Fair Elections Revenue Act of 2011

Mr. President, three years ago, a mentally disturbed gunman walked into a campus lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and shot 22 students, killing 5 of them. Northern Illinois University is not the first college to experience this kind of tragedy. We all remember the horrific events at Virginia Tech in 2007 where 32 lives were taken by a gunman.

In the aftermath of these shootings, we asked what could have been done to prevent it. And years later, we are still trying to make sense of it. Some believe nothing can be done to stop a disturbed person from committing acts of violence. But I believe we can and should do more.

For a long time, we have overlooked the mental health needs of students on college campuses. We know now that many mental illnesses start to manifest in this period when young people leave the security of home and regular medical care. The responsibility for the students' well-being often shifts from parents to students, and the students aren't always completely prepared. It is easier for a young person's problems to go unnoticed when he or she is away at college than when they are at home, in the company of parents, old friends, and high school teachers. College also provides a new opportunity for young people to experiment with drugs or alcohol.

The consequences of not detecting or addressing mental health needs among students are real. Suicide remains the third leading cause of death for adolescents and young adults between ages 10-24. Suicide takes the lives of more young adults than AIDS, cancer, heart disease, pneumonia, birth defects, and influenza combined. Forty-five percent of college students report having felt so depressed that it was difficult to function. Ten percent have contemplated suicide. There are over 1,000 suicides on college campus each year. These heartbreaking and traumatic incidents demonstrate the tragic consequences of mental instability and help us recognize we need to do more to support students during what can be very tough years.

Fortunately, many students can succeed in college if they have appropriate counseling services and access to needed medications. These services make a real impact. Students who seek help are six times less likely to kill themselves. Colleges are welcoming students today who 10 or 20 years ago would not have been able to attend school due to mental illness, but who can today because of advances in treatment.

But while the needs for mental health services on campus are rising, colleges are facing financial pressures and having trouble meeting this demand. As I have travelled around my State, I have learned just how thin colleges and universities are stretched when it comes to providing counseling and other support services to students.

Take Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. SIUC has 8 full-time counselors for 20,000 students. That is 1 counselor for every 2,500 students. The recommended ratio is 1 counselor for every 1,500 students. And there is another problem. Like many rural communities, Carbondale only has one community mental health agency. That agency is overwhelmed by the mental health needs of the community and refuses to serve students from SIUC. The campus counseling center is the only mental health option for students. The eight hard-working counselors at SIUC do their best under impossible conditions. They triage students who come in seeking help so that the ones who might be a threat to themselves or others are seen first. The waitlist of students seeking services has reached 45 students.

The story is the same across the country. Colleges are trying to fill in the gaps, but because of the shortage of counselors, students' needs are overlooked. A recent survey of college counseling centers indicates that the average ratio of professional-staff-to-students is 1 to 1,900. Although interest in mental health services is high, the recession has put pressure on administrators to cut budgets wherever they can. At times, counseling centers are in the crosshairs. Ten percent of survey respondents said their budgets were cut during the 2007-8 academic year, half said their budgets stayed the same, and nearly a quarter reported that their funds increased by 3 percent or less.

With so many students looking for help and so few counselors to see them, counseling centers have to cut back on outreach. Without outreach, the chances of finding students who need help but don't ask for it goes down. This is a serious problem. We know that some students exhibit warning signs of a tortured mental state and four out of five young adults show warning signs before attempting suicide. But faculty and students don't always know how or where to express their concerns. Outreach efforts by

campus counseling centers can help educate the community about warning signs to look for as well as how to intervene. Of the students who committed suicide across the country in 2007, only 22 percent had received counseling on campus. That means that of the 1,000 college students who took their own lives, 800 may never have looked for help. How many of those young lives could have been saved if our college counseling centers had the resources they needed to identify those students and help them? Our students deserve better.

We need to help schools meet the needs of their students, and that is why I am an original cosponsor of the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act Reauthorization. This bill includes an important provision of the Mental Health on Campus Improvement Act, which I introduced last Congress that would increase funding for colleges and universities to improve their mental health services. Colleges could use the funding to hire personnel, increase outreach, and educate the campus community about mental health. The Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act Reauthorization would provide States, tribes/tribal organizations, and universities with much needed resources to prevent suicide.

Reflecting on the loss of his own son, the well-known minister Rev. William Sloan Coffin once said, ``When parents die, they take with them a portion of the past. But when children die, they take away the future as well.'' I hope the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act will help prevent the unnecessary loss of more young lives and bright futures.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill by printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I rise to call for a new effort to combat an often deadly form of cancer--by re-introducing the Lung Cancer Mortality Reduction Act. I am pleased to be joined by my cosponsors, Senator Isakson and Senator Kerry on this very important bill.

