DISCLOSE Act of 2012

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, as chair of the Small Business Committee of the Senate, I am pleased to come to the floor to give some supporting remarks for Senator Schumer's small business tax reduction bill. The bill will invest, basically, $20 billion to the bottom line of small businesses--owners of businesses that are dynamic and that are growing. I would like to make that distinction. It is not all small business that will get tax relief. It is small businesses that are dynamic and growing and adding employees or increasing wages.

The bill is smartly and narrowly targeted to motivate and to reward those small businesses, a subgroup of the 28 million small businesses that exist in the country today, many of which are in the Senator's State, Minnesota, that has some very high-growth, high-potential small business development in the medical field, I understand. In my State, it would be those businesses that are growing because of the increased demand for energy and the new technologies that are coming out, not only for oil and gas production, which is important, but also other sources of energy. In Ohio and Michigan, it could be those small business suppliers that are rallying around the emerging and strengthening automobile industry, which President Obama and the Democratic Members of this Congress had so much to do with salvaging.

Our business is not just throwing money against the wind. It is taking precious taxpayer dollars and targeting them to those businesses that are growing. That is why, as the chair of the Small Business Committee, I strongly endorse Senator Schumer's proposal over the proposal that came from the House of Representatives.

The House of Representatives' bill basically is taking $40 billion that we do not have--we do not have the $20 billion either but one is half the cost--taking $40 billion and throwing it at businesses, 50 percent of which, according to the CBO study, will accrue to the highest income earners in the country--over $1 million. It is not targeted. It is just about business profits, which are important. I know businesses are in business to make profits. I have no problem with that. We want our businesses to be profitable. But the Schumer proposal, relative to the Cantor proposal, is targeted to those businesses making a profit and reinvesting it in the business to grow-- hiring workers and putting behind this recession we are coming out of-- a recession because of poor policies of previous administrations-- coming out of this recession to help grow the economy.

We can give tax cuts in a variety of different ways. If we had all the money in the world, maybe we could afford to do both, but we are not that fortunate. We have to make choices. That is what we do on the floor of this Senate every day, make choices, make distinctions between wise ways to spend money and poor ways to spend money.

I suggest, if we have $20 billion to spend, if everybody agrees we have at least that, that the Schumer approach is much more efficient, will be much more effective, will get much more bang for the buck than the Cantor approach.

I commend Senator Schumer for putting his bill on the floor, the Small Business Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012. According to the National Economic Council, the tax credit would provide $20 billion in direct tax relief for businesses that hire new workers or increase wages, and it could encourage an additional $200 to $300 billion in new wages and jobs this year.

This tax credit, as I said, makes sense. It will help create jobs. According to the Congressional Budget Office report released last year, the CBO report from November of 2011, policies that have the largest effect on output and employment per dollar of cost in 2012 and 2013 are the ones that would reduce the marginal cost of hiring. That is exactly what the Schumer bill does.

Firms that make capital investments in 2012 would be allowed to deduct the full value of the investment on their 2012 return. We know this kind of targeted tax cut can spark demand that small businesses have been clamoring for. This tax cut is an extension of a tax provision that expires in 2011 and had yielded an estimated $50 billion in added investments and lowered the average cost of capital for business investment by over 75 percent, according to the National Council of Economic Advisers.

We have had a lot of experience in the Small Business Committee and in the Finance Committee, on which Senator Schumer serves, in the last couple years designing and implementing tax cuts for the middle class, tax cuts for the job creators. Again, if we look very objectively, considering the Schumer proposal costs half as much as the Cantor proposal and will probably do three times if not four times better, it is a no-brainer which one is more effective; that is, the Schumer proposal.

Our hope is if Senators come to the floor and begin to look more carefully at the Schumer proposal versus the proposal that came from the House, they will realize the benefit of the Schumer approach and give it the 60 votes we need to move it forward and will reject the Cantor approach as being too expensive relative to the other option that is on the table and much less effective. In the event the Senate decides to do neither, which might happen because there have been logjams around here for a while now, I have to say I was very proud of my colleagues Barbara Boxer and Jim Inhofe for working to break the logjams in a spectacular way just 2 weeks ago on the Senate floor when they finally negotiated a 2-year transportation bill, the flood insurance bill, the RESTORE Act, and the student loan reduction bill, which is the remarkable work the Congress did last week.

In the event the Cantor proposal fails and the Schumer proposal fails, I am hoping to offer an amendment that the leadership is considering now that was put together by the Snowe staff and the Landrieu staff over the course of the last several weeks. The only name on this right now is mine, but it has been put together by a variety of Senators who have been working across the aisle for months on items that are very important to the small business community.

Again, we have 28 million small businesses in America; 22 million of them are single employers. In other words, they are self-employed professionals who are doctors, lawyers, landscape architects, architects, other service providers, network professionals, and IT professionals who are working in their own business and employ themselves. They are very valuable. We encourage entrepreneurship in America. We may have more entrepreneurs per capita than any place in the world. We believe in it and we are excited.

We are also excited for our businesses that start with two or three employees, and before we know it they have 200 or 300 employees. Then, when we close our eyes and open them, they have 2,000 employees. That is very exciting. We

call them the gazelles. We look for accelerating opportunities.

As I said, we put this package together with the significant input of Senator Snowe and her staff, along with input from Senator Kerry, who has been an extraordinary leader in this way. Senator Merkley, Senator Cardin, and a list of other Senators whom I am going to refer to have been working for years on some of these issues. I wish to make sure I give them the credit for these issues.

First in our package is the very popular and very effective 100- percent exclusion of capital gains for investments in small businesses. It was part of the small business tax extenders package. President Obama has recommended this and Senator Kerry is the lead sponsor, along with Senator Snowe, on the Finance Committee.

Let me give a little background. Until 2009, noncorporate taxpayers were allowed to exclude 50 percent of the gain from the sale of the stock of a qualified small business if taxpayers held the stock for 5 years. The Recovery Act increased the 50 percent to 75 percent and the Small Business Act of 2010 subsequently increased it to 100 percent. As of January this year, it was reverted down to 50 percent and startup investments are no longer entitled to the preferred capital gain treatment.

Our proposal would basically take this up to 100 percent exclusion from the sale of capital gains that noncorporate taxpayers purchased in 2012 and 2013 and hold for 5 years. It has bipartisan support. As I said, Senator Kerry has been the lead advocate. Senator Snowe has worked side by side with him, and along with Senator Moran, Senator Warner, Senator Coons, and Senator Rubio have all called for this provision to be permanent. I wish we could make it permanent. This bill will not make it permanent, but we will extend it for another year and a half.

According to the Kauffman Foundation paper published earlier this year--and the Kauffman Foundation, for those who don't know, is the leading think tank. It is not political at all. It is just a middle-of- the-road, well-respected think tank on small business development. They published a paper earlier this year, the 100-percent exclusion ``boosts the after-tax returns on such investments in startups and should induce substantial levels of new investments in startup firms.'' They further estimate that making this provision permanent would increase risky investments by, conservatively, 50 percent more than the overall cost of the provision. So they are supporting this provision very strongly and would like to see it permanent, but we can only afford in this package to have it for the next year as we again build our way out of this recession.

I guess, from a conservative point of view, one of the good things about this provision--after we vote on the Schumer proposal and the Cantor proposal--it only scores at $4 billion. We get a tremendous benefit for a very small investment of taxpayer money, relatively speaking. Not that $4 billion is chump change, but compared to the $20 billion we are considering for the Schumer package and the $40 billion for the Cantor package, we think we can take that $4 billion and, similar to yeast, make it stretch and grow to affect a lot of people and to spur a lot of investment.

The next provision is the small business tax extenders, the increased deduction for startup expenditures. Again, this has been a Snowe and Merkley initiative. I think Senator Merkley has truly stood up to fight for this.

Under current law, taxpayers can elect to deduct up to $5,000 of startup expenditures in the taxable year in which they start a trade or business. The $5,000 is reduced--but not below zero--by the amount by which the startup costs exceed $50,000.

Examples of potential startup costs: studies of potential markets, products, labor markets or transportation systems; advertisements for the opening of a new business, et cetera; compensation for consultants who help get one's business started.

The Small Business Jobs Act temporarily increased the amount of the startup expenditures entrepreneurs could deduct from their taxes in 2010 from $5,000 to $10,000, with a phaseout threshold of $60,000. Senator Merkley fought to have this provision in the Small Business Jobs Act. This proposal has been repeatedly endorsed by the National Association for the Self-Employed and the National Federation of Independent Businesses.

As part of his ``Startup America'' legislative agenda, President Obama has called for making this permanent. Again, my amendment doesn't make it permanent, but it does make it effective through 2013.

According to a Kauffman Foundation survey, on average, new firms inject about $80,000 into their businesses during the first year of operation. The vast majority of small business owners--between 80 percent and 90 percent--also invest significant amounts of their own money. I wish to underscore this. The way this amendment came together is we conducted in the Small Business Committee--and had very good turnout--about three or four high-level roundtables, where instead of just having 2 or 3 people testify, we had 20 people at a roundtable show up. For 2 hours, in a very informal setting, they were answering questions, such as: What is the best thing we could do to help you now? What are the barriers to growth? What does a healthy ecosystem for small business look like and what could we do to strengthen and make healthier that ecosystem in America? That is where these ideas came from.

Of course, Senator Merkley picked up on some of this and understood. The Kauffman Foundation was there. They said that even though I have talked a lot on the Senate floor about how small businesses need to borrow money--and many do--when they start a company, they don't want to borrow money unless they absolutely have to because the chances of it not working are pretty significant. Most new startups fail, and so people do not want to go into debt unless they have to or unless they are a little bit more sure their idea is going to work.

The benefit of this proposal is that we are actually rewarding the risk-takers who are digging into their savings and taking second mortgages out on their homes and putting some of their other savings at risk behind their idea. What we are saying is if they do that, we will give a significant tax break, considering it costs about $88,000 to start an average business. So this is targeted to those risk-takers. It is not just taking money out of the Treasury and throwing it at all small businesses. It is taking that money--and this is only $4 billion total--and saying: Ok. Let's target it to those individuals who are putting their lives on the line. They are putting their livelihood on the line and their future on the line. What can we do to support them? I am a very big believer in this provision, and I thank Senator Merkley for bringing it to us.

I see Senator Casey and Senator Shaheen are on the Senate floor to speak and that my time has expired. Since I am going to be on the floor most of the afternoon explaining this amendment, I would be happy to yield the floor.

I see Senator Sessions is here and ask unanimous consent that Senator Casey speak for 10 minutes, Senator Sessions for the next 5 or 10 minutes and Senator Shaheen for 5 minutes.

I will amend that to 10 minutes each in the order of Senator Casey, Senator Sessions, and Senator Shaheen.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague from New Hampshire for not only being such an aggressive and fine and thoughtful member of the Small Business Committee, but for her constant encouragement to me and to Senator Snowe to try to pull together some of the ideas that we all can agree on and move forward.

It may not be the most perfect package, it may not be the most extensive package, but as the Senator from New Hampshire said, it is a package that most all of us can agree to, and it has a pricetag of only $4 billion.

That is a lot of money. But compared to the Republican proposal that has come over here from the House at $40 billion, and the Schumer proposal, which I support because it is much more targeted and much more responsible at $20 billion, this $4 billion amendment could have a tremendous bang, a tremendous leveraging power for its cost. And the two proposals Senator Shaheen explained beautifully actually have zero cost because the 504 program is a program that pays for itself. All we are doing is extending its authorization so people--and there are thousands of them in Louisiana, in Rhode Island, in New Hampshire, and other States--who are caught paying higher interest rates on short-term loans for commercial buildings--and I am sure we all know someone in that category--can now, if this amendment passes, go to their local bank--it is not a government program; it is a partnership with the local banks and through the SBA--and refinance their building and get a longer term loan.

In fact, I am told that this program, this 504 program, is basically taking up the majority of the space in this lending, that still the lenders are very weak. They are not extending credit out in a long fixed rate. They are lending short term. They are lending with adjustable rates. As the Presiding Officer knows, and many others, when a person is starting a small business and taking so much risk, one risk that can be eliminated is the cost of their money. It is very comforting to a small business owner--who has to borrow, who does not have the savings or has run through their savings or the equity in their home and they have to extend and take that risk--to be able to have a fixed, longer term rate.

So again, this proposal came from Senator Isakson, who truly is acknowledged as the expert in this entire Chamber on commercial real estate and on residential real estate. He is known and respected on both sides of the aisle. This is his proposal with Senator Shaheen. I thank him for his leadership.

Also, the Senator spoke about the export coordination. Again: zero cost; just smarter government, at no cost. We need more of that around here: smarter government, less spending. That is what Senator Shaheen's proposal does, which is a portion of this amendment, the Small Business Export Growth Act.

Let me reiterate that 95 percent of the world's customers are located outside of the borders of the United States. It might be shocking to people in America to realize this, but we represent only 4 to 5 percent of the population of the Earth. We think of ourselves as the biggest and the best, and we are the best. We are not necessarily the biggest when it comes to population, though.

