[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 15486-15509]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           EXECUTIVE SESSION

                                 ______
                                 

                           EXECUTIVE CALENDAR

  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the 
Senate will proceed to executive session and resume consideration of 
the Hargan nomination, which the clerk will report.
  The bill clerk read the nomination of Eric D. Hargan, of Illinois, to 
be Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the time 
until 11 a.m. will be equally divided between the two leaders or their 
designees.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.


                   Recognition of the Minority Leader

  The Democratic leader is recognized.


          Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands Recovery Effort

  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I understand the administration intends 
to submit its first request for disaster aid for Puerto Rico and the 
U.S. Virgin Islands today. It is a good first step, but it is just the 
start of the financial aid we will need to provide to the American 
citizens in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
  I urge my colleagues to work quickly to add additional and urgent 
funding for recovery, like community development block grant dollars, 
just as we did for Texas after Hurricane Harvey, with the understanding 
that an additional and more comprehensive request for Puerto Rico, the 
Virgin Islands, Florida, Texas, and the western wildfires will be 
coming from the administration once the damage assessments are 
complete.


                        Las Vegas Mass Shooting

  Mr. President, returning to the events in Las Vegas on Sunday, we 
cannot let this American tragedy, another in a long line of American 
tragedies, fall out of our hearts and minds too quickly.
  Let us pledge to be there for the families of the 59 Americans who 
were killed and the over 500 Americans who are still injured and 
recovering. Seeing the pictures of so many of these beautiful, young 
people in the prime of life--young, excited about the world, some of 
them newly married, some of them a little older with young children--
breaks your heart. So not just today or this week, but in the weeks and 
months to come, let us pledge to continue to show our gratitude to 
those firefighters and cops, the emergency and medical personnel, and 
all the other first responders who rushed to the scene. Let us pledge 
to remember the acts of everyday heroism that are a beacon of light in 
this moment of darkness: the lines to give blood that stretched around 
the block at 6 a.m., the teachers who went to school the day after the 
shooting to try and give their students a sense of normalcy. I hope 
these are the things President Trump highlights in his visit to Las 
Vegas today.
  And one more thing: President Trump has an opportunity to wrench his 
party out of the grasp of the NRA and get our country and our Congress 
to start talking about commonsense gun safety reforms. Before President 
Trump ran for office, he repeatedly supported several sane, rational 
gun safety measures, including the assault weapons ban and longer 
waiting periods to purchase a gun. As recently as 2012, President Trump 
supported President Obama's response to Sandy Hook. In the wake of 
Sandy Hook, President Obama called for action. In the wake of Las 
Vegas, President Trump should do the same.
  We have heard it over and over again: Now is not the time to talk 
about gun safety because it would politicize the tragedy. My friend the 
majority leader said no less than three times at his press conference 
yesterday that it is premature and inappropriate to talk about any 
legislative solutions to the epidemic of gun violence.
  As Martin Luther King said in his letter at the Birmingham Jail, 
``not now'' means never. ``Wait'' means never. That is what he said: 
Wait means never.
  The Republicans don't want to talk about it today, tomorrow, next 
week, next month, or next year. We know why they don't want to talk 
about it. They know the country is totally against their view. It is 
not political out in the country. Over 90 percent of Americans support 
universal background checks. A significant majority of Republicans 
support them. That is not political, I would say to my friend the 
majority leader.
  It is political for him because he is afraid of the NRA, a powerful 
lobby that is off to the extreme. It is not political for American 
people or for Republicans. They are for it. Over 70 percent of gun 
owners support background checks for private sales and at gun shows. 
The only place where this is political is here, and that is because the 
NRA, the gun manufacturers, and their powerful lobby make these folks 
afraid--afraid to do the right thing. They know it is the right thing.
  The NRA and these lobbies are the swamp the President is talking 
about. President Trump talks about the

[[Page 15487]]

swamp, groups of lobbyists who thwart the will of the American people. 
That is what the NRA does.
  So I say to the President, Mr. President, you have an opportunity to 
buck the NRA, buck the gun lobbyists, buck the swamp, and lead this 
country in an adult conversation about gun violence. The President can 
and should bring the parties together--the leaders of this Congress--
and let both sides know he is ready to address this issue head-on and 
talk about sensible, moderate measures of gun safety and, above all, 
background checks.
  The President's visit is an important one today. He should be going. 
He should seek to provide comfort to the families and express gratitude 
to our first responders. But he should take it one step further. Call 
us together, lead this Nation in a debate about rational, moderate gun 
safety laws. Get us started on the work that so many Americans are 
desperate for us to do.


                               Tax Reform

  Mr. President, on one final matter, the Republican tax plan, we 
Democrats have long said that we are willing to work with our 
Republican colleagues on tax reform, and we laid out our principles 
early on so that there would be no mistake about them. We wanted tax 
reform to be deficit neutral. It shouldn't increase the deficit. For 
every reduction in rate, they ought to close a loophole. We wanted it 
to go through regular order, not the way healthcare did, not 
reconciliation, but work with us. You would get a much more sensible 
product. Most importantly, we didn't want to give a tax cut to the top 
1 percent. They are doing great already. God bless them. They don't 
need any more tax relief. It is the middle class that does. But the 
framework the GOP released last week violates all three of these 
commonsense principles, vastly favoring the wealthy over working 
Americans.
  I have spoken several times about tax breaks for the rich included in 
this package--lowering the top rate from 39 to 36 percent, repealing 
the estate tax, opening up a gaping tax loophole for hedge fund 
managers, wealthy Wall Street firms, lobbyists, and law firms by 
lowering the rate on passthroughs so that these rich people would pay 
only 25 percent on their personal income tax while other people pay a 
lot more.
  This morning, I want to highlight not only how the Republican plan 
favors the rich but also sticks it to the middle class. This is 
something that the Acting President pro tempore has brought up.
  Just this week we found a bombshell contained within the GOP 
resolution they are using to pass tax reform. The Republicans plan to 
cut Medicare by $473 billion and Medicaid by more than $1 trillion. It 
can be a little hard to find, but it is right there in the GOP budget--
$473 billion for Medicare, $1 trillion for Medicaid.
  If you are an older American, if you have a family in a nursing home 
or someone in treatment for opioid addiction and you think the GOP plan 
doesn't affect you, think again. The AARP--not a political 
organization, it simply represents the interests of the elderly--sent a 
letter yesterday opposing this Republican plan, the one in the House, 
and I think we have one in the Senate as well. It is the same group 
that represented senior citizens and fought the debacle on healthcare 
that the Republicans proposed.
  The Republicans are proposing to pay for their giant tax cut to the 
rich by gutting Medicare and Medicaid. That is the bombshell this week. 
That is the nugget that will destroy their whole plan. Americans are so 
against those kinds of cuts.
  Amazingly, it is just like the inverse of the Republican plan on 
healthcare. In each case, they gut healthcare for Americans who need it 
most to pay for taxes for Americans who need it the least.
  The healthcare plan focused on cuts to Medicaid but snuck in tax cuts 
for the rich. This plan focuses on tax cuts to the rich and sneaks in 
cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
  The GOP budget is another page out of the same playbook. The GOP plan 
contains another punch to the gut of the middle class.
  This is what the Acting President pro tempore, I believe, spoke about 
yesterday.
  In the form of the repeal of the State and local deduction--44 
million Americans take the State and local deduction. That is one-third 
of all taxpayers. This is not just a small, rarified group in 
California or New York. It is across the country. They get an average 
of several thousand dollars off their taxes each year. That includes 40 
percent of taxpayers making between $50,000 and $75,000 per year and 70 
percent of taxpayers earning from $100,000 to $200,000.
  This is a middle-class tax deduction worth several thousand dollars a 
year, and the GOP tax plan yanks it away. Taking it away means double 
taxation on middle-class families.
  For many families, this will not be offset by a larger standard 
deduction in the GOP plan. Largely due to the elimination of State and 
local, the Tax Policy Center estimates that 30 percent of those making 
between $50,000 and $150,000 and 60 percent of those making between 
$150,000 and $300,000 will see a tax increase with the GOP plan, and 
that is after doubling the standard deduction. By the way, don't think 
that it is just a few States; the numbers are astounding across the 
country, as folks in every State claim this deduction. I say to my dear 
friend the chairman of the Finance Committee that 35 percent of Utahns 
take this deduction, 33 percent of Georgians, and 32 percent of 
Coloradoans.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
a list of how many taxpayers are affected in every State by removing 
State and local deductibility and how much it will cost them on 
average.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

 FIGURE 7.--PERCENTAGE OF TAX UNITS THAT USE THE SALT DEDUCTION AND THE
                       AVERAGE DEDUCTION BY STATE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                            % with SALT    Average SALT
                  State                     Deductions      Deduction*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MD......................................              46         $12,931
CT......................................              41          19,664
NJ......................................              41          17,850
DC......................................              40          16,442
VA......................................              37          11,288
MA......................................              37          15,571
OR......................................              36          12,616
UT......................................              35           8,291
MN......................................              35          12,954
NY......................................              35          22,169
CA......................................              34          18,437
GA......................................              33           9,158
RI......................................              33          12,434
CO......................................              32           9,017
DE......................................              32           9,194
IL......................................              31          12,523
WI......................................              31          11,653
NH......................................              31          10,121
WA......................................              30           7,402
IA......................................              29          10,163
HI......................................              29           9,905
NC......................................              29           9,587
PA......................................              29          11,248
AZ......................................              28           7,403
MT......................................              28           9,357
ID......................................              28           8,862
ME......................................              28          11,431
NE......................................              28          11,088
SC......................................              27           8,765
VT......................................              27          12,407
MI......................................              27           9,648
MO......................................              26           9,886
OH......................................              26          10,444
KY......................................              26           9,955
AL......................................              26           5,918
KS......................................              25           9,425
NV......................................              25           5,989
OK......................................              24           8,201
MS......................................              23           6,302
LA......................................              23           6,742
TX......................................              23           7,823
IN......................................              23           8,756
FL......................................              22           7,373
NM......................................              22           7,091
AR......................................              22           9,116
WY......................................              22           6,306
AK......................................              21           4,931
TN......................................              19           5,611
ND......................................              18           6,864
WV......................................              17           9,462
SD......................................              17           6,098
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Calculated as SALT deduction amount divided by number of SALT
  deductions.


  Mr. SCHUMER. I urge my colleagues to look in the Record and see how 
it affects them. You are fooling yourself if you think that you are not 
affected by the State and local deductibility.
  Of course, if you are a family of four in one of those States, the 
repeal of State and local could be a killer because, again, you would 
lose the personal exemption. The larger the family, the greater the 
loss of exemption.
  I want to make one final point on tax reform. This is related to two 
people whom I know, and I knew one of them before he ever arrived in 
Washington. I have to make this point because what I heard them say 
over the weekend just turned my stomach. It was astounding. It was 
awful.

[[Page 15488]]

  Over the weekend, we heard some pretty extraordinary claims from 
Republican legislators and Cabinet officials about what the GOP tax 
plan was all about, but Gary Cohn and Secretary of the Treasury Steve 
Mnuchin deserve a special admonition.
  Chief White House economic adviser Gary Cohn actually said: ``The 
wealthy are not getting a tax cut under our plan.'' That is not a 
surmising of what he said; that is a direct quote. ``The wealthy are 
not getting a tax cut under our plan.'' Comments like that should make 
everyone's head spin. According to the Tax Policy Center, the top 1 
percent would reap 80 percent of the benefits of the GOP plan. The top 
0.1 percent--the folks who make more than $5 million a year--would get 
a break of more than $1 million a year.
  Some might argue, of course, that it will cause economic growth. I do 
not think that it will, but at least make your real argument. Do not 
hide it. You know that the American people do not agree with you. That 
is why you hide it.
  Only in Wonderland, where down is up and up is down, could Gary 
Cohn's comments be believed. It is something like out of the Ministry 
of Truth from George Orwell's ``1984,'' which would be to cut the top 
rate by 4 percent and repeal the estate tax--yes, no tax cuts for the 
wealthy. Bunk. It is why the Washington Post gave Gary Cohn four 
Pinocchios for his statement. If they had allowed more Pinocchios on 
the scale, I am sure he would have gotten them. He earned them, 
unfortunately.
  What about Secretary Mnuchin? His lack of credibility resembles Gary 
Cohn's. He said that he believes the GOP plan would reduce deficits by 
$1 trillion. ``We think there will be $2 trillion of growth. So we 
think this tax plan will cut the deficits by a trillion dollars.'' 
Mnuchin's claim is fake math at its worst. As was written in the 
Washington Post, no serious economist, liberal or conservative, 
believes that a tax cut boosts economic growth so much that the tax cut 
pays for itself, let alone adds $1 trillion in revenue as Mnuchin 
claims. Four Pinocchios were given by the Washington Post. I am sure 
that he too--Steve Mnuchin--would have earned more Pinocchios.
  Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin claim to be economic experts, and they 
both used to work at Goldman Sachs. If they had used this kind of math 
at Goldman Sachs, they would have been shown the door a long time ago. 
As I said before, they should know better, and they do know better. 
They ought to stop deliberately misleading the American people. It 
demeans them. It demeans the administration. It demeans the debate in 
this country.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time during the 
quorum calls be divided equally between both sides.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cotton). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. SCHUMER. 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. WYDEN. 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. WYDEN. Mr. President, I did not get a chance to hear the 
distinguished Democratic leader's remarks, for Chairman Hatch and I 
were in the Senate Finance Committee. We managed to pass, by an 
overwhelming bipartisan vote, the Children's Health Insurance Program--
a vital program for 9 million kids. So that is a bit of good news in 
that this important piece of legislation is advancing. I do know that 
the Democratic leader touched on a number of very important issues, 
particularly some of these comments that have been made by top advisers 
to the President with respect to taxes.
  I am struck by the fact that Mr. Gary Cohn, the President's top 
economic adviser, said last week that middle-class folks were going to 
get $1,000 in tax relief--set aside the fact that that does not look to 
be true for a number of middle-class folks who have kids. I am also 
struck by the comment that followed. Mr. Cohn said that not only are 
middle-class families going to get $1,000 worth of tax relief but that 
they would be able to go buy cars or remodel their kitchens. You just 
think to yourself, with that kind of tax cut, that you would be buying 
a very small car or remodeling a very small kitchen. The fact is, that 
is not, in my view, a comment that reflects a real understanding of 
what middle-class folks in America are going through. I don't see very 
many of them buying cars for $1,000 or remodeling their kitchens for 
$1,000.
  That comment was accompanied by the comments of Treasury Secretary 
Steve Mnuchin, who not only said a couple of days ago that tax cuts 
would pay for themselves--a statement that was contradicted by 
Republican economists yesterday in the Senate Finance Committee--but 
that there would be something like $1 trillion left over. Mr. Mnuchin 
continues to make the case that there is somehow a magical growth fairy 
here in the American economy that nobody else knows about, including 
Republican economists.
  I am one who believes that behavior does matter, and I am going to 
talk about a bipartisan approach to taxes in a minute--a responsible, 
bipartisan approach to taxes, not one that helps the 1 percent or 
creates a huge new deficit or that kind of thing. I think that you will 
generate some revenue, and Doug Elmendorf said that when he was the 
head of the Budget Office, but it is not going to generate hundreds and 
hundreds of billions of dollars, as in the case of what Mr. Mnuchin is 
talking about, which is something like $2 trillion. There is no 
economic support for that.
  You have the President's economic team and his top advisers trying to 
defend the indefensible, and I will go into that more a little bit 
later today.
  Right now, I think it is important that we have a response that I am 
going to deliver to the distinguished majority whip, who is a member of 
the Finance Committee, who made some comparisons between the Republican 
plan and the bipartisan legislation that I wrote--after months and 
months of hard work--with two of our former Republican colleagues, 
Senator Gregg and Senator Coats. Senator Coats is now a member of 
President Trump's Cabinet.
  The comparison that somehow the Republican plan is like the 
bipartisan approach that I wrote--these extreme ideas in the Republican 
plan--is not just a bit of a stretch or a little off base; there is 
absolutely no comparison--none--between the bipartisan proposal and the 
extreme Republican plan. The distinguished majority whip, in my view, 
offered a complete and total misrepresentation of what the two 
proposals are all about, and I am going to illustrate this in two 
ways--first, with respect to the policy.
  The Republican tax cut framework green-lights the entire wish list 
for major multinational corporations and the wealthy. There is a 
massive corporate tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits shareholders. 
When it comes to international taxes, there is a pure territorial 
system with barely a nod to the kind of tough rules that are needed to 
protect workers and the middle-class folks in the center of our tax 
base.
  There is, in the Republican plan, a brand-new passthrough loophole. 
It is as big as the Grand Canyon. It is the Grand Canyon of loopholes 
in the Republican tax proposal, which invites tax cheats to skip out 
from paying their fair share to Social Security and Medicare.
  The Republican plan eliminates the estate tax, which today only 
touches estates worth more than $11 million or $5.5 million for a 
single individual. The top rate goes down, and the bottom income tax 
rate goes up. When doing the math on what the Republicans have on 
offer, we are looking at upwards of $4, $5, $6, or $7 trillion in tax 
giveaways to the most fortunate.
  It is a different story under the Republican proposal if you are 
middle class. You probably have a lot of unanswered questions. All you 
know right now is that it virtually guarantees that, in order to pay 
for the giveaways to the wealthy and corporations, current middle-class 
tax breaks are going