This bill will renew and improve Federal government's efforts to combat lung cancer. It will: set a goal to reduce lung cancer mortality by 50 percent by 2020; establish a Lung Cancer Mortality Reduction Program, with comprehensive interagency coordination, to develop and implement a plan to meet this goal; improve disparity programs to ensure that the burdens of lung cancer on minority populations are addressed; create a computed tomography screening demonstration project based on recent science; and establish a Lung Cancer Advisory Board, which will provide an annual report to Congress on the progress of the Mortality Reduction Program.

We have made great strides against many types of cancer in the last several decades. However, these gains are uneven.

When the National Cancer Act was passed in 1971, lung cancer had a 5- year survival rate of only 12 percent. After decades of research efforts and scientific advances, this survival rate remains only 15 percent.

In contrast, the 5 year survival rates of breast, prostate, and colon cancer have risen to 89, 99 and 65 percent respectively.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death for both men and women, accounting for 28 percent of all cancer deaths.

Lung cancer causes more deaths annually than: colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and pancreatic cancer combined.

A National Cancer Institute study in 2009 indicated that the value of life lost to lung cancer will exceed $433 billion annually by 2020.

A four percent annual decline in mortality would reduce this amount by more than half.

A lung cancer diagnosis can be devastating. The average life expectancy following a lung cancer diagnosis is only 9 months.

This is because far too many patients are not diagnosed with lung cancer until it has progressed to the later stages. Lung cancer can be hard to diagnose, and symptoms may at first appear to be other illnesses, such as bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or asthma.

As a result, only 16 percent of lung cancer patients are diagnosed when their cancer is still localized, and is the most treatable.

When I introduced this legislation in 2009, lung cancer lacked early detection technology, to find the cancer when it was most treatable. Now, however, preliminary results show a screening method with a demonstrated reduction in mortality for lung cancer.

In 2010, the National Cancer Institute released initial results from the National Lung Screening Trial, a large-scale study of screening methods to detect lung cancers at earlier stages.

The National Lung Screening Trial found a 20 percent reduction in lung cancer mortality among participants screened with the computed tomography screening versus a traditional X-ray.

This is the first time that researchers have seen evidence of a significant reduction in lung cancer mortality with a screening test.

This is why this legislation also includes the creation of a computed tomography screening demonstration project, to assess public health needs of screening for lung cancer, and develop the most effective, safe, equitable, and efficient process to maximize the benefit of screening.

Efforts to fight lung cancer lag behind other cancers, in part, due to stigma from smoking. Make no mistake, tobacco use causes the majority of lung cancer cases.

Tobacco cessation is a critical component of reducing lung cancer mortality. Less smoking means less lung cancer. Period.

But tobacco use does not fully explain lung cancer. Approximately 20 percent of lung cancer patients never smoked.

Two-thirds of individuals diagnosed with lung cancer who have never smoked are women.

60 percent of lung cancer patients are former smokers who quit, often decades ago.

These patients may have been exposed to second hand smoke, or they may have been exposed to radon, asbestos, chromium, or other chemicals. There could be other causes and associations that have not yet been discovered, genetic predispositions or other environmental exposures.

The President's National Cancer Advisory Board Report of 2010 identified radon as the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking and listed 15 other environmental contaminants strongly associated with lung cancer.

I believe that we have the expertise and technology to make serious progress against this deadly cancer, and to reach the goal of halving lung cancer mortality by 2020.

We need this legislation to ensure that our government's resources are focused on this mission in the most efficient way possible.

Agency efforts must be coordinated, and all sectors of the federal government that may have some ideas to lend should be participating. That is what the Lung Cancer Mortality Reduction Program will accomplish.

In this bill the Secretary of Health and Human Services is tasked to work

in consultation with Secretaries and Directors from the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, and the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

This means that each agency with an expertise on lungs, imaging, and cancer will be included in this long overdue process.

We can do better for Americans diagnosed with lung cancer. I ask my colleagues to support this legislation.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, today I rise to reintroduce the whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act. I am pleased that Senators Collins, Grassley, Lieberman, Levin, Carper, Leahy, Harkin, Pryor, Landrieu, McCaskill, Tester, Begich, and Cardin have joined as cosponsors of this bill.

The need for stronger whistleblower protections is clear. As we slowly recover from the deepest recession since the Great Depression, and grapple with unsustainable budget deficits, we cannot wait to act on measures to make sure the government uses taxpayer money efficiently and effectively.