So there are growing markets all over the world. Mr. President, 95 percent of our customers and a majority of the market are outside of the boundaries of the United States. What we are recognizing is, right now only 1 percent of the 28 million small businesses in America export. Why would that be? One, it can be intimidating for a small business, even though they have a great product, they have a great idea, they have great technology. And India needs that technology or some countries in Africa might absolutely want that product or that service. The small businesses are intimidated. They do not have the accountants, they do not normally have access to high-powered, expensive lawyers and trade executives and experts. So that is what our government--and, frankly, State governments are doing this. Smart governments at the State level--whether it is

California, Oregon, Louisiana--all States are now recognizing: Gee, we need to get behind our small businesses in our State and help them to export.

I was very proud to put a substantial investment in the jobs act of 2010, which gave competitive grants to States. And it is remarkable; just a little bit of investment at the Federal level is leveraging a tremendous amount of excitement at the State and local level as those governments accept those grants and then put them to work.

In Louisiana, our department of economic development has been very aggressive in using its step grants. So, again, this is not an additional grant program. This Shaheen-Ayotte proposal has no cost. It is perfecting, coordinating this export initiative by establishing an interagency task force between the SBA, the USDA, and the Ex-Im Bank. It is really encouraging cooperation that now does not exist at the Federal level and requires the SBA, in coordination with other agencies, to conduct one outreach event in each State per year, which I think would really help to motivate our State governments and our stakeholders at the State level to be helpful.

Let me go back to the beginning. We have the SUCCESS Act amendment. I talked earlier about 16 provisions in this amendment. We talked about the 100-percent exclusion of capital gains. We have talked about the increased deduction for startup expenditures, which is Senator Merkley's provisions.

Now I want to talk about the S corp holding period. This has come out of the Finance Committee. Senator Snowe and Senator Cardin have been very strong advocates of this provision. Under current law, when a corporation becomes an S corporation--and there are, of course, benefits to becoming that kind of corporation--right now it is required to hold its business assets for 10 years or pay punitive taxes. In our mind, this 10-year holding period is too long. It ties up assets that could be sold to raise capital. In 2010, in our small business bill, we reduced this holding period to 5 years so businesses would be better able to manage their planning cycles. So this proposal is to extend the 5-year holding period through 2012 and 2013. You know, potentially, if we could afford it, we would like to make this proposal permanent, but in the Landrieu SUCCESS Act amendment, it would extend it through 2012 and 2013 and has a minimal cost.

The next provision is a carryback provision--up to 5 years of general business credits. This is a proposal about which Senator Snowe feels very strongly. The proposal would extend the carryback period from 1 year to 5 years for general business credits earned in 2012 and 2013. It would provide tax refunds to businesses that were previously healthy but are currently running losses.

The proposal would improve the effectiveness of business credits that are intended to expand investment and employment. The provision would allow businesses greater immediate benefit from credits designed to encourage specific types of activity. By providing businesses with greater opportunity to claim business credits, the provision would also give an infusion of cash to businesses, which might promote investment. So that is another provision of our SUCCESS Act.

Section 179 is probably the most popular part of our amendment and, again, Senator Snowe has championed this in the Finance Committee. Many Finance Committee members are completely aware of section 179 in the Tax Code, which deals with expensing that many restaurants and retailers use. Basically, it provides a credit for them if a small business buys machinery and equipment or property contained in or attached to a building other than structural components, such as refrigerators, grocery store counters, office equipment, gasoline storage tanks, pumps at retail service stations, even livestock, including horses, cattle, sheep, and goats, other fur-bearing animals-- all of the equipment or products or purchases small businesses make to run their businesses. This would allow an immediate writeoff of up to $500,000 for this kind of property. So, again, it is $2.3 billion over 10 years. It is the most expensive part of this whole amendment, but we think it is $2 billion well invested to encourage those small businesses to make these investments now, to get jobs and expansion opportunities underway.

Twenty-six national business groups, such as the NFIB, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Home Builders, and the National Association for the Self-Employed, have endorsed this and have sent a letter to us with very enthusiastic support.

The next section is expanding access to capital for entrepreneurs. This was actually mentioned in President Obama's State of the Union Message to us when he talked about his small business proposals. He outlined maybe half a dozen things, a few of which we have implemented and a few of which we have not yet implemented. This was on his bucket list, if you will. And I am a strong proponent of this provision.

We created a small business investment company in a bipartisan way decades ago. It has been one of the most successful programs created to spur business development in the country. It basically operates on a sustainable level and does not cost the Federal Government anything. It is like venture capital--not really like venture capital--it is like an investment; not a bank but a nonbank investment company that was created many years before I became chair of this committee. It is something that was done through Democratic and Republicans administrations because it worked.

All this does is raise the statutory cap from $3 billion to $4 billion, and it increases the amount of leverage of licensees from $225 million to $350 million. They are bumping up against that $3 billion cap. It has been very successful. We would like to take it to the next level. And, of course, some of the most successful funds within SBIC are bumping up against their $225 million cap per fund. So this is one of the great ideas that came out of our roundtable. Again, not only does President Obama support it, it has my strong support and Senator Snowe's, the ranking member of the Small Business Committee.

The next provision would be the SBA 504 refinance. This extends for a year and a half the ability of the SBA 504 Loan Program. We talked about this. Senator Shaheen spoke about this, and I have already explained it. So this is really the Isakson-Shaheen-Snowe proposal.

The next is the small business lending activity index. This is something I have put forward. We have talked with the banks and the SBA. They are all on board and accepting of this concept. It is a way to measure the small business lending activity that is being done at the city-State level through the 7(a) and 504 Lending Program.

It was very curious to me, when I became chair of this committee, that we did not have the measurements in place to actually judge whether some of our programs were really working. Were they working really well or working moderately or were they very weak? So I have instructed my staff and we have been working together to see in every way if we measure and really record the activities of the Small Business Administration. It is only a $1 billion agency, one of the smaller agencies of the government, but that billion dollars comes from taxpayers and we want to make sure that money is spent well and wisely.

So this legislation, again, is at no cost. It can be done within the current budget. It will be called the lender activity index. It will be posted on the SBA Web site. It will have the name of the bank, the number of SBA loans made by each bank, the total dollar amount of SBA loans, the ZIP Code of bank activity, the industries lent to, so we can sort of see how our banks are lending and to what areas, the stage of the business cycle, and then whether it was a woman-owned, minority- owned, or veteran-owned business, if that information can be obtained. It is very simple. We made sure the language is easy for the banks. They already have to report this data; it is just not in a useable format. This will require them to put it in a useable format.

The next is access to global markets. This is what Senator Shaheen spoke about. So the major part of this bill is tax cuts to businesses and then some oversight of the SBA, tightening up, coordinating our export strategy. And then the next and final part of this--or next to last part of our amendment is basically access to mentoring, education, strategic partnership.

In our roundtable--I am not going to go into all of the details of these items, but the bottom line is that in our roundtable, experts-- business owners and the Kauffman Foundation and others--came to us and said: Senator, you are right, businesses need capital. You are right, we need access to global markets. You are right that we need a fair tax code. But what businesses also need is technical advice and support and training, and we need more education, entrepreneurship education.

The Small Business Administration is not the education agency, so we have been very careful not to mission creep. We have designed a couple of proposals that can encourage better activity within the SBA to form partnerships with nonprofits and even for-profits, not-for-profits, and schools to promote entrepreneurship appropriately. The Federal Government can be a model. It is only one model. But we believe technical training is important. We have partners already established-- the women's small business centers and minority business centers. Getting them to be more effective and providing additional counseling is very important.

Finally on this amendment, access to government contracting is another method for small businesses to be able to grow. Governments-- whether it is Federal, State, or local--are huge purchasers of goods and services, and if our contracting laws are right and if they are enforced, then small businesses in America will have an opportunity to get started by competing for government contracts or to grow by receiving government contracts. And they are more likely to grow. If a big business gets a contract from the government, they can sometimes absorb that contact and make their company more efficient, giving more work to the people who are already there. And there is nothing wrong with that; that is business. But when a small business gets a government contract, most of the time it results in additional hiring because small businesses have to be lean and agile. So they might have five people but they have a lot of expertise. They land a contract from the government that they are most certainly qualified to do, and then they have to hire. So they have to hire 10 people to carry out that contract, which is why I have been very supportive--Senator Cardin has been a champion on this issue and Senator Levin as well--of giving small businesses an opportunity for contracting. That will really help.

In conclusion on this amendment--I see other Members coming to the floor. I wish to speak for another 5 or so minutes. I came to the floor today to support the underlying bill, which is the Schumer tax cut provision that is targeted tax relief to small businesses in America. I hope our Members will support that.

If for any reason they don't support that, or even if we do, we will still have an opportunity, I hope, to vote on the Landrieu amendment. I say that humbly because this amendment has been put together by Senator Snowe and her staff with me and members of the Small Business Committee on both sides of the aisle. We picked up some great ideas from individual legislation that had been filed, and it got unanimous consent and review, talking to many people.

So we don't believe it is controversial. We know it doesn't cost that much--$4 billion--and we believe it will have a tremendous and immediate impact on small businesses in America.

I wanted to give that explanation. We have received a tremendous amount of support today from a variety of organizations.

I see my colleague on the floor. I will yield the floor at this time and perhaps will take a few more minutes before 6 o'clock.

Mr. President, there are a few other things I would like to say.

I wanted to take a minute to respond to something that Senator Rubio said earlier, and Senator Sessions, while I was on the floor. I have great respect for those two Members, but he came to the floor with a fairly critical diatribe, if you will, against some of President Obama's policies. I have not been a great supporter of the President's energy policies, and I actually appreciate some of the views Senator Rubio holds about the fact that we need to drill more in this country.

I want to show something I think Florida should be mindful of and suggest that the Senator from Florida could start making that speech at home in Florida because Florida is one of the States that virtually produces no energy, from any source. It has been a bone of contention with me for many years that we have had Senators come to the floor and talk about what so-and-so doesn't do and what so-and-so doesn't do.

I want to remind the Senator from Florida that the gas that keeps the lights on in Florida actually comes from the Mobile Bay. These are the pipelines that Mississippi and Alabama and Texas--9,000 miles of pipelines and drilling--have off of our shore and onshore to provide gas and lights to Florida.

This is a chart that is very interesting. Before America can be energy independent or energy secure, each State should be energy secure, or each region. The country is not made up of smoke and mirrors; it is made up of 50 States. If every State and every region would do its part, either producing or conserving or a little of both, we could actually get there. But I get a little tired of the lectures criticizing us--particularly from States that neither conserve nor produce.

California gets a little bit of a break, even though they consume more energy than any State. They are a net consumer of energy. We are down here, a net producer. The States that produce more energy than they consume are Wyoming, West Virginia, Louisiana, New Mexico, Alaska, Kentucky--and North Dakota should be on here now because this was some years ago. Probably Montana also would be on here now.

The Senator from Florida is coming and lecturing everybody about producing, and his own State produces virtually nothing and consumes everything. I wanted to say that I find that offensive. California gets a little bit of a pass from me because if we look at another chart, they do more to sort of consume energy through government regulations, which I know the other side doesn't like. They think we don't need any regulations, and that is their view. California has a lot of regulations--maybe too much for me as well--but they are doing a lot to conserve. Florida doesn't. Maybe if Florida started doing a little drilling, it would help the United States to be more energy independent.

My second point: I want to answer something Senator Sessions said. I will try to find my document on that in a minute. Senator Sessions came to the floor a few minutes ago and talked about the cost of the health care bill. The health care bill has some expensive components to it. The purpose of the health care bill, remember, Mr. President--because the occupant of the chair was in the middle of that battle--was designed to reduce the overall cost of health care for the Nation because the percentage of the gross national product going to health care was moving up dramatically and frighteningly--from 12 percent a few years ago to 14 percent, to 16 percent, and it was on its way to 19 percent. It was on its way to 19 percent before Barack Obama got sworn into office.

I am getting tired--and the American people are getting tired--of the same diatribe coming from the other side of the aisle about how the cost of the Affordable Care Act is causing the country to go off the edge. This country was going off the edge before President Obama even became President. They know that. But they are just bound and determined to keep talking about the same old thing day in and day out, about how the Affordable Care Act is wrecking America. The only thing wrecking America is their stubbornness.

I want to put this into the Record. When President Clinton was President, as you know, it was the last time we had a surplus. It was the Republican President and the Republican leadership that turned that surplus into a

deficit. The ship had already hit the iceberg before President Obama took his oath of office. Now they want to blame the entire deficit on the Affordable Care Act.

When the Affordable Care Act is implemented--now that the Supreme Court has said it is most certainly constitutional--instead of fighting it every step of the way, it would, in the long run, save money.

They want to talk about this tax, tax, tax, tax. I want to call what they do the ``no care tax,'' because that is the Republican position. Before there was the Affordable Care Act, people in America were losing care rapidly. Small businesses were dropping their insurance. They could not afford it anymore. These premiums have been going up for a long time. The Affordable Care Act didn't drive the premiums up; they were going through the ceiling. We had to do something to try to stop it.

When President Obama came into office, and we saw that the trends were going up, in our efforts to try to get the budget back into balance it was obvious that we had to do something with health care. But they keep talking about tax, tax, tax. I remind them that before we passed the Affordable Care Act, there was a tax on every insurance policy that people in America had because it was a tax for the uninsured. It was about $1,200. That tax was on the backs of the American people before President Obama ever became President, before we even began debating the Affordable Care Act.