[[Page 15489]]

to be on the chopping block--the personal exemption, incentives for 
retirement savings, education, and home ownership, to name just a few. 
From everything we know, when you set up these kinds of extreme 
approaches, when you raise the parts of the Tax Code that are a 
giveaway to those at the top, what you see is the middle class getting 
hurt.
  Instead of tripling the standard deduction, which is what we did in 
our bipartisan bill, the Trump people double it, but then they take 
away the personal exemptions for working-class folks. So unlike our 
proposal, where the middle class can count on hundreds and hundreds of 
dollars in their paycheck when you triple the standard deduction, under 
the Republican proposal, they give it with one hand by doubling the 
standard deduction and take it away with the other hand by eliminating 
the personal exemption. So you have a very stark difference between the 
bipartisan proposal that I offered with Senator Coats, a member of the 
President's Cabinet, and what the Republican extreme plan is all about.
  The bottom line is that the Republican plan seeks to raise those 
parts of our Tax Code that are all about the middle class, and they are 
doing it to pay for the giveaways for those folks at the top. That is 
not what we did in the bipartisan plan at all. Any middle-class person 
can sit at their kitchen table and look at the bipartisan plan that I 
was involved with and see how the middle class wins. They get hundreds 
and hundreds of dollars more in every paycheck by tripling the standard 
deduction, and they can see how they as middle-class folks--say, who 
make $70,000 and have a couple of children--lose under the Trump 
proposal.
  Now there are other differences between our bipartisan plan and what 
the Big 6 and the Trump administration want. The bipartisan plan was 
scored as revenue neutral by authoritative independent tax experts. It 
made the Tax Code more progressive. The fact is, what we offered--
Senator Coats, Senator Gregg, and I--was an actual bill. It was the 
product of weeks and months of work.
  Senator Gregg and I--and I think it is fair to say that all Senators 
may not be aware of this, but Senator Gregg was a top economic thinker 
with whom the majority leader consulted--sat next to each other for 
months in order to put together what is still the first and only 
comprehensive Federal bipartisan tax reform plan since 1986. It was an 
actual bill. It wasn't four pages of rhetoric.
  In the spring we got one page. It was shorter than your typical 
drugstore receipt. Now I guess we are up to four pages, when you take 
out all this kind of white space. Our bill was an actual bill and was 
designed to give everybody in America a chance to get ahead, not just 
those in the 1 percent, not just those who have real clout and power.
  I have always said that this is the heart of the difference. We have 
two Tax Codes in America. We have one for the cops and the nurses. It 
is compulsory. Their taxes come right out of their paychecks--no Cayman 
Islands deal for them. Then we have another Tax Code for the high 
flyers--the fortunate and well-connected. They can pretty much pay what 
they want when they want to. The bipartisan proposal that I wrote with 
Senator Gregg and Senator Coats helps the first group, the cops and 
nurses, but it was also fair to everybody. It gave everybody a chance 
to get ahead. The Republican plan is another big gift to that second 
group, the group that can decide what they are going to pay in taxes 
and when they are going to pay it. So we really couldn't have two 
proposals that are more different.
  The fact is, the Republican framework looks less like a real effort 
at tax reform than a shameless attempt, in effect, to accommodate the 
President's boast about the biggest tax cut ever. The bottom line is 
that it is a giveaway to those at the top, and it robs from the middle 
class.
  The differences don't just end with these specifics that I have 
described here. We took a fundamentally different approach. With 
Senator Gregg and Senator Coats, we were digging into the cobwebs of 
every dark corner of the Tax Code. We brought together principles on 
which both sides had to find common ground with a lot of sweat equity.
  If you are going to write a partisan bill, you can go off on your own 
and do your thing. The fact is, if Senators Gregg, Coats, and I had 
written separate bills on our own, they would have looked very 
different, but the bill we wrote together, starting with Senator Gregg 
and I, was the first comprehensive bipartisan tax proposal in a quarter 
century. Senator Coats, to his credit, did yeoman's work in updating 
it. There is no comparison from a process standpoint between that 
bipartisan work that was done to update the system of more than a 
quarter century ago and the Republican tax cut framework.
  The majority leader said from day one, at the beginning of the year, 
that he didn't want Democratic input on tax reform. He said: We are 
just going to do it on the ``our way or the highway'' approach with 
reconciliation. Reconciliation is a rejection of bipartisanship through 
and through.
  I note that the Presiding Officer is the tallest Member of the 
Senate, along with Senator Strange, and I talked fairly frequently with 
our former colleague Senator Bradley, who was another tall Democrat on 
the Finance Committee with a much better jump shot than me. He has 
described the bipartisan efforts of 1986, with key officials in 
President Reagan's administration, Jim Baker and Don Regan, who spent 
months talking to Democrats--months and months--before anything 
happened. That is not what happened here. The specifics are very 
different, and the process is very different.
  Recently, my Democratic colleagues and I came forward with our 
principles for reform, and it was just a matter of a few hours before 
Leader McConnell rejected them in the media. One administration 
official actually said that tax reform would be worse if it included 
Democratic ideas, and the ``go it alone'' mentality is pretty obvious 
when you look at the framework that came out last week.
  The tough questions haven't been answered. For those at the top, it 
is all sweet and no sour. There was not a single shred of Democratic 
input in the framework--not one Democratic fingerprint anywhere to be 
found. The administration officials in charge of selling it to the 
public are, in my view, executing a con job on the middle class.
  So I wanted to come here today to highlight some of the recent 
comments that the Senate Democratic leader has made with respect to 
some of these out-of-touch comments we have heard recently from key 
administration officials, like Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin, and I 
wanted to make sure that Senators heard--after the comments of the 
Senate Republican whip--that they now know that there is no comparison, 
none, between the bipartisan proposal that I had the honor to write 
with Senators Coats and Gregg, which brought the two parties together, 
and the framework that came out last week that forced even more 
polarization between the parties. The reality is that this Republican 
proposal, this tax cut framework, is so radically skewed toward the 
wealthy and the big corporations, that it makes Ronald Reagan's 
landmark reform look like the work of rabid socialists.
  So I appreciate the chance to set the record straight by outlining 
the differences between a recent bipartisan bill with two influential 
Republican Senators with whom I had the honor to work and the extreme 
Republican framework that came out last week. These plans are not just 
trillions of dollars apart based on the numbers. It is clear they are 
written with entirely different goals in mind.
  Our view is that tax reform ought to be about giving everybody in 
America the opportunity to get ahead. What we have said is that, 
instead of it being an ``our way or the highway'' partisan approach, we 
ought to be doing--particularly in the area of tax reform--what has a 
storied history. The key to a successful tax reform, based on that 
history, is working in a bipartisan way.

[[Page 15490]]

  I will close with the comments about the Democratic principles, which 
is that we are not going to give relief to the people at the 1 percent, 
we are not going to break the bank, and we are going to focus on the 
middle class. Those principles don't even go as far as ideas advanced 
by President Reagan, where he said that we are going to treat income 
from a wage and income from investment in the same way.
  I close by way of saying this. No. 1, the distinguished Republican 
whip is wrong when he compares the bipartisan bill I have been a part 
of to what the administration's tax framework is all about. No. 2, the 
right way to do this is to focus in a bipartisan way, not through 
partisanship only. The principles that we have outlined on our side, 
when you compare them, do not even go as far as some of the ideas 
embraced by the late President Reagan.
  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. BURR. 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. BURR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we start the 
scheduled 11 a.m. vote now.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                             Cloture Motion

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

                             Cloture Motion

       We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the 
     provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, 
     do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the nomination 
     of Eric D. Hargan, of Illinois, to be Deputy Secretary of 
     Health and Human Services.
         Mitch McConnell, Lamar Alexander, John Cornyn, John 
           Barrasso, Mike Rounds, Chuck Grassley, Thad Cochran, 
           Steve Daines, Roger F. Wicker, John Boozman, Thom 
           Tillis, John Hoeven, John Thune, Mike Crapo, Bill 
           Cassidy, James M. Inhofe, Tom Cotton.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. By unanimous consent, the mandatory quorum 
call has been waived.
  The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on the 
nomination of Eric D. Hargan, of Illinois, to be Deputy Secretary of 
Health and Human Services, shall be brought to a close?
  The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant bill clerk called the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the 
Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), the Senator from Nevada (Mr. 
Heller), and the Senator from Arizona (Mr. McCain).
  Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Nevada (Ms. Cortez 
Masto) and the Senator from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez) are necessarily 
absent.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sullivan). Are there any other Senators in 
the Chamber desiring to vote?
  The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 57, nays 38, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 210 Ex.]

                                YEAS--57

     Alexander
     Barrasso
     Blunt
     Boozman
     Burr
     Capito
     Carper
     Cassidy
     Collins
     Coons
     Corker
     Cornyn
     Cotton
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Donnelly
     Durbin
     Enzi
     Ernst
     Fischer
     Flake
     Gardner
     Graham
     Grassley
     Hatch
     Heitkamp
     Hoeven
     Inhofe
     Isakson
     Johnson
     Kennedy
     King
     Lankford
     Lee
     Manchin
     McCaskill
     McConnell
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Paul
     Perdue
     Portman
     Risch
     Roberts
     Rounds
     Rubio
     Sasse
     Scott
     Shelby
     Strange
     Sullivan
     Thune
     Tillis
     Toomey
     Wicker
     Young

                                NAYS--38

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Booker
     Brown
     Cantwell
     Cardin
     Casey
     Duckworth
     Feinstein
     Franken
     Gillibrand
     Harris
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Hirono
     Kaine
     Klobuchar
     Leahy
     Markey
     Merkley
     Murphy
     Murray
     Nelson
     Peters
     Reed
     Sanders
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Stabenow
     Tester
     Udall
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wyden

                             NOT VOTING--5

     Cochran
     Cortez Masto
     Heller
     McCain
     Menendez
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 57, the nays are 
38.
  The motion is agreed to.
  The majority whip.


                               Tax Reform

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, beginning today, the Senate Budget 
Committee will take the next step in our effort to enact pro-growth tax 
reform, this time by marking up a budget resolution.
  The committee's work follows the release last week of our unified 
framework--the tax blueprint on how to create jobs and how to put more 
money back in the pockets of the hard-working Americans who earn it.
  Even though the framework is just 1 week old, there are some who are 
imagining the worst-case scenario. Rumors are spreading like wildfire. 
Last week, the Tax Policy Center fanned the flames when it published a 
report analyzing the plan--which, I want to emphasize, hasn't been 
written yet. Let me say that again. The Tax Policy Center published a 
report criticizing a plan which hasn't been written yet.
  This alleged or so-called nonpartisan think tank has looked into its 
crystal ball and now claims to be able to see the future, and it said 
the future doesn't look very good. The tax plan, it says, will be a 
resounding flop. Well, give me a break. I, for one, am sick and tired 
of this sort of pessimism parading as expertise--people talking about 
things they know nothing about and claiming to be the experts. It is 
pretty common here, in Washington, DC, you might have noticed.
  It is not helpful to assume the worst prematurely and to condemn this 
important exercise before we are even starting, and it is irresponsible 
to masquerade biased, partisan analysis as somehow objective.
  As the Wall Street Journal wrote a couple of days ago, in response to 
the Tax Policy Center's economists, they made at least two baseless 
claims: first, that our proposal would ``reduce federal revenues by 
$2.4 trillion over the first ten years and $3.2 trillion over the 
subsequent decade''; second, the top 1 percent of taxpayers would 
``receive about 50 percent of the total tax benefit.''
  These statistics were pretty quotable and indeed raged like a prairie 
fire across the news media in our country, especially when the media is 
predisposed to believe the worst, without any question or semblance of 
skepticism. After all, the Tax Policy Center's report made for easy 
headlines, reciting the same tired refrains we have all heard before 
that are all too predictable; that, somehow, our tax plan is only 
designed to help the rich.
  Apparently, the temptation was just too great to resist, even though 
the report didn't have a real author since no self-respecting economist 
wanted his or her name attached to it. As the Wall Street Journal 
pointed out, however, last week's tax blueprint was just that--a 
starting place, a plan, a framework, and nothing more. It excluded many 
important data points which would be important to a real analysis.
  For example, the income ranges for the three consolidated tax 
brackets, those weren't in the blueprint. The value of the expanded 
child tax credit and when it would be phased out, that wasn't in the 
blueprint either, and you would need to know that information in order 
to make a reasoned, logical analysis. The blueprint also doesn't 
mention tax rates for small businesses and what deductions will be 
eliminated as part of the base broadening.
  As we all know, an army of lobbyists, lawyers, and other folks have, 
since 1986, larded the Tax Code with a wide variety of deductions, 
credits, and other special preferences. What we need to do is clear out 
some of that thicket so we can lower the rates for everybody, so 
everybody gets a tax cut, and I mean everybody.
  It is not going to be easy because we can imagine that army of 
lobbyists descending upon Capitol Hill trying to

[[Page 15491]]

protect the special deals they were able to carve out of the Tax Code 
since 1986, but we have to do it.
  None of these facts that would be important in order to conduct a 
reasoned and objective analysis was included in the framework, but all 
of them would have great potential to greatly move the final numbers. 
These, and many other details, are essential for any honest fiscal 
assessment of changes in our Tax Code.
  When will we begin to see some of those numbers? We need to pass the 
budget resolution out of the Budget Committee this week--which we will. 
Then, after Columbus Day, we will come back and have a debate and a 
vote-arama to pass the budget resolution, which will equip us with the 
technical tools we need in order to pass a reconciliation bill.
  Then the real work is going to be occurring in the Finance Committee 
on this side of the Capitol, where we will take the chairman's mark--
the original bill which Senator Hatch will introduce at the committee--
which will fill in a lot of these details. I predict that will be 
sometime around the third or maybe fourth week of this month.
  Then we are going to have an amendment process. The real question in 
my mind is, Will our Democratic colleagues participate and make this a 
bipartisan bill? I hope they will.
  I also want to mention two other related points that deserve mention 
but which were left out of the Tax Policy's report. One is, the 
committees in Congress will actually have the ability to come up with 
the details I mentioned. That will happen in the Ways and Means 
Committee in the House and in the Finance Committee in the Senate. 
There will be, as there should be, discussion, deliberation, and 
compromise as the normal legislative process works out.
  There have been many around Capitol Hill who have said we don't have 
enough ``regular order.'' What that means is, we need to conduct the 
normal legislative process and have the committees actually do what 
they are designed to do--which is to have hearings and vote on 
amendments and pass the bill out so it is available to be heard on the 
floor of the Senate. Then the Senate has a chance to amend it, vote on 
it, and debate it.
  The second point I want to make is, any analysis of tax reform must 
consider what will be the impact on economic growth that will result 
from it. As the Journal stated, if the rate of GDP growth speeds up 
from the Obama administration's pace of 2 percent a year to 3 percent, 
incomes would rise and revenues would increase to the Treasury by some 
$2.5 trillion. That is what is most often underlooked, including by 
some of the people who score these bills.
  If we are successful in passing pro-growth tax reform and tax cuts 
and we can get this sleeping giant of an economy awake and roaring 
again just to get it to 3 percent--which is below the average growth of 
the economy over the last three decades--just at 3 percent, it would 
put $2.5 trillion more in the Treasury. That would be great because it 
would help us not only pay our bills, it would help us pay down the 
deficit and the debt.
  Obviously, these are important factors to acknowledge. The best way 
to accomplish meaningful tax reform is to lower rates and simplify 
provisions across the board, to give Americans more take-home pay and 
have to spend less time hiring somebody just to complete their tax 
return. We can't simply throw up our hands, do nothing, and accept the 
status quo because American workers and job creators can't afford the 
status quo.
  I am optimistic about the framework that has been released and look 
forward to working with my colleagues on the Finance Committee in the 
days and weeks ahead. What we have now is a useful starting point, and 
we need to fill in the blanks--and we will--so then we can have a 
debate based on the facts, not based on somebody's wild, fevered 
imagination about what the tax bill might look like.
  One last point on that. We have the highest tax rate in the world for 
corporations and businesses. This used to be something that even the 
President of the United States, Barack Obama, back in 2011 acknowledged 
and said we need to reduce that in order to be competitive globally. We 
know too many of our jobs are moving overseas.
  I mentioned yesterday that IBM, one of the largest businesses in the 
world, has more employees in India than they have in the United States. 
Now, there are probably varied reasons for that, including our Tax 
Code. Some of it is access to highly trained workers, lower costs of 
operation, and the like, but our Tax Code is a self-inflicted economic 
wound for our country, and the people who pay the price are the people 
whose wages are stagnant or people who are looking for a job and can't 
find one. We need to put more money back in their pocket, let them keep 
more of what they earn, and get this economy growing again.


                        Protect Our Children Act

  Finally, just yesterday, the House passed a bill I introduced with 
Senators Blumenthal, Klobuchar, and Heller called the PROTECT Our 
Children Act. This bill helps to stop the exploitation of children 
across the country and over the internet by reauthorizing the Internet 
Crimes Against Children, or ICAC, Task Force Program.
  The Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force is a national network 
of 61 coordinated entities that represent 3,500 Federal, State, and 
local law enforcement agencies that investigate and prosecute child 
predators. They develop victim support programs, provide training and 
technical assistance, and advance forensic methods.
  They also help facilitate community education to make parents more 
aware of this threat against all of our children so we can prevent 
internet crimes against children before they even happen. This is an 
issue I have cared about for a long time, starting with my service as 
attorney general of Texas. I saw firsthand how vulnerable children can 
quickly become victimized at the hands of some truly despicable 
individuals. I also learned about the resources it takes to stop and 
prosecute these predators. Like the Presiding Officer, who also served 
as attorney general, we know that not all of our jurisdictions have 
access to the same sort of expertise and resources so it is important 
to have this resource in order to help them investigate and prosecute 
these crimes.
  Back in 2000, when I started it in Texas, we called it the Internet 
Bureau. It is kind of a quaint title these days. Now I think they call 
it the Cyber Crime Unit, but we call it the Internet Bureau to fight 
internet crimes like child pornography. Tragically, in this day and 
age, the internet provides a safe harbor for too many people who want 
to use it for their own nefarious purposes. It can be a difficult arena 
for our law enforcement to navigate, but this bill ensures that they 
will have the resources to fight cyber crimes and keep our communities 
safe by reauthorizing programs until 2022.
  I am happy the House has now acted, and I am thankful for the work of 
my colleagues from Connecticut, Minnesota, and Nevada for joining me in 
this effort. I look forward to working expeditiously to ensure that we 
repass this legislation in the Senate as soon as possible.
  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. KING. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                               Healthcare

  Mr. KING. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about a subject that 
has been on our minds in recent weeks and months and, in fact, years; 
that is, healthcare--one of the most complex and confusing but 
important topics that we have to consider.
  Before I get into the bulk of what I want to address, I want to make 
the point once again that as we are debating healthcare and debating 
who pays, how much they pay, whether it is the ACA or Medicare or 
Medicaid or private insurance or private pay, we also have to begin a 
serious discussion about the underlying cost of healthcare.

