee 
comes forward. Whatever we did, the President said he was going to veto 
this. So the idea that this bill would go forward and we would spend 
all this time on it and then have the President veto it--that doesn't 
accomplish the goals that I know my good friends, the chair of the 
subcommittee and the ranking member of the subcommittee, want to 
pursue. The onus is on us to do it before we get to that.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I appreciate the comments of Senator 
Schumer, Senator Durbin, and Senator Feinstein, for whom I have great 
respect.
  The people who can figure this out are on the floor, and we ought to 
be able to, is the bottom line. I suspect a big part of the problem is 
timing. The administration apparently decided to do this over the 
weekend. We are in the middle of this bill. Senator Cotton

[[Page 5151]]

would say that he moved as quickly as he could. And there is no 
question that this is an issue which raises lots of temperatures on 
both sides of the aisle. There is no doubt about that.
  We have to have a balance. Senators have a right to take important 
issues and present them in an appropriate way here in the Senate. In 
just this bill, there are several times when I was one of only one or 
two or three Republicans who voted for amendments just so we could get 
the amendments through and we could keep the bill going. I know how 
that works, and I intend to keep doing it.
  But I would say to my Democratic friends: I hope we can put our minds 
together and think of some way to allow Senator Cotton to make his 
point, to achieve what is an important objective and do it in a way 
that, A, is acceptable to the Democratic side, and B, doesn't have the 
problems that are associated with the timing. This came up on us all of 
a sudden. There are several reasons for that which we don't need to go 
into, but let's see if we can't work it out. I would certainly like to 
do that. I would like for Senator Feinstein and myself to be able to 
set a good example for the rest of the Senate and get our bill through.
  The only other thing I would say that is a little different from what 
the Senators from New York and Illinois said is that I don't really 
agree that if the President threatens a veto, we should stop our work. 
I think we would only be here about half a day a week. It is fine for 
the President to veto a bill if he feels he needs to, and he can send 
it right back. We consider that and we consider that it takes 67 to 
override it, and what often happens is we take something out or change 
some provision and send it back to him. So just because the President 
says he will veto a bill I don't think means the Senate should stop its 
work.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Will my colleague yield?
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Of course.
  Mr. SCHUMER. I understand that every time the President says 
``veto,'' we shouldn't freeze in our tracks, but it would be a lot 
better if we could avoid that situation because we want this bill to 
pass and be signed into law.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. I agree with the Senator from New York.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.
  Mr. COATS. Madam President, I will not weigh in on this issue, but I 
might later. I am here for a different purpose. I did serve previously 
in the Senate several years ago, and this is my second time back. My 
experience with the amendment process was a pleasant one then. Any 
Senator at any time could offer an amendment to any bill, and it would 
be discussed and debated and voted on, and we accepted the fact that it 
was either a yea or a nay. It was part of a process that sometimes 
started here, sometimes started in the House, but it is a process that 
goes through many iterations.
  So to determine that something at one step in the process takes the 
bill down ignores the fact that this bill will go over to the House of 
Representatives; they will debate it, and they will add things and 
subtract things; and then we will go to a conference to resolve the 
differences even before it gets to the President's desk.
  Unfortunately, what has happened here is that on anything the 
President of the United States doesn't like, he simply says: I am going 
to veto it, so drop it.
  So I agree with the Senator from Tennessee, Mr. Alexander, in saying 
that if that is the process and the way this Senate is going to 
operate, we might as well just close the place down. We can maybe show 
up just to show people that we showed up for work. But we are not going 
to accomplish anything on this floor if that is the case.
  The responsibility falls not just on us to do the job we were elected 
to do but also falls on the President to not try to torpedo a bill--
there are multiple dimensions--because one amendment gets passed with 
the will of the Senate, including bipartisan support, but the President 
doesn't like it and therefore shuts the whole thing down.


                           Wasteful Spending

  Madam President, I am here for the 40th-something week to talk about 
the waste of the week, and I will do that now. The other issue is being 
very ably handled by Senator Alexander, who is a veteran here and knows 
how to work through these conundrums.
  With a Federal debt that is over $19 trillion and growing, it is 
fitting to take a long look at every penny the Federal Government 
appropriates to ensure that hard-earned taxpayer dollars are not 
wasted. I have been down here week after week with examples of waste.
  Today, for my 41st edition of ``Waste of the Week,'' I would like to 
bring attention to an app the Transportation Security Administration 
paid IBM more than $47,000 to develop. ``App'' is a new word in our 
lexicon. We all carry around these new devices with which we can push a 
bunch of buttons and, by certain applications, access or do things that 
make life easier: monitor traffic on the road, getting the latest 
ballgame scores, checking on the weather. I have a whole bunch of apps 
on here.
  I heard about an app that had been developed for the Transportation 
Security Administration called a randomizer app, and it does just two 
things. Very simply, it points an arrow to the right or to the left. 
Now, we might say, why would anybody need an app--a device--that 
randomizes an arrow to the right or an arrow to the left? Well, let's 
take a look at this picture here.
  This is obviously a TSA agent. We have all been through this. This is 
a line at the airport. Those of us who go home every weekend--I go back 
to Indiana on Thursday night or Friday--are very familiar with these 
lines because we have to go through the security process.
  This is a TSA agent using this app. As we can see, it is a screen and 
it has a big arrow.
  When you walk through Reagan National Airport to go home every week--
as I know the Presiding Officer does to go back to Iowa--there are 
several lanes you can go down. Almost always there is a transportation 
security agent or someone associated with the process standing at the 
beginning of the lines and, with an arrow, saying ``Take this one'' or 
``Take that one.'' Well, I don't know about the details, but for some 
reason, they didn't want that to be an individual decision, so they 
called up IBM and said: We need to develop an app that will allow us to 
have a screen that has an arrow pointing to the left or to the right. 
And it needs to be random; it can't be controlled by this person.
  For whatever reason, it needs to be random. OK. Maybe there is a 
rational reason TSA needs to do that for security purposes, and without 
divulging what that is or knowing what that is, I won't get into that, 
but obviously it doesn't take a lot of money to develop a screen that 
has an arrow to the left, an arrow to the right, and a little bit of 
software running in the background randomizing so that you can't figure 
out whether it is going to be left or right. It does it all by itself.
  I wondered, how much would this cost? So we did a little research. 
What we found is that this is such a simple application that it can be 
developed by a developer of apps within a 10-minute period of time.
  So taxpayers paid $47,000 to build an app that had an arrow pointing 
one way or the other. Now, $47,000 is minuscule compared to what we 
waste around here, and I have a chart here that shows well over $160 
billion of waste, fraud, and abuse tallied up during my 40 visits to 
the Senate floor to talk about the various ways the government wastes 
taxpayer dollars. But this one baffles me because something which is so 
simple and which takes 10 minutes to produce costs $47,000--well above 
the average income for the average worker in Indiana and in many cases 
significantly more than the TSA agent who is holding it is paid 
annually for the work they do.
  So here we are once again. People might ask: Well, could we have done 
this in an easier way? Well, how about flipping a coin? That is random. 
Tails, go in this lane; heads, you are in this lane. How about drawing 
from a hat?