This legislation will help us hold those who manage the public's dollars accountable by strengthening protections for Federal employees who shed light on government waste, fraud, and abuse. Studies have shown that employee whistleblowers are responsible for uncovering more fraud than auditors, internal compliance officers, and law enforcement officials combined. As an example of the type of disclosures we need to encourage, in one of the few cases in which a whistleblower prevailed, an Internal Revenue Service manager disclosed alleged fraud and preferential treatment of certain wealthy and influential taxpayers. The Merit Systems Protection Board denied his claim, but five years after the whistleblower retaliation occurred, the Court of Appeals reversed. Ensuring that dedicated civil servants can come forward and report wrongdoing without facing retaliation is an important step for saving taxpayer dollars, reducing the deficit, and improving our country's long-term economic health.

Our bill also will contribute to public health and safety, civil rights and civil liberties, national security, and other critical interests. Federal employees may be the only people in the position to observe a problem with a drug safety trial, a cover up of violations during a food inspection, overreach in Federal law enforcement, or safety concerns at a nuclear plant. But few employees will have the courage to disclose Federal Government wrongdoing, which can affect every aspect of government operations, without meaningful whistleblower protections.

The Whistleblower Protection Act, WPA, was intended to shield Federal whistleblowers from retaliation, but the Court of Appeals or the Federal Circuit and the Merit Systems Protection Board repeatedly have issued decisions that misconstrue the WPA and scale back its protections. Federal whistleblowers have prevailed on the merits of their claims before the Federal Circuit which has sole jurisdiction over Federal employee whistleblower appeals, only three times in hundreds of cases since 1994. correction is urgently needed.

Our bill would eliminate a number of restrictions that the Federal Circuit has read into the law regarding when disclosures are covered by the WPA. Because of the Federal Circuit's restrictive reading of the WPA, it would establish a pilot program to allow multi-circuit review for 5 years, and would require a Government Accountability Office review of that change 40 months after enactment. This bill would also bar agencies from revoking an employee's security clearance in retaliation for whistleblowing.

Additionally, this bill expands coverage to new groups of whistleblowers. This bill would expand the coverage of the Whistleblower Protection Act to include employees of the Transportation Security Administration. Intelligence Community employees for the first time would be protected as well, with an administrative process modeled on the protections for Federal Bureau of Investigations employees. Moreover, it would make clear that whistleblowers who disclose censorship of scientific information that could lead to gross government waste or mismanagement, danger to public health or safety, or a violation of law are protected.

I have been a long-time proponent of strengthening oversight by protecting Federal whistleblowers. Last Congress, my Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, S. 372, passed both the Senate and the House of Representatives by unanimous consent in December 2010. In the 110th Congress, my bill, the Federal Employee Protection of Disclosures Act, S. 274, passed the Senate by unanimous consent in December 2007, and a similar bill, H.R. 985, also passed in the House of Representatives in March 2008. Unfortunately, both times, we were not able to reconcile the two bills and enact whistleblower protections before the Congress adjourned. I intend to finish the job this Congress. Whistleblowers simply cannot wait any longer.

Congress has a duty to provide strong protections for Federal whistleblowers. Only when Federal employees are confident that they will not face retaliation will they feel comfortable coming forward to disclose information that can be used to improve government operations, our national security, and the health of our citizens. I urge my colleagues to support this legislation.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, this weekend I know that Marylanders will be taking advantage of Passport Day this Saturday, April 9. During these weekend hours at our passport acceptance facilities in Maryland, my constituents will have the ability to renew their passports or apply for a new passport, as we get ready for the summer travel season.

When Marylanders apply for and ultimately receive their passports, I want them to continue to have confidence that the U.S. passport is the gold standard for identification. It certifies

an individual's identity and U.S. citizenship, and allows the passport holder to travel in and out of the United States and to foreign countries. It allows the passport holder to obtain further identification documents, and to set up bank accounts.

The U.S. Government simply cannot allow U.S. passports to be issued in this country on the basis of fraudulent documents. There is too much at stake. Unfortunately, hearings that I have chaired in the last Congress have convinced me that we have serious vulnerabilities in our passport issuance process that need to be closed quickly.

Nearly two years ago, on May 5, 2009, I chaired a Judiciary Terrorism Subcommittee hearing entitled ``The Passport Issuance Process: Closing the Door to Fraud.'' During the hearing last year, we learned about a Government Accountability Office, GAO, undercover investigation that had been requested by Senators Kyl and Feinstein to test the effectiveness of the passport issuance process, and to determine whether malicious individuals such as terrorists, spies, or other criminals could use counterfeit documents to obtain a genuine U.S. passport. What we learned from GAO was that ``terrorists or criminals could steal an American citizen's identity, use basic counterfeiting skills to create fraudulent documents for that identity, and obtain a genuine U.S. passport.'' But that 2009 GAO report was not the first time that problems with the passport issuance process were identified. In 2005 and 2007, GAO also brought these issues to light.