The other cost that was going on in this country was the people who didn't have Medicare, who didn't have Medicaid, and didn't have insurance--and it was a rising number of people without insurance. And as States cut back on their Medicaid, a rising number of people who didn't have Medicaid went to our hospitals, our private hospitals, our public hospitals, and our not-for-profit hospitals. Do you know what the Republicans want to tell them. Just treat those people for free. There is no one to reimburse you for this cost. Medicaid will not reimburse them because they are not 65. They don't have private insurance. And the Governors cut back on Medicaid because they can't bear to go look for some tax loopholes that people might not need in order to provide working Americans with health care.

They are too busy campaigning for their next election, so they told all the hospitals: You all go ahead and take care of these people for free. So when a non-paying customer went to a hospital, whom do you think picked up the tab for that? The paying customer.

So before President Obama became the President, before we started trying to figure out a way out of this terrible mess, there was a huge tax on the backs of the American people and a huge debt having to be paid every year by every hospital in America. Why don't they talk about that? They don't.

I hope the American people will listen because I am so tired of that same old speech. I have heard it for 3 years--before the debate, during the debate, and I guess we are going to hear it up to the election. I hope the American people will listen. Don't let them talk about the tax that is supposedly in this bill. The Affordable Care Act is alleviating a tax burden. It alleviates a terrible tax burden, an invisible tax that has been on the American people, and a heavy burden on the backs of the taxpayers--and immoral in some ways, as well--with working Americans working 50, 60 hours a week, and when they get sick, they have nowhere to turn.

Instead of putting their proposals on the table, they decided they wanted to block and tackle and stop and not contribute anything. I think the country will make a good decision. I think the country likes the fact that their kids can stay on their health care plan until they are 26, and they like the fact that when they get sick with cancer or diabetes they cannot be kicked off their health insurance. Particularly businesses would like it if the States would step up and cover some of these lower wage workers, and the burden would not fall on us.

For every Governor--and mine may be one--who rejects the expansion of Medicare, who do they think has to pick this up? It is the small businesses.

The burden should be shared for our lower income workers broadly, not on the backs of businesses that are struggling. That is the way we designed this program. The Federal Government said: We know it is tough. We know it is an expansion. Do you know what. We will pick up the 3 years 100 percent to give you some time, to help you so you can look at your Tax Code, and you might be able to find out and let me get this one more thing off my chest. Who made up the rule that the Federal Government is in charge of the health of every American citizen? Do Governors have any responsibility for health? Are we supposed to just do everything up here? Do mayors and Governors have any responsibility for the health and welfare of the people they serve? I suggest the Governors--some of them--get off the campaign trail, get back to their offices, and start putting health care legislation together-- particularly some of the Republican Governors.

I am glad I said that. I am happy to turn over the microphone. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Blumenthal and I be recognized for the next 20 or so minutes to speak on the issue of cybersecurity.

Madam President, I rise to speak about cybersecurity, but specifically about the cyber threat to our Nation's critical infrastructure. By critical infrastructure I mean the power grid that supplies electricity to our homes that keeps us warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I mean the financial services' processing systems that connect our ATMs to our accounts and move money around in our complex financial system. I mean the communications networks by which we talk and e-mail and text and message one another.

The men and women we have charged with our Nation's defense and we have confirmed in these roles in the Senate have repeatedly and consistently warned us about the danger of cyber attacks on this critical infrastructure. It provides power and light and heat, tracks and records financial transactions, allows communication and data transfer, keeps airlines safe in the air, controls our dams, and enables our commerce. The consequences of failure in these areas could be catastrophic. We must pay heed to these warnings about America's critical infrastructure as we consider cybersecurity legislation.

The administration has described this cyber threat in no uncertain terms. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has stated:

[I]t's clear from all that we've said [that] we all

recognize we need to do something. . . . We all recognize

this as a profound threat to this country, to its future, to

its economy, to its very being.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has warned:

The next Pearl Harbor we confront could very well be a

cyber attack.

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has compared this threat to the September 11 attacks.

Prior to 9/11, there were all kinds of information out

there that a catastrophic attack was looming. . . . The

information on a cyberattack is at that same frequency and

intensity and is bubbling at the same level, and we should

not wait for an attack in order to do something.

Attorney General Holder stressed the urgency of responding to this threat in a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. He said:

This a problem that we must address, our nation is

otherwise at risk and to ignore this problem, to think it is

going to go away runs headlong into all of the intelligence

we have gathered, the facts we have been able to accrue which

show that the problem is getting worse instead of getting

better. There are more countries that are becoming more adept

at the use of these tools, there are groups that are becoming

more adept at the use of these tools, and the harm that they

want to do to the United States and to our infrastructure

through these means is extremely real.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey has warned that ``a cyber attack could stop society in its tracks.''

NSA Director and U.S. Cyber Commander GEN Keith Alexander, a four- star general, has stated:

We see this as something absolutely vital to the future of

our country. Cybersecurity for government and critical

infrastructure is key to the security of this Nation.

A recent report from the Department of Homeland Security found that companies which operate critical infrastructure have reported a sharp rise in cybersecurity incidents over the past 3 years. Companies reported 198 cyber incidents in 2011, up from 41 incidents in 2010, and just 9 in 2009. This may reflect that the private sector is just now beginning to catch on. It is unfortunate but true that the private sector cannot be counted on to respond to this growing challenge on its own.

As Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has explained, and I quote again:

There is a market failure at work here. . . . Companies

just aren't willing to admit vulnerability to themselves, or

publicly to shareholders, in such a way as to support the

necessary investments or lead their peers down a certain path

of investment and all that would follow.

These were administration warnings, but the concerns are bipartisan. A wide range of national security experts from previous Republican administrations have echoed this alarm. Former Director of National Intelligence and NSA Director ADM Mike McConnell has said, and I quote:

The United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are

losing. It's that simple.

He explained:

As the most wired nation on Earth, we offer the most

targets of significance, yet our cyber defenses are woefully

lacking. . . . The stakes are enormous. To the extent that

the sprawling U.S. economy inhabits a common physical space,

it is in our communications networks. If an enemy disrupted

our financial and accounting transactions, our equities and

bond markets or our retail commerce--or created confusion

about the legitimacy of those transactions--chaos would

result. Our power grids, air and ground transportation,

telecommunications and water filtration systems are in

jeopardy as well.

That ends the quote from Admiral McConnell.

Admiral McConnell also made a comparison to threats from the past.

The cyber-war mirrors the nuclear challenge in terms of the

potential economic and psychological effects. . . . We

prevailed in the Cold War through strong leadership, clear

policies, solid alliances and close integration of our

diplomatic, economic, and military efforts. We backed all of

this up with robust investments--security never comes cheap.

It worked, because we had to make it work. Let's do the same

with cybersecurity. The time to start was yesterday.

Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has also echoed the administration's warning that a cyber attack has the potential of causing devastation on the scale of another September 11. He stated:

I hope we do not have to wait for the cyber-equivalent of

9/11 before people realize that we are vulnerable.

Former Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security Stewart Baker has compared the threat to the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina.

We must begin now to protect our critical infrastructure

from attack. And so far, we have done little. We are all

living in a digital New Orleans. No one really wants to spend

the money reinforcing the levees. But the alternative is

worse. . . . And it is bearing down on us at speed.

Former NSA Director and CIA Director Michael Hayden has said:

We have entered into a new phase of conflict in which we

use a cyberweapon to create physical destruction, and in this

case, physical destruction in someone else's critical

infrastructure.

Former Republican officials have also noted the cybersecurity gap in the private sector due to this market failure. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Chertoff said:

The marketplace is likely to fail in allocating the correct

amount of investment to manage risk across the breadth of the

network on which our society relies.

The following examples are emblematic of the market failure that both Democratic and Republican national security officials have identified in this cybersecurity area for critical infrastructure.

When the FBI-led National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force informs an American corporation that it has been hacked, 9 times out of 10 that American corporation had no idea.

Kevin Mandia of the leading security firm Mandiant has said, and I quote:

In over 90 [percent] of the cases we have responded to,

Government notification was required to alert the company

that a security breach was underway. In our last 50

incidents, 48 of the victim companies learned they were

breached from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the

Department of Defense, or some other third party.

In operation Aurora, the cyber attack which targeted numerous companies, most prominently Google, only 3 out of the approximately 300 companies

attacked were aware that they had been attacked before they were contacted by the government.

We cannot count on the private sector to defend itself against a threat about which it is so unaware. An advanced persistent intrusion of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's systems also went undetected until the chamber received help from the government. The Wall Street Journal reported that a group of hackers in China breached the computer defenses of the U.S. Chamber, gained access to everything stored in its systems, including information about its 3 million members, and remained on the network for at least 6 months and possibly more than a year. The chamber only learned of the break-in, according to the article, when the FBI told the group that servers in China were stealing its information. The special expertise of our national security agencies is a consistent theme through these examples. As former Assistant Attorney General, OLC Director, and Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith has explained:

The government is the only institution with the resources

and the incentives to ensure that the [critical

infrastructure] on which we all depend is secure, and we must

find a way for it to meet its responsibilities.

By the way, that was Goldsmith at the Department of Justice in the Bush administration. This is a Republican appointee speaking. These warnings have been repeatedly communicated to us in the Senate. We cannot plead ignorance of them.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter to Senate Majority Leader Reid and Minority Leader McConnell dated January 19, 2012.

This explains that the threat is only going to get worse; inaction is not an acceptable option. This letter was signed by former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, former Director of National Intelligence and NSA Director ADM Mike McConnell, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright, former Defense Secretary Dr. Willian Perry, former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, former Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn, III, and former Special Advisor to the President for Cyber Security, Richard Clarke.

I also have a letter written to Majority Leader Reid and Minority Leader McConnell, dated June 6, 2012, which I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record.

Secretary Chertoff, Admiral McConnell, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, General Hayden, and General Cartwright urged us to:

. . . bring cyber security legislation to the floor as soon

as possible. Given the time left in this legislative session

and upcoming election this fall, we are concerned that the

window of opportunity to pass legislation that is in our view

critically necessary to protect our national and economic

security is quickly disappearing.

They specifically focused on the threat to critical infrastructure, stating that ``protection of our critical infrastructure is essential in order to effectively protect our national and economic security from the growing cyber threat.''

We must not ignore this chorus of warnings issued by those who are the most informed and most alert about the danger to our critical infrastructure. We must pass cybersecurity legislation, and we must ensure that the cybersecurity legislation we pass addresses our Nation's critical infrastructure. No bill that fails to address critical infrastructure can be said to have done the job of protecting our country.

Our Nation will be vulnerable if critical infrastructure companies fail to meet basic security standards, as they do right now. Legislation must include a mechanism to end this continuing vulnerability. If operators object to a particular approach to cybersecurity for our critical infrastructure on the basis that it is too burdensome or too unwieldy, they will find many Members of the Senate on both sides--myself and Senator Blumenthal included--who are ready and eager to work with them. But if the purpose of the exercise is to come to an end point in which the operators of our critical infrastructure do not have to reach adequate levels of cybersecurity, then we need to move on and we need to vote and go beyond that.

The question of how we get to cybersecurity is one we should engage in the Senate. The question of whether we protect our privately held critical infrastructure in a responsible way is one we should not allow to deter us from getting this job done to protect our national and economic security.

Whatever the ultimate solution, we simply must find a way to improve the cybersecurity of our critical infrastructure.

I yield the floor to Senator Blumenthal, who has been engaged in efforts with me to try to find a way through to a bipartisan bill that will protect our critical infrastructure. He has expertise in this area as a superbly trained lawyer, a multiply elected Attorney General of his home State, a former marine dedicated to our national security, and as a person who brings the highest level of legal talent to this discussion, having argued, I think, five separate cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He has been an enormous asset, and I appreciate his participation.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I am delighted to respond to the Senator in two ways. First, as the Senator so well pointed out, this is not a future threat or a prospective threat that we need to prepare ourselves against; this is an ongoing, current threat. There is a campaign of attacks into our national security infrastructure, into our intellectual property, and into our critical infrastructure, such as the power grids and the communications networks we count on in our daily lives for what we consider the American standard of living here at home. So time is not our friend.

As one of the individuals I quoted said--I think Admiral McConnell-- the day to get this done was yesterday. So the sooner the better. We do need to form a consensus in this body, enough to move through the parliamentary obstacles that exist in this body, which allows us to go forward and will allow us to go forward in a way that does something serious about forcing the operators of our critical infrastructure to put in adequate cybersecurity protections. If they have to do it because they have incentives to do it, that is one way of getting there. If they have to do it because there are regulations that demand it, that is another way of getting there. There are different ways of getting there. And as the Senator from Connecticut and I have discussed--and we are actually working together on this--we are open to different ways to get there, but it should be agreed amongst us in the Senate that getting there, getting to the point where America's critical infrastructure is protected from cyber attack as reasonably well as we can should be the nonnegotiable goal. Anything short of that should be seen as failure.

There is another thing I wanted to add. The Senator was very generous in his remarks and credentialing of a great number of Senators who have been working very hard. I would also like to single out Senator Coons, who has been very helpful in our efforts.

I will stay on our side of the aisle at this point and add in particular Senator Mikulski. Barbara Mikulski serves on the Intelligence Committee. She is keenly aware of the cyber threat. She has taken deep dives into this issue in her role as a cardinal on the Appropriations Committee. She does the appropriations for many of the national security agencies and law enforcement agencies that are deeply involved in this. So when she speaks, she speaks with real authority and she speaks with real impact. Her participation in this effort is extraordinarily helpful, in addition to the efforts of the many Senators whom my colleague singled out as well.