[[Page 5152]]

The TSA person standing at the line can have a hat with a whole bunch 
of slips of paper in it that say ``left'' and ``right.'' Go ahead, put 
your hand in, and pull it out.
  What does it say?
  Left.
  That is over there.
  What does it say?
  Right.
  That is over here.
  Maybe we can do what I do with my grandkids. I put my fists behind my 
back, and I will have one or two fingers extended. They all get excited 
and so forth. The brother is elbowing his little sister so she won't 
win, and the third child is crying, maybe, because they are not letting 
her play.
  So I say: OK, Charlie, is it a one or a two?
  Two.
  Charlie: Yay, I won.
  His sister starts crying.
  No, no. You are going to get your chance.
  All right, Maggie, you pick a one or a two.
  Anyway, we may go through each. I have 10 grandkids, so this takes a 
long time when we have family reunions.
  Any one of those processes could be used, and I don't think it would 
cost $47,000. It wouldn't be $4.70. It is just something we could do.
  I used to serve as the lead Republican on the Appropriations 
Subcommittee on Homeland Security. I know how difficult it is for the 
Homeland Security Subcommittee to fund the critical elements they need 
to fund and the programs they need to fund in order to keep us secure. 
Every penny counts, and every dollar counts in this regard.
  This type of egregious waste has got to stop. Perhaps it is time for 
TSA to precheck--we are all familiar with precheck, another thing we 
have to go through--these programs before we fund them. As we continue 
to determine funding levels for various government programs and 
agencies, we must remember projects such as TSA's randomizer app. This 
is yet another example of why minimizing waste, fraud, and abuse will 
go a long way to restore trust in government decisions as to how our 
tax money is spent.
  I just realized I missed out on naming one of my grandchildren who I 
play this with, and that is Avery--the sister of Charlie--who wants to 
make sure that she is in the game also. I will not go through the other 
seven. I will save those for another time.
  Let me note that we add more money--ever more money and examples of 
taxpayer waste. We are up to $162,277,955,817. This is big money. It is 
nothing to laugh about. This is a small example. We have had examples 
in the billions of dollars. We owe it to the taxpayer. We owe it to the 
hard-earned tax dollars that are earned by hard-working taxpayers to be 
as efficient and effective with the spending of their money as we 
possibly can. Once again, this is the waste of the week.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.


                           Fighting Wildfires

  Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, according to the Forest Service--and we 
checked with them this morning--there is right now an 11,000-acre fire 
burning in the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. This is just 
April, not the time when one normally thinks you are going to have 
fires when the fire season is on. But there is a fire burning in the 
Shenandoah National Park in Virginia that has already cost more than $3 
million. This is the second largest fire in Shenandoah National Park 
history.
  I have come to the floor this afternoon to once again make the case 
for the Senate, on a bipartisan basis--Democrats and Republicans--to 
come together to fix this dysfunctional system of fighting fire in 
America. I am going to describe it, but let me talk first a little bit 
about the consequences.
  In the American West, we used to talk about the seasons in a way that 
Americans had done for decades and decades: harvesting crops in the 
fall, skiing in the winter, fishing during the spring salmon runs, and 
camping in the summers. We fought fire during the wildfire season. But 
when Americans in the West talk about the seasons now, they are talking 
about the seasons of yesteryear. That is because the wildfire season 
raging across our forests and special places is no longer limited to a 
single time of the year.
  Fighting fires has become a continuous battle virtually year-round 
throughout the country. That is why this fire burning in the Shenandoah 
National Park ought to be a wake-up call once again to everyone to 
understand how important it is to fix this broken system of fighting 
fire, because the funding system for doing so is leading to dysfunction 
throughout the Forest Service and contributing to the breakdown of the 
national forest management that is needed to prevent catastrophic 
wildfires in the first place.
  According to the Forest Service, 1.4 million acres have already 
burned across America this year. That is more than twice the 10-year 
average for this time of year. These numbers show, in my view, how 
important it is that urgent action be taken to fix the way we fund 
wildfire fighting operations. This is something that Senator Crapo and 
I have been working on for some time.
  With the support of scores of organizations, well over 200, a 
significant number of bipartisan Senators and a significant number of 
bipartisan House Members have all joined in this effort, because it is 
not just the West that has been impacted. Forest Service work in States 
that manage timber sales, stream restoration, trail maintenance, and 
recreation get shortchanged when money has been diverted to fighting 
wildfires.
  I was particularly struck last year when we had the good fortune of 
having the senior Senator from New York, Mr. Schumer, join as a 
cosponsor of our legislation. The reason he did so is because this 
absolutely dysfunctional system of fighting fires has resulted in 
important priorities for New York State not being in a position to 
secure the funding they need. That is because the rising costs of 
fighting fires keeps raiding all these other programs in the Forest 
Service that are needed to help prevent fires down the road.
  The raids take place two different ways. Certainly, in my part of the 
world, we are very troubled by the fact that you have prevention 
getting short shrift. Then it gets really hot and dry. We have lots of 
thunderstorms in our part of the world, and all of a sudden we have an 
inferno on our hands. Then what happens is the agencies end up 
borrowing from the prevention fund to put the fire out, and the problem 
gets worse because you have repeatedly shorted the prevention program.
  This is what is called fire borrowing, and it happens not just in the 
West. That is why the senior Senator from New York wanted to be a 
cosponsor of our legislation, because programs that were important in 
New York State, thousands and thousands of miles away from the forests 
of eastern and central Oregon--those were a problem for programs he 
cared about and to secure their funding as a result of this 
dysfunctional system, just like it has been for people in the West.
  It is time for the Congress to find a solution to ensure that, one, 
wildfires can be fought; and, two, to control the cost of fighting 
these wildfires by better preparing our forests and making them 
healthier.
  I am very pleased that the chair of the Energy and Natural Resources 
Committee, the committee I had the honor of chairing in the past, 
Senator Murkowski, and Ranking Member Cantwell are committed to working 
on this issue, and I wanted to once again reaffirm my commitment. I 
know Senator Crapo shares this view to work with them to find a 
solution to wildfire funding that can pass in this Congress.
  I certainly have some ideas, and I am very interested in welcoming my 
colleagues' ideas and I have been for some time.
  For example, last year in the summer, it was pretty clear that it was 
going to be a tough fire season. What I and others essentially sought 
to do was to find a way to get our colleagues working together to try 
to find some common ground and get this resolved. We couldn't quite get 
it done. We are

[[Page 5153]]

now going to be at this day in and day out, week in and week out. 
Senator Crapo and I will be working with our colleagues and their staff 
on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and on the Budget 
Committee and with Members from the other body to find a solution that 
works for all sides of the issue.
  We saw last summer that this was going to be a problem. A big group 
of us got together and said we have to get it resolved. We couldn't 
quite thread the needle. This time we have to make sure that gets done. 
There are not a lot of certainties in life, but the fire season is one 
of them, and the Congress simply cannot let this problem continue.
  I wanted to come to the floor, particularly today, to take note of 
the fact that the fire in the Shenandoah area ought to be a wake-up 
call to everybody. If they are having one of the biggest fires they 
have ever had this early in April, that is a signal of what is to come. 
It has been the story of summer after summer. Now we are learning, as I 
indicated earlier--and it appears it is not just in the West--that we 
are thinking about the seasons and talking about the seasons of 
yesteryear because now it is fire season all year round.
  My colleague is here.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Coats). The Senator from Oregon.


