[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 6]
[Senate]
[Pages 7461-7463]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             HIRE VETS ACT

  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the 
Senate will resume consideration of the House message to accompany H.R. 
244, which the clerk will report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       House message to accompany H.R. 244, a bill to encourage 
     effective, voluntary investments to recruit, employ, and 
     retain men and women who have served in the United States 
     military with annual Federal awards to employers recognizing 
     such efforts, and for other purposes.

  Pending:

       McConnell motion to concur in the amendment of the House to 
     the amendment of the Senate to the bill.
       McConnell motion to concur in the amendment of the House to 
     the amendment of the Senate to the bill, with McConnell 
     amendment No. 210 (to the House amendment to the Senate 
     amendment), to change the enactment date.
       McConnell amendment No. 211 (to amendment No. 210), of a 
     perfecting nature.
       McConnell motion to refer the message of the House on the 
     bill to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and 
     Pensions, with instructions, McConnell amendment No. 212, to 
     change the enactment date.
       McConnell amendment No. 213 (to (the instructions) 
     amendment No. 212), of a perfecting nature.
       McConnell amendment No. 214 (to amendment No. 213), of a 
     perfecting nature.

  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Missouri.


                           Religious Freedom

  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I will speak in a few minutes about the 
business before the Senate today, but first I wish to speak about what 
is happening at the White House today.
  President Trump is expected to sign an Executive order to protect 
religious freedom. Many times during the last year, the President has 
talked about his commitment and our commitment as a nation to religious 
freedom, but I expect that today he will lay down, specifically, by 
Executive order the policy of this administration to protect and to 
vigorously promote religious liberty--not to vigorously promote 
religion but to vigorously promote religious liberty.
  Reports are that the President will tell the IRS that we can't 
challenge churches and what they say, as well as challenge their not-
for-profit status, simply because of what that pastor or that rabbi or 
that imam believes in the place where they deliver their message and 
how they live out their faith. It also tells Federal agencies to stop 
forcing religious organizations to pay fines if they don't want to 
cover certain healthcare items that conflict with their faith views.
  In fact, just this week, Senator Strange and I sent a letter to the 
Attorney General after we saw that in the Fifth Circuit the Attorney 
General's office had said that they want 60 more days for all of these 
pending cases on this very matter. In the letter that Senator Strange 
and I sent to our former colleague, the Attorney General, we just 
pointed out to him that the President repeatedly said, as a candidate 
for President, that this sort of continued action of taking religious 
organizations to court that simply want the ability to practice their 
faith is going to stop, and we hope it stops and we hope it stops now.
  Lastly, I think this order has the potential to be either more 
specific or to really instruct the Attorney General to look throughout 
the agencies of government and issue guidance, so that in all of those 
agencies, as they go about the work that they do, one of the things 
they want to be sure they are

[[Page 7462]]