With that, I yield the floor. I see the Senator from Louisiana is here, and I thank the Senator from Connecticut.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, we were here two winters ago, in February, when Washington was hit by a snowstorm that achieved the nickname Snowmageddon. The city and, in fact, much of the mid-Atlantic was buried under feet of snow. It was the biggest snowstorm in 90 years for this area. People in Washington were struggling to get to work and school, and people went without power for days.

This being Washington, some of our colleagues in the Senate seized on that opportunity to mock climate change and to suggest these winter snowstorms were inconsistent with the projections of what would happen from global warming and climate change. As an initial matter, that is a false comparison from the very get-go all by

itself. Climate science models have predicted consistently that as polar icecaps and glaciers melt and more water enters the system, we can expect heavier precipitation events. One of the ways it has been described is that if you have a pot on the stove and you have the heat under it and it is simmering, when you turn up the heat, you get more activity in the pot. You add energy to a dynamic system like a pot of boiling water, and it creates more energy in the dynamic environment.

In the same way, the extra energy coming in because of climate change, our carbon pollution in the atmosphere, is energizing our atmosphere and our weather, and we are getting weather extremes as a result.

There was an article in Science Daily, headlined ``Arctic Ice Melt Is Setting Stage for Severe Winters.'' It says this:

The dramatic melt-off of Arctic sea ice due to climate

change is hitting closer to home than millions of Americans

might think.

That's because melting Arctic sea ice can trigger a domino

effect leading to increased odds of severe winter weather

outbreaks in the Northern Hemisphere's middle latitudes--

think the ``Snowmageddon'' storm that hamstrung Washington,

DC, during February 2010.

I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.

That shows the original challenge to climate change theory, based on the incident of Snowmageddon, was like so much that is said to challenge climate change--phony, outright wrong, a misunderstanding of how it works, and misrepresenting what it shows.

Scientists have recently published an article in

Oceanography that demonstrates that link between climate

change and severe winter weather in the northern Hemisphere's

middle latitudes. I think that can be debunked as a phony

claim against the facts of climate change that are

surrounding us. Look around at what is happening now. We are

seeing extreme weather on the other side.

Last week, Eugene Robinson wrote a Washington Post column that was entitled ``Feeling the Heat.'' He wrote:

Still don't believe in climate change? Then you're either

deep in denial or delirious from the heat.

He points out that the evidence is mounting in irresistible and ultimately irrefutable ways. To quote from his article:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says

the past winter was the fourth-warmest on record in the

United States. To top that, Spring--which meteorologists

define as the months of March, April and May--was the warmest

since recordkeeping began in 1895.

Again, this spring--March, April, and May--was the warmest since recordkeeping began in 1895.

He continues:

If you don't believe me or the scientists, ask a farmer

whose planting seasons have gone awry.

The Bloomberg news recently wrote a story entitled ``U.S. Corn Growers Farming in Hell as Midwest Heat Spreads.'' The story reported that corn crops are in the worst condition since 1988 and that 53 percent of the Midwest is experiencing moderate to extreme drought conditions.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record, at the conclusion of my remarks, the Bloomberg article I have just referenced.

It is not just the agricultural sector that is getting clobbered by the drought and the heat. As the Presiding Officer, Senator Udall of New Mexico, knows all too well, and to quote from a New York Times story:

Explosive wildfires have burned across much of the west in

recent weeks. In southwestern New Mexico, the largest

wildfire in state history has burned nearly 300,000 acres.

Of course, New Mexico is the Presiding Officer's home State, but the article also describes other fires on the loose in Colorado and Utah.

The High Park Fire, which has been burning for weeks near

Fort Collins and is one of the largest and most destructive

blazes in the state's history . . .

The article also mentions that Colorado had more than half a dozen fires burning and said conditions have not been this bad in a decade.

So we are seeing exactly the kind of extreme weather conditions the climate scientists, whom the deniers have always mocked and made fun of, actually predicted. They predicted this would happen, and it is, in fact, happening.

It is clear we can't take a particular storm and say this storm, this fire, this drought was the product of climate change. The example people use to describe what is going on is that it is akin to loading dice. The more someone loads the dice, the more the numbers they have loaded the dice to show up will show up. So we will get more weather events. Even if we don't load the dice, we are sometimes going to get double sixes. We can't show every double six is because the dice were loaded, but when we see more and more double sixes showing up--more than history would suggest or more than the odds would suggest--then something is going on. That is what we have done by loading our atmosphere with carbon pollution. We have loaded the dice for these extreme weather events, and now we are reaping that bitter harvest from the pollution we have thrown up there.

Unfortunately, the bitter harvest in this city is that we continue to listen to propaganda and nonsense from the polluters designed specifically to create enough doubt to prevent us from taking action about something that is creating these immense consequences for foresters and firefighters in the West, for corn farmers in the Midwest, and for anybody who has to experience extraordinary weather events like ``snowmageddon,'' so-called, here in Washington. These things are beginning to have an effect as real life begins to model what the climate scientists predicted.

NOAA's Chief Jane Lubchenco spoke before an audience in Australia, which is experiencing very similar conditions, and said these extreme weather events are convincing many Americans that climate change is a reality. We are seeing that more and more.

Yale, George Mason University, and the Knowledge Networks did some polling on this subject, and 69 percent of the respondents said they agreed that ``global warming is affecting the weather in the United States'' versus 30 percent who said they disagreed. So better than 2 to 1 the American people are ready for us to do something about this. They know there is a connection and they expect us to take responsible action.

Gallup polls are reflecting a rebound in the public's concern about climate change from 51 percent in 2011 up to 55 percent in March of this year. Before the recession, it was all the way up to 66 percent, until the economic issues pushed it aside.

The contention the polluting industries and their mouthpieces here in Washington make--that the jury is still out on climate change caused by carbon pollution--is simply false. The jury is not still out. The verdict is in, the verdict is clear, and we should start doing something about it.

When I come to the Senate floor to give these talks, I often quote a letter from back in October 2009 that was signed by virtually every major scientific organization in the country--the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the American Society of Agronomy, the Botanical Society of America, the Soil Science Society of American, the American Statistical Association, and I could go on and on. The point is not to name all the multiple responsible and respected scientific organizations that signed the letter but to read what it was they said. If we think about it, as I read it, think about how cautious scientists ordinarily are in the language they use. Here is what they said:

Observations throughout the world make it clear--

Clear--

that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific

research demonstrates--

Not suggests, demonstrates--

that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are--

Not maybe, are--

the primary driver. These conclusions are based on multiple

independent lines of evidence, and contrary assertions are

inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of

peer-reviewed science.

That is a very ``sciencey'' way of saying something that is pretty harsh, which is that all these contrary assertions about climate change simply cannot be reconciled with an objective assessment of the facts, of the vast body

of peer-reviewed research. If it can't be reconciled with an objective assessment, what kind of assessment is it getting? What it is getting, I submit, is a phony assessment, a political, propaganda-driven assessment, and an assessment with the purpose of creating enough doubt to slow down political action, to preserve the status quo, and to allow pollution to continue to pour out of these smokestacks.

I speak very specifically about smokestacks because Rhode Island is a downwind State, and so much of the coal pollution that gets piped up into the atmosphere through Midwestern smoke stacks ends up landing in my State. It lands in the form of ozone, in particular. There are days in a Rhode Island summer that look clear, look beautiful, and someone can be driving by sparkling Narragansett Bay in the morning on their way to work when off goes the radio and the radio jock, in giving the news announcements of the day, says: Today is a bad air day in Rhode Island. Infants should stay indoors. The elderly should stay indoors. People with breathing difficulties should stay indoors.

This is an otherwise beautiful day. Yet children, seniors, and people with breathing difficulties should stay indoors? Yes, because corporations, pumping carbon pollution and other forms of pollution out of their Midwestern smokestacks, will not clean up their act. So they get to hold Rhode Islanders, on a clear summer day, captive indoors because they will not clean it up? That is wrong. It is just plain wrong.

I am going to continue to come to the floor on a regular basis to keep pointing this out. For some reason, this has become the issue in Washington that dare not be mentioned. Enough of that. It is time we started to mention it. It is time we started to force this issue, and it is time we started to do something about it because any other form of activity faced with these facts would be wildly irresponsible.

Let me give the example I have used before. You are a parent. You have responsibility for the welfare and well-being of your child. Your child is showing symptoms. You don't know quite what is wrong, but you take her to the doctor and the doctor says: Something is wrong here. She needs treatment. Treatment is not going to be easy, it will not be cheap, but she needs it. You think: OK. That is bad news. I tell you what, I am going to be a responsible parent and I am going to go get a second opinion. So you go and get a second opinion and that doctor says the exact same thing: Your daughter is sick. She needs treatment. So you ask a couple more doctors who are friends. You get a third and fourth opinion.

Let's say you are the most determined parent in the world and you go out and you get 99 second opinions. You contact 100 doctors about your daughter's condition, and 97 of them, 97 of those doctors say your daughter is sick and she needs to be taken care of and she needs this treatment. At that point you say: There is still doubt. There are these three other doctors who aren't so sure about this, so I am not going to do it. That is not something a responsible parent would do. I suspect in some circumstances that would be so irresponsible that it might land you in the child and family services office of your local government.

That is exactly what we are being asked to do about climate change-- to ignore the 97 percent of peer-reviewed climate scientists who understand this is real, this is man-made, and the consequences are going to be ferocious for us because there is a 3-percent doubt. It gets even worse because so many of the scientists involved in the 3 percent are scientists for hire who have economic ties to the polluting industries. Some of them even go back to previous fights, such as those over whether cigarette smoking is good for you or whether lead paint is safe for children. These are scientists who have made a career of manufacturing doubt on behalf of the cigarette and tobacco industry, on behalf of the lead paint industry, and now on behalf of the big carbon polluters. In a nutshell, they are phonies, and we are being asked to believe them.

I see the Senator from Florida is here, and I think my time at this point has probably expired. I appreciate the time to come before this body and share these views again. I will close by pointing out if there is one place we truly need to worry about climate change and about the effects of our carbon pollution, it is not just in our atmosphere, it is not just in the climate or in the weather, it is in the oceans. The oceans are undergoing historic changes as a result of the amount of carbon in our atmosphere. We are acidifying our oceans at a rate that is unprecedented. We are now out of a bandwidth that has lasted for 8,000 centuries--8,000 centuries. Our entire species has developed within a safe bandwidth of atmospheric carbon and of ocean acidity that we have now, for the first time, stepped out of and a long way out of. If we do not take this issue on in a responsible way, we are going to bear an even more bitter harvest.

Exhibit 1

[From the ScienceDaily, June 6, 2012]

Arctic Ice Melt Is Setting Stage for Severe Winters

(By Anne Ju)

The dramatic melt-off of Arctic sea ice due to climate

change is hitting closer to home than millions of Americans

might think.

That's because melting Arctic sea ice can trigger a domino

effect leading to increased odds of severe winter weather

outbreaks in the Northern Hemisphere's middle latitudes--

think the ``Snowmageddon'' storm that hamstrung Washington,

D.C., during February 2010.

Cornell's Charles H. Greene, professor of earth and

atmospheric sciences, and Bruce C. Monger, senior research

associate in the same department, detail this phenomenon in a

paper published in the June issue of the journal

Oceanography.

``Everyone thinks of Arctic climate change as this remote

phenomenon that has little effect on our everyday lives,''

Greene said. ``But what goes on in the Arctic remotely forces

our weather patterns here.''

A warmer Earth increases the melting of sea ice during

summer, exposing darker ocean water to incoming sunlight.

This causes increased absorption of solar radiation and

excess summertime heating of the ocean--further accelerating

the ice melt. The excess heat is released to the atmosphere,

especially during the autumn, decreasing the temperature and

atmospheric pressure gradients between the Arctic and middle

latitudes.

A diminished latitudinal pressure gradient is associated

with a weakening of the winds associated with the polar

vortex and jet stream. Since the polar vortex normally

retains the cold Arctic air masses up above the Arctic

Circle, its weakening allows the cold air to invade lower

latitudes.

The recent observations present a new twist to the Arctic

Oscillation--a natural pattern of climate variability in the

Northern Hemisphere. Before humans began warming the planet,

the Arctic's climate system naturally oscillated between

conditions favorable and those unfavorable for invasions of

cold Arctic air.

``What's happening now is that we are changing the climate

system, especially in the Arctic, and that's increasing the

odds for the negative AO conditions that favor cold air

invasions and severe winter weather outbreaks,'' Greene said.

``It's something to think about given our recent history.''

This past winter, an extended cold snap descended on

central and Eastern Europe in mid-January, with temperatures

approaching minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit and snowdrifts

reaching rooftops. And there were the record snowstorms fresh

in the memories of residents from several eastern U.S.

cities, such as Washington, New York and Philadelphia, as

well as many other parts of the Eastern Seaboard during the

previous two years.

Greene and Monger did note that their paper is being

published just after one of the warmest winters in the

eastern U.S. on record.

``It's a great demonstration of the complexities of our

climate system and how they influence our regional weather

patterns,'' Greene said.

