National Park Service Critical Authorities Act of 2012

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation, along with my friend and able colleague, Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, that would create a national campaign at the Department of Health and Human Services to bring attention to congenital diaphragmatic hernia.

What is CDH? It is a birth defect that occurs when the fetal diaphragm fails to fully develop, allowing abdominal organs to migrate up into the chest.

This invasion of organs--including the bowel, stomach, spleen, and liver--may severely limit the growth of a baby's lungs.

Regrettably, some have recommended terminating the pregnancy when a woman learns that her unborn child has CDH.

This is an important issue, and makes promoting awareness of this birth defect and the positive outcomes of good treatment especially important.

CDH will normally be diagnosed by prenatal ultrasound as early as the 16th week of pregnancy. That is important. If undiagnosed before birth, the baby may be born in a facility that is not equipped to treat its compromised respiratory system because many CDH babies need to be placed on a heart-lung bypass machine, which is not available in many hospitals.

The lungs of a baby with CDH are often too small, biochemically immature, structurally immature, and the flow in the blood vessels may be constricted, resulting in pulmonary hypertension.

As a result, the babies are intubated as soon as they are born, and parents are often unable to hold their babies for weeks or even months at a time.

Most babies are repaired with surgery 1 to 5 days after birth, usually with a GORE-TEX patch. The abdominal organs that have migrated into the chest are put back where they are supposed to be and the hole in the diaphragm is closed, hopefully allowing the affected lungs to expand. However, hospitalization often ranges from 3 to 10 weeks, depending on the severity of the condition.

Survivors often have difficulty feeding, some require a second surgery to control reflux, others require a feeding tube, and a few will reherniate and require additional repair.

Congenital diaphragmatic hernia is a birth defect that occurs in 1 out of every 2,500 babies. Every 10 minutes a baby is born with CDH, adding up to more than 600,000 babies with CDH since just 2000. CDH is a severe, sometimes fatal defect that occurs as often as cystic fibrosis and spina bifida. Yet most people have never heard of CDH.

In my opinion, awareness and early diagnosis and skilled treatment are the keys to a greater survival rate in these babies. Fifty percent of the babies born with CDH do not to survive.

In 2009, my grandson, Jim Beau, now 2\1/2\ years old, was diagnosed with CDH during my daughter Mary Abigail's 34th week of pregnancy. Although she had both a 20-week and a 30-week ultrasound, the nurses and doctors did not catch the disease on the baby's heartbeat monitor. Thankfully, when Mary Abigail and her Navy officer husband Paul and daughter Jane Ritchie moved to southeast Georgia, the baby's irregular heartbeat was heard at her first appointment with her new OB.

She was sent to Jacksonville, FL, for a fetal echo. The technician there told her she wasn't going to do the echo because there was something else wrong with the baby. She asked my daughter if she had ever heard of congenital diaphragmatic hernia. Of course, Mary Abigail had not, and at that time our family did not know of this problem or the extent of our grandson's birth defect.

The Navy temporarily allowed my daughter and her family to move to Gainesville, FL on November 16, and Jim Beau was born 2 weeks later on November 30. They heard their son cry out twice after he was born, right before they intubated him, but they were not allowed to hold him.

The doctors let his little lungs get strong before they did the surgery to correct the hernia, when he was 4 days old. As it turned out, the hole in his diaphragm was large, and his intestines, spleen, and one kidney had moved up into his chest cavity. Thankfully, Jim Beau did not have to go on a heart-lung bypass machine, but he was on a ventilator for 12 days and on oxygen for 36. In total, he was in the NICU--the neonatal intensive care unit--for 43 days before he was able to go home, all under the constant watch of his angel mother. I could not have been prouder of her. She and Paul were wonderful during this time.

This country has superb health care--the world's best. Without even our knowledge, this young Navy family had their unborn child diagnosed and sent to a university hospital three hours away the University of Florida's Shands Hospital.