[[Page 15492]]

  Regardless of who is paying, it is going to break us. If healthcare 
continues to grow in cost as it has over the last 20 years, it is going 
to eat the Federal budget, family budgets, individual budgets, and it 
is going to be something we absolutely have to address. Usually around 
here we don't address something until it is a crisis.
  I would argue, as we are approaching 20 percent of GDP, with $1 out 
of every $5 in the country being committed to healthcare costs--more 
than twice as much as most other countries in the world, far more than 
any other country in the world--we have to address this issue.
  Arguing about who pays is not going to solve the problem. That is 
important because in the interim, that is what is going to protect our 
citizens' coverage and what is going to protect our citizens from a 
healthcare disaster, a healthcare crisis.
  I want to preface my remarks with--I think this is something we all 
need to be thinking about--how do we move beyond the discussion we are 
having now, not that it is unimportant, but we also need to move beyond 
the discussion and start talking about the underlying cost and why is 
it that Americans are paying virtually twice as much as anyone in the 
world for healthcare per capita--or as a percent of GDP or however you 
want to calculate it--without noticeably better results? In fact, most 
worldwide studies indicate the results of our healthcare system are not 
as good as those in many other countries.
  It would be one thing if we were paying a lot of money and getting 
absolutely superior care across the board in our country, but that is 
not the case. In measurements such as infant mortality, longevity--
standard basic healthcare indicators--we are not doing very well. Yet 
we are paying twice as much. There is something wrong with that, and we 
have to address it.
  I want to talk about the Affordable Care Act. I want to start with 
the point that it is the law of the land. It is the law of the land.
  I am rising today in sadness but also in anger because there is a lot 
of talk about the Affordable Care Act collapsing, imploding. It is not 
collapsing. It is being mugged. It is being stabbed in the back. It is 
being sabotaged deliberately and consciously by the actions of the 
administration.
  I want to emphasize that this isn't about ideology. It is not about 
politics. It is not about who wins and who loses or which party is up 
or who voted or who didn't. This is about people. It is about people in 
Maine. It is about people, many of whom got care for the first time 
under the Affordable Care Act; lobstermen, small farmers, small 
businesspeople, individuals finally had a shot at reasonably priced 
healthcare.
  It is not perfect by any means. I would never argue that. In fact, I 
have been working on proposals since the day I got here on how to 
improve it, how to fix some of the problems, how to make it better, how 
to have the effects be less intense on some parts of our economy. It is 
the law of the land. The impacts of what we do here or don't do here 
fall on real people--real people, in my case, in my home State of 
Maine.
  The Affordable Care Act is not collapsing; it is being sabotaged. 
Here is a partial list.
  In January, during the period of the last open enrollment, one of the 
first acts of the new administration was to cut the advertising on 
television, advising people that they had this healthcare option. Cut 
the ads, that is No. 1. That was in January.
  Then they announced they were going to minimize the enforcement of 
the personal mandate. If you tell somebody you are not going to enforce 
something, that is an invitation to not abide by it, to not pay any 
attention to it. People can argue about whether that is desirable, but 
that is the law. To announce that administratively you are not going to 
enforce it, again, what does that do? It reduces the number of people 
who are going to get healthcare. That, in turn, undermines the 
individual market, and that, in turn, makes it less financially viable. 
That is a deliberate act that will undermine the viability of this law.
  In April, there began a series of what turned into seven different 
threats from various people in the administration to not make the 
legally mandated CSR payments--the cost-sharing reduction payments--
which are not bailouts to insurance companies but which were designed 
as part of the law to hold the rates down and to hold the deductibles 
down for those people buying coverage under the Affordable Care Act. 
Continuously threatening the reduction or the elimination of these 
payments has created an uncertainty in the marketplace that is now 
coming home to roost.
  Just last week, Anthem announced they are leaving the Maine 
marketplace. They cited a number of reasons, but one of the chief 
reasons was the uncertainty created by whether these payments are going 
to be made.
  Recently, the HELP committee had a series of hearings on this 
subject. They had a bipartisan group of Governors. They had a 
bipartisan group of insurance commissioners, health experts from across 
the country. I was at all but one of those hearings. I believe I am 
right in saying it was unanimous that we must ensure the continuation 
of the CSR payments in order to stabilize the market and reduce 
premiums projected to increase this coming year.
  The number nationally is estimated to be about 20 percent--a 20-
percent increase attributable to the failure to ensure that the CSR 
payments will be made because an insurance company, if they are setting 
rates, has to factor into their rates the risk of these payments not 
being made. The testimony is--it depends somewhat on the State, but 
roughly a 20-percent increase is attributable to just this fact.
  If we could pass legislation here--unfortunately, we missed the 
deadline, but we may be able to work on that because the deadline was 
just last week. But if we could simply ensure those payments are made, 
that in itself would lower rates by 20 percent next year on a silver 
plan.
  By the way, if those CSRs aren't made and the rates go up, 
ironically, that means the mandatory payments of subsidies to 
individuals under the Affordable Care Act will also go up. So it will 
cost the Treasury money--additional money not accounted for, roughly 
$200 billion over the next 10 years.
  What else has gone on? In May, there was another one from the head of 
the Office of Management and Budget. The administration has not decided 
whether to pay the CSRs. That is a big red signal to the insurance 
companies: You can't count on this, so you better raise rates. In May, 
the budget was released. In the budget, there were drastic cuts in the 
call centers for the Affordable Care Act, in the in-person assistance, 
and in marketing. And just for good measure, they announced they were 
cutting the enrollment period in half, from 3 months to 6 weeks. What 
possible reason can there be to do that, except that you want fewer 
people to sign up? That is called sabotage--reducing from 3 months to 6 
weeks.
  Then, all along, the Health and Human Services Department has been 
monkeying around with the website, taking down explanatory material 
about the Affordable Care Act, taking down material indicating why this 
would be a good deal for people and, instead, putting up critical 
material.
  On August 31, the administration announced reductions in outreach of 
90 percent and cuts in assistance to people trying to navigate this 
system by 40 percent. This is complicated material. Any of us who have 
signed up for insurance--we all have the Affordable Care Act. Most 
people don't know that. But we had to go on the website and choose a 
policy for ourselves. It is hard, it is complicated, and to take away 
the people who are in the communities helping people work through these 
various decisions and weigh the different policies, the deductibles, 
and how to compare them is the same as taking away the coverage. It is 
an act of sabotage.
  The most recent one I just learned about this morning. This is 
amazing. The Affordable Care Act is based on a website, healthcare.gov. 
We all know it had terrible problems when it started. There is no 
excuse for that. I was critical of it at the time. Those were problems 
that were not intentional.

[[Page 15493]]

  Now intentional problems are being created. This is the one that 
really gets me. I just learned this morning that every Sunday during 
the bobtail enrollment period, the 6-week enrollment period, the 
website is going to be closed for 12 hours for maintenance. Isn't that 
amazing? For 12 hours on the one day of the week when many working 
people are going to have an opportunity to try to understand this 
system and enroll, they are going to be down from midnight Saturday 
night until noon on Sunday, the middle of the day on Sunday.
  I want to go back to the beginning. This isn't about ideology. This 
is about seeing that the laws are faithfully executed. That is why they 
call it the administration. The administration is supposed to 
administer the laws, not unadminister them.
  We are talking about people. Why does anyone want to have fewer 
people with insurance? I am at a loss to understand the motivation. I 
can understand if you don't like the ACA. If you don't like the ACA, 
let's work together and find ways to improve it and change it, but 
figure out how to keep people with health insurance.
  The uninsured rate in America has fallen 50 percent because of the 
Affordable Care Act. That is an enormous achievement. It is one that 
should be celebrated, not sabotaged. That is what is so puzzling to me 
about this: fewer people with coverage and higher costs to the 
Treasury.
  We can do better than this. These are all things the administration 
in good faith can say: OK, we don't like the ACA, but we are going to 
move beyond the politics of this and try to help people get the 
coverage they desperately need.
  This is about real people's lives. This is about lifting the threat, 
the cloud of a healthcare disaster, both physically and financially, 
from families across America. We are talking about millions of 
families--not tens of thousands but millions of families. I don't get 
why we are deliberately trying to undermine and sabotage something that 
is so meaningful to so many people. As one can tell, it makes me angry. 
Mostly, it makes me sad because I know people in Maine who have 
benefited, who have gotten coverage, who did not have it before and who 
will not have it if this is taken away--people who need those 
navigators to help them, people who need to be able to use the website 
on a Sunday morning, people who need to have rates that are lower 
because the CSRs have been funded, and we are not continuously raising 
the uncertainty of that piece of this law.
  We can do better. This is about the health of our people. I cannot 
think of anything more important. We can have different ways of getting 
there, but right now we have a law that is in place, and until we 
change it--and we should change it; we should fix it--we should 
administer it straight up, straightforwardly, as it was written and as 
it was intended. This is too important for politics, and it is too 
important for ideology. This is all about people and their health.
  Thank you.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Ernst). The Senator from Utah.


                               Tax Reform

  Mr. HATCH. Madam President, last week I joined with the Secretary of 
the Treasury, the Director of the National Economic Council, our Senate 
majority leader, the Speaker of the House, and the chairman of the 
House Ways and Means Committee in releasing a unified framework for tax 
reform.
  This is a big step in the ongoing effort to overhaul our Nation's 
miserable Tax Code. I have been in the Senate awhile, and I can only 
remember a few times when the White House and the House and Senate 
leadership were in agreement on an issue as complicated as tax reform 
so the current state of affairs is pretty remarkable. Still, as we made 
clear in the framework document, this is only a step; it is not a final 
product.
  The House and the Senate tax-writing committees will be tasked with 
putting together legislation that is aimed at meeting the goals and 
principles that are outlined in the framework. Therefore, as the 
chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, my top goal at the moment is 
to produce a comprehensive tax reform bill that can get at least 14 
votes in the committee because, without that, there likely will not be 
any tax reform. Yet, before we can get to that point, we have to pass 
the fiscal year 2018 budget resolution.
  Make no mistake, the budget resolution is critical to our tax reform 
efforts. If we are going to move a tax reform vehicle in the current 
environment, we need a resolution in place with a workable 
reconciliation instruction that will allow us to produce a bill of 
sufficient size and scope to give middle-class taxpayers a pay raise, 
grow our economy, and create more American jobs.
  As we all know, the Budget Committee will begin marking up its 
resolution later today, and it will include the type of instruction we 
need in order to produce a bill that will fix our broken tax system, 
boost economic growth, and give a pay raise to middle-class Americans.
  I am grateful for the leadership of Chairman Enzi and all of our 
colleagues on the Budget Committee for their work in crafting the 
resolution, and I urge everyone who supports tax reform, whether he is 
in Congress or elsewhere, to support the budget resolution.
  Once again, that is the next big step in this process, and it is an 
absolutely essential step. Once that is done, the Finance Committee 
will be able to move forward on crafting and marking up a tax reform 
bill.
  Some have said tax reform is a do-or-die moment for the GOP. I 
wholeheartedly believe that to be true, not just because we might lose 
an election or that our poll numbers might go down, it is that 
Republicans have promised, for some time now, that we will deliver 
meaningful, comprehensive tax reform that will spur economic growth, 
increase wages and well-paying jobs, and simplify our existing system. 
We need to deliver on that promise and not just because we will suffer 
politically if we do not. We need to deliver because the cost of doing 
nothing--the cost of maintaining the status quo for the foreseeable 
future--will be too much for the American people and our economy to 
bear.
  The last major overhaul of our Tax Code was 31 years ago, and in many 
respects, our current tax system was built for the economy of 1986 and 
is ill-suited for the needs of today. In the last 31 years, we have 
seen a dramatic increase in international trade and expanded 
globalization. We have seen the fall of the Soviet Union and the 
collapse of most centrally run economies, and of course we have seen 
the development and rapid expansion of the internet, which has, in many 
respects, remade the entire world several times over.
  America no longer has a competitive Tax Code. Instead, we have a 
Byzantine system with exceptionally high rates and an array of 
overlapping and often less-than-effective deductions, exclusions, and 
credits. This is not just a parade of horribles trotted out by 
Republicans, these problems have been acknowledged by a number of 
prominent Democrats, like Presidents Clinton and Obama, not to mention 
our current Senate minority leader and the ranking member of the 
Finance Committee, Senator Wyden.
  We all know the system is not working. Still, in many respects, we 
have politics as usual around here when we talk about tax reform. While 
both parties have supported reforms in the recent past, including a 
number of reforms that are included in the framework, we are already 
hearing the same, tired arguments that come up every time Republicans 
want to talk about tax reform.
  According to the opponents of reform, our ``plan'' will cut taxes on 
the superrich. Our ``plan'' will raise taxes on the poor. Our ``plan'' 
will harm the middle class. Our ``plan'' is a giveaway to greedy 
corporations. These are some pretty odd claims given that as of right 
now, no completed ``plan'' exists. We have a framework, and we are not 
calling it that simply for PR reasons. We have some basic principles 
and targets that the leaders have agreed upon, but

[[Page 15494]]

as the framework makes clear, the Finance and Ways and Means Committees 
have been tasked with filling in the details and writing legislation.
  Here are just some of the details that are not included in the 
framework:
  Income thresholds for individual tax brackets. The framework includes 
rate targets for three brackets, but the breakdown of those brackets is 
still to be determined.
  The size of the enhanced Child Tax Credit. The framework anticipates 
an increase, but it does not specify an amount.
  The existence and rate of the highest bracket. Our document leaves 
room for the creation of a fourth bracket at the high end, but it does 
not include any rate target.
  Safeguards to prevent abuse of the separate passthrough rates.
  These are just some of the key details that need to be filled in.
  My point is, no one can make any definitive statements or make any 
credible estimates about the fiscal impact of the plan until the 
committees do more work. Still, that has not stopped people from 
trying.
  Last week, the left-leaning Tax Policy Center released an 
unattributed ``analysis'' of the framework that appeared to confirm a 
number of blanket claims that critics have made about our ``plan.'' As 
we all know, left-leaning pundits, liberal media outlets, and many of 
our friends on the other side seem to love the TPC, apparently because 
the TPC is willing to provide estimates and analysis about tax plans 
without waiting for all of the boring details.
  We all remember well when the TPC wrote Mitt Romney's tax plan for 
him and claimed that he wanted to raise taxes on the middle class to 
finance a tax cut for the top 1 percent. Their analysis of the Romney 
plan--a plan that was not yet in existence beyond a broad set of 
principles--became the gospel for our friends on the other side, and 
their estimates were repeated time and again; never mind the fact that 
they did not have nearly enough evidence to support their assertions.
  The TPC appears to be on the same track with regard to the unified 
framework. I guess they think they can get away with it again. Maybe 
they can. I don't know. The TPC's document from last week included a 
relatively precise estimate of lost revenue that they claim would 
result from the framework. It also estimated how much of the tax 
benefit of the framework would go to the top 1 percent of earners, 
again with a fair amount of precision. How they got to these results 
is, certainly, to me, a mystery.
  There is simply no way for the TPC or anyone to deliver these kinds 
of specific estimates with the information that is provided in the 
framework. To get their estimates, they filled in blanks with numbers 
from other proposals, added a pile of exceptionally pessimistic and 
biased economic assumptions, and came up with a tax plan that, for all 
intents and purposes, is their own. Just because they say this analysis 
was performed on the unified framework and was not just a plan they 
made up themselves does not suddenly make their estimates credible.
  Still, I expect to hear a lot about the TPC's ``analysis'' in the 
coming weeks. Some will treat their estimates as fact, and I expect we 
will see them cited in a few campaign commercials before too long. 
Breaking from any notion of professional accountability, the TPC's 
``analysis'' was, according to the TPC's report, authored by the TPC's 
staff. Evidently, no one in an organization that describes itself as 
``nonpartisan'' wanted to put their name on a document that would be 
used in such a partisan manner, but let's be clear. We cannot separate 
this kind of speculative ``analysis'' from the way it is being used by 
our friends on the other side. It has become fodder for more of the 
same partisan attacks.
  In going forward, I hope the TPC and other think tanks will 
acknowledge the still undefined features of the framework, including 
the commitment to maintaining the current progressivity of the Tax 
Code, which will require adjustments in order to achieve. I think 
groups like the TPC can be helpful if they avoid the partisan 
criticisms and focus on shedding light and providing accurate 
assessments of various proposals. Everyone who has an interest in these 
issues should wait and let the tax-writing committees do their work.
  In the Finance Committee, we are going to write a committee bill. Any 
Member who is sincerely interested in working with us will get a chance 
to contribute, whether he is a Republican or Democrat. We are going to 
have a markup during which the bill will be debated and amended in the 
light of the day. Thereafter, I expect that we will have a fair and 
open amendment process on the floor. Despite some odd claims to the 
contrary, the Joint Committee on Taxation will score the bill.
  At the end of the day, people will be free to disagree with the final 
bill and to vote against it, but no one will be able to credibly claim 
that the legislation was written behind closed doors or that the 
American people did not get a chance to see what was in the bill and 
read accurate accounts of its fiscal and economic impacts.
  I want to work with anyone who is willing to come to the table in 
good faith. I think the framework puts forward a number of general 
proposals that both parties can support. There is fertile ground for 
bipartisanship here if my Democratic colleagues are willing to set 
aside some of the unreasonable preconditions that they have put on 
their involvement in tax reform. The last time I checked, both 
Republicans and Democrats supported tax relief for low- and middle-
income families. The last time I checked, reducing our uncompetitive 
corporate tax rate was a bipartisan objective. The last time I checked, 
both Republican and Democratic voters were in need of higher wages, 
more jobs, and a more competitive economy.
  This is going to be a difficult process, whether it is bipartisan or 
partisan. There is a long list of sacred cows in our Tax Code, each of 
them with a constituency that will fight to keep them in place. We are 
going to have to eliminate a number of tax deductions and credits if we 
are going to be fiscally responsible, including a number of provisions 
that are, under the current system, pretty popular in certain segments 
of the country. The framework specifies two deductions that should stay 
in place because they benefit many in the middle class and they are 
designed to achieve important policy goals. Everything else is 
currently on the table, including items that I have personally 
championed in the past.
  We have already seen stories about how Republicans are already 
divided on the fate of the State and local tax deduction. Make no 
mistake--that is a pretty popular deduction, particularly among 
Democrats, but it has some Republican supporters as well. I would 
remind my colleagues who are adamant about preserving the State and 
local tax deduction that the benefits of that particular provision skew 
heavily toward higher income earners, especially those living in high-
tax cities and States. So if our main goal is to help the middle class, 
I would hope that there won't be many Senators who will fall on their 
swords in order to keep this particular deduction in place.
  Still, nothing is set in stone, and most items are currently still up 
for negotiation. The State and local tax deduction is, like virtually 
every other tax provision, currently on the table, and we may very well 
have to pare it back one way or the other. We need to see how the 
numbers work out before we can speak definitively on this or any other 
tax policy item.