                   Filling the Supreme Court Vacancy

  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, the most important words in the crafting 
of our Constitution are the first three words: ``We the People.'' With 
those three words, the Founders described what the government of our 
new Nation was all about.
  As President Lincoln later summarized, it is a government of the 
people, by the people, and for the people. In fact, even in the 
crafting of the Constitution, the Founders put special emphasis upon 
those three words, putting them in supersized font before all the 
details that were to follow.
  Periodically, I will come to the floor to talk about issues that are 
closely related to the ``we the people'' vision of our Constitution and 
our responsibilities under the Constitution. This week, I rise to 
address the responsibility of the Senate and its advice and consent 
role under the Constitution.
  The President's duty is to nominate a Supreme Court nominee when 
there is a vacancy. That responsibility is written very clearly into 
the Constitution. It says that ``he shall nominate, and by and with the 
Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint . . . Judges of the 
supreme Court'' in article II, section 2 of our beloved Constitution.
  The Senate then has the responsibility to provide advice and consent, 
as required, and over time it has been understood that we need to vet 
the nominee, determine whether the nominee is fit to serve in the post 
he or she will serve in, which is particularly important in the Supreme 
Court. That is how this esteemed Chamber, our beloved Senate, has 
operated for more than 200 years.
  In fact, we need to go back now and understand how this design was 
created. I have come to the floor before and read from Hamilton's 
Federalist Paper 76 that summarizes a conversation that was taking 
place over the nomination process. Some folks--in crafting the 
Constitution--thought that responsibility should be solely with what 
they referred to as ``the assembly,'' which is this body, the Senate. 
The reason they argued that is, it would be a balance to the power of 
the President in the executive branch if the assembly, the legislative 
branch, were to make the appointments. However, they then realized that 
those appointments would probably never get done because there would 
likely be a lot of horse trading and the most qualified person probably 
wouldn't be nominated. Instead, it would most likely be the friend of 
one Senator traded for the friend of another Senator, and that didn't 
make sense. They said: No, it would make more sense to invest the 
responsibility for the quality of the individual in a single 
individual. As the expression goes, the buck stops here. It stops at 
the President's desk. The President would have the responsibility to 
nominate individuals to serve in the executive and judicial branches 
and will bear the public responsibility for the credibility and quality 
of those nominations, but in that conversation, they also thought that 
was too much power for the President to have. What if the President 
starts to appoint friends or those with little experience or those of 
unfit moral character? There needs to be some kind of check, so in that 
regard then came the role of the Senate to give advice and consent. In 
order to do that, the nomination would go before this body for debate 
and then this body would vote on that nominee.
  The words that were the key words Hamilton used in describing the 
responsibility was to determine whether the individual was ``of unfit 
character''--fit character, unfit character. Did that nominee have the 
qualifications necessary for the job and the personal characteristics 
required to fulfill the job effectively?
  Well, here we are and President Obama has fulfilled his 
responsibility under the Constitution. He has nominated Judge Merrick 
Garland. We now have our responsibility in the Senate to vet this 
nominee, examine Judge Garland's record, examine any aspect of his 
writings or his previous court decisions, and determine whether Judge 
Garland is a fit character or unfit character. That is our 
responsibility in the Constitution.
  A number of my colleagues across the aisle--my Republican 
colleagues--have said: We don't want to fulfill our responsibility 
under the Constitution. We are just going to ignore the responsibility 
that has been vested in the Senate of the United States. They are in 
the majority, and a nomination can't go to a committee for a hearing 
and determine whether an individual is of fit character or unfit 
character without the majority making it happen. The nomination can't 
come to the floor without a majority vote in committee so it can then 
be put forward for our consideration. Unfortunately, the job strike of 
the majority party in the Senate--failing to fulfill its responsibility 
under our Constitution--is now imposed on this entire body.
  If we were within the usual timeline, we would be holding a hearing 
on Judge Garland this week. Since 1975, the average time from 
nomination to committee hearing has been about 42 days, but instead the 
leadership has said: We are not going to honor our responsibility. I 
find that deeply disturbing. Each and every one of us stood before this 
body and took an oath to fulfill our responsibilities under this 
Constitution, and that is what we should be doing right now.
  I say to my colleagues: Do your job. After a bit of reflection on the 
importance of how our government functions, one would think there would 
be a bit of reflection upon what we owe to maintain the integrity of 
our institutions and that this decision to go on a job strike would 
have been reversed.
  I have talked to colleagues who are, quite frankly, somewhat 
embarrassed because they have been asked to toe the line, and they 
don't feel it is right that they should be, in fact, failing to fulfill 
their responsibility, but there is a lot of pressure on them. We need 
to set aside political pressure when it comes to the integrity of our 
institutions.
  Since the 1980s, every person appointed to the Supreme Court has been 
given a prompt hearing and a vote within 100 days of their nomination. 
This chart shows three different phases as to the vacancies. Sometimes 
those vacancies have been longer or shorter in terms of before a 
nomination occurs. The red bar shows the start of the nomination 
process and the green bar shows the time before a vote is taken, which 
is the period of consideration. In every case, the red and green bar 
together are 100 days or less. This dates all the way back to Justice 
Sandra Day O'Connor.
  It has now been 100 days. How many days are there between now and 
when the next President takes office? What is the math? Well, there are 
268 days. So for anyone who comes to this floor

[[Page 5154]]

and says there isn't time, that individual is making a case with no 
foundation because the record shows that from the time the nomination 
was made until a vote, time and time again--under Democrats or under 
Republicans--it has been less than 100 days. Yet we have more than 260 
days left before the next President takes office.
  There are other folks who have come to the floor of this Chamber and 
have invented this new principle called the job strike during the last 
year that a President is in office. They act as if there is something 
in the Constitution which gives this Senate permission not to do its 
job during the last year a President is in office. Well, I encourage my 
friends to pull out and read the Constitution, find that clause, and 
bring it to the floor because it does not exist. The Constitution 
anticipates that each of us will fulfill our responsibilities 
throughout the entire length we serve until we exit office, that a 
President will serve and work through all 4 years of his or her term, 
that a Senator will serve and work through all 6 years of his or her 
term. There is no vacation in the Constitution for the last year. There 
is no special permission to fail to do your constitutional 
responsibility in the last year of a term. That simply doesn't exist.
  Many Supreme Court Justices have been confirmed in the final year of 
a Presidency, and so for those who come to this floor and argue that 
there is some historical precedent, that precedent doesn't exist 
either. Republican and Democratic Presidents have issued nominations 
regardless of the party in control of the Senate and the Senate, 
regardless of the party of the President, has done its job in case 
after case after case throughout time. Until this moment, the Senate 
has vetted the nominees, individual Senators have met with the nominee, 
the nominee's record has been exposed, thereby giving the public the 
opportunity to give us their input, and we would have voted in 
committee and on this floor.
  (Mr. BARRASSO assumed the Chair.)
  If we look to the recent past, Justice Kennedy was confirmed in the 
last year of President Reagan's final term. By the way, the Senate was 
controlled by Democrats. The Democratic leadership didn't say: We are 
going to go on a job strike and not vet the candidate and not hold a 
vote and not fulfill our responsibility. No, they honored their 
responsibility under the Constitution and so should every Senator 
today.
  This is a black mark on the record of the Senate. Think about what it 
will lead to. For example, let's say the job strike we are engaged in 
is purely for political reasons in an effort to pack the Court with 
more conservative Justices. Let's say it succeeds in delaying a 
nomination until the next Presidency, and the next President nominates 
someone on the far edges and way out of the mainstream, then what does 
each party do? Do they say: Well, the other party worked to pack the 
Court and refused to do their job, and, now, because the consequences 
would be so destructive and so partisan to the Court, we will refuse to 
do our job but only because of what preceded it? That is not a 
conversation we should ever have. That is not a dialogue we should ever 
have in this Chamber of action to politicize the Court, pack the Court, 
followed by reaction to try to blunt the impact of the initial action, 
followed by reaction, back and forth. This will deeply undermine the 
integrity of the Supreme Court of the United States. Let me tell you, 
the Court is already in trouble. The activist Court decisions of the 
far right, trying to write legislation through Court decisions to 
change the fundamental understandings of how our Nation operates, have 
already deeply politicized the Court.
  Citizens United turned the fundamental premise written into our 
Constitution on its head. Our Constitution was written all about, ``We 
the People.'' Jefferson talked about the mother principle; that we 
could only claim to be a republic to the degree that the decisions 
reflected the will of the people and that in order for that to happen, 
citizens had to have an equal voice. His vision was one of the town's 
square, where there was no cost to participate. Everyone had a chance 
to stand and have their say.
  Lincoln talked about the equal voice principle for citizens. The 
fundamental premise in a republic is to express the will of the people. 
People have to have the ability to participate in roughly equal 
proportion, but now the town square is for sale. It is the television, 
the Internet, the Web sites, the radio, and our Court has decided it is 
OK for the very rich to buy it up and destroy the equal voice principle 
that our Founders so cherished.
  This activist Court on the far right has decided to undermine those 
important first three words of the Constitution: ``We the People.'' 
This has produced a great cynicism in America because once this massive 
concentration of money buys up the town square, buys up the airwaves, 
influences elections, it is no longer ``We the People,'' it is ``we the 
powerful'' and ``we the privileged.'' Wouldn't it be wonderful not to 
have had the Supreme Court decisions that have undermined the integrity 
of our Supreme Court, but we have them and now the majority in this 
body wants to further damage the Supreme Court, further politicize the 
Supreme Court, and that is a huge mistake. We should go in the other 
direction. We should invest in the integrity of the Supreme Court. That 
doesn't mean a nominee gets automatically passed through this body 
because we have a job under the Constitution. We have a responsibility 
to vet the nominee. We have the responsibility, as Hamilton said, to 
judge if the nominee is unfit or fit. But how can you have that 
judgment if we do not hold hearings? How can you have that judgment if 
the committee does not vote? How can you have that judgment if there is 
not a debate on the floor of the Senate? How can you have that judgment 
if there is not a vote on this floor?
  So I say to my colleagues: End your job strike that is so out of sync 
with the tradition of the Senate. End your job strike that is so 
damaging to the Supreme Court's integrity. End your job strike that is 
so damaging to the ``we the people'' principles of our Nation. Do your 
job. Do your job. Hold the hearing. Meet with the nominee. Exercise 
your vote. Do your job.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Tillis). The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                     Nomination of Merrick Garland

  Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about the nomination 
of Merrick Garland to the United States Supreme Court and to urge my 
colleagues to grant timely consideration to the President's nominee.
  I recently had the pleasure of meeting Chief Judge Garland, as have 
many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. I encourage all 
Senators to meet the nominee because I suspect that they will find, as 
I did, that the rumors are true; he is an exceptionally qualified 
nominee.
  Since joining the DC Circuit, Chief Judge Garland has been recognized 
as one of the best appellate judges in the Nation. His reputation for 
working with colleagues to identify areas of agreement and to craft 
strong consensus decisions is well earned.
  After meeting Judge Garland and discussing the way that he approaches 
his role as a judge and as a chief judge, I am pleased to agree with my 
colleague and friend Senator Hatch, who described Judge Garland in 1997 
in this way:

       I believe Mr. Garland is a fine nominee. . . . I know of 
     his integrity. I know of his legal ability. I know of his 
     honesty. I know of his acumen. And he belongs on the court.

  Senator Hatch is right. He was talking about, of course, the DC 
Circuit--the second court in the Nation, really.
  Before Judge Garland was nominated, the White House reached out to me 
and to many of my colleagues, especially those on the Judiciary 
Committee, to ask the type of nominee whom I hoped President Obama 
would put forward or whether I had any particular names in mind. I 
didn't. My

[[Page 5155]]

only recommendation was that the President nominate someone whose 
intellect, experience, and demeanor would be apparent during a hearing 
and would cause the American people who watched the confirmation 
hearing to say: I want nine of those on the Supreme Court. This is what 
I told the White House.
  Now that I have met Judge Garland, I will set about the task of 
reviewing Judge Garland's full record and all of his opinions. I will 
set that aside, but the American people deserve to meet him and decide 
for themselves whether he is qualified to sit on the highest Court in 
the land. The American people deserve a hearing.
  In my view, confirmation hearings also serve a broader purpose. 
Hearings aren't just an opportunity for the public to get to know the 
nominee and discover how he or she views important issues; open, public 
hearings provide an opportunity for the American people to learn about 
the Supreme Court's jurisprudence and to demystify the Court's role in 
our democracy. Hearings also allow our constituents to see and judge 
for themselves how and whether their government is working, whether we 
are doing our jobs.
  Before any of us knew whom the President would nominate, Senate 
Republicans wasted no time in refusing to fill the vacancy until after 
the election. The majority leader said that ``this vacancy should not 
be filled until we have a new President.'' The Republican members of 
the Judiciary Committee gathered behind closed doors and vowed to deny 
the eventual nominee a hearing. Many Republicans refused to even meet 
with the nominee. They said it didn't matter who the President 
nominated. This was about principle.
  This type of obstruction marks a historic dereliction of the Senate's 
constitutional duty. Since 1916--for the past 100 years--the Senate 
Judiciary Committee has fulfilled that duty by holding hearings. 
Nonetheless, Senate Republicans stood firm in their opposition.
  But within a day of Judge Garland's nomination being announced, some 
Republicans began to change their tune. Once they discovered that the 
President had nominated a consensus candidate--a judge who had earned 
the praise of so many Republican Senators during the course of his 
career--their calculus began to change.
  Now my Republican friends are tying themselves in knots trying to 
explain to the American people how they plan to move forward. Quite a 
few Republican Senators broke ranks and agreed to meet Judge Garland 
privately while nonetheless maintaining that the Senate should not 
grant the nominee an open, public hearing. It would seem that some of 
my colleagues believe they--not the public and not their constituents--
deserve the opportunity to meet and to question the nominee.
  A few Republicans said that they would consider Judge Garland and 
even vote to confirm him in the lameduck session--but only if Democrats 
win the White House. That is a very odd sense of what the principle is 
here. I guess the thinking behind that is the Republicans are afraid 
that should the election not go in the direction they prefer, then the 
people shouldn't decide. They should decide unless they decide the 
wrong thing. That is the odd principle that I have heard in the 
Judiciary Committee when we have had business meetings, where members 
come in and make a statement and then leave. I hear a lot of 
contradictory stuff. Obviously, the theory is that should a Democrat be 
elected to the White House, they might eventually face a nominee who 
hasn't earned quite as much bipartisan praise, so then we will do 
Garland. That is absurd. That has nothing to do with principle. This 
has nothing to do with principle, and it never did. This is about 
politics.
  The Supreme Court is too important, too central to our system of 
democracy to let it fall victim to partisan politics. It has been just 
over 1 month since President Obama nominated Judge Garland to fill the 
vacancy caused by the death of a Justice. During that month, the effect 
of allowing a vacancy to persist has been made clear. The eight-member 
Court has deadlocked twice, handing down two 4-to-4 decisions. 
Permitting a seat on the Supreme Court bench to remain vacant means 
that, in some cases, the Court is not able to fulfill its core function 
of resolving the splits among the courts of appeals and serve as a 
final arbiter of our laws. The Court isn't able to do its job.
  I think we have to go through our history and look at when Justice 
Marshall was appointed in the last weeks, I believe, of that 
administration.
  I hope my Republican colleagues are finally coming to the 
understanding that they have an obligation to fill this vacancy. 
Members of the Senate and of the Judiciary Committee in particular have 
an obligation to do our jobs, to get to work.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  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. HATCH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Scott). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.


                       Defend Trade Secrets Bill

  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, this afternoon the House of Representatives 
is poised to pass the Defend Trade Secrets Act, bringing this critical 
proposal one step closer to becoming law. Over the past few months, 
Senator Coons and I have witnessed a groundswell of support for our 
bill, which will strengthen the ability of American companies to defend 
their most valuable information from theft.
  Businesses, both large and small, and lawmakers, both Republican and 
Democrat, have rallied around our legislation, providing the impetus we 
need to pass this key intellectual property bill. Passage of the Defend 
Trade Secrets Act marks not only a watershed moment for the 
intellectual property community, it also represents a victory for the 
American people.
  To appreciate the significance of this legislation, we must first 
understand the importance of trade secrets in American industry. Trade 
secrets are the lifeblood of our economy. In simple terms, trade 
secrets are the groundbreaking ideas that give businesses a competitive 
advantage. They range from unique production and manufacturing 
processes to food recipes and software codes.
  This critical form of intellectual property is not only invaluable to 
individual business owners, it is also directly responsible for 
creating millions of jobs in our country. But a lack of Federal legal 
protection leaves trade secrets vulnerable to theft and oversight that 
cost the economy billions of dollars each year.
  Two years ago, Senator Coons and I set out to fix this problem 
together. From the very beginning, we sought the input of business 
owners and job creators so that we could better understand the 
obstacles facing American industry and chart a path forward for reform. 
The Defend Trade Secrets Act is the culmination of our work.
  Under current law, companies have few legal options to recover their 
losses when trade secrets are stolen. For example, if a disgruntled 
employee steals a Utah company's confidential information and leaks it 
to a competitor in another State, attorneys must navigate a complex 
labyrinth of State laws just to bring suit. This cumbersome process can 
take weeks, which is an eternity in a trade secrets case. During this 
time, the likelihood that valuable intellectual property falls into the 
wrong hands increases every day, as does the potential for permanent 
damage to the company.
  Our bill solves this problem by creating a uniform Federal law that 
businesses can turn to when their trade secrets are stolen. This 
Federal standard keeps companies from getting bogged down in State laws 
by allowing business owners to take their case directly to a Federal 
court. Essentially, our legislation removes an unnecessary and time-
consuming layer of bureaucracy, buying businesses precious time to 
recover stolen information. By providing America's businesses with the 
ability