Fortunately for my family, and for thousands of other similar families across the United States, there are a number of physicians doing incredible work to combat CDH. By chance, the University of Florida's Shands Children's Hospital is surely one of the world's best--maybe the best. The CDH survival rate at Shands in Gainesville is unprecedented. The survival rate of CDH babies born at Shands is being reported at 80 to 90 percent, while the nationwide average is 50 percent.

Dr. David Kays, who directs the CDH program and who was the physician for my grandson's surgery, is a magnificent surgeon and physician. He uses gentle ventilation therapy as opposed to hyperventilation. Gentle ventilation therapy, he has discovered over the years, is less aggressive and therefore protects the underdeveloped lungs. Jim Beau, I have to say, is a wonderful little boy, full of energy and enthusiasm. He is active and happy--one of the most happy young children I have ever seen--and so quick to smile.

This weekend, he attended his big sister Jane Ritchie's 5 year birthday party and he was totally happy and running around, climbing over all the playground equipment, with the older children just as though he was one of them. He thought he was in high cotton to be playing with these big boys and girls.

While the challenges are many, so are the successes with this condition. Every year more is learned and there are more successes. My family has been very lucky that Jim Beau's defect was caught before he was born and that he was able to go to the right place--a first-rate place--to seek excellent care for his CDH.

The bill Senator Cardin and I are introducing today is important because a national campaign for CDH will help bring awareness to this birth defect and save lives, I am convinced of it. Although hundreds of thousands of babies have been diagnosed with this defect, the causes are unknown and more research is needed. The thousands of happy, growing children who have overcome this condition validates what

has been accomplished to date and encourages us to do even more.

I hope my colleagues will join me and my friend and colleague Senator Cardin in supporting this bill to bring awareness of CDH to the world. I think it will create many more happy and healthy young people in the years to come.

Mr. President, I have come to the floor to talk about Colorado. This summer, most people have been thinking about the wildfires we have had up there. These fires were widespread throughout the State, and it is still just the beginning of fire season. We have already seen a lot of damage, including the destruction of hundreds of homes, and, most sadly, the loss of life.

I wish to say in this Chamber, to all my colleagues, how much I appreciate their kindness. The knowledge that all of you have been thinking about people at home has been very comforting to the people I represent. Thanks to the heroic work of the firefighters, and with a lot of help also from Mother Nature, the fires are under control. So I wish to remind people, as I have been doing now for months, that Colorado is the best place to visit during the summer. It is the best place to bring your family.

In fact, last week--or during the recess--Susan and I loaded up the minivan and drove across the State with our kids. It takes all the fun out of playing the license plate game when you are driving in Colorado because in about 2 hours the kids saw half the license plates representing half the States in the United States--just 2 hours from Denver, CO. So I would say, as I have said time and time again, over the coming months, if you have plans to come to our State, please do.

Today, I wish to focus on one area that illustrates how special our State of Colorado is.

The Hermosa Creek watershed is a beautiful parcel of land just up the road from Durango in the southwest corner of our State.

Over 4 years ago, an incredibly diverse group of local citizens, mountain bikers, fishermen, outfitters, local elected officials, and others got together to talk about the future of this striking land. Everybody involved likes to visit the area for recreation or to do business there. Their discussion was about how to put together a plan from the local level up to manage the area so everyone could enjoy it and benefit, and so that we could protect it for the next generations of Coloradans and the next generations of Americans.

A little over a year ago, the group invited my family and me to take a hike through the watershed and join the discussion. During a tour over the last Memorial Day weekend, we unloaded at the Hermosa Creek trailhead, we tied up our boots, and my youngest daughter Anne made a hiking stick out of a nearby fallen branch. We started up the trail with 40 or so others from the local community.

As we climbed higher and higher, we were all overcome by the beauty. People stopped talking. I stopped talking largely because I was out of breath. But the people I was with were as awestruck as I was by the beauty of this place. It was a particularly settling walk after being cooped up with my children.