doing is promoting religious liberty; so that religious organizations 
that have traditionally or are hoping in the future to be delivery 
services for adoption, delivery services for addiction, delivery 
services for other problems that people face, would continue to have 
the ability to be competing to provide those services.
  We know this hasn't happened over the last several months. Religious 
groups that have had contracts for a long time and the availability to 
provide those services, even when they scored the highest on the 
scoring of the competitive bids for these contracts, were not given the 
contracts because they were faith-based.
  Well, if there is any country in the world that has understood the 
importance of religious liberty, it has been the United States. 
Religious freedom is the first freedom in the First Amendment to the 
Constitution, the first right in the Bill of Rights, and I don't 
believe that is by accident. No other country in the history of the 
world ever committed itself to religious freedom as our country did 
from the very first weeks of the government under the Constitution. No 
country ever held this as a principled tenet of what they would stand 
for as a country prior to the United States doing that.
  We might recall how we come to the place today where the President 
has to issue an Executive order protecting religious freedom. In 1993, 
President Clinton signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration 
Act. That act really affirmed that the Federal Government shouldn't 
infringe on individual religious beliefs unless there was an overriding 
public purpose to do so. If, in fact, it was found to be necessary to 
infringe on somebody's religious beliefs because of that overriding 
public purpose--if there was justification that there was one--then we 
should really only interfere with it in the least intrusive way and we 
should do the minimum necessary to meet whatever that greater public 
need might be.
  It is unbelievable to me that in recent years, groups like the Little 
Sisters of the Poor, Christian colleges, or other groups that are 
traditionally providing services are suddenly finding themselves in 
court defending who they are and who they hope to be. The order issued 
today would finally provide that relief in a case like the Little 
Sisters of the Poor. I looked a few months ago at their stated purpose 
and it is, for the Little Sisters of the Poor, to receive older people 
without means, regardless of their faith, and treat them like they were 
Jesus Christ. Now, that doesn't sound like a group that the Federal 
Government would have to crack down on. But the Federal Government, in 
recent years, decided that, in fact, they should force this group to do 
things that violate its faith principles. There is no possible greater 
good to be accomplished by that. Hopefully, this Executive order makes 
it clear today that harassment of religious groups is going to stop and 
that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act principles are still 
principles in our country and, more importantly, that the First 
Amendment is still a founding principle in our country.
  There is no question in the mind of any American, I think, that the 
U.S. Government should do everything in its power to defend and protect 
religious freedom. Whether you are a person of faith or a person of no 
faith at all, you should be able to pursue those beliefs.
  When Jefferson was asked in the last year of his Presidency which 
freedom is most important, he said that the right of conscience is the 
freedom that we should most vigorously defend--the right to believe 
what we believe and pursue what we believe. That has been further 
defined over the years by this: If there are times when that creates a 
true hazard to others, others have a right to come in and explain that, 
and the government has a right to see what can be done about that and 
still maintain in every way possible the essence of belief that people 
have.
  So I commend the President for the action that he is reported to be 
taking later today. I continue to be not only supportive of the 
President's view that religious freedom is a critical tenet of who we 
are, but also I look forward to working with his administration as they 
further put this Executive order into place throughout the agencies of 
government.
  Mr. President, I also wish to speak for a few minutes while I am here 
about the bill before the Senate today. I think the fact that we are 
moving forward with an update on how we spend our money and a 
prioritization of how we spend our money is incredibly important. I 
would have been and would be, if somehow we failed to do our job today, 
very disappointed if we think that the priorities of a year ago have to 
be the exact same priorities today.
  Now, many of them will be the same, but many of them will not. So all 
of these appropriating committees have worked together, House and 
Senate, and have come to a process where we will have 12 bills--not 
debated on the floor as intensively as I would have liked to have seen 
them debated--that should be our goal for this year--but 12 bills where 
House Members and Senate Members, Republicans and Democrats, came 
together and decided what our priorities should be.
  The subcommittee that I chair--the Labor, Health and Human Services, 
Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee--dollar-wise, after we 
take Defense off the table, that is the biggest of the committees and, 
in some ways, it has the most challenging debates as to where we wind 
up in these areas, but I think we have made good choices that hopefully 
can be improved on next year, but I am absolutely confident they are 
better than last year.
  It is really important for the people we work for to understand that 
we had to make choices. There is very little difference in the money 
that will be spent this year and the money that was spent last year, 
but there is a difference in priorities. I think in the Labor, Health 
and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, we 
have either eliminated or consolidated in a dramatic way 28 programs so 
that we could find that money and use it for what we now believe to be 
a better purpose.
  One of those better purposes would be an increase for the second year 
in a row, and the second year in the last 14 years, in health research 
at the National Institutes of Health. There were 12 years with no 
increase at all, and now, for 2 back-to-back years, we are trying to 
get us back to the research buying power we were at 12 years ago. 
Again, as to the programs that weren't performing, many of them wound 
up with zero appropriations in both of these last 2 years so that the 
NIH appropriation could increase.
  At a time when we are looking at precision medicine, when we are 
looking at immunotherapy, when we no longer look at cancer as just 
cancer and throw everything at it we want to throw at it, in fact, we 
look at the individual cancer, and we are at that moment because we 
understand now what we didn't understand a decade ago. We can look at 
the individual cancer and the individual patient and figure out how 
that patient has a unique potential to fight that cancer in their body. 
We looked at things that may not be required for people with cancer and 
other diseases, and if we can figure out which people need this 
procedure and which people don't, not only do you not pay for the 
procedure for people who don't need it, but also people don't go 
through the physical challenge of procedures they don't need.
  As to Alzheimer's, one of the growing concerns in American families 
today--right up there now with cancer as one of the things that people 
worry about most as they look to the future--if we could reduce the 
onset of Alzheimer's by an average of 5 years, we would be spending 
almost 50 percent less in 2050 than we will be otherwise. In 2050, 
spending of tax dollars on Alzheimer's care will overwhelm the budget, 
but research commitments can do something about that.
  The Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies 
Subcommittee bill puts us back, for the school year that begins next 
fall, where we will be back to year-round Pell. What does that mean? 
What is year-round Pell as opposed to what we