Vulnerabilities in the passport issuance process are very serious because it can have a profound impact on the national security of the United States.

A new GAO undercover investigation that I requested, along with Senators Kyl, Feinstein, Lieberman and Collins, also revealed that while some improvements have been made by the State Department, the passport issuance process is still susceptible to fraud. A Judiciary Terrorism Subcommittee hearing that I chaired in July of 2010 revealed that the State Department issued five additional passports on the basis of fraudulent identity documents that had been submitted by undercover GAO agents.

As a result, today I am reintroducing the Passport Identity Verification Act, or PIVA. This legislation is co-sponsored by Senators Feinstein, Lieberman, and Kerry. It is a common-sense solution that will give the State Department the legal authorities that it needs to access relevant information contained in federal, state, and other databases that can be used to verify the identity of every passport applicant, and to detect passport fraud, without extending the time that the State Department takes to approve passports. The legislation also requires the State Department to promulgate regulations to limit access to this information, and to ensure that personnel involved in the passport issuance process only access this information for authorized purposes. These are very important privacy and security protections in this legislation.

The legislation also requires the Secretary of State to conduct a formal study examining whether biometric information and technology can be used to enhance the ability to verify the identity of a passport applicant and to detect passport fraud.

I understand that the American people can become concerned when their travel plans, whether for leisure or business, are linked to their ability to obtain a passport in a timely fashion. My legislation would not lengthen the average amount of time it takes U.S. citizens to obtain passports. We have got to get this right, and it is not simply a question of process, techniques, and training. We need to make sure that the agencies that are responsible for processing passport application documents are concerned about national security as well as customer service, and we need to make sure they have the legal authorities, the resources, and the technology they need to verify the identity of a passport applicant and to detect passport fraud.

We already have much of the technology and the information to prevent such issuance of genuine U.S. passports based on fraudulent documents or information. The Passport Identity Verification Act will dramatically improve the State Department's ability to detect passport fraud, and strengthen the integrity of every American's passport.

I am pleased to be joined by Senators Murkowski, Durbin, and Tom Udall in the introduction of the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act Reauthorization.

This legislation continues the important work of my former colleague Senator Gordon Smith, who authored the original law, which was named for his 22-year old son, Garrett, who was a student at Utah Valley University when he took his own life. I want to once again recognize Gordon Smith for his work to champion suicide prevention and mental health initiatives.

Currently, this law supports 35 States, 16 Tribes and Tribal organizations, and 38 colleges and universities in their efforts to prevent youth suicide. Indeed, with the help of these important programs, we have made real progress since the 2004 passage of this law in identifying at-risk youth and young adults, providing proven mental health and substance use disorder treatments, and educating the public about youth suicide prevention efforts.

Unfortunately, suicide remains the third leading cause of death for adolescents and young adults age 10 to 24, and results in 4,400 lives lost each year. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 150,000 individuals in this age group annually receive medical care for self-inflicted injuries at Emergency Departments across the U.S.

Suicide is particularly prevalent among college-age students as it is the second leading cause of death, resulting in approximately 1,100 deaths each year. The 2010 National Survey of Counseling Center Directors at colleges and universities found that 10.8 percent of students seek counseling each year, an increase of nearly 1 percent from 2009. At the same time, the average ratio of counselors to students has remained constant at one to 1,786.

Many young people who commit suicide have a treatable mental illness, but they don't get the help they need. The legislation we introduced today provides critical resources for prevention and outreach programs to reach at risk youth before it is too late.

It would increase the authorized grant level to States, tribes, and college campuses for the implementation of proven programs and initiatives designed to address mental health and wellness and reduce youth suicide.

Additionally, I am particularly pleased that the bill would enable college counseling centers to have greater flexibility in their use of Federal resources. Counseling centers will continue to be able to apply for funds to operate suicide prevention hotlines and organize educational and awareness efforts about youth suicide prevention; however, with this bill they will also be able to use funds for the provision of counseling services to students and the hiring of appropriately trained personnel. These two components are integral to identifying and treating students who may be at risk with the goal of preventing suicide and attempted suicide on campuses.

Our bipartisan legislation is supported by 43 coalition members of the Mental Health Liaison Group and the American Council on Education.

Mr. President, I unanimous consent that the text of the bill and a letter of support be printed in the Record.