[[Page 15495]]

  Before I conclude, let me just say that this is a once-in-a-
generation opportunity. There is currently more momentum in favor of 
tax reform than at any other time in the past three decades. All of us 
should be willing to take advantage of this opportunity. All of us 
should be able to give in order to get a final bill done that will make 
sense and will get us back on track. I am hopeful that we can have a 
bipartisan effort here, but whether we do or don't, I intend to see 
that we get tax reform done and that we get it done in the best 
interest of our country, the best interest of our people, and above 
all, the best interest of the middle class.
  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. CASEY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                        Las Vegas Mass Shooting

  Mr. CASEY. Madam President, I come to the floor today for the second 
time this week to highlight the tragic human cost of gun violence. I 
will speak today about just one victim, but of course we are thinking 
as well about the 58 victims in Las Vegas. Not counting the killer in 
that total, the last count was 58 victims and well over 500 injured.
  We have some sense of the gravity of the violence that played out in 
Las Vegas. I am not sure any of us can fully understand it, and some of 
us will never quite understand what happened there, but I think we have 
to dedicate ourselves to taking action. I will get to that in a moment.


                      Remembering Gerard Grandzol

  Madam President, today I am here to honor the memory of Gerard 
Grandzol, a resident of Philadelphia who lost his life to gun violence 
last month as he protected his 2-year-old daughter from carjackers. 
This was truly a senseless tragedy, one that took a father from his 
wife and two young daughters, one that robbed the Spring Garden 
neighborhood in Philadelphia of a man who was a beloved member of the 
community, and I think that is an understatement.
  Gerard was known as Gerry. His wife Kristin and their 2-year-old 
daughter had welcomed a second baby girl into their family this past 
July.
  In addition to raising his family and working at a legal recruiting 
firm, Gerry dedicated his time and energy to making his community a 
better place. As a member of the Spring Garden Civic Association, he 
was the go-to guy in his community, in the words of Philadelphia City 
Council president Darrell Clarke. Gerry was an avid hockey player, the 
neighborhood handyman, and the person who would man the grill at block 
parties and repair bikes for kids in the neighborhood. His neighbors 
and friends have spoken of his happy, magnetic personality and his 
willingness to help others.
  You can tell how important Gerry was to his family, friends, and 
community. You can tell what an impact he had on the people he met 
because thousands of people lined up at the Cathedral Basilica of 
Saints Peter and Paul a few weeks ago to pay their respects to Gerry 
and to celebrate his life. The people who knew him are keeping his 
memory alive on his Facebook page, where they shared pictures of Gerry 
hiking, painting, playing hockey, full of life and surrounded by 
friends and family.
  This is a man who became yet another victim of gun violence last 
month after he refused to give a pair of robbers his car keys because 
his 2-year-old daughter was in the back seat. This was a truly 
senseless act of violence that has shaken his family, friends, and his 
community. Two suspects in this terrible crime are now in custody, and 
I hope that proceedings in the justice system in Philadelphia can 
provide some measure of relief, some measure of comfort, and, we pray, 
even closure to the Grandzol family. Whatever relief it might provide, 
justice can't heal every wound. It can't bring Gerry back to Kristin, 
their daughters, and their family, friends, and neighbors. But we can 
make sure his memory lives on in the way we treat each other, and I 
hope we can honor Gerry's life by dedicating ourselves to improving the 
lives of our neighbors and working together to solve problems.
  One thing I hope we can do here on the specific issue of gun violence 
is to work on legislation and policy that will at least--at least--
reduce the likelihood that someone like Gerry will lose his life. It is 
part of a longer conversation. I won't get into the list of issues we 
should be working on--some of those I have outlined already--but we 
can't simply, as we often do, express condolence and pay tribute that 
is appropriate to those whose lives have been lost and those who may 
have been injured in Las Vegas and so many other places around the 
country. We have to do more than that. We can't stop with those 
expressions--those appropriate and essential expressions of sympathy 
and solidarity and commendation for the great work of law enforcement 
and emergency personnel. We have to do more than that.
  Today, as we remember Gerry, we offer not only condolences but we 
offer prayers to his wife Kristin, to their daughters, and to the 
family and friends of the Spring Garden neighborhood in Philadelphia.
  Once again, stopping there is not enough. There are plenty of 
examples of people who have lost their lives in a city like 
Philadelphia or in cities around the country that may not add up to the 
58 deaths, may not add up to 500-plus injured, but when you take just 
one life--in this case, the life that we highlight today, Gerry's 
life--it is reason enough to come together to work on new approaches, 
commonsense approaches to, as I said before, reduce the likelihood. No 
one is suggesting that we can pass something that will be a magic wand 
to take away all of these acts of violence, but we shouldn't throw up 
our hands and say there is absolutely nothing we can do to reduce the 
likelihood that people will lose their lives due to an act of gun 
violence. I refuse to accept that as an American, that there is nothing 
we can do legislatively to reduce that likelihood or even, God willing, 
to substantially reduce the likelihood.
  So when we are thinking about Gerry today, I hope we can commit 
ourselves to action and debate and maybe even reach consensus on 
legislation and policy to move forward in the right direction.
  Madam President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.


                               Tax Reform

  Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I would recommend to this body 
something that is obvious to all of us. Our economy is stuck. We are in 
a bad spot of just treading water. Over the last 11 years, our gross 
domestic product--that is how much our economy is growing--has been 1.9 
percent, and 1.9 percent is a tiny change.
  Just to give you a perspective, over the last 100 years, there has 
not been a single decade when we have not had a year without at least 3 
percent growth, until the last decade. Literally, our economy, is 
typically growing; that is, more jobs are being added, people are 
making more money, there is more happening, and we are selling more 
internationally. In America, over the last 100 years, it has just 
slowly grown and grown and grown until the last 10 years, and, then, it 
has flattened out. We are stuck.
  Now, when I was younger, we had a record player in the house. Now, 
for all of you under 40, I would explain that a record player is kind 
of like a CD player, only it was larger and made of vinyl. But if I say 
that, then, all the under-20 crowd will say: What is a CD player?
  Let me just say this. The big black pieces of vinyl that played music 
at my house occasionally would get stuck. The record needle would land 
in the same groove and play the same part of the song over and over. It 
was my job, as the youngest one in the house, to go over to the record 
and bump it and get it out of that. Our economy needs that.
  We need to be able to get over to our economy, which is stuck in the 
same groove at 1.9 percent in this incredibly low-growth rate, and give 
it a bump.

[[Page 15496]]

Now, that bump can come in a lot of ways: increasing international 
trade would be a great help, engaging more internationally, keeping our 
regulations common sense and as nonintrusive as possible so that small 
businesses and medium-sized businesses aren't panicked all the time of 
what the Federal Government is going to do to them with a new 
regulation. Just keep them common sense and simple.
  How about making sure that there are fewer Federal forms and that the 
Federal forms that people have to fill out not only are simple to do 
but they don't duplicate over multiple different agencies. It would be 
good if people who worked in small, medium, and large businesses spent 
more time selling products than they did filling out a form for some 
Federal bureaucracy that is never going to read that form anyway.
  The obvious way to be able to bump the record needle in our economy 
right now is tax reform. It is not the main thing that is going to do 
everything, but it is a pretty big element. If we can get tax reform 
done, it actually gives our economy a little bit of a boost. Now, I 
have folks that will say: How does that make a difference? When you do 
tax reform, why does that actually increase economic activity?
  Well, quite frankly, people around the country and in my State of 
Oklahoma are struggling to be able to save money because their wages 
aren't growing at the same speed that everything else is going up in 
price. So people need to be able to save more money and to be able to 
have more money to be able to spend.
  Also, we need to create more jobs and we need to get companies going 
again and actually developing more jobs. If people can actually get a 
job, if people can make more money at that job, and if people actually 
have more take-home pay, they spend a little more, they save a little 
more, and the company expands a little more. If each place does that a 
little bit, it dramatically increases our economy around the country, 
and we know it because we feel it.
  Making the Tax Code simpler for every person in every business means 
people don't have to pay as much to have their taxes done. Maybe you 
can do your own taxes because it would be simple enough to do it, and 
it wouldn't cost so much. Accountants who work for businesses could go 
back to working for their businesses to see how they can make their 
businesses more efficient rather than spending all of their time just 
on tax policy.
  I think we should follow the lead of the President on this. The 
President made a very clear statement. He said: Let's help our 
companies compete, but to do that we have to also knock down barriers 
that stand in the way of their success. For example, the President 
said:

       Over the years, a parade of lobbyists have rigged the tax 
     code to benefit particular companies and industries. Those 
     with accountants or lawyers to work the system can end up 
     paying no taxes at all. But all the rest are hit with one of 
     the highest corporate tax rates in the world. It makes no 
     sense, and it has to change.
       So tonight, I'm asking Democrats and Republicans to 
     simplify the system. Get rid of the loopholes. Level the 
     playing field. And use the savings to lower the corporate tax 
     rate for the first time in 25 years.

  Did I fail to mention that the President who said that is President 
Obama? President Obama did, right down the hallway, in 2011, in his 
State of the Union address. That is what he said we should do: simplify 
the system, lower the corporate tax rate, and be able to deal with all 
of the loopholes that are in the system.
  This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Everyone sees this, Republicans 
and Democrats alike.
  So my focus is this. How do we actually get this done and not make it 
into a partisan food fight here but actually do what is right for the 
American people and help bump the economy to be able to help get us 
going again?
  In my State--whether you live in Valliant, Gotebo, Healton, Sayre, 
Muskogee, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, or Lawton--this matters because 
everyone unfortunately pays taxes. Everyone knows it is a necessary 
thing, but we want to have it as simple as possible and to have it as 
low as possible, and we want to make sure it is as fair as possible.
  So the framework has been presented this past week. It is a simple 
framework for how we deal with tax policy. It talks about consolidating 
our rates. We have seven rates now. We would drop that down to four 
rates. There would be a 0-percent rate, a 12-percent, a 25-percent, and 
a 35-percent rate.
  Now, some folks have asked me about the 0-percent rate, because a lot 
of Americans say one simple thing: Every American is an American, and 
every American should pay a little bit in taxes. I would agree, by the 
way. But every American is paying some taxes. For those folks at the 
lowest end of the scale, I would propose dropping the rate to zero for 
them on income taxes, but they are paying their fair share in property 
tax, in gas tax, and in sales tax. They are helping their local fire 
department and their local police department. They are paying for the 
roads that are federally subsidized, based on their gas tax. They are 
paying taxes, but if they are not at a rate and at an income high 
enough to be able to survive at that rate, then let's drop theirs to 0 
percent for income tax. They will keep some of the other taxes so they 
can still contribute to society and still be a part of this great 
Nation.
  Dropping those rates down to the lowest bracket being 0 percent for 
income tax, then 12 percent, 25 percent, and 35 percent is a pretty 
standard rate. Quite frankly, this is something that was proposed in 
the Simpson-Bowles proposal before, which was a bipartisan proposal, 
for it to be able to come out, on how we can reform the system.
  Eliminating the alternative minimum tax--do you want to talk about a 
complicated tax code? Basically, we have two Tax Codes. We have the 
standard Tax Code, and then we have the alternative minimum tax. 
Everyone who does their taxes has to do them twice to be able to 
evaluate which one of the codes they actually fit into. Now, if are 
using an electronic system, you lose track of it because the electronic 
system on the computer is doing that for you. But the AMT dramatically 
increases the complexity of the code. We should do away with that.
  If we want to be able to protect the folks who are in the lowest 
bracket, then let's double what is the standard deduction. Right now 
the standard deduction is about $12,000. Let's double that to about 
$24,000. That $24,000 amount for families would mean that the first 
$24,000 of income that you would make as a family would fall into that 
0-percent bracket. So you are paying zero income tax to the Federal 
Government until you make more than $24,000. That protects a lot of 
families in the lowest end of the bracket to make sure they are not 
falling into this.
  Quite frankly, in Oklahoma, most Oklahomans just use the standard 
deduction. They don't itemize. Doubling the standard deduction would 
mean that for a lot of those specialized deductions that everyone else 
gets, it actually flattens that out. It makes it fair. The No. 1 thing 
I hear from people when they fill out their taxes is not only that they 
filled them out and turned them in, but they say: I have no idea 
whether I did them right. It was so complicated, and I don't know if it 
is right. Then, the second thing they say, though, right behind that, 
is this: Why is it that, when I read through the hundred pages of 
instructions on the 1040 form, every deduction seems to be for someone 
else?
  So let's increase the standard deduction so everybody gets a flatter, 
simpler, and fairer system, and let's keep the biggest of the 
deductions that most Americans use, like the charitable deduction or 
the mortgage interest deduction. If there are any two deductions that 
most people use, it is those two. So let's protect those two in the 
system.
  As for reducing the corporate tax rate, I have folks say that it only 
benefits the biggest businesses. I always smile and say: Those are 
actually people who employ people. If you reduce the corporate rate, 
that means they are more competitive internationally and that means 
they are not having to

[[Page 15497]]

move their corporate headquarters overseas.
  For years, as a nation we have used the carrot-and-stick approach on 
trying to keep businesses here in the United States; that is, if they 
go overseas, beat them with a stick and try to punish them for trying 
to move. Why don't we use the carrot approach? Why don't we find out 
why they are moving overseas and fix that? Many of these companies are 
moving overseas because of the very high corporate tax rate here in the 
United States. Let's fix that. Over the decades, many of our competing 
nations have done that. We should fix that. That increases the number 
of jobs, that increases economic activity, and that keeps American jobs 
in America.
  We should deal with the child tax credit and continue to be able to 
protect that for families.
  We can deal with how we do expensing. Now, if you don't run a 
business, that doesn't matter much to you. But if you are the one who 
owns the small business, you understand how expensing works. If you 
have a cost to your business this year and if you can't write it off in 
this year, you have to expand that out, and you know that slows you 
down.
  Here are the basics. If you are running a small business and you need 
to buy a new pickup for your business, if it takes you years to be able 
to depreciate that out, you are slower to do it. But if you know you 
can depreciate it out this year in your business, you are more likely 
to buy that. So that business buys a new truck this year. Well, that 
not only benefits that business in having new equipment, but it also 
benefits the Ford dealership down the street that actually sold them 
the truck, and it benefits all of the people in the area who helped 
supply that vehicle. So it trickles down through the rest of the 
economy.
  There are ways to be able to accomplish all of these things and to be 
able to be as simple as we possibly can be.
  There has been a lot of conversation about worldwide taxation as 
well. People seem to get confused on that area because most people 
don't live in that world. Here are the basics of it: Right now, if you 
are an American company and you are selling things overseas and doing 
business overseas, when you make a profit overseas and you try to bring 
that money back, you get taxed overseas at their tax rate, which you 
should, in that country you are making the product and selling it, but 
you get taxed again when you bring it back to the United States. We are 
the only country that does it that way.
  If we will just simplify the system, it will actually encourage 
companies to be able to stay in America and then do business all over 
the world rather than moving their company out of America. It is a 
simple way to be able to do it, and it is a way that we can do and 
should do. You will hear the term ``repatriation,'' and that is really 
what it is about. It is Americans being able to move their money from 
overseas accounts back to the United States and get that money moving.
  There was a lot of conversation about the stimulus plan back in 2009 
trying to get almost a trillion dollars of government money--that is 
money from you and me--and to be able to move that around in a stimulus 
package. Let me give you the figure. Right now, it is estimated that 
American companies have about $2.5 trillion of private money parked 
overseas that they are not going to bring back to our economy because 
of the high cost of the tax coming back. If we were able to change that 
system, $2.5 trillion of private money would move from overseas back 
into the United States. What effect would that have on our economy? I 
would stipulate that it would be a pretty dramatic effect that it would 
have on our economy.
  We can fix this. We can resolve this. This shouldn't be as hard as we 
are making it, and it can be a bipartisan approach to be able to 
address some basic things--taking care of our families, making sure we 
are watching out for those who are in poverty, simplifying the code, 
making sure deductions aren't for a few but that they are spread out 
across the way that we handle it, protecting things like charitable 
giving and the mortgage interest deduction and things that most 
Americans use. These are the parameters we are trying to be able to 
work through over the next couple of weeks.
  Hopefully in the coming months, as we work through all the details in 
the committee process with amendments and coming to the floor and being 
able fight our way through the process, we will be able to actually get 
to a decision that will help us long term as a nation. This is 
something that can and should be resolved. It is one of the issues I 
have to raise to this body again.
  This body has had a hard time actually moving on the biggest issues 
we face as a nation because the rules of this body prohibit us from 
debating them. The rules haven't changed over the past multiple 
decades, but the way we operate has. The American people are ticked 
about it, and rightfully so. The Senators in this body are frustrated 
with it. May I remind us that the rules of the Senate are set by the 
Senate? So if we are frustrated with the rules, we should address them.
  Many of you have heard me speak about this in the past.
  There are three basic rule changes that I think will change 
dramatically how business gets done in the Senate. The biggest one is 
the filibuster rule. We have two filibusters for every single bill that 
comes up. There is one at the beginning. You have to get 60 votes to 
start debate; you have to get 60 votes to stop debate; then the bill 
passes with 51. That needs to change. We should take away the first 60 
votes at the beginning. We should be able to get onto a bill. 
Regardless of whether it is Republicans or Democrats in the majority, 
the majority party should be able to bring up a bill and debate it 
without being stopped. Let's bring up any issue and actually debate it. 
Let's not inhibit debate in this body. If we can't find agreement, keep 
the 60 votes at the end of it so we can keep the debate going until it 
gets resolved, but we should be able to debate the issues.
  The second big issue is that we have to deal with nominations in an 
appropriate time period. Currently, my Democratic colleagues are 
forcing the long periods of time in debate for every single nominee who 
comes up. I had folks say that is what Republicans did in the past. 
That is actually not true. This is the first time it has happened like 
this.
  This week, we are going to move four nominees for the President in 1 
week--four. Under the current structure, it will take 11 years for 
President Trump to get his staff. Let me give you a barometer of where 
things have been in the past. As of yesterday, President Trump had 153 
confirmations. At this same point, President Obama had 337 total. 
President Bush had 358 total at this same point. President Trump is not 
getting his nominees heard, and they are being slow-walked through the 
process.
  We have to fix that. A simple way to fix it is to allow only 2, 4, or 
8 hours of debate, not this protracted 30 hours of debate per nominee. 
It is already a resolved issue. Everybody knows it. These individuals 
have already gone through committee. They were already voted on in 
committee. By the time they get to the floor, it is resolved. The 30 
hours of debate time is purely delay tactics. We should be able to 
resolve that within 2, 4, or 8 hours total.
  Here is a radical idea: If we want to get the Senate going again, we 
can agree to a rule change that would allow for what is called dual-
tracking. We would do nominations in the morning and legislation in the 
afternoon. Right now, we can only do one thing at a time in the Senate, 
so while we are waiting on a nomination vote, everything waits until 
that is done. It slows down the process. Why can't we do nominations in 
the morning and legislation in the afternoon?
  There are basic rule changes that will help that are not partisan 
issues. They are designed to get the Senate moving regardless of who is 
in the majority. We have to resolve this long term. If we don't, the 
American people will continue to be frustrated, and we as Senators will 
continue to be frustrated.