In any particular region, many factors can have an

influence, including the El Nino/La Nina cycle. This winter,

La Nina in the Pacific shifted undulations in the jet stream

so that while many parts of the Northern Hemisphere were hit

by the severe winter weather patterns expected during a bout

of negative AO conditions, much of the eastern United States

basked in the warm tropical air that swung north with the jet

stream.

``It turns out that while the eastern U.S. missed out on

the cold and snow this winter, and experienced record-

breaking warmth during March, many other parts of the

Northern Hemisphere were not so fortunate,'' Greene said.

Europe and Alaska experienced record-breaking winter

storms, and the global average temperature during March 2012

was cooler than any other March since 1999.

``A lot of times people say, `Wait a second, which is it

going to be--more snow or more warming?' Well, it depends on

a lot of factors, and I guess this was a really good winter

demonstrating that,'' Greene said. ``What we can expect,

however, is the Arctic wildcard stacking the deck in favor of

more severe winter outbreaks in the future.''

I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of the remarks by the Senator from Florida the Senator from Wyoming be recognized, and then I be recognized after the Senator from Wyoming for up to 35 minutes.

Mr. President, I have to say that I enjoy these second opinions when they come from such a well-known doctor who knows what he is talking about. Quite often we in this body are forced to kind of assume we are experts in every area. It is nice to have a few who really are. I think I don't say it very often, but I actually learn something when I hear him talk.

Anyway, that is not why I am here today. I hope to help provide some sense and balance and accuracy which is clearly lacking in the mainstream media trying to drum up support for the global warming hysteria again.

I have to say it is like we are back to the good-old days. We talked about this for 10 years. There are different people coming up with legislation, the cap-and-trade legislation. They found out, of course, that the American people realized it was a gigantic tax and there were no benefits, so it kind of went by the wayside. But there is a new thing happening, and it was interesting because just last Friday one of the Obama appointees to the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Association said to the Associated Press:

The wildfires and hot temperatures over the past few weeks

will likely convince Americans that global warming is real.

In other words, they are now trying to tie them together. They have never tried to do this before because that is one of the few things that all experts agree on: that one isolated case doesn't make a case for major changes in the weather. This is kind of a dangerous game to play because what are they going to say when winter comes and it is going to get cold? As soon as it gets cold I can tell you what they are going to say. They are not going to use global warming; they are going to use climate change.

As the season changes, the terminology changes, and they will start saying just because the temperatures are freezing doesn't mean the planet is not overheating--if you follow through the double negatives.

My good friend from Rhode Island commented on the famous igloo. This was pretty prominent two summers ago. Let me tell you the story of where we got to the igloo. As most people know, because I brag about it all the time, I have 20 kids and grandkids.

This happens to be one family. You cannot see them as well. It is six of the most beautiful people we have ever seen. It happens to be my daughter and her husband and their family of four kids.

Anyway this would have been in February 2010. Some of us remember how cold it was during that time. It happens that one of my kids--the only one who is adopted is a little girl, an orphan from Ethiopia, whom we found and nursed back to health. My daughter Molly, who had nothing but boys, adopted this little girl.

Put her picture up there. She is a pretty little girl. She has become kind of a hero.

Every February I sponsor something called the African dinner where about 400 of our friends from Africa come over, and we are establishing close, intimate relations with them. It happens that 12 years ago, we found the little girl who is pictured on the poster. She is now a 12- year-old little girl. She reads at college level. She is smart and she is the main speaker every time we have this dinner.

In February 2010, little Zegita Marie was up here and she brought her whole

family and made her speech. It was a beautiful thing. Afterwards, as they were getting ready to take the plane back home, the blizzards came, and all of the airports in the area shut down. There was no way they could get back. So what do you do with a family of six when you are snowbound and there is nothing but snow and ice on the ground? You make an igloo. So they did.

That is a real igloo. It sleeps four people. I know that; I was in it. It was right by the Library of Congress. The sign on the top said: Al Gore's new home. Actually, I think it may have said: Honk if you want global warming--or something like that. Anyway, everyone was having a good time.

Some of my liberal friends were so upset. One of them was Keith Olbermann. Keith Olbermann, who was with MSNBC, designated my daughter Molly's family of six as the worst family in America. Now, there is her husband who is very prominent in Fayetteville, AR. My daughter Molly is a professor at the university. She was designated as Outstanding Professor of the Year this year. She will be marching out during the homecoming on November 3 to accept that award. It is quite an outstanding family, and the kids are all straight-A students and all of that wonderful stuff.

So that is the famous igloo. It has been a long time since we had a chance to talk about it. There we have Molly, James, Jase, Luke, Jonah, and Marie enjoying that. Believe it or not, that is the worst family in America.

Well, just after the igloo story broke, a reporter by the name of Dana Milbank warned the alarmists. Keep in mind the terminology we use. Those people who think the world is coming to an end because catastrophic global warming is coming is all due to manmade gases, so we need to shut down America. Those are the alarmists.

The skeptics are people like me, those who look at it and say science has been stripped out by the United Nations for an ulterior motive. Dana Milbank has been very much on the other side of the issue and warned the alarmists to stop using weather to justify global warming because then what do they do when the weather doesn't cooperate with their predictions of the melting planet.

He wrote:

In Washington's blizzards, the greens were hoist by their

own petard.

He said:

If the Washington snows persuade the greens to put away the

slides of polar bears and pine beetles and to keep the focus

on national security and jobs, it will have been worth the

shoveling.

But not everyone got that memo. In July 2010, the hot summer that followed the intense blizzards when my family put up the igloo, Jon Karl of ABC News asked me to do an interview outside in the heat. It was obviously an ambush. People who know me well know I enjoy ambushes, so I went out there in the heat. They got ready with the cameras rolling, and they had a pan with an egg on it. They were going to fry it, but it didn't fry. Nice try, but it didn't work.

I am sure some here may have noticed that somebody else tried this last weekend. Last weekend I happened to be in the Farnborough Airshow, which I go to every year. While I was at the airshow, I got a call from home telling me that they have kind of resurrected the igloo, and they were talking about that. They were planning a great big event on The Mall, and in the event they were going to take the thing, called ``Hoax''--let me go back to 2003.

In 2003 when I realized and I started hearing from a lot of the real scientists that it was a hoax, I made the comment that the notion of catastrophic global warming is due to manmade anthropogenic CO2 and manmade gases. It is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. So that is where ``Hoax'' came from.

So they had a great big thing made of ice. Apparently, it was the size of a car. It said ``Hoax'' with a question mark. They were going to put it out there and it was going to melt and they were going to make a big issue out of it.

The problem is nobody showed. So what did they do? They felt they couldn't do this if there were no cameras, so they called it off. They used the excuse that there had been a storm, and they thought this might be offensive to people who lost electricity in the storm. Anyway, that thing went under too.

So in addition to the recent activity from my alarmist friends, the hot weather has also brought some of my favorite global warming reporters out of hiding, and they have been all too eager to link today's weather events to manmade greenhouse gases. Of course, many of the most outspoken global warming alarmists and scientists have been happy to play along. The important point is that no one, not even the most committed alarmist, can claim that any percentage of the warm weather is due to manmade greenhouse gases. I will go into more detail in just a minute.

This is an inconvenient truth that global warming reporters have kept out of their headlines, and in some cases their stories as well.

Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press is a good guy. He is on the other side of this issue, but he is one of these guys I still like. He is one of the most prominent global warming reporters. He came out last week with another scary headline proclaiming: ``This US summer is what global warming looks like.''

Some quotes and stories appeared in Reuters, The Hill, and Politico. Yesterday morning Time magazine ran a piece by Bryan Walsh with the headline, ``Now Do You Believe in Global Warming?'' I was happy to see that Mr. Walsh began his article in Time magazine with a picture of my family in their igloo. He concluded his piece with:

We're living in an igloo in the summertime, and the ice

melting all around us.

It is kind of interesting that they try to talk about global warming, but all of a sudden they changed it to cooling.

This was in the New York Times. They said:

This summer has been conspicuously different in New York

City, not one 99-degree day in Central Park. Not a single day

that the temperature even approached 90. For just the second

time in 140 years of record keeping, the temperatures failed

to reach 90 in either June or July.

The daily average last month was at or below normal every

day but two. The temperature broke 80 on 16 days in New York.

So it goes on to say that the problem they are having is it is unusually cool. But that didn't inure to the benefit of the alarmists, so that wasn't used.

So it is time to take a trip down Memory Lane. Don't forget that Time is the same publication that told us in 1974 that we should be very concerned about the coming ice age.

There it is. Every magazine had it. Newsweek had the same thing. All the other magazines said another ice age is coming, and we are all going to die.

Since there is time to do this, I will mention one thing which is not in my notes. Think about how many times this has happened. Let's look at the last 100 years. We will start with 1895. From 1895 to 1925, we went through a 30-year period that was a cooling period. Everyone back then was saying another ice age is coming, and we are all going to die.

From 1925 to 1945, for that 20-year period, we went through a warming period. That is when they coined the phrase ``global warming.'' That was way back in the 1930s. From 1945 to 1975 we went into a cooling period. Again, we talked about how an ice age is coming. After that, we went into a warming period that went up to the turn of the century. Now it is actually going down into a cooling period again, but that was actually a chart.

I guess what I am saying is every 20 or 30 years, we go through this. We go through the same hysteria, and everyone goes crazy and says the world is coming to an end. The interesting thing about this is that the time in world history when we had the greatest surge of CO2 was right after World War II. That was in 1945, and that precipitated not a warming period with all of that CO2, but a cooling period that endured for 30 years. Those were the headlines in the paper.

Now 30 years later, during the height of the global warming movement, they changed their tune. The image that is sealed in everyone's mind is the Time magazine cover, which we have: ``Be Worried, Be Very Worried.'' There is the last polar bear standing on the last cube of ice. Everything is melting, and we are all going to die. Again, that is Time magazine.

If I were on the board of directors of Time magazine, I would probably do

the same thing. It is a competitive business, and they have to sell magazines. The truth is when we ask the alarmists directly, they will specifically link the recent weather events to human activity. How do we know this? We recently came across a reported conference held by a group called Climate Communication. This is a very liberal group. As their Web site confirmed, this call was held to spoonfeed talking points to reporters on how to link the heat over the past few weeks to manmade global warming.

To his credit, AP reporter Seth Borenstein asked the most important question of the call. He asked: What percentage of the recent warm weather can be attributed to manmade gases? I want to be completely accurate, so I would like to quote in full Borenstein's question as well as the answers he got from Dr. Michael Oppenheimer and Dr. Steven Running, two of the foremost global warming alarmist scientists. This is what Seth Borenstein said:

Let me try to put you more on the spot, Mike and Steve: I

know there's attribution--you haven't done attribution

studies, but if you ballparked it right now and had to put a

percentage number on this, on the percent that the heat wave,

the percentage of blame you can put on anthropogenic climate

change, on this current heat wave, and on the fires, what

percentage would the two of you use?

Dr. Oppenheimer, who is a scientist, said:

Come on, I'm not going to answer that. Yes, I will answer

it, and my answer is: I won't do it. You know, we have to do

things carefully, because if you don't, we are going to end

up with bogus information out there. People will start

disbelieving because you'll be more wrong, more often. This

is not the kind of thing I want to do off the top of my head.

Nor do I think it can be done, you know, convincingly without

really taking--doing careful analysis, so I'll pass on this

one and see if Steve has a different view.

Well, Dr. Steve Running said:

Well, I already got way too hypothetical on my last answer.

Yeah, it's . . . probably really dangerous for us to just lob

out a number.

Well, this goes on and on and on. I have all of this down. It is actually all in the record at this point, so it is redundant. He keeps trying to get them to say there is a percentage of chance that this warm weather is due to global warming.

Now, we have to stop for a minute because we have seen that Seth Borenstein was asking the inconvenient question. One of the moderators tried to step in and tell the AP reporter that his question was a bad one.

Let me quote that one again, Susan Hossel, moderator for the event, said:

Seth, most of the scientists I talk to say it is a

contributing factor and that's what we can say and that it's

really not even really a well-posed question to ask for a

percentage, because it just--what you're asking really is for

a model to determine the chances of this happening without

climate change or with climate change and models are not very

good.

So we see how he responded. He said:

I understand, I've been covering this for 20 years, I

understand. I don't need a lecture, thank you very much. What

I'm asking for is--

And he went on. Obviously, he was never able to get it.

Here is the irony: Their Web site specifically explains that the purpose of the call is to give reporters a link relating hot weather to human-caused global warming.

It states:

Climate Communication hosted a press conference featuring

experts discussing the connections between extreme heat and

climate change.

But when pressed, they couldn't make the link. Again, Borenstein asked a great question, a question that badly needed to be asked. Unfortunately, none of the information appeared in his article for the AP. Without that link, Borenstein was forced to make his article about what global warming could look like in the future. But in doing so, he left out any mention of uncertainty expressed by the scientist.

Borenstein quoted Chris Field, a leading author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That is the United Nations that started this whole thing, and they are the ones who were stacking the scientists. He is one of the individuals. According to Field, this report warns of ``unprecedented extreme weather events'' due to global warming. But, as usual, Borenstein failed to mention that even the IPCC, which normally heightens the fear factor as much as possible, admitted in that same March report that there is significant uncertainty regarding linking extreme weather events to human causes.