There are forested valleys, crystal-clear streams, and unspoiled views. After about an hour, the group pulled off the Forest Service trail into a meadow. And as Anne, Helena, and Caroline Bennet made themselves and their father and mother dandelion necklaces, we started a discussion about what this area means to the people who live there and the people who visit. The sportsmen come to fish for native Colorado cutthroat trout and for back-country elk hunting. The mountain bikers come to enjoy single-track riding on trails known throughout the United States of America, and actually in other countries as well. The local water districts love Hermosa because it provides drinking water for the great city of Durango. Workers in the timber and mining industries stress that some of the watershed could contribute to extractive development in the future. Some might not know that mining has long been an economic driver in that region of our State.

This is a photograph of the group that hiked that day. The upshot of the discussion we had in that meadow was an agreement to work together on a bill, a balanced bill that managed the watershed so it would contribute to the local economy long into the future. After nearly 14 months of discussions and negotiations since that hike, I introduced that bill earlier today.

The Hermosa Creek Watershed Protection Act governs the entire 108,000-acre watershed. It includes provisions to allow for multiple uses, such as timber harvesting for forest health; access and trails for off-road vehicle enthusiasts, and for mountain bikers.

It keeps getting better. The bill also adds nearly 40,000 acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System, lands that provide unique and important opportunities for solitude and reflection, lands that will remain undeveloped forever, so they will always have clear streams of fish and lush forests for a local outfitter to take clients into the wilderness on horseback.

I am proud to report the bill has the unanimous bipartisan backing of the two county commissions involved, the San Juan County Commission and the La Plata County Commission. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a copy of letters of support from both counties.

It has the support of the Hermosa Creek Workgroup, ranging from hard-rock miners to wilderness advocates. I am pleased to carry this bill on behalf of the people of Colorado. I am especially proud because this was a community-driven process at its very finest, through and through, from beginning to end. Colorado wrote this bill. This bill wasn't written in Washington, DC. The bill has grown from the grassroots up, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents working together to cement a long-term plan for the community's future.

I also want to thank my senior Senator, Senator Udall of Colorado, for joining me as a cosponsor of the bill, and to thank Senators Bingaman and Murkowski for their past help moving Colorado land bills through their committee. I am confident that as we work on this bill together we will find similar consensus.

To bring this back to the beginning, I don't have to convince most people that Colorado is a special place. Many have visited our State over their lifetimes to ski our mountains, run our rivers, or climb a ``14er.'' The Hermosa Creek watershed represents some of the best Colorado has to offer. It deserves to be protected for our outdoor recreation economy, and for future generations.

I want to thank all of the people who have spent countless hours working together to make sure they could overcome their differences and reach a consensus on this bill. As I have told all of them, it makes my work so much easier when people work in such a constructive way together, and for that, they have my deep appreciation.

Mr. President, today I introduce the Preserving Work Requirements Act of 2012. Chairman Camp of the House Committee on Ways and Means will introduce a companion measure in the House. This bill halts last week's unprecedented power grab from the Obama administration, whereby unelected bureaucrats unilaterally granted themselves the authority to waive Federal welfare work requirements.

To put this another way, unelected bureaucrats ignored the law passed by Congress, the elected representatives of the American people. They ignored the work requirements intended by Congress and by the Presidents of both parties who signed welfare reform and its subsequent reauthorizations.

Ultimately, they decided they knew better than the American people. The American people, through their representatives, enacted work requirements in welfare reform. These unelected administrators decided they did not like these work requirements, so with the stroke of a pen, they have attempted to eliminate them. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this action is fundamentally illegitimate in a Democratic Republic and is just the latest example of President Obama's administration acting without legal warrant when the law stands in their way.

The Camp-Hatch bill, introduced today, is cosponsored in the Senate by my friends and colleagues, Leader McConnell and Senators Grassley, Kyl, Crapo, Roberts, Enzi, Cornyn, Coburn, Thune, and Burr--valuable and distinguished members of the Senate Finance Committee.

This bill includes dispositive findings clearly demonstrating that the Obama administration acted outside the scope of the law and the clear intent of Congress. I would like to stress the fact that I am introducing this legislation because I believe the Obama administration grossly undermined the constitutional authority of the legislative branch to effect changes and settle the law.

It does not mean I believe the 1996 law is perfect in every way and cannot be improved upon. That could not be further from the truth. A case could be made that due to prolonged inaction the TANF Programs, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Programs, have withered on the vine, and now many States see TANF as a funding stream rather than a welfare program.