[[Page 15498]]




                    Detention of Dr. Andrew Brunson

  Madam President, this weekend is an anniversary I don't like bringing 
up. One year ago this weekend, a gentleman named Dr. Andrew Brunson was 
detained in Turkey. He has been a pastor in Turkey for more than 20 
years, and he is a U.S. citizen. He has faithfully served the people of 
Turkey for two decades. A year ago this weekend, he was picked up by 
local authorities and was detained for months and months without 
charges. He was just swept up and held.
  Things are changing rapidly in Turkey right now. Turkey is not the 
same NATO ally and friend of the United States that they have been. The 
leadership of Turkey is radically changing the nature of that very open 
democracy and is shutting it down to become more and more of an 
authoritarian government. American citizens who do business there, who 
do mission work there, who have friends and family there, need to be 
aware that Americans are being swept up and detained without charges 
and held. In the case of Dr. Brunson, he has been held for a year. I 
have to warn fellow Americans that Turkey is not necessarily a safe 
place to do business in and travel to anymore.
  Right now, Turkey has the authority to release Dr. Brunson. He is an 
American citizen and a pastor. They have the ability to do that.
  Recently, the Appropriations Committee passed an amendment in an 
appropriations bill giving additional authorities to our State 
Department to take action against Turkish officials who hold American 
citizens like this and to put specific sanctions on those individuals. 
I hope that in the days ahead, our State Department will use that tool 
in their toolbox to apply pressure on the Turkish people to not impose 
arbitrary detention on U.S. citizens. We can push back on the Turks.
  I hope that in the days ahead, the Turkish Government turns back 
around to more of an open democracy. They have been a nation in the 
past that was historic for their stand for religious liberty and 
democracy in that region. We would like to see a Turkish ally that 
still stands for religious liberty and the protection of all citizens 
in the days ahead.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.


                               Tax Reform

  Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, as the ranking Democrat on the Senate 
Finance Committee, I followed the Senator's comments with respect to 
taxes and the debate over tax reform with considerable interest. I will 
just tell you, my goodness, how I wish we could have what the Senator 
called an uninhibited process with respect to the debate over tax 
reform. I have written an actual bipartisan tax reform bill with our 
colleague who is now part of the Trump administration, Senator Coats.
  Unfortunately, what our colleague laudably called for is not on 
offer. The Senate majority leader has said that he intends to use 
reconciliation--the most partisan process for considering tax reform. 
When we were talking about healthcare, which is one-sixth of the 
economy, we had the same process--reconciliation, all partisan. Now we 
are talking about taxes that involve the whole economy, and we are 
seeing the Senate majority leader say once again that it is his intent, 
his preference, and his plan to use that same process. I sure wish the 
world was like my colleague has called for because I have written a 
bipartisan plan.
  What is so striking is that the Senate majority leader has called for 
20 hours of discussion, which is essentially what you get with 
reconciliation, as opposed to what happened when Ronald Reagan and a 
big group of Democrats got together in 1986 and spent a whole month on 
tax reform.
  So before the Senator leaves--and it is a pleasure to serve with him 
on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as well--I sure wish the 
world was along the lines of what my colleague has called for. Perhaps 
he can use his intellect and energy to persuade the Senate majority 
leader to use that process on taxes because that is what some Democrats 
have called for.
  I can just tell my friend, given my interest in the subject, which 
goes back well over a decade--we have a bipartisan proposal written, 
coauthored by a member of the President's Cabinet, so we would very 
much like to have what the Senator is talking about.
  Madam President, I rise now to oppose the nomination of Eric Hargan 
to be Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. 
This is the No. 2 position at HHS, the chief operating officer. Of 
course, with Secretary Price's departure, Mr. Hargan would fill the top 
spot if he is confirmed.
  My concern is that I don't have any confidence that Mr. Hargan is 
going to lead the Department in a different direction than it took 
under Dr. Price. Last week, the country watched as more and more 
details emerged about Secretary Price's travel. In my view, the flights 
were an abuse of office.
  In my view, from the very outset, there was reason to be concerned 
about Secretary Price and how he would handle the public trust. Ever 
since our committee received the Price nomination, it was clear that he 
had a little trouble following the rules when it served his own 
personal interests rather than taxpayers. He used insider information 
from a fellow Congressman to get a sweetheart stock deal that made him 
hundreds of thousands of dollars. He frequently bought stocks in 
industries that he was overseeing as a Member of Congress. He pushed 
healthcare legislation that benefited industry insiders rather than 
patients.
  He was confirmed on a party-line vote, and it wasn't very shortly 
after that that he proceeded to go forward with what I and others 
consider a sabotage campaign that, in effect, has been executed since 
day one. He was a top salesman for TrumpCare. He came before our 
committee and made countless other public appearances in which he 
willfully misrepresented the massive scale of the harm TrumpCare would 
have done to American healthcare. He also appeared on national 
television and argued, in effect, that healthcare funding cuts aren't 
actually cuts. He denied that individuals would lose health coverage or 
see increases as a result of TrumpCare, even after there were 
independent analysis showing that was wrong. Then, of course, he flew 
about the country scaring folks who just wanted affordable healthcare.
  As far as the President's promise to bring down the high prices of 
prescription medicine--that was a promise the American people heard 
stop after stop on the campaign trail in 2016. That promise is nowhere 
to be seen or heard from at this point. It is my hope that the 
President's next pick to lead Health and Human Services will follow 
through on what the American people were told in the campaign they were 
going to get--lower the cost of healthcare and get our citizens 
covered--but that nominee hasn't been put forward.
  In the meantime, Mr. Hargan's nomination has him in line to serve as 
Acting Secretary. I will tell you, having examined the record as 
closely as I could, I don't think there is any reason to believe Mr. 
Hargan would deviate from Secretary Price's ideological agenda that 
included a constant effort to undermine and in my view sabotage the 
implementation of the Affordable Care Act. This campaign is driving up 
premiums and confusing Americans who just want to be able to see a 
doctor and get affordable healthcare services.
  I am going to tick through some of the actions the administration has 
taken that would undermine the upcoming open enrollment period and the 
effect that is going to have on our people's healthcare costs.
  First, just a few weeks into his tenure, Secretary Price cut the 
enrollment period. This is the period during which Americans sign up 
for health insurance. We are talking about a private marketplace. I am 
really struck by this debate about the role of government. We are 
talking about a private marketplace where private healthcare plans 
offer coverage. Secretary Price cut the enrollment period for private 
healthcare in the private marketplace

[[Page 15499]]

in half. People across the country used to be able to sign up for 
healthcare from the beginning of November until the end of January, and 
now they have literally half that time. That is going to cause a whole 
lot of disruption for people who are working hard and living their 
lives rather than trying to follow every little press account from 
Washington, DC.
  Let's imagine for a moment a 29-year-old who just got locked out of 
the healthcare system because he has had a 3-year routine of signing up 
for health insurance around the new year. That is exactly the kind of 
individual the private insurance market needs to attract in order to 
hold costs down--a young person who is probably signing up right toward 
the deadline.
  Then think of the single mom with two kids who marked January 30, 
probably with a big, bright pen on her calendar because she cut it 
close to the end of enrollment last year. Her life is busy enough. She 
doesn't read trade publications from health industry sources to see 
what is happening with open enrollment. Because of the early enrollment 
cutoff, this mom and her family, who just want affordable, private 
healthcare from the private marketplace, are going to be locked out.
  The Department of Health and Human Services is taking the 
healthcare.gov website offline for maintenance on all but one Sunday 
during the open enrollment period. The fact is, Sunday has been one of 
the most popular times for well-meaning assistance groups to help folks 
get signed up at community centers. It is like the State Department of 
Transportation blocking the highways and digging up the blacktop with 
construction crews every Monday morning during the peak commute time. 
It is just the opposite of common sense.
  The Department is kneecapping the programs that are designed to get 
highly trained people. These are folks called navigators, and what they 
do is get out into the communities and go to various places where they 
know a lot of folks aren't signed up, and they help them get signed up.
  The Department of Health and Human Services has slashed the budget 
for getting the word out, including zeroing out the budget for TV ads. 
That has been a big factor in getting enrollment up in the past.
  Let's be clear about what the Department has done under Secretary 
Price's leadership. They have been working overtime to make it harder 
for people to get healthcare, plain and simple.
  The sabotage doesn't really end with just making enrollment a 
headache. The administration continues to dangle the threat of cutting 
off cost-sharing payments as if it were a political gain without 
consequences in the real world. In State after State after State, 
insurers have made it clear that this gamesmanship is causing premiums 
to go up. If the payments are cut off, families will face premium 
increases of hundreds of dollars or more, and it is all because they 
are searching for a political trophy.
  I want to talk about what this means for private sector healthcare. 
When you have the President and the previous Secretary of Health and 
Human Services pouring gasoline on the fires of uncertainty in the 
private health insurance marketplace, it makes it very hard for 
insurers to make the calculations that are involved in spreading risk 
and getting people signed up and pricing products.
  The reality is, an administration that says they really care about 
the private sector--the President continually says that he is from the 
business community and he wants to be sensitive to private sector 
economic forces. The last thing you would do is pour all this 
uncertainty into the private healthcare landscape, which is what they 
have been doing with the gamesmanship in terms of whether they are 
going to pay these cost-sharing payments so that folks who face big 
deductibles and extra prices for medicine and the like would know there 
is going to be help in their health plan for those costs.
  The Secretary was out jetting all about, spreading falsehoods about 
the private healthcare landscape. Sometimes he would say that it would 
be collapsing, and I would say: We know a lot of people who are trying 
to stabilize it, but you are making it harder by pouring all this gas 
on the fires of uncertainty.
  While this was going on, they were also neglecting to work with 
States. For example, Oklahoma designed a reinsurance system intended to 
stabilize the private insurance market and control costs, and they 
sought a waiver application to the Department of Health and Human 
Services. But the Department of Health and Human Services didn't get 
around to approving it in time to help Oklahomans in 2018, so the State 
just pulled their application.
  I have been a strong supporter of these waivers. I authored a 
provision in the Affordable Care Act, the innovation waiver, 1332. For 
the Secretary to not work with Oklahoma in a timely way and in a way 
that would stabilize the private insurance market is not what those of 
us on this side are in favor of.
  There is no reason to believe Mr. Hargan would come in and clean up 
the mess. In my view, many States want to see stable or reduced 
premiums this coming year, but so far the Department is just marching 
in lockstep with the status quo. The President apparently is committed 
to continuing this kind of mismanagement and willful wrongdoing. Mr. 
Hargan has made clear what his stance is on the Affordable Care Act in 
plenty of public statements.
  Beyond this question of undermining the Affordable Care Act, we were 
also particularly troubled that Secretary Tom Price shared the Trump 
administration's abysmal record of responding to oversight letters from 
Congress, especially the Democrats. As far as I can tell, some of this 
is shared on both sides.
  I think this is profoundly undemocratic, and our obligation to 
perform oversight as Members of Congress is derived from the powers 
laid out in the Constitution, in article I. The issues we raise in 
oversight inquiries to the Department of Health and Human Services 
relate directly to the well-being of people in North Carolina, in 
Oregon, and everywhere in between. I don't think Senators on either 
side, Democrats or Republicans, do it for sport. But the 
administration's behavior is not that of a government that sees itself 
as answerable to the public--either that or it just doesn't have good 
answers as to why it constantly, constantly is out there undermining 
private health insurance markets to make it harder for people to get 
affordable healthcare. Either way, they aren't doing their jobs, and 
they aren't putting the interests of the American people first.
  Members on both sides of the aisle have expressed concern about the 
Department of Health and Human Services stonewalling important 
oversight issues presented by Members on both sides. Chairman Hatch and 
Senator Grassley are two very senior Republicans. Chairman Grassley and 
Chairman Hatch deserve a lot of credit for calling out the Trump 
administration on this lack of responsiveness to basic oversight.
  The fact is, what our committee has heard is basically a lot of sweet 
talk from nominees about how, of course, they are going to be 
responsive, and then they go out, and it is business as usual. We see 
them for that confirmation hearing, and there is not much of any kind 
of response when we ask the questions.
  I will not support Mr. Hargan's nomination today. In my view, under 
Tom Price and this administration, the Department of Health and Human 
Services has done a miserable job of working to improve the health and 
well-being of the American people. The irony is, it seems that one of 
the objectives from day one was to set out and try to accomplish that, 
to make it appear that there were problems when the Affordable Care Act 
was being implemented. Instead of rolling up their sleeves and tackling 
it, the idea was to try and get an ideological trophy: Let's tell the 
American people that everything about the Affordable Care Act is 
horrible so we can get it repealed.
  The Affordable Care Act is far from perfect. In fact, when we were 
debating

[[Page 15500]]

it, I had an alternative plan. We had seven Senators on both sides of 
the aisle. It was a bipartisan plan, but that is history.
  The Affordable Care Act has made an enormous difference for millions 
of Americans. What we ought to be doing is working together to improve 
it. There are plenty of ways in which this Senate and an administration 
that really want to accomplish that can work together in a bipartisan 
way.
  What I have been more interested in than any other aspect of public 
service is to work in a bipartisan way on healthcare. That has been my 
No. 1 interest. So nothing would please me more than to be able to say: 
OK. We have an official who is going to break with the past and, 
instead of trying to make the implementation of the Act as bad as 
possible, is prepared to roll up his or her sleeves and make it as good 
as possible. Unfortunately, that person is not Mr. Hargan. I urge a no 
vote.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Tillis). The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                      Nomination of Randal Quarles

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, today we are considering the nomination of 
Randal Quarles to be a member of the Federal Reserve Board of 
Governors.
  Since 1984, Mr. Quarles has revolved between the public and private 
sectors. He was most recently the director of the Carlyle Group from 
2007 to 2013, and then founded Cynosure Group, an investment management 
company.
  I appreciate Mr. Quarles' willingness to serve the public once again, 
but I don't think he is the person we want in this important role at 
the Federal Reserve.
  The financial crisis devastated communities in my State and across 
the country--devastated in terms of lost jobs, foreclosed homes, and 
evaporated savings. We have made a lot of progress in the 7 years since 
we passed Wall Street reform. The Vice Chair of Supervision at the 
Federal Reserve, a position created in Dodd-Frank, is supposed to look 
out for our financial system and make sure that our financial system is 
sound.
  Mr. Quarles served as Treasury's Under Secretary for Domestic Finance 
in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. It was his job to 
coordinate oversight of the financial industry. Many of his statements, 
however, leading up to the crisis were far too credulous. He seemed to 
believe whatever the banks were telling him. They were far too 
credulous when it came to industry claims that we simply need not 
worry; the economy is in good shape and we don't have to worry about a 
credit bubble.
  In the early 2000s, while at the Treasury Department, Mr. Quarles 
espoused the following view of the role of regulators in financial 
markets. It is a long quote, and I will quote him directly:

       Markets are always ahead of the regulators, and frankly 
     that's how it should be. It's analogous to the advice that my 
     father provided me that ``if you don't miss at least two or 
     three planes a year, you're spending too much time in 
     airports.'' If the regulators aren't a little behind the 
     market in a few areas at any given time, they would be 
     stifling innovation and evolution. The regulators' task is to 
     promote investor protection, while ensuring that prudential 
     and supervisory activities do not stifle efficiency gains. 
     For effective regulation, the regulators must work with the 
     markets.

  I am not sure where to start on picking that apart. More importantly, 
it is showing that someone who says that shouldn't be in charge of 
financial regulation at the Federal Reserve.
  He said at his Senate nomination hearing: ``That is probably the most 
unfortunate use of language that I ever made, and I do not stand behind 
that statement.'' That is what he said when presented with these words 
at his confirmation hearing. He made other similarly unfortunate 
statements in the years leading up to the financial crisis.
  In 2006, as Under Secretary for Domestic Finance, he discussed the 
prospects for an impending financial crisis. This was before things 
looked really, really bad. He said:

       How would our current financial system stand up to this 
     sort of canonical crisis? On the whole, I would say that the 
     U.S. economy is well positioned to weather such a 
     retrenchment in risk-taking.