Also missing from the article was the mention of Borenstein's interview from climatologist Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Fortunately, she was good enough to post her answers on her blog since he didn't use it. Curry explained:

We saw these kinds of heat waves in the 1930's, and those

were definitely not caused by greenhouse gases. Weather

variability changes on multidecadal time scales, associated

with large ocean oscillations. I don't think that what we are

seeing this summer is outside the range of natural

variability for the past century. In terms of heat waves,

particularly in cities, urbanization can also contribute to

the warming.

There was another interesting part of the conference call that I think is worth mentioning. When ABC News reporter Bill Blakemore asked about the effect of La Nina and El Nino on today's hot weather, Dr. Oppenheimer was again uncomfortable about this question and said it was ``off message.'' Yet NOAA--that is, the N-O-A-A--came out yesterday with a different opinion. Andrew Revkin of the New York Times explained on his blog:

In a briefing and several postings today, the National

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reviewed the most

notable climate and weather events of 2011. Many of these

events--from an extreme East African drought to Australian

deluges--were significantly driven by a ``double-dip La

Nina'' cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean, agency

scientists said.

In other words, it is La Nina and El Nino that made the difference.

In yesterday's Tulsa World, there was an opinion piece that directly addressed this El Nino and La Nina debate and how it affects Oklahoma specifically; that is, my State of Oklahoma. The editorial mentions an interview in April of 2008 with Tulsa National Weather Service meteorologist Nicole McGavock regarding Oklahoma's record rainfall that month. McGavock said:

Don't go blaming global warming, but rather blame El Nino's

counterpart, La Nina. La Nina happens when the weather is

cooler near the equator along the Pacific Ocean.

It has nothing to do with global warming.

That same opinion piece mentioned another article published in December of 2011 which was about Oklahoma's drought-filled summer of 2011. In it, associate State climatologist Gary McManus said:

Did this hot summer happen due to global warming? [No.] I

think when we study this summer, we will find that we would

have had the warmest summer regardless of global warming.

With all this in mind, it is no wonder that when Time magazine asks the question, ``Now do you believe in global warming?'' the answer is resounding: The American people are no longer buying it. As the Washington Post recently reported, global warming is no longer an issue of concern for Americans, and one of the reasons is that the public doesn't trust those who try to use hot weather as proof of global warming. The public has clearly grown weary of the alarmists' fear campaigns. After all, they have been going on for 12 years.

Just how bad have things gotten for the global warming movement? Well, one indication is that no one is even talking about global warming except for myself and Representative Markey over in the House. As a Politico article said yesterday, Representative Markey accused Republicans of being silent on the threat of global warming and called for Republicans to hold hearings.

While Representative Markey is quick to accuse Republicans of silence, he says nothing about the silence we are hearing from the Democrats here in the Senate. We haven't heard anybody. I haven't heard the term ``global warming'' coming from any Senator. When was the last time anyone heard President Obama or the Democrats mention global warming? In fact, their campaign has failed so miserably that President Obama, running for reelection, is pretending to support oil and gas to gain votes.

The irony is that the President, who came into office promising to slow the rise of the oceans and all that, has presided over the complete collapse of the global warming movement. Since

President Obama took office nearly 4 years ago, not one global warming cap-and-trade bill has been debated on the Senate floor. In fact, if anything, they are regressing in support for their pet issue. Last year 64 Senators went on record as wanting to rein in the Obama EPA's global warming regulations.

We have said several times that there have been numerous bills introduced ever since the Kyoto Treaty was never submitted for ratification. That was back in the early 1990s. Ever since that time, there have been numerous bills that would be cap-and-trade bills and they have gone down. Each time, they go down by a greater percentage than the one before did. In fact, if anything, they are regressing in their support.

So the far-left environmental community has clearly been instructed to keep quiet, although sometimes they can't help themselves and they get into trouble, like 350.org that I referred to. They are no doubt assured that if President Obama is reelected, he will do everything he can to achieve his global warming agenda through regulations because the American people have rejected legislation. That is what has happened. Actually, the cost of it, which is not controversial--it is because people recognize and nobody has actually refuted the fact that if it were to pass either by legislation or by regulation, it would cost the American people between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. So people now realize that and know we can't afford to do something that really is not going to accomplish anything.

Anyway, the Obama administration is already doing--we have identified right now some $68 billion that he has, through regulations, been able to have on all of his climate agenda. So it has already been very expensive. Nobody is really aware of it, but nonetheless that is what is happening. He just doesn't want the American people to know it. How can he convince them that so much economic pain is necessary now that the global warming movement has completely lost its trust in the public? That would stop some of the usual suspects from continuing to try to drum up global warming hysteria, but we wouldn't count on Al Gore coming out of hiding to help or President Obama saying anything to back him up--at least not now, before the election.

Just the other day, George Mason University, I believe it was, did a polling of all of the 480 TV meteorologists. Only 19 percent of them said we are having global warming due to manmade gases. Now, that is a major change from before. So the trendline is going back the other way. The polling has definitely gone the other way.

Back to last weekend's failed effort to blame hot weather on global warming, I would like to mention three things on which scientists agree.

First of all, we can't blame global warming on one event. Let me share with my colleagues what Roger Pelke, professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, said:

Over the long term, there is no evidence that disasters are

getting worse because of climate change.

Judith Curry, whom I already mentioned, is a well-established scientist. She said:

I have been completely unconvinced by any of the arguments

. . . that attributes a single extreme weather event, a

cluster of extreme weather events, or statistics of extreme

weather events to anthropogenic forcing.

Myles Allen, the head of the Climate Dynamics Group at the University of Oxford's Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department, said:

When Al Gore said . . . that scientists now have clear

proof that climate change is directly responsible for the

extreme and devastating floods, storms, and droughts . . . my

heart sank.

I was on ``The Rachel Maddow Show.'' She doesn't have Republicans on very often. She is one of my favorite liberals, and I enjoy being on. I found out then that Bill Nye, her science guy, actually is one--one of the things he states is, don't fall into the trap of trying to say that because somebody is at some place that is very, very hot, that somehow that supports global warming. In fact, Dana Milbank, a Washington Post columnist who is a major Maddow contributor, said:

When climate activists make the dubious claim, as a

Canadian environmental group did, that global warming is to

blame for the lack of snow at the Winter Olympics in

Vancouver, then they invite similarly specious conclusions

about Washington's snow . . . Argument-by-anecdote isn't

working.

That was Dana Milbank, who is really on the other side of this issue.

So I mentioned that there are three things. One is a fact that is incontrovertible, that people agree on, which is that one or two events aren't going to reflect climate change or global warming.

The second thing is the cost. Years ago when the Kyoto Treaty was up, I wasn't sure which way to go. I assumed the scientists were all together on this, only to find out they weren't.

One thing we did find out when we got a report from several universities, including MIT, was that the cost of this, if we were to pass any of the bills, would have been between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. What I always do when I hear about billions and trillions of dollars is I try to, if I can, find out how that affects my family and the State of Oklahoma.

Back when we had the largest tax increase in 1993 called the Clinton- Gore tax increase, they increased marginal rates, the death tax, capital gains tax and all of that, and it was at that time the largest tax increase in three decades. We were all pretty outraged about it. Yet that was a $32 billion tax increase. Here we are talking about a $300 billion to $400 billion tax increase.

The last thing I would say is that if we have a tax increase like this, what do we get for it?

I sometimes appreciate--in fact, I always appreciate the Administrator of the EPA, Lisa Jackson. She is an appointee of President Obama. I asked her this question on live TV in one of our committee hearings: If you guys are going to do this by regulation or if you are going to have cap and trade and punish the American people with all of the cost of this and everything else, if they are successful, if that happened, would this reduce the CO2 worldwide? Her answer: No, it wouldn't. Because this isn't where the problem is. The problem is in China and Mexico and India. One could carry that argument on out further and conclude that if we have that kind of a regulation in this country and drive our manufacturing base overseas, they would go to places such as China and India where there are no emissions restrictions, so it would have the effect of actually increased CO2.

Anyway, I appreciate very much Time magazine coming out and bringing up the igloo again. It is a thing of beauty, and it is very meaningful to me, and I think it told a story that a lot of people needed to hear, and they have heard it now.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from Arkansas now be recognized to deliver remarks regarding a casualty from his home State--for which I will take this opportunity to send my condolences and the condolences of the people of Rhode Island-- and at the conclusion of his remarks that I be recognized.

Mr. President, I rise to speak about the DISCLOSE Act of 2012, legislation that will shine some much needed light into the flood of secret money that is now polluting our elections. I would like to open with thanks to Senators Chuck Schumer, Mike Bennet, Al Franken, Jeff Merkley, Jeanne Shaheen, and Tom Udall for their hard work in our task force that developed this legislation. I look forward to continuing to work with them through this debate.

On Thursday, Majority Leader Reid moved to proceed to this vital piece of legislation, and we will vote on it this evening. I thank the leader. I and many of my colleagues are looking forward to the opportunity to make the case for this important measure. But in a sense, for the American public, the case has already been made. As anyone who watches television knows, our airwaves are filled with political attack ads. The organizations paying for many of these ads have patriotic and benign-sounding names with words such as ``prosperity'' and ``freedom'' and ``future'' frequently to be found. These names sound harmless, but all too often the ads are actually paid for by secret special interests, such as billionaires and wealthy corporations seeking secret special influence in our democracy. In the process, they drown out the voices of regular American families who wish to participate in elections.

The Republican leader indicated we were going after the impression of mischief where there is none. Many Americans certainly have the impression of mischief.

As U.S.A. Today put it last week in an editorial supporting this DISCLOSE Act:

Everybody's watching what's expected to be by far the most

expensive presidential campaign in history, and not without a

dose of horror. Freed by the Supreme Court from spending

limits, all manner of special interests are opening the

spigots to buy influence.

Here is how my home State paper, the Providence Journal, explained the Citizens United decision that unleashed this torrent of special interest money.

The [Citizens United] ruling will mean that more than ever,

big-spending economic interests will determine who gets

elected. More money will especially pour into relentless

attack campaigns. Free speech for most

individuals will suffer because their voices will count for

even less than they do now. They will simply be drowned out

by the big money.

I think the Providence Journal hit the nail right on the head. What has happened since the Citizens United decision has, in fact, proved them right. Senator John McCain said earlier this year:

The United States Supreme Court--in what I think is one of

the worst decisions in history--struck down the restrictions

in the so-called McCain-Feingold law, and a lot of people

don't agree with that, but I predicted when the United States

Supreme Court, with their absolute ignorance of what happens

in politics, struck down that law, that there would be a

flood of money into campaigns, not transparent, unaccounted

for, and this is exactly what is happening.

Senator McCain is right. This is exactly what is happening. It is not an impression of mischief, it is mischief on the loose.

Richard Posner, a leading conservative legal scholar and a Federal judge, recently said:

Our political system is pervasively corrupt due to our

Supreme Court taking away campaign-contribution restrictions

on the basis of the First Amendment.

Our political system is pervasively corrupt. This is from a conservative Federal judge.

The impact of Citizens United has been very clear. In the 2010 midterm elections, the first after Citizens United, there was a more than a fourfold increase in expenditures from super PACs and other outside groups compared to 2006--$69 million up to $305 million--with nearly three-quarters of political advertising coming from sources that were prohibited from spending money back in 2006. Also, in 2010, those 501(c)(4)s and (c)(6) not-for-profit organizations spent more than $135 million in unlimited and secret political contributions. Anonymous spending rose from 1 percent of outside spending in 2006 to 44 percent in 2010.

We are already seeing the influence of money on the 2012 elections. Super PACs and other outside groups have spent over $150 million in this election cycle, about twice of what was spent in the same period of 2008 during the last Presidential election.

Nondisclosing groups, said the New York Times, ``have accounted for two-thirds of the political advertising bought by the biggest outside spenders so far in the 2012 election cycle . . . with close to $100 million in issue ads.''

Campaigns are no longer waged by candidates and parties fighting over ideas, they are now waged by shadowy political attack groups posing as social welfare organizations run by the likes of Karl Rove and other political operatives and fueled by millions of undisclosed dollars from secret special interests. When these secret special interests take over our elections this way, it drowns out the voices of regular individual Americans. It also puts in jeopardy some of the key pillars of a strong middle class, pillars such as Medicare, Social Security, and Pell grants that have paved the way for generations to achieve the American dream but have always been the targets of special interests.

These special interests have motives. They have motives to spend this kind of money. If those motives were good for America and were welcomed by the average American, they wouldn't need and wouldn't want to keep them secret. We need to ask ourselves a very important question: What are they hiding? Why do they demand secrecy? Whatever the answer, one thing is clear: Americans who worry that Washington is too beholden to special interests now need to be concerned more than ever. Hang onto your wallets, here come the special interests, and you won't even know who they are.

As recently reported in the New York Times, secret spending groups have accounted for two-thirds of this advertising. Two-thirds of ad spending from groups, other than candidates or parties, has come from secretive corporations and billionaires whose names and agendas the voters may never know and who will have no accountability for how that money is spent. Impression of mischief, indeed.

Of course, when we don't have accountability, there is no limit to what people will say. One of the restraints on the vitriol and the filth that is so often part of the American political debate is that candidates have to stand by their ads. If someone says something that is awful, if they engage in relentless negative attacks, voters may charge them a price for that. They may find that unwelcome. That, of course, disappears when the name behind the ad is attached to no living person or corporation. It is just an entity, a sham, a phony, a shell.