[[Page 7463]]

have now? Right now, we have two semesters where you can qualify for 
the Pell grant. A Pell grant is given based on income and need. If you 
qualify for a full Pell--I believe, in the Acting President pro 
tempore's State and, I know, in my State--there is no community college 
where full Pell doesn't pay for all tuition, all books, all fees. If 
you are at the level of need where you qualify for the full Pell grant, 
you have other things you have to worry about to sustain yourself, but 
paying for school is not one of them. As an adult going back to school 
and someone paying for your own school with your own effort, if you are 
the first person in your family to hope to graduate from school, 
anything that disrupts whatever pattern you are in minimizes the 
chances to achieve your goal. So if you have things working in the fall 
and the spring and you can also stay in a summer term, not only do you 
get done quicker, but you don't disrupt the pattern you found yourself 
in.
  For 8 years now we haven't had year-round Pell. This vote we will 
take today allows that to happen, and it will make a big difference. It 
will also make a difference when you are in a program where you are 
being prepared to do a job that is uniquely available or available in 
your community. It is pretty hard to explain why we can do this and we 
have ways to pay for it through the fall and spring, but by the summer 
we just have to take a break. That is not a very easy thing to explain 
to an employer who has come to the community because you have that 
training potential in your community.
  The third major allocation of money that had to come from somewhere 
else is opioid abuse. This bill will increase by 430 percent our 
commitment on this issue. It is not because we had 650 million new 
dollars to spend on opioid abuse. It is because in many places in our 
country today and in many States in our country, more people die from 
opioid overdoses than die from car accidents. It is because many 
families are destroyed by addiction to prescription drugs that leads to 
other drugs when those prescription drugs can't be available and, 
frankly, the abuse of prescription drugs, in some cases, where they are 
available. So we are looking at new ways to deal with pain and looking 
at new ways to deal with this growing problem.
  In 2014 and 2015, each year more than 1,000 people in Missouri died 
of drug overdoses. In my State and most States, a fire department that 
also has a first responders unit is three times more likely to respond 
to a drug overdose than the average fire department to a fire. So there 
is a third area where this bill prioritizes what needs to be done.
  In the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, title I, charter 
schools, all those things have a new focus as this bill passes. The 
mental health initiatives, rural healthcare, and Head Start are all 
benefited by a reprioritization of what happens here, as are veterans 
workforce issues and Job Corps issues.
  I think this bill is far from perfect, but it is better than the way 
we are spending our money today and better than we were spending our 
money a year and a half ago. Hopefully, it will not be quite as good as 
the way we spend our money starting October 1.
  So we need to get this work done and get started immediately doing 
the business of setting priorities, making difficult choices, and 
spending people's money in a way that has a long-term plan to benefit 
them, their families, and our growing economy. I look forward to that 
vote later today, and then to have, I would hope--as I know the 
majority leader hopes--a greater effort this year than ever before to 
get these bills on the floor and to have them fully debated. The best 
possible thing would be to pass them one at a time and put them on the 
President's desk one at a time. But the next best thing is to look at 
the bills and reach individual conclusions about these individual 
bills. That is what the bill before us today does, and I urge its 
passage.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. 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.

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