  This was about a year and a half before the economy began to implode. 
He was in a high position in the Treasury Department, and he had access 
to all of the information he might possibly want, and he said that the 
``economy is well positioned to weather such a retrenchment.''
  In the same speech, on the potential harm posed by increases in 
mortgage payments for families with exotic mortgages he said:

       While that is certainly a large number, it represents only 
     a small hit to aggregate personal income. Moreover, market 
     reports indicate that borrowers using such non-traditional 
     mortgages tend to be upper income individuals that can manage 
     a sizable increase in their mortgage payment.

  He concluded by saying, again, in 2006:

       Fundamentally, the economy is strong, the financial sector 
     is healthy, and our future looks bright. We will surely face 
     challenges in the future, but we can take comfort in the 
     knowledge that our economy and financial system have proven 
     remarkably resilient to all manner of adverse shocks in the 
     past.

  That was a lot of comfort to the millions of Americans afflicted by 
the financial crisis.
  My wife and I live in Cleveland, in ZIP Code 44105. The year after 
Mr. Quarles made that statement and the economy started to really tank, 
my ZIP Code had more foreclosures than any other ZIP Code in the United 
States. I know what that does to a neighborhood.
  I am not confident Mr. Quarles took to heart the costly lessons of 
the financial crisis. He seems far too ready to relax the rules for 
Wall Street and those who protect consumers. He is another example that 
this administration, which said it wants to drain the swamp, instead 
looks like a retreat for Goldman Sachs executives. The number of people 
on Wall Street who have influence on our government is just far and 
away worse than we have ever seen it.
  Putting Mr. Quarles--who should know better but apparently doesn't, 
from his statements--at the Federal Reserve, in charge of financial 
regulation, is just the wrong thing. In 2015, when asked about Dodd-
Frank, he said:

       The macro issue is that the government should not be a 
     player in the financial sector. It should be a referee. And 
     the practice, and the policy, and the legislation that 
     resulted from the financial crisis tended to make the 
     government a player. They put it on the field as opposed to 
     simply reffing the game.

  How could he think that, when he was part of the government when it 
didn't do its job and didn't do the job that regulators are supposed to 
do? In response to questions for the record at his nomination hearing, 
he stated: ``My approach to policy making, and particularly to 
regulation, has been that the discretion of policy makers, and 
particularly of regulators, should be as constrained as possible.''
  He is really saying: Let Wall Street do what it wants to do; let Wall 
Street run the financial sector of our economy, and government 
regulators should sort of step aside.
  As vice chair for supervision and as a Member of the Federal Reserve 
Board of Governors, Mr. Quarles will be making decisions about risk-
based capital, leverage and liquidity requirements, resolution plans, 
concentration limits, risk committees, stress tests, and other 
important safeguards put into place after the crisis for the Nation's 
largest banks. The crisis showed we need strong financial watchdogs, 
not, as he said, ``constrained'' ones. If confirmed, I am not sure who 
Mr. Quarles will be working for, taxpayers and working families or Wall 
Street.
  Let me close by reminding my colleagues that, last Congress, the 
Banking Committee refused to consider President Obama's nominees to the 
Federal Reserve Board. Mr. Quarles is the first nominee President Trump 
has chosen. There are currently three other vacancies. The term for 
Chair of the Federal Reserve expires early next year. Because of that, 
President Trump

[[Page 15501]]

will likely fill at least five of the seven Federal Reserve Board 
seats, which are 14-year terms.
  Again, if the first one is someone who is so close to Wall Street, 
what does that tell you about who is in the White House? What does it 
tell you about the advisers in the White House? What does it tell you 
about that executive retreat for Goldman Sachs I talked about in the 
White House?
  If all the nominees to the Federal Reserve are like Mr. Quarles, 
average Americans may once again pay the price. We can't return to a 
time when financial watchdogs are asleep on the job.
  There seems to be a collective amnesia in this body, in the White 
House, and in the Banking Committee about what people in our country 
went through in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012, which was, in large 
part, because of the influence of Wall Street in our government. We 
can't let that happen. That is why I urge my colleagues to oppose the 
nomination of Mr. Quarles to the Federal Reserve.
  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. BLUNT. 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.


                               Tax Reform

  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am not aware of any Missouri 
constituents, for whom I work, who wouldn't like to see a tax code that 
was simpler, fairer, that did more to create jobs, that was better for 
individuals, and one that they understood. I don't have anybody come up 
to me and say: What can we do to complicate the Tax Code further, or 
what can we do to make us less competitive, or how much more of my 
money would you like to have to do what you think the government ought 
to do? I don't have anybody say that to me.
  We are now at a time when we have the tools available. We have the 
focus available that will allow us to move in the right direction. For 
almost a decade now, hard-working families and hard-working individuals 
have had to deal with a below-average economy and with below-average 
wage growth in that below-average economy. Surely, we don't want that 
to be the new normal.
  I kept hearing the last 3 or 4 years that 2 percent growth is what we 
should expect now. The growth since World War II has averaged 3.4 
percent for over 70 years. Suddenly, we were told: No, 2 percent is the 
best we can do.
  I understand that, even counting the Great Depression, growth in the 
entire 20th century was over 3 percent. What do we need to do to get 
our economy growing in a way that creates better opportunities and 
better jobs?
  Why would it create better jobs? Because you have people who are 
looking for workers who are more eager to pay and keep a workforce in a 
growing economy than you do in an economy that is not growing. You have 
people who understand they can compete better if they have a workforce 
that is the workforce they want rather than the workforce they just 
happen to get and that there is competition for that workforce. So our 
goal here in tax reduction and tax reform should be to help families 
and individuals keep more of their hard-earned money, to empower people 
to invest in their own future in ways that we currently are not 
encouraging or just simply not allowing because we don't let them take 
enough of their money home from work that they make at work, and to 
make it easier for families to see a pathway toward success and not to 
penalize people when they make the right decisions.
  The tradition has always been this: If you want more of something, 
you don't tax it. You don't regulate it. You encourage it.
  We need a tax code that encourages more success, that encourages 
higher take-home pay and better jobs. Most people don't realize that 
the individual income tax is still the biggest source of Federal money. 
More than half of all Federal taxes collected come from the income tax.
  One of our goals should be how do we get more taxpayers and not how 
do we make more from the taxpayers we have. Perhaps the greatest 
voluntary compliance in the history of the world is how Americans have 
complied with the income tax system.
  The more Americans think the system is fair and understandable and 
everybody else is being treated the same way they are being treated, 
they are much more likely to comply with that system than a system 
where they hear: Well, some company made a lot of profit, but because 
of the complexity of the Tax Code, they paid zero taxes, or this 
neighbor has figured out that and that neighbor has figured out that, 
and because of the Tax Code, you work just as hard as they did, but the 
Federal Government somehow got a lot of your money because you hadn't 
set up your tax planning in the right way.
  Tax planning doesn't need to be that difficult. Right now the Tax 
Code has seven individual rates. We are proposing three individual 
rates, which maybe could go to four, but that would still be barely 
half the number we have, even if it got to four. There are seven 
individual rates, and there are more than 100 deductions, credits, and 
exclusions that people use when they fill out their tax form. American 
people collectively pay billions and billions of dollars just to figure 
out how much of their money the Federal Government is going to get.
  Most people would like to have the certainty of a postcard form that 
you fill out, but instead they see this system that has gotten 
increasingly complex, often not indexed for inflation. So you start 
with something that you think is only going to apply to a few people, 
and, before you know it, it applies to a whole lot of people.
  I think that when the alternative minimum tax was added to the Tax 
Code, there had been 155 wealthy individuals who hadn't paid any income 
tax. So the Federal Government decided, and Congress decided, that we 
are going to put the alternative minimal tax in to be sure those 155 
people, who are clearly wealthy people, are going to pay income tax. No 
matter how much they have gamed the tax system, they are still going to 
pay an alternative minimum tax. This was just a few years ago.
  By 2015, the 155 had gone to 4.4 million people who paid the 
alternative minimum tax. It is unbelievably successful if you are 
trying to collect people's money in a way they don't understand. It is 
not very successful if all you were trying to do was to prevent 155 
wealthy people a couple of decades ago from being able to not pay any 
tax at all. They took a shot at 155 people and wound up hitting 5 
million.
  That is unacceptable. That is not what the Tax Code is supposed to 
do. We need to work hard to simplify that. There are 14 pages of 
instructions that tell you or, more likely, your tax preparer how to 
comply with the alternative minimum tax guidelines.
  I don't have the one page with me, but I was handed the one page of 
instructions for the Tax Code from 1913. By the way, the estimate was 
that not only not many people would pay it, but nobody would ever pay 
it because you didn't pay anything unless you made at least $3,000, 
which in 1913 was a lot of money. But it was one page of instructions. 
Now we have 1 page of index to the 100 pages of instructions, and 14 of 
those pages are just for the alternative minimum tax. When you fill the 
form out, there are 64 different lines that you use to calculate now 
how almost 5 million people are impacted by a part of the Tax Code that 
was designed for 155 people.
  We can do a better job. We can do a better job of being sure that 
hard-working families get to take home more of the money they have 
earned with that hard work. We can also do a better job with the rest 
of the Tax Code to make sure we are creating the kind of opportunity 
for us to compete as a country, for us to compete as a nation, for us 
to be more fairly aligned with the other countries in the world that we 
compete with, and to make sure

[[Page 15502]]

those hard-working families have better jobs with more take-home pay to 
start with.
  If you are working hard for a living--and Americans do; we are a 
working country--the best of all circumstances is that you have a 
better job than you used to have and less money comes out of every 
dollar you make than used to come out of every dollar you make, and 
that needs to be our goal. Whatever we do on the individual side needs 
to be focused on that. Whatever we do on the job-creating side needs to 
be focused on that. If we do that, we will not have the people we work 
for come in complaining: What have you done? The Tax Code is too simple 
now. It is too easy to fill out my tax form. I am walking out on Friday 
with more money than I used to walk away with, and, oh, by the way, 
they tell me there is a better job about to develop that I can apply 
for.
  That is what we ought to do. I hope we keep focused on that and get 
this tax bill passed this year.
  I think the Senator from Georgia has come to talk about this same 
topic, along with Senator Barrasso from Wyoming.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Missouri. I make 
the point that I have enjoyed the last 19 years serving with him in the 
Congress of the United States. He was elected 2 years before me to the 
House of Representatives. I came a little bit later, but I preceded him 
in the Senate in 2004. He has been great to work with.
  The Show Me State of Missouri is an awful lot like my State of 
Georgia. They are proud of their country. They are proud to be 
Americans. They are proud of the chance to have an opportunity to make 
an honest living and want to be a part of a country that continues to 
grow and have prosperity for the future.
  We had a hearing in the Finance Committee yesterday where there was 
an interesting study I had not seen before. It had been done by a 
Harvard student, who I assume was correct. Ninety percent of the people 
born in the 1940s ended up making more than their parents did when they 
went to work. But only about 40 percent of the people born in the 1980s 
will end up making more than their parents did, meaning that as we have 
gone along the way since World War II, we have taken more and more away 
from the opportunity in the earning level and more money has gone to 
different places, like taxation.
  Personally, I think the Finance Committee and the leadership of the 
Big 6, so to speak, have done us a great favor to open the debate on 
tax reform in America. Unlike some of the debates we have had recently, 
this debate is open-ended. We are starting with a framework, not an 
absolute dictate but a framework. We are talking about an opportunity 
we have to see if we can lower the burden of taxes on the American 
people, while incentivizing the American people to work more, to make 
more, and to earn more.
  There are two ways to increase revenue to the government. First, you 
can increase the rate of taxation. But then you are not necessarily 
taking in any more money. You might incentivize somebody to go 
somewhere else. The other way is to improve the opportunity to make 
money and the atmosphere in which people make money so they invest 
their time and effort and they grow their revenue, which grows the 
revenue of the United States of America.
  The proposal in the framework before us has any number of outlines 
and any number of targets. The four things I want to focus on are 
these. One is the middle class. I have gotten tired of hearing this 
reference to dividing us as Americans by class. We are all Americans. 
Regardless of our station in life, we are all important. The code ought 
to be important to every single person who is an American and, if they 
can come to this country, to improve their life, raise their children, 
and live a good life.
  I am not into a class society. I am into an opportunity society. If 
you take a look at this proposal, for those people you put in the 
middle class today, it proposes lower rates, less brackets, and more 
opportunity to gain wealth in the future through work, through 
investment, and through earnings.
  Second, this framework encourages job creation. I know that people 
are always demonizing the rich. Most people who are rich are people 
providing people who aren't rich with jobs. I don't think it is bad to 
provide people with jobs. I think it is good to provide them with jobs. 
We need a Tax Code that incentivizes the creation of jobs.
  The focus on the passthrough rate, which is talked about by the Big 
6, may lower the passthrough rate to 25 percent. It is a job-creating 
proposal that works.
  I have run a sub-S corporation. I have been a partner in limited 
partnerships. I have known people who have had sole proprietorships. I 
have known people who have had independent operations. They all pay 
their taxes at the regular, ordinary tax rate on the individual. They 
don't pay at the corporate rate. They pay at what is called the 
passthrough rate, where the profits at the end of the year of the 
partnership or the LLC or the sub-S corporation flow in a K-1 to the 
individual and are taxed at the ordinary income tax rate; whereas, 
corporations in C-corps, or stock-held companies, pay a top rate of 35 
percent.
  That rate is being proposed to go to 25 percent conceptually. If that 
goes to 20 percent and the 25 percent rate is applied to passthroughs, 
we will have a good environment in which companies can form 
investments, form new companies, make investments of those companies, 
build opportunity, and, in turn, build jobs. So it motivates America to 
create more jobs. With jobs come income. With income comes money. With 
money comes investment. At the end of that comes profit, which ends up 
being taxed, which is revenue to our country, and it increases.
  We also need to recognize that we are not as competitive as we used 
to be, in large measure because of the code we have, not because we are 
not competitive people. America is the most competitive environment in 
the world in which to do business. Americans by themselves were 
explorers to get here. Americans by themselves are investors and 
inventors. Americans by themselves are risk-takers. We want to improve 
in every competitive opportunity we have, but the current code we have 
suppresses competitiveness.
  This proposal by the Big 6 takes us to a territorial tax system. We 
are one of the few countries in the world that taxes the old-fashioned 
way. The territorial system is the way in which most of the world 
competes, and we are the biggest competitor within the rest of the 
world. It is time we put an end to a company making a dollar in Delhi, 
India, on a product they made there and sold there, pays the Indian 
tax, and then brings it back into America and has to pay the 
differential on the American tax as well. It is time we did what the 
territorial tax does, which is to tax the money where it is earned; 
therefore, you will never have to do repatriation again, and you will 
never have to talk about offshore tax havens again because the Tax Code 
will not induce those things to happen. Instead, people will pay the 
tax where it is earned, bring the money back here to hire people, 
invest, build new products, and then take them overseas and sell them. 
There is nothing more important than going to the territorial tax 
system. I am excited about this.
  Have you ever thought about this?
  If you were the president of a major American corporation and it was 
coming to the end of the year and you were getting ready to have your 
stockholders' meeting for the year and you were looking at ways to show 
how the stock could grow and how, next year, you were going to improve 
the profits of the company and, in turn, the net of the company and, in 
turn, the dividends to the stockholders--right now, if you have a home 
office in America, that is your principal office, and you are taxed at 
35 percent in America. If you have a competitive company that is in 
Ireland and it is taxed at 12\1/2\, it just might cross your mind: If I 
move my headquarters from America to Ireland, I could take my 
stockholders and