How has this worked out? Not well for the American public. An April study found that about 70 percent of ads in this election cycle have been negative. That is up from only 9 percent through the same period in 2008. In 2008, 9 percent of ads in that time period had been negative. In this cycle, 70 percent have been negative. Over the last 6 months, if we look at the four top-spending political 501(c)(4) organizations, the ones that don't have to disclose their donors, they spent an estimated 85 percent of their election spending on ads containing deceptions. So 70 percent of the stuff out there is negative, up from only 9 percent, and 85 percent of the big spenders are spending their money on ads that have been determined to be deceptive.

The names of the organizations sound lovely: Americans for Prosperity, American Future Fund, American Energy Alliance, and Crossroads GPS. Without knowing who funds these shadowy groups, the American voter has no idea what mischief they are up to.

This is all a result of the Supreme Court's disastrous and misguided decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This is the decision that opened the floodgates to unlimited and secret corporate and special interest money pouring into our elections.

This chart shows how easy it is under our current system for wealthy interests to skirt existing disclosure rules and spend secret millions in election ads. This amounts to a form of legalized political money laundering or, to use the phrase Senator McCain and I used in our brief to the Supreme Court, ``identity laundering.''

Super PACs are supposed to disclose their donors under current law, but that can sometimes be weeks or months after a deceptive ad runs. If a donor wants to avoid even that disclosure, it can set up a shell corporation, which may be nothing more than a P.O. box someplace, and send the money through that super PAC through a shell corporation without a real name showing up on a disclosure form. They just launder it through the shell corporation, and the next thing they know the money is doing their work.

They can also pass the money through a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. I put the words ``social welfare'' in quotes because that is the IRS phrase that is used for these organizations. There is very little social welfare being accomplished by the big political donor groups known as social welfare associations. The IRS gives nonprofit status to these groups whose primary purpose--and in many cases their only purpose--is to shield big spenders from having their identities disclosed. In many cases, these 501(c)(4) so-called social welfare groups are so closely affiliated with the super PACs that they have all the same staff and the same office space. It is a 501(c)(4) independent social welfare organization for the IRS with the same staff and the same office space as a super PAC. Please. Of course, the 501(c)(4) groups still don't have to disclose their donors, even when they are the same staff and the same office as the super PAC.

On this chart, we see the money raised by one of them, Citizens United, by Republican political operatives, including Karl Rove. They raised money through the Crossroads PAC. It is a super PAC, and it is supposed to disclose its donor. It has attached to it Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)(4) group that is not the super PAC and it can maintain complete secrecy for its donors. Guess which one has raised the most money. It is an easy question. It is the 501(c)(4) group that doesn't have to disclose its donors. The group raised $76.8 million through 2011 as opposed to only $46.4 million raised by its sister super PAC. This is by no means a unique situation.

As the New York Times wrote in an editorial last Sunday in support of the DISCLOSE Act, ``Corporations love the secrecy provided by Mr. Rove's group because it protects them from scrutiny

by nosy shareholders and consumers.'' They want a big influence on elections but without leaving any tracks.

An unnamed corporate lobbyist told the newspaper Politico earlier this year that nondisclosure is always preferred by corporate donors. Why is it preferred? Because it makes it impossible for the public and law enforcement to track down the corrupting influence of the money that these corporations spend in elections. The DISCLOSE Act puts an end to this nonsense. It puts an end to using 501(c)(4) groups and shell corporations to shield the identities of big donors.

One thing that should not be lost in the discussion of anonymous spending is the fact that there is one person to whom this spending is never anonymous; that is, the candidate who is either benefited or punished. Although the donors have managed to hide their identities from the public, they can sure tell the candidate how much money they are putting in the candidate's super PAC and, by the way, what position they want that candidate to take on issues. What this creates is a perfect recipe for corruption--wealthy corporations, individuals, and special interests secretly spending millions of dollars to influence a candidate in ways the public never sees.

A rich donor can secretly threaten massive spending against a candidate without even putting up the money. If the candidate doesn't take the right position on an issue, then they can pull the trigger, but they can make the threat quietly.

Political scientist Norm Ornstein recently said:

I had this tale told to me by a number of lawmakers. You're

sitting in your office and a lobbyist comes in and says,

``I'm working for Americans for a Better America. And I can't

tell you who's funding them, but I can tell you they really,

really want this amendment in the bill.'' And who knows what

they'll do. They have more money than God.

If the candidate complies, of course, the expenditure is never made, there is no paper trail, no trace of that threat. Yet the system has been corrupted. Let's also dispense with the fiction that this spending is independent. The whole rationale for unlimited spending was that it was to be done independently of candidate campaigns. The reality is that super PACs are anything but independent. Campaigns and super PACS share fundraising lists, donors, former staff, and consultants. Candidates appear at fundraisers for their super PACs. Super PACs recycle ads that were originally run by the candidates. They share film. They are free to act as the evil twins of candidate campaigns, as one FEC Commissioner put it, raising unlimited, secret money, and then spending it on massive amounts of advertising--most of it negative--to benefit their preferred candidates.

Our campaign finance system is broken, and it lends itself to corruption in new and unprecedented ways. Immediate action is required to fix it. Today we are debating a bill that will at least bring some transparency and accountability into this election spending. This should not be a Democratic issue or a Republican issue, and in the past, it has not been. It has always had bipartisan support because it is about protecting our Democratic process. We need to pass the DISCLOSE Act now.

The USA Today editorial said:

Citizens United left the public only one way to protect

itself from the rising threat: Disclosure. At the federal

level, this would be achieved by the DISCLOSE Act.

I thank USA Today for supporting this bill.

The Supreme Court also made it crystal clear in this very Citizens United decision that disclosure was an appropriate and even a necessary part of a healthy campaign finance system. Here is what Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, writing for the majority:

[P]rompt disclosure of expenditures can provide

shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold

corporations and elected officials accountable for their

positions and supporters. Shareholders can determine whether

their corporation's political speech advances the

corporation's interest in making profits, and citizens can

see whether elected officials are in the pocket of so-called

moneyed interests.

The new version of the DISCLOSE Act will do exactly this. It says nothing more and nothing less than when corporations and other wealthy interests spend money--more than $10,000--to influence our elections, their identities must be disclosed.

There is no question where the American people stand on this issue. Americans of all political stripes are disgusted by the influence of unlimited, anonymous corporate cash in our elections and by campaigns that succeed or fail depending on how many billionaires the candidate has in his pocket--or advisers, perhaps. More and more, people feel their government responds only to wealthy and corporate interests. They see their jobs disappear. They see their wages stagnate. They see bailouts and special deals for the big guys. And they lose faith that their elected officials will listen to them.

Six in ten Americans say the middle class will not catch a break in this economy until we reduce the influence of lobbyists, big banks, and big donors. Seven in ten Americans, nearly, including a majority of both Democrats and Republicans, agree that ``new rules that let corporations, unions, and people give unlimited money to super PACs will lead to corruption.'' Notwithstanding what the NRA and the chamber and other big DC lobbying powerhouses want, they are at odds with the regular American people. Indeed, one in four Americans says they are actually less likely to vote because big donors to super PACs have so much more influence over elected officials than average Americans.

These numbers should be a call to arms for anyone who believes our American democracy is one of our world's shining jewels and should be scrupulously, carefully, ardently protected. Indeed, people are answering this call to arms in numbers that are increasing every day.

I have with me today here on the Senate floor 213,000 Americans-- 213,000 citizen cosponsors of this DISCLOSE Act, which were collected by CREDO Action. My colleagues can leaf through them and see people from Apple Valley, MN; from San Francisco, CA; from Ashland, OR; from Austin, TX; from Long Beach, NY; from Imperial, NE; from Yorktown Heights, NY; from Brick, NJ; from Schaumburg, IL; people from all across the country--nearly a quarter of a million of them now--coming from all 50 States, and more than 1,000 Rhode Islanders are in this group. Unlike the corporations and the billionaires who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy our elections and who insist on doing it in secret, these regular people are unashamed to stand up for what they believe in. Their pride in civic engagement reflects the best values of America, and their numbers show that this is an issue where a broad cross-section of Americans demand a change to what is happening in our elections.

Justice Antonin Scalia has written:

Requiring people to stand up in public for their political

acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is

doomed.

Our friends who have signed on as citizen cosponsors have that courage, and the biggest campaign spenders in the world should as well. Frankly, even those big campaign spenders should be patriotic enough to understand, as Justice Scalia did, that democracy is doomed without civic courage, and they should step up on their own. But, instead, they are hiding behind the rules and hiding their identities and trying to buy influence.

I will conclude by saying that prior to Citizens United, there was a long bipartisan tradition supporting laws that require disclosure of spending in elections. This bipartisan consensus may be reemerging. Senator John McCain of Arizona and I recently filed with the Supreme Court a brief that urged the Court to reconsider the flawed premise of its decision in Citizens United--the false premise that independent expenditures can't lead to corruption or the appearance of corruption. As the statistics about anonymous spending and public perception I have cited make clear, this premise has been fully discredited.

Although the Supreme Court declined this opportunity to put our elections back on a saner path, I am proud to have worked in a bipartisan fashion on that brief with Senator McCain, who has long been a leader in this Congress and in this country on campaign finance issues. I hope our partnership will mark the beginning of greater cooperation across party lines on this issue of vital importance to our democracy.

There are some misconceptions about the act that have colored the public debate. We plan to explain during the course of the debate why the critics of this bill have gotten so many things just plain wrong. This act contains only the most basic provisions requiring outside groups to disclose campaign-related fundraising and spending. The legislation has been streamlined from the DISCLOSE Act that nearly passed the Senate in 2010. It places fewer burdens on covert administrations. It contains no prohibitions on spending, no special exemptions for any group or type of group. Contrary to what the Republican leader said, it does not require grassroots organizations to disclose their donors, and it treats every organization exactly the same right across the board.

Some have complained, such as a Republican witness in the Rules Committee hearing on this bill, that the so-called stand-by-your-ad requirements originally in the bill were too burdensome. He described them, actually, as radical. So we removed them. We have tried to accommodate. I know that many of my colleagues, including Senator Ron Wyden, who authored this stand-by-your-ad legislation and who has heroically fought for it for many years, remained very supportive of these provisions, and I hope we will be able to reintroduce them at another time. But we didn't, so that complaint should be closed off. Some complain that this was just an attempt to influence this election. Well, its effective date is January 1, 2013, so it will not, to the regret of many, influence this election.

According to Republican former FEC Chairman Trevor Potter, the DISCLOSE Act of 2012 is ``appropriately targeted, narrowly tailored, clearly constitutional and desperately needed.''

I stand ready to work with any of my colleagues, Democrats or Republicans, who want to make this bill better, but we can't use complaints--particularly unjustified complaints--as an excuse to do nothing.

While the status quo of unlimited secret money may work to benefit some politicians for the moment, in the long run it will hurt us all, regardless of party. Unlimited money is not a force that anyone can ultimately hope to control, and unlimited secret money is even more dangerous. More important, the American people, who are already beginning to lose faith in our electoral system, can reasonably fear that their elected officials will only care about the anonymous donors writing eight-figure checks in deals and gifts that they will never see.

Many of my Republican colleagues in the Senate know this, and they have supported disclosure in the past. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, for instance, was once a great advocate for disclosure. As he said in 2000, ``Republicans are in favor of disclosure,'' adding, ``Why would a little disclosure be better than a lot of disclosure?'' That question is as timely today as it was then.

I hope my Republican colleagues will join us in passing this important piece of legislation. Help us restore the fundamental principle of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The Washington Post wrote yesterday in an editorial supporting this DISCLOSE Act:

We'd like to see a few courageous Republicans rise in the

Senate on Monday and declare: Enough is enough.

If our friends across the aisle decide to block this legislation which clearly reflects the will of the American people, I am prepared to force this issue by debating this bill long into the night. If they are unwilling to join us in our mission to shine a light on secret money elections, we will keep the lights on here.

I urge my colleagues to support the DISCLOSE Act of 2012.

I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I wanted to come to the floor today because of the good news I have heard recently, that the Senate is going to spend the next couple of weeks, maybe the whole month, talking about tax policy. I think that is very encouraging, because this is one of the issues I was hoping we would deal with early on, when I got here last year. And I am, quite frankly, surprised it has taken this much time, a year and a half, to pivot to this issue. I am hopeful--I don't know if it has been determined yet--but I am hopeful on this legislation currently before the Senate, the minority will be given an opportunity

to introduce ideas. I think that is important for this place to work well.

I have read the history of this distinguished place and it only works well, it only functions when the ideas of both sides are allowed to be heard. I know we can count votes here, and from time to time we may have a chance to pass a few things, but when one is in the minority, as I am, it is harder to get ideas passed. But I would love to at least get a vote on some of these ideas we are hoping to push forward, and our hope is that will happen. So let's hope that works out.

What I want to remind us all about a little bit today is what our goal is. We can't arrive at the right solutions if we don't know exactly what it is we are trying to get to. Our goal, I believe--and there is a consensus now throughout this country, and it is actually something that unites both political parties--needs to be to grow the economy. That is our goal, to grow the economy. And what will result from growing the economy is that good will happen for everybody.