An exception to this is my State of Utah. Utah runs a gold standard welfare program which focuses, like a laser, on work. By work, I mean real work, as in a paying job; work as most Americans define work, not work as defined in the ``Alice in Wonderland'' world of TANF, where running errands, smoking cessation, and bed rest count as work. Utah would like some relief--I think a lot of other States, in addition to Utah, would like some relief--from a number of administrative procedures in order to focus even more vigorously to moving welfare clients to jobs. This is a very reasonable proposition, especially if combined with a robust evaluation of the success of moving clients into work.

I do not want the introduction of this legislation to prevent the Obama administration from bypassing Congress to imply that when Congress does take up the reauthorization of the TANF Programs, that I will not be open to giving States flexibility in exchange for results. The fact remains that this administration and the Democratically controlled Senate could have made welfare reform a priority for several years. They did not. For the administration to be arguing now that they need to give States flexibility under TANF rules is so urgent the need to bypass Congress right this very minute does not pass the laugh test.

I am going to do everything I can to stop the administration from going forward with its waiver scheme. Then we should roll up our sleeves and take a good, honest look at how welfare reform has been working for the past 16 years.

Domestic social policy is rarely permanently settled. Things change; people change. A law that is more than halfway through its second decade can most assuredly be updated and improved. That is why we have reauthorizations. I do not view the Preserving Work Requirements for Welfare Programs Act of 2012 as the end of the debate on how best to get families out of poverty. In fact, I see it as the beginning of what I hope will be a thoughtful and deliberative discussion of these critical issues.

Finally, some in the press have attempted to characterize this debate, which at its heart is one of Executive overreach as a standoff between me and my own home State of Utah. As they say in the country, that dog just won't hunt. I have consistently supported State flexibility in exchange for measurable outcomes. One of the few pieces of domestic social policy legislation that has actually been enacted during this session of Congress, Public Law 112-34, was authored by Chairman Baucus and me to provide States with waivers to improve outcomes in their child welfare systems. Utah has applied for one of these child welfare waivers. As Casey Stengel said: You can look it up.

I worked very hard back in the middle 1990s to get welfare reform passed. We required a work part of that. We said: We are going to help you folks. We are going to subsidize you, we are going to give you help financially, but at the end of a certain period of time, you better have a job. The work clauses of that bill have helped millions of people to get jobs and get the self-esteem that comes from working and supporting themselves. To have this administration unilaterally, and without any congressional authorization, modify that work requirement is just plain wrong.

Frankly, I will be for flexibility in the work requirement, but I don't consider bed rest work. We can list 10 or 15 other things that the administration has been talking about that don't qualify for work either.

This is an important issue. I hope the Congress will stand up for itself and let this administration know there is a limit to what we are going tolerate from an Executive order standpoint.

Mr. President, last month the Department of the Interior transmitted two draft legislative proposals relating to the National Park Service. Both executive communications were referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

The first legislative proposal, the National Park Service Critical Authorities Act of 2012, would address three National Park Service management concerns. The second proposal, the National Park Service Study Act of 2012, would authorize the Park Service to undertake or update fifteen special resource studies to determine the appropriateness of adding the study areas to the National Park System.

I am pleased to introduce these bills, S. 3398 and S. 3399, by request as a courtesy to the Administration. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the transmittal letters from the Secretary of the Interior, including a section-by-section analysis of each bill, be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, last month the Department of the Interior transmitted two draft legislative proposals relating to the National Park Service. Both executive communications were referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

The first legislative proposal, the National Park Service Critical Authorities Act of 2012, would address three National Park Service management concerns. The second proposal, the National Park Service Study Act of 2012, would authorize the Park Service to undertake or update fifteen special resource studies to determine the appropriateness of adding the study areas to the National Park System.

I am pleased to introduce these bills, S. 3398 and S. 3399, by request as a courtesy to the Administration. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the transmittal letters from the Secretary of the Interior, including a section-by-section analysis of each bill, be printed in the Record.