[[Page 15503]]

put 18 percent or 20 percent--or whatever the differential is--on the 
bottom line for them. When your Tax Code causes people to think about 
things like that, you are predicting a future for a country that is not 
as bright, as rich, or as important as it should be.
  Lastly, everybody thinks I am a city slicker because I am from 
Atlanta, but I did grow up working on a farm in Fitzgerald, GA, and 
Ocilla, GA. I love farmers and I love farms. I know one of the 
proposals of the Big 6 is to do away with the remainder of the estate 
tax that is still with us. A few years ago, we exempted all estates at 
$5 million or less from the estate tax. Now it is $5.49 million because 
the index has been used on inflation. The tax rate used to be 55 
percent, and it is now 40. Yet, in my State of Georgia, with the 
effective application of the income tax, the tax is about 46 percent. 
So, for round figures and argumentative figures, for someone who dies 
in our State, after the first $5 million, he pays a tax closer to 50 
percent.
  A lot of people say that is rich people taking a benefit of the Tax 
Code. I don't call being dead in order to collect a tax benefit a good 
idea. I do not think that that is a benefit to me at all because the 
estate tax is on somebody's estate who passes away, who pays that tax 
for the people who would inherit the assets. Those are normally the 
children or the spouses or maybe the employees with whom they work in 
their companies.
  Have you ever thought about this?
  If somebody were taxing you at 50 percent or close thereto and you 
file your first estate tax return after you are dead, then if this were 
the value of your estate, you would be telling the government: OK, you 
get this half, while my children, my wife, my family get the other 
half. A year later, when you go back to the well--or a generation 
later--those kids who inherited the business will have to go back and 
pay taxes, and a quarter of it will be gone. So, in two generations, 
you took an asset that was worth a lot and reduced it to 25 percent of 
what it was worth. You are incentivizing people to liquidate something 
that was paying taxes on an ongoing basis and pay a onetime exit in 
terms of an estate tax. That is backward thinking.
  What we should do is take those things people have worked for and 
striven for and tried their best to build and have an incentive for 
them to take that and leave it to their heirs and leave that company in 
a tax-paying mode or that farm in a tax-paying mode so America benefits 
and they benefit as well. Just because you are not taxing something 
does not mean you are not taking advantage of your company or the 
benefit of that item. By abolishing the estate tax, you will actually 
put more money, over time, in the Treasury of the United States of 
America in taxes than you ever will by taxing the one-time 50 percent.
  So as we enter this debate--and I have been joined on the floor by a 
number of my colleagues who, I know, want to talk--let's talk about 
what benefits the American people, what incentivizes innovation and 
competition, what puts more money in the pockets of middle-class 
Americans today but also creates more people in the middle and upper 
classes in the future, not because we gave them anything except an 
opportunity, a fair place to compete, and that competitive drive that 
only people in the United States of America have, possess, and will 
always use to the benefit of our country.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.
  Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, it is always such a privilege to come to 
the floor and hear Senator Isakson, of Georgia, speak, as he speaks so 
eloquently. He comes here and makes perfect points. He was talking 
about the tax system looking to the future. What we have is a tax 
system that looks backward, regrettably. A number of years ago, we had 
a Treasury Secretary named Bill Simon, who said: ``The Nation should 
have a tax code that looks like someone designed it on purpose.'' That 
is what we are trying to do now--have a Tax Code that looks like it was 
designed on purpose.
  The person who really understood this was Ronald Reagan. As we take a 
look at tax proposals, it is not about taxes; it is about much more--
about a better life for the American people. Ronald Reagan said that 
tax reform is the door to a bigger future and, I would add, to a 
brighter future. He said it was the door to a future as big and hopeful 
and full of heart as the American dream. That is what we are talking 
about here today, a bright, big future, as big and bright as the 
American dream. That is what we are aiming at with this plan, a big and 
hopeful future for all Americans.
  It all starts with increasing the amount of money Americans get to 
keep in their pockets as a result of their hard-earned paycheck 
dollars. That is the most important thing. That is what families are 
concerned about. That is what I hear about every weekend in Wyoming. 
Under the outline the Republicans have proposed, every working man and 
woman in this country will be better off. That is our goal, to make 
everyone better off and to make the country better off, more 
prosperous, with a strong, healthy economy. That is what we are hearing 
about today on the floor and what we heard about from the Senator from 
Georgia.
  When we cut the amount of money people have to pay in taxes, it is 
essentially like giving them a raise. That is what this is about, 
giving people a raise. We want working people to keep more of their 
hard-earned money. One of the ways you can do that, which is very 
popular, is by doubling the standard deduction. It is easy math to do. 
The current standard deduction is around $12,000 for a couple who files 
jointly. The Republican proposal doubles it to $24,000. That means the 
first $24,000 of a couple's income will not be taxed at all.
  Beyond that, we are going to reduce the number of tax brackets. 
People will like that. It is so complicated, the system we have now. We 
will move people into lower brackets. Isn't that what we are trying to 
do? Yes, it is. If you used to be in a bracket and paid 25 percent, 
there is a pretty good chance that a significant amount of your income 
is going to be moved down to the 12-percent range. For most people, 
that is like getting a big raise when they take a look at their 
paychecks at the end of the week. That is what Republican tax relief 
looks like.
  The second thing we want to do is to actually make it a lot simpler. 
We talked about lowering the number of brackets, making it simpler for 
everyone who does their taxes. The instructions you get now from the 
IRS for the 1040 tax form are 106-pages long, and that is if you just 
limit yourself to the instructions. Remember that there are 15 
different worksheets to fill out just so you can fill out your 1040 
form. When more people take the standard deduction, they can save a lot 
of time and not have to go to the 15 worksheets and the 106 pages of 
instructions. They get that standard deduction, which has now doubled, 
making it a lot easier, with a lot less time having to be spent on 
taxes.
  What else are we going to do?
  We want to cut out a lot of the loopholes and complicated rules so 
most people will be able to just fill out a form on a single page. 
Think of the hours that is going to save families--the millions and 
millions of hours--when you multiply it across the country. Plus, think 
of the stress people will not have to be living under in their 
wondering if they actually followed the instructions properly. When you 
call the IRS help line, you get different answers from different people 
with whom you talk. It is hard to get a single answer because the 
complicated system makes it hard to get the answer right. So you end up 
with the expense of hiring lawyers, tax accountants, and people who can 
help you navigate a complicated system.
  People are looking for simpler lives, more free time, and more money 
of their own they can keep, not complicated government forms so the 
government takes more of their money. There is a lot of room for us to 
improve the simplicity of the tax system and the actual challenges that 
come from filling out the forms.

[[Page 15504]]

  The third thing we want to do with the plan, of course, is to get the 
economy growing faster so it is a strong and healthy economy, with more 
prosperity and higher take-home pay in the paychecks. With that, you 
will actually get an economy that creates more jobs and has more people 
working, which is a big part of tax reform. It is a direct benefit for 
American families. When you cut taxes on small businesses, they can 
afford to hire more people or they can use the extra money to pay their 
workers more. There is a lot that can be done to reach that level of 
prosperity--in individual paychecks as well as in having more people in 
the workforce.
  Under the outline the Republicans released last week, the top rate 
for most small businesses is going to drop from almost 40 percent down 
to 25 percent, allowing the businesses to pass on those savings to 
their customers and the savings to their employees. Larger businesses 
are going to get a tax break too. The idea is to lower taxes for 
everyone.
  When you take a look at it from a business owner's standpoint, 70 
percent of the cost of corporate taxes actually does not get paid by a 
corporation; it gets paid by the people who work for those businesses. 
If we cut taxes, more of that money is going to go to the workers. You 
will have higher wages, better benefits, and more jobs, and businesses 
will actually be able to lower their prices. Every time there is a tax 
increase, a business has to raise the cost of a product to be able to 
collect that tax and send it to the government. I would rather have 
that money go into the pockets of the people who are shopping in the 
store or using that business rather than into the pocket of the Federal 
Government.
  Senator Isakson was talking about something called repatriation and 
the amount of money businesses are taxed that do some business 
overseas. If we can cut the taxes they pay on the money they earn 
overseas, it means those businesses can bring back that money to the 
United States and spend it here. How much is it? Right now, about $2.6 
trillion is sitting overseas because those businesses get taxed twice--
once on the business done overseas and then once on the business done 
when they bring those profits back to the United States. When we get 
that money back, that is going to help grow the economy here as well. 
It makes sure the American Tax Code ought to be helping American 
businesses and the American economy, not helping foreign countries. We 
need to get that money back and put it to work in the United States.
  Those are all of the things the Republicans are proposing. It means 
more money in the pockets of American workers, and it means simpler 
taxes and more jobs for American workers. Isn't that what we are 
looking for? Isn't that what prosperity means for America? Isn't that 
what a healthy economy means--job growth and the sort of things that 
happen when we get the kind of tax reform we have proposed?
  I want to address one other thing I have heard over the past couple 
of days as our plan has come out. I have heard some Members on the 
other side of the aisle say that under the Republican plan, certain 
people will win more than others. Under the Republican plan, the goal 
is for everyone to win. The American economy will win. When we have a 
growing economy, people keep more of their hard-earned money. That is 
the goal. That is why the President and the Republicans in Congress 
wanted to take up tax relief right now in the first place. We need to 
do this to help all American families.
  This gets back to Ronald Reagan, in that tax reform--tax reductions, 
tax relief--means a big and hopeful future for all Americans. That 
should be the goal. It should be the goal of every Member of the U.S. 
Senate. It should be the goal of every American. We want to make taxes 
fairer and simpler and lower for everyone.
  There are too many people in Washington right now who want to use 
America's tax laws to punish or reward one group of Americans or 
another. Too many people in Washington want to use this debate over tax 
reform to stir up conflict and resentment. We hear it already in the 
Democrats' talking points. There are some Democrats in this Senate who 
think that is good politics. Well, it is terrible policy and terrible 
for the direction of our country and economy.
  The tax plan the Republicans have released this last week does 
nothing to change who bears the burden of taxes in the country. People 
who are fortunate and have high incomes will pay their fair share; 
people who make less will pay less. That is how the Tax Code is spread 
today. Nothing in this plan changes that.
  We have a lot of work ahead of us. We have to figure out the exact 
income levels for each of the tax brackets and the size of some of the 
tax credits families get. These are all important details. That is the 
kind of debate we are going to be having--the markup on the budget and 
the mathematics of the tax bill coming through committee.
  I am so grateful to Senator Hatch and members of the Finance 
Committee for all of the hard work they will be putting into this over 
the next several weeks.
  I will refer back to the quote of the Treasury Secretary, Bill Simon, 
who said: ``The nation should have a tax code that looks like someone 
designed it on purpose.'' This is our chance. We need to make sure we 
take full advantage of it.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.
  Mr. ROUNDS. Mr. President, today I rise to speak about our country's 
need for tax reform. As our previous speakers have indicated, this is a 
critical time in our country, and we have an opportunity to make some 
good decisions that will impact our Nation for literally generations to 
come.
  Reforming our Tax Code is a top priority not only for myself but for 
many of my colleagues and the President. We are committed to delivering 
tax reform that will provide more jobs, bigger paychecks, and a fairer 
tax system for the American people.
  Over the 8 years of the previous administration, economic growth 
averaged a paltry 1.5 percent annually, which is about half of the 
post-World War II average. This anemic growth has led to stagnant wages 
and, according to the Joint Economic Committee, has cost families an 
average of $8,600 in income on an annual basis. It is no wonder that 
half of the American public says they are living paycheck to paycheck. 
This is simply not acceptable.
  Even more concerning, the Congressional Budget Office is projecting 
economic growth to remain under 2 percent over the next 10 years if we 
do not act. If that happens, let me just share with you the real 
concern. If we allow economic growth to stay under 2 percent, then we 
will literally bring in revenue based upon the size of our economy. If 
we allow economic growth to move at a paltry 2 percent or less, then we 
won't have the revenue to pay our bills.
  Today, right now, we are looking at trillion-dollar deficits. Yet, if 
we take a look at where the dollars are going, they go basically--
looking at our entire budget, about 28 percent of the money that we 
spend today is found within the 12 appropriations bills that make up 
the defense and the nondefense discretionary side of the budget. All of 
the remaining items, making up 72 percent, are in areas of mandatory 
payments--Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the 
debt. If we don't do anything and if we continue on this same path, 
with the type of growth we have, then we can expect that within 9 years 
now, by the year 2026, our country's 250th birthday, 99 percent of all 
of the revenue we take in will go into Medicare, Medicaid, Social 
Security, and interest on the debt. That means there will be only 1 
percent remaining for defense of our country, roads, bridges, research, 
education, and all of those other items that many people really want to 
see and that help us to move ahead as a country.
  We have to make changes now that will allow our country's economy to 
grow and prosper the way it used to.

[[Page 15505]]

The way we believe we do that is by changing our Tax Code, changing the 
regulatory environment in the United States, and sending the message 
back to the businesses that this is the place where they want to do 
business. They don't have to leave our shores in order to actually make 
a profit and be able to keep that profit.
  It is our intention to deliver policies that will jolt our economy, 
allow hard-working families to keep more of their paychecks, and 
provide financial opportunities to lower and middle-class families. Tax 
reform is a vital component of this.
  Our current overly complicated Tax Code is more than 70,000 pages in 
length. It takes Americans more than 8.1 billion hours each year to 
file their taxes. A fairer, simpler Tax Code will grow the economy, 
increase wages for American families, improve American competitiveness 
overseas, and provide much needed certainty for our business community.
  It has been 30 years since our Tax Code was last reformed. The rest 
of the industrialized world has learned from America what it takes to 
be competitive. They have seen what our tax rates have become. They 
have lowered their tax rates. They are now inviting businesses to their 
shores rather than to ours. Businesses that can go anyplace in the 
world they want to are not choosing America as their location anymore. 
We have to change that because when they come back, they bring good-
paying jobs with them. They keep the profits here, which are reinvested 
within our borders rather than overseas, and that adds to a growing 
economy here, which allows us more revenue through even lower tax 
rates.
  The average corporate rate in the United States today is 39 percent, 
compared to 25 percent by our foreign competitors. This puts American 
businesses at a disadvantage right out of the gate. We must reform the 
tax rate to one that incentivizes businesses to remain here in America 
and keep good-paying jobs from going overseas. Doing so will unleash 
the full potential of this American economy.
  One thing we can all agree on is that taxes are too high and that the 
tax rate, no matter who you are, should be lowered. Allowing all 
American families to keep more of their hard-earned dollars by taking 
them out of the hands of Washington and putting them back into their 
pocketbooks will result in a more prosperous America. That means more 
people investing in America long term. When our economy is healthy, 
every American will feel the positive effects.
  I am encouraged by the ongoing discussions and progress being made to 
alleviate the tax burden on American businesses and American families, 
and I will continue to work with anyone serious about lowering taxes 
and reforming the code to provide a much needed boost to our sluggish 
economy. The American people deserve better than the uncertain growth 
and burdens still lingering from the previous administration.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. TILLIS. Thank you, Mr. President.
  I appreciate the opportunity to speak today. Like last week, I didn't 
plan on speaking on this subject, so my staff is probably wondering 
once again what their boss is going to say. But I was thinking that 
maybe we could translate a little bit of what we are trying to do with 
tax reform, because we talk about tax rates, exemptions, exceptions, 
and simplification--all this stuff that is important because it gets 
baked into the bill--but we don't spend a lot of time explaining why we 
are trying to do what we are doing.
  The last time we had real, meaningful, impactful tax reform was back 
in 1986. That is when Republicans and Democrats came together and 
decided that the stagnant economy that I grew up in--I graduated from 
high school in 1978. I didn't immediately go to college. I moved away 
from home when I was 17 years old, and I was working. It was an economy 
that was not unlike today's. In many respects, it may have been a 
little bit worse. The environment was the same. Iran was behaving 
badly, and Russia was behaving badly. We had sort of the same sort of 
global environment that we have today. We had the threats that we have 
to confront every single day, and we had the threat to the future of a 
generation. I mean, literally, people had no earthly idea, if they were 
getting an education, whether they would be able to get a job because 
the job-creation numbers when I was 26 years old were terrible. People 
were worried about whether they could pay for college.
  So why are we doing tax reform? We are doing tax reform because it is 
time for the American economy to grow back to what it is capable of 
doing, what it has done in the past.
  We need tax reform so we can create economic expansion that lets us 
pay down our debt, which many people in the military say is the single 
greatest threat to our national security.
  We need tax reform and we need to grow the economy because we owe it 
to this generation to have the same opportunities that I did.
  It can be done, but we have to do it probably through reconciliation 
because right now, even though many of the proposals that we are 
putting forward--the tax rate and the kinds of policies we are putting 
forward have been supported by our colleagues and many of my friends on 
the other side of the aisle. For some reason, they don't make sense 
anymore. They made sense back in 1986 when Democrats and Republicans 
joined together to do tax reform. If you were in your midtwenties then, 
you saw prosperity unlike anything we have seen right up to today. That 
was the last time we saw great growth in our economy. We need to get 
back to providing those same sorts of opportunities.
  People will tell you that we are not giving a cut to the little guy 
or the working man. Well, one thing you don't see when you see the 
percentage rates that we are talking about on individual tax rates that 
we are targeting is that there will be tens of thousands of people who 
will pay zero taxes. There is a actually a zero tax bracket. There are 
people who, because of the exceptions and exemptions that we are 
proposing, will actually fall below having a Federal tax liability. We 
need to talk about that.
  We need to recognize that we have to provide relief to the entire 
spectrum, from the businesses that hire people and create jobs to the 
working families and the people who don't make enough where we can take 
any more away from them because they need it to pay their bills. They 
need to pay their electric bills, their utility bills, their school 
tuition, and all the other things that working families are struggling 
to do today, just as I was struggling to do back in 1986.
  So I hope this Congress will deliver on the promise we made last year 
to cut taxes, to get this economy moving again, and to provide the same 
opportunities for the generation going to school and the people who 
aren't in school, who are struggling to make a living--the same 
opportunities that I got when I was that 26-year-old back in 1986. We 
can do it. I know we can do it because we have done it before. It is a 
promise we made and a promise we need to keep.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania.