[[Page 5156]]

to protect their most valuable information in Federal courts, they will 
be better equipped to safeguard trade secrets and increase their 
competitiveness.
  The President has expressed strong support for our legislation, which 
he intends to sign into law shortly after it passes the House.
  The Defend Trade Secrets Act is not only a win for the intellectual 
property and business communities, it is also an example of what 
Congress can accomplish when we put party politics aside and find 
common ground. Indeed, it is always easy to make things look hard, but 
it is impossible to make things look easy.
  Today's House passage of the Defend Trade Secrets Act truly embodies 
countless hours of negotiations and hard work. I wish to recognize 
those who made passage of this bill a reality, including Chairman Bob 
Goodlatte, Representative Doug Collins, and Representative Jerrold 
Nadler. They were indispensable in shepherding this legislation through 
the House.
  I also wish to thank Senators Grassley, Leahy, Graham, Feinstein, 
Flake, Whitehouse, and many others for their contributions to this 
bill. Likewise, I thank my dear friend Senator Coons for joining me in 
coauthoring this bill. He has been an invaluable partner throughout 
this process.
  Enacting meaningful public policy in the midst of a toxic 
Presidential campaign is no small accomplishment. With the imminent 
passage of the Defend Trade Secrets Act, our Nation has cause for 
celebration.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                         College Affordability

  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I actually come to the Senate floor to 
talk about the urgent need to help make college more affordable for 
American families.
  Earlier this year, I launched a comment form on my Web site 
encouraging people to share their struggles to afford college and how 
their student debt is affecting them. Since then, I have heard from so 
many students and families from my home State of Washington and across 
the country. By sharing these stories, I hope we can all come together 
to work on ways to bring down college costs and make sure students can 
graduate from college without the crushing burden of student debt.
  I recently heard from a young woman named Katy. She is a junior 
studying psychology at Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA. Katy said she 
always knew that attending college was going to be financially 
difficult, although it never occurred to her to let that stand in her 
way. Because her parents were not in a position to help her out 
financially, and because she couldn't afford to make regular tuition 
payments, she has had to take on a large amount of student loans, and 
she wasn't able to live with her parents, so she has also had to plan 
and pay for room and board for all 4 years.
  Now, here is a typical workweek for Katy. Katy works 12 hours a week 
as part of the Gonzaga Student Body Association. At least 2 nights a 
week, and usually on weekends, she makes hundreds of calls on behalf of 
the Gonzaga Telefund. On most weekend nights, she is not out with her 
friends and family. Instead, she is babysitting for some extra cash to 
put toward her textbooks. On top of all that, she is also a math tutor, 
which, until recently, was a paid position before the department's 
budget was cut, but she has kept tutoring anyway as her way to give 
back. That is just who she is. Of course, that is all on top of being a 
full-time student as well.
  Let me be clear. Katy is very glad to be investing in herself and her 
future. She knows it is tough work and she appreciates that, but she, 
like millions of other students, is just looking for a little relief. 
In her own words, she admits ``it's a constant stressor thinking of how 
to pay for life while at college, and how I'm going to pay for all of 
this after I graduate.''
  Students like Katy aren't alone. Across the country, the yearly cost 
of tuition and room and board at a public 4-year institution is 5\1/2\ 
times what it was in the early 1980s, and to afford those skyrocketing 
pricetags, people are turning to student loans to cover the cost. 
Today, Americans across the country hold a total of $1.3 trillion in 
outstanding student loan debt.
  In my home State of Washington, the average college student owes more 
than $24,000 in student debt. Think about what that debt means for our 
students. These students are doing everything right. They are investing 
in their futures. Many of them are the first in their families to go to 
college, but when it is time to look for that first job, just starting 
out, they are already in the red.
  I have been so glad to work with other Senate Democrats on 
legislation actually called ``In the Red'' that would help students 
like Katy. Our bill would give students the chance to attend community 
college tuition-free. It would make sure the amount of Pell grants 
keeps up with the rising cost of college, and it would let borrowers 
refinance their student debt to today's lower rates. Our bill is fully 
paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes that only serve to benefit 
the biggest corporations and the wealthiest few.
  This issue for me is personal. When I was young, my dad was diagnosed 
with multiple sclerosis. Within a few short years, he couldn't work any 
longer. Without warning, my family had fallen on hard times. I have six 
brothers and sisters, and thankfully all of us were able to go to 
college with help from what is now called Pell grants, and my mom was 
able to get the skills she needed to get a job. She had been a stay-at-
home mom. She needed to go to work, and she got that job through a 
worker training program at Lake Washington Vocational School with 
government help.
  Even through those hard times, our family never lost hope that with a 
good education, we would be able to find our footing and earn our way 
to a stable, middle-class life. This country has never turned its back 
on my family, and today we can't turn our backs on the millions of 
families just like mine who need a path forward to afford college and 
pay back their student debt.
  I hope we can pass this bill and pave the way for lower college costs 
and less student debt. I hope we can work together to give students and 
families some much needed relief. Let's make sure they know we will 
never let up and that we will always have their backs.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida.


                               Venezuela

  Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I wish to speak about two separate topics. 
The first is Venezuela.
  Venezuela is a country in our hemisphere in total crisis, total 
chaos, and that is because of a number of things: failed leadership, 
failed economic policies, a complete societal breakdown, human rights 
abuses, and now a de facto political coupe that has plagued the country 
for about 15 years. This all started with Hugo Chavez and has now 
continued with Nicolas Maduro, his successor.
  Let's talk about the first cause of the disaster that has now 
befallen the people of Venezuela--failed leadership. For over 15 years 
now, Venezuela has been ruled by two strongmen who have mismanaged the 
country with an iron fist, have squandered its vast wealth and natural 
resources, they have imprisoned political opponents, they have 
corrupted all of the country's political institutions to ignore the 
will of the people and to entrench their power.
  By the way, this failed leadership has only gotten worse because the 
successor to Hugo Chavez is a completely incompetent person. On top of 
the fact

[[Page 5157]]