How does the economy grow is the first fundamental question we have to answer. The economy grows when two things happen: either someone starts a business or someone grows their existing business. That is what leads to economic growth. It is that simple. Someone starts a new business because they think they can make money at it or someone goes into their existing business and says, I think we can make more money, let's grow this thing. That is how the economy grows.

So the issue before us here as Federal policymakers has to be what can the Federal Government do to help that kind of growth. In essence, what the Federal Government can do is to encourage people and make it easier for people to either start a business or to grow their business. So if that is our goal, then every time a measure comes before this body--tax policy, regulatory policy--what we should ask ourselves is, does this make it easier or harder for someone to start a business? Does it make it easier or harder for someone to grow an existing business? Does this measure make it easier or harder for the economy to grow? Because if we are indeed united by this goal of growing the economy, that should be the measure of anything we take on. And it is through that lens that I want to examine some of what we are talking about right now. Because it seems to me, at least in some of the policies I have heard proposed this week, that maybe some folks have the goal wrong. Because if we closely examine some of these policies, it sounds as if the goal is, let's take a limited economy that isn't growing and let's divide it. And primarily it sounds like, let's take this limited economy that isn't growing and let's allow us to take money from people who are maybe making a little too much, give it to the government, and the government can then spend it on behalf of people who maybe aren't making enough.

I know that may sound appealing to the folks who are among those Americans who aren't making enough money, but I want you to know something: It never works. That idea never works. Here is why it never works. It actually never works because, first of all, the money doesn't get to you. When you give government money to spend, it invariably doesn't usually spend it very well. In fact, when you give government money to spend, the people who end up getting that money are the people who can afford to hire people to come to Washington and influence how the money is spent. So sometimes the money never even gets to you, if in fact you allow the government to do this.

But it is more complicated than that. It can actually cost people their jobs, and here is why. How you create businesses or how you expand an existing business is pretty straightforward. Someone is in business, someone makes some money or gets a hold of some money and they decide to take that money and invest it. They use the money they have made and they reinvest it in their business so the business grows or they use the money they have made to start a brandnew business. This stuff works. This is how the American economy has grown and how we became the most prosperous people on Earth.

I know this works not just because I read about it in a magazine. I know it works because I have lived it. As I have detailed and talked about in the past on this floor, my father was a bartender. He worked at a hotel as a bartender. My mother had a lot of different jobs, but for a while she worked as a maid in a hotel. The reason I talk about this is to explain how and why my mom and dad had a job that paid them money to raise us and give us a chance to do all the things my siblings and I were able to do. Someone made some money, they took that money and opened up this hotel. That is why my parents had a job. They didn't have a job because the President of the United States back in 1965 or 1975 gave them a job. They had a job because someone who made money took that money and used it to start a new business or to grow an existing business and hire them. They also had a job because other people who had money decided to use that money to go on vacation and they came to Miami Beach or to Las Vegas, when I lived in Las Vegas, and they spent that money at these hotels.

The point is, people had money, and they either invested it or spent it. And that allowed a bartender and a maid--my mother and father--to raise my siblings and me and to give us opportunity. That was true in the 1950s, in the 1960s, in the 1970s, in the 1980s, in the 1990s, and it is still true. That is what is needed to grow this economy. And the problem is, if we go after these people, if we go after the money they have made and give it to the government, maybe they will decide not to open that new business or maybe they will decide this is not the year to take that vacation or instead of taking the 5-day vacation, they take the 3-day vacation. And you know who gets hurt? The bartender and the maid and the people who work in these places. Because money has to go somewhere. If you are taking it out of the hands of the people who invest it and spend it, they can't invest it or spend it, and it is people who are trying to make it--like my parents were--who get hurt by it.

So we have to get our goal right. Because if our goal is to grow the economy, we don't have to call trick plays. What we can do at the Federal level to grow the economy is pretty straightforward. All we have to do is talk to the people who grow the economy. If we go out and talk to the people who have a great idea and are trying to start a business, they will tell us what they are looking for. It is pretty straightforward stuff: tax reform.

What do we mean by tax reform? Simple. We want a Tax Code that is stable, predictable, and affordable. Of course we have to have taxes. Government needs revenue to be able to pay for what we all expect from government. But it has to be a predictable system and it has to be an affordable system. If taxes get too high, people may decide not to invest it in this country or to leave it in the bank, and that doesn't help anybody. So the point is we need to have a Tax Code that is stable, predictable, and affordable.

We need regulations that are the same: stable, affordable, and predictable. Look, we need regulations; right? I want this water to be clean. I don't want the water to poison me. We don't want to walk out on the street and breathe in air that will hurt us. There is a role for regulation. The problem is that most Federal regulations are set by bureaucrats who work for the government, and all they think about is can this regulation maybe help. They do not think at all about the impact of that regulation on businesses. That is not part of the equation. When they sit down and write a regulation, that is not part of the equation at all. So we end up having these regulations that may not even help that much but hurt a lot; that help wipe out entire industries, but the impact on helping the environment or whatever else is nebulous at best. So we have to change that.

That is why we need to pass a law here like the REINS Act, which says any regulation that has an economic impact beyond a certain amount of money should have to be approved by elected people, who are accountable, who have to measure both the effectiveness of the regulation but also whether it is going to cost jobs or wipe out an industry. Because that is important too. Protecting our industries and our sources of job creation is as important as some of these other things we

are trying to protect through regulations and they have to be balanced against one another. We do not want to simply be making decisions in a vacuum.

Along those lines, something that is both a tax and a regulation is ObamaCare. Look, we have a health insurance problem in America. There is no denying that. But there are better ways to deal with it. The problem is this bill that passed has created a tremendous amount of uncertainty. For example, it says if you have more than 50 full-time employees, there are certain requirements you have to meet. So imagine if you are a company with 48 or 49 employees. This may not be the year to hire the 50th. And maybe you are going to be the 50th, but now you don't get hired or, worse, maybe you will decide this is the year to turn all your employees into part-time employees. That is not good for the workers. Yet that is the impact this law is having, not to mention the fact it is a tax increase.

That is what the IRS does. The IRS collects taxes. And guess who you have to prove you have insurance to. And not just any old insurance, but insurance they deem to be acceptable. The IRS. Millions of Americans now every year will have to prove to the IRS they have insurance or they will owe the IRS money. That is a tax, and that is not going to help job creation, especially if you are a small business.

I outlined this last week. Imagine a small business run by a husband and wife with two kids, and the business--not them, but their business--makes $95,000 a year. It will cost them between $4,000 to $6,000 to buy health insurance. If they do not, they will owe the IRS $2,000. Tell me that is good for that business. Or imagine if you are thinking about going into business and you realize this is what is going to happen to you and you decide not to go into business. That is not good for growth. That is why this law needs to be repealed and it needs to be replaced.

Something else we need in this country is a pro-American energy policy. Do people realize the American innovator has come up with this technology over the last 5 years that now has made us a very energy- rich country? I don't know if people fully understand how energy-rich America is. If you want a small glimpse of what it can mean to our future, go to North Dakota. They are having a jobs boom. They can't find enough people to work there.

Energy is important and we need to start behaving like an energy-rich country, with a true all-of-the-above strategy where the energies we choose are decided by the marketplace and not by politicians. When politicians decide which energy source to use, you know who wins? The people with the best lobbyists. The people with the best lobby. The people with the most political influence. That is how we got a Solyndra-type situation, where a company that was going to go bankrupt got all this money--your tax dollars--and meanwhile America is sitting on over 100-some-odd years of natural gas at our disposal and no concise national energy policy to utilize it.

Let me tell you why energy matters. If we can get energy costs down and stable and predictable, manufacturing will start coming back to America. That is one of the leading costs of manufacturing, energy. We are an energy-rich country. Some of those factories that closed, we can actually get them to come back here. Imagine what that would do for economic growth, not to mention the fact that America could potentially now begin to sell overseas as well, creating yet another industry and all the things that come with it.

How about free and fair trade? There is an emerging middle class all over the world now. One of the great things that has happened over the last 20 years is that all over the world there are now people who a decade ago were living in poverty and can now afford to buy the products we invent and build, people all over the world, by the way, who can now afford to take vacations. And do you know where they want to come? To the United States of America. They want to come to Florida. They also want to come here.

I think that is fantastic, that now there are millions of people all over the world who can afford to visit the United States and leave their money at our hotels, at our restaurants, and at our amusement parks. That creates jobs, that creates growth, free and fair trade, that allows the American people to build things we can sell overseas to other places and lowers the cost of buying certain things here.

Last year, we ratified the free trade agreement with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. We are already seeing the economic benefits of that in south Florida. Imagine if we were able do that with more countries in a free and fair way. It has to be fair.

One last thing we could probably do to help grow this economy is deal with the long-term debt. And that is what it is, it is a long-term debt problem that hovers all over all of this conversation and creates uncertainty. People are afraid--especially people with lots of money are afraid--to invest in the American economy because they look at this debt problem, they look at this political process's inability to deal with it, and they think, Do you know what. That country is destined for confiscatory tax rates. They are going where Europe is going. We don't want to invest in a country that is going to wind up like Europe in 5 years. That is why we have to deal with the long-term debt, and the sooner the better.

To deal with the long-term debt, by the way, you have to deal with what is causing it. That is why it is so important we save Medicare. Medicare is a very important program. My mother is on Medicare. I would never support anything that hurts my mother or people like her. But people in my generation need to understand that if we want to keep Medicare the way it is for our parents and if we want Medicare to even exist when we retire, Medicare is going to have to look different for us, for 41-year-olds. We have to save Medicare. And to deal with the long-term debt, we have to deal with that. That is what is driving part of the debt. That is not being driven by foreign aid, which is less than 1 percent of our budget. The debt is not being driven by food stamp programs. The debt is not being driven by defense spending.

Look, if money is being misspent or wasted, it is never a good idea to do that. If there are ways to save money on foreign aid, we should save it. If there are ways to save money in the food stamp program, we should save it. If there are ways to save money in the defense budget, we should save it. But that is not what is driving our long-term debt. To pretend we are going to get 100 percent of our savings from 25 or 20 percent of our budget leads to the kind of catastrophic cuts we talk about in this town, because no one wants to touch the big issues that have to be dealt with.

What would happen if we did these six things? Let's say that tomorrow, overnight, magically these things happened: We got real tax reform, real regulatory reform, we repealed and replaced ObamaCare, we had a pro-American energy strategy, we expanded free and fair trade, and we had a plan in place that began to deal with the long-term debt in a serious and sustainable way. Let me tell you what would happen: explosive economic growth, primarily by the creation of jobs.

Do you know what more jobs means? It means, No. 1, more taxpayers. It means you can now generate revenue for government to pay for what we all want government to do, and you don't have to raise tax rates to do that. It means you have more taxpayers who are now paying into the tax system who give you the revenue you need to bring the debt under control. Everything gets easier if the economy grows. The debt gets easier, our budgets get easier.

Jobs also mean more customers for your business. If someone is unemployed, it is hard for them to spend money. It is hard for them to buy a house, much less the things that go in it. It is hard for them to take vacations. More jobs means more stability for your business or for the place you work in. More jobs means more taxpayers, it means more customers for your business. And, by the way, it means a more stable society, a place where hard work can earn them a decent wage so they can save money for their kids' college, so they can save money for their retirement, so they can buy a home and furnish it, so they can afford to take a couple weeks vacation a year with their families. Millions of Americans can't do that anymore.

Millions of Americans have done everything we have asked of them. They

went to school, they graduated. They were told if they did that, they could find a job that paid them a decent wage, and they are struggling to do that now.

By the way, all of the strategies for growth aren't at the Federal level. It is important that States take on the issue of education reform. It is important for us as parents to be honest with our kids. In the 21st century, it is going to be hard to find a job if all you have is a high school diploma. It is that simple.

If you look at the unemployment rate between people who have a college degree or a post-high school degree and those who don't, it is stunning. It is stunning. If you don't have more than a high school education, you are going to struggle to succeed in this new century. We have to let our kids understand that. It is our job as parents and as a community to do that.

By the way, it is important for us to work with the States, as I outlined earlier, to modernize our education system. Why have we stigmatized career education? Why can't we graduate kids from high school with both a diploma and an industry certification and a career? We need to begin to teach our kids to compete with the world, not just with other States. These are other things that have to happen as well.

The point I wanted to drive today is we need to remind ourselves of what the goal is here. The goal is growth. The goal is, What can we do at the Federal level to help grow the economy? Ultimately, the economy grows because of the private sector, because someone who has made some money takes that money and invests it by starting a new business or by growing their existing business. We should find ways to make that easier and encourage people to do that. That has to be our goal. It doesn't require trick plays; it doesn't require some complicated new gimmick. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. The American people haven't run out of good ideas. Americans haven't forgotten how to start businesses or even entire new industries. Even as I speak to you right now, I am 100 percent convinced that within walking distance of this building there is someone somewhere drawing up the great next American company business plan on the back of a napkin or a scrap piece of paper. And if we give them a chance to do it, they are going to do it.

We are still the same people we have always been. There is nothing wrong with the American people. They just need a little help from their government. I think if we get our goals right around here, we can do a few simple but important things that allow Americans to do, once again, what we do better than any country or any people in the history of the world, and that is create prosperity and create opportunity.

Madam President, I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.