                    National Hispanic Heritage Month

  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I want to speak today with regard to a 
month we set aside--or I should say the equivalent of a month that 
spans two different months--as National Hispanic Heritage Month.
  As many know, the United States is home to more than 56 million 
people of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, comprising over 17 percent of 
the Nation's total population. We set aside September 15 to October 15 
to mark National Hispanic Heritage Month. This month is a reminder of 
the vibrant culture and substantial contributions that people of the 
Hispanic community have made to our Nation. Although we have only a 30-
day time period as a designation, we recognize the contributions made 
by Latinos in this country every

[[Page 15506]]

day, not just between September 15 and October 15.
  I have held a number of meetings with Latinos and Latino leaders this 
past year in Pennsylvania and here in Washington and recently just a 
couple weeks ago, as well, to discuss issues of concern to Hispanic 
Americans and Latinos. The resounding theme I heard from Pennsylvanians 
is the strong economic drive that Latinos and Hispanic Americans share.
  As the second fastest growing minority in the United States, the 
Hispanic community's economic power continues to grow. Small businesses 
are the backbone of our economy both in Pennsylvania and across the 
Nation. Latinos are 1.4 times more likely than the general population 
to become entrepreneurs. In fact, Latinos own some 3.3 million 
businesses in the United States, accounting for more than 40 percent of 
all minority-owned businesses. Together, these businesses generate 
almost $500 billion in economic activity. Overall, the Latino community 
accounts for a combined $1.3 trillion in economic activity. Their 
contributions are projected to top $1.7 trillion by 2020--from $1.3 to 
$1.7 trillion in just a few years.
  Last month, I was proud to join many of my Senate colleagues in 
designating the week beginning September 18 as National Hispanic-
Serving Institutions Week. This resolution recognizes the achievements 
and goals of the 472 Hispanic-serving institutions, known by the 
acronym HSI. These HSIs are throughout the Nation, and they improve 
their local communities and play a vital role in expanding access to 
college for students across the country. These HSIs represent 13 
percent of nonprofit colleges and universities. Yet they enroll 63 
percent of all Latino students. These Hispanic-serving institutions are 
located in 18 States and Puerto Rico. I am proud to be a cosponsor of 
the resolution which recognizes the important work these institutions 
play in expanding access to higher education for everyone.
  This year, Hispanic Heritage Month has become a month of advocacy and 
action. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Dream Act. This issue 
has been on the forefront in recent discussions, not only among the 
Latino community, the Hispanic-American community but with many of my 
constituents across the board, and I am sure that is true in every 
Senate office. Dreamers shared with me the hard work and struggles they 
have endured to be successful in this country. Ending DACA, in my 
judgment, is wrong. First of all, it is wrong to break a sacred promise 
to hundreds of thousands of people living in our country, young people 
who were promised by their government, if they came forward, they would 
be protected. Ending DACA would be breaking that sacred promise.
  In Pennsylvania alone, estimates say that ending DACA would cost the 
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania nearly $357 million per year in GDP losses 
to our State, and that is according to the Center for American 
Progress. Ending DACA would result in the loss of $460.3 billion--not 
million but billion--from the Nation's GDP over the next decade, again 
according to the Center for American Progress.
  So it would be a betrayal to violate this covenant with hundreds of 
thousands of young people, and it is really a bad move for the economy 
of my State of Pennsylvania and the economy of our Nation.
  I was proud to vote for the DREAM Act in both 2007 and 2010, and I 
hope the Senate will have a clean vote on the Dream Act soon. We should 
be focused on humane and commonsense solutions that keep our Nation 
safe as well as allowing it to thrive. Hispanic Americans are a vital 
part of the fabric of American society.
  With that, 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. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                       The Budget and Tax Reform

  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, The most powerful words in our 
Constitution are the first three words: ``We the People.'' It sets out 
the mission statement for our Nation, or, as President Lincoln put it, 
a nation ``of the people, by the people, and for the people.'' Our 
Founders did not start out our Constitution with ``we the powerful'' or 
``we the powerful and privileged.'' They didn't proceed to say that our 
form of government is all about the powerful and privileged ruling for 
themselves to make themselves richer at the expense of everyone else.
  Thus, going back to the foundation, the vision of our Nation is 
appropriate because our Republican colleagues have put forward a 
document--a budget--with a tax plan that is all about government for 
the powerful. It is all about self-serving government for the 
privileged. There is nothing about fighting for a foundation for 
ordinary people to be able to thrive here in the United States of 
America.
  Indeed, the plan put forward by my Republican colleagues is a plan 
fit for a king living in a gilded castle--maybe fit for King Trump 
living in Trump Tower, but certainly not for working Americans living 
and striving to build the wealth of America. No, this is not a plan for 
them. This is a plan for the King Trumps of our Nation, who believe 
they can deceive the country again and again by putting forward an 
argument that they are going to do something to help the people while 
writing it for themselves.
  We can take a look at this and realize that the President himself 
leads that effort to do the sales pitch when he unveiled his tax plan 
at the National Association of Manufacturers last week. President Trump 
said: ``My plan is for the working people.'' He said: ``There's very 
little benefit for people of wealth.'' And he went on to say: ``I don't 
benefit. I don't benefit.'' He repeated it twice.
  Well, as soon as you look at the tax plan, you see that this is 
wrong. He sent out his other Secretaries to reinforce his message. 
Secretary Mnuchin showed up on the shows and said: ``The objective of 
the President is that rich people don't get tax cuts.'' Well, that is a 
little bit of lawyerly work there. He didn't want to confront the 
reality that this plan is all about tax cuts for the wealthy. So he 
said the objective wasn't to do that.
  Well, let's talk about the reality. The bottom third economically 
here in America get zero help from the tax provisions in this plan--
none whatsoever. Plus, the broader budget slashes Medicaid by about 
$473 billion--you know, the one thing that has improved for working 
people. It has been tougher in a blue-collar communities to get a full-
time job. It has been tougher to get a living wage. It has been tougher 
to save for retirement, with pensions disappearing and employer-
supported retirement and savings plans disappearing.
  One thing got better, and that is access to healthcare, thanks to 
ObamaCare. In my State, over half a million Oregonians gained access to 
healthcare. It didn't just help them; it helped everyone. The 
uncompensated care rate went way down in hospitals and way down in 
clinics, which meant stronger clinics and stronger hospital services 
for everybody in the State. Everyone benefited.
  So the one thing that has improved for working America the 
Republicans in this Chamber wanted to rip it away--stomp on it, destroy 
it, shred it. They couldn't bear the thought that working Americans 
might finally have affordable, quality healthcare. They couldn't stand 
the vision of healthcare as a right. They wanted to return it to 
healthcare being only for the wealthy and the healthy, but not for 
ordinary working people.
  Well, the bottom third is totally unhelped--in fact, hurt by this 
plan. How about the middle third? For the middle third--25 percent of 
the middle third--taxes go up, not down. The tax bracket goes from 10 
percent to 12 percent. For the seniors in middle America, this plan 
takes a trillion dollars away from Medicare. Not only do my Republican 
friends hate having healthcare for working people, but

[[Page 15507]]

they want to destroy healthcare for older Americans at the same time.
  So if the bottom third doesn't benefit and the middle third has taxes 
going up, who benefits here? Simple answer: It is the billionaires. The 
millionaires and billionaires of America are those whom this plan is 
written for.
  Well, let's just look at the provisions that cost so much money to 
the Treasury. The alternative minimum tax is wiped out. Remember how 
the rich and powerful rigged the system so they were paying no taxes at 
all? We here in America established an alternative minimum tax, saying 
that, if you are wealthy, with a ton of money coming in the door, you 
should pay at least a little. The one tax return we have for President 
Trump shows he paid taxes because of the alternative minimum tax. That 
is the only reason he paid taxes.
  So when President Trump says he doesn't benefit, clearly that is 
wrong. If he knows it is wrong, it is a lie. Let's just say he is 
either incredibly ignorant or trying to be incredibly misleading about 
the fact that this would benefit him enormously to get rid of the 
alternative minimum tax.
  What is the second thing it does? Where it raised the tax rate at the 
lowest bracket for working Americans, it lowers the tax rate for the 
wealthiest Americans, from 39.6 percent to 35 percent. That is a huge 
reduction that benefits people at the very top, wealthy enough to be 
paying in the top bracket. Certainly, President Trump, by his own 
description of his own affluence, would be in that category. So 
clearly, he benefits enormously from that.
  The third huge provision is getting a special rate for passthrough 
entities. Let's say you own a big development, like a shopping complex 
or a Trump Tower, and it generates a lot of money and you pass it 
through to pay your personal taxes from your limited liability 
corporation. Well, instead of being charged 39.6 percent, the current 
rate, or 35 percent, at the lower rate or at the corporate rate, no, 
you get this special deal on this passthrough of 25 percent. So you 
paid an enormous amount less.
  Who benefits from this? Well, the people who own LLCs and pass 
through huge amounts of money are the ones who benefit from this. Who 
has a lot of LLCs? Who has, by various estimates, hundreds and 
hundreds? I heard an estimate that the President has over 500 LLCs. So 
if the President has hundreds and hundreds of LLCs, passing through 
income that is lowered from a 39.6-percent rate to a 25-percent rate--
basically, a 15-percent reduction--he benefits enormously from this, as 
do all of his millionaire and billionaire friends.
  Finally, there is the estate tax. This one, I have to admit, 
President Trump doesn't benefit from today because he hasn't died. But 
when he dies, his estate would benefit massively. If he is taking out 
insurance to be able to pay his tax bill when he dies, then he has to 
take out less insurance. In that case, it does benefit him today. Most 
wealthy individuals do have that kind of insurance investment to pay 
the estate tax. A very small number of Americans fall into this 
category, and that very small number have a whole team of financial 
planners. That means that, yes, even though, technically, he wouldn't 
pay the tax benefit until he dies, he pays less for the preparation of 
paying that. As for the AMT, the lower tax bracket, the passthroughs, 
and the estate tax, the President benefits enormously from every single 
one.
  There you have it. There is nothing for the bottom third. The middle 
third get hit with Medicare being slashed, and also with an increase in 
taxes for a good share of them, but the billionaires at the top benefit 
enormously. Let's be fair. The President understands this. His advisers 
understand it. His Cabinet is full of the types of individuals at the 
very top--the 1 percent, the 0.1 percent--full of the richest 
Americans. They wrote this plan for themselves and to hurt the rest of 
America. That is shameful.
  There is another provision that the President has put in that 
probably helps himself, and that is cutting the corporate tax rate to 
20 percent. It is keeping with the President's demonstrably false 
statement that the United States is the most taxed nation in the world. 
That is simply not true, as a percentage of GDP. We have seen the share 
of tax revenue that companies pay decline.
  Here we have the argument that somehow there will be prosperity 
because we reduce the tax rate. Let's look at those companies that 
already pay less than 20 percent in corporate taxes because of the big 
difference between the nominal rate--the stated rate of corporations--
and the reality of what they actually paid. A report from the Institute 
for Policy Studies analyzed 92 U.S. corporations that paid less than 20 
percent in corporate taxes. Did they find that these firms have medium 
job growth of 20 percent? No. Ten percent? No. Five percent? No. Zero? 
No. It is negative 1 percent. There is negative job growth even though 
these companies paid less than 20 percent in corporate taxes, while the 
private sector job growth over those years as a whole was 6 percent 
positive. So those paying less than 20 percent had negative 1 percent 
growth, while the entire private sector grew with job growth at 6 
percent. In fact, during that period, these 92 firms that were 
studied--in fact, just a fraction of them, or 48 of them together--
eliminated basically about half a million jobs. They had very low 
taxes.
  The argument is that they will do more because they don't have to pay 
as much taxes. They will expand the number of people they hire. But 
instead, they slashed half a million jobs--just 48 of these firms that 
pay less than 20 percent.
  What happened to the CEOs of those firms? Their salaries went through 
the roof. Part of the plan here is that you cut as many people as you 
can, and you have a net profit increase. Sometimes, even when you 
don't, you get a big increase.
  So if we take this as a model of what the President wants to achieve, 
he wants to empower other companies to follow this track of having this 
model of slashing hundreds of thousands of jobs and jacking up the 
salaries of the already richest CEOs in the country. Who were these 
companies?
  AT&T had an effective tax rate of 8 percent. Wouldn't that be nice 
for middle-class Americans, to have an effective tax rate of 8 percent? 
While they had that beneficial 8 percent tax rate, they slashed 80,000 
jobs and doubled their CEO's pay to $28.4 million. Think of how many 
ordinary working people would have a better life if they raised their 
pay by one dollar an hour. But no, the CEO slashes 80,000 jobs and 
raises to pay himself $28.4 million.
  How about GE, which boosted its CEO's pay nearly $18 million in 2016, 
while cutting 14,700 jobs over 9 years and achieving a negative tax 
rate? A negative tax rate--get that. They didn't pay a dollar to the 
National Treasury--not a dollar. They had a negative tax rate. The 
company got more money back from the government than it paid in taxes.
  How about ExxonMobil? Between 2008 and 2015, they had an effective 
tax rate of 13.6 percent. That is way below 20 percent. In that time 
period, did we see a significant growth in the number of people they 
employed because they got this hugely beneficial 13.6 percent tax rate? 
No, we did not. In fact, they cut their global workforce by a third. At 
the same time, the CEO of that company, who just happens to be our 
Secretary of State at the moment, saw his compensation grow to $27.4 
million.
  The record shows that these companies that are getting these low tax 
rates are slashing their employees and boosting their CEO salaries. Is 
that the model that makes for a prosperous middle-class America, slash 
jobs and a dramatic increase of inequality in this country?
  That is why this entire tax plan and the budget are so diabolical. It 
is everything contrary to ``we the people.'' It is a vision of 
basically hijacking the National Treasury to inflate the wealth of the 
wealthiest in America, while doing as much harm as possible to working 
Americans, laying down a model on the corporate side of rewarding 
companies for slashing hundreds of thousands of jobs and inflating the 
salaries of their CEOs.

[[Page 15508]]

  Here is the question every Member of this Chamber should ask: Is your 
priority adding more zeros to the bank balances of millionaires and 
billionaires? Is that your mission? Are you at work here not 
representing the people of your State but just millionaires and 
billionaires? If you are, then you should be full-throated supporting 
the Republican tax plan and the Republican budget on the floor of this 
Senate. But if you believe in the mission of the United States of 
America, the ``we the people'' mission of providing a foundation for 
families to thrive across this land, then there is no choice but to 
take this budget and this tax plan and shred it, destroy it, burn it, 
put a stake through its heart in every way possible.
  I, for one, believe in this mission of ``we the people.''
  Thank you.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Toomey). The Senator from Illinois.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                                  DACA

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, there are many lobbyists around Capitol 
Hill. They perform the important task of informing Members and their 
staff about issues that are going to come before us. Some of them are 
volunteers, and some of them are paid very handsomely.
  There is a special group of lobbyists who are roaming the corridors 
of Capitol Hill in the House and Senate today and tomorrow. They are 
young people from across the United States. Many of them are college 
students, and all of them have one thing in common: They are Dreamers. 
They are young people who came to the United States under the age of 
18, many of them 2 years old, 4 years old, brought here by their 
parents. They grew up in this country. They went to our schools. Some 
of them were excellent students. Many of them have gone on to college--
at their own expense many times. Some have even enlisted in our 
military. They have a nagging problem. The problem is that they are not 
legally citizens of the United States. They don't have legal status in 
the United States, and so the uncertainty about that status has led 
many of them to wonder what their future will be.
  About 5 years ago, President Obama, at my urging, issued an Executive 
order that changed their lives. It was called DACA. It gave them a 
chance to come forward and register with the government, submit 
themselves to a criminal background check, get fingerprinted, pay a 
$500 fee, have their background looked at in detail, and gave them a 
chance to stay in the United States for 2 years at a time, and in that 
2-year period not be subjected to deportation and be able to work.
  Four weeks ago, President Trump announced that the DACA Program was 
going to be rescinded. Many of these young people don't know what their 
future will be from this point forward. A number of them came out to 
the steps of the Capitol this afternoon to talk about their lives. Two 
in particular I wanted to mention.
  Nathali Bertran from Columbus, OH, is a student who graduated from 
college after great sacrifice and has gone on to become an engineer. 
She is currently working in the Columbus area for a global automotive 
company. She has a bright future if she is allowed to stay in the 
United States. She doesn't know the answer to that because we haven't 
come up with a replacement for DACA, which was rescinded by President 
Trump.
  Jesus Perez is from Tulsa, OK. He had given up on a college education 
and a future, and then DACA came along, and he decided he wanted to be 
a doctor. He is on his way. He has finished community college. He is 
now about to complete his studies at Oklahoma State, and he wants to go 
to medical school. He works as a transporter and a surgical orderly in 
a hospital to make enough money to stay in school. His future is 
completely in doubt because of the uncertainty around what is going to 
happen to those who were protected by DACA.
  I have said many times that these young people were brought here by 
their parents. They didn't make the decision. I don't want to look 
negatively on their parents. If I were given a choice of skirting the 
law or even breaking the law to save my child's life or to give them 
security and safety, I know what I would do. I also know what these 
parents did. But the kids themselves were not in on that decision 
process.
  Now, all they are asking for is a chance to be a part of the only 
country they have ever known. They got up in the classroom every day at 
school and pledged allegiance to the only flag they ever knew, and most 
of them can sing only one national anthem, the anthem of the country 
they believe is their own, the United States. That is an important part 
of this conversation.
  If we believe in fairness and justice in America--and I think we do--
we want to be fair and just to these young people. If they have not 
done something in their lives that is dangerous, such as commit a 
crime, for example, that is serious, they ought to be given a chance. 
If they are willing to go to school or to work or to enlist in our 
military, why wouldn't we welcome them in so that they can be a part of 
our future, as they should be. The alternative, in many cases, is to 
ship them back to a country they cannot remember or never really knew, 
to a language they don't speak. That is not the right outcome.
  I want to thank Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. He is my Republican 
cosponsor of the Dream Act. Senator Graham has been a stalwart. He and 
I may disagree on an issue every other day, but on this issue, we 
agree. We agree that America should step forward and do the right thing 
for these young people.
  I hope these lobbyists--I will use that term--who are Dreamers, who 
are roaming the Halls of Congress, will make the same impression on my 
colleagues that they made on me--that their special lives and their 
special future will make this Nation a better Nation in the years to 
come.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is, Will the Senate advise and 
consent to the Hargan nomination?
  Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk called the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the 
Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Cochran), the Senator from Nevada (Mr. 
Heller), and the Senator from Arizona (Mr. McCain).
  Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Nevada (Ms. Cortez 
Masto) and the Senator from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez) are necessarily 
absent.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber 
desiring to vote?
  The result was announced--yeas 57, nays 38, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 211 Ex.]

                                YEAS--57

     Alexander
     Barrasso
     Blunt
     Boozman
     Burr
     Capito
     Carper
     Cassidy
     Collins
     Coons
     Corker
     Cornyn
     Cotton
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Donnelly
     Durbin
     Enzi
     Ernst
     Fischer
     Flake
     Gardner
     Graham
     Grassley
     Hatch
     Heitkamp
     Hoeven
     Inhofe
     Isakson
     Johnson
     Kennedy
     King
     Lankford
     Lee
     Manchin
     McCaskill
     McConnell
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Paul
     Perdue
     Portman
     Risch
     Roberts
     Rounds
     Rubio
     Sasse
     Scott
     Shelby
     Strange
     Sullivan
     Thune
     Tillis
     Toomey
     Wicker
     Young

                                NAYS--38

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Booker
     Brown
     Cantwell
     Cardin
     Casey
     Duckworth
     Feinstein
     Franken
     Gillibrand
     Harris
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Hirono
     Kaine
     Klobuchar
     Leahy
     Markey
     Merkley
     Murphy
     Murray
     Nelson
     Peters
     Reed
     Sanders
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Stabenow
     Tester
     Udall
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wyden

[[Page 15509]]



                             NOT VOTING--5

     Cochran
     Cortez Masto
     Heller
     McCain
     Menendez
  The nomination was confirmed.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the motion to 
reconsider is considered made and laid upon the table and the President 
will be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

                          ____________________