he is a strongman, he is incompetent. He does not know what he is 
doing. The result is this very wealthy country, with a highly educated 
population, is being led by someone who, quite frankly, isn't qualified 
to lead anything, much less a nation of the stature of Venezuela.
  The second cause is failed economic policies. Venezuela suffers from 
shortages across the board. For example, there are shortages of 
medicine and medical equipment, which means--and this is not an 
exaggeration--people are literally dying because their doctors cannot 
prescribe drugs that aren't available, and the hospitals and the 
clinics don't have the equipment needed to conduct surgeries. When you 
speak to medical professionals in Venezuela, they will tell you there 
are simple medications that could save the life of an individual, but 
they can't do anything about it. I had someone tell me today they asked 
a doctor: What do you do when one of your patients is about to die? And 
he said: Nothing. We comfort them as they die. We don't have basic 
medicines to deliver to them.
  Unlike the case of Cuba, by the way, where they are saying it is 
because of the embargo by the United States--which of course is 
ridiculous and is another topic for another day--there is no embargo on 
Venezuela. There are no sanctions on Venezuela and its people. So as a 
result, there is no explanation for this.
  The supermarkets are bare. The shelves are completely bare. People 
there cannot buy food or even basics such as toilet paper, toothpaste, 
toothbrushes--anything.
  In addition to the government's political censorship effort, its 
economic policies also help censor in the sense that there are 
shortages of paper that independent newspapers need to print their 
editions. So here is another Machiavellian move the government has 
made. There is a shortage of paper, and so they make sure the 
independent press has no access to paper. If you don't have paper, you 
can't print a newspaper.
  Things are so bad in Venezuela, economists earlier this month 
compared Venezuela to Mugabe's Zimbabwe of 15 years ago. The reason 
that is an unbelievable comparison is because, as I said earlier, 
Venezuela has one of the largest, if not the largest, oil reserves in 
the world; they have a highly educated population; they have a well-
established business class of professionals; and last year their 
economy shrank by 5.7 percent, and this year it will shrink by another 
8 percent. This is a country that now has rolling blackouts--an energy-
rich country that has rolling blackouts. It has gotten so bad that 
today their so-called President, the incompetent Nicolas Maduro, 
announced that government employees are only going to work 2 days a 
week, Mondays and Tuesdays. Government offices will be open only 2 days 
a week because they aren't turning on the lights. This is the state of 
one of the richest countries in the world and one of the richest 
countries in our hemisphere.
  They have had a total societal breakdown. Economic misery begets 
desperation, and we are seeing that reflected in the lawlessness that 
plagues Venezuela. Crime rates are among the highest in the hemisphere, 
particularly the murder rate. It stems from the top, at the highest 
levels of leadership. When an incompetent thug is running a country--
someone whose government intimidates opponents by using what they call 
colectivos, which are nothing more than street gangs, to ride around on 
motorcycles, causing all kinds of mayhem, shooting and attacking 
people--it only contributes to the lawlessness. Caracas, Venezuela, 
which is a beautiful city, is one of the most dangerous places in the 
world, comparable with war zones in terms of the murder rate. It is 
basically every man and woman for himself and herself in Venezuela.
  They have atrocious human rights abuses. Since the government's 
crackdown on demonstrators and political opponents began in February of 
2014, dozens of innocents have been killed, thousands have been beaten 
and targeted for intimidation, and hundreds have been jailed, including 
Leopoldo Lopez, who has been a political prisoner now for more than 2 
years.
  We need to demand the release of all 115 political prisoners in 
Venezuela and respect their rights and those of their families. I heard 
another horrifying story today. Most political prisoners are men. When 
their wives go visit them in prison, their wives are strip searched by 
male guards as an ultimate act of humiliating them. This is the 
situation in Venezuela.
  Last, but not least, we have a de facto political coup by the Maduro 
regime. This country faces a real political and constitutional crisis. 
Maduro has stacked the country's supreme court with his loyalists, and 
the supreme court is basically nullifying every law the Congress there 
passes.
  The opposition won the election in the last cycle. By the way, they 
won because the discontent with the government is so massive that they 
couldn't steal the election. It was so big that not even they could 
steal the election from them, so they sat this new Congress. He has 
stacked the supreme court, and the supreme court is literally 
nullifying law after law--doing it not for judicial reasons but for 
blatantly political ones.
  Maduro basically ignores the law. The congressional branch there will 
pass a law with a veto-proof majority, and he just ignores it. Imagine 
passing a law out of the House, out of the Senate, and sending it to 
the President. He can't veto it, and so he just ignores it or refuses 
to do it.
  That is the situation in our own hemisphere. The result is an 
incredible disaster--of deep interest to us, by the way, because of all 
the uncertainty it is causing in the region. So what can we do about 
it? First of all, it is in our national interest. The current situation 
is happening in our own hemisphere. It threatens to destabilize the 
region. It creates more pressure on our neighbors and our strategic 
allies, such as Colombia, where Venezuelans have been fleeing to. This 
creates migratory pressures on the United States. The lawlessness is 
fueling organized crime, including drug cartels, which senior 
government officials in Venezuela have established links to, which 
impacts our entire region.
  For these reasons and more, the United States has an interest in 
making sure Venezuela does not spiral further out of control.
  The first thing we should do is we should be active at the 
Organization of American States as it considers the situation in 
Venezuela, and they should ask that voting members recognize the 
humanitarian and political crisis in Venezuela.
  The United States should ask our allies in the region, countries that 
receive an extensive amount of aid from this country--Haiti, Colombia, 
the Central American nations, our neighbors up north in Canada, among 
others--to support this effort. Right now we are about to give hundreds 
of millions of dollars to countries in Central America, in the Northern 
Triangle, the Alliance for Prosperity. I think that is a good idea, but 
we should ask them to support what I hope we will try to do at the OAS. 
The same with Haiti. We have poured millions of dollars into Haiti's 
reconstruction. We should use that as leverage to ask them to support 
something happening at the OAS.
  What has happened in Venezuela is nothing short of a coup d'etat, a 
de facto coup, and the Organization of American States--if it has any 
reason to exist anymore, it should be to defend democracy in the 
region. It is the reason we have an Organization of American States. We 
will soon find out whether that organization is even worth continuing 
to exist if it cannot pronounce itself collectively on the outright 
violation of democracy in a nation that purports to be a democratic 
republic.
  Sanctions. We have to impose sanctions on human rights violators--not 
sanctions on the people of Venezuela, not sanctions on the government, 
on human rights violators, many of whom steal money from the Venezuelan 
people and invest it in the United States.
  On the front page of the Miami Herald yesterday was a story that one 
of

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the individuals linked to the petroleum industry with the Government in 
Venezuela, a billionaire--and you become a millionaire with these links 
by basically stealing the money--is the secret developer behind a major 
development in Miami, FL, in my hometown, in my home State. Travel to 
Florida, come down there, and let me know--any of my colleagues--and I 
will show you where these people live, and I will show you the money 
they have stolen from the Venezuelan people, and they are living the 
high life on weekends in Miami. You will see them everywhere. That is 
why we imposed sanctions on them. There will be an effort here, I hope, 
in the next day or so to extend those sanctions for another 3 years.
  Finally, I hope the United States uses our megaphone to highlight the 
corruption in the institutions of the Government of Venezuela. That 
should not be tolerated.
  There is also a humanitarian component to this. We should help make 
sure the Venezuelan Government is not stealing or otherwise standing in 
the way of the Venezuelan people getting the medicines and food they 
need.
  For far too long, the issues in this hemisphere have been ignored by 
administrations in both parties, by this administration. We can no 
longer ignore this. I hope we give Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere 
the attention and the priority they merit. It is in our national 
interests to do so.


                              Puerto Rico

  Mr. President, I want to briefly discuss the issue of Puerto Rico and 
the debt crisis Puerto Rico is facing. The island faces a major 
deadline coming up. A $422 million debt payment is due on May 1, which 
is this Sunday. If this deadline isn't met, it is going to cause some 
serious problems, and not just for the people of Puerto Rico--who, 
let's not forget, are American citizens--but also for millions of 
others throughout the United States. Today I will focus on one example 
of an American community that would be very negatively impacted, and 
that is the city of Jacksonville in my home State of Florida.
  Jacksonville is a port city, so its residents, businesses, and 
families depend in large part on trade. A recent article in the Florida 
Times-Union detailed exactly how close the relationship is between 
Puerto Rico and the shipping industry in Jacksonville.
  In 2009, as much as 75 percent of the goods coming in and out of 
Puerto Rico flowed through the ports in Jacksonville, which brought 
about $1 billion worth of economic impact to the city. In just the past 
year, between October and March, JAXPORT has seen a 32-percent increase 
in cargo tonnage from the island. But this trend is likely to reverse 
if fiscal conditions in San Juan do not improve soon.
  If Puerto Rico misses its payment on May 1 and its debt crisis 
further escalates, its economy is going to stagnate even more than it 
already has, and the harm is going to be passed on to any community 
like Jacksonville that has a significant economic stake in the island's 
well-being. We have already seen a massive exodus of professionals and 
others from Puerto Rico because of a lack of economic growth. They will 
likely continue leaving and heading to Florida and other places on the 
mainland, which will further cripple the island's economy and reduce 
the demand for trade.
  So what can we do about all this? Some have suggested that Washington 
can deliver a silver bullet solution to help Puerto Rico out of its 
debt. This simply isn't true. The reality is that nothing Washington 
does will be effective until Puerto Rico and its government leaders 
turn away from decades of failed policies. Their tax rate continues to 
be too high, government regulations are stifling, and they are spending 
more than they take in. I don't care if you are an island, government, 
business, or family--if you spend more than you take in and you do it 
for long enough, you are going to have a debt problem. That is what is 
happening here in Washington, and that is what is happening in Puerto 
Rico. Anytime your economy isn't growing, you are going to have a 
further problem, and no restructuring is going to solve that until they 
restructure the way they spend money. Bankruptcy protection isn't going 
to solve it, either, at least not without serious fiscal reforms from 
San Juan. Otherwise, if we grant bankruptcy protection, Puerto Rico 
will simply go bankrupt again not far down the road.
  That does not mean Washington should do nothing. All of us need to 
realize that this is an American crisis. It is taking place in an 
American territory. It impacts the people of Puerto Rico, who are 
American citizens. The impact will not be contained on the island; it 
will spread to cities like Jacksonville and other communities 
throughout the mainland United States.
  So we need to take the irresponsible leadership in Puerto Rico 
seriously. We need to urge them to get their affairs in order. But we 
should also look closely at what we can do here in the Senate, which 
may mean taking up some of the ideas currently being worked on by House 
leadership. We can also help Puerto Rico by doing the same things 
necessary to help the rest of the American economy. This means passing 
pro-growth policies at the Federal level, including tax and regulatory 
reform. It means we need to stop spending more money than we take in.
  In closing, the leadership in San Juan must view the deadline this 
Sunday as a wake-up call. They must show their willingness to get their 
fiscal house in order. If they don't, our options in Washington will be 
very limited and won't have support from taxpayers.
  But I think this is a wake-up call for us. The notion that somehow 
this issue with Puerto Rico will figure itself out is not true. The 
notion that somehow this issue with Puerto Rico is not that important, 
that we can put it to the side because it is not a State, is not true. 
Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. Its people are U.S. 
citizens. Its people, by the way, on a per capita basis serve in the 
Armed Forces of the United States at levels as high or higher than any 
ethnic or geographic group in the country.
  The people of Puerto Rico deserve our voice, and they deserve our 
action. I commend leaders in the House for trying to do something 
responsible on this. I understand the majority leader has said that 
once the House acts, the Senate will look at it very carefully. I know 
we have leaders here doing that as well. I urge that work to continue. 
We cannot ignore this crisis, and neither can the leaders in San Juan. 
I hope we can find a solution sooner than later for what Puerto Rico is 
facing with its fiscal crisis, which this Sunday we are going to be 
reading about when they miss their debt payment.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Toomey). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.


                                  NATO

  Mr. COATS. Mr. President, we haven't discussed foreign policy issues 
on the floor for a while. It is not because all is quiet on the eastern 
front. It is not. As we know, what is happening in the Middle East and 
in Europe--the migration issue, Syria, across Northern Africa--is that 
there are major issues that are ongoing and that affect the United 
States in a number of ways, not only economically but strategically, 
and leave us vulnerable to threats to ``take down America'' in one way 
or another.
  Obviously, we are in the middle of a heated campaign, which hopefully 
will be resolved in terms of our nominees in a short amount of time. 
But we do have to recognize the next President, whoever that President 
might be, is going to be facing some extraordinary challenges relative 
to foreign policy and national security issues. Making America great 
again--whatever it is that defines phrase--a new leader will have to 
deal with a number of very difficult challenges.
  This past Monday, President Obama delivered a speech in Germany in 
which

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he discussed the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 
NATO. He said that NATO must be prepared to carry out its traditional 
missions while at the same time meeting the newly emerging threats to 
the alliance.
  That was revealing to me and, frankly, welcoming because we have not 
heard anything from the President along those lines in my memory, but 
his recognition and his statement in that regard defines where we are; 
that is, we need to be prepared to carry out traditional missions 
through NATO while at the same time meeting the newly emerging threats 
to the alliance. We see these newly emerging threats to the alliance we 
are in almost every day.
  The President also noted that Europe has been complacent about its 
own defense and called on our allies to do more. I welcome this renewed 
attention to NATO. It also gives us the opportunity to respond to those 
who believe NATO has outlived its usefulness, is too expensive, and 
should be done away with. Such a view needs a rebuttal.
  It is not necessary nor correct to claim that NATO has no problems or 
its role has not changed or its future is clear. NATO does face 
challenges and has--in defining its mission, securing its resources, 
and providing the leadership that the world requires. But to deny that 
alliance's obvious value is, in my opinion, a major mistake. Such a 
judgment surely cannot be based on any real understanding of what NATO 
is or what it has accomplished, much less of what it can become and, 
candidly, what it must become, given the level of crisis and conflict 
so present in Europe, the Middle East, and in Africa.
  I have been a strong supporter of the alliance and the transatlantic 
security relationship throughout my public life. NATO's proud past and 
enduring importance were a constant presence during my service as a 
U.S. Senator and as U.S. Ambassador to Germany for 4 years following 9/
11. Since returning to the Senate, the alliance has remained a keen 
interest to me.
  Contrary to the notion that NATO has served its purpose and is no 
longer needed or is no longer a viable organization, NATO has survived 
and thrived for half a century because it has proven itself to be an 
adaptable, flexible, and effective organization.
  I think many of us know the alliance began all the way back in 1949 
with the principle motive of protecting Western Europe from the threat 
of Soviet aggression. But many forget that the founding document, the 
Washington treaty of 1949, does not mention the Soviet Union. Instead, 
its founding treaty laid out the core values of the West, which values 
the alliance was designed to protect.
  I want to state that again. What was trying to be accomplished 
through this alliance of NATO, all the way back to 1949, was a values-
based organization that enabled the alliance and gave the alliance 
those values which the alliance was designed to protect. It is exactly 
because the alliance was and remains values-based that it has been able 
to adapt to a changing strategic environment with newly defined 
missions and membership. The vital and permanent need to protect our 
shared values survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and the threat 
it represented and has enabled the alliance to define and confront the 
major threats and modern threats that we face today.
  As NATO adapted to the post-Soviet world, the clearest proof of its 
foundation as a community of values was the process of enlargement. At 
the beginning of that process, few in the administration or Congress 
saw NATO enlargement as having very much to do with actually enhancing 
the military capabilities of the alliance. When the first countries 
were proposed for membership via the Partnership for Peace program, it 
was not only because of the military contributions those newly 
democratic nations could bring; rather, the most explicit motivation 
for extending the prospect of membership to the countries of what we 
then called Eastern Europe was to persuade them to make the political 
and economic changes that would make them worthy and complimentary 
allies. We were trying to cement in the democratic revolutions that 
occurred in these former Soviet-controlled states and make those 
changes permanent.
  We were extending NATO's democratic values--along with its security 
umbrella--and we required prospective members to accept them and 
institutionalize those democratic values. That process continues today. 
NATO was and remains a political instrument of enormous persuasive 
power with historic consequences.
  But are shared values enough to maintain the vitality and the 
relevance of a military alliance? For those new member countries 
themselves, the appeal of alliance membership was the vast military 
capabilities of the club they were about to join. They sought actual 
enhanced security in a still dangerous world, not just a political 
partnership of values.
  Now, in the wake of renewed Russian aggression, most especially in 
Ukraine and its illegal annexation of Crimea, the objective military 
capabilities of the alliance have become even more relevant. This 
renewed threat resulted in NATO, in effect, hitting the pause button on 
redefining NATO's post-Soviet missions. For many alliance members on 
Russia's periphery, it was ``NATO--Back to the Future.''
  Russian behavior has once again provoked profound anxiety among our 
allies on Russia's periphery, especially the Baltic states, Poland, and 
Romania. In response, NATO has taken on new missions intended to 
reassure our allies, discourage Putin's aggressive designs, and renew 
NATO's urgent relevance. All of this has a heritage for NATO's founding 
in the Soviet era, but it also is a new and, in many ways, more 
complicated response. While Russia is not the enemy it once was, it 
certainly is no friend to the NATO nations. It is perhaps a necessary 
partner in some places, but it is a dangerous obstacle in others.
  In restating and reinforcing NATO's role in opposing Russian 
aggression, NATO needs to be creative and firm, active and present. It 
cannot be done on the cheap. This renewed mission emphasizes again the 
persistent issue of lagging resources. It has long been a problem that 
the great majority of NATO membership countries do not meet the 
alliance standard of the 2 percent of their GDP, gross domestic 
product, for defense.
  Although it is true that robust defense of the transatlantic region 
does require a greater commitment of resources than most European 
countries have been willing to accept in the past, it is not true that 
U.S. taxpayers have simply been required to make up the difference.
  The Department of Defense says that the direct U.S. contribution to 
NATO is about $500 million a year, the largest share of NATO's budget, 
clearly, but not out of line with our comparative gross domestic 
product--compared to other European nations. It is true that NATO 
relies on the national assets of its members for operations, and in 
that regard, our portion is the largest. But our portion reflects our 
spending for the entire military, which has global responsibilities. In 
other words, if there were no NATO, those military expenditures 
presumably would be the same, if not larger, since our allies are 
contributors to our collective security as well.
  In any case, the growing anxiety about Russian behavior seems to be 
generating some real progress on this resources front. Secretary 
General Stoltenberg said this week that five NATO members now meet the 
2-percent requirement, while it was only two countries just a few years 
ago. Further, defense spending has increased in real terms in 16 of the 
28 countries since 2014. Clearly, it is a wake-up call for NATO. What 
has happened on their borders, the periphery of Russia, has awakened 
NATO to the belief that it needs to strengthen our military, strengthen 
NATO's resources, and for those countries to live up to their 
obligations in providing the necessary resources.
  Nevertheless, and having said this, we cannot be relaxed about 
meeting the resources gap. Despite the recent uptick, there has been a 
long and dramatic decline in European defense

[[Page 5160]]

budgets for two decades before 2014, not to mention a significant 
absence of constituent support for defense expenditures in most NATO 
countries.
  It is a battle of these nations who are dealing with slow or no 
growth--GDP stagnant--to come to the decision to meet the 2 percent 
obligation that they have under the NATO treaty. They have other issues 
at home, migration simply being one of them, and a number of other 
domestic issues that have restrained them. But now the threat has 
become more real, and now the realization of how to address the threat 
has become more vital and necessary.
  In his June 2011 farewell speech on NATO's future, Defense Secretary 
Bob Gates famously said that our European allies were and had been 
``apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the 
necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own 
defense.'' He declared that NATO faced ``the real possibility of a dim, 
if not dismal, future.''
  But the response to this danger, now especially in the wake of 
Russian invasion and annexation of a neighbor--this is not the time to 
call for NATO's abandonment, but to press ahead in validating NATO's 
relevance, then finding the necessary resources. I believe that process 
is under way, as I have just described.
  Given the new threats to NATO's eastern border states, our allies are 
finding greater support for making larger commitments to their own 
security. Another pressing reason to solve the resources problem is the 
host of new requirements this modern alliance needs to face.
  Since the period of enlargement and the euphoria of democratic 
revolutions, NATO has made repeated attempts to define its new 
missions. The most recent strategic concept of January 2010 makes the 
alliance's newly global and political roles more explicit. It has 
identified numerous new transnational threats that a modern military 
and political alliance must confront. These include nuclear 
proliferation, cyber threats, terrorism, political instabilities, and 
missile capabilities.
  No one can argue that these global threats are not the core of modern 
security challenges. Similarly, no one can dispute that the most 
effective and powerful alliance in world history should and must 
organize itself to confront them. And most certainly, no responsible 
leader should look at these threats and conclude an alliance built to 
confront them should be abandoned. Let me restate that. No responsible 
leader, now or in the future, should look at these threats and conclude 
that an alliance built to confront these problems and challenges should 
be abolished. Modern NATO activities extend well beyond Europe. These 
include combating piracy off the Horn of Africa, operational and 
training support for the African Union in Ethiopia, air policing of 
Europe's borders against Russian incursions, growing cyber defense 
alliance capabilities, expanded special operations capabilities and 
activities, development of a NATO response force for rapid reaction 
operations on land and sea, expanded joint intelligence, surveillance 
and reconnaissance operations, and expanded joint exercises to improve 
the alliance and member-state readiness. That is a big challenge, but 
that challenge is one that needs to be addressed.
  In terms of more traditional warfighting, NATO has taken on missions 
in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya, and continued challenges 
will need to be addressed. It is not yet clear to me whether ISAF, the 
Afghanistan mission, will go down as a success or not, but it is 
clearly in the balance and needs to be carefully monitored.
  It is clear that the Libya operation revealed numerous alliance 
shortcomings and was not a model of alliance coherence and cohesion. 
Rather, Libya was an example of failure at the political level to 
define the new NATO. The correct response to both, new challenges and 
admitted failure, is better leadership, better vision, and creative new 
thinking, along with the resources to carry out those goals.
  I have suggested that these could be best applied in response to the 
Syria disaster, especially with the humanitarian catastrophe and the 
migrant crisis. I proposed that NATO could have helped member-state 
Turkey get control of its Syrian border to stop the flow of jihadists 
into and out of Syria.
  It is clear to me that the uncontrolled flood of refugees from Syria 
could best be handled by creating safe areas in and near Syria so that 
the Syrian people can remain there under safe and humane conditions. 
Building on NATO's Bosnia experience, the Alliance could be critical to 
providing the security for such areas on the ground and in the air. 
This would not be fighting the war in Syria but protecting the 
populations of U.N. designated areas. Difficult? You bet, but it has 
been done before, and NATO is the only possible organization that is in 
a position to do it.
  Although I emphatically believe that NATO continues to have enormous 
value to U.S. interests and global stability, I do concede that it 
needs a new vision of its role. That is clearly a work in progress and 
will have some false starts and failures along the way. How it turns 
out will not only be a function of resources, as I have discussed, but 
also an issue of leadership. On that score, I have some concerns. 
Frankly, I am worried.
  The Obama administration seems to be guiding us toward a dangerous 
deference to others to address emerging global security challenges that 
are and will be threats to our own national security. The most alarming 
example is our acquiescence to Russia's vigorous engagement in Syria. 
Russia basically hijacked our paltry efforts to bring the Syrian 
disaster under control, inserted its military forces to change the 
dynamic on the ground, and guided the political process toward their 
ends. It has all been a sad display of American incompetence and 
impotence. The United States and its allies are paying the price for 
this failure of engagement.
  After reading President Obama's recent and lengthy interview on 
foreign policy that was published in the Atlantic Monthly, I can tell 
he has not drawn the correct conclusions from the foreign policy 
failures in recent years in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, and 
elsewhere. For me, we have abdicated America's traditional leadership 
role. For the alliance, I fear this could be the beginning phase of our 
disengagement from Europe, which, if it continues, will be at our 
peril. Without firm U.S. leadership of NATO, we will begin to see the 
commitment of our allies weaken. They simply do not have the muscle or 
the financial capability to support a NATO coalition without U.S. 
leadership. Without the right kind of leadership, the importance of the 
transatlantic security relationship and the continued robust presence 
of U.S. forces in Europe will begin to lose advocates, as perhaps has 
already occurred among those who do not support our efforts.
  If Americans come to see NATO's value in financial terms--bang for 
the buck--we will lose sight of its real value in the proper terms of 
national security, American reliability, and the eternal appeal of our 
community of values--in other words, the values beyond price that must 
be preserved if we are to prevail against our adversaries.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  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. PERDUE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

                          ____________________